Yes, many medicines/treatments have nasty side effects (a big story in the UK currently is about a 5-year-old boy with a brain tumour whose parents didn't want him to have X-ray treatment as it can leave you with permanent brain damage even if it cures the tumour but the alternative they wanted (of unclear efficacy) was not available on the NHS so they took him abroad and got arrested, apparently for neglect which it seems they didn't) and so for mild illness that can sort itself out on its own with a little help from the placebo effect/rest/care/time can be 'helped' by homeopathy. But the issue comes from informed consent and dubious claims/fraud from homeopaths. I don't want my tax money boosting the profits of a company fraudulently selling very expensive water (but neither do I like subsidising middle-England putting solar panels on their roofs, six figure salaries for council executives who oversee over 1000+ children in care homes being raped, or paying for dole claimants' Sky TV subscriptions). But if the doctor is honest about the water he's giving you the placebo effect is reduced so it's tricky.

As for homeopathy not harming anyone, if it causes you to not seek effective medical treatment it most definitely can harm. To take a famous example: Steve Jobs. I don't know if he was into homeopathy specifically but he tried to treat his pancreatic cancer with alternative medicine before turning to conventional. Had he not done so he might still be alive today.

7 year old dies of strep throat.
9 month old killed by septicemia.
baby dies of eye infection.

When we pretend this is medicine, people use it as medicine and die. It's one thing when an adult makes this choice for themselves, but very often it's children who suffer. So I don't find reminding people that homeopathy doesn't work at all misplaced, as belief in it has lead to preventable deaths and will continue leading to deaths.

A lot of the heavy "homeopaths FTW, MDs suck big time!" people are also against vaccinating their children (I have a case in my family and see if first-hand...) This not only has made several almost totally eradicated stuff (measles, and some others I don't remember the names in English now) re-appear in "Western" countries, but also endangers people who can not be vaccinated for real reasons.

Also, imagine being against tetanus vaccine after breaking an arm. And being against any kind of pharmaceutical pain reliever for that. In a (your) child.

Or, being against any kind of medical antibiotic or painkiller after the removal of a wisdom tooth.

It can get to extreme, totally unhealthy levels.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

She was a thousand miles away and had a lot of trouble talking out son into trying it because he was convinced there was no way it would work.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

You can't lead an argument by saying there are dumb people in the world.
Sadly, there are parents who kill their children and yes, among others they do it by mistreating them medically. Sadly, there are people who generally oppose vaccines and allow eradicated diseases to re-occur. Sadly, there are also people who smoke and drive drunk. Sadly, there are even people who start wars over books.

I never claimed, homeopathy will cure everything. But I could be a real nit-picker and say, homeopathy still does not harm anyone. A misguided belief harms people, not a piece of something which has no scientifically effect. If people start projecting conspiracies or similar stuff into homoepathy then we come back to "There are dumb people in the world".

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

There are dumb people in the world. Convincing them to kill their children is not OK.


Homeopathy _is_ the misguided belief harming people. Homeopathy is a particular system for treating diseases. It is often set up explicitly in contrast to traditional medicine. I googled homeopathy and took the first pro-homeopathy result. From the FAQ:



Again, homeopathy is the belief this is medicine. That belief directly causes people not to use traditional medicine. That directly leads to deaths. If there were no concept of homeopathy there would be specific individuals still alive today. So to say that homeopathy does no harm is to engage is silly semantic word games. By the same logic hatred, fascism and war have never killed anybody, either.

You were talking about multiple occasions and instant relief.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

People googling medical stuff and trusting the internet fall into the category "dumb", in my opinion.



Nit-picking again but if something helps treating a condition, I occasionally call it medicine, too.



Undoubtedly true for some people. But if you take on such an extreme position, you - again - fall into the category "dumb" (imo).
Sadly there are cases where "tradtional medicine" harmed people (thalidomide // Contergan), so I applaud alternatives.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

Interesting.
But then - how can we be sure its not just humming along on idle?
Just like a muscle which we not use at the moment, but it still has blood pumping through, and whatnot.

Since we don't really know the how, why, what, where, and when of the working of the brain - what do we really know?
Can we really be sure we do not have any potential which goes unfulfilled?

Sorry if it is all trivial questions, I am really not en expert in this field, not by a long shot.

