Recreational drugs FAR less likely to kill than prescribed drugs!

[Dylboz]

There is NO scientific evidence that supports Homeopathy. It is not scientific. There is no mechanism, no means, no model, no way it can work.

LOL.  Yeah, no scientific evidence, Dylboz, except the eight studies referred in the report posted by J'raxis.  And other studies not mentioned there.  I'd take the time to post them if I thought you were capable of comprehending scientific literature.  It's easy for you to say there's no evidence when you selectively ignore anything that doesn't support your religious dogma.

Poor Dylboz, he doesn't believe bees can fly, either.

Keep popping those pills, champ, and telling me how I'm the one getting ripped-off.  How much do those cost you anyway?

NO, sir. I have read the scientific literature, and what it says is, when the studies are properly designed and randomized, the effectiveness of Homeopathy falls to the same level as placebo. And, besides, there is no mechanism by which they could work, since they contain nothing but water and/or sugar, a fact which Homeopaths freely admit. So, what you are trying to say, is that there is something about tapping a bottle, or shaking it or playing a tune that imparts the specific "memory" you want while erasing all the other memories you don't want.

THAT is religious dogma. It's a ritual, like voodoo or human sacrifice, or Holy Water. Chanting, rapping, shaking. Rituals, not medicine. The pills I pay for actually have active ingredients that have therapeutic value. I can see their effects, feel them, they can be measured by physical changes in my body. There is no difference between the water coming out of the tap and the water in a Homeopathic remedy. If I did not tell you which was which, you could not differentiate them.

So, I ask you to read the Ars Technica article. Or don't.

Two questions:

1. Since Homeopathic remedies treat a tremendously wide range of symptoms, and you insist that if you don't have a symptom, and you take the remedy for that symptom, the remedy will CREATE that symptom (the aforementioned challenge), by what mechanism does Homeopathy select only those symptoms the patient wishes to treat while not creating the rest? Or, does a patient simply have the side effect of creating all the other symptoms? I mean, either it causes them or it doesn't, right?

2. Since water retains a memory of substances it has come in contact with, even at dilutions equivalent to one atom to 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 (yes folks, one with 60 zeros, requiring a container 30 times larger than the planet earth) water molecules, than why does ALL water not have Homeopathic effect? If it does not, then how do Homeopaths impart that memory to the water, or rather, how do they erase the memory so they can impart only what they wish to. This is the table rapping bit, right?

...

And, as to the bee thing, you've got it precisely backwards. You are the one who thinks that bees can't fly. Clearly, they can, and those scientists could see them do it, just like anyone else. What they couldn't do was explain exactly how, based on their knowledge. They did not say "preposterous! They cannot fly, that is an illusion! A hallucination!" They said, "let's figure out how they do it, and why we don't understand it yet." They kept going until they did that. You, on the other hand, start with the conclusion "Homeopathy works," and when you can't explain why, or how, you stop, because if you tried to figure out how it works and why you don't understand it, you know damn well you'd find out that it DOES NOT work, and there is NO mechanism, water cannot retain a memory of anything, neither can sugar, it is just what it is, so you say "preposterous! You're a liar! They do work, and I don't care that no one can offer a rational explanation, or that Homeopaths admit there is nothing in their remedies but water and sugar!" You're assuming a conclusion and stopping there, despite the obvious facts that contradict the conclusion.

You say you're more concerned THAT it works than WHY, but without a WHY, it CANN NOT work, there is no THAT! See? You are paying for, and advocating a psychological phenomenon, well known as the placebo effect. The studies you pointed to were designed in such a way as to select for the positives, and to allow the placebo effect to creep into them. They have been rightly criticized for poor design. When they have been re-run, their results could not be duplicated. When new double blind, fully randomized, large scale trials have been done with the same Homeopathic remedies, the results are the same for both the placebo and the Homeopathic remedy, which shouldn't surprise anyone, because they have the exact same ingredients!

Homeopaths acknowledge that they are selling water and sugar pills. They admit their remedies do not include ANY of the "active ingredient" from the so-called "mother tincture." Shaking a bottle or rapping it on the table does not make water into medicine. Dropping that water onto some sugar pills does not transform them into effective treatments. That is what Homeopaths do, though. They do not hide these facts. So, either you say "it works!" and stop there with the understanding that it is a leap of faith, a religious superstition, or you look into how and why, posit a mechanism and test it, and when you come up empty, admit it.

I'm already putting my body where my mouth is, by testing your claim that I should cause myself illness with Homeopathic pills. At least have the guts to investigate how what you believe in actually works. Don't just say "IT WORKS!" Tell me how. How does water remember things? How about sugar? How does that memory effect me when I take those pills? How is it imparted to my cells or the water in my body? How does it know which symptoms I want to treat? Why does diluting something make it stronger? By what physical law? How does rapping on a table, vigorous shaking or playing music change the fundamental properties of water? These are the questions that need answering, and these are the questions Homeopaths can not answer, will not answer, and just like the $cientoligists, they start calling people bigots, or close-minded, or dogmatic, or whatever, as a cover for the fact that there is NO good answer.

