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Post # 10 Critical Thinking Step by Step Process: Word Document

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Post # 10 Critical Thinking Step by Step Process: Word Document

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Post#9 Reason for Belief: Unexplained (Article)

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Post#9 Reason for Belief: Unexplained (Article)

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Definition: Things we do not know but are trying to figure out, often long term.
Connection: In the article below it briefly gives a history about the lost city of Atlantis. Atlantis has been a mystery for many many years. It is unexplained how it got to be lost or if it even is a real thing or just a myth. This article shows how the United States may have found it after all this time.

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Has the real lost city of Atlantis finally been found... buried under mud flats in Spain?

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A U.S. led team of archaeologists and geologists believe they have pinpointed the exact location of the legendary metropolis under mud flats in southern Spain, north of Cadiz.

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Post#8 Reason for Belief: Agenticity (Image)

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Post#8 Reason for Belief: Agenticity (Image)

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Definition: Agenticity is when people often look to a higher power of some sort to find meaning when there is no proof that any of them exist.
Connections: In the image below is a representation of what Mother Nature looks like. Mother Nature is known for being the force behind all living things, nature and the weather. Women often blame mother nature for their menstruation cycle.
http://i.imgur.com/CtXJJ8H.jpg

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Post#7 Reason for Belief: Patternicity (Article)

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Post#7 Reason for Belief: Patternicity (Article)

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Definition: Patternicity happens when people see things they want to see things in random objects.
Connections: In the image below you may see a face in the clouds. There is an article that has a video link on how the clouds were moving to make different shapes, but different people saw different things as the clouds shifted.

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Post #6 Red Flag: Ideological Support (Video)

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Post #6 Red Flag: Ideological Support (Video)

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Definition: Ideological Support red flag happens when the idea or set of beliefs are followed regardless of science. These ideas often are in line with: religion, politics, mainstream court cases etc. Often ethical decisions are involved in this pseudoscience red flag as well.
Connections: The following video is an example of a religion that follows an Ideological Support when it comes to their medical opinions. Jehovah's Witnesses do not accept blood transfusions and this video is about a man who practices this religion and has a rare disease. (Please note, this post is in no way against this religion and is only trying to portray how the medical intervention portion of their beliefs can fall under this red flag)

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Jehovah's Witnesses: Refusal of Blood Transfusions

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Post#5 Red Flag: Mystical Energy (Article)

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Post#5 Red Flag: Mystical Energy (Article)

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Definition: Mystical Energy Fallacy happens when people tend to claim to feel forms of energy that effect everyday life. Often people who participate in this type of pseudoscience replace scientific words or phrases with mystical words such as "energy" or other nonsense that seems to make sense to the general population instead of proper scientific language.
Connections: In the article below shows a form of mystical energy called Tantra. Tantra is a form of sexual energy that is supposed to join two people together during acts of sex. Another name for Tantra is "Yoga of Sex"

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Tantra - Seeing the Spiritual in the Sensual - Secret Energy

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"Tantra" is a Sanskrit word of two parts. The prefix, Tan, means "to expand, join or weave." The latter part, tra, means "tool." Therefore, the definition of the term Tantra has a two-fold meaning - a tool to expand, liberate, and bring together.

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Post #4 Red Flag: Confirmation Bias (Article)

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Post #4 Red Flag: Confirmation Bias (Article)

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Definition: Confirmation Bias happens when people believe what they want to no matter what is shown to disprove their beliefs. They only focus on what they believe and ignore everything else.
Connection: Healthcare workers believe that a full moon causes patients, clients and residents to act out of character and for a lack of better word "crazy". Both of us are healthcare workers and we fall under this Confirmation Bias, no matter what you tell the both of, they are still act a little nuts. That is the reason we chose this top because we both fall guilty of it.

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"It is the very error of the moon.
She comes more near the earth
than she was wont. And makes
men mad."
-William Shakespeare, Othello

ACROSS THE CENTURIES, many a person has uttered the phrase "There must be a full moon out there" in an attempt to explain weird happenings at night. Indeed, the Roman goddess of the moon bore a name that remains familiar to us today: Luna, prefix of the word "lunatic." Greek philosopher Aristotle and Roman historian Pliny the Elder suggested that the brain was the "moistest" organ in the body and thereby most susceptible to the pernicious influences of the moon, which triggers the tides. Belief in the "lunar lunacy effect," or "Transylvania effect," as it is sometimes called, persisted in Europe through the Middle Ages, when humans were widely reputed to transmogrify into werewolves or vampires during a full moon.

