The “triumph” of New Age medicine? The Atlantic strikes again

I hate to say it, but when you add the increasing popularity of “prescientific vitalism”-based “medicine” (aka magic) together with the resurgance of religious fundamentalism and its apparently increasing respectability in political circles, it looks to me like America basically just wants to go back to the 18th or early 19th C. on purpose. After all, things were so much simpler then. Dealing with modern reality, especially a modern reality which demands that you understand complex evidence and reasoning, is hard.

If a large and rigorous study that focused solely on treatment while ignoring patient interaction and “individualization” showed that some alternative method beat placebo, people like Orac would naturally express confusion and inqiure whether the study was flawed. How many alties would do the same thing?

Because is their positition were consistent, they would have to. They would have to say, “That doesn’t make any sense, we all know that our system requires individualization of a sort that doesn’t show up in tests!” That painting-oneself-into-a-corner is one unfortunate consequence of making excuses in empirical arenas. Of course, we all know they would instead revel, having the cake of empiricism and eating it too.

Orac, are you running a contest for dumbest comments of the month by altmed/pseudoscience advocates? I didn’t think you could top the autism “researcher” who declared that speech impairment was equivalent to an autism, or the latest Choprawoo. Then you give us this:

“But medicine’s triumph over infectious disease brought to the fore the so-called chronic, complex diseases–heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses without a clear causal agent. Now that we live longer, these typically late-developing diseases have become by far our biggest killers. Heart disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic diseases now account for three-quarters of our health-care spending. “We face an entirely different set of big medical challenges today,” says Blackburn. “But we haven’t rethought the way we fight illness.” That is, the medical establishment still waits for us to develop some sign of one of these illnesses, then seeks to treat us with drugs and surgery.”

Yes, what a miserable failure this proves scientific medicine to be! We aren’t keeling over right and left from epidemics, “blood poisoning’ and the like and surviving longer to get chronic diseases. Surgery keeps us alive and healthy after formerly fatal conditions like ruptured appendicitis and diverticulitis. We survive to develop cancers (some of which used to be death sentences, like testicular CA, choriocarcinoma and many lymphomas, which are now curable, and other cancers like those of breast and prostate can often be managed for many years with substantial quality of life). We get heart disease (which again, can be managed with marked improvement in quality of life if not increased longevity). How terrible a failure this all is!

Far preferable to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear when homeopathy, acupuncture and the like proved themselves far superior to Western “scientific” medicine. Hell, it’s worth it to die young if the doc listens to our need for woo and gives us what we want.

Thanks Jesse, for touching upon the “there has to be a better way” parts of the issue I really want to hear more about from doctors – the part that focuses on us, rather than the crazies.

“I wouldn’t be so sure when the clinic is telling patients that there is a magical life force that acupuncturists can rearrange by sticking little sharp objects into their bodies and thus heal them. If you start with a completely unscientific premise like that, it infects everything else.”

If people who don’t accept modern medicine are sticking little sharp objects into human bodies, I’d worry a bit about more literal infection too. 

David, [citation needed]

That’s in large part because mainstream medicine itself is failing. “Modern medicine was formed around successes in fighting infectious disease,” says Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “Infectious agents were the big sources of disease and mortality, up until the last century….

Among the top ten causes of death worldwide, according to the WHO:

#3) Lower respiratory infections
#5) Diarrhoeal diseases
#6) HIV/AIDS
#7) Tuberculosis

Infectious agents are most of the causes in poor countries, but who cares about them, really?

But medicine’s triumph over infectious disease brought to the fore the so-called chronic, complex diseases–heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses without a clear causal agent….

I think some clear causal agents have been identified with regard to, say, cardiovascular and pulmonary disease, some cancers,… Smoking, for example, rings a bell. And the food system.

That is, the medical establishment still waits for us to develop some sign of one of these illnesses, then seeks to treat us with drugs and surgery.

Acupuncture, enemas, and homeopathy are much better. Really. Don’t bother addressing these as public health issues. No money in that.

***

The reason is that France, just as much as the U.S., uses science-based medicine as its preferred system. It’s just apparently better at providing that science-based care at a lower cost than we are. CAM has nothing to do with it.

Socialized health care has quite a bit to do with it.

By the way, some of the healthiest populations in the world have Homeopathy as their primary care source.

Which ones? Are we talking about entire national / regional populations, or self-selected individuals who are healthy enough (because they live in societies with stong public heath initiatives) to use homeopathy as their medicine of personal choice?

Anyone care to comment on the “science” behind the safety studies for things like Fluoridation, GMO, Estrogen mimicking plastics, and the off the chart number of food additives to which conventional health care has given its blessings. Like I said above, how about some “science” supporting the Holy Grail theory of conventional Cardiology…Cholesterol?

David: Do you care to comment on which societies use homeopathy as their primary health care? Or are you just going to pretend you never claimed that, and keep throwing crap against the wall, in case you accidentally say something that isn’t completely laughable?

New age medicine- homeopathy, reiki, accupuncture, energy healing, as well as herbal and supplement-based “treatments”- is the 21st Century equivalent of patent medicine.

Over one hundred years ago, untested and un-regulated concoctions containing active ingredients like alcohol and controlled substances ( opiates and cocaine) were widely available. Two hundred years ago, it was even worse. I’ve read accounts of some of the more famous “addicts” of literature** whose treatment of relatively minor complaints ( coughs, neuralgia, arthritis) started the ball rolling. Those who lived in a cold, damp places with poor heating ( be it London or New London) were especially susceptible to these complaints and sought help from “practitioners” and salesmen dispersing goods for self-treatment.

Today, while science-based treatments are available, many complaints, cyclic and unpredictable, as well as those less amenable to treatment, render sufferers vulnerable to the predations of new age providers. Like our predecessors, we moderns also suffer from psychological complaints, from minor transient dissatisfactions to outright mental illness.

Our woo-meisters inculcate mistrust of modern medicine, aided and abetted by articles like this one: I’m sure it’ll be quoted widely by the usual suspects. Usually the false dichotomy is portrayed in vivid shades of black and white***: a “Paradigm Shift” is under-way, out with the old, in with the new! SBM is riddled with COI’s and tied to the machinations of Pharma, Government, Universities, and the Media. The audience, not schooled in stat, doesn’t appreciate the subtle results of studies that are well done: woo, you see, promises 100% improvements and cures, because it is, at heart, an opiate itself- soothing pains and qualms, re-assuring fears, pulling the sufferer far from the cares and distractions of reality to a fair land of pleasure and certainty where all is as you would wish.

** the fabled triad of linguistic ability, depression, and substances.
*** which tells me lots about their level of thinking.

LW, I must have missed the posts extolling the virtues of socialized care.
Way to go…..Bring your personal politics into it.

As far as Homeopathy goes…It’d definitely be cheaper and less toxic. Additionally the average Homeopath can run circles around most conventional doctors regarding nutrition and other preventive issues. Given the over medicated state of our amazingly unhealthy population, it seems apparent that we should do better. Homeopathy might well be more effective, except for crisis and surgical situations.

Bacon, You could start with the Greek Islands, home of some of the World’s healthiest people, and where Homeopathy is often the only local medicine. You might also consider an impressive list of wealthy and prominent people who have access to virtually any practitioner on the Planet, and who have opted for the modality (Including the long lived women of England’s Royal Family.)

It’s hard to find health data for the Greek Islands distinct from the mainland (you can provide that for us, right?), but this claims that the health care there is modern and science-based: http://www.atlasinternational.com/en-GB/greek-islands/lifestyle/

As for the Royal Family, it’s true that they use homeopathic remedies for self-limiting contitions, but they also use real medicine when required. And they benefit from living somewhere where endemic diseases are controlled by a public health system that relies on modern, science-based medicine. Not to mention the fact that “The Royal Family” is a tiny group of 21 people (counting those currently living), all closely-related; and extrapolating their health to indicate the efficacy of one of the modalities they use is bound to be confounded by genetic and lifestyle issues, even if one is able to definitively say they they do indeed live longer than most people (Princess Mary, for example, died at age 67, which is below the national average, even if you don’t factor out inustrial accidents and the like. Princess Mariana (who was Greek!) died at the age of 52).

You might also consider an impressive list of wealthy and prominent people who have access to virtually any practitioner on the Planet, and who have opted for the modality

No, I might not. Crap, it’s not even an argument from authority, because celebrities and/or the rich are not authorities. Argumentum ad Hollywoodum?

By your own logic, you should be a Scientologist. Good luck.

@David – since CAM true believers find personal anecdotes and testimonials more convincing than scientific evidence, here’s a couple for you:

– about 15 years ago I had acupuncture to treat a back injury that happened on the job (no pointing and laughing from the RI peanut gallery, please – I was young, it was the ’90s and woo was the new black!) It was a fairly straightforward muscle strain and the chiropractor (I said no laughing!!) I was seeing at the time decided to do acupuncture rather than try to adjust the area. It did temporarily relieve the pain, though it’s entirely possible that was a placebo effect, but I can’t say it helped me heal any faster. I think it was better in a week, which is probably about the same amount of time it would have taken to heal anyway. And in my chiropractor’s defense, he also gave me perfectly sensible advice to ice the area, stay mobile but don’t strain it, and so on. Anyway, my point is it wasn’t any more effective than taking an NSAID would have been, and getting acupuncture is uncomfortable, time-consuming, and carries a risk of infection and/or injury from the needles.

– back in 2009 my entire family (me my husband and our then 2-year-old son) came down with H1N1 at once, just as the vaccine nontroversy was gathering steam. It was absolute hell. Luckily none of us needed to be hospitalized, but my husband and I were both incapacitated for nearly a week, and it was several more weeks before we fully recovered. We nearly had to cancel a trip to a family wedding because we weren’t sure we’d be allowed on the plane. So much for acquiring immunity “naturally.” I would have gotten the vaccine in a heartbeat if I’d had the chance.

I’d be interested to know exactly where these healthy people who use homeopathy as primary care live? My guess would be: they’re either wealthy people in countries where there’s easily accessible conventional medical care that keeps the general population healthy enough not to be a risk to the woo-lovers, or: they’re very isolated and don’t come into contact with a lot of foreign pathogens in their daily life.

Beamup…..Try Google….with an open mind. Type in “HOMEOPATHY”. Check out what the supporters have to say, not just what the other side has to say….Maybe there just might be two sides to the argument? While you’re at it, check out the incredible list of people who have chosen the modality over the years.

Also while you’re at it type into Google “106000 drugs”….reportedly the number of Americans who died from the “proper use” of conventional drugs in 2003(?). Now remember that this is the verified number of connected deaths, not the certainly much larger number of casualties from longer team usage. While you’re at it throw in the tens of thousands who die from non prescription drugs. Now throw in the amazing loss of life from “doctor supervised” medical errors, infections, malnutrition, etc. Might just be time to rethink the “overall” abilities of conventional care?

@ Edith Prickly: the “healthy people who use homeopathy as primary care” reside exclusively in the vivid imaginations of woo-meisters.

BTW: I would *never* point and laugh at one who has *reformed* after being inveigled into a single escapade by a canny proselytiser (Shame on him!) who used the foot-in-the-door techniques via chiro ( a/k/a PhysTher). It wasn’t your fault.

Also while you’re at it type into Google “106000 drugs”….reportedly the number of Americans who died from the “proper use” of conventional drugs in 2003(?). Now remember that this is the verified number of connected deaths, not the certainly much larger number of casualties from longer team usage. While you’re at it throw in the tens of thousands who die from non prescription drugs. Now throw in the amazing loss of life from “doctor supervised” medical errors, infections, malnutrition, etc.

… and compare that total to the number of lives saved by modern medicine.

What’s your point? Do you beleive that people tend to die younger than they did before medicine became evidence-based?

@David – from the Wikipedia entry on homeopathy:

“Homeopathy (pronunciation: i /ˌhoʊmiˈɒpəθi/; also spelled homoeopathy[1] or homœopathy) is a form of alternative medicine in which practitioners treat patients using highly diluted[2][3] preparations that are believed to cause healthy people to exhibit symptoms that are similar to those exhibited by the patient. The collective weight of scientific evidence has found homeopathy to be no more effective than a placebo.[2][3][4][5][6]

In the context of homeopathy, the term remedy is used to refer to a substance prepared with a particular procedure and intended for treating patients; it is not to be confused with the generally accepted use of the word, which means “a medicine or therapy that cures disease or relieves pain”.[7]
The basic principle of homeopathy, known as the “law of similars”, is “let like be cured by like.” It was first stated by German physician Samuel Hahnemann in 1796. His “law of similars” is taken on his word[8] as an unproven assertion, and is not a true law of nature based on the scientific method.[9] Homeopathic remedies are prepared by serial dilution with shaking by forceful striking on an elastic body, which homeopaths term succussion. Each dilution followed by succussion is assumed to increase the effectiveness. Homeopaths call this process potentization. Dilution often continues until none of the original substance remains.[10] Apart from the symptoms, homeopaths examine aspects of the patient’s physical and psychological state,[11] then homeopathic reference books known as repertories are consulted, and a remedy is selected based on the totality of symptoms.”

Now I am not a scientist or medical professional like a lot of the commenters here, but it seems to me that homeopathy is simply an outmoded, pre-scientific theory that really should have been abandoned sometime between the establishment of Pasteur’s germ theory and the discovery of antibiotics. I’ll concede it was less risky than most of the conventional medical treatments available in 1796 (bloodletting, purging, etc.) but that’s because it was basically ineffective. In the past 200-odd years, conventional medicine has become very effective. Homeopathy, on the other hand, is still useless and all the testimonials in the world from celebrities and royalty won’t change that.

