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#41 |
Anti-homeopathy illuminati member
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 5,363
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Bump and,
I was just reading this, http://apgaylard.wordpress.com/2007/...-secret-eight/ Never mind the issue of whether any homeopathy works, if you take the published data and really believe we are dealing with a therapy that is capable of working in some instances, do we see any evidence of the homs winnowing their pharmacopoeia to separate the good (or at least, not proven to be useless) remedies from those with strong negative evidence? No we do not. As far as the homs are concerned, every remedy ever dreamt up is effective and does precisely what they claim it to do. It must be wonderful to be right 100% of the time. I wish I could just pull random medical ideas out of my backside and have them work every time. What are Pfizer and GSK playing at, sifting through thousands of 'discovery' compounds? If they just moved over to homeopathy everything would work first time. |
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"i'm frankly surprised homeopathy does as well as placebo" Anonymous homeopath. "Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right." (Robert Park) Is the pen is mightier than the sword? Its effectiveness as a weapon is certainly enhanced if it is sharpened properly and poked in the eye of your opponent. |
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#42 |
New Blood
Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 5
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Indeed.
And pace those perfect martinis, where the shadow of the vermouth bottle is allowed briefly to traverse one's glass (surely an example of homeopathy in action....?), you wouldn't even have to go to the trouble of synthesising the compounds themselves. You need merely project a pictorial representation of the structure of the NCE on to a vial of solvent, and Voila! |
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#43 |
Anti-homeopathy illuminati member
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 5,363
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"i'm frankly surprised homeopathy does as well as placebo" Anonymous homeopath. "Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right." (Robert Park) Is the pen is mightier than the sword? Its effectiveness as a weapon is certainly enhanced if it is sharpened properly and poked in the eye of your opponent. |
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#44 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 10,226
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From the other thread:
The written report states that the 110 conventional medical studies were chosen using a random number generator, and were chosen without knowledge of the trial results. If you wish to claim that all of the researchers are lying, it becomes a trivial exercise to dismiss the scant support for homeopathy with the same claim. Your other criticisms actually support the veracity of the report. If Shang had gone through and selected out the best conventional medicine trials, then they would have fared better in measures of quality.
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#45 |
Thinker
Join Date: Jun 2007
Posts: 203
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Links for the sepsis paper which Criticalist mentions:
Adjunctive homeopathic treatment in patients with severe sepsis: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in an intensive care unit, M Frass et al., Homeopathy 94 (2) 75-80 (2005). More to the paper on ‘Homeopathy in Sepsis in ICU’ than meets the eye, Kamal Patel, Homeopathy 94 (4) 213-214 (2005). |
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#46 |
Thinker
Join Date: Sep 2007
Posts: 158
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#47 |
Thinker
Join Date: Sep 2007
Posts: 158
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Actually I have the pdf of the entire article if anyone is interested, but Im not sure how I post a link to that.
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#48 |
Thinker
Join Date: Jun 2007
Posts: 203
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#49 |
Anti-homeopathy illuminati member
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 5,363
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Of course, what needs to be remembered at all times is that the pathetic bleating noises emanating from Ullman as he quibbles away at the minutiae of the Shang study is that the mere fact that he has to engage in such barrel-scraping tactics at the absolute margins of the statistical noise means that he has already lost the argument. Homeopathy is supposed to produce deep permanent cures for real diseases. The emperor is prancing about stark bollock naked and making a fuss about whether he is really wearing a transparent thong. Not a pretty sight.
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"i'm frankly surprised homeopathy does as well as placebo" Anonymous homeopath. "Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right." (Robert Park) Is the pen is mightier than the sword? Its effectiveness as a weapon is certainly enhanced if it is sharpened properly and poked in the eye of your opponent. |
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#50 |
Anti-homeopathy illuminati member
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 5,363
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Bump just for Dana
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"i'm frankly surprised homeopathy does as well as placebo" Anonymous homeopath. "Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right." (Robert Park) Is the pen is mightier than the sword? Its effectiveness as a weapon is certainly enhanced if it is sharpened properly and poked in the eye of your opponent. |
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#51 |
Thinker
Join Date: Jun 2007
Posts: 203
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I find it interesting how smoothly Dana went from "Perhaps, SOMEONE can finally tell us which were the 21 homeopathic trials and the 9 allopathic ones. Shang NEVER divulged" to general complaining about how the choice was made, based on apgaylard pointing out that the information has been available for two years.
