I had debates a couple of times in a newsgroup with people who believed they could “set dice” at a craps table, meaning that they could cause the dice to come up with the numbers they wanted to be rolled. The sequence of the argument went like this:
Dice setter: I can roll the numbers I want to roll.
Me: Then why are you here and not in your mansion?
DS: It’s a lot of work, and it doesn’t work every time, but it’s enough to allow me to regularly win.
Me: So it’s not enough to make you an instant millionaire? How much is the effect?
DS: Mr. X did the calculations which showed that you would only have to shift the odds of rolling a seven from 16.67% down to 15% in order to turn around the house advantage, to your favor. That’s what I do.
Me: How do you know that you can do this? I can show simple calculations that you would have to document hundreds of thousands of rolls in order to measure an effect this small. If you have not actually collected that data, then you yourself cannot know whether you have the ability. So do you have the data?
DS: [silence]
Which brings me to:
How do the homeopaths know that they are helping their patients if the double-blind studies have not been done?
I was the first one to use the word “homeopathy”. But you brought it up. Do you think people need to be members of the Inner Brotherhood to recognize homeopathic cant when they see it?
akrako1, you seem to be talking past the rest of us. I can’t believe anything you have said has made any of us doubters change our minds. Astrologers can make many of the claims you do, and I never met a scientist who accepted their claims.
Perhaps I can point one or two things out? Tests of homeopathic efficacy are probably going to come from academic researchers, and probably not from pharmaceutical companies. There are several reasons for this.
The potential profits from distributing homeopathic “medicene” are too small for any company to gamble their money. Null results do not benefit the company.
Scientists make their name by either breaking the convential “paradigm”, or by extending the conventional paradigm in new ways. The pressure in these directions is enormous. Pons and Fleischman and their cold fusion mistake is an example of the pressure to produce the former, and that Lucent guy who was busted for faking results last year is an example of the latter.
(Academic researchers aren’t tripping over themselves to test homeopathy for a couple of reasons. It is hard to get funding for something that lies outside the paradigm - ask any astronomer trying to get telescope time for some non-definitive test of something other than the big bang. Also, you are not going to get tenure getting null results for homeopathy, even if you might get a Noble for a positive result.)
Double-blind tests have been performed by “the establishment” and they consistently come up null. (I even recall a test performed by French practioners.)
Science distinguishes itself from other means of learning by expecting the unexpected, and seeking to verify the unexpected. If Homeopathy were a valid, scientific discipline, you would expect to see null test results at homeopathy sites (i.e., not AMA). (I looked in google and found none.) Why? Because nothing works on anything 100% of the time. Perhaps the wrong technique was used, or that particular ailment was not amenable to that particular treatment, etc. Such unexpected null results happen within science all of the time - look at all the money “wasted” by pharmeceutical companies who thought they had something, but did not.
Finally, I take some affront at your mention of auto-immune diseases. My family is rife with them, and standard medicene works quite nicely, thank you. (Mine is no biggie, but diabetes and ulcerative colitus are.) Frankly, I think homeopathy is a nice way of using the placebo effect. Since the practioner “knows”, and the client at least hopes, that it will work - you can’t get a stronger effect.
I also have experience with the auto-immune world. My mother is a sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis, and modern medicine hasn’t been much help. This is actually one of the reasons for my interest in Homeopathy. I have problems with the general practice of modern medicine supressing the bodys functions. Take a malfunctioning immune system, then forcibly supress the symptoms when they occur. That doesn’t seem like it would be very beneficial to the immune system. To me, the only rational way to fix this type of problem would be to reprogram the immune system to operate properly. This seems like an approach that modern medicine is very far from, and Homeopathy is right with.
That is not anybody’s approach to curing autoimmune diseases. It is done for some of the diseases, because we know how to suppress the immune system, and nothing else seems to work. But for example, diabetes is treated with daily insulin. Prospective cures include implanting islet cells. Ulcerative colitus is treated by dietary changes; I don’t know of any prospective cures. Psoarisis (sp?) is treated with uv, coal tars, antiyeast agents, etc. I don’t think anyone is working on a prospective cure. Sclerdoma’s best hope is not immune system repression, but a little complicated to explain in a short note. Gene therapy is a distant possibility. I can’t think of an autoimmune system disease in which the “cures” involve “forcibly supress”.
The words “pseudo-scientific gibberish” spring to mind here.
This seems to be based on a few misconceptions -
[ul]
[li] That illness always means that the immune system is malfunctioning[/li][li]That scientific medicine only suppresses symptoms[/li][li]That the immune system does not function when a patient is treated by scientific medicine[/li][li]That homeopathy can “reprogram” the immune system[/ul][/li]
None of the above statements is true.
Homeopathy has no effect (other than placebo), and therefore has no effect on the immune system.