David said: “”By the way, some of the healthiest populations in the world have Homeopathy as their primary care source.”

followed by:

“Homeopathy might well be more effective (bolding added), except for crisis and surgical situations.”

So now it’s only possibly more effective? You seemed so positive at first. You must be losing confidence in your woo.

Speaking of “triumphs” of New Age medicine, USA Today has a good feature story dealing with one of those “triumphs” – the return of preventable infectious diseases due to vaccine refusal. Fine article (it even quotes the Dark Lord of Vaccination, Paul Offit).
For the “it’s my body, screw the rest of you” types, there’s a nice anecdotal example of who’s placed at risk in these situations:

“Among the most vulnerable patients are children with cancer, including Ben Bredesen, 3½, who has acute leukemia. He was exposed to measles in March by another child at the Minneapolis hospital where he receives chemotherapy, says his mother, Laura Bredesen of Minneapolis. “I can’t tell you how much weight I lost, how sick you feel, checking your child at night to make sure he’s still breathing,” says Bredesen, noting that infections such as measles could kill her son. “You’re looking at every little thing as a symptom.”

Ben was lucky this time and didn’t develop measles. But he will remain vulnerable during the two years of cancer therapy ahead. “My kid is fighting for his life every single day,” Bredesen says. “There is no reason that he should have to fight even harder because other people aren’t vaccinating their kids.”

This is the kind of reporting needed to shake up the parents who are vulnerable to antivax nonsense. Quote them the extensive research rebutting antivax claims, sure – but powerful anecdotes like this are also valuable for influencing those who care not only about their own children but others as well.

@david

Scientific citations, please, for your position, not google.

You made the claim, you put up the citation, or we have to assume you are just lying.

“Alternative practitioners have a big advantage. They can lie to patients. I can’t.”

Has been added to my random quotes page and attributed to Dr. Steven Novella, M.D.

-Karl Withakay

…our amazingly unhealthy population…

Um! This is the one that is living longer with a better quality of life than at any time in history, right? Wow! Yes, we really need to do something about that – we’re dropping like flies.

David #44:
“I think….”

“I think….”

“I think….”

Yes, we know you think, though you’re not very good at it. It would be nice, however, if you would learn how to CITE!

Given how good animals are at hiding distress, I’ve always viewed the mechanism for animal acupuncture as rather straightforward. Fluffy quickly learns that the sanction for showing any distress is to get stabbed. Many times.

“Works like a charm, Doc!”

@ David

You might also consider an impressive list of wealthy and prominent people who have access to virtually any practitioner on the Planet, and who have opted for the modality (Including the long lived women of England’s Royal Family.)

Sorry, son. Being wealthy and prominent doesn’t guarantee that someone isn’t susceptible to being conned. Heck, even high intelligence (including scientific) doesn’t make that guarantee.

Humans are extremely good at fooling themselves. That’s why the scientific method exists and works — it’s a mechanism that helps us avoid that tendency to self-delusion. That’s why we want evidence from you, not references to the “wealthy and prominent.”

Look up “argument from authority” and “argument from popularity” — they’re both logical fallacies. They sound good, but really prove nothing. They’re just two more ways in which we fool ourselves.

Blasphemous, Given the cost of American care, and the sad levels of American health, am I really the one who needs to explain himself? How about CITING some proof that Fluoridation is safe over the longer term? Can you show me CITATIONS that prove that a vaccine won’t come back to haunt me in forty years?

if it is all smoke and mirrors it shouldn’t work on dogs, horses, and other animals but it does.

Oh no, not again this old canard.

Yeah, because after more than 6 millennia of domestication, we still have not established any form of relationship with our horses and dogs.
There is absolutely no way a domesticated animal could expect anything from its provider.
When it’s hungry, we feed it. When it’s thirty, we water it. When it’s dirty, we clean it (OK, sometimes). When it has thorns or parasites latched to its skin, we remove them. When it needs company, we pet it.
And when we forget, it will be looking for us.
But when it’s sick or in pain, and we do something to it, there is no way it may expect to be better, and start acting accordingly. After all, we just failed to provide for all its other needs, didn’t we?

And there are no way that the provider may be erroneously thinking “eh, you are going better!” after giving some magic water to his cherished doggy. Humans never do wishful thinking.

Yeah, my family just loses their dog. Old age and arthritis. I can give you some testimonials of placebo effects he (and us) demonstrated.

Jayk, Actually it appears s that rather than my sucking at research, it might be that you suck at reading? I asked for a good study that showed that a general population of reasonably healthy people with lower cholesterol outlived a similar group with higher cholesterol. You came back with some meta-analysis of sick people who are being treated with drugs. Additionally, I think it is arguable that rather than cholesterol reduction, some other statin induced benefits might have affected the result. Additionally I see nothing about overall life expectancy here.

@David: Keep moving goalposts, troll. You still haven’t provided a single scientific reason for your pseudoskepticism. Again I ask: Why are you here?

@David

type into Google “106000 drugs”….reportedly the number of Americans who died from the “proper use” of conventional drugs in 2003(?). Now remember that this is the verified number of connected deaths

That frequently repeated number is a bugbear of mine. It comes from this study.

Lazarou looked at studies of adverse drug reactions, mostly from the 60s and 70s, that included a total of 78 deaths out of 46,625 patients, and then extrapolated (with a little statistical manipulation) from these to the 33,125,492 total US hospital admissions in 1994 to come up with the 106,000 figure.

If you exclude studies from the 60s and 70s and include only those from the 80s and 90s there were only 5 deaths out of 11,376 patients, or 0.04%. The 106,000 figure is not in any sense a “verified number of connected deaths”.

And with David’s #55 post we get ‘shifting the goalposts’, and I get fallacy Bingo!! Do I get an extra prize since the ‘bingo’ fallacy came in a comment directed at me?

To answer David’s first question: Yes, you made the statement, so you are the one who needs to explain yourself. Easy.

David, YOU make the argument, YOU provide the proof. That’s how one debates an issue.
Otherwise you’re just giving me a headache-and my desk can’t take any more beating.

Anyone get “bingo” yet? Or is it sack time?

Given how good animals are at hiding distress, I’ve always viewed the mechanism for animal acupuncture as rather straightforward. Fluffy quickly learns that the sanction for showing any distress is to get stabbed. Many times.

This is frigging gold, made me laugh out loud. I think you’ve stumbled on the unifying theory of acupuncture: the body learns that being sick means getting stabbed, so it learns not to be sick anymore.

I’m using that.

I love David’s most recent tangent.

David: Homeopathy will fix everything!
Non-clueless posters: Where’s your evidence?
David: Find it yourself!
Non-clueless posters: Back up your own claims.
David: Um, er, FLUORIDATION IS BAD! Now you have to prove it isn’t.

Complete non sequitur in a transparent attempt to divert attention from how completely his foolish claims have been obliterated.

David,
I don’t personally have a problem with “inconvenient” thoughts. What you’ve done so far is come in scattershot with a bunch of comments that have been done to death and have been so far found to be without merit.
I’ll talk about one – you said “Additionally the average Homeopath can run circles around most conventional doctors regarding nutrition and other preventive issues.” Now, I have no doubt that some homeopaths know more than some doctors about nutrition. Knowledge varies from individual to individual.
But you said the average homeopath knows more than most doctors about nutrition. Why do you say this? Do homeopaths in training have to study more nutrition courses than doctors in training do? Has someone done a survey showing that on average homeopaths understand more about the current best research on nutrition than most doctors do?
Or is it the canard that doctors only know how to prescribe pills and set broken bones?
Now, to paraphrase Michael Vick I have no dog in this fight. If you have data that homeopaths know more about nutrition (backed by solid research) than doctors, please share. Likewise, if you have knowledge of any research on any of the topics you’ve brought up that agrees with your stated views, please share.

@Damien:

I’m glad I brightened somebody’s day today. Have fun with it!

Since no one else has commented on the actual study that was posted by a drive-by-troll above:
“Animal acupuncture: Acupunct Med 2011;29:21-26 doi:10.1136/aim.2010.002576 ”

I’ll give my two cents to see if we can have a real discussion about it. It actually does use objective diagnostics to make a case that acupuncture, when used with standard treatment, had a positive effect on reducing the recurrence of otitis in dogs.

What I immediately noticed was the small sample size (16/15), but I’ll admit that it could have actual implications in indicating efficacy of acupuncture. They even spelled out the mechanisms, but I’m not qualified to judge if they are real or fake mechanisms.

Given the ability of acupuncture to modulate neurotransmitters and opioid peptides, which can in turn modulate the immune system, the immune response to acupuncture also seems worth exploring.

More importantly, scientific medicine gave us long life, and long life gave us uncertainty and ennui.

It is ironic that it is because of the success of modern medicine that folks have the luxury of being able to complain about it.

I live in Canada, where health care is free and doctors have to treat you whether you have money or not.

I almost never make use of doctors, but a few weeks ago I sworded myself in the left hand and required five stitches across the base of my thumb. The doctor who treated me was very compassionate and very concerned with reducing my suffering, and his needlework was most artful. I can’t say the injury was a pleasant experience, and I’ve since learned that beer and razor sharp swords don’t mix, but the treatment I received was certainly a positive one.

@Scott: The results are pretty clear and significant, even if their sample group was far too small to make a clear determination. It gives the appearance that there was a real effect to adding acupuncture to standard veterinary care. I’m mostly just playing devil’s advocate, but I’m wondering how they managed to get such significant results.

David: I’m a lurker here, but I thought I’d respond to one of the things that you have said, namely that we should read about homeopathy with an open mind before coming to any conclusion.

What makes you think that we haven’t done this? I know that I have a (possibly unhealthy) interest in alternative medicine; this blog is only one of several similar ones that I read regularly. I’m sure I’m not alone here in this. I (and probably many others here too) think that homeopathy is ridiculous because I know about it, not because I don’t!

Do you know anything about homeopathy? How can you take seriously something so fundamentally opposed to everything that we have learned about the world in the past two hundred years, and which itself has remained essentially unchanged in that time when every area of science has changed out of all recognition? It isn’t scientists, or even medical doctors (not quite the same thing) that are frightened of new ideas!

Incidentally, I’ve been kept alive as a Type 1 diabetic by insulin for almost 40 years now. It would be nice if this could have been prevented, but to prevent something we need to know what causes it. Are homeopaths (or other alt-medical people) doing anything to answer this question? Citations would be nice!

how can such a study ever find a way to be linked to the original to make sure that researchers find both in a limited search?

Indeed, this is a major problem. SBM has a current post on exactly this topic:

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-value-of-replication/

As the example described there illustrates, even getting replications published can be very difficult. Which inevitably skews the literature. Definitely a hard problem to solve.

Ironically, CAM may well be less susceptible to this in some ways since they can twist ANYTHING around to claim that it’s positive. So the negative results actually show up, though you have to read carefully to realize that they’re negative (“Well looky there, random toothpick taps are just as good as acupuncture! They’re beneficial too!”)

Wintermute, I think you’d find that with the possible exception of Spain, widespread Fluoridation of water in Western Europe is history.

Britain also still flouodates its water. But, yes, many European nations have switched over to flouodating salt instead of water; I would have thought it would support your argument better if they stopped flouodating altogether rather than just switching to another vector, but I’m sure you can explain the error in my reasoning?

@ njd

What makes you think that we haven’t done this?

I can tell you what David’s (or any other woo-meister’s) answer to that is: Because we haven’t come to the same conclusions that he has. If we don’t know that homeopathy works and is the best thing ever, then it’s because we’re ignorant — we haven’t read the right things or, if we did read them, our minds were closed.

In the case of the woo-meisters, it comes from a complete lack of self-doubt. The idea that they might be wrong is completely incomprehensible, so everyone else must be wrong. It’s the same “reasoning” that gives us the Pharma-Shill Gambit. “You won’t acknowledge my Truth, so you must be in the pay of Big Pharma.”

Science, of course, starts from the premise that we can be (and frequently are) wrong, so we develop mechanisms like the scientific process to fix that.

From the article:
“Yet while France was ranked No. 1 in health-care effectiveness and other major measures, the United States ranked 37th, near the bottom of all industrialized countries”

This ranks among my most hated statistics that people keep trotting out and I’d love to see it get a heaping of respectful insolence.

It is always used to imply that health outcomes in the US are poor. In reality, the rating was based on factors such as whether the wealthy paid a higher share of healthcare costs. You can argue whether or not that is a good thing, but it has very little to do with how well the healthcare services are performed.

In essence, the study ranked healthcare systems based on how close they were to the French system. Not surprisingly, France ended up #1 and the US was very different. Also, a subsection of the study found that patient satisfaction with the healthcare system was highest in the US.

Boring troll – seems like you are advocating a more socialized form of medicine, moving to a single payer system, etc – since many of the countries above us provide greater access to health care than the US (through single-payer government programs).

None of the countries above us on that list are doing anything differently when it comes to the actual practice of medicine on an individual level – they are, in fact, offering greater access.

So, what’s the problem with that again?

A great section from the troll’s quoted reference:

The current proposals for U.S. health care reform focus mostly on extending insurance coverage, decreasing the growth of costs through improved efficiency, and expanding prevention and wellness programs. The policy debate has been overwhelmingly centered on the first two of these elements. Achieving universal insurance coverage in the United States would protect households against undue financial burdens at the same time that it was saving an estimated 18,000 to 44,000 lives.4,5 However, narrowing the gap in health outcomes between the United States and other high-income countries or even slowing its descent in the rankings would require much more than insurance expansion. Given the vast number of preventable deaths associated with smoking (465,000 per year), hypertension (395,000), obesity (216,000), physical inactivity (191,000), high blood glucose levels (190,000), high levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (113,000), and other dietary risk factors, there are huge opportunities to enact policies that could make a substantial difference in health system performance — and in the population’s health.4 More investments that are targeted at promoting proven strategies — including tobacco taxation and smoking-cessation programs, screening and treatment for high cholesterol and blood pressure, banning of trans fat, creating incentives for people to engage in physical activity, and subsidizing the cost of consumption of n–3 fatty acids — could dramatically reduce mortality and enhance the performance of the U.S. health care system.