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#52 |
Mostly harmless
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Nor Flanden
Posts: 35,758
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And yet you seem to be unable to state why it is weak. I don't think anyone is going to rely on your unsupported assertion.
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Try looking around the forum a little. There are so few "positive" studies of homoeopathy that the same ones get brought up over and over again. A recent discussion of some of Reilly's work started here, when a homoeopathy proponent's misquoting of the the name of one of the authors failed to prevent it being identified. |
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"You got to use your brain." - McKinley Morganfield "The poor mystic homeopaths feel like petted house-cats thrown at high flood on the breaking ice." - Leon Trotsky |
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#53 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 10,226
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From the other thread:
Data dredging refers to a specific activity. Large amounts of information are collected, then the parameters of interest are chosen based on which fall furthest from the mean. Homeopathic studies are rife with examples - the childhood diarrhea studies where the very specific outcome just happens to coincide with the one point where statistically significant differences were found, the allergic rhinitis studies where the parameter of interest is suddenly changed at the end of the study when it is discovered that the parameter chosen a priori is not statistically significant, etc. Shang et. al. is not an example of data dredging. The parameters were chosen a priori and the only information collected relates to those parameters. And they were those necessary to minimize chance and bias (randomized, controlled, double-blind), and to make the comparison fair for homeopathy (matched on the basis of disorder and outcome). You have demonstrated (by failing to provide a single example otherwise) that homeopathy is used in situations where improvement is expected in the absence of effective treatment. And the tendency is to measure 'soft' outcomes. It would be unfair to compare that to medicine trials which achieve differences in hard outcomes in situations that would otherwise be unremitting. It would be like comparing the mortality rate in a group that consists of frail, elderly people (homeopathy) with a group that consists of a general population (medicine). What would be fair is to select out the frail, elderly people from the general population, and to take a sample from them for comparison.
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#54 |
Thinker
Join Date: Aug 2007
Posts: 127
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Linda has already done an excellent job picking apart Dana Ullman's assertions, but I wanted to say one thing about this statement of Peter Fisher's:
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#55 |
Anti-homeopathy illuminati member
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 5,363
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Shhh...Dana doesn't know this thread is here so we can say what we like behind his back.
Mind you, he could learn so much if he could just find his way here through the trackless wastes of the internet guided only, well I say only, by numerous specific invitations, exasperated demands and hyperlinks. You can lead to woo to water but you can't make him think. Don't worry, he'll never see that. He's too busy curing AIDS and keeping it secret. |
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"i'm frankly surprised homeopathy does as well as placebo" Anonymous homeopath. "Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right." (Robert Park) Is the pen is mightier than the sword? Its effectiveness as a weapon is certainly enhanced if it is sharpened properly and poked in the eye of your opponent. |
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#56 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 10,226
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What also gets missed in all this is that the comparison of the 8 homeopathy and 6 medicine trials was a small part of the overall analysis. Analyzing the 110 homeopathy and 110 medicine trials shows that both are subject to a similar, significant bias. And that the characteristic with the strongest association with this bias is study size, with all other characteristics (including study quality) attenuating and becoming non-significant when a measure of study size was taken into account. In order to see what effect this bias had on the results they did two things. They did a meta-regression to take the effect of bias into account (which left homeopathy with no treatment effect, but left medicine with a statistically significant treatment effect), and they looked at those studies which would have the least effect from bias (the 8 and 6 studies). In addition, the 110 medicine studies had significantly more heterogeneity than the homeopathy studies. That is, something made the medicine studies show greater variation in the results. This would make sense if in addition to the bias which was present in both studies, the medicine studies were also influenced by a real treatment effect.
