Talk:Electric bath (electrotherapy)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 00:44, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

First reading

WP:GACR Criterion 1, prose quality and layout:

• Lead: "The electric bath is no longer a recognised medical treatment in electrotherapy.": Neither this, nor why it fell out of favor, are described in more detail in the body of the article. At the very least it needs a source.

I've removed the sentence. There used to be more in the body of the article, but it was removed at DYK review for the same reason. It's fairly clear that the treatment is not current – nothing in medical books, no papers on the subject – but I have no RS. "Franklinization" is offered at various clinics of uncertain status. I suspect they are ussing some kind of hand-held high-voltage equipment in a localised area rather than a "bath". However, I'm not going to start citing promotional pages of dodgy Russian cosmetic clinics. They are simply not WP:MEDRS compliant. We can't have it both ways in this case. Either rely on editor assessment and have the information, or demand sources and don't have it. So let people go off for the treatment if they want. Who are we to stop them. SpinningSpark 09:15, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

• Description: The prose oscillates from subjunctive "The source...would" to past "The patient...was" to present "The patient is" to past again "The electric tension...was" to subjunctive "Treatment could" to present "the patient is". Please be more consistent.

Done SpinningSpark 10:19, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

• History: "One notorious practitioner using the electric bath": was he notorious for other reasons and also happened to use the bath? Or was he notorious for using the bath? And why would that have made him notorious prior to the bath's discrediting?

Use of the electric bath, I think, was the very least of the reasons for Graham's notoriety. I've changed "practitioner" to "fringe practitioner" to hopefully make that clear. We don't know that the bath was discredited, see your first point. SpinningSpark 10:19, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

• "Conditions for which Bird found this treatment did not work were mostly conditions": not high quality prose.

Reworded. SpinningSpark 10:19, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

• Should we have a link to Franklin's electrostatic machine?

Not so sure about that. Franklin mostly used Leyden jars as the patient facing apparatus since they could deliver a much larger shock. The electrostatic machine would have been used to charge the jars beforehand. In any case, there is phrase currently in the article that would be convenient to link. SpinningSpark 10:19, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Criterion 2, sourcing:

• With the exception of the lead issue mentioned above, most claims appear to have sources, and the sources appear unreliable. I am unable to check the offline book sources. The use of the Chalovich video is unusual (and I did not take the time to watch the video; I find such slow-access formats annoying) but appears to pass the "recognized expert" clause of WP:SPS.

"...sources appear unreliable." ??? SpinningSpark 11:06, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Typo, sorry. I meant reliable. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:23, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

• The references are in a somewhat idiosyncratic format (not the usual Citation Style 1 or 2 more commonly found on Wikipedia) but reasonably consistent for that format. Because they are not formatted with a standardized template, though, there are some minor inconsistencies: a different style of article title quoting in Chalovich, a doubled comma in Coley, and an inconsistent use of Vancouver-style author initials vs spelled-out names.

I don't think it is idiosycratic. It is a perfectly normal style of citation in printed bibliographies. I've fixed the inconsistencies. Chalovich is different because it is the title of a work, not of an article within a work. It was meant to be italics but the markup was broken. Coley only has initials simply because I don't know the full name. SpinningSpark 11:06, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

• The Coley link was broken for me. Is there a reason you're not using the pubmed link https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1033981/pdf/medhist00137-0071.pdf for the same article?

The link could be fixed with this, but I have instead linked directly to the CUP site (the publishers of the journal). SpinningSpark 11:06, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

• Earwig found no copyvio.
• Is our first sentence accurate and sourced? It says "an electric bath is a machine". But the Coley source (the only one I can read) says an electric bath is a method of treatment. There is no specific machine called a bath; the tools used to perform this treatment are merely an insulating stool, a source of electricity, a grounding connection to the patient, and a conductor near but not touching the patient. None of these is a "bath".

Yes, good point, I've reworded. SpinningSpark 11:06, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Criterion 3, broad in coverage:

• What I find missing from the article is any kind of evaluation, from the point of view of medical science, of this procedure. Why did it become discredited? What do modern researchers think of this sort of therapy?

Can't cover what there is no source to provide coverage from. SpinningSpark 11:06, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Criterion 4, neutral:

• With the exception of the "notorious", which without clearer writing reads as our own editorialization, this appears neutral, maybe too neutral: there are not enough sourced opinions about the usefulness of this procedure.

Criterion 5, stable:

• Beyond the recent improvements of the nominator to bring it up in quality, yes.

Criterion 6, images:

• The images appear to be relevant, properly licensed and accurately captioned.

—David Eppstein (talk) 01:04, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for reviewing David. I've addressed your points as best I can. I realise the article is deficient in lacking a modern medical assessment. I tried to address this with a cursory review of current offers in this field, but this has been shot down as OR. The most recent assessment I can find is this 1913 Lancet article claiming the treatment is good for lead poisoning. That hardly counts as modern, and is pretty much following the treatment given by Bird already described in the article from secondary sources. It seems to be ignored by modern practitioners, but even saying that much is going to be called OR. We can't put information in the article that doesn't exist. SpinningSpark 11:28, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Ok, now that all issues have been resolved (except for the lack of MEDRS-compliant evaluation, which appears unresolvable), I'll go ahead and pass this. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:23, 28 May 2018 (UTC)