Again troll – how is this in any way a damning statement against modern medicine? Care to elaborate?

And you get that from your source how? Seems to me that it is all about the right combination of coverage, prevention and wellness – and lots of countries do it better than us, so we need to do better.

Again, what’s your point? You really don’t seem to have one here, since modern medical practice encapsulates more than what you say it does….And since many countries with better outcomes provide MORE health care to a greater percentage of the population than we do (like Scandanavian countries, for example) – you’re last point about diminishing returns is a bunch of hooey too.

David:

Well we can start with all those unintentional hundreds of thousands of annual deaths from conventional medicine and work from there

Green curry contains coconut milk. That’s about as closely related to homeopathy’s effectiveness as your statement.

Interestingly though, in spite of the fact that good tests for the Homeopathic remedies are almost impossible for non Homeopaths to set up, I have never seen a study where the homeopathic remedy didn’t at least slightly outperform the placebo.

Name five.

BECAUSE ACCORDING TO CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE HOMEOPATHIC REMEDIES ARE PLACEBO

All caps stupid troll is trolling.

Let me fix it for you:

BECAUSE ACCORDING TO CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE, PHYSICS, CHEMISTRY, PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY, GEOLOGY, ENGINEERING, RADIOLOGY, AUTOMOBILITRY, HOMEOPATHIC REMEDIES ARE PLACEBO!

The only people that think homeopathy can have any effect beyond placebo are those like yourself, lying sacks of crap that troll science threads with absolutely no education or capability.

@ David

… all those unintentional hundreds of thousands of annual deaths from conventional medicine …

It was pointed out above that your “statistic” was entirely bogus. Did you think that removing the actual number made it any more believable?

BECAUSE ACCORDING TO CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE HOMEOPATHIC REMEDIES ARE PLACEBO

Shouting doesn’t make something true. Evidence is how we know something is true or not. The evidence has repeatedly shown that homeopathy is no better than placebo. That’s above and beyond the fact that any of the explanations of how homeopathy is supposed to work fly in the face of everything we know about chemistry and physics.

Explain this, if you will. How is it that water can “remember” the active ingredient most recently put in, but it “forgets” all the other (literal) shit that was in it before? By what physical mechanism does dilution make a potion stronger? Physics and chemistry (not conventional medicine) tell us that these things aren’t possible — so how do they work?

Jayk, Hmmm… Lemme see now: Googled “famous people who have used Homeopathy” Many many names, among those listed:

Mother Teresa, Michael Caine, David Beckham, Boris Becker, The Royal Family, A number of Presidents Including Lincoln, Gandhi, Mark Hanna, Tony Blair, Disraeli, Douglas Fairbanks, Susan B. Anthony, Charles Dickens, GB Shaw, John D. Rockefeller, Henry James, William and Charles Mayo, Brian Josephson (Nobel Laureate in Physics), Charles Darwin, Marlene Dietrich, Chopin, Pete Townsend, Jackson Pollock, Napoleon, several Popes, and of course John Wayne.

Quite a collection of “sacks”!

Interesting that on a “science” site that almost nobody seems to have a shred of curiosity about the “other side”.

Name as many people as you want David, we’ll still be waiting around for your evidence for a long time.

LOL – too funny.

Here you go, you answer the litany of questions that have been posed directly to yourself by others here – including your own educational background and occupation, and maybe I’ll think about answering yours.

And where did I ever say “more medicine & more tests?” See, I didn’t – I said “health care” learn the difference moron.

Art K, the 106,000 sticks around with good reason. Those numbers have legs in spite of what some poster says. Not much that I can find to seriously refute them. How about the other obscene numbers like medical errors, bedsores, malnutrition, death and injury from non prescription drugs, etc.?

Here you go, you answer the litany of questions that have been posed directly to yourself by others here – including your own educational background and occupation, and maybe I’ll think about answering yours.

Hey! There’s me up on the Facebook link!

Hey – not here to fight with y’all today – but this article was sent to me as an “Oh Yeah!” and I wondered if you were up on it. Glad to see you are.

One word about France. I lived there for a while and quackery does run pretty rampant there – I hear 40% of the population uses homeopathy – and I saw all kinds of things I couldn’t explain at the time. Mind you, I wasn’t into quackery or cultism then, so it was just stuff that didn’t make sense to me, or fit my image of a modern country:

Kids with their hair falling out, lots of people with what appeared to be polio, and other oddities.

Some of these were explained to me as the result of centuries of inbreeding in walled-in villages, but whatever it was, it creeped me out and caused me a few sleepless nights, wondering, if I should ever need medical care, would I get it there?

I told you my mother-in-law was killed by a homeopath. And then he, and my wife, went on to kill two more people before the medical authorities listened to me and put the quack out of business. I still can’t tell you for sure what’s going on over there, but honestly, I don’t think any of us anti-quack types know for sure.

Y’all stay up,

CMC

Art K, the 106,000 sticks around with good reason. Those numbers have legs in spite of what some poster says.

There you are with the argument from popularity again. The fact that something “has legs” doesn’t make it true.

“Some poster” pointed out that the method used to derive that statistic was seriously flawed. The original data was cherry-picked (they ignored other years that would have produced very different results.) Hospital conditions in the 60s and 70s were different from those in the 80s and 90s (when the “study” was done) and those are even different from conditions today. Taking data from the 60s and 70s and trying to extrapolate that to 2011 is ridiculous.

I’m not enough of a statistician to effectively critique the study, but the fact that their 95% CI for fatal ADRs runs from 0.23% to 0.41% makes me wonder about the robustness of their statistics.

@Uglyhip:

If a large and rigorous study that focused solely on treatment while ignoring patient interaction and “individualization” showed that some alternative method beat placebo, people like Orac would naturally express confusion and inqiure whether the study was flawed. How many alties would do the same thing?

Because is their positition were consistent, they would have to. They would have to say, “That doesn’t make any sense, we all know that our system requires individualization of a sort that doesn’t show up in tests!”

Ah, but they have an answer for that! Individualization is needed, with a few exceptions. This gives them a lovely “heads I win, tails it’s a tie” situation: positive outcomes of a non-individualized trial are the exceptions which count as proof that their modality works, while negative outcomes can be dismissed because they weren’t individualized.

@David

Beamup…..Try Google….with an open mind. Type in “HOMEOPATHY”.

If the Internet and Google existed hundreds of years ago, you’d have been able to find plenty of people extolling the health benefits of bloodletting.

Additionally I think there’s a pretty good leap of faith with the high cholesterol/heart disease connection. Is the cholesterol the cause? Maybe it’s just a symptom? Better yet maybe it’s an attempt by the body to heal itself?

High cholesterol is associated with atherosclerosis, and cholesterol is found in atheromatous plaque, making the theory much more than a leap of faith. Further, high blood cholesterol is associated with a high cholesterol diet, and changing the diet lowers blood cholesterol. If it was a symptom or the body’s attempt at healing itself then dietary changes would have no effect.

My bad, a little under the weather today.

Larry

My bad, a little under the weather today.

I just thought you attended the Oswald Bates school of phonics.

@ David: I hope you won’t mind a question from a curious observer- which authors, researchers, practitioners, websites, or teachers do you consider to be most influencial in the formation of your own point of view about health and healthcare? Are there any websites you can recommend to those who might wish to understand your position more clearly? Thanks.

To a large degree, the medical infrastructure we have today was designed with infectious agents in mind. Physician training and practices, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and health insurance all were built around the model of running tests on sick patients to determine which drug or surgical procedure would best deal with some discrete offending agent. The system works very well for that original purpose, against even the most challenging of these agents

Hunh?

Yeah, we’re so bad at treating chronic conditions that my father, who was overweight nearly his entire adult life, had type 2 diabetes, and had two heart attacks, the first at age 60, passed away at age 91 last year. His quality of life was just fine.

–as the taming of the AIDS virus attests.

What!? We’ve “tamed” AIDS? Where was I when the news release came out?

Amazing and ironic that the art of the con – ingratiate yourself with the “mark” – is now praised as a form of treatment!

I still do subscribe to The Atlantic and will be interested to read the article. Meanwhile, Orac, I can’t recall at the moment: Do you have particular objections to Ornish’s diet recommendations themselves, as opposed to his claims for them?

Heck, I suspect we’d be using MRIs to measure shoe sizes if we poured that much into the existing system.

Ha! I’m old enough to remember having my feet fluoroscoped in the Buster Brown shoe store more than once!

Chris, RE: India

I think India is a challenging country to use as comparison for, well, anything. They have some *very* well education portions of the population, and then, they have portions of the population that never even go to kindergarten. And these are both significant portions of the population. I’ve read accounts of adults who didn’t even know that we’ve been to space (and India has their own space program), or a 7 year old that didn’t know what the difference between green and purple, even in his own language (and he wasn’t color blind).

So to claim that India endorses homeopathy, a qualifier as to which segment of the population follows homeopathy needs to be attached.

Was Elizabeth Blackburn actually advocating alt-med, or was her statement taken out of context and used by the author to advance his own opinion?

The placebo effect works. It can be induced by “alternative” medicine. Or if you don’t like that option there are others. Like a visit to an AMA certified doctor. What exactly is the problem?

I may be late to comment here, but let me chime in with an anecdote of my own. When I was about 8, I had really bad asthma. I think at one point I was in the hospital about once a month. I was pumped to the gills with steroids, and it was pretty rough on me. So in desperation, my mom turned to alternative medicines.

I think we tried it all: accupuncture, herbal medicine, faith healers, healing massage, air purifiers, and different forms of chinese medicine, including ground up dried lizards, and a topical treatment that severley burned a small portion of my back. We drew the line when someone suggested drinking the blood of a black dog, however.

Only one treatment was successful in giving me relief from asthma. One day my parents decided to bring me from our small town in the Philippines to the capital Manila, and seek a specialist. The good doctor prescribed what was by then becoming pretty common, the albuterol inhaler. I thought it was a miracle; one puff, and I could breathe again.

To this day, I can function without breathing issues thanks to a regular regimen of inhaled steroids (way more effective than the tablets that I took as a kid), and the occasional puff of albuterol when I feel wheezy. So please excuse me if I trust science-based medicine; and I won’t buy whatever snake oil is being peddled by the alternative medicine proponents.

The placebo effect works. It can be induced by “alternative” medicine. […] What exactly is the problem?

The problem is that you can get the placebo effect for a lot less cost than most of these “alternatives”, for starters. Then there’s the issue that by using PlaceboCare folks may skip MoreEffectiveCare, and thereby fare more poorly than they need to.

(That’s setting aside the ethical question of whether it’s okay to bamboozle your patients.)

— Steve

Since no-one else has brought it up, I think it’s worth bringing up — given that this David fellow keeps trying to “prove” how much better homeopathy is through the number of deaths supposedly caused by medical malpractice/failure within the conventional system.

Not ONLY is this a logical fallacy (“[x] is bad therefore [y] must be good” does not necessarily follow), it also begs the question: how many people die because of a reliance on homeopathy, not so much as an absolute number, but as a percentage of those who use homeopathy for primary care? Because that is the only real way that one could legitimately compare safety and efficacy between the two systems.

And that is where yet another difference between real medicine and alt-med becomes apparent:

– The mainstream medical system keeps patient records which are accessible for study; even if it is difficult and/or the only cited study is extremely flawed, it is at least theoretically possible to work out how many people are seriously injured by medical mistakes, neglect, or side effects within this system.

– The alt-med system is under no obligation to keep accurate records, record statistics, or do patient follow-ups, and so far as I can see, the don’t do it. So in response to the question “how many people are injured?” the only possible answer is “nobody knows and nobody can know, there aren’t any records.”

Anyone who thinks the latter system is preferable is insane.

David @105:
1) Most of those people are dead; at least a couple of them died of cancer, so homeopathy didn’t actually work for them, did it?
2) Which Mark Hanna? Google brings up at least a dozen of them.
3) I bet Tony Blair doesn’t use homeopathy to control his tachycardia.

One notes that “teapartydoc” is unable to actually refute anything in this post with, oh, you know, facts, evidence, or science.

Speaking personally, I’d rather listen to or read Orac pontificate all day than have as brief an exposure to fact-impaired drive-by trolls such as the one @141.

Just sayin’.

God made the Earth and everything therein for Man.

Here’s a song for you, Chuck.

Chuck: “Ever get a bad burn? As in 2d Degree? Hurts. Doesn’t it. Leaves a rude scare too…If your experience is the same as mine, the pain will dissipate in about 20 minutes (with homeopathy). AND there will be little, if any, scar tissue.”

Um, Chuck? Superficial second-degree burns typically don’t cause scarring even if you do nothing to them.

I’m sure you’d agree that God gave you brains, with the intent that you’d use them.

TO: Dangerous Bacon
RE: No Damage from Burns

Yeah….Right….

Tha’s why I’ve got all these scars on my hands and arms from playing with fire as a young boy.

Tell us another one, Bacon…..

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out….]
P.S. Why is it that the skeptics all seem to be atheists?