It's a scam.

[Dylboz]

I'll repeat myself.  The so-called "scientific" argument against homeopathy boils down to nothing more than "I cannot understand it, therefore it's not possible."  This is the same logic used by "scientists" who claimed until just a couple years ago that bees cannot fly.

The so-called evidence for Homeopathy is, "here are some flimsy and poorly controlled studies that show a slight improvement over placebo, but we cannot explain why, and if there really is an effect, what it is or by what mechanism it operates, but it must be doing something." Yet, even those flimsy studies turn out to be inconclusive, and the meta-analysis, taken together, shows that even the tentatively positive initial results were ultimatley wrong:

Meta-analyses, which analyse large groups of studies and draw conclusions based on the results as a whole, have been used to evaluate the effectiveness of homeopathy. Early meta-analyses investigating homeopathic remedies showed slightly positive results among the studies examined, but such studies have warned that it was impossible to draw firm conclusions due to low methodological quality and difficulty in controlling for publication bias in the studies reviewed.[128][12][13] One of the positive meta-analyses, by Linde, et al,[13] was later corrected by the authors, who wrote:

The evidence of bias [in homeopathic trials] weakens the findings of our original meta-analysis. Since we completed our literature search in 1995, a considerable number of new homeopathy trials have been published. The fact that a number of the new high-quality trials... have negative results, and a recent update of our review for the most "original" subtype of homeopathy (classical or individualized homeopathy), seem to confirm the finding that more rigorous trials have less-promising results. It seems, therefore, likely that our meta-analysis at least overestimated the effects of homeopathic treatments.[129][15]

A recent meta-analysis of clinical trials on the effectiveness of homeopathy has shown that earlier clinical trials showed signs of major weakness in methodology and reporting, and that homeopathy trials were less randomized and reported less on dropouts than other types of trials.[12]

(emphasis added)

The idea that there has been some scientific research conclusively showing homeopathy to be ineffective is simply not true, and it doesn't matter how many times detractors repeat "it's absurd! It's absurd! It's absurd!"  That's not scientific evidence.  Sorry.

It doesn't matter how many times you insist that it works, if you can't duplicate the effects, and you can't show how it works or by what mechanism, that's not science, and it's not evidence. "Life force" and "miasmas" and "energy patterns" are the stuff of fairy-tales, not medicine. You might as well promote bloodletting or exorcism as alternative medicine. How are your humors lately? What's your sign?

[John Edward Mercier]

Its quite possible that it has to do with the actual consumption of water and avoidance of certain substances, rather than any mineral content or other component.

Several cultures induce sweating to help purify the body...

[Dylboz]

This water is dosed in mere drops. Not enough to make you sweat.

[J’raxis 270145]

And, besides, there is no mechanism by which they could work, since they contain nothing but water and/or sugar, a fact which Homeopaths freely admit.

Regardless of all the other pseudoscience flying around in this thread, mackler is right that this isn't the right approach. The so-called "memory" could be a currently undiscovered mechanism. And that's usually how science works: An observation is made that doesn't fit with the current theories, and so the theories have to be updated. We don't yet have a thorough understanding of how things work on the molecular or atomic level, and when you get down to the quantum level, we've barely scratched the surface. The theory that water and substances dissolved therein interact in some manner on the quantum level that allows water to "remember" their presence is certainly possible.

The open question is whether or not this purported feature of water has even been observed in the first place.

[Dylboz]

Homeopaths exploit the ignorance of quantum mechanics to attribute validity to their "memory" theory. But there are no observable effects to attribute a mechanism to! And besides, there is no way of understanding quantum physics that includes persistent information retention, for even fractions of a second. In fact, even a passing familiarity with quantum mechanics and the incredibly short times that particles exist at that level invalidates any kind of "memory" lasting long enough to impart effectiveness to Homeopathic remedies.

Please, J'raxis, read the Ars Technica article, especially the section on Homeopathy's attempts to co-opt quantum physics.

[mackler]

NO, sir. I have read the scientific literature, and what it says is, etc.

ROTFL!  Yes, you've cited a lot of scientific literature, Dylboz.  We've got a webpage on a Federal Gubmit website, Quackwatch, some pop-journalistic hit-pieces, and--oh yeah--that pillar of scientific rigor, Cecil Adam's "Straight Dope" column, no doubt peer-reviewed by the finest tabloid-columnists in the country.Please stop..you're killing me!  I don't think you would know scientific literature if your State-employed father-in-law dropped a stack of it onto your lap with an attached note of explanation.