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PS>
From personal observations about concentration, Go, and the reading ability:

I notice that most of the time when I play, I am not really using my full potential. I know I could concentrate more, read deeper, and play better - often by a few stones. Can it be said I am not using my brain's full potential? For important games, I make an effort to get more mentally involved, and so I concentrate better and read deeper. So I am using some more of the potential I have. Still, I know that with a little training, I could use even more of it, and concentrate even better and read even deeper. I have done so in the pest, in spurts.

But this leads me to a question - can I push it further? During my youth, after two weeks of intense study of another subject, I noticed my mental abilities dramatically increased, in Go and in other areas - to the point at which it would have been impossible for me without those two weeks. And this was only two weeks! What if I was at it for a month, or a year? Would I then reach my limits? Or did I reach them after the two weeks? How do I know?

In any case, this makes me believe that with proper training a/my brain could lift much more than it does otherwise. I *know* I am not using my brain's full potential. Not sure how much percent I use, but not all of it. And this is independent of any actual brain activity which we can or cannot observe any odd day.

So can it be that there are actually two issues here? On one side - the physical usage of the brain mass, in the sense of electrical impulses going through, synapses firing, and all that. But on the other side, the actual efficiency with which we use the brain, how much mileage do we get out of all this synapses and all.

The bottom line - It is clear to me that when people say stuff like "we use only 10% of our brains" they do not mean it in physical sense at all. They do not mean we can cut off 90% of our brain and still function normally, or at all. But can it be this is about the "potential" and the efficiency with which we use our brains? We can sure argue about exact percentages, but I am sure there is something to it.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Be very careful about your terminology here. What exactly is "traditional medicine"? Definitely not the allopathic drugs forced upon us by money-driven Big Pharma in conjuntion with the AMA. Allopathy has not been around long enough to have developed any traditions.

No, traditional medicine, whether you believe in it or not, is the medicine which has been around for centuries. The one which was marginalized and supressed by law at the instigation of the AMA. They even started to call it alternative medicine to try to make out that this new stuff is the real stuff.

Note, I am not claiming that alternative is good and allopathic is bad (although I happen to believe it for chronic problems) but rather that the terminology which is generally used today is misleading.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

And again, just because somebody is dumb doesn't mean profiting off of convincing them not to treat their children's preventable ailments is ok.



The difference is I would never claim that traditional (or modern Western if Dr Straw prefers (: ) medicine does no harm. It absolutely does.

I'm sorry that you think I'm dumb, but personally I believe that it's actually a sign of intelligence to be able to acknowledge the good and the bad in a topic.

It has long been proven, beyond any reasonable doubt, that homeopathy does not work at all in treating any condition whatsoever.

Every day I turn on the TV, I see commercial about "tell your doctor to prescribe you THIS OR THAT drug..." - really makes me mad. Why go to a doctor if I have to tell him which drugs to prescribe? And then, almost invariably, a year or so later, I see adds for class action lawsuits against the company which produced "THIS OR THAT drug" and now it came out they did not test it properly, or even knew it harmed people, but released it anyways... They pay some when they lose the suit, but the bottom line will still be in the black.

A few years back I was sick, strapped throat or something. Went to this doctor, she prescribed me some antibiotics. Even though I told her I was largely immune, she gave me the lowest dose of the mildest drug. Well, who am I to argue, she's The Doc. Anyhow... I was visiting her every week for a few weeks, and she was prescribing progressively stronger drugs, while my throat was killing me. Finally we hit the strongest one, and it helped. But then I developed some kind of fungal infection in my throat... went back to the doc, and she said "Oh, in Europe we used to tell patients to drink kefir with strong antibiotics, no clue why here we are told not to." And I thought: "You stupid B*tch! You are gaming the system, milking the insurance, at my expense!" Some kefir sure fixed the problem in two days.

Is that "real medicine"?

Not sure homeopathy is the way to go, though. There are other alternatives. The important thing is to get healthy, not necessarily the exact way how you got there. Sometimes medicine works, sometime homeopathic methods do the trick, and sometimes you have to do something else entirely. Hey, I know people who got better on a prayer! Who am I to judge?

Well, let's judge anyways.
Speaking of "dumb" - I think anybody is "dumb" who blindly believes in only one method or philosophy, and insists that it is the best in all cases. I say - use common sense, take what works for you, but do not sneer when something else works for others. Unfortunately, there seems to be many people fixated on their worldview being not only the best, but the only one worth consideration. Reminds me of religious fanatics, same kind of arguments. THAT I call "dumb".