Also: Holy crap, cantharis is used in the treatment of a lot of things. Sunburn, gangrene, bloody stools, kidney pains, gallstones, excessive urination, insufficient urination, sudden loss of conciousness, death-like appearance, pleurisy, haemmoraging…

http://abchomeopathy.com/r.php/Canth

I’d be fascinated to see someone have a gallstone confirmed by ultrasound, take a handful of homeopathic pills, and then have another ultrasound to see what happened to the gallstone.

That would be a fair test, right?

I’ll confess I’m unwilling to pay $7 for something that hasn’t been demonstrated to work, and I know enough about how easy it is for me to fool myself that I wouldn’t believe the results of such an unblinded demonstration with an n of 1.

Also, I’m not about to go out and burn myself just to do this test.

If it does work reliably, then there should be no problem with homeopaths demonstrating that burns treated with pills that were shown a photograph of ground-up insects heal quicker and more cleanly than burns that are not so treated, right? After all, the makers of Neosporin managed to demonstrate that very thing. How is it that they manage to use science and statistics while homeopaths are limited to anecdotes? Why can’t they generate a series of anecdotes in a controlled setting, and then track how many of these anecdotes are positive or negative, and statistically analyse them?

P.S. I’ve GOT ‘blanks’. I make my own homeopathic materia medica on occasion. I’ll send you some.

And by the way, speaking of the ‘placebo effect’, I’m familiar with in in various venues otherer then homeopathy. HOWEVER…..

I have gout. A birthday ‘gift’ from my Father, God rest his soul. The attacks are usually triggered by stress. However, the same homeopathic materia medica doesn’t always provide the cure.

There are 46 materia medica known to treat gout. The trick is to recognize other symptoms that one is experiencing.

Case in point…..

An attack in January of 2007 would not respond to a homeopathic I used in an attack from 2003. A couple of painful days later, I noticed that I was taking very hot showers and pouring hot water over my limbs. It felt GREAT. I recognized the symptom of ‘chills’. Looking up ‘gout’ with ‘chills’, I found three materia medica. I had two of them on hand in my collection. I took the one that had even more symptoms that matched what I was experiencing. Within 15 minutes the sensation of being crucified with 16-penny nails was GONE.

Three months later, I had another attack. This time, neither of the two previous cures would work. So, I spent another 24 hours in a very interesting condition. The next morning, whilte shaving and brushing my teeth, I noticed that my tongue looked like someone had painted it with whitewash. Go to the book. Cross reference ‘gout’ and ‘heavily coated white tongue’ and found a third materia medica. Took it and 15 minutes later, vast relief.

So…..tell US…..

…..how is it that the famous ‘placebo effect’ wasn’t working if I should be able to take blanks and get the relief from the pain as if someone is driving nails into the knuckle behind my big toe? But if I have a good cross-fix on other symptoms I get relief?

Come on….use the ‘brain’ God gave you…..

whilte shaving and brushing my teeth, I noticed that my tongue looked like someone had painted it with whitewash.

Just out of curiousity, what colour toothpaste do you use?

@141: I would greatly enjoy “sitting next to the author of this piece in the surgery lounge” and listening to him (though he’d wonder what *I* was doing there!). My only complaint to him is that he doesn’t write *enough*, though, sadly, like the rest of us (certain trolls excluded, of course), he has to earn a living instead of blogging all day.

Come on….use the ‘brain’ God gave you…..

I do. A lot. I like to think that’s the reason I pick modern medicine rather than antique, obsolete quackery… because the measured results are so vastly greater and better, and because I don’t have to shut off that brain in order to accept treatment.

— Steve

TO: Luna_the_Cat
RE: Wrong

Chuck, in your description of finding homeopathic treatments for gout, you mention things like “after a couple of days…” and “another 24 hours…”. I would just like to point out that acute attacks of gout left completely untreated tend to resolve in a few days to a week. — Luna_the_Cat

The 2003 attack lasted several months, silly cat. NOTHING in my homeopathic kit, nor anything else, would relieve it.

Where’s the ‘placebo effect’ in THAT?

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Skeptics are the latter-day Flat Earth Society]

The placebo effect isn’t just thinking your symptoms improve. It’s also your symptoms actually improving and you attributing it to the treatment, when it would have happened anyway.

As others have pointed out: You have a gout attack. You take various treatments until it goes away. You declare victory for whatever treatment you were taking at the time.

The fact that sometimes the symptoms remain, regardless of what treatments you take is strongly indicative that they actually provide no relief.

Once again, why is there no clinical evidence that homeopathic remedies have a measurable effect?

The 2003 attack lasted several months, silly cat. NOTHING in my homeopathic kit, nor anything else, would relieve it.

Isn’t that good evidence that homeopathy doesn’t work?

Gout attacks can last from hours to months, but eventually the gout will subside. You are trying different remedies throughout the attack and assume the one you are using when the attack ends is the effective one. The next time you have an attack, that remedy doesn’t work, so you have to figure out which remedy will work for this attack, and try different remedies until one works. You assume this remedy was effective. But it doesn’t immediately end the next attack so you try different remedies until one works…

Everything you have described about this is consistent with that scenario: attacks of differing duration, no single remedy works, the remedy that ended the last attack doesn’t work for the next attack etc.

Come on….use the ‘brain’ God gave you…..

Quite.

K –

“The analgesic action of the homeopathic preparation Cantharis in the treatment of minor burns was assessed in a series of 34 patients. Under double blind conditions no statistically significant difference was found between Cantharis and a placebo.”

BUT BUT BUT – just yesterday, David told us that…

I have never seen a study where the homeopathic remedy didn’t at least slightly outperform the placebo.

Man, are you saying he was wrong?

Man, are you saying he was wrong?

Certainly looks that way.
“The average percentage reduction in pain between the first and last recordings was 61% in the Cantharis group and 66% in the placebo group.”

I have a tiger repelling rock to sell to Chuck, and I have a special running, today only. Why should Chuck buy a tiger repelling rock? Well, ever since I started carrying it I’ve never been attacked by a tiger.

Have you seen that viral video where the tiger is trying to eat the small tot behind safety glass? That child did not have my rock.

Proof positive Chuck should buy my rock!

TO: ArtK
RE: The Cold Water Treatment

I’ve burned myself and treated with cold water. Guess what? The pain went away in about 20 minutes. So, did I somehow ingest a homeopathic remedy, or is that pain something that just self-limits after about 20 minutes? — ArtK

While working in the kitchen of my church preparing a meal for about 100 people attending an Alpha Course program, someone took a roasting pan out of the oven and put it in front of me to serve from without telling me it was right out of the oven. I made the mistake of picking it up with my bare hands. The expletives I uttered were involuntary and caused a hush in the kitchen.

I didn’t have my cantharis with me. I spent the next two hours with my hand in a pot of ice water.

Ever time I took it out, the intense pain returned within a matter of minutes. That’s for the WHOLE TWO HOURS. All the way on the drive home the pain was with me.

When I got home I took the cantharis and, in 15 minutes, the pain was gone. There are STILL some faint scars from where the blisters formed.

Hope that helps….

….but I have SERIOUS doubts.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Life is tough. It’s tougher if you’re stupid. — John Wayne]

TO: sophia8
RE: Homeopathy v. Cancer

Most of those people are dead; at least a couple of them died of cancer, so homeopathy didn’t actually work for them, did it? — sophia8

Homeopathy has it’s uses. However, I’m not familiar with any homeopathic materia medica that is useful against cancer. Works rather will with viral infections in many cases, e.g., flues, viral colitis, etc. I’ve also found it works well in treating acute gout attacks.

RE: Cancer Cure

If you REALLY want to find an inexpensive and effective cure for cancer, I suggest you look into pawpaw.

I saw it kill an aggressive squamous carcinoma of the skin on the former president of my garden club. Not that she’s ‘former’ because she’s dead. Rather because I’M now the president.

Two years ago at a monthly meeting of the club she pointed out the cancer on her arm to me. She said she’d had such before and they always had to be surgically removed. It takes a LONG time for her to heal from such. I suggested she look into pawpaw. She got some and began taking it.

The next monthly meeting, she pointed to the cancer and it was GONE! She said that within 24 hours of taking the pawpaw, the insane itching went away. Then, over the course of the next few weeks she watched the cancer wither and slough off.

The active agent was discovered by researchers at Purdue U. back in 1997. It was found to kill cancerous cells while leaving healthy cells alone. The Big Pharms have been trying to synthesize the agent since then, but have failed miserably.

Why synthesize? Because you can’t patent a naturally occurring substance and make a billion bucks off it.

Pawpaw is available on-line. However, if you have a tree nearby—it grows in North America—just go out to it, collect some leaves, dry them out, grind them up into a powder, encapsulate it and take it four times a day.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Life is good, if you know how to live it.]

Chuck:

Expectations matter. The burns are likely of different intensity and depth (you note that the one you had trouble with despite the cold water made you swear aloud; you said nothing similar about the ones that resolved quickly).

More to the point, why should a random stranger (which is what we are to you?) believe your not-well-controlled anecdotes over lots of other studies?

Also, I have no intention of burning myself regularly in order to test any remedy, homeopathic or otherwise. You might want to consult someone about ways to reduce the number of burns, because you can’t count on them all being superficial. (It may be as simple as using different pot holders, or it may mean rearranging your kitchen, slowing down, and assuming things are hot unless proven otherwise.)

TO: Luna_the_Cat
RE: Underlying Cause

Chuck, if you have acute attacks of gout that last for months, you need real treatment of the underlying causes of gout. — Luna_the_Cat

The ‘underlying cause’ of my attacks, as I stated earlier, are ‘stress’. Just like my Father, God rest his soul. His worst attack was the day he retired from the Air Force.

My worst attack, the 2003 event, was when we pulled up our roots from Denver and moved to Pueblo in order to take care of the distaff’s aging parents.

I tried homeopathy. I tried drinking lots of black cherry juice. I tried everything I could come up with, short of going to the GP for shots and other forms of AMA-sanctioned voodoo.

NOTHING worked.

Eventually, it did go away. But now my foot clicks when I walk. I’ll probably have to have a big-toe replacement in due time. But I doubt if Obamacare will provide for that.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. Do Luna_Cats have lunatics?

TO: Vicki
RE: Why Take Advice

More to the point, why should a random stranger (which is what we are to you?) believe your not-well-controlled anecdotes over lots of other studies? — Vicki

I’m not offering so much advice as I am asking people to test it for themselves.

However, the more I talk to skeptics about this, the more a body of evidence builds up that skeptics don’t have the natural curiosity to test things for themselves. They ‘why’ of THAT is a more interesting subject than the ‘why’ you propose.

I guess skeptics only listen to the various ‘priests’ that agree with their world-view, be they medical or economic or whathaveyou. To step outside of the ‘box’ would be tantamount to ‘anathema’.

It’s sad, when you think of it. Most skeptics seem to be rather intelligent people, but they just can’t quite bring themselves to the point that they’ll actually….you know….QUESTION AUTHORITY. Why IS that?

It’s a SIMPLE test. Anyone can do it. And what they might learn could improve their life. However, it could also destroy their carefully crafted world-view. And maybe there’s more danger in that then they care to chance.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear. — Ralph Waldo Emerson]

This tiger repelling rock I have should be tested, Chuck, and since you’re so open minded about the efficacy of unproven and unprovable “homeopathy” I think you should be the one to go into the tiger enclosure and make sure it works. What night would be good for you so I can pencil in the video guy?

Chuck – every single one of your snide little comments can be applied directly back to yourself. You do realize that if homeopathy really worked, it would have to violate the laws of physics, right?

And, if water has a “memory” why does it just remember the so-called solution & not all of the other garbage (and excrement) that has been in it?

And there is a difference between being curious about the world around us & embracing the fantastic. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – does homeopathy have that? Hell no.

I don’t need to test for myself that jumping off a building it bad for my well-being, just like I know that drinking water isn’t going to cure cancer either.

TO: Lawrence
RE: The ‘Laws’ of Physics

You do realize that if homeopathy really worked, it would have to violate the laws of physics, right? — Lawrence

Heck…..the ‘Laws’ of Physics get re-written every year or so….as we learn something new.

Are you suggesting that Science is ‘static’?

You sound like the Roman Catholic church of the Middle Ages, thinking the Earth is the center of the Universe and the Sun orbits around it.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Science is Truth. Don’t be confused by facts.]

TO: TBruce
RE: Yeah….

The reason that skeptics are skeptical about “testing things for themselves” is that the easist person to fool is one’s self. Double-blind crossover studies aren’t just make-work projects, after all. — TBruce

….Right….

Then ‘skeptics’ must be the most self-deluded people I’ve ever encountered. Perhaps something like those people who put a ‘No Solicitors’ sign on the door of their houses. Why? Because they’re the ones most afraid they’ll buy whatever someone who bangs on their door will offer.

Do your own ‘double-blind’ test, if you wish. Doesn’t matter to me whether or not you make ANY test. You’re the one who ‘suffers’. And, pays through the nose for all kinds of government approved drugs.

Very interesting when all those drugs for the really bad things are ‘disappearing’ under Obamacare.

What you gonna do when Big-C come for you? And the government won’t allow the necessary treatment.

Not that homeopathy has anything for cancer. I’ve not seen it. But there are other things out there….

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[I HOPE you’re all enjoying the CHANGE.]

You actually TRUST the government?

That study was carried out by doctors in the UK. Are you seriously suggesting that they conspired to produce a fake study that made it look as if Cantharis didn’t work?

As for “thinking outside the box” and “the lack of an inquisitive mind”, I experimented with homeopathy years ago (though it’s embarrassing to admit that here). I even made my own remedies, diluting and succussing for hours, just out of curiosity. It didn’t work, and I lost interest. Real science and medicine are far more interesting and rewarding.

