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Science vs. Homeopathy
Mr. E writes "Ars Technica has an interesting look at pseudoscience as it applies to homeopathy. While most discussions about what science is get derailed by the larger controversies surrounding them, Ars chose a relatively uncontroversial pseudo-science to examine so that they could examine the factors which make homeopathy a psuedo-science: ignoring settled issues in science, misapplication of real science, rejection of scientific standards, claims of suppression, large gaps between the conclusion and evidence, and a focus only on the fringes of what we currently understand."
Homeopathy is when you don't care either way about the gays
Prepare for the Keith World Order
Homeopathy is controversial, in that some people actually believe it and loudly proclaim its wonders. That's like saying that evolution vs. intelligent design is settled just because science overwhelmingly supports the former, ignoring that many people still believe the latter.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Your tax money goes to fund an NHS homeopathy hospital in London, whilst other local health trusts are desperate for cash.
Which reminds me, that "Head On" junk advertised on TV is homeopathic. My advice is to use bottled water instead:
"Evian: apply it directly to the gullible"
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
and the suppression of homeopathy.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
James Randi has often spoke brilliantly on the topic of homeopathy, in this authors@google video he speaks on it, among other things. http://youtube.com/watch?v=MTPj9VlNzQ0
Homeopathy is a terrible scam and I know too many people that have been sucked in to it due to lack of education, and the ability for critical thought.
Free software, free thought, free society.
The more you rinse them, the stronger the soap becomes!
Enjoy your placebo effect, people.
You can't take the sky from me...
A friend of my cousin works in a homeopathic pharmacy (in Russia). She told a story that once in a while a client appears in the pharmacy with a prescription which literally says: "Placebo" (yes, an average Ivan is probably even less likely to be able to read a prescription than an average Joe, as Latin is not Cyrillic). The client gets the prescribed drug and pays a hefty sum for it. Supposedly, the more they pay, the more likely it is to work.
Honestly, as long as it doesn't interfere with other scientific endeavors, I see no problems with such things as homeopathy. They may even stumble across something that is heretofore unknown, actually contributing to science in the process. Even in this case, competent MDs certainly don't discount human willpower and mindset, especially in matters such as healing times and recovery from sickness or injury.
Sneer all you like folks, but even the fundamentalist creationist types have a chance (small as it may be) at accidentally discovering something along the way that "real science" may have ignored or discounted, or in asking a question (or posing a challenge) whose answer might lead to something useful in science itself -- if a scientist here or there takes the time to tackle them.
It's kind of how we've gotten as far as we have.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Have a look at http://www.badpsychics.com/ and look at Professor Richard Dawkins' two part series on "The Enemies of Reason". He gives homeopathy and other pseudo-science a right good pasting.
My web domain.
Yeah, many slashdotters are opposed to Homeopathy, Scientology, and many other varieties of fraud.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think what he meant was that the fact that it is pure junk science is completely uncontroversial.
Homeopathy is controversial, in that some people actually believe it and loudly proclaim its wonders. That's like saying that evolution vs. intelligent design is settled just because science overwhelmingly supports the former, ignoring that many people still believe the latter.
You keep ignoring that word, I do think it means what you do not think it means.Homeopathy, relative to intelligent design, is uncontroversial. That's like saying that a rat, relative to a tiger, is harmless.
You can't take the sky from me...
"ignoring settled issues in science" There should never be a settled issue in science. Science is about observation and theory not orthodoxy. Regardless of how crack-pot the theory, it should be able to be tested using scientific method, without being ridiculed because it goes against "established science." /Fortean.
I'm a doctor -- I could write an entire book on the relation of "scientific" or "evidence-based" medicine in relation to homeopathy.
:)
In general, homeopathy is essentially tolerated, and as the article humorously points out, it tends to not do much harm because things are dilute. From the Wikipedia article, which nicely summarizes it:
> any positive effects of homeopathic treatment are simply a placebo effect.
That has pretty much been my experience -- and it is difficult for an individual (even a doctor) to tell somebody to NOT do something that is not harmful, and (very, very unlikely) may be beneficial. Physicians joke about "homeopathic" doses of drugs when we think a drug is significantly under-dosed (usually when beginning somebody on a new medicine to see how they react to it.)
It is really funny the ritual surrounding this -- you wouldn't believe the people that adhere to homeopathic remedies and spend hundreds of dollars on these cure-alls, yet still "struggle" to afford the copay on the drugs that are actually keeping them alive. However, something that reinforces positive thought (which indeed can have an effect on your health) is good, and the placebo effect is undeniable.
Despite their benign nature, the aggressive marketing of these substances to vulnerable groups (the sick) disagrees with me. I mean, look at this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=homeopathic+remedy&btnG=Google+Search and some of the wild claims they make for cure. I can't make these outlandish claims for most of the drugs I prescribe, so how can an honest doc compete?
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Homeopathy is controversial, in that some people actually believe it and loudly proclaim its wonders.
"Some people" also claim the holocaust never happened, but I don't think anyone would seriously claim that the holocaust is controversial.
I'm sure if you looked hard enough, you could find someone that still believes in geo-centrism as well.
There's always a few nuts around that will believe crap. The existence of those nuts doesn't mean something is controversial. If anything I'd say it's the percentage of the nuts in the general populace. Even for homeopathy, I'd say that percentage is quite low.
AccountKiller
>
> "Evian: apply it directly to the gullible"
"Evian: apply directly to the naive."
Fixed it for ya. I always wondered if having your product be "Naive" spelled backwards was an inside joke on the part of some marketroid.
With that out of the way, my go-to site for debunking quack medicine is Quackwatch. Debunks all the health scams from homeopathy to ear candling to colloidal silver to chiropracty, all on one convinient page.
The writers picked the topic because of a relative lack of controversy. This is unsurprising to me, but not for a good reason. My experience - I would love to see some research, hopefully proving me wrong - has led me to believe that a majority of people accept the spurious claims of homeopathy advocates. I'm disheartened about this by the number of otherwise perfectly reasonable people who have insisted that I should pay money for a homeopathic dilution of zinc to fight a cold virus.
"My last cold only lasted three days, must have been the Zicam," is so wrong on multiple levels, and it's a sad commentary on the state of education that such thinking is so widespread, although it's only fair to note that such has always been the case with regards to medicine.
My favorite part of the article is this three-bong-load abuse of physics by Lionel Milgrom, a contributor to this very special journal edition, who proposes a theory (I shit you not) of quantum entanglement of humans:
Mr. Milgrom, you and I share the same perspective on the universe. Unfortunately for you, it's called religion, not science, and your attempts to dress it up as science for the purposes of promoting our generation's version of patent medicine are the worst sort of shameful mockery.
Also, "instantaneously?" How can any two things be made instantaneous by a force that "transcends time?" You're as shitty a philosopher as you are a physicist, Mr. Milgrom.
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This sort of thing only fuels further stupidity on their part. Look! We're being oppressed we have to be right. Though on the other hand I'm not sure what exactly can be done to discredit psuedosciences, when the average lay person can't tell the difference.
Excellent flamebait. I find it hard to believe that someone who writes under the name "David Hume" could actually endorse the viewpoint in your posts, so I can only assume you're hoping to enjoy some copious nerd hate, which you will no doubt receive in short order.
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Diluting something to the point that it is nothing and admistering it as medicine is not a great testament to Homeopathy in my mind. It is a testament against "western medicine". I think it is very true that often doing nothing is better than doing whatever western medicine says. Example: US has one of the most medicalized Birth process of any country, and one of the worst infant mortality rates of any modern world country. The US also feeds babies medicine(infant "formula") instead of food (breastmilk), cuts off functional parts of the male anatomy at birth out of tradition and ignorance.
All this unnecessary medicalization happens in the first few seconds of life a large percentage of US born babies. Setting that precident, imagine all the rediculious medicalization the "western world" faces and it is not hard to see why backing the *eff* off and using some kind of placebo voodoo water (assuming homeopathy is false) would be popular and even relieving to the bodies of people who have been abused by their own thirst for "medicine".
I am not saying western medicine gives us nothing, or that homeopathy gives us something, but I am saying that psychological response is perhaps more important than chemicals and surgery, and maybe a psudo science of placebo is a nice way to wean lemmings off of "just gimme an antibiotic so I can feel better".
Totally agreed. The trouble is, the placebo effect is real, and huge (somehow seems to settle in around ~30% regardless of what metric you use). People are all different in their diseases, and their response to medications. Thus, to test a drug you need a lot of patients with similar diseases, and give a fraction of them the drug, and a fraction of them placebo. You need to have a system of following up the results of this test without bias, and keeping track of potential confounding variables. Thus to convincingly scientifically demonstrate in medicine something (I did not say prove!), it takes a *lot* of time and money.
:p
So, what do you do until then? You rely on small sample sizes or what seems "reasonable." If something is crack-pot, it probably doesn't work, and thus probably won't be proven nor disproven. I welcome you to entertain any theory, or anybody for that matter, but scientists focus on designing studies for reasonable hypotheses, and then form the test to demonstrate it.
What happens in real life, is somebody does something, it makes them feel better, and then they tell their friends about it. We have all seen the correlation versus causation debates here.
By the way, last time I ate carrots and posted on slashdot, I got +5 insightful. Excuse me, I'm going to get some carrots. Or maybe it was the postings on even days?
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Excuse me, but isn't the article yattack way too convoluted than necessary, and logically faulty? One can totally misunderstand the principles behind a cure, yet apply it and having it work.
If you want to prove homeopathy useless gather enough cases and compare how they stack up against normal cures. I guess you'll win.
Because if the arstechnica objections are right, and homeopathy is only a matter of placebo effect, you'd still have to prove that this placebo effect is inferior to normal cures in terms of percentage of people cured.
And even before stopping calling it homeopathy and starting it calling placebo you must prove that convincing people in other ways than explaining the homeopatic theory is irrelevant to their faith in being cured.
I am nitpicking of course but the defenders of science and logic must be logically faultless.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Seeing as this is /. I'm in no way surprised that this was modded troll. Moderators hear seem to lack the funny gene. Still pretty damn funny though.
It is a good thing, when one is trying to heal, it is a good idea to know as much as possible about the treatment protocols involved. One of the reasons why acupuncture is being given an increased role in medicine around here is the serious amount of study that the Chinese government in particular has put into it over the last 50 years or so. Up until the middle of last century things were much more empirical than they are now.
Any legitimate medical treatment should go through great pains to at least do no harm. If it can't do that at least, then it isn't something which has any right to be considered legitimate. The next step is that it should help ease the symptoms or cure the disease outright. That's where things tend to get a bit more difficult.
The big issue I'm seeing with the article is stated in there, if one wishes for the result to be a specific result, then one really has to be careful about contaminating the study. There's a reason why, despite the inconvenience, that double blind studies are so common. Believe me they aren't doing them because they're fun, they do them to try and keep the observations normative.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Something few people seem to recognize is there are two separable elements to most of homeopathy. The first is the treatment itself, and the second is the explanation for how it works. For whatever reason people aren't satisfied to know that something works, they also need to know why it works. And unfortunately if there isn't a self-evident explanation one will be invented. And it doesn't end there, the invented rationale is then usually extended to develop other treatments (which don't work of course because what they are based on isn't true).
Take acupuncture. Twirling small needles in the top layer of the skin has a variety of benefits. But why? Traditions tell the story that it balances the energy flows, etc etc. A recent study examined three groups, one with no acupuncture, one with acupuncture in the traditionally prescribed locations, and one with acupuncture in random locations. Both of the latter two groups were better than the first (no treatment), but interestingly they weren't different from each other.
So yes acupuncture has some effect, but the traditional explanation has nothing to do with why it works.
So two of the big problems with homeopathy are first that most people get hung up on the far out explanations for why the treatments supposedly work and miss out on stuff that could actually help them. And second that lots of homeopathic treatments are developed that don't do anything to help because they are logical extensions of faulty premises.
Alternative medicine also suffers from the fact that once a treatment becomes well accepted and is supported by empirical research it magically leaves the realm of alternative medicine. So by definition alternative treatments will always be those that haven't yet been supported by scientific research, even though many of them do in fact work.
I've talked to a number of homeopaths and in my limited experience they seem to take it like an all or nothing religion, where you have to accept it all or none of it, and you have to accept the wacky explanations to the letter. It would be nice if they didn't feel so burned by the modern medical machine that they reject as a matter of principle empirically based testing.
Then, no one would object to holocaust jokes, huh? Since there's nothing controversial about it...
An Austrian told me this one: <controversial>Q- How do you fit 60 jews in a Volkswagen beetle? A- In the ashtray.</controversial> (his accent made it so much worse/funnier)
You can't take the sky from me...
Like most things there's good and bad so science often dismisses the good by lumping it in with the bad. The dilutions are snake oil. Other things aren't. I use a product called Oxy something, long unpronouncable name. It's essentially hepititus that's been freezed dried 400X to fragment it and render it harmless but the chemical markers are intact. Your body recognizes it and flips on the immune overdrive. Since I started using it eight years ago I haven't gotten a full blown cold or flu. When I start to feel the first symptoms I take and it always knocks it out of me. There's also the unfortunate lumping of herbal remedies in with some of the more out there parts of Homepathic preparations. The earliest drugs came from herbs and most of the early pharmecuticals came from herbal remedies they just refined and repackaged them. The important thing is to cherry pick what works from the wacky placebo effects. Eight years without a cold or flu isn't a placebo.
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I want homeopathy to die, not really because I mind idiots being separated from their money because they're gullible. That's what Apple's Inc. is for ;) It's just that every time I put honey in my coffee, some "expert" tells me that it's good for relieving your allergies. If I know the idiot, I'll politely explain that bee pollen has absolutely no relation to the airborne pollens one succumbs to in these parts (cedar, ragweed, oak, etc.). You see, flowers frequented by bees actually need the BEES to do their pollenating. If I were allergic to clover honey or something, sure, immunotolerance might ensue. But allergies to airborne antigens ain't affected by honey!
I LIKE HONEY BECAUSE IT TASTES YUMMY, OKAY, SO FOAD YOU MORONS!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I find it somewhat funny that they make fun of non-western style medicine because it is expensive and unnecessary. In my experience most of the treatments THEY prescribe are also expensive and unnecessary. The majority of ailments people suffer in the U.S. could easily be cured by getting the proper amount of sleep, using good hygiene, exercising daily, and eating whole foods in moderation. Instead they give their patients all kinds of drugs that cause just as many problems as they eliminate and at prices that bankrupt families and put a huge strain on the overall economy. Somewhat hypocritical don't you think?
Creative Demolition
It seemed like a joke to me.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Friends: Baron Arthur Gerard Michael von Boennighausen here......... My wife Marty is the decendent of James Watt - Inventor of the Steam Engine. Every lightbulb in the world has a reference to James Watt (20 Watts, 40 Watts, etc). I am the great grandson of the Baron von Boennighausen who helped found the field of Homeopathy. Marty and Arthur can help answer any questions about the field of Homeopathy or the development of the Steam Engine. My email address is: arthurvynb@sangre-de-cristo.net We live on a 1640 acre Ranch in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range of Colorado....... Look here: www.sangre-de-cristo.com/land/horses You can Google names like James Watt and Clemens Franz Marie von Boennighausen to Learn more....... Thinking allowed in Colorado........ Arthur von Boennighausen
People may claim over and over about it being a fraud,
but we must not forget the study of Madeleine Ennis,
who initially wanted to disprove homeopathy, but ended up
reaching the conclusion that solutions, dilluted to the
point of not containing even a single molecule,
produced reactions just like the controls did.
I know her experiment was later "disproved", but then again,
they used a method that didn't match her own, with many
questionable practices.
I am not ruling out it being a total fraud, but I guess it
would be more accurate to say it's a fraud if compared
to our usual western medicine.
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
I would say that it is true that there shouldn't be any absolutely settled issues in science; there are however, well established ones. One cannot just ignore them and retain any scientific credibility. One must either reconcile their new theory w/ the established ones, or produce sufficient evidence for overturning the established ones and the existing body of evidence in their favor.
Read the wiki page? When the double blind test was conducted without experimenter bias, there was no effect.
You can't take the sky from me...
It was, and a funny one at that. I'm just predicting that it will get at least one angry response.
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> If you want to prove homeopathy useless gather enough cases and compare how they stack up against normal cures. I guess you'll win.
That's not the way it works. Besides, that would only prove one particular cure as being no better than placebo. In general, real medicines undergo double-blind trials with a placebo wherein they are screened for effects both positive and negative. They also undergo toxicity testing to make sure that they aren't likely to be poisonous.
Also, they generally have some idea of what they do or might do to the body in mind before they start a whole lot of testing. You know, something more than a wild guess, even if they start by noticing nothing more than that it kills cancer cells (or whatever) in petri dishes.
Because there's no evidence that homeopathic remedies do work, because the proponents totally disregard those methods of testing, ignore control groups, and report anecdotes as data, they're not really taken seriously. It's really not that hard to set up a proper experiment, but no one else is going to do it for them when everything we know about medicine says that weaker doses are weaker, not stronger.
But if, you know, they want to be taken seriously, they COULD try doing real experiments. Not just setting up bogus "peer-reviewed journals." If they can show, given proper controls, that there's a real effect, people will take notice. I mean, the one ridiculous thing that actually claimed to show positive results was reviewed by Nature. Mind you, they found that the experiment was horribly flawed and that they were unable to reproduce those effects, but it's not like they ignored the research out of hand.
How lucky you are. Right there in France, we have a big lab called "Boiron" that's leader in homeopathy, makes regular mess in the media and have a *lot* of the population believe in its lies.
Eh, our nuts believe the earth is 6000 years old, and want to teach that crap in schools as science. If your nuts only make a stink in the media, I'd say you're the lucky ones.
AccountKiller
Yea, I don't see the problem here. If some people think it makes them better, then power to them.
Western medicine's first reaction to anything is rejection. They probably hated the x-ray and antibiotics when they first came out also, so basically, modern medical science is not all that advances in my opinion.
If we had the cures to everything then people wouldn't be looking for things like homeopathy to make them feel better. I think people who follow this might ultimately wind up being more aware of what toxins and such they put into their body, so from the point of becoming more aware of your body I think it has some positive uses.
You can argue meditation is useless also and for the most part it is, but for some people it's amazing. Now I've experienced homeopathy first hand as my aunt is into that stuff, and yea it's pretty crazy and more or less laughable, but if she feels it bring her 'inner peace' then chances are she has still achieved more than most people.
I think the fact people are aware and interested about their nutritions and biological make-up is a good think, even if it's pseudo science or just total BS. I mean TV is BS, social network is BS, political campaigns are BS, yet most of us buy into all those.
I think we may be missing the idea that science is not the only way to improve how you feel. Positive thinking and feeling as though you are empowered over a situation, even when you not, in most cases makes people happier. It doesn't have to make sense and making sense out of it will only confuse you, especially if you not one of the people who support the view in question.
The only think i don't like it when new age or conservative nutball parents brainwash their children into not taking real medicine. These assholes who put their kid on homeopathic medicine instead of chemo and then their kids chances for being cured drop off drastically because by the time they can no longer lie to themselves about the effectiveness of homeopathy you are past the 'get it early' stage. That does piss me off, but it's not something limited to homeopathy, just stupidity and I do think people have the right to refuse treatment, though I don't think parents have the right to make that decision for their children.
It's funny, conservatives believe they can deny their children life saving treatment but they think abortion is wrong because your murdering a child. What's up with that? Both ways the child has no real choice so it's a very comparable situation.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Random guy: "I've got a degree in homeopathic medicine!" Truck: "You've got a degree in baloney!" *knocks guy down with water from a hose*
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Western science could have it: reinforcement. If you think about it could work on a number of levels. You go to get treated with something that carries both a psychological impact and a physical one. We tend to fear needles and this is our treatment. If you're looking to reinforce ideas (the treatment) this seems like one possible way to do it. Of course I'm not a psychologist.
Quack, quack.
I am amazed at how tolerant doctors are of alternative medicines. Years ago I had a letter published in the local newspaper where I protested their gullible coverage of an obviously bogus medical claim. I was surprized that my letter was the only one that appeared. This was in a big city - where were the letters from the medical doctors?
Why do so few doctors speak out? Where is their courage? Where is their integrity?
Some day we may have a public who is completely unable to differentiate between true medical doctors practising evidence-based medicine, and a vast array of charlatans and witch doctors, and the doctors will wonder what happened.
Your tepid and spineless response to alternative medicine is what happened.
I DO care when these con artists claim it can cure/treat real illnesses, because if even one person delays proper treatment to these quacks, it's one too many. Homeopathy is mildly therapeutic at best, and even most of those benefits can be explained as nothing to do with the treatment itself.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
One time, a buddy and I went into a homeopathy/herbal healing store and noticed the ear candles. When we asked the lady what they do she said "It's like smudging your insides!" We immediately left the store to relieve the uproarious laughter from such a nonsensical, yet enthusiastic response.
Quack cult people are a strange breed. How is the layman supposed to be able to decipher their inane technobabble?
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
Regardless of whether or not homeopathy is valid or not, there's another problem: how is the consumer to know whether any homeopathic product is genuine?
HeadOn Extra Strength Sinus Headache Relief, from Miralus Healthcare, is stated to contain
"Golden Seal Hydrastis 30X HPUS 0.08%."
30X means that the ingredient has been diluted by a factor of ten thirty times. As in ten-to-the-minus-thirtieth power. As in over a million times Avogadro's Number. I'm not sure that the 0.08% means--probably that it started out at 0.08% before they diluted it, but after dilution to one nonillionth (Europeans: one quintillionth), who's counting?
How the heck would anyone know for sure whether or not the product actually contained any Golden Seal Hydrastis in it, or not? Even the "White Bryony 12X HPUS 0.04%" would be a challenge.
I suppose the "Potassium dichromate 6X HPUS 0.05%" is detectible, but exactly who is trying to detect it? Not the FDA, that's for sure.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If only we could combine the two. Then we could sell them Jesus Water and make a mint!
The Farewell Tour II
It's still fraud if someone claims a false claim, takes your money, but by a happy chance you get something out of it anyway.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
So...there's money to be made in the field of sage enemas, once I work out where to stick the fuse?
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That's called Wine. French people already sell it to us.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Dude, that is some advanced logic acrobatics - I hope you didn't strain anything.
(PS if you sell something based on a claim, and that claim is bullshit, it's fraud)
sic transit gloria mundi
It's a fraud. Don't worry yourself over it. But if you're interested I'll sell you some very special homeopathic remedies. I've currently got Dasani and Aquafini brands, but I should be getting a big shipment of Kirkland in next week.
The Farewell Tour II
The fact that it happened isn't very controversial. You know what's worse than finding a worm in your apple? The holocaust. You know what's worse than the holocaust? Finding half a worm in your apple.
Mr. Daily Kos, how tall is a pony?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
There's a reason why Galileo is considered the father of modern science. Its because, prior to Galileo, knowledge progressed via increments of dogma. "scientists" of that time, held that heavier bodies fell faster than lighter ones, simply because Aristotle had said so. Nobody challenged this way of doing science until Galileo came along and performed experiments. And that is the crucial contribution that he made: the role of experiment in determining the truth.
Saying that the theory of a flat earth was "largely settled" in 1404, therefore has no bearing on the argument at hand. In 1404, the methods of science didnt exist. Nobody had looked at the existing facts, constructed a theory, and used that theory to conduct experiments to measure predictions against experimental outcomes to validate the theory. People also tend to apply these principles the wrong way when criticizing science. For example, they say that in Newton's time, it was a well settled matter that Force = mass * acceleration, and Einstein showed that this was wrong. Therefore science can be wrong. This is a fallacy because force is indeed mass times acceleration when one looks at all the data that was available in Newton's time. Quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity were created to explain facts that were observed past Newton's time.
So the true test should be that, today, given all that we know, can a scientific theory be constructed to explain homeopathy, and if so, can we make successful predictions using that theory. If this isn't possible, thats alright - just dont call homeopathy a science. Call it dogma.