Here, for the benefit of the open-minded readers of this thread, is what's known in the industry as "debunking of pseudo-scientific myths."

Dylboz myth: homeopathic remedies are chemically indistinguishable from placebo
Status: FALSE
Evidence:
A study was performed by a team of five researchers from the University of Arizona led by Iris Bell, MD, from the Departments of Medicine and Surgery, and including Dr. Audrey Brooks of the Center for Frontier Medicine in Biofield Science, and Dr. Gary Schwartz of the Departments of Medicine, Surgery, and Neurology.  The researchers compared 30C potencies of four different homeopathic remedies and two control substances (not homeopathic remedies) by using a computerized biophysical method, gas discharge visualization (GDV), to compare the six samples.  Not only did the the procedure differentiate between the remedies and the control substances, but also between the different remedies.  The study design was blinded and randomized.
Source: Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, vol 9 (2000), #1, pp 25-38, 

Dylboz myth: experimental homeopathic effects are not reproducable
Status: FALSE
Evidence:
A team of four researchers from the University of Glasgow set about to see if effects reported in not one but two previous studies of homeopathic treatment of asthma as compared with placebo would reappear if tested again.  Trial design was random and double-blinded. Results of the previous two studies were reproduced, with immunotherapeutic differences appearing between the homeopathic and placebo groups within one week of beginning treatment and lasting up to eight weeks.
Futher, a meta-analysis of this and the previous two studies showed a 99.96% likelihood that the differences between the homeopathic and placebo groups was not due to chance.
Source: Lancet, vol. 344 (1994) pp 1601-1606.

Dylboz myth: meta-analyses do not convincingly show the effectiveness of homeopathy
Status: FALSE
Evidence:
Three researchers from the Department of Epidemiology and Health Care Research, University of Limburg, Maastricht, assessed 107 controlled trials of homeopathy in humans from 96 published reports with distinction made for methodological quality.  The results showed a positive trend regardless of the quality of the trial.  Of the 105 trials with interpretable results 77% indicated positive effects of homoeopathy.
Source: British Medical Jounal vol 302 (1991) pp. 316–323
Four researchers considered 89 published double-blind and/or randomised placebo-controlled trials of homeopathic remedies.  The combined odds ratio for the main meta-analysis was 95% in favor of homeopathy.
Source: Lancet, vol 350 (1997) pp. 834-43.

And I could go on, and on, and on.  I would be here all night if I typed in all the scientific evidence that Dylboz's talking points are no more scientifically valid than voodoo.  In fact I think I could create a whole snopes.com-style website just to debunk all the myths he's perpetuating here.

Now I'm not saying homeopathy is right for every person in every situation.  But when you say there's absolutely nothing to it you reveal a stunning degree of ignorance...assuming you're sincere.  For your sake, Dylboz, I hope you're a troll, because it would seriously suck to be as ignorant as you would have to be to believe what you're saying.

[Dylboz]

All those articles have links, dude. To the studies. The scientific literature. So does the wiki. I can click through more than one link, OK? It's not that hard. And if there is nothing to the "pop-journalism hit pieces," read 'em, you got nothing to fear, especially the Ars Technica one. As to your post, if they discovered something in the 30C remedies (at the UA, my alma mater no less), OK, but that's supposed to be the WEAKEST by your standard, and even Homeopaths admit that the 100C and 200C, supposedly the STRONGEST remedies (because they are the most dilute), are not likely, and in fact do not, contain anything distinguishable from water or sugar. I'm going to look at the actual difference in these studies, too, because I'll bet it's minute, and not statistically significant. The meta analysis you posted suffers from selection bias, because it's just 2 studies. The one I referred to was the largest sample, and I think it's conclusions are therefore more reliable.

Look, answer the 2 questions (I'll re-post them below). You can scream all day, "IT WORKS!" But you have nothing but faith to go on. Even the scant positive evidence you have is very weak and shows only a tiny difference over placebo, if any. You don't know HOW it works, and NO ONE has a convincing model that can explain it. Without that, Homeopathy is just Woo Woo magical thinking, bro. I am not ignorant, or a troll. You are promoting a 19th century pseudoscience as if it were a legitimate alternative to modern medicine. I feel genuinely sorry for you, because you are wasting your time and money on a superstition instead of actual medical care.

Two questions:

1. Since Homeopathic remedies treat a tremendously wide range of symptoms, and you insist that if you don't have a symptom, and you take the remedy for that symptom, the remedy will CREATE that symptom (the aforementioned challenge), by what mechanism does Homeopathy select only those symptoms the patient wishes to treat while not creating the rest? Or, does a patient simply have the side effect of creating all the other symptoms? I mean, either it causes them or it doesn't, right?