TO: All
RE: Lawrence

Nice playing with you Chuck – always interesting to poke the new troll. — Lawrence

Typical. When they can’t win the ‘debate’, they start calling you names.

Reminds me of the Lawyers Rule….

[1] If the Law is against you, argue the facts.
[2] If the facts are against you, argue the Law.
[3] If the Law and the facts are against you, call the other side names.

The Official Rules: A Compendium of Truths and Laws for Living

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. The ‘facts’ is that skeptics—like Lawrence and others here—don’t seem to have what it takes to look for themselves.

[To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science. — Albert Einstein]

As the author of the Atlantic article that has Orac and this crowd so hot and bothered, let me share a few observations and thoughts that I suspect will be completely lost on you. First, it’s interesting that all of you are deeply confident you know so much more than the dozens of highly credentialed, highly regarded physician-researchers I interviewed at several of the world’s most renowned medical centers and academies. (I only quoted a portion of these interviews in my article, due to space limitations. And let me anticipate Orac’s claim that I misquoted or distorted or spun or quoted out of context, as was his claim with my Ioannidis article, by pointing out that such claims reveal a deep ignorance of the fact-checking process that goes on at most well-regarded magazines, and especially at The Atlantic. Every single person quoted had an opportunity to correct the record ahead of time–as did Ioannidis, by the way.) These top scientists almost to a person agreed with my four main points: Most mainstream drugs don’t help most patients much with chronic, complex disease; alternative treatments don’t work better than placebo; alternative practitioners do a better job on average than mainstream physicians in investing time and effort with patients to get them to adopt healthier lifestyles and have better attitudes about health; and these lifestyle and attitude changes can significantly reduce the risk of complex, chronic disease as well as relieve the hard-to-treat pain and discomfort of many different disorders. All of these points are backed up by mainstream studies, aren’t even all that controversial, and, as I say, are endorsed by physician-researchers whose credentials and reputations are, well, let’s be charitable and say “at least as solid as,” those of Orac. (I happen to agree that the Nobel Prize or any other credential or affiliation doesn’t confer a monopoly on insight or the truth, but on the other hand it’s genuinely shocking and appalling to me to see the combined word of so many highly regarded people dismissed with a wave of the hand.) Frankly, the unwillingness of Orac and this crowd to consider for a moment the possibility that there may be some aspect of alternative medicine other than any direct physical action from its core treatments that might be helpful to many patients, especially in light of all the evidence and widespread, highly informed opinion that this is so, perfectly embodies everything that science is supposed to oppose: closed-mindedness, deep bias, hostility to disagreement, reckless disregard for reason and evidence that don’t support a favored conclusion, and a total lack of humility with regard to what one knows for sure. What you are defending here isn’t science, folks–it’s what I call “scienceology,” a quasi-religious faith in a set of closely held beliefs that are dressed up in the trappings of science and kept immune to any counter-evidence or -opinion. When a person genuinely operating in the true spirit of science hears a counter-argument or counter-evidence, he or she thinks, “Hmmm, let me consider this carefully to see if I need to rethink or modify my position”; when a scienceologist hears a counter-argument or counter-evidence, he or she thinks, “Hmmm, what’s the best way to viciously trash this so I can continue to believe in what I absolutely know to be true?” Which one applies to you, would you say? — David H. Freedman

Chuck – you are a funny little diversion. There is an old saying, “keep an open mind, but no so open as to let your brain fall out.”

The ludicrous nature of homeopathic claims are enough to generate skepticism – and the fact that studies have shown it to be no better than simple placebo only heightens it.

From the Gout information I was able to dig up from a simple google search, you could have saved yourself from months of agony with some pretty simple OTC solutions – or a single trip to an actual doctor.

TO: novalox
RE: Missing the ‘Point’?

Citations for your viewpoints? novalox

The ‘citation’ is what you write yourself. AFTER you take the proposed ‘test’ and discover for yourself.

Hope that helps.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[For more information, please re-read this post.]

…Let me just add, the conclusion I came to regarding back surgery for certain types of back pain was that chiropracty works just as well as the surgery, because neither works.

And, Chuck, quit yawping about how people here don’t like facts, and demonstrate that you are capable of understanding the facts that have been presented to you — or at least capable of discussing them sensibly — and trust me, you will get a much nicer reception. Precious quotations at the end of every post do not have sufficient value to replace engaging with what is being said to you.

I kind of hope Chuck stays around. He’s a lot more entertaining than the ugh troll (step up your game, augustine!). In fact, I would say he is superior since he actually takes up a positivist stance, whereas the ugh troll is a medical nihilist.

And his complete lack of irony regarding his little quotes at the conclusion of his posts… simply priceless.

Oh, and here’s a direct inquiry for Chuck:

Kindly provide citations to:
– reliable evidence with regards to your claims about the AMA/US federal gov’t health recommendations & subsequent corrections
– peer-reviewed papers proving your claim that the laws of physics are so reliably re-written. Last I checked, the laws of conservation of matter & energy still apply, and it is primarily these laws which dictate the physical impossibility of homeopathy

TO: Luna_the_Cat
RE: Missing the ‘Point’, Too

And, Chuck, quit yawping about how people here don’t like facts, and demonstrate that you are capable of understanding the facts that have been presented to you. — Luna_the_Cat

Where did I say any such think? Indeed. I did not.

I’m asking people to TEST facts for themselves.

Why you can’t quite grasp that, and now are slipping into ad hom mode is quite an interesting thought.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out….skeptics can’t ‘think’ for themselves…..]

Actually, I love the fact that he can post a pro-education quote, followed by an anti-education quote in subsequent messages. He also is a conspiracy theorist & definitely more interesting than a number of our resident trolls. If he does hang around, should make for some interesting banter.

TO: All
RE: Heliantus

Like, totally rewritten and turned upside-down? — Heliantus

Welcome to the comedy of the absurd. Or maybe someone hasn’t been through college physics just yet.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Essay Exam Question: Define the Universe. Give two examples.]

@chuck

So I see that you are unwilling to put up citations for your views.

You made the claim, you provide the evidence.

~@wintermute — I like that, that’s quite clever. 🙂

No, it’s incredibly basic. But it does raise the question of why homeopathy doesn’t work for me, but it does work (sometimes) for you.

Care to take a stab at that?

(And Neuromancer was my favourite book, as a teenager. The ‘nym has kind of stuck, though)

Time for another fallacy bingo count-up?

Maybe next time I run a similar test, I should just have the one set of pills, and my sole criteria for efficacy should be does my headache stop before the heat death of the universe?

I bet, in that case, I’d discover that homeopathy “works”.

@wintermute
“…but it does work (sometimes) for you.”

Huh? Were you thinking you were responding to Chuck? I complimented your experiment design and ‘nym, and I can assure you that homeopathy has never worked for me.

Heck…..the ‘Laws’ of Physics get re-written every year or so….as we learn something new.

Really? I suppose you can give an example? The last time I can recall a law of physics being changed was back in 1956 when the Law of Conservation of Parity was revised – not repealed. It was still a law, it just didn’t work the way they had thought.

We learn new things that help clarify the details, but discoveries that make us say “oops, all that stuff we thought we knew was wrong”? Not happening.

Sadly, Chuck doesn’t get critical thinking – neither how to do it, nor why it’s of value.

Huh? Were you thinking you were responding to Chuck?

My apologies. I’m sure I’d seen his name there, but the lack of a non sequiteur in square quotes should have tipped me off.

@Stu

Probably the latter.

chuck’s postings, at the most, are full of unintentional humor. I get a laugh at him, and that’s about it.

TO: Stu
RE: ERRATA

It was NOT a ‘link’. My error. My apologies.

Additionally….

….she said the insane itching stopped within 24 hours of taking the pawpaw. Then she said she watched it wither and slough off. A few days later, based on her report, what appeared to be a lymph node popped out of the site and broke off.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Seeing my error, with eye opening coffee, I begin again. — Haiku Error Message]

Hmm. Shockingly, it did not get censored. So, I’m sure she had that growth biopsied to confirm that it was in fact carcinoma?

Excellent troll, Chuck! Tenacity, refusal to cite, anecdotal evidence and a sharp finish with the lymph node.

I wonder if we’ll ever know who it really is that trolled this thread?

Bravo, sir. Bravo.

Actually, Chuckles here has been one of the more entertaining ones, because he’s not quite as off his rocker as Thingy, but definitely more interesting than Augietroll.

Chuck: There are quite a few papers on bullatacin, the compound mentioned in that press release (which is not a paper, but gave me enough to search Pubmed). Several have McLaughlin as a coauthor. Oddly, while the work is ongoing (a paper published in 2011), McLaughlin hasn’t published since 1998.

That said, the question is, why do you prefer the raw fruit to the purified extract that was shown to have anticancer activity? If you’re trying to convince us that plants can produce useful medicines, you’re preaching to the choir: nobody here doubts that. (Nobody except possibly you, since you’re advocating homeopathy, water without any molecules of the substance allegedly being used to treat the condition.)

You may recall that I suggested you talk to a doctor about a flower-based remedy for gout.

I know someone with gout: in addition to plant-based drugs, his doctor has told him to modify his diet, because there are foods that increase the risk of gout. I suspect that if you went to a doctor and said “I have gout, and I don’t want to take drugs for it, what else can we do?” you could get some advice on diet.

Bear in mind: we don’t want you to suffer. People here are in favor of science-based medicine because it saves lives and reduces suffering. There are known treatments for gout, which will help if not cure it.

Yes, it’s a crying shame that nobody is doing research on pawpaw.

*snort*

“@Dedj
I’m glad someone else has taken a close look at that study. Extrapolating from 78 deaths (I worked backwards from the percentages) in studies that are mostly more than 30 years old really is stretching the data past breaking point. ”

In addition, it appears that they excluded studies that looked at sub-populations that were in hospital for specific drug administrations.

I would hazard to suggest that people who are in pre-planned, for a regular dose, of a regular script, possibly administered by clinical specialists with allergy and adverse reactions pre-tesing, may be much less likely to have ADR’s than people who are your traditional unplanned admission patients.

In essence, they appeared to have excluded the safest sub-populations, yet still extrapolated out to the entire hospital admissions population which may have included these subpopulations.

I’ll have to have a proper look at their definitions later.

Says the troll that suffered for months while trying to find the correct “magic water” solution for what is actually a very simple medically-treatable problem.

Mr. Freedman, the only convincing evidence that “alternative” treatments work have all been shown to be working due to the placebo effect. Which is an inherently unethical and – in most cases – fraudulent treatment if looked at from a cost of treatment vs. charges to the patient point-of-view.

Chuck, if you’re going to hold it against us that we’re unwilling to burn ourselves with soldering irons and pans in drunken stupors on as regular basis as you seem to do, AND that even if we were, we might prefer a $6 bottle of Lidocaine we KNOW will help over a $7 remedy that by your anecdotes might not even help until we get the exact right kind…

…I really don’t know what to say to you other than that you are clinically insane.

@ David Freeman

First, it’s interesting that all of you are deeply confident you know so much more than the dozens of highly credentialed, highly regarded physician-researchers I interviewed at several of the world’s most renowned medical centers and academies.

Argument from authority. You managed to fail right at the start of your “rebuttal.” Their credentials and institutions don’t make them right.

(I happen to agree that the Nobel Prize or any other credential or affiliation doesn’t confer a monopoly on insight or the truth, but on the other hand it’s genuinely shocking and appalling to me to see the combined word of so many highly regarded people dismissed with a wave of the hand.)

D’oh. Either the credentials and affiliation confer authority on the topic of they don’t. Make up your mind which it is.

By the was, as a journalist, you should know how to use paragraphs to make your text readable. Either that or give your text to your editor before posting, if you don’t understand paragraphs. Your stream of text makes you look just like half the trolls out there on the ‘net. (In other words, it’s not helping your case any.)

Frankly, the unwillingness of Orac and this crowd to consider for a moment the possibility that there may be some aspect of alternative medicine other than any direct physical action from its core treatments that might be helpful to many patients, especially in light of all the evidence and widespread, highly informed opinion that this is so, perfectly embodies everything that science is supposed to oppose: closed-mindedness, deep bias, hostility to disagreement, reckless disregard for reason and evidence that don’t support a favored conclusion, and a total lack of humility with regard to what one knows for sure.

Run on sentence, dude. You really need an editor.

By the way, several people have posted about how we are very open to new things. We just want evidence, not anecdotes. Just because we don’t come to the same conclusions that you do doesn’t mean that our minds are closed. There’s plenty of humility here. We’re all willing to admit that we could be wrong. Are you? The difference is that we’ll admit we’re wrong when there’s reliable evidence that we are. Woo-meisters won’t admit that they’re wrong despite evidence that they are.

We could make the same argument to you: Why are you so closed to the possibility that the woo you love so much is nothing more than an expensive placebo?

TO: All
RE: By the Way….

….I was once like you about homeopathy.

My undergrad work was pre-med microbio. My GPA and skin-coloration were insufficient to get into med school in the mid-70s. Something to do with Affirmative Action. So I went into the Army as an infantry officer. [NOTE: Ended up retiring as an Airborne-Ranger LTC in ’97. Hence the ‘tenacity’. It’s inculcated.]

At any rate, in the late 80s, my second wife, ‘the witch’, was wondering why I kept a pan of water under the bed in the Summer and soaked my feet in it several times before I could go to sleep. Came on from my daily multi-mile ‘constitutionals’. Didn’t happen in the Winter. Just the Summer. So I told her about it: the burning sensation that wouldn’t let me go to sleep.

She dug out her ‘books’. She asked me some questions. I answered her. She got out a vial and offered me the pills.

I ‘humored’ her, not expecting any positive result.