I note that circa 200 BC, Eratosthenes announced a number that he considered the circumference of the earth. This was assuming a round earth. His figure has been found to be amazingly accurate given the quality of the measurements that he had access to. However, there was no attempt made to validate this result by correlating this with the results of experiments or other measurements, and so this measure was nothing more than Eratosthenes' opinion. Not science.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
I think this is a Wikipedia thing: the phrase "some people" automatically makes any opinion or belief valid.
sic transit gloria mundi
If an experiment's results cannot be reproduced when it is repeated double blind, chances are that it's just the placebo effect.
I have a thorough science-based education and outlook. I like to know how stuff works. Pseudo-science and other hippy new age shit makes me want to reach for a clue stick with six inch nails in it, and apply it vigorously and repeatedly to the person spouting said shit.
However.
I can't say that about homeopathy. It has been my experience that it works. And I can't see why.
Placebo effect? Surely this is only effective when the person taking this "new treatment" expects it to work. How the hell does it work on someone like me who can't see how homeopathy could possibly work, with such ridiculously dilute solutions, water memory (give me a break), quantum entanglements (are you fucking kidding me?) ? I can't see any way, using established scientific criteria that it could work, and it bugs that it has been my experience that when I have taken homeopathic remedies in the past that it does.
It could be something to do with the homeopath taking far more time than conventional doctors with each patient. This would go under placebo effect I think. See previous comments about dilutions etc.
It has worked despite my skepticism that it should not work at all.
This annoys me.
So, faced with the apparent lack of scientific explanation of how it works, I am forced to conclude that there is something going on that is not yet understood by science.
Anyone who says "I can't see how it works therefore it can't possibly work" is just being arrogant. Dawkins is guilty of this, in spades. While I applaud his skepticism and generally agree with his views, his unwavering view that if something has not been validated (if not actually invented) by western science means it is completely invalid doesn't sit well with me. He is a major sufferer of NIH-syndrome.
Note that my grudging acceptance of homeopathy is limited to stuff actually prescribed by a qualified homeopath after a consultation. The myriad of supposedly homeopathic remedies seen in health shops are quite another matter.
Trying to associate Microsoft with "fun" is like trying to associate Satan with aromatherapy. -Tycho
The claim is that if you dilute a substance X to the ratio of one part X to 10***120 parts pure water, you will then have no X left in the pure water, only the memory of X, and this will now cure whatever illness X caused in the first place.
Now ask yourself, where did you get the pure water for the dilution, since all water has the memory of all substances that it has ever been in contact with?
How do you remove the memory of X from water so the water can become pure again and suitable for another round of dilution with substance Y?
Infuriate left and right
Now we shouldn't even laugh at bad science. Heavens! Is there anything left we're allowed to laugh at?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Wisdom is what happened.
There is a big difference between what seems scientifically implausible and what happens in a complex biological system. Many, many scientific theories that "seem right" are then proven wrong. A classic case study in medicine regarding this is the CAST study. Here, the drugs that suppress arrhythmias after somebody has a heart attack were found to kill them! Suppress life-threatening arrhythmias seems good, and logical. However, the end result was not what was expected at all. This was HUGE news and changed practice dramatically.
http://general-medicine.jwatch.org/cgi/content/full/1991/322/1
Now, what you are asking is slightly different -- we should discount "scientifically bogus" therapies. Well, it is difficult. Without going into too much detail, there are numerous therapies that sound like total bunk, and work. Take, for instance, counterpulsation therapy:
http://www.clevelandclinic.org/heartcenter/pub/guide/disease/cad/eecp.htm
strapping on a G-suit and inflating it rapidly? Huh? Yet, there is a wealth of data supporting its effect.
Before anybody gets angry -- I don't believe in magic, and am not "tolerant" of magical thinking -- I firmly believe that each one of these therapies has a scientific, logical, demonstrable basis (counterpulsation likely releases vasoactive substances from vascular endothelium that have a positive effect, many yet to be discovered...) but it is not as easy as you would think to take a defiant stance.
Often, strong opinions are for weak minds.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
There is first of all, no proof of water memory, which is what you'd be looking for. A positive indication, not trying to disprove something like this which flies in the face of all our scientific understanding. Why does water not remember all the other things that had been part of it, like urine, dirt, sand... Filtering wouldn't remove the memory of those things, as filters works of the basis of removing particles, not memory.
Free software, free thought, free society.
Did it produce "reactions" at a higher rate than those expected for a pure placebo?
If so, were the testing methods determined to be sound upon peer review and was it reproduced by others?
Unless you answered yes on all counts, passing it off as a valid treatment *is* fraud
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Homeopathy, means that molecules can "immprint" in water. Here is the premise taken to original meaning of homeopathy, when you take one drop chemical and put that into a Olympic sized swimming and then take one from that Olympic swimming pool and then put that into another Olympic swimming pool and continue on several more times. After all of this in theory you get the "Immprint" of the original chemical molecule in that water and that is your homeopathic medicine. I reality there is possibility of one molecule, if that, after all that dilution. I work in a biological research lab and we can measure incredibly small amounts of any sort of chemicals so there is virtually no chemical trace and there is no such thing as "chemical immprinting" in water. This psuedo-science was grandfathered into current medical law so states and US government doesn't go after them.
Homeopathy is the thought that the more diluted a substance is in water, the more effective it is. That's why a homeopathic "doctor" will give you a bottle of pure distilled water. At some point in the past, the water in that bottle was part of a *much* larger batch of distilled water, and a single molecule of medicine was added. (Actually, most homeopathic medicine claims an impossible level of dilution... a level that would take every molecule in the universe and more to dilute a single molecule of medicine).
You're missing the heart of it. The claim is not that a single molecule is left, but that NO molecules are left, only the MEMORY. It is this memory which does the work, and that is precisely why they want the super dilution.
This is also what makes it a fraud by definition, since there can no longer be such a thing as memory-less water, and thus all dilution brings in all the previous memories and confounds things. Homeopathy has no procedure for removing memories, as best as I can remember (!).
Infuriate left and right
It was settled in favor of a round earth. I know that is what you meant, but your answer implied it was still in dispute.
Infuriate left and right
Tell that to all the people on
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Of course we are the center of our observable universe. And yours is different from mine. Have you forgotten relativity??
My favorite myth buster, James Randi, gave a pretty entertaining lecture on what homeopathy really is.
To do list for Windows
That depends, a lot of quackery going around these days is so unrealistic as to be untestable. Something that can't be tested is simply NOT REAL. Period.
You could test homeopathy, since it's just bottled water with funny names on the label, but what's really the point?
There most certainly are issues that are settled, but whether or not they are "settled issues in science" is open to interpretation depending on if you consider something that is settled before you even get to science an issue "in science."
The Farewell Tour II
Those bastards! Well I've got a trick for them. I'm going to distill their wine in water and sell it back to them. One bottle of wine has got to be good for infinite bottles of Jesus's Homeopathic Patriot Water.
The Farewell Tour II
Well, I have to say that I've had good luck with a chiropractor for back pain, but I agree with you on their general theory of disease being cause by misalignment. Chiropractor as physical therapist? I'll buy that. Chiropractor for digestive ailments? No thanks.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Tell that to all the people on /. who keep saying that Global Warming is a settled question and that no more research on anything except profiting from the melting of the polar ice caps needs to be done.
The Farewell Tour II
> "largely settled matters"... in 1404, a flat Earth was a "largely settled matter"
No it wasn't. Not only did they know the Earth was round, they had a better estimate for it than Columbus did. He thought the Earth was a LOT smaller and his crew would've died if the Americas hadn't been between him and Asia.
But even if it was, the problem is that they're IGNORING those "largely settled" issues instead of explaining them in a new way! You can overturn them, yes, but you have to explain the existing evidence somehow.
Geocentrism was once the better explanation because we couldn't measure stellar parallax (it's really, really freaking small) and didn't realize just how mind-bogglingly far stars are away from us (e.g. convert light years to miles). People didn't know about the speed of light, gravity, or many other things back then, either, so they didn't have a lot of evidence with which to prove that the Earth wasn't at the center, especially when they saw the stars appear to go around them every day.
Then people found that heliocentrism could better explain astronomy, especially once we had better measurements for stellar orbits (which took a lot of money and many years worth of data to compile, not to mention a lot of analysis in a day without calculators or calculus). Later, we had Newtonian physics which simplified things even more by explaining gravity and motion.
And then we found that, at very high speeds, Newtonian physics broke down. We didn't just ignore Newton--we find that relativistic physics produce very nearly the same results as Newtonian physics at non-relativistic speeds. But we also found that Einstein's corrections were necessary. Same goes with QM, at really tiny scales, we see really strange things. And the models aren't quite compatible with relativity, so it's quite complex to see how the universe transitions from one to the other in any kind of unified theory.
So you see, it's VERY true that established science can be overturned.
But established *results* don't get overturned.
Even if we find some new Theory of Everything tomorrow, Earth's gravitational acceleration is going to be *really close* to 9.8 m/s^2. That's just NOT going to change. We might understand the "why" part differently. We might find that there are some extra terms in the equations that make a bit of difference in some rather exotic circumstances.
But we're not going to wake up tomorrow and have things fall up instead of down. The world just doesn't work that way.
And so the problem with homeopathy isn't that they're trying to overturn our understanding of science, it's that they're ignoring it and that they're unable to provide a better working explanation than the ones we already have for the things we've observed.
They're merely *ignoring* the bits of data they dislike.
And that, my friends, is the problem here.
It covers it fairly well:
http://www.acahf.org.au/articles/homeopathy1.htm
http://www.acahf.org.au/articles/homeopathy2.htm
Read the last one, at the very least. Homeopathy is ludicrous.
"Uncontroversial" is vague and scope-bound. Do you mean uncontroversial among scientists? Uncontroversial among the educated public? Uncontroversial among the greater public at large? I think homeopathy is uncontroversial within at least two of these scopes.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Uh, yea, I guess there is. Notwithstanding the implications of the word "fuse" in an enema... Ahh hell, let marketing figure that one out.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
It's a shame that in most people's minds homeopathy has become mixed up with "natural remedies", some of which do contain useful compounds.
Herbalism and natural remedies aren't suitable for everything, but some of them can help and have been proven to. Some of them are the source of things like aspirin.
Homeopathy on the other hand is total quackery.
If science was a car, people would never buy it. The basic fact of science is that, even though we learn a bunch of new things, and have ten thousand new ideas a day to better humanity, probably only one in a million of those new ideas actually WILL, so, as a risk management thing goes, you genuinely are better off ignoring most scientific breakthroughs - even if there is overwhelming evidence that the breakthrough is beneficial. Cell phones and plastic bottles suddenly come to mind.
But its more than that. Science as a brand is in trouble and on a many levels.
The public exposure to science is, in these days, filled with a bunch of bad news. It used to be that science would make peoples lives better, and now, the more we know, the worse our lives promise to get. Every time a scientist gets up on TV, its to say that we're screwing up the planet, we have to have less, use less, in essence, roll back a pretty good chunk of our wealth really, just to "share" with the emergent third world, and that sucks.
Every time a scientist gets on TV, you hear about wonder drugs that kill some small amount of people, so your grandmother can't get them, how you can't smoke, can't drink, can't even eat peanuts on the plane anymore. It's like, science used to be about human promise, and it's really, any more, just nickel and diming us into a life of total misery. Then, to top it all off, some scientist comes out with a supposed cure for cancer, but you can't afford it anyway, because, the truth is, the gov't and the insurance companies know that the country can't afford to spend 1 million bucks per citizen and medical costs and have a solvent nation.
Accompanying all of that doom and gloom is a remarkable lack of constitency and clarity. You get scientists that say claiming that there will be more hurricanes than ever for a year, and none show up. You have the government taking recommendations of scientists saying that people should eat cheese and peanut better one year and then the next year, eat celery and whole grains. Now, scientists claim to have your kids interests at heart, and all of a sudden we have the absurd primary school educational disasters of the 1980s, becuase, oops, we didn't learn until last year that boys brains really ARE wired differently from little girls brains, sorry, folks, that an entire generation of men got screwed despite the best intentions of the scientists in that field.
Now, compare all of that to a preacher, who reads out from the bible. He's not hawking a perfect system, but it is a system that has been field proven, and, at least in the context of christianity, coupled with some technology, that actually elevated europeans from the dark ages into world domination. You'd have big families, spread out, dominate. That's good stuff, and at the end of the day, you've got the promise of a woopass god that will smite your enemies when you die and shower you with goodies. That's cool.
What's science giving us instead, a life that sucks, a death that's permanent, and a universe that will wink out of existence in 100 billion years, or some other grizly fate. Even the existence of man is utterly pointless in the long run.
So yeah, while it may be factual and consitent and the religious types live in a fantasy land, it is a fantasy that gets your more goodies if you can win it, and finally,
Y o u d o n ' t n e e d t o b e l i e v e i n e v o l u t i o n t o
u s e a c e l l p h o n e...
When the dust all settles, its really no surprise. Science offers a shitty deal, and religion offers a good one, so only an idiot would really choose science, and so more and more people don't!
This is my sig.
If that were actually the case, a lot of us would die from Cyanide processing when we eat a single almond.
Medicine is full of fuzzy science. Yes, most is good stuff derived from research, but there is also a lot of "we tried this on five patients and it seemed to work". Too much medicine is just simply the memorization of some "x is indicated for y". Later we find out that while x actually did work on y, it also produced z and z turned out to be a very bad thing. This usually leads to a better understanding of the interaction of x with the body, but one would have hoped to have had that information first. There are still too many traces of 18'th century thinking left in modern medicine. Most were pushed out into the "alternative" categories during the last century, but enough remain to allow the cranks to have an argument. Homeopathy is certainly benign compared to some "established" procedures with a equal level of quackery, but it is at the very least unproductive, and that raises ethical as well as scientific issues. When you treat someone, you should do it with a reasonable expectation that the procedure will yield the desired result (in addition to doing no harm, although failing to treat the condition could be causing the patient a great deal of harm). Doing the science right is not just a good idea, it is an obligation for anyone claiming to practice medicine.
Acupuncture is indeed far more accepted in the west today than it was a few decades ago, but it's effectiveness hasn't changed it has just been studied. I would propose that in many circumstances homeopathic remedies are as much as 75% as effective as prescription drugs. Mainly because of the placebo effect.
Now of course for a placebo to work, you have to expect it to work, so widely published careful studies could actually reduce the effectiveness of homeopathic "medicine". Now if you have a harmless sugar pill that works 75% as well as Prozac but cost 3% the price, why would that be a problem? Sugar pills have almost no bad side effects while:
From some viewpoints Homeopathic remedies could be superior to prescription drugs even if the effectiveness was closer to 20%, they are still affordable by pretty much everyone and cause less side effects than most prescriptions. Who cares if the only thing that they really do is make the person think and feel as though they are receiving a cure? Many times that is all it takes to actually fix the problem.
http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Labs-Calms-Homeopathic-pills/dp/B000F3Q72C http://www.pharmacychecker.com/Pricing.asp?DrugName=Prozac&DrugId=19219&DrugStrengthId=104989
We are all just people.
http://btjunkie.org/search?q=horizon+homeopathy
I really recommend it to anyone interested in science, how it works, and how homeopathy fails when you do your science right.
Homeopathy follows the Similia Similus Curantur principle ("like cures like"), where you take something that causes a certain illness and dilute this substance in an infinitesimal solution. The resulting solution will possess curative properties against the same illness the original poison causes. The process of producing a homeopathic drug includes diluting the original substance in water and shaking the solution so water molecules interact with this original substance's molecules evenly. The problem everybody has about homeopathy is dilution. Dilution types in homeopathy are labeled by letters and numbers (i.e. C1, C12, C100). For instance, C1 dilution is the so called "mother tincture" diluted 1 in 100 parts water. The mother tincture is by itself a dilution made from the original substance. C2 is C1 diluted in 100 parts of water. C3 is C2 in 100 parts water, and so on. So, doing some math, we can see that C1 will probably get 1/100 of the "mother tincture". C2 will get 1/100 from C1, and so on. The rest is water. This yields the following fomula:
Cn = C(n-1) / 100
If we expand that to create a relationship to the source "mother tincture" (MT), we'll have:
Cn = MT / (100^n)
Using a dilution above C100 is a very common practice in homeopathy, actually it's possible to have even higher dilutions (i.e. C200). So, based on the formula, we would have this for C100:
C100 = MT / (100^100) = MT / (10^2)^100 = MT/10^200
I think we all remember Avogadro's number, which is the number of molecules in one mole. That number is approximately 6.02*10^23
As we can see in the calculations, in C100, MT gets divided in more the 10^200 parts, which is way bigger than the Avogrado's number. So, in an utlimate analysis, C100 contains only water, nothing else. Even in face of this, it is homeopathy's contend that a homeopathic drug in C100 will possess curative properties. Some people listen to this as "water cures", and that's the problem. Yet, thousands successful cases of homeopathy use have been reported around the globe, and I am also talking about veterinary homeopathy (which dismisses many of the placebo arguments).
The fact is that there is convincing evidence that the therapy works, but nobody knows exactly how. We are only beginning to understand some pretty astonishing facts about our world with new discoveries in physics and chemistry, things that would be considered crazy before, and yet some dismiss the possibility that water may be changed in a way that makes it have unusual and beneficial effects over our health.
BTW, anyone care to explain to me how the hell Sulfasalazine (SULFA) works as an anti-inflammatory? I guess that should be fairly easy since everybody is using it these days.
Water memory is not just contested, the single experiment that demonstrated it was not done correctly, not documented correctly and not presented correctly. Noone know if the microscope pictures he took of those ice crystals were of areas he selected (he didn't show th surrounding area or the whole structure, just a small part that he selected). He came into all parts of the experiment, there was no blind element, he "scared" the water, froze it and then tried to find crystal formations conforming to his own hypothesis. That really is the definition of bad science! Needless to say, noone has gotten the same result when trying to repeat the experiment, strange that......maybe you just have to BELIEVE!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The infant mortality rate is an apples to oranges comparison.
The US counts "children" that are much more premature than the other countries. What Europe counts as a miscarriage the US will count as a birth, tries to save the kid, and when this falls counts it as an infant death.
Basically this is yet another case of the US trying too hard and getting punished for it.
Nope, that fraud has already been done. Sad part is that the guy's already been busted 20 years ago for fraud (by none other than James Randi), and he's only recently come back to the late-night infomercial circuit. I guess he thinks most people have forgotten his scam. Sadder still, he's probably right. Saddest of all, his target audience doesn't even think it could be a scam. *sigh*
Medicine is (also) an empirical science. It doesn't care much to know "how the treatment works" but "if the treatment works".
That's seems to scare outsiders or those paid to discover cures studying chemicals, but that's how Medicine works. What's most important is the patient wealth, not how the cure is processed.
Homeopathy had a lot of empirical studies showing it's better than placebo. Its effects have been proved even in babies and animals. That's what matter to medicine.
A lot of people have failed to explain how it works but much more repeatedly explaining the ways it doesn't work.
The chemicals have all the rights to say they can't find chemical causes.
But MD also have the rights to make their studies as well and to improve patients health using any empirical proved method.
Ennis's work appears to be identical to that of Jacques Benveniste. Benveniste also showed positive results for ultra-dilute solutions - until James Randi adjusted the experimental protocol to exclude confirmation bias, whereupon the results disappeared.
As the Wikipedia article states, when Ennis's tests are repeated with a proper protocol in place, the results likewise disappear. The conclusion is straightforward: Ennis is a sloppy experimenter - probably honest, but incompetent.
Well, not really, you can just dip another almond in a bucket of water, have a glass of it and be cured.
To do list for Windows
Many people here referred to homeopathy as a scam or compared it to Scientology.
Or think people spend a lot of money on it.
Homeopathic remedies cost usually $5-10 a bottle, they hold dozens of those "sugar pills" and often you only need to take it once.
The remedies are not copyrighted or trademarked.
The way they are produced is documented and anyone can reproduce them.
Just like open source.
Another misconception is that you take remedy A for a cold, remedy B for back pain etc just like allopathic meedicine.
Homeopathic remedy is prescribed according to the unique needs of the individual.
Pharmacies often sell so called homeopathic remedies for specific ailments but that's not true homeopathy.
Most people I know (rational, techies) got into homeopathy after they had children.
Most kids start getting into a cycle of ear infections and antibiotics after the age of 2.
At some point for the sake of the kid you stop it and you try alternative medicine.
Kids treated with homeopathy do a lot better, get sick a lot less often, their immune system doesn't get worn out by the frequent use of antibiotics.
Why it works? I don't know.
I'm not a fanatic about it.
If I have a hangover I'll take a Tylenol or Aspirin.
Why that works?
Nobody knows either.
It does not work. I'm tried quite a few of them, to be sure.
But there is one exception - and amazingly it works great. Arnica Montana is amazing stuff. All it does is stop compression-type injuries from swelling.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Are you kidding ? I've been using colloidal silver for years, and have yet to contract a life threatening illness.
Until we began synthesizing new chemicals from scratch, guess where most of our medicines came from? Yup, nature. Now I won't say homeopathy is a full-fledged science, but it's been practiced for millenia with recorded and published results. To call homeopathy a quack science is a baseless accusation. Got general gastro-intestinal issues like gas or indigestion? Mints help with that. Toothache or got a bee sting? Willow bark has the answer.
Without homeopathy, most painkillers known about now days may not exist, and we'd still be smoking opium before surgery.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
no
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
One core idea that it espouses is:
Encourage the initial symptoms rather than suppress them.
For some infections and injuries, this makes eminent sense.
Let me give two examples:
Example 1. Getting a cold or other respiratory virus.
Basic homeopathic advice: In the very initial stages,
encourage coughing,sneezing, nose blowing, and drink lots of fluids
so you can have a productive cough and nose-blowing.
Doesn't it make sense to facilitate the body's own
defense mechanisms that are attempting to rid the body
of virus particles?
Sure, after a few days, further coughing is likely starting
to get destructive of lung tissue, but for the first day,
cough and nose-blow as much as your body wants to and
even a little more. Seems to work for me, but I know
the plural of anecdote is not data.
Example 2: You injure a joint. It swells up. Ok, maybe
it makes sense to reduce the swelling with ice, but the
swelling, and the pain, is there to tell you something,
and that is: Don't move me more and cause further injury.
Taking pain medication and ice then "soldiering on" in whatever
physical activity you are doing is going to exacerbate the
injury. So feel the pain, and respect what the damaged part
is telling you.
For either case, there is no reason the efficacy of the
strategy I mentioned could not be scientifically tested.
The fact that a lot of medical research is funded by
pharmaceutical companies means that homeopathic
or alternative remedies are unlikely to receive scientific
examination even if their practitioners wanted it done.
Put these things to a proper test, I say. Fund it through
public health funding. I am almost certain that some
homeopathic techniques will pass muster.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
People may claim over and over about it being a fraud,
Umm, point of order there: it's not up to us to prove it's a fraud, it's up to the quacks to prove otherwise.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
An exploding rabbit killed my father, you insensitive clod!
See "Death by Medicine"
LE Magazine August 2006 (Life Extension Magazine)
Death by Medicine
By Gary Null, PhD; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; and Dorothy Smith, PhD
Go to www.lef.org and search their magazine for "medical deaths" and read the article.
Something like 780K deaths/year caused by "real" medical care.
(There's no signon needed at their web site, but it's a bit klunky so no direct URL).
Placebo effect is very important, especially in things like depression, anxiety, and agitation (its a real clinical status, look it up!) where behavioral therapy may improve symptoms. I'll let it slide that homeopathy for these things is hard to justify, what with the "like cures like" and all (can we get a 100000x dilution of sad juice?), and stick to the placebo effect which I think is your main point.
..So, if you wake up and feel tired (who does that??), you are experiencing possible drug-related fatigue..
Also, we can pretty much write off Prozac because it has become the Ritalin of middle-age. By that I mean that a wide array of causes, behavioral, social, or chemical, are causing a problem, and instead of resolving it (through behavioral therapy or psychological analysis) the doc is just writing for the same treatment. Bobby is loud, give him Adderall. Bobby is sad, give him Prozac. Some people really need the chemically altering action of Prozac to be happy- some people just want to buy a month's worth of 10mg Problem Solver from CVS... i digress..
