I’m reminded of something I saw in USA Today, ironically, today.
A woman is giving her reason for why she doesn’t want to go through a backscatter full-body scanner at an airport, as she’s heading for her flight.
Ye-ah, as she’s about to climb on board a jet and fly somewhere…after probably driving her car there, chatting on her cell phone to talk to someone, etc.
Yeah, but it’s minimized, especially when compared to the various flavors of alternatives which amount to “my mom’s mom’s uncle’s best friend swore that this stuff helped his cold,” when in reality, the cold went away by itself, the “remedy” had no connection to it at all, and now all we have is another crap product on the market.
Damn skippy I want to take “faith” out of the realm of medicine. No amount of belief will get rid of a raging infection. Science, however, just might.
When considering the effectiveness of homeopathy, don’t forgot to take into account the placebo effect. In some ways homeopathic medicine may be less harmful and do more good than other naturopathic medicines for exactly the reasons MsRobyn posted - if you believe with all your heart that your little bottle of water is going to cure your cough, it damned well might. And that little bottle of water is not likely to hurt you, like St. John’s Wort or licorice might. But - and this is a HEEYUGE but - if I decide to take a little bottle of water to fix my cough, that isn’t the same thing as letting my child turn blue.
And now I have to go make some ginger, lemon, and honey tea for my asthmatic husband’s persistent cough, which, if it gets worse, we will take to the doctor. We’re all responsible for our own health, even in these days of mostly-readily available healthcare, and making the best, informed decisions.
I was reminded of an email from my friend who was just diagnosed with breast cancer. She’s reading One in Three, A Son’s Journey into the History and Science of Cancer, and remarked to me that:
I noticed that Cecil’s view is
In fact, it appears that a scientist’s EGO was the problem.
Yes, anecdotes = data.
If your husband is honestly a research scientist, he should be readily able to explain the difference between controlled study and a group of people expressing their opinions. If not, I’m not sure he can be called a research scientist.
After all, you’ve changed your mind on homeopathy in the past few hours. Nevertheless, there are scads of groups of laypeople who will gladly share their experiences with homeopathy with you.
Nope, I’m crap, and if you read my work, you’d realise that. 
Well, no. Anecdotal reduction of symptoms is effectively meaningless. I had a cold last week; I sat at home, ate pizza and drank Pinot Grigio. I’m better now; was that a cure? No way of telling. People who receive “medical” attention of a concentrated nature will feel better; this is well established. What is important is establishing whether the treatment is better than no treatment, or better than an existing treatment. Saying, “well I had pins stuck in me and felt better,” is completely meaningless, because just receiving the attention makes us feel better, without any actual remedial action taking place.
The very question “why should scientists have a monopoly on that” is revealing in itself. Again, there’s nothing stopping anybody from being a “scientist”. We don’t get a badge, we don’t have a union; a scientist is anyone who tests a claim in a rigourous manner. What is so very significant about homeopaths (and I realise you’re not defending them any more) or many “nutritionists” or chiropractors is that they actively resist evaluation of their claims, precisely by saying that the establishment is somehow preventing them from proving their case. But this is ludicrous.
No-one is stopping them being “scientists”; all they have to do to earn that appelation is to test their claims. And yet more effort is invested in arguing that they shouldn’t have to, or that the “scientists” have some sort of monopoly on empirical testing, than would ever be necessary to simply set up a test of their own. Really; what is this monopoly? Do “scientists” have some sort of union that stops people conducting their own rigourous experiments? Are we shooting potential trial volunteers for remedies we deem unworthy? Of course not. But when (say) applied kinesiologists say that they can’t perform double blinded tests because of the filthy medical establishment, why do we not treat them with the same incredulity we afford Uri Geller and his spoons? What is stopping them from proving their own worth? I’m not; the medical establishment isn’t. No-one is. The only thing stopping them is the knowledge that if they do an actual test, they’re going to found out as frauds.
If I’m sounding a bit irritable at this point, by the way, please be assured it’s not aimed at you; I just get very annoyed at people who blame others for their inability to demonstrate their own worth. I’m quite well aware that you are not one of them. And no, the scientific process is not immune to fraud; but it is only by increased scrutiny that said fraud will be uncovered. Was the Korean cloning fraud uncovered by abandoning peer review and empiricism? No, it was found out by rigourous application of these principles. I have no objection to any “alternative”* remedy, assuming it can demonstrate its worth; my objection is to people who insist that I take their expertise purely on faith. I refuse to; evidence is absolutely non-negotiable. No arguments of persecution are sufficient to excuse its absence.
What on earth does this mean? Do “those people” have bad table manners? Wear funny ties?