Even today many people think the mystical powers of the full moon induce erratic behaviors, psychiatric hospital admissions, suicides, homicides, emergency room calls, traffic accidents, fights at professional hockey games, dog bites and all manner of strange events. One survey revealed that 45 percent of college students believe moonstruck humans are prone to unusual behaviors, and other surveys suggest that mental health professionals may be still more likely than laypeople to hold this conviction. In 2007 several police departments in the U.K. even added officers on full-moon nights in an effort to cope with presumed higher crime rates.

Water at Work?
Following Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, some contemporary authors, such as Miami psychiatrist Arnold Lieber, have conjectured that the full moon's supposed effects on behavior arise from its influence on water. The human body, after all, is about 80 percent water, so perhaps the moon works its mischievous magic by somehow disrupting the alignment of water molecules in the nervous system.

But there are at least three reasons why this explanation doesn't "hold water," pardon the pun. First, the gravitational effects of the moon are far too minuscule to generate any meaningful effects on brain activity, let alone behavior. As the late astronomer George Abell of the University of California, Los Angeles, noted, a mosquito sitting on our arm exerts a more powerful gravitational pull on us than the moon does. Yet to the best of our knowledge, there have been no reports of a "mosquito lunacy effect." Second, the moon's gravitational force affects only open bodies of water, such as oceans and lakes, but not contained sources of water, such as the human brain. Third, the gravitational effect of the moon is just as potent during new moons-when the moon is invisible to us-as it is during full moons.

There is a more serious problem for fervent believers in the lunar lunacy effect: no evidence that it exists. Florida International University psychologist James Rotton, Colorado State University astronomer Roger Culver and University of Saskatchewan psychologist Ivan W. Kelly have searched far and wide for any consistent behavioral effects of the full moon. In all cases, they have come up empty-handed. By combining the results of multiple studies and treating them as though they were one huge study-a statistical procedure called meta-analysis-they have found that full moons are entirely unrelated to a host of events, including crimes, suicides, psychiatric problems and crisis center calls. In their 1985 review of 37 studies entitled "Much Ado about the Full Moon," which appeared in one of psychology's premier journals, Psychological Bulletin, Rotton and Kelly humorously bid adieu to the full-moon effect and concluded that further research on it was unnecessary.

Persistent critics have disagreed with this conclusion, pointing to a few positive findings that emerge in scattered studies. Still, even the handful of research claims that seem to support full-moon effects have collapsed on closer investigation. In one study published in 1982 an author team reported that traffic accidents were more frequent on full-moon nights than on other nights. Yet a fatal flaw marred these findings: in the period under consideration, full moons were more common on weekends, when more people drive. When the authors reanalyzed their data to eliminate this confounding factor, the lunar effect vanished.

Where Belief Begins
So if the lunar lunacy effect is merely an astronomical and psychological urban legend, why is it so widespread? There are several probable reasons. Media coverage almost surely plays a role. Scores of Hollywood horror flicks portray full-moon nights as peak times of spooky occurrences such as stabbings, shootings and psychotic behaviors.

Perhaps more important, research demonstrates that many people fall prey to a phenomenon that University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologists Loren and Jean Chapman termed "illusory correlation"-the perception of an association that does not in fact exist. For example, many people who have joint pain insist that their pain increases during rainy weather, although research disconfirms this assertion. Much like the watery mirages we observe on freeways during hot summer days, illusory correlations can fool us into perceiving phenomena in their absence.

Illusory correlations result in part from our mind's propensity to attend to-and recall-most events better than nonevents. When there is a full moon and something decidedly odd happens, we usually notice it, tell others about it and remember it. We do so because such co-occurrences fit with our preconceptions. Indeed, one study showed that psychiatric nurses who believed in the lunar effect wrote more notes about patients' peculiar behavior than did nurses who did not believe in this effect. In contrast, when there is a full moon and nothing odd happens, this nonevent quickly fades from our memory. As a result of our selective recall, we erroneously perceive an association between full moons and myriad bizarre events.

Still, the illusory correlation explanation, though probably a crucial piece of the puzzle, does not account for how the full-moon notion got started. One intriguing idea for its origins comes to us courtesy of psychiatrist Charles L. Raison, now at Emory University, and several of his colleagues. According to Raison, the lunar lunacy effect may possess a small kernel of truth in that it may once have been genuine. Raison conjectures that before the advent of outdoor lighting in modern times, the bright light of the full moon deprived people who were living outside-including many who had severe mental disorders-of sleep. Because sleep deprivation often triggers erratic behavior in people with certain psychological conditions, such as bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression), the full moon may have been linked to a heightened rate of bizarre behaviors in long-bygone eras. So the lunar lunacy effect is, in Raison and his colleagues' terms, a "cultural fossil."

We may never know whether this ingenious explanation is correct. But in today's world at least, the lunar lunacy effect appears to be no better supported than is the idea that the moon is made of green cheese.