When administering or justifying a placebo as a treatment, take care not disregard the importance of real medicine. Placebo effect is significantly less present with things like hypertension, electrolyte imbalance, heart problems, diabetes, kidney and liver diseases, obesity, hypercholesterolemia, and other more corporal diseases. There is no "I think this will resolve my congestive heart failure" placebo effect that stands on its own.
As far as "sugar pills have no side effects" is concerned, look at and drug study that reports side effect profiles - placebos can have many of the same adverse effects as the "medicine" medicine. People will report dry mouth, sweating, fatigue, headaches, sleeping problems, and even sexual problems because ordinary people will have all of these things randomly on a day to day basis. The only thing thats different is that the FDA makes them report every single thing as a "possible side effect" if it occurs during a trial.
If you wanted to market sugar pills as an FDA approved drug, your drug monograph would be as bleak as that of any other drug with regard to side effects. I'm not trying to say that pharmaceutical compounds dont have side effects, but the same effect that makes people feel better regardless of drug action can also make them feel worse.
Homeopathic drugs will never be superior to prescriptions because they are just water. Literally, in some formulations there is actually NO drug - just the solvent, because they have diluted it to such a degree that you could have an entire lot without a single molecule of the effective chemical. It would be nice if all of our healthcare issues could be resolved by just "thinking and feeling as though one is receiving a cure," but almost every time, this is not the case. People who have needs for medicinal intervention can not afford to be distracted by things like this at a cost of delaying real medicine. Real medicine and real doctors and real pharmacists who make people better through real science.
"Uncontroversial among the greater public at large." Of course it's scientifically bogus.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Conventional medicine still prescribes things like antibiotics for influenza.
Yeah. Kill those bacteria. That'll teach them stupid virii!
I've seen a relative done damage by colloidal silver. I've seen a sister almost killed by antibiotics.
Pot, meet kettle.
The greater public of... where, exactly? There's more ID supporters than homeopath believers in the US, I'll give you that. I'd be willing to bet a decent sum of money the opposite is true in Asia, though. And probably Europe.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Which reminds me, that "Head On" junk advertised on TV is homeopathic.
Wait! You mean those irritating ads are for something that isn't even real medicine? That's it! I no longer have any reason not to burn down their company for those awful ads.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There is no way to show that God didn't make the earth, but there is a really easy way to show that giving people water that had drug in it a long time ago doesn't cure disease. Without God showing up in the equation, homeopathy should really be easy to dismiss. No scientific proof (though there are lots of scientific studies to disprove), faulty reasoning, no omnipresent, omnipowerful beings twiddling with shit...
It's always nice to hear a positive story from a chiropractic patient on a forum such as this. And yeah, for the most part, I agree that there is something to the theory of disease being able to be caused by misalignment.
I generally have excellent success with back pain/neck pain/headaches/knees. I have decent success with hips/shoulders/ankles. Everything else, I'm happy to make an attempt at. Do I tell people with Crohn's disease that I can help them? No. I do occasionally have good results with minor digestive issues though. There are few things more satisfying than making a patient with chronic constipation sprint for the bathroom.
Quackwatch? ha. I appreciate the concept and I agree with a lot of the skepticism shown there about different topics, but Stephen Barrett seems to have an old-school AMA hate for chiropractors, which I think is humorous. But it also taints his opinions on the rest of the site, in my mind.
Colloidal Silver? Probably not a good idea.
Magnetic Healing? Probably something to it. Many types of electromagnetism have different effects on the body. I could see it working, but that doesn't validate the $15 magnetic bracelet at the counter at Walgreens.
Acupuncture? Definitely does something, but I don't think we know exactly what. Hopefully the Chinese will figure it out and let us know.
Homeopathy? I've never been to a practitioner, but I'm honestly not too confident in the concepts. Water memory? I believe that water memory could possibly be true. If you take a volume of pure water and let it approach equilibrium, I assume that the whole mass will oscillate/vibrate/move at some frequency. If you introduce copper atoms(for example) into the water, they probably would have some effect on the water's previous vibrational state, by introducing a vibrational state of its own. Now, remove the copper. Does the water immediately go back to its original state, or does the water retain some of the effects of the copper addition? I don't know, to be honest with you. IANAB(iophysicist). But I would not say that it is impossible. And if water memory has even a bit of truth to it, then I'd believe that homeopathy could also have a bit of truth though. But we currently have no good proof of either.
I can understand the doubting attitude towards a lot of 'alternative medicine' but I really have a hard time feeling that chiropractic belongs in that category anymore. Your family practitioner isn't going to be able to do much for that back pain you've got.
Homeopathy though? I continue to doubt.
The consensus is that breastfeeding is good, and circumcision isn't beneficial.
Actually, there's no consensus on the latter. First, circumcision is actually beneficial in helping to prevent HIV by removing tissue that acts as an easy point of entry. Second, a small (40 person) study was performed that showed that strongly suggests that sensitivity is not significantly impaired in circumcised men despite commonly held beliefs to the contrary.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If you take a volume of pure water and let it approach equilibrium, I assume that the whole mass will oscillate/vibrate/move at some frequency.
This is the kind of science they teach you in chiropractor school, eh? No, it doesn't "vibrate", and adding different ions doesn't make it "vibrate", and what the living FUCK does "vibration" have to do with health claims?
And if there's something to acupuncture, you're welcome to prove it. It's failed every rigorous test before it, but hey, keep on trucking. Granted it's pretty hard to do double-blind studies with people you're jabbing with needles, but I guess you could deliberately miss the "meridians" or target the wrong qi flow or whatever.
Magnetic healing, should be pretty easy to test double-blind, though I suppose you'd have to keep all the subjects from getting their bracelets near ferrous metals.
My captcha is "injury". Love it.
I'll rant first, read later.
I have a cousin who was almost killed by colloidal silver. It would have helped if conventional medicine had had some answer for his headaches.
I have a sister who was almost killed by antibiotics. Homeopathic treatments brought her back the first time. Later, she almost died from cancer because she was too scared to talk with MDs who would naturally insist on prescribing conventional medicine. She got really lucky and went to a hospital that allowed unconventional treatments like reiki. They also allowed me to bring in food and weren't offended when she wouldn't eat the standard fare from their kitchens, and when she insisted on picking and choosing what treatments to subject herself to. I personally used reiki to help her reduce the swelling in her legs. I know I did something, even though I can't quantify what I did, and I know I can't reproduce it on demand.
The last point is probably the biggest problem with homeopathy. There are times you can do things that you don't understand. It's kind of like hacking a huge system you are unfamiliar with, where maybe you're lucky at first, and you get some ideas and they seem to work.
But then the boss comes in and says, since you had some small success with tweaking a few things and saved the company a few thousand dollars, you should be able to convert the system from big function A to big function B, and you should be able to plan the project and set up a schedule, and it should all come together on time and make the company millions of dollars. Yesterday.
And then you hire some guys out of college and they insist that you have to have a planning meeting or two and describe all the modules and their interfaces and the API so they can apply top-down or whatever the current fad in design is.
Homeopathic is a bit like software hacking, I think.
it is difficult for an individual (even a doctor) to tell somebody to NOT do something that is not harmful, and (very, very unlikely) may be beneficial
I'm afraid that homeopathy can be potentially harmful from a financial and an intellectual perspective. When a patient, who may not have had the opportunity to get a solid scientific education and an understanding of critical thought, comes in contact with a homeopathy practitioner who demands payment for the provision of 'medicines' that are essentially water or alcohol, they are exposed to the dangers of magical thinking and they lose their money at the same time.
Homeopathy opens a whole can of worms. Behind every system of thought, there is an underlying philosophy. When a doctor tells you about a disease, they can show you the actual virus that causes it. When a homeopathy practitioner talks about your symptoms, they will refer to miasms and your life force, but no one will show these things to you (but, of course, if you believe in them you can see them everywhere).
The underlying philosophy behind science as it emerged from the dark ages is that of materialism. Homeopathy is supported by the philosophy that there is something 'spiritual' out there, something out of this world. It is important to understand that science can rapidly change its underlying philosophy the moment after we develop a machine to make observations and measurements into the so-called 'spiritual' world. Science is what we see. If we can see it, then we can study it, and we can develop a science around it. The reason materialism is the generally accepted underlying philosophy of scientists is because everything we have seen so far is of material quality and is consisted with a materialist viewpoint. But homeopathy will never change its assumptions regarding 'spiritual' essences like the life force or the miasms, simply because these ideas emerged not from careful observation but from the wishes (many people enjoy thinking there is something 'spiritual' out there, they really want to believe in it, and this is desire for the 'spiritual' may be too old as there is some evidence hinting to a Neanderthal religion), ignorance, and obscene doses of gross criminal stupidity.
An important property of science is that it is falsifiable. It is possible to say when a scientific theory is not true. But this is not so with homeopathy. There is no way you can disprove the existence of a life force or of miasms. Stupid people say lack of disproval correlates with existence, but those trained in critical thought know that when you cannot know when something is not true then you know nothing. When confronted with the idea of something you cannot see the proper answer is "I don't know" not "I can't see it so it must exist!". Science can very easily show you actual photographs of viruses that cause your diseases, but no homepathy practitioner will ever show you photographs of miasms or of the hypothetical 'life force'.
A short discussion between a patient and a homeopathy practitioner is enough to make the patient slip into a deep cycle of magical thinking and disapproval of science. What could a patient be thinking after they finish a consultation with a homeopathy practitioner? Here are some of what I think could portray their thoughts: "My cancer is the result of a miasm that affects my life force, and this miasm was attracted by my negative thoughts; now in order to cure myself I just have to give all of my money to my homeopathy practitioner and get their miracle-making diluted medicines", "Since my homeopathy practitioner talks about miasms, then what I have heard about viruses in the school was wrong", "Scientists believe in bullshit. Homeopathy has found out about the spiritual cause of disease, while science is still in the dark ages of materialism unable to see the true cause of disease, so I will never go to a medical doctor again".
Exposure to homeopathy will inevitably lead to exposure of its underlying philoso
you could find someone that still believes in geo-centrism as well
Next you're going to tell me that the anti-arthritis knee-joint magnets I'm using aren't actually powered by the Electric Universe.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Well, yes, but homeopathy isn't exactly fraud
Yes it is, because it claims more than placebo effects.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
NO! In thunder!
Homeopathy is between a woman and her Homeopath!
Let no man come between them!
And let those tiny crunchy homeopatters dissolve Slowwwwly, under your tongue.
(or when the wife isn't looking, quickly wash them down with organic pinoqachole)
Guaranteed to keep your marriage stable.
Oh. Ummm, still living in mom's basement? Well, just suppress that cough.
(and hide the sticky gent's mag!)
Quackwatch has a good section on how pseudoscience does not make progress, unlike real science.
That's the real problem. Homeopathy isn't any better understood than it was fifty years ago. Nor does it work better. Nor does is ESP. In real science, if you have some phenomenon that's near the noise threshold, people work to design experiments that yield a more definitive result. In psuedoscience, the results stay near the noise threshold forever.
So you never get a working technology out of psuedoscience. And that's the real problem.
Consider electricity. Early researchers, back in the "rubbing fur" era of electric generation, were barely able to get anything to happen. And sometimes, on humid days, it didn't work. It almost looked like psuedoscience. But there was progress. von Guericke in 1650 put a sulfur ball on a rotating shaft and started to build up serious static charges. Then von Kleist made a glass-jar capacitor, and charge could be stored. No question about whether it worked; that setup could deliver a serious zap. From then on, progress was steady.
Orsted discovered electromagnetism in 1820, and that, too, was a flaky phenomenon at first. A wire near a compass would move a compass needle when current flowed, but just barely. But more current caused more needle movement, an indication that this was real. (That's what to watch for - if there's something you can do that makes the effect stronger, it's probably real. If not, probably not.) By 1821, Faraday was able to demo the first electric motor. By 1835, motors had progressed from demo size to demo electric railway size.
All I can say is that it has been working for my kids and me for a long time. If it is a placebo then I don't know how it cures kids too young to understand what they were given, but it does.
Here's an example:
There are two basic homeopathic cures for the flu. In years when the flu lasts 10 days for everyone I know, it lasts maybe four of five days for the people who take the remedy. Is this placebo? I don't know, but for a remedy that costs maybe $10US or $15US, I have to believe that it is worth a chance!
The best thing is that since it is a one molar solution diluted 100 to one 30 times then spritzed on small sugar pills, if it does not work, it can't hurt you.
Mainstream? You can find Hyland's Teething Tablets in just about any drug store.
and the suppression of homeopathy.
No, slashdotters are firm believers in homeopathy. We never ever use it. But by homeopathic principles that means it is at its most effective.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
>> Any legitimate medical treatment should go through great pains to at least do no harm. If it can't do that at least, then it isn't something which has any right to be considered legitimate.
...Spend 5 years getting coffee enemas, then die, sucker.
Great. This is the state of legitimate western medicine.
Well, gee, at least they didn't HARM me!
And BONUS! They kept me awake so I could send money in to Preacher Ted!
Every fucking charlatan in the western world (and all those other "worlds") should take great comfort in your reassuring words.
I just love our society, and its ever-increasing acceptance of Swift's "Extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers"...
.
- aqk
F U
That is indeed about the closest you can get to "double blind": There just has to be a mechanism in place to tell the acufakers when to target the "proper" area and when to stick the "wrong" area.
If people want to believe in bullshit, they're welcome to it. The problem arrives when these poor, ignorant people have real medical crises and are going to their local homeoquack, chiroputz or acufaker instead of getting therapy that has undergone (or is undergoing, in the case of experimental treatments) scientific testing. If one of my family members looks to be falling into that trap, I'll be dragging them to medical doctors and force-feeding them real meds if I have to.
It was 'largely settled matter' because there was a bunch of Christians threatening to cut your head open if you ever said you believed otherwise.
It is however important to point out that it was mostly in the early Christian period (eg 300s) that Christian authors wrote a lot about a flat earth. Their problem, actually, was not the sphaericity of their world, but the idea of antipodes - of people living on the other side of their world that could potentially be unaffected by their Christ.
There were many books written before 1404 that regarded the Earth as a sphere. It is also important to point out that monarchs still carry a sphaerical object that symbolises their power over the world.
It is *very easy* to find out that we live on a sphere just by observing the world around you, eg a ship at a distance hiding below the horizon. Read some Ptolemy. Every sane person can easily discover the spericity of their own planet. It was only a few theologicians that believed otherwise.
> For example, they say that in Newton's time, it was a well settled matter that Force = mass * acceleration, and Einstein showed that this was wrong.
Uh, no, it's not wrong, it's just not the complete equation, but the other variables were too small to affect the equations. There's a big difference between failing to account for special relativity and failing to account for the lack of flaming chariots pulling the flaming ball across the sky. But creationists and quacks will sieze on any small inconsistency in a scientific theory and claim that it has the same equivalence as their magnitude of error. And most of them, deep down, know this is wrong, but do it anyway. And that's what makes me mad.
Those are all very good things for the human body. They lead to relaxation, reduced stress, reduced physical tension.
Which are further very good things for the human body. All together and individually, these actions and effects are known to be good for you, promote wellness and improve health.
The rest is mostly innocent quackery. Except for "adjusting" infants. That's dangerous quackery.Dangerous quackery.Probably something that can be sold for a profit. Fraudulent but harmless quackery.It pokes holes in you and irritates tissues normally protected by your skin. Other than that, lots of nearly untestable placebo effect.The word you're searching for is "bullshit". Homeopathic medicine has lots of well-diluted bullshit and will be more than happy to sell you not-really tainted water at a price that makes bottled water vendors blush.That's a great start. Keep it up. Skepticism can be tiring, but is incredibly rewarding.
Regards,
Ross
Then, no one would object to holocaust jokes, huh? Since there's nothing controversial about it...
An Austrian told me this one: <controversial>Q- How do you fit 60 jews in a Volkswagen beetle? A- In the ashtray.</controversial> (his accent made it so much worse/funnier)(Score:-1, Flamebait) q.e.d.
You can't take the sky from me...
You can't take the sky from me...
All the dilutions my sister uses are clear.
I could probably stop there and get modded +2 funny, but I've got a rant to counter your rant.
I've watched conventional medicine almost kill my sister. Twice.
Most of conventional medicine is placebo. It is quite nearly criminal to prescribe anti-biotics for the common cold, when the best medicine would be chicken soup or a nice, hot, cup of spicy apple cider. (Half a teaspoon of grated ginger root does quite a lot of good, and another half teaspoon of cinnamon makes it almost addictive, but anyway.) Oh, and rest, of course.
Medicine uses a lot of showmanship, a lot of placebo, a lot of gamesmanship, and a lot of what could best be described as something like hacking. We don't have the API maps and UML diagrams for all the systems of the body, even if we set aside the metaphysical issues.
Who are we to call conventional medicine good and homeopathic evil?
It is true that homeopathic practice makes claims they shouldn't, but so does conventional medicine. The competition between conventional and homeopathic is not healthy for society in general.
joudanzuki
>> 've never been to a practitioner, but I'm honestly not too confident in the concepts. Water memory? I believe that water memory could possibly be true. If you take a volume of pure water and let it approach equilibrium, I assume that the whole mass will oscillate/vibrate/move at some frequency. If you introduce copper atoms(for example) into the water, they probably would have some effect on the water's previous vibrational state, by introducing a vibrational state of its own. Now, remove the copper. Does the water immediately go back to its original state, or does the water retain some of the effects of the copper addition? I don't know, to be honest with you. IANAB(iophysicist). But I would not say that it is impossible. And if water memory has even a bit of truth to it, then I'd believe that homeopathy could also have a bit of truth though. But we currently have no good proof of either.
Hmmnn... You are a woman, no?
Did some MAN tell you about those copper vibrators... umm, vibrations?
Tell ya what: YOU remove the copper. And tell me how you did it.
BTW, how did you do in High school chemistry? Did you pass?
How about physics? Sleep a lot during class?
OK- Math. OH. I forgot: "Math is HARDDDD!" -Barbi.
Hey- Lady. Stop letting those men with peircing eyes (and waterous memory) sell you their charlatan crap.
.
- aqk
F U
Those "settled issues" ARE the observations. You might rewrite the laws of gravity tomorrow, but things sure as hell aren't going to fall up instead of down if you do.
The problem isn't that it upsets settled issues, it's that it ignores them. It ignores what we do know from observation. So it's like writing a theory in which things fall up without bothering to explain why we never see things fall upwards.
That's exactly what we see in homeopathy, where tinctures are diluted with pure(?) water until they retain only a "memory" of what was in them beforehand. Where on earth do you get "pure" water if the memories remain forever? Why do they only retain the memories they're supposed to? What IS the "memory" and just what makes you think it actually exists?
Anyhow, the claims HAVE been properly tested, by the journal Nature no less, and found wanting. That's why it's being dismissed.
Vibration. You assume the whole mass would oscillate/vibrate at some frequency. I'm extremely curious as to why you would believe that. Are you under the impression that typical molecules vibrate in funny patterns?
Physically, water molecules in the liquid form experience Brownian motion, true, random motion due to heat. It's chaotic, though, certainly not regular, doesn't really have a measurable frequency (an intensity, sure, in Temperature). Furthermore, supposing there was a regular vibration of some physical sort in water, and the energy of such vibration were somehow to remain in the water instead of dissipating like most vibrations do (try ringing a bell and then putting it down on a table, eh?) it would be readily disturbed and dwarfed when someone sloshed it around or drank it. It certainly could not be expected to persist in the body beyond the esophagus and, if it did somehow maintain this vibrational quality after that, it is sufficiently weakly-interacting that it oughtn't have any effect on the body. (There are plenty of little quantum states which one could maybe possibly call "vibration" if you were feeling poetic, but they're largely irrelevant at super-atomic scales, or else - like magnetism and electron spins - pretty trivial in effect compared to the effects of fields orders of magnitude more intense.)
If there's any sort of "vibration" left, it's a metaphysical pseudospiritual "vibration".
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
It is not valid to characterize "claims of suppression" as a symptom. Here are a couple of reasons:
First, the suppression of "fringe" claims does exist, regardless of their validity, as has been demonstrated time and again over hundreds of years of "mainstream science". In the early part of the 20th century, Scientific American awarded a prize to some unremembered-by-history inventors in the aviation field, because the "peers" of the Wright Brothers' at that journal did not believe their claims. That may not be the strongest example but it is definitely an example.
Second, and more to the point, the disputation of false claims does not constitute evidence of those claims! E.g., the fact that someone maintains that they do not abuse drugs is not evidence that they do, in fact, abuse drugs. Such profiling has been tried in the past (by "counselors" in "treatment programs" to characterize drug and alcohol abusers for example). Inevitably, that has been shown to be a bogus and self-serving argument.
Similarly, then, a claim that evidence has been suppressed is not in itself evidence of fraud, because we know that in fact there have been times when valid evidence was suppressed or not credited.
I think homeopathy is basically Vibrational/Chemical Energy as Catalyst Theory, but does h20 actually retain chemical patterns in vibrations which then can reflect back and be used as a catalyst for human chemical reactions and healing? I don't know enough physics or biology... but I get the idea if it can work.
per virii at dictionary.com/reference.com. Okay. However, it is acknowledged to be meaningful among computer hackers.
Can't blame allergic reactions on misprescribed medicine? That's news to me. Even back in the '50s, doctors knew that some people would react poorly to penicillin, and that overprescription could induce such reactions.
But, technically, the reactions she suffers are not allergic.
And the prescription that almost did her in the first time had nothing to do with a bacterial infection. It was "for general health", what MDs would later excuse as a "guard against secondary infections". What she needed was balanced meals and rest.
And you shouldn't take medical advice from anyone you meet on the web, really. Not that I was intending to give any.
joudanzuki
You don't need double blind tests to know that 2 + 2 is not 5.
You don't need double blind tests to know that air breathing animals won't survive in a vacuum.
You don't need double blind tests to know that jumping off a tall bridge is going to hurt.
You don't need double blind tests to know that homeopathy has an internal inconsistency: pure water is required but by definition can't exist.
Some things are just provably wrong and don't need experimentation.
Infuriate left and right
My wife started to have backpain, which got worse and worse.
She started up with the family doctor, X-Ray, later a specialist, MRI, other specialist, more MRI and the pain got more frequent and more intolerable. The specialists came up with a variety of possible causes and practicly no suggestion for a cure.
After four hellish months the backpain became permanent, for every move, in any possible position, preventing even sleeping. At this time she was offered presciption of heavy pain killers on a regular basis, "to prevent the imprinting of the pain into the brain, so that even if the cause - which was only guessed - disappers, the feeling of the pain would not go away".
Then someone suggested her to visit a practitioner, who practices something that feels like, sounds like, smells like a strange woodoo - but what worse could happen? My wife had to raise her arms and the practitioner was gently trying to push down her arms, while touching the location of different organs. The muscles seemed to have various resistence, which was supposed to give information about the state of different organs.
Five minutes later the practitioner declared, that the pain is completely unrelated to the bones, where it seemed to be originated.
He tested similarly, by asking my wife to hold the box of different "medicines" to find out which would work best and what would be the appropriate dose.
The pills in the box contained nothing else but vitamins and basic minerals, that according to the practitioner the body was deprived from and causing the symptoms.
Choosing between witamins and minerals or pain killers, which are known to be addictive, was simple.
As you guess: 3 days later the pain was completely gone and has not returned in the past years.
Go figure. We could not explain of course, and neither the specialists and the family doctor.
If it was placebo effect it's curious why the previously prescribed medicines would not have the same result.
This is actually a source near Suisse/France. That it spell naive backward is absolute random incident.
sorry this is in french but about evian les bains.
and a SNOPES article on Evian/Naive
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Stating that homeopathy is at odds with generally accepted theories of chemistry and physics doesn't tell us whether the homeopathic hypothesis is true. A carefully constructed test of the homeopathy might run as follows.
Take a group of 1000 patients of varying symptom pictures. For each patient, have a group of trained homeopathic doctors evaluate the patient and prescribe the remedy which they believe best matches that patient's symptoms. Do a carefully controlled double-blind study in which half of the patients receive the remedy prescribed by the homeopathic practitioners, and the other half receive a placebo.