“A group of laypeople sharing their experiences” amounts to a bunch of personal testimonials. These are inherently flawed. It’s impossible to know if all or any of them had a particular medical condition, whether this condition has improved or gotten worse by chance (many chronic disorders wax and wane, fooling people into thinking that a particular treatment worked), what drugs they may have been taking along with their supplements and potions, and so on. In the case of most supplement pushers, there isn’t even reliable evidence that the people supplying the testimonials exist. By contrast, well-conducted scientific studies are designed to avoid these problems.
If you’re talking about religion, I agree that faith has a role. I’m also prepared to listen to someone’s opinion about what ice cream tastes the best. It’s just too whopping a risk to select treatment for a serious medical condition on the basis of what a friend of a friend says worked for her.
It’s never going to be perfect. But it’s continually striving in that direction. The response to scientific error is better science, not a return to superstition.
Incidentally, homeopathy was better than mainstream medicine, hundreds of years ago. Homeopathy didn’t work then either, but doing nothing was an improvement over bloodletting and giving people toxic heavy metals. Mainstream medicine has come a long way since then, while homeopathy is still steeped in ignorance and mysticism.
I’m arguing your side, Badger – if people are sharing anecdotal information that doesn’t actually work, then what good is it? I’m saying we all have an obligation to be as scientific as possible in our pursuit of answers. And sometimes we succeed, doggone it!
Why are you assuming, Hentor, that everyone who isn’t in a lab is merely expressing an “opinion”? I told you what I did to alleviate my daughter’s symptoms - don’t you think I can measure an outcome? She was coughing. Now she isn’t. And I happen to have a control (sort of) - her twin brother, with whom she shares a bedroom.
Worse. Sometimes they dance.
Can you prove it?
And it is your opinion that what you did is associated with the outcome. Which possible confounds did you control for? What range of environmental conditions did you examine? Dead Badger has already given you a couple of examples of the non-sense of these single sample tests.
If you would drop your petulant protestations about the monopoly of scientists for a second and try to understand the process, you might get it. History is rife with lots of examples of anecdotally based processes observed with all honesty and good intentions of the witnesses that had nothing to do with the mechanisms that they proposed were at work. Take faciliated communication for example. Good hearted people thought that they could help non-communicative children communicate by providing their hands with a little guidance. Soon they were producing poetry.
He’s not saying it’s just “an opinion”; clearly you know what you did, and what happened subsequently, but it is only one data point, which is insufficient for establishing a causal relationship. Just as I have no factual basis for claiming that white wine and pizza cured my cold, you have no basis for claiming that your treatment cured your daughter. Her brother is not a control; by your account he wasn’t exhibiting symptoms, and received no treatment. A “control” isn’t someone who happens to be in the same room; it’s someone who exhibits the same symptoms and is given the same apparent treatment, so that they are unaware whether they are in the control or not. That’s a blind study - a double blind (the gold standard, if you like) would involve the person administering treatment not being aware who was a control or not.
You’re arguing a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy; your daughter got better after something you did, therefore what you did cured her. This is precisely what I was trying to illustrate with my pizza example. Science isn’t magic, but you can’t do it with one person as a subject. You need a statistically significant sample size, and a valid control. You had neither. This is no reflection on your actions as a parent; indeed, any one of your actions may have prompted the improvement. But equally, it might have been none of them. Sometimes, people just get better. With colds such as mine, they almost invariably do. There is no way of telling, from the sequence of events you describe, what cured or indeed caused your daughter’s cough. That’s not a slam on “alternative” medicine, or you at all. It’s just not possible to tell. Were your daughter part of a cohort of patients exhibiting similar symptoms, and were there proper controls in place, then we could examine whether certain actions had reliable positive effects, but one case gives us absolutely nothing. It might give us an indication of what to study, but proof? No. Not at all. This isn’t an elitism thing; it’s just logic.
I want to make a point about the history of science, with medicine being a subset of science. People sometimes say something like “hey, look, here’s a quote from a Leading Western Scientist from a few hundred years ago saying that it’s impossible for rocks to fall from the sky… see how dumb scientists are and how we can’t trust science? hahahahaha!”. The irony is, that quote is certainly evidence for how much we should trust science, but it’s evidence in exactly the opposite direction. We now know that rocks can in fact fall from the sky, and the guy who said they couldn’t was wrong. How do we know that? Because scientists demonstrated it. Scientists were wrong, BUT THE SELF-CORRECTING NATURE OF SCIENCE FIXED THE PROBLEM!!!
Scientists are only human, and have been wrong plenty of times. But science, unlike every other belief/knowledge system, has built into it at its very core a mechanism for testing and rejecting claims. It doesn’t always work instantaneously, and it certainly doesn’t always work perfectly, but it does work.