Five minutes after the pills dissolved. The burning sensation in my feet disappeared. Five minutes after THAT, I fell into the best sleep I’d had in several weeks.

After that, I wasn’t quite the ‘skeptic’ that I had been before.

Then there was our baby daughter. She came off of breast feeding at six months. THAT NIGHT, the night after her first day of bottle feeding, we awoke to a horrific, terrified howling coming from the nursery. Our darling little girl was having ‘issues’ with the new ‘culture’ in her tummy: colic.

The Witch got out her books. Read something. Got a vial. Got some pills out of it. We had a heck of a time getting them into the baby’s mouth. She didn’t want ANYTHING that might add to her discomfort.

We finally got the pills in. Ten minutes later, we had our happy baby back again.

So….

…..do six-month old babies experience the ‘placebo effect’? Is their mentality such? Is there any research on that?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. After THAT experience, I began pursuing homeopathy actively. Since then, I’ve had more success with ‘issues’ than skeptics experience.

Whether that’s ‘placebo effect’ or not, is no longer the question. Rather, the benefits outweigh any other consideration.

Call me crazy all you like. Maybe I landed on my head too many times, jumping out of those perfectly good aircraft in flight. What actually WORKS is what counts.

Don’t you think? Or, based on the discussion so far…..

….may you don’t……

Can anyone say “confirmation bias and selective memory?”

@256 Chuck – Thanks for making my point. Your bridge awaits you.

PS – If Messers Mifune, Eastwood, and Willis are qualified clock repairmen I’d be happy to have and of them take the job. However, I don’t believe Mr. Mifune is available.

So I’m a ‘troll’ because I keep offering something to them TO TEST FOR THEMSELVES.

No, you’re a troll because you completely ignore it when it’s been repeatedly explained in detail why that has no meaning or relevance whatsoever.

I’ll wager that any one of the three famous actors who played out the original Yojimbo or it’s Hollywood remakes, could clean your clock. Let alone any Airborne-Ranger.

[God is alive. And Airborne-Ranger qualified. And so am I.]

And bringing that up makes you LESS of a troll somehow? You’re acting like a first-grader. “I’m right because I can beat you up!” Are you going to be accusing us of having cooties next?

Chuck, you claimed a lymph node fell out of a woman’s arm. If that isn’t an admission that you’ve been trolling, then you’re loonier than I thought.

Do you know what constitutes “evidence”? It isn’t anecdotal stories. So far you’ve made countless errors in your recounting, such as the little bit about “colic” or the “cancer” on the woman’s arm. Your stories aren’t adding to your limited credibility and your inability to provide even a small amount of evidence for your claims continues to mark you as little more than a troll or a mentally disturbed personality.

A small amount of research on your name indicates someone with some serious bigotry and racism issues, as well as a massive ego. What is doesn’t indicate is someone that has any familiarity with education, academics, general science or any specific fields of science. In essence, you’re bored and you think that your homeopathic anecdotes are somehow valuable to anyone but your peers, which appear to kick you off their sites often.

You call the commenters here “closed minded” but you seem unwilling to open your mind to the possibility that you’re just full of crap and that our scientific research trumps your anecdotes.

TO: Yojimbo[wannabe]
RE: Heh

PS – If Messers Mifune, Eastwood, and Willis are qualified clock repairmen I’d be happy to have and of them take the job — Yojimbo[wannabe]

That would make a fascinating YouTube video, their cleaning your ‘clock’.

Might even make America’s Funniest Home Videos grand prize.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Vegetius said: If you want peace, prepare for war. Paul the Apostle said: If you want peace, work for justice. Twenty bucks says: Vegetius kicks Paul’s ass in a paint-ball fight. — The Covert Comic]

Argh.

I fairly offer an opportunity for people to experience something for themselves.

Except you experiment is flawed: your test doesn’t include a negative control. For all the reasons already discussed above.
So you are fairly offering people to hurt themselves for no benefit.

They refuse.

Because, as they explained to you, your experiment is flawed. There is no control for confirmation bias and other confounders.

I continue to make the same offer. To test something for themselves. By themselves.

That’s still flawed. There is still no control for confirmation bias and other confounders.

They refuse.

Because it is still a flawed experiment.

If you were to try that experiment in the presence of any of my past scientific mentors, you and your coach would ‘read about it’ in their critique.

BTW, Yojimbo means bodyguard. That’s not a tradename, so anyone can claim to be one. Even a white rabbit, so why not an anonymous blogger?

It looks like Chuck is one of those kinda guys that likes violence as a solution.

That’s two threats against other posters, Chuck.

My GPA and skin-coloration were insufficient to get into med school in the mid-70s. Something to do with Affirmative Action.

They wanted more smart people?

TO: Heliantus
RE: [OT] As If….

BTW, Yojimbo means bodyguard. That’s not a tradename — Heliantus

….’bodyguard’ is NOT a ‘trade name’? Are you out of high school yet? Or are you an example of what has become of the vaunted America public education system? Such as it has become since the mid-80s.

Sakes!

I sit on a community government oversight commission. I’ve not seen such a STUPID understanding of English in quite some time.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. Since this household gave up on television in 1997, we’ve acquired quite a collection of movies and classic television on VHS and DVD. We have Yojimbo, A Fist Full of Dollars and Last Man Standing in the collection.

TO: Lawrence
RE: Creds

A walk through Googleland provides some very interesting background information on our: Air Force ‘brat’. Retired (reserve side) Army officer who enlisted in 1970. Evangelical christian. Undergrad work pre-med microbiology. Post-grad work in computers. — Lawrence

Thanks for doing the third-party establishment of my background. Much appreciated.

So….what’s your point?

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. You left out being the former LocSec for the Denver chapter of Mensa and the co-editor of their monthly magazine. Or maybe that wouldn’t have assisted your ‘agenda’…..

*sigh*

I’m gonna leave you guys to this. This particular person is quite evidently about as responsive to argument and evidence as augustine, I get bored with this quickly, and honestly, I have only so many minutes in my life. And right now they need to be spent doing some statistical analyses for real work.

Until later,
the very occasional cat.

But I can base my ‘bias’ and ‘memory’ on this topic on personal experience

Dude, anyone’s biases and memories are based on one’s personal experiences. By definition.
That was the freaking point.

That’s why we want experiences designed to eliminate as much as one’s personal biases as possible.

P.S. You left out being the former LocSec for the Denver chapter of Mensa and the co-editor of their monthly magazine. Or maybe that wouldn’t have assisted your ‘agenda’…..

I can’t stand MENSA. A bunch of smug, self-satisfied, self-declared genuses who use their combined brain-power to… um… well… There must be something they’ve achieved, right? You can’t have that many geniuses in a room without them having some ideas about how to improve society, can you?

“Why would a Purdue researcher give up his academic career to go work for a supplement company? Seems that’s what McLaughlin did.” — Dangerous Bacon

Chuck: “Maybe he did it because of the suppression of the discover.”

And maybe he did it because wearing saggy pants interfered with his brain function. We have the same evidence for both theories (none).

“After all, you can’t make a billion bucks off of a naturally occurring substance.”

Tell that to Bristol-Myers Squibb, which reported sales of close to that amount in just one recent year for the anti-cancer drug Taxol, based on a naturally-occurring substance from the Pacific yew tree. You could look it up, if you had that open mind which you profess to be important.

“[The worst thing that could happen here is that someone might actually learn something.]”

Or the worst thing is that we could continue to waste time battering at the fortress of your ignorance with facts and logic.

TO: wintermute
RE: Heh

I can’t stand MENSA. — wintermute

“Look into my eye.” — Platoon Sergeant in Aliens. [NOTE: Actually, I heard REAL sergeants say that to whinny troops complaining about some silliness. The inference being ‘Do you see anybody who cares?’]

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. The ad homs keep on piling up against this site.

Can’t take a simple test, so the only thing they can do is stoop to ad homs…..

Yojimbo – I agree. It was fun for a bit to push his buttons, but he’s a one trick pony. Perhaps he and Augie could have a good conversation with each other.

So long & thanks for all the Fish!

TO: Dangerous Bacon
RE: Perhaps….BUT….

And maybe he did it because wearing saggy pants interfered with his brain function. We have the same evidence for both theories (none). — Dangerous Bacon

….please explain away the cure I witnessed.

And WHY after 13 years the vaunted American medical-industrial complex has not been able to synthesize a substitute for the successful killing of cancerous cells while leaving healthy cells alone.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. As we say in the Army, there’s something of a ‘key indicator’ in all of this…..

I also notice that Mr. “All I ask is that you try it” doesn’t show any interest in trying the treatments I’ve mentioned for his painful, chronic disease.

Is your mind too closed to consider that something derived from crocus might help you, merely because of the amount in each dose? Why can’t you consider changing what you eat?

Are you out of high school yet? Or are you an example of what has become of the vaunted America public education system?

Actually I’m not American. I’m not even in the US. And well-spotted, English is my second language.

‘bodyguard’ is NOT a ‘trade name’?

Anyone can use this word in non-commercial situations, right? Compared to unique names like Unilever or Clark Kent, by example. It was that I meant.
Um, maybe Tradename was not the right word to use for this. Registered name? Trademark?

But I believe you were about to tell us why we should burn ourselves and try your stuff?

And WHY after 13 years the vaunted American medical-industrial complex has not been able to synthesize a substitute for the successful killing of cancerous cells while leaving healthy cells alone.

Because it didn’t work? Due to problems that we’ve discussed on this very site, current journal standards for publication don’t encourage the publishing of negative studies or research.

Tell me, Chuck, do you understand that natural plant based medicines have to be processed and controlled for specific dosages and quantities, or do you think you just chew up a yobyob plant and suddenly you’re all better? By identifying and creating a patented and protected process for manufacturing drugs from natural sources, Big Pharma does take natural compounds and creates profitable and effective medications. A specific example was shown above, a topic I’m familiar with since the discovery of the specific yew started in my state.

Do you want an ad hom? You’re an ignorant ass.

Do you want an ad hom? You’re an ignorant ass.

Please do not perpetuate that myth. It’s STILL not an ad-hom. It’s an insult.

Can’t take a simple test, so the only thing they can do is stoop to ad homs…..

Well, if you would actually say something, then there would be something to discuss. You refuse to actually discuss anything at all, in favor of mindlessly repeating the same twaddle, so there’s nothing else to say other than trying to figure out why you are so completely opposed to using your mind.

TO: Vicki
RE: Treatments

I also notice that Mr. “All I ask is that you try it” doesn’t show any interest in trying the treatments I’ve mentioned for his painful, chronic disease. — Vicki

As I commented earlier…..

….”So many comments”.

Maybe you should be a TAD more ‘specific’ as to where you mentioned ‘treatments’.

RE: The Closed Mind

Is your mind too closed to consider that something derived from crocus might help you, merely because of the amount in each dose? Why can’t you consider changing what you eat? — Vicki

Actually, meadow crocus IS a homeopathic treatment for gout. But it doesn’t seem to work that well for me.

As for what I ‘eat’. I eat a very well balanced diet. And, my attacks are not related to eating habits. I think I’ve mentioned that on several occasions now. Why you don’t quite ‘get that’ is beyond my interest.

Maybe you’re ‘projecting’ about a ‘closed mind’. Eh?

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. Based on all the comments here, I suspect I’ve got a more ‘open mind’ then most of the other commentors here. After all….

….I’M the one suggesting a new course.

Weeeeellllll………you probably mis-diagnosed.

As opposed to the lady with “lymph nodes coming out of her arm”, correct? She’s cool because she used pawpaw, right?

Actually, meadow crocus IS a homeopathic treatment for gout. But it doesn’t seem to work that well for me.

Okay, Chuck, I’ll lay off the insults. Honest question. Why not?

….I’M the one suggesting a new course.

By using a 150 year old modality that has been thoroughly discredited ever since.

….I talk with cooks, master chefs, candy makers all the time. They ALL get bad burns.

Do you seriously not see how stupid you’re making yourself look? Really. Go back and read what you just said. “Professional cooks get burned, therefore everyone does!”

TO: Stu
RE: Insults

Okay, Chuck, I’ll lay off the insults. — Stu

They add nothing to the discussion. Just give me more incentive to be ‘clever’.

RE: Why Not?

Honest question. Why not? — Stu

No idea. But it just didn’t work. Tried it in the 2003 and 2007 events. No positive benefit. However, as I pointed out earlier, there are 46 known materia medica that work with gout. The challenge is to find the proper secondary symptoms and cross-reference THOSE with the principle symptom…..the intense sensation of someone driving a 16-penny nail into the joint behind your big toe.

I couldn’t identify any such secondary symptom in the 2003 incident.

As for the headaches of wintermute, @ 206 (above), he probably couldn’t identify the proper secondary symptoms either. Headaches are all over the proverbial ‘board’ when it comes to homeopathy. Hence the ‘failure’. As I’ve said earlier, each of us is different from the other. What works for me, might not work for you. You’re ‘different’ than ‘me’.

And therein may be the failure of all these ‘tests’ done by the AMA. They think we’re all the same. So many ’round pegs’.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Vive la difference! — pardon my French]

TO: Stu
RE: Discredited

By using a 150 year old modality that has been thoroughly discredited ever since. — Stu

Take the ‘test’.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. Or are you ‘gutless’?

Chuck: the medicine I’m talking about for gout is called colchicine. But I Am Not A Doctor, and cannot diagnose or prescribe. All I have to offer is someone I know who benefits from it: that is to say, the same level of evidence you are asking us to accept on homeopathic treatments. Just give it a chance.

The problem with just saying you’re eating a “well-balanced diet” is that the definition of that is based on averages. A healthy balanced diet for someone with gout may be different than one for people without gout (and most people don’t have gout, so the average recommendations will assume the person doesn’t).