Additionally, for each patient, have a second group of doctors (preferably non-homeopathic doctors) evaluate the patient twice: once before the remedy or placebo is administered, and a second time some number of days afterwards. This second set of doctors judges whether the patient has substantially improved or not, but neither group of doctors, nor the patient, knows whether the patient is in the placebo group. Determine whether there is any statistical difference between the two groups of patients.
If the observations end up being at odds with currently generally accepted theories of chemistry and physics, then we need to change our theories to account for what we're observing. That's how science works. It's not "science" if you rejecting something as a "pseudoscience" merely because it doesn't square with our current theories.
Also, the term "natural" doesn't really have much meaning in this situation. At one end of the spectrum, you could say that everything is natural, since it's made from atoms that were found here on earth. At the other end, you could say it's only natural if you're taking a bite out of a plant or animal that you found in the wild, without even cooking it or washing off the natural dirt and bacteria. Most people draw an arbitrary line somewhere in the middle: some amount of processing is OK, but any more than that and it's suddenly "unnatural".
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Authors@Google:James Randi, in the Q&A he talks about a friend who runs a government supported acupuncture clinic in China. (41:50 into the movie (Incidentally I didn't know until now that you can now jump straight to any point in a YouTube video, how handy. Anyway..))
The person knew it was a placebo but says that it's used for people who have small, partly psychological problems, but they turn away people who need real medical treatment.
I think homeopathy is just a Western equivalent; as long as the person giving it understands that it's bunk, and takes care to ensure that real medicine wouldn't be more effective, it doesn't seem too outrageous to use it.
The problem happens when people make money off pushing homeopathy where real medicine is needed. (Or when Prince Charles spends money studying whether homeopathy is real, and gives homeopathic medicine to animals who presumably don't get the same placebo benefits.)
If it's not exploitative or dangerous, and the people taking it are too ignorant to understand that it's bunk, I don't see the harm. (But I admit there are ethical issues with using placebos.)
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Human is well known to be the most selfish species in the universe : If i don't understand it , it doesn't exist ! ..and still call himself "intelligent race"
I wait for you guys to get it . For now i just use it, it works :)
Good luck
"Also, we can pretty much write off Prozac because it has become the Ritalin of middle-age. By that I mean that a wide array of causes, behavioral, social, or chemical, are causing a problem, and instead of resolving it (through behavioral therapy or psychological analysis) the doc is just writing for the same treatment. Bobby is loud, give him Adderall. Bobby is sad, give him Prozac. Some people really need the chemically altering action of Prozac to be happy- some people just want to buy a month's worth of 10mg Problem Solver from CVS... i digress."
How exactly does behavioral therapy or physiological analysis "resolve" a problem? If your wife left you, will therapy bring her back? No, only the way you feel can be addressed. The fundamental problem will never be resolved. I would be thoughtful before taking a drug like Prozac, but I'm not swayed by the unscientific protestant-ethic-based theory that solving a problem should be hard or time-consuming.
How do you fit 600,000 homeopathic medicines in a VW?
In the ashtray. (But don't forget to mix in a packet of sugar!)
You say it was "I know her experiment was later "disproved", but then again, they used a method that didn't match her own, with many questionable practices.". I call that a tightened proper protocol. The fact that you name it "questionable practice" and don#t qualify it, sound more like an ad hominem and tell a lot on your position. let me guess, you believe in homeopathy ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I have kids and I couldn't have survived their teething without those things. It is a homeopathic remedy that works. My son is now teething and when he starts fussing, you put them in his mouth and he goes right back from cranky to happy baby. They sell them everywhere you can buy baby formula. Does the Placebo Effect work on 6 month old infants too?
Scientists will call those results anecdotal.
In the real world, the plural of anecdotal is called evidence.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Ont thing to point out here is that home remdies (ie. medicines made from common or uncommon plant extracts, insect exctracts ect ect.) can and do work...
...Now AFTER the home medicine has been thoroughly tested using the scientific method, and its proven NOT to work, then using said product is quackery.
:-/ ) i found that chewing a piece of gum after eating seemed to calm my stomach more than taking an antacid tablet... this could be called a home remedy, well low an behold i read an article the other night that showed a study done proves that chewing gum is like 10% more effective against heartburn and acid refulx than an antacid tablet.
its foolish to say "Well that remdy has never been tested by a man in a white coat therefore use of it constitutes as quackery"
for example, i have terrible acid reflux, and before i started taking Prilosec (i'm stubborn and hate going to the doctor
So was i a quack before the study, and not one after?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This is MY galaxy...go find your OWN!
Acupuncture is indeed far more accepted in the west today than it was a few decades ago, but it's effectiveness hasn't changed it has just been studied. I would propose that in many circumstances homeopathic remedies are as much as 75% as effective as prescription drugs. Mainly because of the placebo effect.
Didn't the NIH, AMA, and a bunch of medical academics do some studies on it. They found it's more successfully then placebo and despite having no idea how it works currently they recommended increase use as a secondary treatment option and further research? I'm not sure if it belong with the other quackery you mentioned.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Is that everyone I know who believes in homeopathy also believes that the climate is getting warmer and humans are the cause of that. When asked why they believe in global warming the answer is, invariably, "Because science has proven it." More questioning leads to the point that the consensus of scientists is that global warming is real, and human caused. Fair enough, they lack the education and/or will to investigate it themselves, so they rely on the prevailing expert opinion.
However you then confront them that the prevailing expert opinion is that homeopathy is junk and they start twisting things, calling up studies of dissenters, distrusting scientists, and so on.
In other words, they like the "scientific consensus" explanation when it supports their views, but don't when it doesn't. Unfortunately, I think this is extremely common with most people. They just buy whatever explains their world view, they don't apply the rigor they sometimes like to pretend.
The point of the article, though, is that proponents of these ideas often don't use the scientific method, or don't use it properly. They ignore results that don't fit their preconceived notions (confirmation bias), or they don't use sufficient controls to determine exactly what is causing the effect seen, or jump to conclusions that don't logically follow from the evidence that they've collected.
You want to investigate psychic powers? Fine by me. Just make the investigation scientifically rigorous, and fit your conclusions to the evidence -- not the other way around.
If anything, when someone uses homeopathy for their cold, they are at least avoiding more antibiotics from normal doctors.
>> Jokes and put downs that aren't actually scientific aren't really welcome in response here.
Umm.. I am sorry. Water memory IS the joke.
I suggest you put your head in a bucket of it for half an hour and absorb the "vibrations".
And hopefully any memory of its past life.
Let me know how it turns out.
.
- aqk
F U
If only chiropracters would take a humility pill and limit themselves to... well, massage therapy.
Instead they insist on doing things like neck manipulations. Nobody's done the study (yet) but I used to do clinical stroke research and whenever there was a young person with a stroke there was a disturbing likelihood that it was caused by a dissection of one of the arteries in the neck and the patient had been to the chiropractor within the last few days.
They're not harmless, even when they're working on adults.
Sure, but what people don't realize is that taking "natural" remedies, ie herbs, is just diagnosing yourself and then taking unpurified drugs of dubious origin and dosage.
Herbs are not only drugs, they're drug cocktails.
I suggest that you consider that your post is a troll. Who cares what you think when that's all you've got to say, when the only one who cares about seeing it is you?
--
make install -not war
Quackwatch is a fraudulent organization cobbled together by the drug industry in an attempt to undermine alternative medicine.
The leading speakers of Quackwatch, Stephen Barrett in particular, are liars and losers who are almost certainly psychopathic with regard to their total lack of shame when their lies are exposed. Luckily, the legal system is smarter than the average internet reader. Stephen Barrett does a good job of losing the court cases he brings to court against alternative practitioners.
Stephen Barrett, although claiming to be a retired Psychiatrist, was never able to become "Board Certified." He failed his test. Also, Barrett gave up his MD license in 1993. His employment record shows he NEVER was able to hold a full-time job - and his claim to "Psychiatric fame" was his part-time (4 to 8 hours a week) employment at a Pennsylvania Mental Hospital - from 1978 through 1993. From 1976 through 1978 he could not get a paying job. He also claims to be a legal expert, though he has never had any legal training.
Bobbie Baratz, the current president of the NCAHF, was terminated from his former position at a Boston area medical center after a physical altercation with a 72 year old woman. He now operates a hair removal business. He also operates the NCAHF out of that same hair removal location.
-FL
In any case I will not allow the drug companies slowly poison me to a cancerous early grave. Nor my family. We don't have health care in this country (US) we have drug company dumping grounds. No thank you.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
Holy Christ! Homeopathy does NOT work with herbal cures at all. The idea is entirely different. And the passage "Modern medicine acknowledges that aspirin came from willow bark" is highly suggestive (implicatures: traditionally they did not recognize it and they still don't want you to know it). However, it is modern science that isolated the effective component and made it a reliable consumable, instead of folklore. Can you imagine your doctor telling you to go to a forest, find a willow, and extract some bark with a silver knife at new moon, and that oak perhaps will also work, but not for everyone?
A scientist will not claim that all alternative medicine doesn't work, he will claim that many don't, that you cannot trust them and that some treatments are detrimental.
There are also more than enough who'd diagnose themselves and then rummage through their medicine box and every pill with a sufficient pleasant colour, or those who swallow three Aspirines a day, just in case..
Didn't the NIH, AMA, and a bunch of medical academics do some studies on it.
presumably...
They found it's more successfully then placebo and despite having no idea how it works currently they recommended increase use as a secondary treatment option and further research?
No. Not statistically significantly more effective. Whoever told you this was lying to you in a dangerous way.
"Evian: apply it directly to the gullible"
And let's not forget Dasanti: when someone else has tap water that seems better than yours!
I can't believe the number of people nowadays that will pay a dollar for a 20 oz. bottle of water, feed $0.75 into an AIR pump, pay $1.29 for a 20 oz. bottle of Coca-Cola (when the 2 litre bottle is $1.84!), but then bitch about the price of gas or tobacco. WTF?!?!?... Falling all over themselves to buy water and air, but bitch about distilled petroleum products?!?!?
As a society we are clearly educated beyond our intelligence, and are now actively outsmarting ourselves!
But it's not our fault..ask any 10 people around you, and probably 7-9 out of 10 will give some lame (but sometimes well argued excuse that depends on an assumption) excuse as to why it's someone else's fault that we are heading to hell in a hand basket.
If I did not have a part in all of this, I would be happy to become a hermit...with internet access....and new PC hardware...and new updates/upgrades to Kubuntu...and a new car...and...Fsck it! I'm stuck here by my own devices! HELP!!!! Ahggghhhh!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
This says Otherwise. I can't imagine acupuncturers being wealthy or influential enough to buy off these two respected medical associations.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
True, but at least those people are doing something pretty much everybody acknowledges is stupid and nobody recommends they do.
Herbal remedies are marketed as "natural" and better for you or safer than "drugs." It's not so much the people taking them, it's the people lying to the people to get them to take them. If you want to dose yourself, more power to you. But I don't think it's right to mislead someone into doing it.
Head On is not Homeopathic its Ayurvedic - which is the Ancient Indian system of medicine which basically uses a lot of plant oils and extracts as medicines. These are pretty much proven to work the best proof being most modern medicines which are not Antibiotics are just hyper purified versions or artificially synthesized versions of these plant based compounds. The one thing which modern medicine has achieved which ancient medicine did not is figure out that disgusting looking fungus can be good for you (that pretty much what antibiotics are)
**Life is too short to be serious**
Reading the responses, I became curious if a reverse placebo effect has ever been observed... that is, instead of an inert substance causing improvement because people believe they are on medicine, does a proven medicine work less well if the people believe they are being given a dummy pill? I'm not sure how you'd stage it, perhaps tell all the participants that they are part of a control group that is receiving no treatment, and then slip a little into their food or something?
:)
The placebo effect is very interesting, and dare I say useful. I sometimes worry that my skeptical nature has precluded me from benefitting off it
Cheers.
Acupuncture is stress-relieving because it stimulates the release of endorphins, which is a quaint way of saying it gets you high. Less stress is, incidentally, better for your health. But it's nothing special about acupuncture. It's something special about stress-relieving activity. You could spend an hour sitting in a peaceful place reading a good book and get the same benefit.
IAALS.
Antibiotics, which comprise only a small amount of modern medical treatment, are drugs which are deadly to bacteria and other pathogens. They are, in essence, poison for what ails you. Many of these compounds are found in some form in nature (hence, why "herbs" and things like that have some beneficial value), BUT modern science often isolates and synthesizes these compounds to be more effective, with less damaging side-effects from other incidental compounds found in the natural state.
This of course doesn't cover inoculations, sterilization, diagnostic medicine, physical therapy, or any of the other number of modern, scientific advances in the field of medicine unknown to our primitive ancestors.
And ayurvedic medicine is a term coined by con-men to fleece you out of your money.
IAALS.
Being the devil's advocate here - in this case I'm more likely to believe Ennis than Randi since:
;).
0) He already assumes it's wrong
1) He stands to lose lots of "face" if proven wrong.
2) He stands to lose 1 million dollars (ok it might be insured).
Whereas where's the proof that Ennis is incompetent? So far I don't see any evidence that she's incompetent. I don't think it's all that clear cut if you see what Ennis says about that BBC show trying to "reproduce" her experiment:
http://www.homeopathic.com/articles/view,55
I'd be more likely to believe that Ennis was a disinterested scientist honestly trying to investigate whether there is a phenomena or not, than believe James Randi would be doing something similar.
Ennis still could be wrong and could have made a mistake, but if her objections to the "failed replication" are true and relevant, then I think we shouldn't dismiss her (or the entire field of homeopathy) just because of that experiment. And it's a bad experiment since the homepathy bunch are going to cite the objections, and the mainstream scientists are going to glance at the "results" (if at all), and we don't really _learn_ anything new.
I don't have any hard opinions on whether homeopathy works or not, but what I dislike is bad debunking. This sort of thing is very harmful to science.
For example: I personally believe there was some phenomena in that "cold fusion" stuff, I don't know whether there really or not was fusion, but to me it seemed that there's something interesting going on worth investigating. Even if that cold fusion thing turns out to be nothing more than a "battery" it may be a new and interesting type of battery that's useful in some scenarios. Govs and scientists have spent billions and years on hot fusion with not much net benefit, so what's a few million bucks for a new class of batteries?
But because of the circumstances, I doubt most scientists would risk their careers investigating "cold fusion" or homeopathy, or even be able to get funding to do so in the first place.
Most of the homeopathic quacks won't be interested in funding it if they were interested in continuing to make money. If it's totally disproven they lose, if it's proven they lose too as most of them will be sidelined as the field rapidly moves from "alchemy to chemistry".
There was a sci fi short story where people dropped an experimental drug because a few postmenopausal women taking it were getting pregnant as a "side effect". It actually reversed aging, but that wasn't the result they were looking for
"By that I mean that a wide array of causes, behavioral, social, or chemical, are causing a problem, and instead of resolving it (through behavioral therapy or psychological analysis) the doc is just writing for the same treatment."
Psychoanalysis has been as thoroughly discredited as homeopathy. Not only was it not based on proper science, but it actually did far more harm than good by teaching people that if you have a problem now, it's your mother's fault, or maybe uncle Kevin abused you as a child, without you ever having realized it.
--And I've also searched far and wide, and talked to a lot of people and experienced a lot of things which orthodox science must stretch to such lengths to explain as to sound utterly ridiculous.
Arstechnica's understanding of understanding of Homeopathy is limited in the common way. --They were trying to understand Homeopathy using conventional theory, and shamefully enough, the various editors of the homeopathy essays which they were knocking down like so many straw men, were doing the same thing and of course, were getting nowhere.
Strangely, in Ars' multi-page screed, the one theory they did not attack, or even deign to recognize although it is not an uncommon idea, is based on Energy. --As in Chi, (the major component of 3000 years of Chinese understanding of the universe. Surely they've heard of it. I know everybody here has.)
Energy is is the functional force behind acupuncture, reiki, various forms of kung fu, auras and numerous other phenomenon which are hotly discounted by scientists who haven't bothered to explore any direct experiences with the medium which binds the entire universe together. Essentially, with regard to homeopathy, all matter has an energetic signature and vibrates accordingly. --And we're not talking about classic atomic vibration. It's another quality altogether, although from my observations, it is linked closely to electromagnetism.
I'd love to see Energy quantified, and I strongly suspect that it has been in the darker recesses of some black-budget lab deep under a mountain someplace. --The vibration of one object or being can affect the matter around it so that it is passed on and emulated. If you put intention into water of a certain energetic flavor, then the water can take on that same energetic quality. It cannot be measured in terms of dissolved particulate matter, nor through molecular configuration, nor through misbegotten theories of quantum entanglement, (all theories which were put forth and appropriately knocked down in the article). Energy is it's own thing.
Further, energy is the medium from which consciousness is made. --My understanding is that the soul is a highly complex energetic expression which settles into the brains of these human mammals we walk around in, and directs that animal's activities. When the body dies, the soul moves on. This explains everything; all the out of body experiences, the light at the end of the tunnel, phantom limbs, ghosts, Auras, possession and why things like Reiki and Homeopathy work.
For anybody who is interested in this, Reiki is an interesting subject. --I was exploring Reiki, trying to get something happening, (and had been getting only the most subtle feelings which I wasn't sure were anything), until that one time when my friend was suffering from a headache. I asked if I might try Reiki with her, and she said, sure. So I began. My hands were over her head and I was going through the motions, trying to clear my own intentions out of the way to channel the correct energies as I envisioned them, and unlike all the other times, this time I got whammied with a sudden feeling of extreme heat. It was like somebody had blasted my palms with air from a paint stripper gun. It jolted both me and my friend so that she immediately looked at me with wide eyes. "Wow! I felt that! What did you do?"
"Heck if I know." --They don't teach this stuff in highschool science. Almost nobody understands this stuff properly, and those who do can't explain it very well. --The best we mundane folk have are a bunch of Chinese metaphors and Castaneda stories.
Anyhow, my friend's headache didn't go away, and I went home feeling really sick and promptly threw up. I felt much better after that. --I found out the next day that my friend had thrown up as well shortly after I left, and also went to bed feeling much better. And no, there were no drugs or alcohol involved and the only food we'd eaten was whatever we'd each had before I'd arrived that evening. --In any case, I'm
If your wife left you, that is no longer a problem.
The way you feel about it is the problem. The way you act because of that is the problem.
Whatever problems you had before she left you are gone.
Well, you're probably still broke, or even more broke because she also took all your money when she left, and have probably lost a friend or a gardener as well, but I digress.
Anyway, therapy (which I consider only a substitute for friends who'll talk to you - and, more importantly, listen to you; I've had both and friends are both better and cheaper) resolves a problem by first showing you it is not the immediate problem at all.
"Fundamental" problems tend to occupy your attention, so you don't see the real, immediate problems. Problem is (I'm using that word way too much now), if suddenly your fundamental problem was resolved, i.e. your wife came back, your immediate problems would seem to have disappeared altogether. However, whatever led to her leaving in the first place remains unresolved, and your new feelings for her would never be the same anyway.
Basically, save for foing back in time and preventing certain things to happen, there is no solving those fundamental problems.
There's just dealing with the consequences.
Problems are only solved in maths. In life, they are dealt with.
Ignore this signature. By order.
There are lots of settled issues in science. When you drop something, it goes down. So you come along and tell me that you have a brilliant new theory that says that things you drop will not, in fact, fall down. I call you an idiot and go about my business. Should I have tested your idea using the scientific method? The trouble is that testing things is hard, but thinking up new crackpot ideas is easy. If we go about testing every crackpot idea we encounter we'll never get any actual work done. We have to think very hard about what ideas show some promise before we start testing stuff. If you think an idea is worth testing you can test it yourself, in the mean time stop whining and let the professionals get back to work.
Well, it's time to get on the bad side of Slashdot again...
Let me state one thing: Just because something can't be proven doesn't make it impossible, you science-nazis. It's the other way round. Only once something can be clearly dismissed is it okay to see it as a fraud.
It's a fact that a lot of things can prove to work for one person and not for another. So what if it is a placebo effect? In the end, isn't the most important thing about any "medicine" that it helps cure people from ailments or at least helps them live better in spite of it?
That's the whole problem. Medicine isn't there to help people anymore... it's just another money machine. The pill is a very good example of this. The pill often leads to vein problems but the doctors told my wife she wouldn't have to worry about it even though her mother had a genetic vein problem and she herself works in a field that is notorious for creating even more trouble. It wasn't even the doctor telling her about it! she had to read the fucking package insert and specifically ask him about it and then had to "endure" a miffed doctor who acted as if she just questioned his knowledge.
Also did you know that the pill can kill (yes, kill. Not lessen, fucking KILL) a womens sex drive? My wife had this problem. Either she wasn't in the mood anymore or she was horny like hell and her body just didn't want to cooperate. She was a psychological mess at the time. And you know what? she isn't alone. BATALLIONS of other women had exactly the same issues until they got rid of... well guess what, the pill.
So what did I learn out of this: Only when she switched to natural birth control (taking temperature combined with some other factors), which I believed to be a fraud because "science" always told us so, did the problem go away and oh boy did it go away... Oh and she's without a baby and she's actually in her eighth month with the NFP method. So much for fraud.
She's also had cystits, I think it's called, several times and got antibiotics for that. The antibiotics messed with her body big time. She got plenty sick of that. And a month after the whole mess she got cystitis again. Didn't keep the doctor from trying the same fucking product again. So rinse and repeat another two or three times... until she got fed up. So what did she do? She drank a lot as she did while taking antibiotics (about 3 to 5 litres a day) and drank natural teas and stuff which are known to have a desinfectant property. And lookie lookie the problem was solved in no time with no sickness due to the antibiotics.
So seriously, all science and medicine nazis can go fuck themselves for all I care. From our combined experience it is clear that a lot of the "professionals" are only geared towards selling you the most expensive therapie not the one that is best for you. Thanks, but no thanks. Then I rather fall for the fraudsters and try acupuncture, magnet resonance therapy and the likes. If it helps I don't care whether it's just my brain doing the work and the therapy is crap. Because before, my brain obviously didn't do the work and now it does. If my problem goes away without more problems being created then that's EXACTLY what I want.
I wish someone would have made this distinction. I use herbal medicine on a somewhat-regular basis, and I somewhat resent how much it gets mixed in with homeopathy. Plants certainly do have measurable results. Mainstream culture mostly remembers the bad ones. (see: marijuana, opium, morphine, ephedra) This then, is certainly not meaningless quackery, and does not deserve to get mixed in with homeopathy, even though both technically fall under the "Alternative Medicine" umbrella. Most of our drugs are based on isolating one or two chemicals from a plant, making them more concentrated, and then finding out what they do. Granted, we've made a lot of progress that way, but that doesn't negate the fact that we DO NOT make drugs based on what we need to cure, but rather discover the drug and then figure out what, if anything, it cures. If we're unlucky, though, we've just discovered new ways to cause death. If you ask me, all science has an element of a leap of faith to it. We often do stupid irrational things to reach new discoveries, and ingesting unknown substances is one of the biggest... but the payoff! A moment of awe when we figure out even just one piece of this incredible puzzle, when we look at the code of life itself and actually understand a small fraction of it for the first time. While I don't like homeopathy, psychics, etc, I also don't like it when someone on the opposite end of the spectrum forgets that we don't know everything. It's neither all mystery nor mostly-discovered. Too many people categorize and reject - and this goes for those who reject science as well as those who claim All alternative medicine is like homeopathy, or that it's all placebo effect. I love skepticism. Without it, we would not have healthy minds. I love mystery. Without it life would lose some of it's beauty. Long live discovery.
Science neither confirms nor denies the latter. It can merely provide strong evidence in support of the former. This means that evolution is an empirically sound theory with theoretical basis - i.e. it is good science - whereas intelligent design is outside the realms of science entirely, and no scientist can use his abilities to confirm or deny it. Couple of reasons:
Because ID proponents are making untestable statements, a scientist - while wearing his scientist hat - can only reject the proponent's claims as untestable, not as wrong and stupid. Otherwise he is entirely misunderstanding his own discipline. ID proponents assert their claim to be scientific, while scientists claim that science refutes ID; these mistakes makes the whole battle so prolonged.
It ignores the placebo effect.