So, by several different measure, there was a consistent confirmation of the idea that homeopathic trials do not demonstrate an effect beyond that of placebo and bias, whereas medicine trials do. Homeopaths don't mention the other analyses, though. They attack the only measure which superficially appears the weakest because it is based on a relatively small number of trials. However, even if you reject that analysis, you are still left with the other analyses that lead to the same conclusion. |
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#57 |
New Blood
Join Date: Sep 2007
Posts: 5
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I wonder why Ullman hasn't cited his own paper:"Controlled Clinical Trials Evaluating the Homeopathic Treatment of People with Human Immunodeficiency Virus or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome"?
(THE JOURNAL OF ALTERNATIVE AND COMPLEMENTARY MEDICINE, Volume 9, Number 1, 2003, pp. 133–141) |
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#58 |
Thinker
Join Date: Jun 2007
Posts: 203
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And here's a link to that: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs...55530332122300
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#59 |
Mostly harmless
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Nor Flanden
Posts: 35,758
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Try here: you missed an 8 off the end of that url.
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"You got to use your brain." - McKinley Morganfield "The poor mystic homeopaths feel like petted house-cats thrown at high flood on the breaking ice." - Leon Trotsky |
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#60 |
Thinker
Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 201
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Hey...can't you gave a guy a little break? It is challenging enough being ganged up by dozens of you. I'm glad that someone acknowledged some reality by calling me "Sir Brave Dana." Thanx.
For the record, I didn't previously mention my own AIDS article, nor have I made reference to many many other studies. Also...you're not remembering: there is a simple reason that I have commented upon the Rao/Roy spectroscopy study, I do not know the answers to this very technical study, though I did correctly acknowledge the high respect that Roy's lab at Penn State University is known for. Whether you agree with him or not, please consider his body of work. And pleeeeeze, don't expect me or any homeopath to provide free treatment to you as a "test subject." At the best (or worst, depending upon your point of view), you would lose your crediblity if homeopathy was helpful, and no one would consider a single case to be an example of anything. Here's another one for you all...the walrus was Paul...arsenic poisoning is not a self-limiting condition: http://ecam.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/c...stract/2/4/537 Although this is a preliminary trial due to the limited number of people who agreed to be in the placebo group, it is a part of a larger body of environmental toxicology. Hopefully, there are people on this list who have an interest in this subject. Although prevention must obviously be the first priority, we must also consider ways to treat people who have already been exposed. Will homeopathic doses of environmental poisons be one solution to consider? Just don't look at the clinical results, check out the liver enzymes between the treated group and the control group. |
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#61 |
Anti-homeopathy illuminati member
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 5,363
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__________________
"i'm frankly surprised homeopathy does as well as placebo" Anonymous homeopath. "Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right." (Robert Park) Is the pen is mightier than the sword? Its effectiveness as a weapon is certainly enhanced if it is sharpened properly and poked in the eye of your opponent. |
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#62 |
Butterbeans and Breadcrumbs
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Emily's shop
Posts: 17,640
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#63 |
New Blood
Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 7
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But remember that since homeopathy treats the whole person you can't just take the first suitable remedy, history and personality has to be taken into account. So explain the huge shelves full of remedies in most pharmacy stores... Plus, aren't we asking for a single case in the other thread (albeit with some constraints)? Sorry - I can't link yet... |
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#64 |
Philosopher
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 9,583
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#65 |
...now with added haecceity!
Join Date: Dec 2005
Posts: 510
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Someone should put him out of his misery:
http://www.stmoroky.com/sirrobin/fleeing~~.au Don't forget to post saying that you knew all along that was what they meant. We know you didn't. You don't need to put what happened on the thread on "the record", the thread is "the record", don't you see how that works? But good attempt to make yourself look as though you're addressing a point without actually doing so. |
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One evening I came home to find my wife dissolved in tears. After crystallizing her over a bunsen burner, I managed to elicit the reason. S. J. Perelman |
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#66 |
Butterbeans and Breadcrumbs
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Emily's shop
Posts: 17,640
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Sponsor me please! http://www.justgiving.com/Catherine-Kiernan http://www.justgiving.com/Catherine-Kiernan1 My blog |
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#67 |
Butterbeans and Breadcrumbs
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Emily's shop
Posts: 17,640
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And isn't that (almost) the entire problem. You are quick to laud a study merely because it supports your position, regardless of whether you have read it and even if you don't understand a word of it. This is why nonsense like Lionel Milgom's quantum bollox papers are so popular with homeopaths. They don't understand a word of it, and they don't care as long as it is "on their side".