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Does a full moon really trigger strange behavior?

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Post #3 Red Flag: Ancient Wisdom (Website)

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Post #3 Red Flag: Ancient Wisdom (Website)

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Definition: Ancient wisdom happens when there is no scientific proof to back up and of the theories and methods the alternative medicine, rituals etc. It often originates from ancestors and that's how things were done 1000 years ago.
Connection: Acupuncture is an old Chinese tradition that was used to treat many conditions and symptoms. The following article explains what  acupuncture is and how it works.

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Acupuncture facts

Acupuncture has been shown to be effective for the treatment of nausea and vomiting in adults following surgery or taking chemotherapy and post-operative dental pain.

Acupuncture may be effective in treating a number of other conditions.

More research is needed to define more precisely the role of acupuncture in health care.

What is acupuncture?

Acupuncture is a component of the health care system of China that can be traced back at least 2,500 years. The general theory of acupuncture is based on the premise that there are patterns of energy flow (Qi) through the body that are essential for health. Disruptions of this flow are believed to be responsible for disease. Acupuncture may, it has been theorized, correct imbalances of flow at identifiable points close to the skin.

The practice of acupuncture to treat identifiable pathophysiological (disease) conditions in American medicine was rare until the visit of President Richard M. Nixon to China in 1972. Since that time, there has been an explosion of interest in the United States and Europe in the application of the technique of acupuncture to Western medicine.

Acupuncture is a family of procedures involving stimulation of anatomical locations on or in the skin by a variety of techniques. There are a variety of approaches to diagnosis and treatment in American acupuncture that incorporate medical traditions from China, Japan, Korea, and other countries. The most thoroughly studied mechanism of stimulation of acupuncture points employs penetration of the skin by thin, solid, metallic needles, which are manipulated manually or by electrical stimulation.

Are there standards for acupuncture needles?

After reviewing the existing body of knowledge, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) removed acupuncture needles from the category of "experimental medical devices." The FDA now regulates acupuncture needles, just as it does other devices such as surgical scalpels and hypodermic syringes, under good manufacturing practices and single-use standards of sterility.

What Is Cupping?

Cupping therapy is usually used as part of acupuncture or body work treatment.

Cupping therapy involves heating the air inside a glass cup, which removes some of the air from the cup. The cup is then quickly placed on the skin, and the resulting vacuum pulls the skin part of the way into the cup. The cup may be left in place for several minutes and then removed, leaving behind a bright red, circular welt. The theory behind cupping is that it moves or stimulates the body's natural energy - also called qi.

What are the possible side effects of acupuncture?

The most common serious injury reported from the needles of acupuncture has been accidental puncture of the lung, which results in a partial collapse of the lung called pneumothorax. The most common infection reported from acupuncture treatments is viral hepatitis, a potentially serious infection of the liver. Other side effects include bacterial infections locally at the site of needle insertion in the skin and elsewhere in the body. Generally, side effects seem to relate to poor hygiene and training of the acupuncturist.

For what conditions has acupuncture treatment been found helpful?

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Consensus Development Program was established in 1977 and is designed to assess health technology. The program organizes major conferences that produce consensus statements and technology assessment statements on controversial issues in medicine important to health care providers, patients, and the general public. The following statement is from the NIH Consensus Development Statement on Acupuncture on November 3-5, 1997.

Acupuncture as a therapeutic intervention is widely practiced in the United States. There have been many studies of its potential usefulness. However, many of these studies provide equivocal results because of design, sample size, and other factors. The issue is further complicated by inherent difficulties in the use of appropriate controls, such as placebo and sham acupuncture groups.

However, promising results have emerged, for example, efficacy of acupuncture in adult post-operative and chemotherapy nausea and vomiting and in post-operative dental pain. There are other situations such as addiction, stroke rehabilitation, headache, menstrual cramps, tennis elbow, fibromyalgia, myofascial pain, osteoarthritis, low back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, and asthma where acupuncture may be useful as an adjunct treatment or an acceptable alternative or be included in a comprehensive management program.

Findings from basic research have begun to elucidate the mechanisms of action of acupuncture, including the release of opioids and other peptides in the central nervous system and the periphery and changes in neuroendocrine function. Although much needs to be accomplished, the emergence of plausible mechanisms for the therapeutic effects of acupuncture is encouraging.

The introduction of acupuncture into the choice of treatment modalities that are readily available to the public is in its early stages. Issues of training, licensure, and reimbursement remain to be clarified. There is sufficient evidence, however, of acupuncture's value to expand its use into conventional medicine and to encourage further studies of its physiology and clinical value.This statement is representative of the opinions of current standard medical practice.