Deleted
Its fraud to claim it works. Ignoring the logica Fallacy you present...several really, condisider this:
Where are the testable result? the falsifiable tests? the double blind studies?..oh yeah, they ALL turned up NOTHING.
It is fraud, it is immoral, it is dangerous and it FUCKING KILLS PEOPLE, you ignorant prick.
Here is a clue that someone isn't thinking logical:
People apply scientific rigors to the sacred cows, then when it turns up nothing, they blame the method. Claiming that there method is better.
Her letter is based on information from Lionel Milgrom who is a known liar and cheat, so there is no way to know if she got the actually information in any accurate way.
more clues that his is a scam artist, or a kook:
involved with people who have discovered some magic way to cure all the ails you:
http://www.photobiotics.com/index.html
He is one of the Directors of the Society of Homeopaths -- Not exactly unbiased. And before you say it, yes I know people are biased, that's why we have tests that reduce or eliminate it. Test that don't seem to work with Homeopaths.
A letter full of inaccuracies:
http://www.badscience.net/?p=341
Quackery at best.
SOrry about the prick comment, but come one, wake the fuck up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
you science-nazis
Oh, this should be good..
Only once something can be clearly dismissed is it okay to see it as a fraud.
That's why we call Homeopathy a fraud. It never had any plausibility in the first place.
Also did you know that the pill can kill (yes, kill. Not lessen, fucking KILL) a womens sex drive? My wife had this problem.
Is that what she told you?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Because I haven't been attacked by tigers for as long as I have been drinking milk... 43 years of this is plenty of proof the milk keeps the tigers away!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm not saying that chiropractors are all charlatans, as I have had my back fixed a couple of times where I was walking hunched over for weeks, and after a single adjustment, I could walk straight again, but people should realize that even in the best of situations, "adjustments" are no different than cracking knuckles. Once in a while isn't the end of the world, but if you do it all the time, you will eventually have problems in those joints.
Right there in France, we have a big lab called "Boiron" that's leader in homeopathy, makes regular mess in the media and have a *lot* of the population believe in its lies.
That's very sad. What do you think are the causes of the decline of intelligence in France that allows this sorry state of affairs? Is it the brain drain of people emigrating to England, Canada and the USA?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Herbs are drugs. Used in untested amounts, in unknown strengths, from unmonitored farms.
"(see: marijuana, opium, morphine, ephedra) "
I see know 'bad' ones there.
"This then, is certainly not meaningless quackery,"
it is the definition of quackers. Untested medical uses, from untested drugs, of doses of unknown strength.
"Granted, we've made a lot of progress that way, but that doesn't negate the fact that we DO NOT make drugs based on what we need to cure, but rather discover the drug and then figure out what, if anything, it cures."
This is just wrong.
"If you ask me, all science has an element of a leap of faith to it."
good think know one asked you, because you are wrong.
There is trust, but with sience you can run falsifiable tests your self. Coupled with the fact that the goal of the field is to disprove your peers.
"..forgets that we don't know everything."
No one forgets that, thats why they keep striving. What you fail to relize is that herbal medicines always fail the tests, but you got some ugly meme* in your head that won't let you look at it rationally..on;y rationalizingly. yay, new word!
"All alternative medicine is like homeopathy, or that it's all placebo effect. "
Well, it is. It's crap that can't stand up to scientific riggers. Mostly it's not placebo effect but finding ways to blame problem on something else because, clearly, the herbs worked.
"I love skepticism."
Why don't you practice some? While your at it learn the scientific method and try to understand why it work.
*it's irony, don't use it in any rebuttal.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes, and they _do_ come from disgusting looking fungi (molds).
>> And ayurvedic medicine is a term coined by con-men to >> fleece you out of your money.
Hardly: The term as well as the earliest ayurvedic texts are about 4000 years old, predating any other system of medicine. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayurveda .
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
"The word you're searching for is "bullshit". Homeopathic medicine has lots of well-diluted bullshit and will be more than happy to sell you not-really tainted water at a price that makes bottled water vendors blush." Disclaimer: I do not want to convince anybody, but just asking, whether it could be placebo or not. Since I was 10, I've been suffering epilepsia (petit mal, that means little attacks). After few years my life became nightmare, every day I had terrible symptoms and once a year the great fit with unconsciousness, muscles tension and very bad feeling a day or two afterwards. I tried 2 different therapies (Depakine Chrono - twice a day, convulex - three times - these were newest on the market 20 years ago), changed the style of life - NOPE. Only if I've forgotten my pills on certain hour, symptoms arisen automatically. And pills affected my brain :(
After 3-4 years I tried the homeopathy. My doctor had dozens of certificates and so on; he examined me 3 hours, very detailed.
After examination, he gave me 2 little pills (AFAIK that was sulphur). After that I'm absolutely healthy - no pills, no symptoms, even if I'm tired and had no sleep for long time. That was 15 years ago; now I'm 33 and have no epilepsia.
And most important thing: I was very sceptical to homeopathy. Now I'm not an enthusiast, if I had the headache, I take ibuprom.
Besides, there are some well known homeopathy effects: one is chinin, the second one is a little cup of alkohol for fighting hang-over (Katzenjammer ;-))
-- Sneer
No doctor in their right mind would call the Rhythm Method (what you are referring to) a fraud. It just isn't nearly as effective as the pill, or virtually any other common method of contraception. All published statistics on birth control effectiveness refer to the liklihood of a woman getting pregnant over the course of a year - your anecdotal story doesn't even provide a single year - and it's a single data point - which is to say, it's completely worthless for the purposes of evaluation of effectiveness.
All hormonal birth control methods are outrageously more effective than all non-hormonal methods (leaving out abstinance for the purposes of this discussion). This includes the pill, implants, vaginal rings, shots, and some IUDs. They also have very real side effects (bad: blood clots, mood swings, good: prevents cervical cancer, prevents ovarian cysts), though different dosages, delivery mechanisms and drug combinations impact this. Do what works for you, but don't try to sell the rest of the world about how "the pill is unnecessary" or "natural birth control is just as good" because that's a load of crap.
Just a heads up: After you do have a child and are trying to prevent another immediately your wife (a hypochondriac perhaps?) will likely tell you about how breast feeding for a long duration (multiple years) can be an effective form of birth control. It is in fact documented to be 'effective' in the third world, and can be effective here.
There are also side effects to this, the regularity of feeding required to maintain the necessary hormone levels will impact her sex drive - and for many people is completely impractical in the first world (if, for example, she works for a living.) There's that and the fact that 'effective' in this case still means less effective than every 'normal' form of birth control available.
Now, on the general issue of 'natural medecine'. There are TONS of natural medicines that work REALLY well. We identify them, purify them, and they become drugs, at which point some people decide they are no longer 'natural'. (what, because we know why they work?). The rest of the commonly known herbal remedies you can buy today have not become drugs because they don't work.
We do not know anything and a good scientist knows how little we do know and is reluctant to bash things without proof in the negative. Skepticism can be foolish its not always the best policy - I meet so many close-minded scientists with strong opinions on things they do not understand. (I'm a scientist.)
Chiropractic WORKS! There are scams in every area. My insurance covers it now but back 15 years ago when I went for treatment people were telling me how much of a sucker I was. I could not stand up after my back went out. My doctor unofficially said I needed a chiropractor because officially all he could do is send me for back surgery! My back wasn't fixed by a quack. (FYI the chiropractor happened to be a former back surgeon.)
Acupuncture WORKS! Try having your teeth REMOVED using it to stop the pain. People used to dismiss that completely as well; even now its slow going. It can knock you out or make you hyperactive.. Haven't tried anything else with it yet.
I informally test fairly harmless stuff I run across for curiosity and sometimes I find plenty of 'proof' - the above two examples being concrete proof. I also have run into some of the most obvious snake oil salesmen they were a living parody (those I dismissed.) I have had insurance backed medical doctors that sucked too... and many of those pills they push are no better than snake oil with corp backing.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
However, the Society of Homeopaths refused to sanction the people giving this dangerous advice, presumably out of solidarity with their colleagues or whatever. This is just evidence that, if you accept homeopathy, you are validating all the loons as well as anyone who may take part in the dubious placebo-peddling approach (something I pretty thoroughly disapprove of, but which is significantly less bad than the massive levels of delusion which lets people really, truly believe in these things.
The problem I have with scientific examination of pseudo-science, is that they lump everybody who does under the same umbrella and when doing research just pick the first best weirdo who says he knows the stuff. The reason pseudo-science is under such low regard is that most of the people doing are just schucks who want to make money without any education. But the reputation for the art comes from real masters who number just a few in the whole world. In Russia homeopathy is very widespread, but only a few are actually regarded specialists who know what they are talking about. Same with acupuncture. Most people doing it are just what you say, stress-relievers (sp?) and such. But there are a very few who actually know how the stuff works. The reason I'm convinced is that my brother was actually saved by one such "pseudo-doctor" from china when he was little. He was dying from a brain-condition and none of the ordinary doctors could do anything, but this guy could. Sounds freaky, but he could tell what was wrong with you just by looking at you. Quite different from the usual acupuncterists he never used more than 2-3 needles under 15-20 min. He had to sons and to his dismay one of the sons who had "the gift" didn't want to be a doctor and the other one didn't have it at all. I was 6-7 at the time so I definetely remember it all myself (no 'my moms uncle's friend told me'). Scientists are keen on disproving such things cause it's something they really don't understand and when something they don't understand works better than their own stuff it's not funny anymore. But I think it's great that they disprove the ordinary schucks who just try to make money out of it.
With regards to the "It's a placebo, but that's ok because some people get better!" line of reasoning - the re-emergence of the acceptance of homeopaths is emboldening them to prescribe their sugar pills for diseases where they are singularly inappropriate - acute illnesses like malaria, or things like cancer - There was a significant case in the netherlands (I think?), where a group of homeopathic doctors were struck off for advising patients with early-stage cancer to avoid traditional treatments altogether, and instead provided their "remedy", leading to numerous deaths from cancers who have a high survival rate for traditional therapy. In cases like this, homeopathy is solely a money-making machine, but moreover one which doesn't offer any meaningful potential for cure and is held to vastly lower standards.
The placebo effect is a tricky one - yes, everyone who it does work for says "This is great, this was half the price and no side effects. Huzzah!". But there are (by definition) a section of the population who do not get better, and so are exposed to prolongd illness or death. This is what is inappropriate about the acceptance of homeopathy.
Also, with regards to your other points: The side-effects of the pill are well established, and publically available in dozens of places. Anyone who denied them was simply lying to you. This is not a criticism of medicine, this is a criticism of the practitioners you were exposed to - and as mentioned above, dubious practitioners exist in all fields.
With regards to NFP: Saying it "doesn't work" is largely a question of how you define "work". If someone said it had no effect on your chance of conception, they were lying. But if they meant worked less effectively than the pill/condoms/etc, then that's certainly quite true - and an 8-month trial is certainly nowhere near evidence to the contrary (hell, i know people who took longer to conceive while they were actively trying).
You seem to be confusing lies and deception with actual science - but this is far from unique to science, and homeopathy and similar treatments being "alternative" does nothing to prevent this.
I'm sorry - but ANY doctor that gives antibiotics for a cold, should be thrown out of the profession. Antibiotics are absolutely no use for colds/flu. Colds/flu get better on their own. Simple. Your body does all the work. If you were physically able to get out of bed during the first week then you have a cold - and not flu. Grow Up you jessie. If you are not getting better/getting worse after a week... then you have something else wrong too, and need to seek URGENT *REAL* medical advice.
Warning: I am extremely biased against Chiropractory and believe it should be shut down. Any arguing with me on it will be pointless. I am sure you are a nice person and so is your chiro but I look at it as snake oil. I am not going to try to convince you not to go but I will give you some facts. Maybe talk to your "doctor" about it but if you decide to continue seeing one, that is your choice and I hope it works out for you...
I can agree with the parent comment. My wife was given a neck adjustment on Dec 28 2003 and on the 2nd of 2004 had a mild (thankfully) stroke. It appears what happened was when the chiro torqued her neck one of her vertebrae moved. Of course a little while later the muscles pushed it back in place which they will do. At the same time a blood vessel was pinched off to her brain causing her left eye to not track quite as well as her right. She is fine but she still gets a bit of vertigo. Talked to a lawyer about it and they said unless we were willing to go through years of heartache and stress her time would be more worthwhile spent telling people her story. Her GP informed her that she has another patient who is middle age who's right arm is now useless due to a bad chiro adjustment.
My wife was 30 at the time of the stroke, in perfect health as she was an avid runner even doing a half-marathon, doesn't drink, never smoked, so not even close to being someone classified as a normal risk for strokes.
My wife isn't bitter, I am I admit as I had to look her in the eyes when she was terrified as we didn't know what was happening and whether or not this was the beginning of something bigger. She thinks the big problem was that the chiro glossed over the risks, she doesn't even recall ever being told about them. She had been a semiregular patient for 5 years for lower back pain (which visits to a physical therapist fixed in a couple months after she stopped going to the chiro). I agree with the person up the thread that Chiros should stay away from the neck area and as well they should drop the whole "latent intelligence" BS that moving bones makes your organs work better.
An interesting read (albeit definitely not an unbiased view on the world of chiropractory is book called Spin Doctors, which you can order on Amazon or Chapters .
The wormwood example is fundamentally different from homeopathy. The only way that homeopathy could actually work is if the homeopath failed to carry out the procedure properly and gave the patient an undiluted solution of a compound that was an effective treatment. /As described/ homeopathy /cannot/ work.
I like the software analogies, but we are talking about someone claiming their computer works even though it is just an empty box. Yes, you could test the hypothesis that empty space is capable of carrying out computation, but the answer is easy to predict.
Actually, software IS maths. So is medicine, and so is everything else. It is just very complex mathematics! For infinite dilutiions to be effective, many other things would have to be false - the 'memory of water' idea would have horrible implications - so, yes, it is reasonable in this case to say that it is logically impossible, given what else we know. Of course, if we are all living inside a simulation, then the world would not have to be consistent, but then there wouldn't be much point in testing anything.
what things are and what's worth, fantastic. The placebo effect is something 'real' but 'homeopaty' is not, 'intelligence' exist but we don't have a clue of what it is, and so on....
I for one perfer to fight the actual science-religion mix with philosphy .
What's in a sig?
>The more you dilute it, the better it works.
No, no, no! Just diluting it doesn't work at all. It has to have the magic shake, loosely from the wrist, to rub of all that memorializing goodness. Then you take one drop out of the first gallon and dissolve it into the next lot of lobotomized H2O. Repeat the magic shake. If it ain't got the shake, it's gotta be fake.
cigarette butts D50 against lung cancer.
I am not entirely certain that I would classify chiropractors as quacks. About a year ago, I was sleeping "wrong" and something "misaligned" in my back. I was uncomfortable for two months and when I finally had a chance, I went to a chiropractor for a few visits. He eventually found the spot that was causing me discomfort and popped it back into place. I have been fine ever since.
A chiropractor is useful for those "one off" situations to get you back to normal. It is absurd to use a chiropractor for regular treatment because if you do need regular treatment, something is wrong (bad posture, notched bone, etc) and it really needs to be fixed by a real doctor.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I'm sure you can find any number of normally healthy people who had a stroke and died unexpectedly. It happens every day. Far more people visit a chiropractor receive and adjustment and get on with their lives. Ever heard "correlation is not causation"?
For years I lived with neck and shoulder pain that doctors could do nothing about, short of surgery to fuse two vertebrae. Eventually I also developed a numbness that reached down into my arm. After I finally broke down and visited a chiropractor, at the suggestion of my doctor, I was on the road to a pain free life. Now I visit one every now and then when the pain starts returning.
Can they cure disease? No, and a decent one will never make such claims. Are they providing a valuable needed treatment? YES.
The fact that you mentioned a lawyer without ever mentioning any sort of PROOF is telling. You know, my dad died of a heart attack after having used a scuba tank for years, maybe I should sue the makers of scuba tanks.
My main counterargument to the quackery thesis (and I have a few others) is the "sniffing sharks". We know that sharks are able to somehow "sniff" blood in sea water from miles away and they all congregate quickly around the prey. This is not a myth, it's been documented and it is readily accepted. For the sharks to be able to somehow sense that blood, they have to be able to perceive dillutions at least as high as those found in homeopathy. We also know that dogs and most animals are able to pick up scents with similar high dillutions. Then why can't we accept that homeopathy, when done right and by the [huge] book, can actually work, using the same principles?
I have tried once, when I was a kid, a homeopathic doctor, but that guy was a quack. His interview was just dumb (and the interview is a very important part of the classic homeopathy), and he ended up prescribing a remedy that's given usually without interview. I did not take it and haven't tried again.
Finally, we all know that since the 80s, there have been at least two high profile attempts to prove that water does have memory. In both cases, they resulted in ending the careers of those scientists when the experiments could not be replicated. What bothers me is why would respected scientists chose to go ahead and publish such revolutionary research, bound to be thoroughly examined by their peers, if they did not have the results to back it up? Is it not possible though that they were not quacks as well, but rather that they found something and yet failed to describe certain conditions that resulted in replications failure?
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
Actually studies have shown that the opposite is true. Using Black or White Willow bark is safe and has fewer side effects than Salicylic acid by a long shot. This is true with many herbs digitalis being another example. Many herbs will give you a warning sign such as an upset stomach or nausea when you are over the effective dose and approaching toxicity. Modern drugs have none of those failsafes. Iatrogenic illness and over-prescription is a studied known issue in modern medicine. Death rates actually drop when Doctors go on strike and this has been studied several times. Herbs are far safer and in a lot of cases are far more effective in addressing issues.
I had a horrid ear infection and while I had seen a doctor, the stuff he gave me was not working. I was told I had to see a specialist but since it was a long weekend, I would have to wait several days to see him. One lady at work swore by homeopathy and I looked it up and was skeptical, but hell, at that point I was looking for any relief.
So I went to a nearby natural food and health place and a nice lady helped me find stuff which was meant to help ear infection, especially the pain. It was a bottle of liquid and you would put like 15 drops under your tongue with the included dropped. It was like $5 and I figured it would be an interesting experiment and at worst I was out five bucks.
I tried the stuff and it did help the pain a little, but not because of any homeopathic qualities. The medication was suspended in alcohol. Vodka to be exact. So it actually dulled the pain a bit for that reason. My five bucks would have been better spent on a cheap bottle of Popov at the grocery store.
So the lesson I learned here is homeopathy doesn't work near as well as vodka.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Details are important and I cannot emphasise enough just how fucking huge the scale difference is in your analogy here. Humans are weird and scientists are human. They are not any more immune to delusions than the rest of us. That's why the method is paramount and replication vital to ensure self-bullshitting has not occurred. It happens. All the time. Even to the best of us.
Yep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
You're wrong. From headon.com:
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
YOU are making the promotion of the correlation to the causation - not your kids.
What do I mean by that? In a nutshell:
Events X, Y and Z occur in that order. Repeated observation of that pattern of occurrences is a correlation. XYZXYZXYZ... and so forth. The pattern is strengthened. The promotion from correlation to causation allows one to formulate the hypothesis: Z follows Y because Y caused Z, Y follows X because X caused Y and so on... You perform this sort of thing perfectly naturally as a function of your brain. The problem? Sometimes Z follows Y. Sometimes it may follow it a lot. But Y may not ever be causing Z.
And superstition is born. Science separates "child is well," followed, "child was given remedy," therefore, "remedy cured child" from "remedy had no effect, child became well for other reasons." And it must do this by removing the BIAS of the observer - the natural tendency for your brain to work just as it does.
And so the double blind trial is born and knowledge increases exponentially yet our brains are still, basically, superstitious and without innate understanding of this concept. To your brain if correlation occurs frequently enough it's causation. End of. Ideas are associated and that's that.
What two consenting adult men do in the privacy of their own laboratory is their own business.
Just keep your Homeo shit away from me.
if you wanted to market sugar pills as an FDA approved drug, your drug monograph would be as bleak as that of any other drug with regard to side effects.
Carefull now the FDA is going to have to regulate sugar, or San Francico is going to ban it's sale or possesion in the city like they did with that dangerous chemical Dihydrogen monoxide!
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My oldest son is 11 months to the day younger than my oldest daughter. "Breast feeding as birth control" advocates can kiss my counter-anecdotal butt.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The whole point of the placebo effect is that it is *NOT* a causation - it is a correlation. It is more a statement about how our brains formulate hypotheses about the world than it is some spooky, "the way you feel about something will change the outcome," effect.
Trust me, you can be down right negative about some remedy working and *STILL* get better and *STILL* want to associate the remedy with the result.
I'll let you in on a secret: most of the time, given acceptable nutrition, your body will heal itself. Do you think everyone who got cystitis or strep throat or earaches died before antibiotics were invented? Of course not. Your wife's immune system did what it was evolved to do.
Having said that, you couldn't pay me enough to run through an untreated course of strep throat. Antibiotics exist because 1) being that sick really sucks, and 2) sometimes those things did kill people, and you're far better off treating them when possible to keep them from getting out of control. Your wife got lucky this time. I hope she's lucky the next time, too, and the time after that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Arnica as herb medicin or as homeopathic medicin? It's not always obvious to see because the same company can make both.
There are many instances where herb medicin works. People who use herb medicin tend to believe that it is better to use the complex "natural" mixture of substances as it occurs in a plant rather than extract one single component and make a pill of it, or make the component artificially.
White willow has long been known for its ability to kill pain, although it was very bad for the stomach. The active component was identified and then modified to make it less aggressive. Then it was made industrially. That became aspirin. It's possible to keep using willow bark but aspirin is less harmful.
Homeopathy conflicts with all of chemistry. Homeopathy claims you can keep diluting the active substance and the resulting liquid will become more and more powerful long after the last molecule of the active substance is gone. With dilution steps of 1/100, the last molecule of the original product is gone after 15 steps, or a factor 10e30. Homeopathic products are sold that use dilution factor 10e1000
No, I have gout, Acupuncture worked for me. One of the problems with gout is you can't move. Sitting still is mandatory and reading a good book or anything distracting just doesn't work. I watched as my wife, a victim of failed back surgery, go from 2 fentynal patches a day to a couple of Norco with 2 visits a week at our acupuncturist. Sadly today she uses Avinza (timed release morphine) as our stupid idiot governor in Ca. OK'd visits to a chiropractor and not an acupuncturist. Stupid ass Arnold. Yeah anecdotal but so is life.
Cart
Remember the hole in the ozone layer? It's going away now because we banned CFC's. Didn't read any advice about that in the Bible BTW.
No, but you did get a cultural tradition that said that we should wait and genuinely understand things before we rushed them into production. Instead, we got a bunch of scientists saying that people are completely ignorant for being opposed to air conditioners and other CFC uses, and loh, it turned out that those who opposed the adoption on that technology, long derided as ignorant and superstitious, WERE RIGHT.
The same could be said for ANY other technology that we have.
So really, the question, is, do we continue to listen to all the scientists who call us ignorant for not rushing into the next new thing, or, do we instead stop and listen to those people who you call backwards and superstitious and yet, seem to have been right all along about unintended consequences.
Remember the hole in the ozone layer? It's going away now because we banned CFC's. Didn't read any advice about that in the Bible BTW.
Do you listen to the radio at all, or is that too obsolete for you. Local radio in any major city is riddled with ads about people making miracle recoveries for going to a particular hospital.
I also am not aware of any science that says you can't give dangerous drugs to your grandmother, or eat peanuts on the plane.
Vioxx was great for arthritis, and now its yanked, and many airlines don't serve peanuts any more because there is a 1 in a billion chance that the peanut dust will get into the air and whack someone with peanut allergies. Sure, we know that we can save a man's life now, but, the rest of can't eat peanuts on a plane any more.
Let's imagine that you're driving on a road, it's dark, night-time, raining, and someone has kindly put up a sign that says "Bridge Out".
Yeah, let's imagine that. Exactly. The question that you seem to forget to ask, again and again, is, why the hell are you driving at night in the rain anyway!!!!!
This is my sig.
It starts with the premise that homeopathy is a fraud and that it cannot work. and goes on from there.
All the "science" goes into proving that homeopathy can't work. It doesn't start with a clean, unbiased slate and investigate; It starts with a conclusion and simply works to only prove that conclusion. Their foundation allows them to automatically discount any evidence of workability as anecdotal, lies or placebo effect.