ArtK: Thank you for the writing tips. It’s true, I don’t spend much time commenting on blogs, as you probably do. I’ll try to remember when posting to blogs like this that a lot of the people have trouble following long paragraphs and even long sentences, as you apparently do. And if you think I failed right at my first point, how would you grade yourself for starting off your comment by misspelling my name?

Well, except for the tiny little fact that homeopathic preparations don’t actually have anything in them.

Yeah, water and medicine are really the same thing.

My GPA and skin-coloration were insufficient to get into med school in the mid-70s. Something to do with Affirmative Action.

LOL WUT?

You freely admit your GPA was substandard, but blame affirmative action for failing to get into med school?

It’s what we’d call a ‘target rich’ environment.

Then why do you keep missing?

….I’M the one suggesting a new course.

But it’s not really a “new” course, is it?

Sorry, but while I apparently have more time on my hands than I thought (as evidenced by my reading this entire thread), I don’t have the luxury or the inclination to go back and reconfirm every aspect of modern medicine.

The fact that I’d rather go out and buy a new laptop than re-invent the integrated circuit doesn’t make me less inquisitive — just someone who wants to appropriately prioritize my time.

@ David Freedman

My apologies for missing the ‘d’. People are perpetually dropping a letter from my name, so I should be more sensitive to that.

As far as being familiar with commenting on blogs or not: Clear writing is clear writing, whether here, in a magazine or in a scientific paper.

Any response to the two more substantive points in my comment? The first being your inconsistency about credentials and authority. The second being your accusation that we here are close-minded because we don’t see things the way that you do.

Weeeeellllll………you probably mis-diagnosed.

Ah, you think I can’t tell when I have a headache. Let me assure you that they’re not that subtle; I get an ache in my head.

What reference were you using? Boericke? Panos? I’ve got about ten such references. Most of them don’t do very well. I rely on Panos and Boericke.

You’re saying that most catalogues of homeopathic remedies are completely wrong, and the consumer has to figure out the few that work on their own? That does not seem like a great reference for homeopathy.

But the reference I was using was “what the homeopathic “doctor” recommended”. How is a patient supposed to be able to tell a qualified homeopathic “doctor” who will prescribe stuff that actually works from the kind of quack that I evidently found myself with?

It’s complicated. Much more so than the regular vaunted American medical-industrial complex’s approach that everyone is a ’round peg’.

So, what you’re saying is that if I did do your experiment next time I burn myself, it probably won’t work, because it’s not been “personalised” for me?

Actually, meadow crocus IS a homeopathic treatment for gout. But it doesn’t seem to work that well for me.

Maybe if you try it at non-homeopathic concentrations, it might have a different effect? Or don’t you think that changing the dosage can have any effect?

Freedman @315: Wow. Passive-aggressive much?

FWIW, I couldn’t care less about your argument to authority… For me, your fail is in the intersection between these two statements:

“alternative treatments don’t work better than placebo”

and

“there may be some aspect of alternative medicine other than any direct physical action from its core treatments that might be helpful to many patients”

Either there is evidence that CAM works, or there isn’t. You can’t have it both ways.

Parsing out the weasel words (“may be”, “some aspect”, “might be helpful”), we’re left with your claim that despite your experts’ agreement that CAM is no better than a placebo, there is “all [this] evidence” we’re ignoring — remembering, of course, this evidence has nothing to do with the “direct action” of the “core treatments”.

If, as you argue, the increased benefit to patients has to do with “investing time and effort with patients to get them to adopt healthier lifestyles and have better attitudes about health”, why not just advocate better training for doctors?

Why do I have to stop treating woo with disdain because its practitioners are (allegedly) more nurturing than real doctors? Why can’t I just insist on more nurturing doctors?

I’ll try to remember when posting to blogs like this that a lot of the people have trouble following long paragraphs and even long sentences, as you apparently do.

Your copy editors must really love you with that attitude.

Wow. Mocking my ‘nym AND calling me ‘dumb’ in one post.

Nice.

A better analogy would be whether to use Intel or Motorola chips in your computer.

Actually, since even you acknowledge that these remedies we’re supposed to try out for ourselves may or may not work, an even better analogy would be whether to use an Intel chip or a ham sandwich in my computer.

The ham sandwich MIGHT give me more processing power, but I wouldn’t count on it…

“I’ll try to remember when posting to blogs like this that a lot of the people have trouble following long paragraphs and even long sentences, as you apparently do.”

Or you could try writing properly. You may even know of a professional writer or two who could help you out.

What you cannot do is blame your failure to write appropriately on other people.

That you failed at a task which is considered to be basic form in your job does not give much weight to the rest of your claims of having competantly and diligantly followed the more advanced processes and skills of your profession.

TO: Danny Boy
RE: Mocking? Dumb?

Wow. Mocking my ‘nym AND calling me ‘dumb’ in one post. — Danny Boy

Well….

….if the fhoe sits.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. I suggest you think thinks through before posting them.

….if the fhoe sits.
[…]
P.S. I suggest you think thinks through before posting them.

And I suggest proofreading.

Regardless, I’d like you to explain the difference between using homeopathy to cure a headache and replacing my computer’s processor with a ham sandwich.

After all, the lack of evidence that a ham sandwich outperforms an Intel chip shouldn’t be a hindrance to me trying it for myself, right?

TO: Danny Boy
RE: Suggestions

And I suggest proofreading. — Danny Boy

I suggest you get some more ‘experience’ under your ‘belt’.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. Based on your latest, I suspect I was jumping C130s before your father learned how to jump a prom date.

Chuckle, it’s so much fun to follow your traces all over the internet (you are prolific).
Reading your latest PS statement and compare it to this one
I’m a born-again christian. And something of a ‘fundamentalist’ at that
you made elsewhere I see you’re not only the pride of the US Army officer corps but also an outstanding example of Christian eloquence.

“That Stu is no longer worthy of paying any particular attention. He’s ‘lost it’.”

Or that he’s just got you to pretty much argue against yourself.

If trying it for yourself is so great, you should have no opposition to doing it yourself.

If, however, it’s stupid because it’s fairly obviously wrong, even though you’ve never tried it yourself (meaning you’re basing it off of others ‘testing’ it before you), then it’s fairly obvious that we aren’t actually required to test stuff for ourselves in order to ‘know’.

He got you to stitch yourself up good and proper and you fell for it like a rookie.

Go one way and you argue that anything and everything is a valid subject to test. Go the other way and we can actually believe that other people are educated, competant and capable of being trusted not to have totally screwed up.

Nice one, Stu.

“P.S. Based on your latest, I suspect I was jumping C130s before your father learned how to jump a prom date.”

Presumably you didn’t jump into them before performing all pre-flight maintainance and refuelling yourself.

After all, doing it yourself removes the possibility that one of those fallible ‘human’ things may have messed up.

Don’t trust scientists to do science and don’t trust ground crews to have done anything you didn’t witness first hand.

Chuck really doesn’t get the irony of his little taglines, does he?

It’s like reading Neil Craig’s XX-0 claims of victory all over again, only funnier.

Hardly a ‘lady’ at all. More like the sort of women you can see in the classic silent movie Intolerance.

…says the troll who got all wound up about “name calling”…

Nothing to add to the discussion except args that none of the parties involved should have anything to do with the child they brought into the world.

Lessee.

Called you a racist? Check.
Quoted your use of the word “tummy”? Check.
Implied you were negligent in not knowing what “the witch” used to treat your baby? Check.

Nope. Nothing in there about parents shouldn’t be involved with their children…

I’ll tell you what. If Stu does the act first, without outside assistance. I can attempt the same….should he survive….WITHOUT assistance.

So, you insist on evaluating the results of a trial, the conditions of which you determine, before trying it yourself? Why?

I suggest you get some more ‘experience’ under your ‘belt’.

Why the quotes? Are “experience” and “belt” euphemisms for something?

Based on your latest, I suspect I was jumping C130s before your father learned how to jump a prom date.

What, exactly, from my “latest” would lead you to suspect this?

All I’m asking is for you to explain how the complete lack of any evidence whatsoever for the efficacy of homeopathy is in any way different than the total lack of evidential support for the use of a ham sandwich in place of a processing chip.

No fair dodging the question with something like “most intelligent people would recognize the stupidity of [this] suggestion.”

After all, most intelligent people recognize the lunacy of expecting a bottle of magic water to cure gout.

TO: Danny Boy
RE: It’s Simple Enough

So, you insist on evaluating the results of a trial, the conditions of which you determine, before trying it yourself? Why? — Danny Boy

I’ve already TRIED the homeopathic technique I’ve asked everyone here to try.

So….

….let’s see Stu prove HIS ‘technique’ FIRST before asking anyone else to try it.

Get it?

Or…based on your blatant inability to follow a train of thought…..

…..I guess you don’t.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. Another ‘rube’ self-identifies.

TO: All
RE: ‘Wiggle Room’

I suspect one of the reasons that homeopathy still survives in the 21st century is that there are various remedies for every condition. That allows a lot of wriggle room. — Krebiozen

Especially when it works.

RE: Why?

Chuck – why is it that your gout responded to a different remedy each time? I can kind of understand why homeopaths believe that gout in different people might respond to different remedies, but within the same person? — Krebiozen

Maybe it has something to do with the different symptoms. As I explained earlier. And yet you seem to have some sort of mental-block that won’t let you appreciate that.

I ask YOU….WHY IS THAT?

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out….and skeptics aren’t going to like it…..]

….let’s see Stu prove HIS ‘technique’ FIRST before asking anyone else to try it.

No need. I just tried it for my cold. Worked like a charm.

Your turn.

In all seriousness; do you honestly not understand the reluctance to give any credence whatsoever to a remedy for which there is no empirical evidence — for which, in fact, there can never BE any empirical evidence, by definition — and which can only work if the current understanding of physics and chemistry is completely wrong?

As Jesse pointed out, this is about more than just waiting for the next time you get burned. People DIE because they reject treatments that have been proven to work in favor of anecdote-based claptrap, the efficacy of which no one (not even the experienced practitioner) can know. You said so yourself: “It’s complicated … Heck. I misdiagnose myself at times. It’s taken me over 20 years to get as good as I am today.”

(SBM doesn’t always succeed, obviously, but at least the chances of success are a known quantity, and can be evaluated against possible risks.)

In other words, CAM is dangerous. Even if no one is harmed by that $7 bottle of whateveritis, the unwarranted fear and mistrust of “the medical-industrial complex” you and your ilk actively promote will cost lives.

Get it?

P.S. Another ‘rube’ self-identifies.

P.S. Seriously. Please read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark

Good ‘cover fire’ to protect Stu’s ‘neck’.

Arrgh.

However, I guess that Dedj doesn’t recommend ANYTHING they’ve used for themselves to anyone else. That be it fine scotch, tobacco or medicine.

But as we’re all not “round pegs”, why should we recommend anything to anyone else? We’re all different, YMMV, etc. etc.

Chuck(le)–

Is there a list of those things I should accept/reject on faith (or on your word) and those I should try for myself? It would save a lot of time…

Especially when it works.

But we know from hundreds of double-blind clinical trials that it doesn’t work, and that people who think it works are deluding themselves.

Maybe it has something to do with the different symptoms. As I explained earlier. And yet you seem to have some sort of mental-block that won’t let you appreciate that.

Please forgive my mental block – in the system of medicine I understand to some extent gout is a single condition with a single cause, an excess of uric acid in the blood. I used to measure blood uric acid on gout patients. I used to analyze renal calculi too, which was fun. When gout patients were treated with allopurinol (which reduces the body’s production of uric acid) their uric acid levels dropped and their symptoms subsided.

Does homeopathy reduce blood uric acid levels? If I took some blood from you before and after taking your gout remedy, would your uric acid level have gone down? If so, why would a remedy lower uric acid levels on one occasion but not on another? If remedies don’t lower uric acid levels, what do they do to alleviate the symptoms? They clearly don’t prevent gout, as allopurinol does, or you wouldn’t need a toe joint replacement.

TO: Danny Boyo
RE: Come to Think of It…..

…..it’s a LOT like discovering women.

[1] Half the ‘fun’ is getting there.
[2] You never REALLY ‘know’ a woman until you’ve met her in court.

Enjoy,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out…..and some people will not enjoy it at all…..]

Chuck Pelto Said:
But I have SERIOUS doubts that Stu has proven HIS proposed ‘cure’ to himself, let alone anyone else.

And I have SERIOUS doubts that your homeopathy works.

Also, why you were out goofing around jumping your C130s (couldn’t you have been doing something more productive than wasting tax payers money?), I was out in a warzone, disrupting enemy battle plans, rescuing people, and saving lives (US Army). There. Does that make me more qualified to speak on this subject, since I have better military experience than you? No?

Ok, how about the fact that I’m a toxicologist, with degrees in chemistry and toxicology (earned after my military career). Homeopathy does not work, plain and simple. Water does not have memory, plain and simple. If you think that taking homeopathic preparations helps you, then you are fooling yourself, plain and simple.

It’s like when you’re driving down the road on a hot day, and up ahead you see a shimmer, and think, “there must be a large puddle of water up there,” but you were just fooling yourself with an optical illusion, because there really isn’t a large puddle, it’s just the heat off the pavement. Likewise, homeopathy doesn’t work. You’re just creating an illusion, where you believe really hard that your symptoms have gone away; or, conversely, you were imagining this particular bout of symptoms, and your magical remedy made your imagined symptoms go away. Either way, it’s all in your head. It’s a mental illusion. And you are allowing yourself to be tricked.