And the fact that the author seems to have done good work before does not in any way negate the criticisms of this particular study. That's not how science works. |
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#68 |
Philosopher
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Denmark
Posts: 6,358
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Steen -- Jack of all trades - master of none! |
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#69 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 10,226
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Arsenic poisoning is a self-limiting condition once the source of the arsenic has been removed or reduced.
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Part of the study was double-blind, randomized and placebo-controlled and involved measuring arsenic levels in the urine. It showed no difference between the two groups once you take into account that the arsenic levels in the urine were significantly higher in the control group before the treatment was even started. Sheesh. The second part of the study had no controls. The results are what you would expect to see in the absence of any treatment in a group of people who are being extra careful about limiting their arsenic exposure. This study provides no support for homeopathy. Next? Linda |
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#70 |
Thinker
Join Date: Aug 2007
Posts: 127
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Originally Posted by James Gully
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#71 |
Thinker
Join Date: Aug 2007
Posts: 127
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Here's Ullman just the other day on Comment is Free, talking about the 'highly significant' results of Rao et al. If you 'do not know the answers to this very technical study', perhaps you should refrain from touting it around as evidence for homeopathy.
He also states that the 'silica hypothesis' is scientifically sound, although it has no supporting evidence whatsoever. |
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#72 |
Mostly harmless
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Nor Flanden
Posts: 35,758
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Homoeopaths frequently claim that critics of homoeopathy don't understand it. Projection.
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"You got to use your brain." - McKinley Morganfield "The poor mystic homeopaths feel like petted house-cats thrown at high flood on the breaking ice." - Leon Trotsky |
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#73 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 10,226
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The most recent meta-analysis does not support your claim.
And this is the absolute best that homeopathy has for evidence. It is the only evidence that comes even remotely close to the sort of evidence that supports medical therapies. And what does it say? At best, special water can shorten the duration of the flu symptoms by a few hours. After the hundreds of years of time and effort that has been put into homeopathy, all you can show for it is the possibility (and the possibility that this is all a fluke is still more likely than the possibility that special water had anything to do with it) that some people had relief from their aches and pains for a few hours. You know what this means? The entire practice of homeopathy can be substituted with the advice to "take two aspirins and call me in the morning."
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The sepsis study showed that if you take two heterogeneous groups of ill people and measure the number of deaths at various points in time over the next six months, that there is a good chance that at least one of those points in time will show a difference between the two groups. There's no reason to attribute that difference to homeopathy though, since it's exactly what you'd expect to see in the absence of any homeopathic treatment.
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Linda |
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#74 |
Thinker
Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 201
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Sorry, this meta-analysis says exactly what I said it does. I said that the Cochrane report called the results of the treatment of influenza "promising." I made it clear that its use in the prevention of the flu is not proven, though this has not been its use anyway.