How does acupuncture work?

Here are current thoughts from the National Institutes of Health on the manner by which acupuncture might produce beneficial health results.

Many studies in animals and humans have demonstrated that acupuncture can cause multiple biological responses. These responses can occur locally, i.e., at or close to the site of application, or at a distance, mediated mainly by sensory neurons to many structures within the central nervous system. This can lead to activation of pathways affecting various physiological systems in the brain as well as in the periphery. A focus of attention has been the role of endogenous opioids in acupuncture analgesia. Considerable evidence supports the claim that opioid peptides are released during acupuncture and that the analgesic effects of acupuncture are at least partially explained by their actions. That opioid antagonists such as naloxone reverse the analgesic effects of acupuncture further strengthens this hypothesis. Stimulation by acupuncture may also activate the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, resulting in a broad spectrum of systemic effects. Alteration in the secretion of neurotransmitters and neurohormones and changes in the regulation of blood flow, both centrally and peripherally, have been documented. There is also evidence that there are alterations in immune functions produced by acupuncture. Which of these and other physiological changes mediate clinical effects is at present unclear.

Despite considerable efforts to understand the anatomy and physiology of the "acupuncture points," the definition and characterization of these points remains controversial. Even more elusive is the scientific basis of some of the key traditional Eastern medical concepts such as the circulation of Qi, the meridian system, and other related theories, which are difficult to reconcile with contemporary biomedical information but continue to play an important role in the evaluation of patients and the formulation of treatment in acupuncture.

Some of the biological effects of acupuncture have also been observed when "sham" acupuncture points are stimulated, highlighting the importance of defining appropriate control groups in assessing biological changes purported to be due to acupuncture. Such findings raise questions regarding the specificity of these biological changes. In addition, similar biological alterations including the release of endogenous opioids and changes in blood pressure have been observed after painful stimuli, vigorous exercise, and/or relaxation training; it is at present unclear to what extent acupuncture shares similar biological mechanisms.

It should be noted also that for any therapeutic intervention, including acupuncture, the so-called "non-specific" effects account for a substantial proportion of its effectiveness, and thus should not be casually discounted. Many factors may profoundly determine therapeutic outcome including the quality of the relationship between the clinician and the patient, the degree of trust, the expectations of the patient, the compatibility of the backgrounds and belief systems of the clinician and the patient, as well as a myriad of factors that together define the therapeutic milieu.

Although much remains unknown regarding the mechanism(s) that might mediate the therapeutic effect of acupuncture, it is encouraging that a number of significant acupuncture-related biological changes can be identified and carefully delineated.

Further research in this direction not only is important for elucidating the phenomena associated with acupuncture, but also has the potential for exploring new pathways in human physiology not previously examined in a systematic manner.

From

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Medically reviewed by Avrom Simon, MD; Board Certified Preventative Medicine with Subspecialty in Occupational Medicine

REFERENCE:

National Institutes of Health

Complete List

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Migraine

Migraine headache is a type of headache associated with a sensitivity to light, smells, or sounds, eye pain, severe pounding on one side of the head, and sometimes nausea and vomiting. The exact cause of migraine headaches is not known.

Triggers for migraine headaches include certain foods, stress, hormonal changes, strong stimuli (loud noises), and oversleeping.

Treatment guidelines for migraines include medicine, pain management, diet changes, avoiding foods that trigger migraines, staying hydrated, getting adequate sleep, and exercising regularly. Prevention of migraine triggers include getting regular exercise, drinking water daily, reducing stress, and avoiding trigger foods.

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acupuncture alternative medicine qi chinese medicine eastern medicine chemotherapy

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How Does Acupuncture Work? Points, Benefits & Needles

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Acupuncture is the ancient Chinese practice of inserting needles in specific points on the body to manipulate the flow of energy or Qi. Side effects of acupuncture are rare. Infection and injury from needles at acupuncture points are possible with poor hygeine or untrained practitioners.

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Post #2 Red Flag: Appeal to Authority (Video)

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Post #2 Red Flag: Appeal to Authority (Video)

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Definition: Appeal to Authority fallacy happens when someone of higher status, or someone with degrees tends to say something is good to use, or better to do. The authority figure could be as simple as your parent or as high as a doctor. If one of these people says it is right or better, people tend to believe them.
Connections: In this toothpaste video a man in a white coat is posing to be a dentist and he is recommending using this fantastic Colgate toothpaste that is recommended by dentists. It shows Appeal to Authority because of the fact that an actor has put on a white coat acting like a dentist to advertise a product on TV. People will go to the store to buy it because they saw on TV that a dentist has recommended this product.

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Made by: Jennifer Hoyne (right) & Jessica Metcalfe (left)