So, western medicine certainly may be wrong about something. But if it is, it will eventually be found out and fixed. “Alternative” medicine may also be wrong about something. But if it is, there’s no reason to think it will ever be found out. Compare folk medicine to western medicine. Both have been wrong. Both have been right. But western medicine is constantly finding out when it is wrong, and self correcting. If folk medicine is wrong, there’s no reason to think it won’t stay wrong forever.
And what serious side effects would those be?
Now you’re being tricky - no frickin’ way would I re-introduce (potential) allergens, just to find out which one (if any) was the trigger. 
Experiment? On my kid? Uhhh, no. Besides, AFAIK it could have been the virus itself that triggered her problems and her night cough might NOT have been a telltale symptom. That’s why we have Pulmicort and Albuterol on hand. Just in case.
But I took the actions I did based on the recommendations of women I know, who’ve dealt with this problem themselves, and from that book on allergens in the home. The information sure didn’t come via the medical establishment - they’d rather sell me pills, because that is their stock in trade.
Just like my previous doctor wanted to operate to cure cystitis, rather than teaching me to pee after sex.
Oh, and I have another one for you – pseudoephedrine. I can’t be the only one who misses being able to buy it without showing my driver’s license to the pharmacist (people with big families are screwed, they can only buy 2 boxes/month). So now there’s that great new substitute that you can buy, right off the shelf - have you tried it? It sucks ass. I’ll tell you why - during the clinical trials, they administered it intraveneously. Apparently it works that way. Take it orally, though, and you might as well be popping a sugar pill. It’s just…arrrgh! I realized the stuff didn’t work, my girlfriends noticed it, too.
One more question Badger (yes, I realize her brother isn’t a true “control”; I meant to say that he has slight allergies, not entirely the same as hers, so it’s interesting to watch his reactions, too, that’s all)
Anyway – say you feel bad, take medicine X, feel better – how do you know that the medicine “cured” you, any more than your pizza did? It may be a proven cure for whatever, but we (or at least I) don’t get blood drawn and have cultures made for every diagnosis. Isn’t it still a bit of a guessing game? Don’t we ask our friends, “Gee, what do YOU take for this-or-that”?
If my friend says “I gnaw on pig knuckles”, I’ll be less inclined to follow their advice –
but these drug companies, the schools, these scientific institutions we’ve created…there are points where they run into the same problem as all other human institutions, which is the problem of self-perpetuation. They (mostly) start out with lofty goals (worshipping God, what could be loftier?) and then run into the small problem of paying the rent. And that’s where the compromises start.
Of course, as Jackmanii pointed out, the answer to bad science isn’t superstition, but more science; yet while science continues to look for better answers, mommies with kids to raise are going to network their asses off trying to figure out what to do.
Which reminds me, back to the OP, one of the problems that nobody’s taking into account is that there is very LITTLE medicine for small kids, period. Who’s going to run clinicals on them? You couldn’t begin to gauge outcomes - they can’t even truly diagnose asthma in children under 4 because they can’t follow the directions well enough to be tested. The woman in the OP had a 2-yr-old, so a lack of treatment options is part of her dilemma. Not an excuse for homeopathy, but still.
Yikes! Best of luck with you in all you do, fessie. You’re too many for me.
Sorry, Hentor - first toothy Pit thread I’ve run into in a while; that “science is God” thing always bugs me.
Plus the kids conked out early.
I should quit too, though; lots of excellent points made, I enjoyed reading them.
Before I go, let me just say: Jesus fucking Christ, nobody is fucking saying “Science is God” except you.
Quit behaving like a fucking chimp in front of the obelisk in “2001” - science is not some mysterious black rectangle from a something-wonderful place.
In other words, They Don’t Want You To Know.
Wonder if fessie has ever thought this mindset through. The docs, researchers, hospitals, health organizations and drug companies are some sort of multitentacled Thing that doesn’t want fessie’s family to get well (or the families of any other of the Networking Moms). Could it possibly be that the Medical Establishment is made up of people with families, who want the best of health for everyone, including their loved ones, friends, and themselves?
Of course not! They’re just out for the money, and would prefer everybody sicken and die, rather than give up an iota of their profits.
Instead, fessie and those of like mind can put one over on the Establishment by sharing testimonials and purchasing cures from the honest folks who reveal those remedies They Don’t Want Us To Know.
That’ll teach 'em!
I went to an “Allopathic” doctor for allergies. He did a scratch test to see what I was allergic to and then told me to stay away from them (he told me to make my wife cut the lawn 
). He said I could get a series of shots to make me less allergic, but they took a long time and weren’t that effective in any case. He didn’t care if I got the shots or not. He also prescribed some pills, but he didn’t make any money off that.
The funny thing, is that I ended up in the hospital a month earlier when I took a “natural” remedy that consisted of ragweed pollen.