Hope this helps.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

It is not the kefir, per se. It is the probiotics which kefir contains. There are other ways to get them: tablet or powder form, most fermented foods, etc. Yogurt, by the way, is not so good because it only contains a few strains of probiotics.

No one in my family will take antibiotics unless they are really necessary. Sometimes they are but they are also way over prescribed. I once asked a physician why he prescribed antibiotics when he had told me I had a viral infection and his answer was that it was a good idea "just in case". I did not take them and I recovered.

The important thing is to never take an antibiotic without taking probiotics after the course is finished, in order to replenish the intestines. In our house we usually have homemade water kefir, pickles or sauerkraut around so that we can use them if needed.

But, of course, for physicians to recommend non-pharmaceutical solutions such as kefir goes against what the AMA teaches and so it not generally permitted. That is probably why you were not told initially.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Kombucha is another good choice. I lost my gut flora to an antibiotic regimen and fermented food has been a godsend. But it was an infection after a wisdom tooth extraction, and it was absolutely the right thing to get it treated with antibiotics and not hope the infection wouldn't reach my brain. Your story of antibiotic prescriptions for viral infections by a doctor is downright frightening.

Probiotics are a great example of non-mainstream, but non-harmful alternative medicines. It claims to help with particular issues. It doesn't claim to be a replacement for any serious medication: it's recommended as a complement to antibiotics and not a replacement. Viewing homeopathy as problematic does not require you to believe that all pharmaceutical medicines are great, or that there are no alternatives. Healthy skepticism and respect for the scientific medicine leaves a large area of beliefs, but at the end of the day I do believe it's crazy to approach health with disregard for scientific study.

I can't speak for your experience, but my physician (in the US) has strongly recommended things like diet change or gargling with black tea rather than treating something with medicine to me. I imagine some physicians are more open to this sort of thing than others.

There are other medical traditions aside from allopathy, such as osteopathy, that can be licensed as doctor's in the US, but the key is that they teach medicine that has been tested using the scientific method to tell if it actually does anything more than a placebo.

That said, a good placebo is an amazing thing that can work wonders in many situations, but it only works if you think it will. As I gather, side-effects help, because they convince you it's working.

Many, if not most, allopathic procedures are not tested scientifically. It is not possible to do a double-blind, placebo controlled experiment for most surgical procedures, for example. Imagine the uproar there would be if half of the cancer patients were randomly assigned and unknowingly received a placebo instead of radiation or chemo and then they died.

Also, numerous drugs are put on the market without thorough testing and are then recalled many years later when they are found to cause all sorts of problems.

There is also not a lot of difference these days between osteopaths and allopaths. Our family doctor is an osteopath, but we also use an integrative medicine doctor for chronic issues so we do get some non-standard recommendations like you do. Not that we need to see a doctor very often because the best medicine is a healthy lifestyle.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Indeed, so what you do is test your new medicine/procedure against the current best practice, not against placebo. You only want a new thing if it's better than the current thing, not better than nothing (though better is a multi-faceted value). But there are cases where doubts are raised over whether current practice is really better than placebo, for example over the use of adrenaline after cardiac arrests, so a trial will soon start in parts of the UK where adrenaline will not be administered to some patients. (Due to the ethical issues involved there is an opt-out register in the affected areas.)

Trying, even if there are shortcomings, to base medical practice on the evidence of whether it works seems a better idea to me than putting your fingers in your ears and going "la-la-la" when there is evidence it doesn't.

I have lots of examples where the current best practice is not allopathic. So will new procedures be tested against those? I doubt it. For most in the medical profession, at least in the US, the bottom line if that if it doesn't make money it doesn't work.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Sorry I missed your reply by this much.

We can be fairly certain that something is going on. If not the whole brain, at least part of the brain is quietly coming up with new ideas and combinations of ideas. A lot of your brain's mass is preoccupied with absorbing and sorting sensory information. Part of it is creating the internal sensory representation of your own thoughts as you involve conscious and unconscious decision-making processes, such as internal dialogue, mental images, etc.

