‘people believing some of those treatments may help them to avoid a surgery are idiots, ignorant or desperates’
I do think many of them are ignorant and desperate.
I have said at least a few times in this thread that I do not think people who try conservative treatments (bracing and PT) are crazy. But it is only ethical if they know what the evidence is going in. I have gotten the feeling that some parents seem to be operating under the assumption that there is good evidence for bracing. They are reasoning from bracing being the standard of care and that a surgeon is prescribing it. But this is very uncanny and unusual because bracing is clearly experimental. So they are not lying to their children but they are mistaken and the child does not get an accurate picture and so can't make an informed decision about whether to wear the brace or not. That's why I wondered how they will ever get compliance in BrAIST when the braced kids know the surgeons are okay with randomizing half of them to a no brace group based on their clinical experience and reading the literature.
Alternative treatments (modified hand-held jigsaws, vibrating chairs, rain drops, little massagers with little feet that go up-and-down, up-and-down, chanting, etc.) are generally dreamed up by lay people and so are not worth discussing as a general rule.
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