According to the AM101 study, in the placebo group up to 65% of participants showed some improvement in their subjective tinnitus loudness. Thats is a lot of people who got better without any actual medical treatment. This was in three months from the injection. Is it possible that the people who got better using LLLT would have fallen in to this category.
@mick your argument is correct but I don't know how accurate it is to say people arguing against LLLT don't have a leg to stand on. Using your argument i could insert any number of words in place of LLLT and your argument would be true. Would you agree that the burden of proof is on LLLT advocates? They are the ones making a pretty extraordinary claims.
I believe the burden of proof in on the person making the claim. It is very easy to prove that something is not 100% anything. All one has to do is show one exception or one bit of doubt, and that is what I see myself as having done. Its very hard to prove something to a probabilty of 1, and unless you are talking about a case of deductive logic (A=B and B=C, therefore A=C), it is actually impossible to prove that. So it is easy for me to say with certainty, that it not 100% certain that LLLT is ineffective. There is somewhere a mathematical proof for that that uses deductive reasoning.
Also, I did not say that people who argue against LLLT do not have a leg to stand on. I said that people who say with
certainty that LLLT absolutely does not work do not have a leg to stand on. As I think about those words now, I can see how they may not convey well what I meant depending on how you view that saying. Perhaps what I should have said is they do not have a fully stable leg to stand on (meaning they don't have a case for saying that LLLT is absolutely, 100% ineffective against tinnitus - the evidence simple does not support that).
The fact that some tinnitus suffers say they have received benefit from it is enough evidence for me to cast doubt on the hardline naysayers. Who am I to step on someone's first hand positive experience and judgement. They know what they experienced - no one else does. It might be that in 1 of a gazillion instances LLLT works, and if things are not exactly as they were in that particular instance, it doesn't work. If a person says it was effective for them I believe them (unless I have some reason to think they are lying and trying to manipulate me), and that is evidence that the treatment is not 100% ineffective. And if someone says that it did not help them, that is evidence that the treatment is not 100% effective. At the same time, the fact that there is little scientific evidence that it works makes me not want to spend my money on the treatment because I believe the probability that it will help me is low. The naysayers certainly have great evidence that their assertion is true, but it is not 100% certain. It is arrogant to to step on someone's sincere first hand experience claims that the treatment helped them. To squash their claim with opposing statements of certainty is equivalent to saying, "You're obviously a dunce", or maybe more mildly "you're mislead, you poor thing."
I think it is perfectly fine and correct to say, "There is not sufficient evidence to convince me to spend money on LLLT for tinnitus." Or to say, "I think the people who are selling LLLT treaments are frauds". I think it is wrong and insensitive to others values to say, "LLLT absolutely does not do anything for T" unless you have verifiable proof. Aside from what it says about what you think of that person, it is also damaging to constructive science. Such an attitude casts LLLT into the dungeon and makes it taboo to even study it. This certainly leaves room for scammers. There is not anything anyone can do about the fact that it is very difficult (actually impossible) to prove something like the effectiveness of a medical treatment with 100% certainty. That is simply the nature of infinity (you cannot perform a test an infinite number of times which is what is necessary to demonstrate a probability of one in an inductive logic argument). That scammers can exploit that is an unforunate circumstance.
The issue I've been trying to address has nothing to do with whether there a scammers in the world. It is only with the statement that LLLT is absolutely ineffective for tinnitus. Just because someone scams someone with a treatment does not mean the teatment should be wholly, completely, and forever eschewed. Treating it that way inhibits the free flow of information and knocks it out of the realm of worthwhile scientific study.
The fact that there is a study that shows LLLT may stimulate stem cells lends credance to the claim that LLLT may be helpful for T. If LLLT can stimulate stem cells, and stem cells can cause the regrowth of fine hairs in our ears that are used for hearing, then it stands to reason that LLLT might help tinnitus since there is a relationship between T and hearing loss. That does not say you should therefore go to Dr. Wilden for LLLT, or that you should run out and buy a laser. It only says what it says - its a possible avenue still and it should be investigated - not ignored because there are scammers in the world who have used LLLT to fraudulently make money.