There have been many, many studies based on brain imaging of subjects who were engaged in specific active activities, such as juggling or balancing, as well as passive activities, such as being exposed to colors or sound. By manipulating normally unconscious activities as in the latter studies, sometimes in very subtle ways (the subjects were sometimes unaware of what the experiment was, only that one was taking place), we have isolated the parts of the brain which activate in response to stimuli both internal and external. We have a rough idea of which part of the brain does what and how it shows.

Of course we do not know everything, and sometimes the brain is simply firing away in ways we cannot replicate. It could be neural 'noise', but I believe researchers will eventually learn to find out what the subject is doing in their own mind (maybe therapists will learn as well, someday), and replicating this 'noise' will become much easier. Going from 'noise' to clear cause-and-effect is a common process in all sciences, and it goes to show that cognitive neuroscience is still in its adolescence.



Ah yes, this is definitely another issue altogether. This is the meat of what some refer to 'intelligence'. It's the issue that is obscured by the 10% myth and the only thing that really matters: performance.

'Potential' is a very poor term when dealing with the practicalities of our neurology. It's much too vague and is reminiscent of pop-sci terminology. Three major components affect performance in sports: fitness level (state of the body), skill level (technical expertise) and mental state. The same goes for mental activities, such as Go.

In Go, you would think about fitness in terms of how 'fit' your brain is. Are you awake? Did you have enough sleep? Did you 'stretch'? What did you eat recently? Is your body fit and relaxed? When observing the mind-body connection, it becomes very easy to mistake both. After all, one is the other.

Skill level is, of course, Go experience and knowledge, reading ability, analytic skills, etc. For more information, peruse the other sections of this forum.

Mental state is the key here. Think of it as a multiplier to your mental faculties at a given time. The reason you perform much better or worse at any given time is not determined by how much of your brain you use, but simply how you're using it. So far, I haven't taught anyone here anything new. Enter sports metaphors.

One of the factors which affects performance is 'priming'. You will notice sprinters doing this all the time, right before the race. They'll stretch in very specific ways, pump their leg muscles in specific ways, at exact times before the start. Incidentally, these activities also serve as anchors for the proper mental state, and I will get to that soon. Another example of priming is the split-jump in racket sports. Once the best position on the court is achieved, the player performs a small hop and widens their base of support immediately before receiving their opponents' shot. This primes their leg muscles for rapid lateral movement, as the legs are relaxed while recovering from the hop's landing, and the player is moving upward slightly, putting less weight on the legs to allow for a faster start.

In Go, you could conceivably solve a few tsumego or quickly review one of your more successful games before seeking a new match. There is short- and long-term priming, and studying other subjects and using your brain in ways that have no obvious relation to the mental activity in question can in fact improve it. I have read of pros recommend their pupils to engage in a wide variety of mental activities to improve their game. Competitive long-distance runners prepare for weeks - even months - prior to their event, physically, mentally and gastronomically, in order to achieve optimal performance.

One of the reasons they can achieve this is that they track their performance over a range of different factors. Being competitive athletes, they understand how important their mental state is during and immediately before the performance. Every single professional athlete has a method of achieving the state of mind in which they have achieved optimal results, usually by performing a ritual of sorts. They have anchored the state to mental images and sounds, short activities, body positions, etc, and perform these steps in order to get into this state.

Again, being in the correct state is not using more of your brain, but the state must be congruent with the activity. You would not get into the same mental state to perform in Go as you would to make a public speech. The idea here is one of precision. The more precisely you can tune your state to the activity, the better. The more specific you can make your anchoring ritual, the better.

Exponents of combat sports will tell you that the secret to power is the control of tension and relaxation. They practice the same punch a million times not only to have it come out instantly and to correctly transfer body weight efficiently. The real secret is that they train each of their muscles to relax in the correct areas and amounts at precise times. Tensing your biceps while throwing a punch will slow you down and be couterproductive. Tensing them while retracting your punch makes the retreat faster and is synergetic.

The secret to achieving the perfect mental state is simply this: keep a close eye on what affects it and how, consciously strive to attain the best state for your activity, then anchor it to some sensory triggers. Fire the triggers immediately prior to the event, and you will perform better. Keep a close eye on it as you perform and find out how you can improve on it. Rinse and repeat.

Sorry for the extremely long post. This is my area of predilection (intellectually speaking, at least), and I am a proud man full of ideas.