Maybe homeopathy works or maybe it doesn't (and I'm not claiming it does), but that whole investigation isn't science and doesn't use scientific method.
I not only find that disturbing, but the fact that no one noticed that is even more disturbing.
We accept bad "science" if it supports our opinions, and I think that's dangerous.
That's a good point. Perhaps we should start calling all those homeopathy advocates and intelligent design fanatics "science deniers" rather than "idiots".
Good source text: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060881909/
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Firstly, Dean Swift related experiments from the Royal Society. Storing Sunbeams in Cucumbers, Feeding dyed flies to spiders etc etc were real experiments. I'm not sure if your comment brings this out. Swift was an anti-Newtonian, thus very much against the mathematical model of the universe.
I have also practiced homeopathy (although I do not do so nowadays), and I have experienced patients having complete cures that they did not get through ordinary medical means. Actually seeing it DO SOMETHING is an experience that just didn't fit the accepted scientific paradigm and made me change my world view enough to accept aspects of 'Traditional' Homeopathy.
Nice to see someone who still remembers Swift.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I get the gist of what you're saying, but at the same time, some conjectures are so absurd that they don't really need rigorous debunking. If I propose that smashing you in the mouth with a brick will end global warming, we can skip right past experimentation and go straight for the explanation of why it won't work. Frankly, homeopathy is approximately as reputable.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It would seem that if one AP, Acupuncturist, prescribbed the insertion point to another AP who physically preformed the proceedure without knowing what the patients presenting complaint was then it would be possible to have a double blind study by one group recieving Tx (treatment) designed to heal while the other group would recieve Tx designed to not Tx the condition. This way neither the patient nor the AP physically preforming the Tx would know which group was which and acchieving a double-blind method.
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Maybe they should have picked a better target, one they could properly use scientific method on. You can't start a "scientific investigation" with pre-defined conclusions. Sure, in life we can agree on some "obvious" things, but science isn't supposed to operate that way.
For an article on how scientific method disproves pseudo-science, they absolutely failed to use proper scientific method.
Pretty sure if you knew a thing or two about homeopathy, you would have at least the knowledge that it does not matter how much of a substance is present. Also less, as most usually the case, will = a greater potency. Don't slander homeopathy when you are clearly trapped in a dillusion that nothing but a "double blind randomised clinical trial" is the only way to determine the effectiveness of a medicine.
I guess that means if you get a NRI all your homeoapathy remedies poop out! Aligning all of the hydrogen nucleuses in one direction and nutating them with a RF signal would surely erase any "vibrations" and "water memory" present in the Rx. Maybe that's why when people get lost in the woods they walk in circles with the center on their left.
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"Remove bias? You what? Nooooo, you increase the bias by assuming you can, somehow, magically avoid the psychology of confirmation and 'know', just by doing, that it works."
Sorry - you can't confirm it from within the system. You have to step out of the system. You can't do that - no one can. Therefore you must be blind to the system. The observer too must be blind to it. Double blinding. It works because it takes the out the human bias as much as possible.
Of course, you aren't biased. Nope. Of course not. You're special. You're unique. You aren't like those other humans - your brain could never engage in such an error. Nope.
The Egyptians would be able to give your ayurvedic medicine a good run for it's money if not outright predate it.
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Actually, you are starting on the wrong side. In the words of Carl Sagan - "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Homeopathy needs to prove that it can work, contrary to all the scientific theory against it. There has not been a good scientific study that proved that a homeopathic have any affect. The only evidence homeopathic providers offer is anecdotal, which holds no actual weight as scientific evidence. Just because someone claims they got over a cold after taking a homeopathic 'cure' doesn't mean the 'cure' was what cured them. That is the logical fallacy of post-hoc ergo proctor-hoc (number 13 here).
True homeopathic cures dissolve some random chemical/herb/whatever in water, then continue to dilute it until there is none left. The providers claim that an "essence" is left, that water remembers what was in it, but if that were true we could drink regular tap water and be cured of diphtheria, and last I checked, diphtheria hadn't been cured...
Clones are people two.
So do you need a license to practice homeopathy or can anyone do it? I bet there is a lot of money to be made selling dead space alien cures to actors in Hollywood. LRH had it wrong the real money is in homeopathy not scientology I bet a 1000C dilution of volcanic pumice in alcohol would send those pesky thetans away!
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A little knowledge is dangerous.
I used to be a Homeopathic Practitioner. Really I was. I was a Traditional Homeopathic Practitioner. There is a huge difference between 'modern' homeopathy and traditional. The split happened in the late 60s and both forms have diverged significantly since.
The modern approach is inclusive of as many therapies as you can shake a stick at, while the die-hard traditional won't adopt anything else.
So what is it?
- Homeopathy is based on the concept of "Like Cures Like" - So the best thing you can do for a hangover is to take a spoonful of brandy the next morning.
- Homeopathy works. Why do you take Quinine tablets for malaria? Because taking quinine causes similar symptoms to malaria.
Ever had eczema or skin issues? Ever taken coal byproducts for it? That's a Sulphur based product - Another homeopathic remedy.
Have a bruise? Want to get rid of it? Get some Arnica cream. Bitten by a mosquito? Try Urtica cream. Want an effective disinfectant? Try Calendula. All of these are proven homeopathic creams that work. No faith required. Sure, nowadays there's alternative remedies for general conditions like this, but there is no reason to discount alternative and older remedies.
- All of what we term 'immunization' is Homeopathy in its traditional form. You ingest a serum made from the very substance that causes the disease.
- Quackery was just that. Real doctors in the 1800's and beyond (especially in the US) used Homeopathic remedies whilst the quacks used opium, alcohol and wild herbs as a panacea.
- Homeopathy has a rating system. All remedies ending with an 'X' are dilutions eg 1 part per 10. All those ending in 'C' are 1 part per 100 and so on - following the roman numeric system.
- Homeopathy works from the general to the specific. Never the other way around. There is a huge difference in the efficacy of super-high dilutions 'M' for example and 'X'. A practitioner worth their salt would never give an 'M' first off. Very high dilutions are only used once a particular condition has been aggravated and only rarely.'X' and 'C' have measurable concentrations of whatever remedy is used. It is not water.
- Remedies are 'proven'. That means that a statistical sample of people are given 'X' doses of a remedy and observed closely as in all drug trials, looking for symptomatology. If the remedy gives consistent results then it is tested with patients who exhibit similar symptoms.
- Remedies come as creams, powders, solutions, pills, sprays, inhalations and injection (hypodermic).
- Homeopathy has a pharmacopoeia of thousands of proven remedies.
- Homeopathy ONLY WORKS if a condition is diagnosed properly. As proper diagnosis involves checking for a myriad of 'symptoms', it becomes a challenge to arrive at the right diagnosis. Get it wrong and the remedy doesn't work. There are a few pitfalls like that. I say that because if you've been given a remedy and it didn't work, then that's probably why.
Modern Homeopathy however has really gone astray. That's why I got out of it. Modern homeopathy considers that effective remedies can be made by shining a light through a slide that purportedly has the same 'vibrations' as the remedy is supposed to represent. And this is supposed to work? That sort of stuff goes against the grain of traditional practice and I would have to agree with many of the placebo comments made here.
I know I won't convince many, but when you see it working properly, all doubts fade.
Just keep an open mind. One day you may need it.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Fixed it for ya. I always wondered if having your product be "Naive" spelled backwards was an inside joke on the part of some marketroid.
If you buy it regularly, it's pretty dumb. On the other hand, they have nice bottles that don't make water taste like plastic, so I'll buy a bottle and keep refilling it out of my Pur filter for a year or two.
Like does cure like.
That's the way it works with alcohol.
I'm curious how he might manage to cram 300lbs of ash into the ashtray of a Volkswagen beetle.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
well, 17 yo is a reasonable age for spontaneous remission of childhood absence epilepsy...
There is nothing a good chiropractor can do that a good massage therapist couldn't. The difference is that one of them isn't pretending to be a medical expert and charging you for x-rays they can't read.
I used to go to Southern Polytechnic State University, a college that is backed up against Life University, a college (possible the college) to churn out chiropractors, and a lot of people at my school had fun debunking chiropracy in their spare time. Sadly, I left before Life University got unaccredited, that must have provided a lot of laughs at SPSU.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I have reported better results with Chocolate Covered Ginger Altoids. My boss snagged one, lured by the yummy exterior. Then the afterbite got him. He became rather quiet for a few minutes, so I could get some work done.
"'Some people' also claim the holocaust never happened, but I don't think anyone would seriously claim that the holocaust is controversial." You mean the 20 - 60 million Russians or the measly 6 million "Jews"? It is apearantly a fact that the word "holocaust" is controversial when it invokes the killing of the poor jews when in fact it should reference the maniac Stalin and the purging of his own people. This isn't couting the millons of Russians killed by Jews! You fucking idiot! Go get a bag of cheetos and watch your jew propaganda films. If Russians were the main producers of media/films in the world would they constantly tout a holocaust on their poor people, probably not. This is slashdot, you better research your stupid fucking comments before you make a fool of yourself.
Arrogance and rudeness discredit any substantive points you might have otherwise made.
You get some credit for wry humor, however.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Which is really what we americans need more of, not sitting someplace quietly, but getting on a fucking treadmill and breaking a god damned sweat for at least 20 minutes 3 times a week. Seriously. This would hella reduce a lot of generalized depression, anxiety, and other minor but common "psychological problems" in this country.
Not that I'm knocking sitting someplace quietly. There's definetly a time for that, and it's a powerful experience in its own right. However, I'm really concerned about all the seriously overweight people in this country that are on half a dozen prescription meds for a wide range of ailments, including depression, that could be substantially relieved by regular exercise.
and before someone kneejerks(and they will anyway because they don't care about understanding shit, or reading the whole thing before replying)... no, I'm not saying all depression can be solved with exercise, though I dare say that the vast majority of depression would benefit to various degrees by exercise. I'm also not saying that all prescription meds can be replaced by exercise, but that in way too many cases today, most people could simply choose to get in shape and would find themselves not needing many meds because they fixed the root cause of many of their ailments.
Hmm - proof that anything can get modded up on /. :)
Uh, the whole point of the double-blind random clinical trial is that it is the only known way to distinguish between drug effects and placebo effects.
What other way would you propose? Tell people to try it and ask them how they feel? The plural of anecdote isn't data. They do precisely that in double-blind trials and guess what - quite a few people report feeling better when in fact they were given only sugar pills...
And the objection isn't to the concept that less dose administered = greater effect. The objection is to the concept that you can take a preparation that is unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but solvent and have it have any effect at all. If the does contains nothing but water, by what mechanism could it convey any effect at all?
If somebody wanted to rely on the prayers of a minister instead of taking a drug I'd not complain about the minister's actions. He would be completely up-front about the fact that he believes that what he is doing is completely supernatural and is not anything that can be relied on to have any particular outcome beyond whatever some deity intends to have happen.
The problem with homeopathy is that it masquerades as science by asserting that a particular concoction can with some degree of certainty promote a cure for a malady, and it asserts that the effect is somehow natural.
If an effect is natural then it is subject to the laws of nature. It must therefore be testable, and the fact that no effects have been found in suitable experiments forces us to conclude that it has no effect.
Nonetheless, you seem to believe that our current understanding of science is sufficient to reject homeopathy; I don't.
Here's some further food for thought from that wikipedia article on homeopathy (emphasis is mine):
- Hahnemann pioneered and always favored the centesimal or "C scale", diluting a substance 1 part in a 100 of diluent. Some homeopaths developed a decimal scale (D or X) diluting the substance 1 part in 10 of diluent. Hahnemann never used this scale but it was very popular throughout the 19th century and still is in Europe.
- It should be noted however that not all homeopaths advocated extremely high potencies. Many of the early homeopaths were originally doctors and generally tended to use lower potencies such as "3x" or "6x", rarely going beyond "12x". A good example of this approach is that of Dr. Richard Hughes, who dismissed the extremely high potencies as unnecessary. This was the dominant pattern in Europe throughout the 1820s to 1930s, but in America many practitioners developed and preferred the higher dilutions. This trend became especially exemplified by James Tyler Kent and dominated US homeopathy from the 1850s until its demise in the 1940s. The split between lower and higher dilutions also followed ideological lines with the former stressing pathology and a strong link to conventional medicine, while the latter emphasized vital force, miasms and a spiritual take on sickness.[34][35]
- Homeopathy has also been integrated into the national health care systems of numerous countries including India, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom. (...) Some homeopathic treatment is covered by the national insurance coverage of several European countries, including France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Luxembourg. (...) Homeopathy is currently integrated into the national health care system of Mexico and in 1985, a presidential decree established the first homeopathic school as well as regulations specifiying training requirements for homeopathic doctors.[102] (...) Homeopathy has been regulated in other South American countries, such as Columbia, since the beginning of the 20th century. In Brazil, Homeopathy is included in the national health system and since 1991, physicians who want to practice homeopathy must complete 2,300 hours of education prior to receiving the proper licenses.
Now whether you believe the "water memory" thesis or not, you have to admit that homeopathy is not synonymous with those high dillutions, and most practitioners use dillutions lower than what we give sharks credit for. Furthermore, America is where the highest dillutions were used and also where homeopathy has had the least success. (It's also the country where the [A]M[edical]A[ssociation] had the most success in eliminating competition to conventional medicine, but that's a different story.)Last but not least, a very often overlooked reason why homeopathy is so successful where it is allowed to flourish and where crooks are weeded out is the correctly applied interview, which provides a full picture of a patient's health and seeks to resolve most negative symptoms. Contrast this with the crook who tends to either rush through or dispense with the interview altogether and prescribe a highly dilluted remedy for the most troublesome symptom.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
The Chinese doctor practices his art (not science), in a thoroughly unreproducible manner. As he apparently can't teach people how to do it, there is nothing there to be learned from it.
But if the Chinese Doctor has a recordable track record of treating patients, then his methods are reproducible, just not reproducible by skeptical western doctors who will never really understand something like "the flow of a persons chi" because western doctors will always be looking for the physical manifestations of chi in the lymph-nodes or nerve pathways. So while it might be "scientifically useless", I'd say the life of the GP's brother is worth a bit more than "an anecdote or two". I have a friend with Crohn's syndrome, he was a complete mess while he was under the care of western medicine, no he goes to someone he referres to as a "witch doctor" who practises something similar to BodyTalk.http://www.bodytalksystem.com/bodytalk/overview/ My friend with Crohn's is now (about two years after leaving western medical care) only experiencing about 10% of his previous symptoms. Western medicine is truly wonderful but it does have some blind spots, mostly in the areas that are not well suited to scientific study, like positive aspects of the mind-body connection.
We are all just people.
I would much agree - I am definitely not an expert in the physical states of water molecules. That was my attempt at a layman's possible explanation of the whole thing. I don't have the science behind me to back it up. I do believe though that your explanation was a slightly-less-layman's attempt to disprove my attempt at a possible explanation.
I guess my issue is that I see us as being at the beginning of the science discovery timeline, particularly in regards to the human body. We've got all the obvious stuff figured out, like arteries contain blood and that you can't live very long without your head and we can even do sophisticated imaging of the body internals in the past 20-30 years. That's just a small part of the total knowledge that hopefully we'll eventually gleam about the body's workings. Same thing with something as simple as water. I'm pretty sure that while we do know a lot, we don't know Everything. Simply because something does not have a measurable frequency currently doesn't mean that there is nothing there to be measured - it may just indicate lacking in our detection technology.
My point is that I feel that I cannot currently claim that the theories of homeopathy are Impossible. It may not be able to be explained at our current level of scientific knowledge, but for me to simply say that it's all bunk because we aren't able to currently explain it, is foolish and short-sighted.
Lots of phenomena have been found in effects that had previously been described as 'trivial'.
And yes, I am under the impression that molecules vibrate in funny patterns, as you say. I suspect that a molecule's surrounding molecules might have some bearing on what that molecule does, and that if you put manymany of the same type of molecule together, all doing the same thing, I'd find it possible that some sort of greater pattern is formed - wave, vibration, oscillation, or possibly something unknown. Scientific speculation? Yes. Prove me wrong? Please do. Good luck. I'll be waiting with a handshake and a cold beer if you do.
Well i've had brainshake don't know how to call it in english, in simple i felt with my head on the ground. So photo's where all okay but still i feel pain like headaches.
:
:)
So finaly after several visits to the hospitals i asked that specialist. He explained that what i have was not in reach of modern docters like himself. It's the unexplainable field we cannot enter and dont understand (pain in head).
So i asked
You must have had patients similair to me, did acupuncture or something else ever helped ?.
Well he didn't believe in those hocus pocus dokters he told me.
He gave a long talk about psudo docters and ended with the
warning; "you know they have to pay their houses two, remember that".
Only a few seconds later he told me, my time for this visit was up and asked for the next one
(so i had spend my time there my money was in, so next one please !!!!
Fact several days later i did went to an acupuncturist and he did help me
It's not over yet but better then before.
I hope one day those "real" doctors will learn from those hocus pocus docters, as currently for me the real docters have lost their magic
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
While I don't disagree with your overall point, Chiropractors ARE "real doctors". They have more training in anatomy and physiology than conventional M.D.'s.
How can anything be non-well suited to scientific study?
Welll i understand your point, dont want to argue it's your experience so here is one of mine
:(
Ever wondered how many mistakes happen at real docters, ever wondered ?.
My own example :
My chyro solved my neck problem, it was so bad i couldnt move my head to left or right anymore.
Just after two visits it was solved. (i was a bit amazed of this)
But intrestingly the year before i had it too, i was afraid of a chyro then. So then i went to a doctor.
He gave me pills for muscle relaxation and against the pain. It got me internal bleedings those medicines.
And when i showed this medications to other dokters they where very supriced i was given such strong medicines.
Those are no good for your stomach they told me, you better stop it....
I still kept my neck problems then for several month's..
I still regualy a few times a year vist her, she's quite skilled a chyro here is a study of 8 years....
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Anecdotes do not prove whether a mediacal treatment works. There are many ways in which different types of biases makes basing conclusions on anecdotes unreliable.
Just as a few examples how this can possibly happen:
- Perception of symptoms may be very subjective. A patient may report an improvement in how he feels even if what he took does nothing.
- Symptoms often vary in intensity or go away and come back. A patient may enter a phase where the symptoms diminished or went away and attribute it to the treatment and report it as such. He may then fail to report it when they later come back.
- Crediting the wrong treatment. A patient may be taking a conventional drug while following his alternative treatment and attribute the curing to the alternative method even though it might have been due to the conventional drug.
- The patient may be a hypochondriac. He may never have had the condition he now reports as cured in the first place.
- The patient may be lying and falsely report his illness is gone.
There is also bias that can be introduced by the person dispensing the treatment. Say you are running a homeopathy shop and many people come and try your products. Those who find it does not work do not return while those who are convinced it does work (rightly or wrongly) keep returning. You are therefore only collecting anecdotes mostly from those people who believe it works.
Also, you may subconsciency remember only the anecdotes that are favorable to what you are doing.
Therefore, if you believe that those stories from your patients PROVE that homeopathy works, you are irrational. If you do not believe it proves it, and if you have nothing else that proves homeopathy right but still decide to change your world view based on it, then you are believing things to be true without knowing them to be true and are again, you are irrational.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
I'm kicking myself for having just used up the last of my own mod points.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Oops, I'd like to say more but I need to go get my aura cleaned.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
So, other than giving homeopathy to one-hundred patients and giving a placebo to one-hundred other patients and seeing the difference, how do YOU suggest we measure the relative effectiveness of treatments?
It's been a long time.
You can't take the sky from me...
Thank goodness all those people peddling quack remedies are altruists who offer their services for free and never attempt to divert patients from safe, effective conventional remedies.
In the grand scheme of things, science makes the claim that a single cause has a single effect, and that simply isn't true. The idea of isolating a variable exists only through an act of ignorance itself. So yeah, homeoapathy is a bunch of crap, but let's not forget that real science too has to depend on ignorance of a sort to succeed.
This is my sig.
What you're experiencing there is the classic "My friend uses it, and it works" manipulation. First you have to realize, that the natural course of any chronic disease is "up and down". There a perfectly good times, and there are times that may kill you. Usually people seek out alternative medicine because they can't take it anymore, and the regular medicine doesn't help. That's when the disease is "up" - at a peak. It doesn't get any worse than that, the disease is maxed out. Naturally, in the following time, the disease will get better (or he will die). This is NOT because of the alternative medicine healing him in magical ways. It might be because of the conventional medicine, as this has been shown to actually work with Crohns.
What conventional medicine can do for your friend, is to make the peaks smaller. Conventional medicine can actually save his life, as a very tall peak will kill him. His witch doctor can only give him a sense of cosmic wholeness or some such notion, not mess with the actual disease.
I hope your friend seeks out medical attention before he dies, the next time his Crohns acts up.
I have no problem with homeopathy should "prove it can work" But. That. Wasn't. The. Article. They made a big deal out of "here's science -- proving something" (which I think is great) but then used bad science.
If they wanted to say "Oh homeopathy is too ridiculous to bother with", that's perfectly fine. But they didn't.
I'm not talking about or defending homeopathy. I object to bad science pretending to be good science. And I'm bothered that we tend to blindly accept bad science if we agree with what it "proves".
Your reasoning displays a post-hoc fallacy. You confuse a correlated series of events with a causal schema between those events.
IAALS.
Placebos are fine as a fob-off the hypochondriac patient. They're even a good starting point in some psychological disorders (as the placebo effect is mostly psychological).
Placebos are NOT FINE in cancer, HIV therapy, TB... anything serious, basically. 75% as good as the drug? I don't think so-- and even if it was, that's 25% less long to live. Bah!
If your sensitivity to these toxins is low enough that you'll chock their side effects up to the disease you're fighting, you won't notice the difference, but if, like me, aspartame makes you fucking sick by itself, then the natural option is now the only option.
You can't take the sky from me...
Because Wikipedia is authoritative and represents the scholarly consensus on the matter...
IAALS.
You also display an ignorance about "Western" medicine (I use scare quotes because doctors and scientists in the East use the same methods as Western doctors do) and the methodology by which it investigates psychology, psychosomatism and other "mind-body" connections. What you're talking about is the quasi-spiritual crap that is used to explain techniques like homeopathy, acupuncture, reiki, and whatever. That's not scientific. Science cannot comment on its correctness. But by the same token, it doesn't come with the pedigree of science -- it's pseudoscience.
So when you ask me what I will trust my health to -- actual science or pseudoscience -- don't be at all surprised when I chose the verifiable, demonstrable method.
IAALS.
Acupuncture is stress-relieving because
Sorry but this is complete nonsense. Acupuncture works very different depending on which stimulation point you treat. Those points by the way where found by "scientific experiments" mainly on prisoners of war.
You could spend an hour sitting in a peaceful place reading a good book and get the same benefit. I doubt you find a book that makes you so stress relieved that one can perform a surgery on you while you read.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The Chinese doctor practices his art (not science), in a thoroughly unreproducible manner.
It is not art, but science just in the way western medicine is science. When you study traditional chinese medicine (yes you can study that in chinese universities just like we study medicine) you have exactly the same way for treatment as we have:
a) doagnosis, what is wrong, what is the picture of the illness
b) treatment -> standard treatment, just as we do
The only difference is: the standard treatment in our western "chemicals based" medicine is to pick the relevant chemicals/medicines/brands for treatment and the chinese doctor picks the relevant points for acupuncture. There is absolutely nothing magical about that, they have a catalog of standard points to use just as a western doctor has a catalog of standard medicals to use.
angel'o'sphere
P.S. the brother of my best friend and partner in my dojo is-a traditional chinese doctor, he spend 10 years in Shanghai and Peking to study traditional chinese medicine.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
A few years ago I had a dog, german shepard with serious regular eyelid inflammation. A friend of my mother, a homeopathy practicioner with some local fame gave me a mixture of some homeopathic drops. After two weeks of using it on the dog, the inflammation was gone and never returned.
Of course you can say - placebo effect. But do you really think that the dog believed in the power of these drops? Or maybe it was my belief which cured the dog? In either case, the homeopathy isn't so easily rejected as alleopathy practicioners would like.