In reference to "severe sepsis," you wrote Hmmm. Did you say that you were an expert in statistics. Eeeks. First, just because some people survive a life-threatening condition does not mean that the entire condition is self-limiting. If that were true, almost ALL disease would be self-limiting (ergo, you've proven yourself: homeopathic medicines cannot be helpful for non-self-limiting conditions because such conditions are so rare). Cool. As for the two groups...both groups had a life-threatening condition in which other studies show that 40-70% of the people die. In 6 months, 50% of those given the placebo died, while only 25% of those given a homeopathic medicine died. How you can say that these significant differences are just what you would expect from NO treatment is a statistical improbability (thus, the impressive p-value). These results not only show an effect, but they show some long-term effects of homeopathic medicines. Thank you. He shoots; he scores. And now that I have your attention, I'm going for a 3-pointer. Here's what I posted earlier today at quackometer. Below is an excerpt from my ebook, "Homeopathic Family Medicine: Evidence Based Nanopharmacology." I update this ebook every 3-4 months, adding new research. This is a partial excerpt from the chapter on fibromyalgia. I know some of you will grunt when you see this diagnostic category, and yet, whether you believe it is a real pathology or just a common disease pattern, you will find two high quality studies, one of which was published in the BMJ and one of which was published in RHEUMATOLOGY (the journal of the British Society for Rheumatology). Some of the objective data (described below) was published in the International Journal of Neurosciences. (You're not going to call these journals "junk journals" too, are you?) The BMJ study was double-blind, placebo-controlled WITH a cross-over (you cannot do better than that). The second study is worthy of your attention because not only was there greater CLINICAL improvement in the homeopathic treated patients (some of you can call that "subjective," except when improvement in YOUR own symptoms is observed), the researchers also conducted EEG readings while the patients were given their dose or a placebo via olfaction. Yeah...this study will blow your mind...and maybe your nose too... The syndrome of fibromyalgia includes a disparate group of physical and psychological symptoms, including pain and tenderness in a dozen or so sites, stiffness, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, abdominal or pelvic pain, diarrhea, memory and concentration problems, and various states of anxiety and depression. The fact that this ailment is recognized as a syndrome is unusual for conventional medicine. In homeopathy, it is believed that ALL ailments are syndromes, that is, all disease is a constellation of physical and psychological symptoms and each patient has their own subtly different version of the disease. The fact that people with fibromyalgia tend to have sometimes slightly and sometimes overtly differing symptoms from each other is no significant problem for homeopaths because each person is observed to have his/her own syndrome of symptoms, no matter what disease doctors diagnose them to have. Because people with fibromyalgia tend to have distinct and unusual symptoms, this actually makes it easier for homeopaths to treat them successfully. However, homeopaths have also observed that a small percentage of people with fibromyalgia are so ill and their immune system is so compromised that it is difficult for homeopaths to provide effective treatment. Scientific Evidence Researchers in England found that patients with fibromyalgia were (obviously) a varied group with differing symptoms but that there was one homeopathic medicine, more than any other, that seemed to be indicated for a certain sub-set of fibromyalgia patients (Fisher, 1986). This medicine, Rhus toxicodendron (also called Rhus tox) was found to be indicated in 25% of fibromyalgia patients. The researchers found 30 patients who seemed to fit the symptoms of Rhus tox, and they were given a homeopathic dose of this medicine, 6C (this dose is considered a “low potency,” that is, it is a dose that generally does not have long-term effects). The researchers found that there was a significant degree of improvement in the reduction of pain and tender points and improved sleep when the subjects were taking the homeopathic medicine, as compared to when the subjects were taking a placebo. The results of this experiment were so significant that the researchers found that there was a 5 in 10,000 chance (P<.005) of this occurring from chance. This study, therefore, strongly suggests that homeopathic medicines can be effective in reducing the pain and tender spots and in improving sleep in some patients suffering from fibromyalgia. In addition to this study, a more recent study published in the highly respected journal, Rheumatology (published by the British Society for Rheumatology) also found statistically significant results from homeopathic treatment. Researchers from the University of Arizona in collaboration with homeopaths conducted a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial with 62 fibromyalgia patients (Bell, Lewis, Brooks, et al., 2004). Patients were randomized to receive an oral daily dose of an individually chosen homeopathic medicine in LM potency (or a placebo). Patients were evaluated at baseline, 2 months, and 4 months. The study found that 50% of patients given a homeopathic medicine experienced a 25% or greater improvement in tender point pain on examination, as compared to only 15% of those who were given a placebo experienced a similar degree of improvement (P=0.008). After 4 months, the homeopathic patients also rated the “helpfulness of the treatment” significantly greater than did those who were given a placebo (P=0.004). It is therefore not surprising that the study also showed that the average number of remedies recommended by the homeopaths was substantially higher to those in the placebo group as compared with the real treatment