2. Since water retains a memory of substances it has come in contact with, even at dilutions equivalent to one atom to 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 (yes folks, one with 60 zeros, requiring a container 30 times larger than the planet earth) water molecules, than why does ALL water not have Homeopathic effect? If it does not, then how do Homeopaths impart that memory to the water, or rather, how do they erase the memory so they can impart only what they wish to. This is the table rapping bit, right?

[Dylboz]

Let me just add, if these things actually did work, the government and Big Business would be all over them, and you guys know it. They leave it alone because they regard it as harmless. Salvia is a fine example. Ephedra another. Anything that actually does anything, they regulate. They want a piece of the action. There is no action here, it's a fringe group of true believers, and that's all. Homeopaths have had nearly 200 years to prove to anyone's satisfaction that they're superior to "allopathic" doctors, and when they were tested in the marketplace, they failed. They couldn't compete with the demonstrable success of germ theory, pharmacology and surgery. It's convenient to blame the pharmaceuticals industry and the AMA now, but these were not around 200 years ago, and in their infancy in a totally unregulated market environment 100 years ago, precisely the time when most Homeopathic schools were closing for lack of students and consumer demand. It was brought back from the brink by a generation of ex-hippies looking for alternatives and natural remedies, despite it's lack of efficacy and evidentiary support. I only hope that in the free market, should we ever get one, it remains on the fringe, though the history of charlatans, snake oil salesmen and patent medicines doesn't bode well. Caveat emptor.

[Caleb]

Let me just add, if these things actually did work, the mafia and Big Business would be all over them, and you guys know it. They leave it alone because they regard it as harmless. Salvia is a fine example. Ephedra another. Anything that actually does anything, they regulate. They want a piece of the action. There is no action here, it's a fringe group of true believers, and that's all. Homeopaths have had nearly 200 years to prove to anyone's satisfaction that they're superior to "allopathic" doctors, and when they were tested in the marketplace, they failed. They couldn't compete with the demonstrable success of germ theory, pharmacology and surgery. It's convenient to blame the pharmaceuticals industry and the AMA now, but these were not around 200 years ago, and in their infancy in a totally unregulated market environment 100 years ago, precisely the time when most Homeopathic schools were closing for lack of students and consumer demand. It was brought back from the brink by a generation of ex-hippies looking for alternatives and natural remedies, despite it's lack of efficacy and evidentiary support. I only hope that in the free market, should we ever get one, it remains on the fringe, though the history of charlatans, snake oil salesmen and patent medicines doesn't bode well. Caveat emptor.

Not necessarily. They might just ban it outright. The most effective pain reliever I have ever tried is pot. The government isn't jumping head over heels to regulate it, they just say I can't have it.

So far in my anecdotal study, the homeopathic arthritis remedy seems to be most effective when combined with 500mg of naproxen.    Taken alone, it seems so far to be mostly ineffective. I might be taking it too frequently, and should reduce the number of doses to increase potency?

I want to add a little bit to the discussion here, because dylboz said this:

You don't know HOW it works, and NO ONE has a convincing model that can explain it. Without that, Homeopathy is just Woo Woo magical thinking, bro

There needs to be an understanding of the philosophical differences between an argument and an explanation. An argument is a statement that something is. Whereas an explanation states how it is.  It is perfectly valid to have an argument without an explanation. In other words, the explanation would be "I do not know".  Invalidating an explanation does not philosophically do any harm to the argument.  To say that every argument must be accompanied by a valid explanation is a philosophical blunder.

[Dylboz]

Banning is regulation. The black market is profitable for the state. Very profitable.

[John Edward Mercier]

This water is dosed in mere drops. Not enough to make you sweat.

My understanding was the sulfur was to be taken will a glass or more of water.
We rid ourselves of water in other ways also .

If you remove the impossible and improbable... all that left is the probable.
Or in this case... the water.

[Dylboz]

You know how Homeopaths say the LESS of the "active" ingredient there is in the remedy, the MORE powerful it is? Well...

Did you hear about the Homeopathy patient who forgot to take his pills?

He died of an overdose.

[Dylboz]

Fun quotes...


"I drank a homeopathic remedy. I urinated and flushed. Soon the remedy will spread throughout the world, becoming ever more powerful as it becomes more diluted." - Timothy Gorski, MD

"Homeopathy is bullshit. Only very, very diluted. It's completely safe to drink." - Peter Dorn

"Homeopathy, where a little of nothing is better than something at all." - Jeanne E Hand-Boniakowski, R.N.

[mackler]

Fun quotes...


"I drank a homeopathic remedy. I urinated and flushed. Soon the remedy will spread throughout the world, becoming ever more powerful as it becomes more diluted." - Timothy Gorski, MD

"Homeopathy is bullshit. Only very, very diluted. It's completely safe to drink." - Peter Dorn

"Homeopathy, where a little of nothing is better than something at all." - Jeanne E Hand-Boniakowski, R.N.

When you have no scientific evidence to support your position, snappy quotes will just have to do.