With the placebo effect, it's worth mentioning that would happen at a real doctor too.
I.e., it doesn't even vaguely count as an 'advantage'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
For the unaware: Evian is a city in france. And there is the source from which the "Evian Mineral Water" is bottled.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Acupuncture 'works' because it gets your body to release natural painkillers, even when it's done in such a manner as to not cause any pain. It's a neat trick, actually. A sort of paradoxical pain.
And endorphines can help with various problems, from pain to mild depression.
But drinking some hot sauce does the same thing. As does riding a bumpy rollercoaster. There's a lot of things people can do to trick their body into going 'Crap, I've been injured, better stop the pain' when there's actually no physical pain, or at least no physical harm.
And there's no indication it can help with any problem outside of pain and mental stuff.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
LOL, causal schema? Now how could I have a set of beliefs about something I had never experienced and didn't believe in ? OTH nice wording, all that money for college did help huh? As long as I have been reading and posting in/. "casual schema" is a new one LMAO.
Cart
It pokes holes in you and irritates tissues normally protected by your skin. Other than that, lots of nearly untestable placebo effect.
ROFL.
What exactly is untestable?
You take 100 people, 50 you treat with acupuncture, 50 not, or 50 with a placebo if you think that makes a difference.
Then you record the results of the 100 "experiments" then you compare the results to figure the effectiveness.
Pretty simple, in fact a standard way in science for conducting tests.
So, now please start to enlighten us: which scientific experiment about which special acupuncture point are you aware off that proved that this point has no effect?
I could ask the same question about an experiement regarding a homeopathic medical btw. Care to care any experiment? Except that most homeopathic medicals are diluted does not change the fact that that same plants are also used in traditional medicine. Dilution does not necessary mean that it is diluted into oblivion, there are lots of levels.
On the simplest level, in germany called D1, the original solution is diluted to 1%.
Now take a traditional medical against heart weakness, made from foxglove
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That your wife needs a new doctor?
Seriously -- taking birth control pills causes hormonal changes. This is not news. This is why people continue researching new methods of birth control -- because those changes aren't always just the ones you want. I'm thrilled that natural birth control methods are working fine for you. Nobody has claimed they don't work, they just don't have the same success rate over large populations as hormonal options do.
No offense, you seem to have such a huge chip on your shoulder about "science nazis" that you have completely lost track of what science is. Having an asshole for a doctor is not evidence that science is wrong.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
They weren't trying to "disprove" homeopothy through scientific means. They were showing that the journal articles which claimed to be scientific were not, in fact, based on science. That's a huge difference.
The goal was not to disprove anything, but to show readers how pseudo-sciences can make things SOUND scientific without actually following the scientific method.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
If you followed that standard consistently on slashdot you would be posting much less frequently.
I suppose that you can take people who don't know the actual location of the meridians and then give some of them incorrect acupuncture and see if there's any effect. I suspect that this would be a very interesting experiment, but would take quite a bit of funding (you have to find untrained staff and then train half of them to give acupuncture incorrectly).Interesting that you think so. It's a similar degree of scientific incompetence that's been present in every "scientific" study that backs up homeopathy and other quackeries. Once those errors have been corrected, every single studies show no difference from placebo. Please don't continue to pretend that you understand the slightest thing about science. Your confusion would be amusing if it wasn't so damaging to actual science.That's a truly extraordinary statement. It's a perfect example of "shifting the burden of proof." Practitioners of acupuncture are the people making the claims, they are responsible for substantiating the claims. Actually, your statement makes me believe that not only are you incompetent, but you're some sort of fraud who benefits from selling the lies of alternative medicine to the gullible. Just my opinion based on what you've written, but you're doing a pretty good job of convincing me.
Here in reality, I don't have to shoot it down, all I have to say is keep your needles out of my body until you prove that you're (1) not causing any harm and (2) causing some positive effect.The problem with homeopathic logic is that the homeopath would expect the treatment to get even stronger through further dilution. The rational person and the doctor both expect the treatment to get weaker with further dilution.
I'm not astonished by small quantities of some substance being effective. What's astonishing is the claim that an even smaller quantity of that substance would be even more effective when everything I know about chemistry and biology says that's wrong. Luckily, homeopathy is quite willing to take this principle to the logical extreme, and dilute substances to the point where there's not a single particle of the original substance in the solvent. Then this pure alcohol/water/oil/whatever is sold as being strong medicine. As a result, it's quite straightforward to show how ridiculous homeopathy is.
Do you see the important difference?
Thanks for playing,
Ross
Regards,
Ross
"the whole point of the double-blind random clinical trial is that it is the only known way to distinguish between drug effects and placebo effects."
Well, not exactly. As per the definition, placebo is only possible on the patient side. For this to be taken into account single-blind is enough. The problem is doctors can be delusioned too (or even malicious): that's the point of *double* blind: neither doctors nor patients get to know who took medicine and who took placebo. I'd say "triple-blind" would be even better, where "triple" comes from the fact that not only neither patients nor doctors knew "who's who", but they should even ignore to be involved into an experiment. Of course this would bring so big ethic problems that is no to be consider.
The water has come in contact with the container. Does not that contribute to the water's memory?
Infuriate left and right
I claim that helium-filled balloons, if dropped here on earth, will not fall down but go up.
Before you dismiss a claim based on current science, make sure that the claim indeed contradicts current science.
That doesn't, of course, preclude rejecting a claim for other reasons (especially missing evidence).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Nothing you say is fundamentally wrong - it just mashes up the concepts too much.
It's human nature. Science is human discipline. It teaches us, informs us. It's not just about the learning of fact and the development of new technology. The whole of its activity has value. I wrote another troll - what if you got rid of all the names of scientists and just published a book of facts?
The answer is, science would be less. Yes, you could do some things perhaps more if we called "avogadro's number" the "atoms in a molar constant", but, that cheats us of the whole story of Avogadro. What sort of a man was he? What sort of a man are you? Similarly, what would F=m(a) or, taking a simple integral be, without visions of Newton sulking bitterly in his compound, alternatively working on one of the greatest breakthroughs of all time in science, while at the same time frustrated that he cannot turn lead into gold!
To some extent, these men "wrestle with God", by peering into the secrets of the universe, as much as did characters in the bible or other ancient books of famous people. These are all stories about ourselves, reflect upon our character, and, it is, ultimately the sort of stuff that deeply satisfies the human soul in ways that mere facts cannot.
From these men, we learn the most useful and timeless of all human lessons:
a) persistence is a virtue. You have to work to achieve great things.
b) you need to learn about your subject matter
c) don't limit your approaches and horizons.
d) don't be afraid to think, to invent new tools, to break things up into steps along the way. Newton invested a few years working on inventing calculus, to invent gravity.
e) don't be afraid to go down your own path, if you can prove that you are right. There's the ghost of galileo, muttering under his breath as he signed the edict of milan, "but why do the planets move..."
This is my sig.
You have seen the trees ... now see the forest. If he had said "masses' instead he would be spot on. The masses given off by copper tainted water are different than pure water, ask anyone who has ever used a mass spec.. As for memory, I severely doubt it, but as the Bard said "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I'll take this as proof that the money spent on my education by my home state was a wise investment. Literacy is cool! (Or should I abbreviate this into Internet-acronym form? Is my tone too elitist? Shall I flagellate myself for being bourgeois and not adopting an appropriately proletarian stance toward intellectual matters like science? Tell me how to live, Cart!)
IAALS.
I hope your friend seeks out medical attention before he dies, the next time his Crohns acts up.
So you are suggesting that after 30 years of medical attention, when my friend decided to seek out alternatives (and stopped taking all of his prescribed drugs) and came across his "witch doctor" it just happened to coincide with the longest,best and steadiest "up swing" in his ailment? There are hundreds if not thousands of similar experiences as my friend has had, and for traditional medicine to write them all off as coincidence is really quite unscientific. To offer some cocky bullshit like "can only offer him a cosmic sense of wholeness" and proceeded to ignore the reality of his vastly improved condition isn't scientific, it's denial. No, these things don't fit nicely into our current scientific understanding of the world, but that means we need to expand our scientific understanding, not deny the anomalies.
We are all just people.
"That is indeed about the closest you can get to "double blind": There just has to be a mechanism in place to tell the acufakers when to target the "proper" area and when to stick the "wrong" area."
The "double" in "double blind" comes from the fact that neither the patient (single blind) *nor* the practitioner know when the glass contains medicine and when it contains sugar. Try now to "fool" an acupuntor this way, if you can.
The only possible way I can imagine about is take a well known acupuntor and teach on Universty A what he feels to be the "right way" and on University B a "fake way" and look for differences between those two groups over the years (not a very sensible method, anyway).
"Since I was 10, I've been suffering epilepsia (petit mal, that means little attacks). After few years my life became nightmare, every day I had terrible symptoms and once a year the great fit with unconsciousness, muscles tension and very bad feeling a day or two afterwards. I tried 2 different therapies (Depakine Chrono - twice a day, convulex - three times - these were newest on the market 20 years ago), changed the style of life - NOPE. Only if I've forgotten my pills on certain hour, symptoms arisen automatically. And pills affected my brain :( After 3-4 years I tried the homeopathy. My doctor had dozens of certificates and so on; he examined me 3 hours, very detailed. After examination, he gave me 2 little pills (AFAIK that was sulphur). After that I'm absolutely healthy"
The word the previous poster was looking for was "bullshit". the one you are looking for is "anecdote".
I'll tell you one from my pocket so you can compare. I knew a fine guy when we started University and we became friends. He told me he suffered epileptical attacks and indeed he suffered three on the first two years at the University. No treatment made any significant advance and he was just resigned to suffer this illness all his life. Then he knew a girl and became in love. He told me how good his relationship made him feel. The fact is that he has never suffered a single epileptic attack again.
Another fact is that many childs suffering epileptic attacks just espontanously cure somewhere between tenage and adult age.
"You take 100 people, 50 you treat with acupuncture, 50 not, or 50 with a placebo if you think that makes a difference.
Then you record the results of the 100 "experiments" then you compare the results to figure the effectiveness.
Pretty simple, in fact a standard way in science for conducting tests."
Sorry but no, sorry. That's not the "way in science for conducting tests". In your case the patients know when they are treated with acupunture and when they are not. The practiotioners know when they administrating acupunture and when they do not too. It has been proben beyond doubt that you can't get confiable results about the effectiveness of the treatment under those circumnstances.
Go please, and do some research on the Internet about "double blind tests".
Did he by any chance have surgery in the 30 years he had Crohns? Statistically he did - several times. If he didn't, his disease wasn't very serious, and it's completely possible that it's become dormant. I have the disease myself, and I haven't had symptoms now for 8 years. I didn't go see a witch doctor though... I'm just counting myself lucky to have a good REAL doctor who can actually explain to me how the disease works. He also knows when he can help me, and what can be done. That's far more than any of the alternative healers can. They have absolutely no evidence of anything other than coincidental "I think I feel better" anecdotes from the select people who just happened not to be ill...
It's time for most of the people in the US and Japan to get new doctors, except where do you go?
"You have the flu. I'll get you an antibiotic."
"Why?"
"Secondary infection."
And if you express doubt, most likely there's a sales pitch to follow the lame excuse.
And if you change doctors, it's the same.
In any case, if this is true, it should be simple enough to isolate the magical "failsafe ingredient" in herbs and then add it into medications.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Yes.
To offer some cocky bullshit like "can only offer him a cosmic sense of wholeness" and proceeded to ignore the reality of his vastly improved condition isn't scientific, it's denial.
To assume a causal connection based on correlation is logically invalid. To offer up the "cocky bullshit" explanation is proper scientific procedure, based on identifiable variables that were isolated and taken into account for when the hypothesis was formulated.
No, these things don't fit nicely into our current scientific understanding of the world, but that means we need to expand our scientific understanding, not deny the anomalies.
No, it means we must consider whether these are true "anomalies" or whether we can explain them in terms of the current theory. The reason that acupuncture cannot possibly work as claimed is that it posits a vitalistic force that is not one of the four natural forces that occur in the world. Hence, any theory that invokes such a force necessarily multiplies the types of entities we must cognize in order to save an appearance, a purported anomaly. But in this case, we can explain the "anomaly" in terms of the four existing forces -- the change in your friend's condition was due to some natural cause, such as the natural progression of the disease, a change in environment, reduced stress... hell, it could be almost anything. Blithely assuming it was the acupuncture is an example of post-hoc reasoning. Don't engage in that.
IAALS.
"I usually counter the "natural" argument by mentioning curare. So far nobody wanted a dose of that."
Curare? too exotic. I usually mention pure, natural and fresh shit. Usually they don't want a dose of that either.
I love the ridiculous conclusion of the article. Yeah. let's lump together all the ideas that we might disagree with and call them all pseudo-science!
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?
"I'm curious how he might manage to cram 300lbs of ash into the ashtray of a Volkswagen beetle."
Just drop them in a swimming pool, vigorously agitate the water, take a drop and put it on the beetle's ashtray. Any homeopathe will tell you that single drop is as jewish, if not more, than the whole original active principle.
Yeah. The first time antibiotics almost killed my sister was about twenty-five years ago. Maybe twenty-four.
No mice that I can recall, although the house she lives in now sometimes has mice, and at first she didn't like to lay traps for them.
The colloidal silver thing was more recent, I think my cousin started using the stuff about fourteen years ago. I'd have expected my cousin would not be one to go in for something like colloidal silver, since he's a physicist, and a good one. One of the projects he's worked on was digging into the real mechanisms of the Pons and Fleischman funny business, so I would have expected a healthy skepticism to have kicked in. Who knows?
His head hurt, the doctor couldn't help. The alternative medicine seemed to, for a while.
Colloidal silver really isn't so much homeopathic as it is alternative medicine, but conventional medicine tends to lump all the alternative stuff in the same basket, just as you apparently do.
The second time conventional medicine almost killed my sister was much more recent.
But you seem to be sure that this is the same story that you've been hearing for twenty-five years. Or, what? Anyway, you don't understand it, so _you_ _must_ _mock_ _it_.
Is that what you really think science is?
Where do you think science gets it's bad name? Maybe from people like you who mock things they don't understand.
Yeah. The homeopaths' explanation for why what they are doing works is wrong. They really can't reproduce many of their results dependably.
Yeah, some of the more extreme alternative medicine practices are dangerous. I have another cousin who "cured" herself of diabetes by a bizzare combination of starvation diet and hot baths that has been known to cause heart failure. So, since she put herself at danger because of this alternative medicine business, should I go running around screaming at my legislators and everyone else who will listen, "STOP THE BAD SCIENCE!!!!!!!!"?
Seriously.
That cousin is not diabetic now, and before the treatment, the symptoms were bad enough that she couldn't safely drive, couldn't take care of the kids, was something of a risk to herself and her family.
You have conventional doctors prescribing antibiotics for every minor complaint, so that the antibiotics have become, essentially, a placebo. How is that any better science than what the homeopaths do?
All I'm saying is that bad science is just more of the stuff that happens in this world, and if we try to suppress all the bad stuff just because _we_ know it's bad, well, that's not a good thing, either.
joudanzuki
The funny thing about this methodology, is that it works wonderfully within the material realm. The double blind test is great when you can remove yourself from the system being studied.
The problem with Energy, is that it appears to be linked in a huge way to consciousness and awareness. What you believe has a significant impact on what you can measure. Stepping outside those boundaries requires a type of experiment which is rather challenging to set up. Further, the subject energies present difficulties in being successfully measured directly using conventional techniques and measurement devices. --There are reports of a type of Aura photography, and ghosts and 'Orbs' have been photographed. --But such evidence is hard to quantify or understand, and despite countless examples, has done little to lead to any sort of watershed acceptance of energies beyond the conventionally recognized forces in nature. (I find that to be a rather curious disconnect; science likes to turn a blind eye to such examples as though they somehow didn't count or do not exist. I consider this to be evidence in itself of the social control system which keeps people locked in place with regard to knowledge.)
But for the most part, evidence of 'energy' is secondary. People recovering from sickness using alternative medicines, like acupuncture and homeopathy is secondary evidence. The fact that dogs can be operated on without complaint with no use of anesthesia and just acupuncture offers evidence that there is something more going on than the placebo effect. This is more evidence which might be considered a manner of 'blindness' in terms of empirical study. But again, such instances are largely ignored. Why?
One of the best ways to learn about energy is to dive in and personally explore it. Is this scientific? Not by the standard definition of scientific procedure. But is it invalid? Absolutely not! Learning how to ride a bike teaches the individual directly through personal interaction with a bicycle. The individual exists within the system and there is no double blind testing going on. The bike rider is very biased, because they believe in what they are doing. Science may reject the bike riding experience because proper scientific method was not followed, but it does not reduce the value of the experience.
The thing with a bike, is that it exists in the physical realm, and so you can easily show somebody a bike and ride it before them to demonstrate. You can 'prove' bikes. But energy is much more slippery. The effects can be diminished or increased by one's will. If you are in a stadium of very angry and skeptical people who don't want to have anything proven to them, then the chances are that an individual being tested will not be able to perform. Indeed, since one aspect of the energetic reality is that we are all connected and aware and in communication on the subconscious level with one another, when the demonstrator hears through the subconscious from the unwilling audience, "Please no! I don't want to see you prove me wrong!", then to force proof upon the audience would be a breach of free will, and thus it is much less likely to happen. This reality is designed to be experienced in a state of extreme ignorance and unawareness. To break down that wall is rather anti-social and people will fight you tooth and nail to keep the veils of forgetting drawn tight around themselves. They nailed Jesus to a cross to stop his efforts! And so curious elements such as these come into effect when we play at 'science'.
--Which is why faith becomes an important element when exploring such matters.
-FL
Oh, that's awful. I reaffirm my need to NEVER EVER EVER visit a Chiropractor. I have studied martial arts for 6 years now. Many chiropractors tend to show up in these classes for some reason. I've never figured out why. Sometimes they offer advice to me which I always categorically reject. One of them, after I broke a rib, gave me his card! As if I'd go to him for a fucking broken rib! There's nothing to do for a broken rib but let it heal.
One of the other side-benefits of studying MA is that I keep my musculature in relatively good shape. I credit that for my avoidance, at age 38, of any back problems. But if I DO have problems with my back, I'm going nowhere near a quacking chiro-doctor. No fucking way.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
If you consistently posted calm, rational comments like that I wouldn't be upping their ante just to shut you down.
--
make install -not war
I don't know.
I know the theory about secondary infection. I've heard it a lot. It seems to make sense, sort of.
I'm relatively healthy. So are my kids. Why should they be prescribing it for us? Why do they?
But elderly people and people with weakened immune systems are that much more likely to develop reactions through overprescription.
The problem with the conditions that overprescription of antibiotics induce is that they tend to go unnoticed until the patient just doesn't seem to be recovering on schedule. Then you find out that the patient was failing to take the warnings about taking the antibiotic with food. (Active yogghurt, in particular, is good for preventing the damage.)
In their weakened state, they were not interested in food at all. So they were taking antibiotics on an empty stomache.
That is _known_ to cause problems.
I'm not against conventional medicine. I'm just saying that the finger pointing ought to stop.
Making fun of bad science is not the way to make it go away, nor is promoting a closed mind towards anything but conventional medicine.
joudanzuki
Does the greater public at large read Ars Technica? Do you think homeopathy is controversial among Ars Technica readers?
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
But...it happened a day after tooking those 2 pills. That was not a process - all symptoms disappeared in one day. My personal evaluation is, 50/50 for placebo and treatment.
-- Sneer
"Natural Family Planning", or perhaps more correctly "Fertility Awareness" forms of birth control can, according to the references from wikipedia , "When used correctly and consistently, studies have shown some forms of FA to be 99% effective, the same as oral contraceptives." The "Rhythm Method" is a pretty old and "simple" method of NFP, with correspondingly less effectiveness - I can't recall if the original posting was talking about purely a calendar based system (Rhythm Method) or one of the more effective "Symptothermal" methods.
Of course one can spend a lot of time thinking about how to interpret birth control effectiveness statistics, both user and method rates, but it is clear that for those committed to the methods, they can be used with some degree of confidence. Cruising through the various wikipedia birth control articles, it is surprising how poor both "perfect use" and "typical use" effectiveness rates are for what at first glance I thought were highly effective methods - see for example here.
As dabraun surely would attest in any case, all of these methods are firmly grounded in science - though there might be considerable debate over the precise level of effectiveness, none of them go against widely accepted scientific understanding of infertility and conception
Here's a way to do double blind acupuncture testing. First time I've seen any workable approach to this.
Are you seriously doubting the fact that Ayurvedic medicine has been around for over 2500 years?
Do you often rewrite history to win arguments?
"But...it happened a day after tooking those 2 pills."
What did I tell you? On one hand you can't have "half an attack"; you either suffer them or not. On the other, they guy I told about han not a single attack as soon as he knew that girl: you see? One day to the next.
Let me try to give a different look at homeopathy.
"Like cures like, when diluted": Apply potential problem item to water that has bacteria in it. Any bacteria that survives is able to deal with that harmful stuff. Said bacteria might be able to deal with the harmful stuff in the body.
"Water memory" in this case is nothing more than the changes in the bacterial population caused by the stuff.
If you start with a high dosage, then all the bacteria will be killed off. You need to start with a low enough dosage that some good stuff will survive.
Now, with this viewpoint/approach, what can we tell, and why can we predict that normal "double blind" tests must fail? (And, how to run a double blind test that won't)
First, you want a control group that is made with distilled water, diluted to the point of "nothing". That should have no effect.
Second, you want to get "active" groups -- many, not just one -- based on water from many different locations. Different parts of the world have different local microscopic populations. There might not be something around here that will survive the nasty stuff, but there might be something that lives in the waters over there.
Thirdly, your "pauses" between dilutions needs to be long enough for the microscopic stuff to reproduce. Ultimately, you want, after the first injection of "bad stuff" into the water, for only (or almost only) the survivable microscopic stuff to be left, and it will want to reproduce until it dominates the water. That might be 3 or 4 generations of replication / cell division / etc. Then, you dilute it. Now you need to wait for that new water to become dominated.
Note that at this stage, the idea is that a creature that dominates the landscape has the best chance to spread and dominate the next/larger landscape. Any ecological niche that was previously occupied by another creature will have been emptied, giving this survivor a chance to spread, and dominate a new niche. There's probably a better explanation/description that I'm not aware of.
Repeat, until you have a testable dosage.
Now, what is going on?
It's not, as people like to set up strawmen: Oh, look, this water is somehow magical. We ran some poison through it, and now it's "different", and somehow special water. Lets test it. Oh, wow, we started with pure water, poisoned it, diluted it with more pure water, and sure enough, we have pure water.
Rather, think more like this: We took biologically active water. We poisoned most of the stuff in it. Something survived. Lets cultivate this survivor, and see if it can neutralize the poison in other locations.
Now, how does it survive? I know of two ways, a biologist might know more ways.
#1. It just isn't affected by it. It survives, but it doesn't do us any good.
#2. It produces something that neutralizes it. Good. This is the stuff we want.
Homeopathy, done right, is all about a way to manufacture #2. And if people stopped trying to set up strawmen, to attack, and actually looked at "How might this work", they might see something as obvious -- patently obvious -- as this.
Yes, patently obvious. This is the sort of thing that the U.S. Patent office might grant a patent to, even though it is obvious.
Now, I noticed that James Randall was mentioned in this thread. I've tried to contact his skeptic.org group, because, supposedly, they have a reward for anyone that can give a credible basis for homeopathy. Yet I've never managed to get through to anyone over there.
Michael Gersten
p.s. And don't even start to mention the whole "immunization" aspect. Start with a badly weakened, low dosage of a nasty bacteria. Body fights it off, and is ready for the real thing. Like cures Like.
Correct in tone, but incorrect in the implication that FDA approval and marketing by a big company mean that we understand why they work, as opposed to merely having demonstrated that they work. Check out the package inserts on pretty much any non-antibiotic prescription: it'll say "mechanism of action unknown." - this is true for asprin (salycilic acid = willow bark derivative), and true for the vast majority of new stuff too.
We know a lot less than we think we do about why things work. Eventually, we'll get a model which will explain it, but until then we'll have to be content with double-blind trials and empiricism.