Actually Dex, when my wife got dry-socket from having her wisdom teeth removed, and the painkillers she was on weren’t doing much for the agony, the oral surgeon handed her a syringe full of clove oil to squirt into the gaping wound.
Which is not to say that it actually works. There could very well have been a strong placebo/suggestibility effect at that time putting MrsB into a state of monomania. But, since the little missus actually does high level scientific research into e. coli (and starting next Fall-- Hepatitis ‘c’), she ain’t likely to fall for medical quackery dispensed by someone who ain’t got a license.
I think you’re being a little unfair on your first point. Auto-immune diseases were being discussed, which are, by definition, the immune system malfunctioning.
As to your fourth point, that, of course, intersects the fundamental principles of homeopathy, grounded as it is in a magic-based theory of vaccination. (To give the creator of homeopathy his due, the mechanism of vaccination was not understood at the time; it was a purely pragmatic response to the fact that people who had had cowpox didn’t get smallpox.)
Barbarian, I don’t think anyone’s disputing the fact that clove is a local anesthetic. Have you never sucked on a clove? I used to frequently when I was a kid (because I liked the flavor), and it would make that part of my mouth slighly numb.
“The tests were designed by classically trained homeopaths who had been in practice for at least ten years and who met membership criteria for the UK Society of Homeopaths. It was found that in twelve months, they had found no evidence that homeopathy had any measurable impact on quality of the children’s life. The severity of symptoms lessened among children taking homeopathic remedies, but not to any extent that was greater than among those taking the placebo. The authors of the report pointed out that their research was ‘pragmatic’ in that it let homeopaths practice in their normal way by combining prescriptions with lifestyle suggestions and advice.”
Ask any doctor out there, and I’m sure 100% will tell you they’d much prefer to have a cure and a preventative for every disease known. (Preventative to keep you from getting it, cure to fix you if you do get it.) I don’t think a single one would say the preferred method would be to treat the symptoms and let the disease continue. So why is that the method applied in many cases? Because there is no cure. If there is no cure for the disease, no way to reprogram the immune system, then the next best course of treatment is to reduce the symptoms so the person can function. It’s an attempt to make the disease as livable as possible.
As far as homeopathy, I don’t understand how it could possibly work to cure anything. Ignore for a moment the complete contradiction with chemistry about concentration levels. The other half of homeopathy is the basis that you take substances that produce the symptoms of the illness in healthy people and give it to the sick. You’ve got a fever, here, let me give you something that gives healthy people a fever. You’ve got arthritis? Here, this will make your joints swell and ache. Sorry, that approach sounds ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous when speaking of vaccines, but with vaccines we understand how they interact with the immune system and make it work to prevent illness. There is no similar understanding of how homeopathy could work. The mechanism of vaccines is very specific, and can’t be applied to homeopathy.
Homeopathy is magical thinking and has no scientific backing.
Right on, Irishman. Another sufferer of an auto-immune disorder here. Gee, I hate to pile on…wait, no I don’t.
One of the more profound effects of my own disease is that it caused my immune system to think that my own kidneys were foreign objects, causing my body to destroy them. This happened over the course of only a few months. By the time it was realized what was happening, it was too late…bye-bye kidneys.
**Now, what the hell would homeopathy do in this situation? :dubious: **
“Reprogram” my immune system? Too late, the damage is done. Dose me up with homeopathic salt water solutions, or even just 10x water? No dice. Ingesting salt or water will just kill you faster. Homeopathy can’t replace a kidney. Only good old allopathic medicine can do anything for a person with no kidneys: dialysis, or transplant. I’ve had both – they work, I’d have been dead for 12 years now if I’d been treated with homeopathy or an other quackery.
What’s interesting is in the case of my disorder, there is actually a huge body of research behind it even though it is very rare (about 1 in 100,000,000 in the US, mostly male). The amount and quality and complexity of the science involved is amazing. In fact, modern medicine knows an incredible amount about this disease in exruciating detail. As yet there is no known cure or preventative, but not for lack of trying. Any suggestion that homeopathy could do as well is not even worth laughing at, it is so wrong.
Hear, hear. “Allopathic” medicine has got it all over this claptrap: it really works. Here are some great examples of real science and medicine actually saving lives, nothing homepathic about them:
-Insulin treatment of diabetes
-Other hormone treatments of disease, such as l-thyroxine and erythropoeitin
-Transplants of all kinds
-Vitamin C treatment of scurvy
-Vaccinations of all kinds
-X-rays to find broken bones, cancers, etc.
-etc.
Oh, yeah, I should talk about milk, since that’s what the thread is nominally about. Speaking as a kidney transplant patient, the two healthiest things I can drink are pure water and skim milk. Love the stuff, I have at least two glasses a day. I am of Northern European descent and am blessed with ample amounts of lactase.