group. One special additional feature of this trial was that the first dose of medicine was given by olfaction (by smell) and that both groups were monitored with EEG. The researchers found that there was a significant and identifiable difference in the EEG readings in patients who were given the real homeopathic medicine as compared to those given the placebo (Bell, Lewis, Schwartz, et al, 2004a). Each patient had three laboratory sessions, including at baseline, at 3 months, and at 6 months after initial treatment. The researchers found that the active treatment group experienced significant increases in the EEG relative alpha magnitude, while patients given a placebo experienced a decrease in this measurement (P=0.003). The combined evidence of clinical improvement along with objective physiological response from the homeopathic medicine makes the results of this trial of additional significance. REFERENCES: Bell, IR, Lewis, DA, Brooks, DJ, Schwartz, GE, Leis, SE, Walsh, BT, and Baldwin, DM, Improved Cilnical Status in Fibromyalgia Patients Treated with Individualized Homeopathic Remedies Versus Placebo, Rheumatology, January 20, 2004:1111-7. Bell IR, Lewis Ii DA, Lewis SE, Schwartz GE, Brooks AJ, Scott A, Baldwin CM. EEG Alpha Sensitization in Individualized Homeopathic Treatment of Fibromyalgia. Int J Neurosci. 2004;114(9):1195-1220. Peter Fisher, Alison Greenwood, EC Huskisson, et al., “Effect of Homoeopathic Treatment on Fibrositis (Primary Fibromyalgia),” BMJ, 299(August 5, 1989):365-6. So, Linda, is this drivel too, and are these journals drivel, and is everyone but you and your buddies on this list drivel? I think that the problem is that some people have a problem in seeing patterns. A 3-pointer and I was fouled on the shot. |
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#75 |
Mostly harmless
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Nor Flanden
Posts: 35,758
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__________________
"You got to use your brain." - McKinley Morganfield "The poor mystic homeopaths feel like petted house-cats thrown at high flood on the breaking ice." - Leon Trotsky |
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#76 |
Illuminator
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 3,789
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James Gully disputes Linda's precise statistical analysis. One would presume that he knows something about the subject (well he wouldn't be one of those pseudoscientists who just pretends he knows stuff, or exaggerates statistics for his own purposes, would he....?)
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"Reci bobu bob a popu pop." - Tanja "Everything is physics. This does not mean that physics is everything." - Cuddles "The entire practice of homeopathy can be substituted with the advice to "take two aspirins and call me in the morning." - Linda "Homeopathy: I never knew there was so little in it." - BSM |
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#77 |
Butterbeans and Breadcrumbs
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Emily's shop
Posts: 17,640
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Sponsor me please! http://www.justgiving.com/Catherine-Kiernan http://www.justgiving.com/Catherine-Kiernan1 My blog |
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#78 |
Philosopher
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 9,583
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This could explain the results the fibromyalgia studies:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/538449
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http://rheumatology.oxfordjournals.o...print/keh111v1 The unadjusted differences in table 2 on page 5 do not look particularly impressive. ETA: In Table 1 it shows that the homoeopathy group had higher scores on Tender point pain, POMS depression and POMS anger-hostility than the placebo group at baseline. In Table 2, the placebo group's score on the Tender point pain had not changed by much, but the two POMS scores increased. After treatment, the homoeopathy group's POMS scored dropped to values similar to the placebo group's POMS score at baseline. It would seem to me this study observed natural cycles in the variables it measured, and the effects can be explained by regression to the mean. |
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#79 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 10,226
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This is what you said:
"Skeptics can no longer say that homeopathic medicines are proven to be effective in treating a specific condition. If anyone is asked, does Oscillococcinum have an effect on influenza or influenza-like syndrome, one must say YES." I assumed the first sentence was a typo, otherwise we could all end the conversation in agreement. The meta-analysis does not support your claim that Oscillococcinum has an effect on influenza. It was qualified as "might".
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But now you have another problem. Here you are claiming that the effects of homeopathy are long term. That they don't show up in the short term is something to be expected. However, your fibrositis references all depend upon homeopathy having no long term effects, as they are all cross-over studies. If you have any suspicion that the effects carry over from one treatment period to another, you cannot analyze them as though they do not. So you face a choice. Either cling to your sepsis study as proof of homeopathy's effectiveness or your fibrositis studies, but they cannot both be true.
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Linda |
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#80 |
Philosopher
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 9,583
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How did the fibromyalgia studies Dana just provided make it into peer-reviewed journals?
Shouldn't the peer review process ensure the conclusions of the study are supported by its results? |
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