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
There's an old science joke that a triple-blind experiment is when the patient doesn't know what he's been given, the doctor doesn't know what's he giving out, and the researcher doesn't know what he's doing.
Infra-Red spectrophotometry is based on the internal vibrational energy levels of molecules. Look it up. I'm not defending homeopathy, just letting you know that there is more to molecular vibration than just translational movement of the whole molecule, Brownian or otherwise. Water is a strong IR absorber (as is CO2, which is why anthropogenic sources are a concern). IR spectrophotometry is a huge field...
Similarly, the rotational energy level of molecules correspond to the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. (This is how your microwave works, it is tuned to emit microwaves at the rotational frequency of water).
If water is liquid, then rest assured, there are molecular vibrations occuring, even in the solid phase as well...
Here is good summary of the subject:
http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/vibrat.html
(Please mod parent not-so-informative.)
No, I'm well aware that India has a long tradition of research into medicine. So do most ancient cultures. I'm telling you that the "Ayurvedic" medicine that you see peddled by the likes of Chopra is 100% bullshit guaranteed to fleece gullible people out of their money by tacking on an appropriately mysterious and ancient name to snake oil.
IAALS.
The rejection of Homeopathies pretense to be a "Science" is correct. That all the theories Homeopathists have proposed for why there cures "work" are provably incorrect is probably also true. But this doesn't mean that Homeopathy doesn't work! Can anybody point out to me double-blind studies of Homeopathies actual effect on known diseases? Could it be something that works without us knowing why? After all, the stars and the planets continued around their orbits for billions of years even when the scientific explanations (Aristotle ect.) for why they did were wrong. I also want to point out the difficulty of statistical methods in determining the efficacy of a particular "cure". Let's say a study of a cancer drug showed that 5% of the people improved. The placebo group also showed %5 improvement. Clearly the drug would be rejected. But, it could be that there was something unique in the genetic/environment of those 5% that made for them the drug a 100% cure! I'm not saying such tests are meaningless, just that we need to know the limits of our knowledge and not to reject methods that could help us, just because the practitioners are not "scientific". There is a field called Ethno-pharmicology which searches tradition cures for substances that could be of use in modern medicine. The "practitioners" of folk remedies certainly could not give a "scientific" explanation for why they work, but nevertheless, many of them do.
The actual placebo effect is not he only contributor to what medical types dismiss as the placebo effect, since there is also the regression effect, which is more of an issue in some ilnesses than others. For example, if the trial was of a treatment for a long-term problem such as an abnormal blood sugar level or high blood pressure, then hose being tested would be those whose condition was fairly bad at the start of the trial, but, owing to seemingly random oscillations, such varying diet, would be likely to appear less of a problem in subsequent measurements, even if there is no effect.
bullshit. Before the attack I suffered anxiety, something strange in stomach and short periods of unconsciousness; going there and back many times a day. This state was partially controllable by me and in most cases I was successful. But those symptoms were EVERY day! After sulphur pills, I had NO symptoms at all.
-- Sneer
As the GP said: "There's that and the fact that 'effective' in this case still means less effective than every 'normal' form of birth control available."
Less effective in this case means: somebody is going to have kids. Sounds like you are the lucky one.
There is no need to be polite to anyone promoting fraud.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Hi Everyone: I am currently a student of homeopathy. Homeopathy works, and it's been proven to work for the last 200 years. It's not all about placebo. Placebo can play a small part in the cure, but it all depends on providing the patient with the right kind of remedy (simillimum) to match the patient's symptoms. A good explaination of why homoepathy doesn't work by the placebo effect, is because it works on animals, and babies as well, so the placebo argument goes out the window. Originally, before I studied homeopathy, I was sceptical as well, but once you start studying homeopathy, and see how it works, then you begin to understand it more. The whole idea with homeopathy, is that you have disease that is giving the body a hard time (lets say cholera). So what you do, is that you choose a remedy (simillimum) that matches the disease symptoms, and what happens is that the body's Vital Force now focuses on the new artificial disease (the homeopathy remedy), and in doing so, provided you have the right remedy (simillimum), dose and potency, what should happen is that then the original disease get extinguished. We don't know why it works (at the physical / quantum level), but we do know that it works. Sure, when a remedy is in the process of getting created, at each stage of potency, there is further dilution, but at the same time, the remedy is sucussed (energy / power added to it), so basically, physically observable what you have is just water (and sugar from the pellets), but the remedy takes on the energetic imprint of the original substance it was made from (whether from the vegetable kingdom, animal kingdom, mineral kingdom or disease matter). It is a natural science, and follows natural laws of cure (a similar, slightly more stronger disease will extinguish / cancel out a similar disease). So the science and art is sound. It is definately not quackery. I understand when people call it such. When I first heard of homeopathy, I was sceptical as well. What are all these wierd "remedies" with latin names. How can they work ? But once i started reading about homeopathy, and discovering how it works, I was very much fasinated by it, and it truly is an ingenious medical healing modality (thanks to Samuel Hahnemann who started homeopathy more than 200 years ago). So if you read a good book about homeopathy, you'll see how it works. Of course there are homeopaths who practice homeopathy the way it should be practiced, and then there are what's call "pseudo-homeopaths", who stray from the way that homeopathy should be practiced. That is basically "quackery" within the homeopathic community, and something that is very much frowned on by the much respected homeopaths that exist today. So homeopathy has a problem, when such "pseudo-homeopaths" give a bad name to homeopathy. Anyway, hope everyone will find the time to study homeopathy. The problem is, that there are some teachers and schools, which don't do a very good job of teaching the art (they've strayed from the tried and true way of practicing the art). But that doesn't mean that homeopathy doesn't work. The science and art is sound: you just need a very good practitioner studying it. Good luck on your future studies. Pat
The Chinese doctor in the OP, who had one son that had 'the gift', and another that hadn't, doesn't seem to follow this particular method of ascertaining that his method works. Not sure if he's professor at one of those universities, the story didn't say that.
My basic, simple, stance on homeopathy is that it has been tested, extensively, double-blind, and it has ALWAYS failed. I offered the JREF million-dollar prize via the Royal Academy and the BBC, waiving the usual requirement for a preliminary test; the million would have been awarded immediately if the results had been positive. The protocol exactly followed Benveniste's original design, except that the double-blind factor was brought in. The homeopathic community accepted every facet of the experimental design, and agreed that a positive result should ensue. It didn't: the results were all within chance expectation. I stand prepared to repeat that process upon request. I don't give a damn about the hypothetical musings offered to explain how homeopathy might work; since it doesn't, that's all moot. Those thoughts might be better applied to looking into evidence for Santa Claus: gifts under the Xmas tree, stories in books, movies, and TV, and masses of anecdotal accounts don't stand up to simple examination of the facts. Fat guys in red suits can't get down chimneys carrying a huge sack of toys. For over a year now, I've been trying to get the homepathic community to enter into another set of tests, and they've offered all sorts of alibis and obfuscations. If it didn't involve the well-being of innocent victims out there who tend to turn to quackery because it's attractive, I would not be so disturbed. The British royal family has depended upon homeopathy - even have a Royal Homeopath! - and yet they turn to real medicine when illness presents itself to them. And have you noticed the present condition of the House of Windsor...? I rest my case.
I used to work at a pharmaceutical wholesale distributor, and the most expensive item we had any way you looked at it was... a vial with THREE PILLS of a homeopathic drug costing about $3000. No shit.
That's a hefty price for sugar.
We supplied them because the customers still wanted them, but I know that some among the managers really wanted to stop carrying high-priced homeopathic drugs, as they were regarded as elaborate scams.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
I'm not talking about a double blind test.
I'm only challenging the ida that it is not "testable".
E.g. the people involved do not need at all to know that it is an experiment.
Regarding homeopathy (your parent/or first answer to me), yes the normal people would think the more you dilute the less the effect. However if you do "double blind" experiments with plants e.g. you see clearly that homeopathy works. The interesting thing for *ME* is why does it work. For me it is long proven that it works. I really wonder what is going on in 7. land. I estimate roughly every 3rd medical in germany is a traditional and a homeopathic doctor. Two or 3 years ago there was a huge FUD campaign about homeopathy. The medical insurances wanted no longer to pay treatment.
Since then we have a very high interest in research regarding homeopathy. Nearly every research shows: surprise it works very well!
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Since I was a child (I'm almost 39 now) I had 2 chronicle problems: tonsils infections and allergies. The only thing that cured both was homeopathy and, believe me, I tried everything else. If it's the power of suggestion, placebo effect (which I really don't believe as it wouldn't work on animals and don't start about placebo-by-proxy, that's something I find even harder to believe) or some sort of yet unknown form of quantum-based effect, I don't know and I really don't care, it solved my problems.
One thing that really piss me off is how easy people calls things fake or quackery. Don't you ever considered that might have something going on that the current science don't understand? At least take this as an option.
Scientia est Potentia
You can't do a "double blind" study on acupuncture.
The patient as well as the doctor knows: we have put a needle into the body.
And BTW: double blind is no quality property per se. Double blind got invented to remove as many weak points as possible. Or do you really think it makes any difference for the outcome of a trial if I know whom I gave what or not? Double blind only means: the person giving the treatment can't reveal by accident (looking pitiful e.g.) any information.
Regarding the story about "the gift", that was a thing the story teller "invented". For a chinese doctor there is no gift involved, for him it is just medicine as he has learned it.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It depends on what you see as the "cause" of the problem. The assumption you make is that external events are the fundamental cause of the depression or whatever, but the whole point of therapy is that your internal, subjective mindset and perspective on the event is as fundamental to your experience as the objective "cause".
So from the perspective of therapy, fixing the objective cause of depression is also not resolving anything. Let's say you were deeply depressed because your wife left you, but then somehow you got her to come back, i.e. you fixed the objective cause. But in fact, you haven't fixed anything psychologically, because you continue to have a mindset such that you respond inflexibly when you have to face certain realities. If your wife changed her mind and left again, you'd go back to being depressed, and you can't reasonably expect that you will be able to completely control objective reality such that you can avoid getting yourself into situations where your subjective mindset becomes a problem.
"It's Dot Com!"
Yes, relaxing is one of the things that may explain part of the effect of some alternate medicine (specially when you compare to the stressful environment and tight working hours in a hospital).
But there's more than that, actually. There's also another well known and well documented phenomenon called 'Gate control'.
Basically different channel of information are in direct competition. Sensory information (more of an analyze type of information) can sometimes override pain information (less precise alert type of info) at the spinal level.
That explains why the ancestral reflex to rub the pain works a little bit. It explains in part the effect of massages. It explains some of the pain-stopping effect of TENS. It explains part of the mecanisms of accupuncture (the needle stimulate sensory channel and overide pain channel).
Meanwhile, regarding homeopathy there isn't a known documented and replicable mecanism that could explain how a drug, which is so much diluted that in fact you don't have any drug left, only the distilled water, could work better than plain water directly from the tank.
For homeopathy, I personnaly think, the biggest explanation comes from the fact that doctors can never take time to listen enough to their patient, and give an answer to their anxiety. Whereas true homeopathy, asks a full interview lasting at least 1/2 hour with the homeopath. As you said, relaxation is important sometimes.
Note: IAAMD and I also happen NOT to prescribe homeopathy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
we wouldn't blame him.
Things are getting a little better lately, but I _am_ talking about docs who give those stupid surveys. (Sure, your average patient knows what rubella is, right? And all the more obscure stuff?)
And I'm talking about my sister writes in that she has reactions to antibiotics in general, and every time she goes to a new doctor, the new doctor is absolutely sure that she hasn't tried new brand X.
The doc that messed her up in the first place had no valid reason to be prescribing antibiotics. He was using it as a placebo, and when it didn't take, he kicked the dose up to ultimately dangerous levels.
(And you don't have to swear just because you think the person you are talking to doesn't know what he is talking about, is being an idiot, or just being unreasonable. Use that kind of language in this kind of a situation, and what are you going to say when you really need to get someone's attention?
And, no, I am not giving you any medical advice. Maybe a little advice about communicating, but, surely you can determine whether advice is useful for your situation? And ignore it or refuse it if you don't need it?)
joudanzuki
"But in fact, you haven't fixed anything psychologically, because you continue to have a mindset such that you respond inflexibly when you have to face certain realities."
I'm not sure that depression could be defined as "inflexibly when you have to face certain realities", but in any case, if therapy is effective it has to be making changes to the brain which is what antidepressants do as well. The difference is that the drugs are more consistently effective at doing it than therapy is.
I will give you that modern medicine has a much better idea of human anatomy which has made possible a lot of surgery but that is surgery. Doctors are generally doctors of medicine or doctors of surgery. As far as medicines are concerned they are just compounds - they are found in nature or can be artificially manufactured but the chemical formula does not change only the level of purity changes. Further some natural plant extracts seem to work better than pure pharmaceuticals as often the extract will have secondary chemicals besides the main active ingredient and these can boost the effectiveness of the active ingredient.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Now you're making sense, but previously you said that "ayurvedic medicine is a term coined by con-men." That's like saying spammers invented e-mail.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
"if you do "double blind" experiments with plants e.g. you see clearly that homeopathy works."
Only sorryness is that "plants" is not homeopathy. I know that in Europe "homeopathy" tends to be a connundrum of all "natural medicine", but that's not true "homeopathy". I don't think anyone doubts some herbs contain active principles, that's obvious. What I doubt is double blind finding anything significative if you take that herbal essence and then dilute it till there's good chances not a single atom from the original solution is in the dosis, and *that's* homepathy.
I found this web page pretty interesting. It's like "homeopathy or acupuncture" but, they do it using electronic equipment. I was hoping to get a little slashdot scrutiny.
http://www.startechhealth.com/
Haven't seen BodyTalk before; looks similar to what Donna Eden talks about in her Energy Psychology books (the tapping). I myself practice Jin Shin Jyutsu, and can feel the energy in my fingertips (it's a tingling, like when a body part falls asleep but without the numbness). Others experience it as a temperature difference (hotter or colder); my cousin practices Reiki and feels warmth in her hands. I agree with you, there's a lot we don't know, and it's difficult to study energy healing because there's no way to harm with it -- as BodyTalk mentions in one of the first pages.
I'm glad it's worked for your friend.
Their courses are $600, which is something that bothers me with respect to JSJ as well; all businesses must make money, but since I can use the energy healing on myself I don't see the need to spend money on it. I suppose I can get better at the technique, and perhaps get a physical therapy certification so I can bill through insurance, but software development is currently working out for me. :)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
well, not that much.
It bugs me a little because I often find myself having to remind myself that (according to my paradigms) it gets in the way of my (methods) of communicating. (Like yawns, it tends to be catching.)
But my mom convinced me early on that excessive punctuation in speech tends to make the punctuation less meaningful, so I tend to pass the thought on sometimes.
But, back to the topic, I'm less interested in spreading blame around than in trying to get people to recognize that certification is, at best, an approximate business, and if we try to enforce it through peer pressure, we're going to lose, well, precisely those people who don't fit under the conventional umbrella.
joudanzuki
Video games also produce endorphins...
Um, I'd say a lot of things aren't well suited to scientific study. Philosophy, for one: how would you scientifically study philosophy? That doesn't make any sense at all.
Anything metaphysical isn't well-suited to scientific study. Also, neither is anything which is too far from currently-known science. Many people who visit "alternative medicine" practitioners have problems which Western medicine simply isn't able to diagnose or treat, such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. If you get a Western doctor to diagnose you with that, the treatment is going to be to just suffer with it, because there is no known treatment, and the drug companies haven't bothered to invest any money into researching it. Then, rightly or wrongly, alternative methods become the only recourse, and in many cases (whether through real effect or the placebo effect) show significant improvement.
Science is fine, but it's rigorous and expensive, and requires someone to pony up the money and effort to do it. There's still tons of things that are not well understood by science, or even at all, such as the mechanisms by which many drugs work, or even how gravity works (no one has any clue how gravity works; there are multiple contradictory theories but that's it), so sometimes people have to do something different instead of waiting around for science to come up with an answer and a solution.
I'm all for empirical results - half of medicine is governed by them.
But that doesn't mean that you can't use science. You don't need a theory to explain where all the missing mass is in the universe to be upfront about the fact that it seems to be there. Likewise I'd be happy to accept alternative medicine sans mechanism, but only if a controlled study showed that it actually had an effect. Otherwise it is nothing more than anecdote.
I'm not aware of any double-blind studies that show an effect of a homeopathic remedy. Until you have that, you really don't have much to talk about science-wise. How do you posit a mechanism for an effect that you can't even measure?
If (the existence of) something has observable consequences, then it is well-suited to scientific studied; it does not even have to be reproducible. On the other hand, if something does not have observable consequences, its very existence is nothing but a petition of principle. Usually, when people refer to `anything methaphysical', they have in mind this very peculiar kind of `things'... It is not a great loss that they are outside of the realm of scientific study, since they do not exist, for all practical purposes.
As for philosophy: if philosophy cannot be studied in a methodologically consistent way in which the criteria for the validity of the statements in question are firmly based upon well-established grounds, then there is nothing to be studied. A huge lot of what passes as philosophy is nothing more than mostly bad literature.
The fact that science be expensive, hard, and so on, and that it does not provide yet (or ever!) explanations for specific phenomena (gravity, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the placebo effect, etc) is completely irrelevant when discussing the applicability of the scientific method and the suitedness of these subjects to scientific study.
Science is fine, but it's rigorous and expensive, and requires someone to pony up the money and effort to do it. There's still tons of things that are not well understood by science, or even at all, such as the mechanisms by which many drugs work, or even how gravity works (no one has any clue how gravity works; there are multiple contradictory theories but that's it), so sometimes people have to do something different instead of waiting around for science to come up with an answer and a solution.(Notice that the different theories of how gravity works do not have observable differences (so far), so the fact that they exst in multitudes is essentially irrelevant) What exactly do people do instead of waiting for science? Either they just use the scientific method (which is a way of coming up with answers from the available information; it does not at all require full understanding and complete information to proceeed) or they... do what, exactly? Invoke the Gods?
What exactly do people do instead of waiting for science? Either they just use the scientific method (which is a way of coming up with answers from the available information; it does not at all require full understanding and complete information to proceeed) or they... do what, exactly? Invoke the Gods?
No, they use healing methods that aren't rigorously tested according to scientific principles, because they have no other choice but to suffer.
If you would like to help fund rigorous scientific testing of alternative treatments, that would be very helpful. Otherwise, you're not being helpful at all for people who suffer with ailments that science refuses to pay any attention to, because it's either too much trouble, or not profitable enough. After all, why bother investigating lupus or CFS when you can make tons of money developing Viagra instead?
You are talking about the politics of research funding. That's a completely separate issue. On the other hand, Lupus or CFS are perfectly well-suited for scientific study. That was my point.
Well apparently they aren't well-suited for scientific study, because no one's bothering to do it.
You're living in a theoretical world; I live in the real world, and in this world, science only studies things that are highly profitable. Viagra isn't very useful to the millions of people suffering from chronic diseases.
Politics has nothing to do with it; only money does. Phizer isn't ignoring various diseases because of their political affiliations. They're ignoring them because they're not profitable enough for them.
You're living in a theoretical world; I live in the real world, and in this world, science only studies things that are highly profitable. Viagra isn't very useful to the millions of people suffering from chronic diseases.
Well, as a pure mathematician who happens to be quite-well financed to do very pure mathematics which would make G. H. Hardy proud for its distance to `real world', profitable applications, I have a different view of things, I guess...
Politics has nothing to do with it; only money does. Phizer isn't ignoring various diseases because of their political affiliations. They're ignoring them because they're not profitable enough for them.You somehow seem to believe that politics is a thing disjoint from money. I hope you do not take offense if I say that that is quite a naive position.
Politics, understood as the human activity which has as an end the determination of collective decisions which, once taken, involve the whole of society, very much includes dealing with the problem of assigning money to do scientific research on `non-profitable deseases'.
In any case, all the things you mention are absolutely unrelated to the statement I hinted, that there is nothing (which actually exists, in an observable way) which is not well-suited to scientific study. You are mixing the well-suitedness of something for scientific scrutiny to the problem that the political and historical conditions required for such scientific scrutiny to actually occur. Mixing things rarely helps...
Politics, understood as the human activity which has as an end the determination of collective decisions which, once taken, involve the whole of society, very much includes dealing with the problem of assigning money to do scientific research on `non-profitable deseases'.
Um, no. How a corporation decides to spend its money is not a "political" decision, it's a business decision. Scientific research in medicine is done by large corporations such as GlaxoSmithKline, Phizer, Bayer, etc., not by governments. Hence, it is not "political", only business. Society as a whole has no say in how corporations spend their money, no more than it has a say in how private individuals spend their money.
You should probably do some research on how research in medicine is funded...
Many of the medicines have a specific smell. Some are colored, and I am talking of the liquid variety. They also sometimes use powders. I don't believe in Homeopathy completely. But some homeopathy doctors are good at some specific medicines. And I use Homeopathy when I know that Modern medicine does not have any cure for it. For example Rheumatoid Arthritis. The only real solution is to remove the cap when there is no improvement with various medicines which are not guaranteed to work. A Homeopathy doctor in our city specializes in Arthritis treatments. He gives one special medicine which is a dark brown liquid, and it works. He did give us the composition of it, and the ingredients are found in Homeopathy shops. My wife could not move when she had got it. With this doctors treatment she could get up within a month. Afterwards sometimes she would get hardened nodes but a couple of days of the treatment would solve it. Now she has been free from it for a few years.
Well, it's way too late, but who knows perhaps someone stumbles across this and in that case:
You sound pretty knowledgeable... but I think it remains right there.
For one, I never stated that NFP is actually as secure as hormonal products. Although it almost is. Because it's not the Rhythm Method. It's the Symptothermal method. It has a Pearl Index of 0.8% while the pill has 0.16%. That's pretty damn close, don't you think? Especially since I'm not sure whether this index takes faulty execution of the method into account. And the Pearl index has thousands of cycles behind it of dozens of women so I think while my wife might not be the end of all examples, the Pearl index is not that bad of an indicator.
Furthermore, you've fallen into the trap of thinking that my wife must be some alternative-lifestyle idiot because she has responded better to some alternative methods. That is very arrogant of you. Just FYI, she works in the chemical field and she's been working with Roche for years. She KNOWS how stuff works, okay? She has been there, in the same room, as people have discussed how a product could be marketed to sell to people with ailments for which this product provides questionable treatment at best.
I find it funny how some people have disqualified themselves by taking shots at my wifes character here. Just because I post a very valid argument: That nothing should be viewed as impossible just because it has not yet been proven. I know that Americans have developed a habit of taking this approach from their courts but it's exactly what will give the creationists ammunition. When science stops using scientific methods.
An example: Go an try to prove to a colour blind person that the heaven is blue. Does that make it less blue for you because you can't? Would the earth have been flat because some idiot before Galileo didn't have the means to prove it was round?
Someone dismissing that there are people who have a better life after being treated by fraudsters is no better than church making Galileo take back his observation. And while the method might not be clear, the results are what count in my opinion. Just because people try to throw poo at my wife's character doesn't make the truth go away.
Oh and I'd like to add... the baboon is not the one who got the poo in his face. It's the one who started throwing it.
So, taking shots at my wife's character albeit you have never even exchanged a single line with her is your way of dealing with this? Well, I say thank you. Thank you for disqualifying yourself so soundly that I'm in awe.
It's moments like this that show me that once again I'm obviously just too bad-ass for certain kinds of people to have the guts to stand up to me with facts.
For sure I believe we should use the science. My point was that lack of science, or scientific evidence, doesn't necessarily mean the cure doesn't "work". For sure we should reject the attempts of alternative practitioners to promote their products through pseudo-science, but we also must be careful about hubris, particularly when dealing with the human body and the difficulties of carrying out the kind of controlled studies needed to determine if something works or doesn't. I recommend the following article, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
on the difficulties of epidemiological studies.
So, taking shots at my wife's character
Nope, I was ridiculing you. I'm not surprised that you were unable to grasp the subtlety.
Thank you for disqualifying yourself so soundly that I'm in awe.
Like I'm supposed to care what someone who defends quackery thinks of my qualifications?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."