I swear, if you applied your logic with homeopathy to your military career, then I fear for those under your command. They must have had one hell of a shitty life working under you.

And remember: Age, Wealth, and Rank do not determine Intelligence or Competence.

Well, I’ve tried Bach Rescue Remedy (5X miscellany) for an anxiety attack. No calming effect whatever. Given that this is an ‘acute’ situation, and that a ‘carousel’ of homeopathic nostrums is apparently required (e.g., ‘gout’), what should be my approach, ‘Chuck’? Do ‘spell out’ your reasoning.

TO: Get Bach
RE: Scotch & Tobacco

Been living on such since 1970. When I took up jumping out of perfectly good aircraft in flight. Since then I’ve expanded my ‘interests’ to martinis, fine food and cinema….as well as women.

Tastes that are acquired and appreciated with life.

As the old adage goes….

You haven’t lived, until you’ve almost died.

And that is not merely an adage. It’s a truism.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[If you had a ‘life’ in the first place, you’ll never have a ‘mid-life crisis’.]

TO: Get Bach
RE: No

I meant EXACTLY what I said.

You OBVIOUSLY have a LOT to learn about living.

I recommend you visit your local Army recruiter and volunteer to go Airborne-Ranger. THEN, should you survive the training, you’ll appreciate the sentiment I expressed earlier.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Life is ‘boot camp’. We are all expected to go out and be heroes.[]

TO: All
RE: Danny Boyo’s ‘Args’

This is all so much twaddle. Obviously, Danny Boy lacks the gonads to test something for himself. Lazy character that he—and a lot of others around here—is don’t have the necessary intellectual curiosity to test anything for themselves.

As my Father, God rest his soul, would say….

You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.

Oh well. One can cast their ‘pearls’ before ‘swine’. And look what it gets you…..

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Cast not your pearls before swine, lest they tread on them and rend you. — Some Wag, about 2000 years ago.]

@Chuck:

Lets say I tried your proposed experiment, and after taking the homeopathic remedy my pain didn’t go away. Would that, in and of itself, be evidence that homeopathy doesn’t work? No. So, with the experiment you’re proposing:

* Take remedy, pain remains -> says nothing about homeopathy
* Take remedy, pain goes away -> homeopathy works

A “heads I win, tails it’s a tie” experiment like that is worthless.

I’ve offered you proof. Proof you can experience for yourself. And it won’t cost you as much as a bottle of aspirin.

What’s the matter? No ‘gonads’?

1) “Hey, drinking magic potions cured me (sometimes) but it might or might not work for you,” doesn’t meet any definition of “proof” of which I’m aware.

2) You’re paying more than $7 for a bottle of aspirin? Where do you shop?

3) I have asked you (repeatedly) to explain why not trying homeopathy makes one “close-minded”, while not using a ham sandwich as a core processor is just common sense.

Both propositions have exactly the same amount of scientific evidence behind them. What makes homeopathy different?

What’s the matter? No gonads?

Chuck said:

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” — Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind

If you had the synapses necessary to follow this thread, you’d have avoided embarrassing yourself.

This is a self-test situation. You have the opportunity to prove it to YOURSELF.

You don’t give a damn? Well, perhaps that’s your problem. You should start giving a damn. Maybe then you’ll actually use that brain your species evolved. Homeopathy does not work, period. There is no aspect of it that does work. Like does not cure like. Period. Things that cause rashes will not cure rashes. Things that cause headaches will not cure headaches. Things that cause burns will not cure burns. Water does not have memory. Period.

How much more simple can I get for you? Are you a retard (if so, well, then I take back everything I’ve said, as you couldn’t possibly understand)? How did you get into the military with that mental capacity of yours?

It does not “work for you.” At all. You are either allowing yourself to be tricked by an illusion, or you are lying. Those are your only two choices. There are no other choices. This is not a false dichotomy.

As for testing things for myself. No. Not at all. I test things on animals first (with approval of an animal ethics board). Then, I’ll do clinical trials, and test it on humans (after approval from a human ethics board). Homeopathy has not done any of this. There are no efficacy testings for it, there are no safety testing for it. There’s no LD50 number for any homeopathic “remedy.” (Remember, folks, EVERYTHING is toxic at a certain dose). And, most importantly, there is no mechanism of action. At all. End of story. I do not take any medicine that I do not know the mechanism of action, or, at the very least, the mechanism of removal from the body.

If you make the claim that it works, then provide the t1/2 value, the Km and Vmax values, and the LD50 values. What’s that? You don’t have them? That’s right, because homeopathy is bullshit. Complete bullshit.

Stop allowing yourself to be fooled by charlatans.

I went back and read your original post (which actually doesn’t effect anything I’ve said so far, despite your claiming that it does). You get a lot of superficial burns. Congrats. So do I. You know what? If you do nothing – nothing at all – your pain will go away in about 20 minutes… about the same time as your “remedy” that charlatans have sold to you. Also, if you do nothing – nothing at all – you won’t get any scaring the majority of the time. For all the thousands of times I’ve burned myself, I have two burn scars. Count em: two. One was when a 7.62mm cartridge case landed in the sleeve of my BDU blouse, the other time was when I accidentally brushed my hand against the inside of a 500 degree oven.

So based on my own anecdotal story, doing nothing at all is about as effective as homeopathy! Something anyone who uses their brain could have predicted! Wow!

@ Chemmomo: Funny thing about has-been servicemen. They have a set belief system grounded in racism and sexism and freely share that belief system on science blogs. They refer to one of the wives as “the witch” and hold their infants down while “the witch” drags an unmarked bottle of pills from her sack of nostrums and proceeds to push pills into a six month old infants.

There are also a pugnacious lot, making threats and talking about their gonads and the gonads of other posters on this site…a weirdo to be sure…all the while offering no proof of the effectiveness of any of the homeopathy cures that they anecdotally report, with nary a citation in sight.

Sorry Chuckles, your GPA in undergrad introductory science courses, plus your wise guy attitude and provocative behaviors toward women, did not qualify you for medical school…no matter what color skin you have. Just be glad that you had a middling career in the armed services and just be glad that you didn’t poison or choke to death the daughter intrusted to your care and the care of “the witch”.

Chuck, your personal experience isn’t the measure of truth.

David@98 “Homeopathic remedies are almost impossible for non Homeopaths to set up,”

??? Why?

David@98 “I have never seen a study where the homeopathic remedy didn’t at least slightly outperform the placebo. I say this is interesting BECAUSE ACCORDING TO CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE HOMEOPATHIC REMEDIES ARE PLACEBO!”

What establishes the the “slightly outperform the placebo” results are not actually merely a placebo result?

Posted by:

I’d prefer to let Orac have the last word, since it is his blog. (Not to mention that I just don’t have time to keep going with this sort of back and forth. Honestly, and I say this with nothing but admiration, I don’t know where Orac finds the time himself, given that, the last time I checked, he has a day job.) But I absolutely cannot restrain myself from responding to one small but (to me) very important point, mostly because I partly got it wrong. When Orac, in his response to my response to his response on my article, claims that he never said I distorted Ioannidis’ views via misquoting and quoting out of context, he may not be recalling these comments from him in the Ioannidis post:

“Oh, please. You’re a journalist. You should know better than I that it’s impossible to write a piece like that without imposing your interpretation on it to some extent. You do that through the selection of quotes (seriously, how many hours of interviews do you have, from which you had to select a few key quotes?), the way you describe findings, etc.”

That doesn’t really justify my saying that Orac has accused me of misquoting sources, as I did above, so I apologize and retract that part of the statement. But I think it does justify my claiming Orac has accused me of distorting sources and quoting people out of context. After all, if he did not mean to suggest that I use the selective quoting of sources (essentially the same as quoting out of context) to misrepresent what my sources were really trying to say, then how else could he defend his contention that Ioannidis’ views were not accurately represented by the quotes in my article about him?

If we can’t accept the basic premise that quotes reflect a person’s beliefs, at least in a reputable publication, we are truly wasting our time with journalism. I’m sure many of you will agree that is exactly what we are doing with much or most of journalism, and I’m not sure I entirely disagree. Still, I plug away. Hey, it’s a living.

Chuck:

If you are going to persist in using only your self-styled personal experiments – the flaws of which the commenters who have attempted to engage you (rather than, say, people like me who have settled for mockery) have pointed out over and over again – you will make no headway here. You are wasting your time and ours by endlessly repeating your unsupported assertions vis-à-vis homeopathy.

What will (start to) convince people are well-designed, methodologically rigorous studies, constructed and conducted to remove as many biases and confounding factors as possible, and published in the peer-reviewed literature, showing homeopathy works better than placebo, whether for gout, cancer, allergies, or whatever claims homeopaths make about homeopathy.

As our knowledge of physics, chemistry, and physiology suggests that homeopathy is extraordinarily implausible or even impossible, the quality and quantity of evidence required to make the case for homeopathy is very high.

If you can provide some cites to peer-reviewed articles on PubMed (PMID numbers will do) or to other peer-reviewed literature, you will find the overall response to your claims to be a great deal more positive. To be sure, other commenters may then analyse and rebut your citations if they find fault with them (methodology, blinding, etc.). But cites will go down better than stories.

Thus endeth the serious talk. Any further participation by me will henceforth consist of mockery.

That’s why I’m suggesting you test the ‘truth’ for yourself….

And the fact that you STILL keep suggesting only proves that not only do you not understand how to determine whether something works or not, but you ignore those who explain it to you.

Come to find out that (1) alcohol and eggs in moderation ARE good for you. Not bad.

And how did we find that out? Science! The same science that showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that homeopathy is just an elaborate placebo, like acupuncture and the vast majority of chiropractic.

Chuck, a wise person learns from personal experience. A fool learns from nothing but personal experience.

That’s why I’m suggesting you test the ‘truth’ for yourself….

I did, remember? It failed. Why haven’t you addressed that?

“After all, if he did not mean to suggest that I use the selective quoting of sources (essentially the same as quoting out of context) to misrepresent what my sources were really trying to say, then how else could he defend his contention that Ioannidis’ views were not accurately represented by the quotes in my article about him?”

You haven’t provided enough context for Oracs quote. Rather ironic given the circumstances.

But anyway, misrepresenting another persons work does not require that the misrepresentation be both insightful and deliberate. You may have simply misunderstood the piece of work.

A quote can be accurate down to the intonation and body language of the interviewee. It doesn’t follow that the high accuracy of the quote therefore results in a high accuracy in the interpretation, even though high accuracy in interpretation does require an accurate quote.

“If we can’t accept the basic premise that quotes reflect a person’s beliefs, at least in a reputable publication, we are truly wasting our time with journalism.”

We can’t accept that premise because it requires that the quotes be both representative and presented in an appropriate context.

The arguement “I quoted them, therefore my interpretation and understanding of their beliefs is accurate” is not an adequate defence to the suggestion that you may not have properly understood them. The subject may know thier beans from thier bacon, it does not follow that you – whether the journalist writing an article or the student writing a marked paper – are automatically on the right track.

It’s rather telling that none of your posts or responses include the possibility that you might have got anything wrong. Interestingly, the only response of yours that comes close blithely insults other people for your failure to follow basic blog post structure.

As it is, you—I suspect—and a lot of others around here are incapable of testing a hypothesis for themselves.

WTF are you talking about? Many people here (including me) are scientists. We test hypothesis ALL THE TIME. However, in order for a hypothesis to be tested, it needs to be plausible in reality.

It is not physically possible to test the core premise of homeopathy, because the core premises are not physically possible in reality. The only possible hypothesis that I could test would be: “Does water have memory?” And every time, the answer will be “No.” There is no mechanism of action for which I could test. There is no way to possibly test whether the “active ingredients” are in the human body, because those “active ingredients” don’t exist. I cannot physically test whether a 200C dilution will be more potent than a 100C dilution, as neither one will have an effect on anything; and the idea that either one has any sort of healing power is completely bogus. I also cannot physically test which unlabeled vial contains which remedy, because there is nothing in there to test. It’s all pure imagination.

Stop allowing yourself to be tricked by charlatans.

“As it is, you—I suspect—and a lot of others around here are incapable of testing a hypothesis for themselves.”

Which is not the same as testing a hypotheis ON yourself.

Indeed, it is a bad idea to be both the tester and test subject. You’ll have a hard time telling whether the test worked the way it did because of your bias as a tester or your bias as a subject.

Of course, there’s the problem that many of us here don’t have the illness you do in the first place. Even though you encourage us to ‘try things out for ourselves’ and ‘think outisde the box’, it’s rather telling that you basically want everyone to have the same attitude to these things that you do.

In other words, you want us to all be like you, and you can’t stand the idea that we’d much rather not be.

TO: Jarred C
RE: Chiropracty Works

2)Chiropractic techniques work sometimes, in highly specific situations, such as muscle and joint manipulation — Jarred C

Works for me.

I threw my back out, for the first time, several years ago, while preparing a birthday cake for my Mother-in-Law, God rest her soul. Down in the basement collecting ingredients, e.g., chocolate, I took some chocolate bars out of a tin. I sealed the tin. Bent, turned and twisted to put the tin of chocolate back on the shelf and then could not stand up again.

Spend two days hobbling around like old Biff in Back to the Future II.

Visited a back-cracker. Next day walked like a Homo sapien again.

What’s your point? That chiropractic techniques don’t work?

Or that, by inference, homeopathic techniques don’t work either?

Are you REALLY a member of Densa?

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out…..]

P.S. That chiropractic incident….

….it is in the vicinity of where my ruck-sack used to ride on my lower back all those years I was humping 80+ pounds of gear as a paratrooper in the 82d Airborne.

Quelle ‘coincidence’, eh?

TO: Gray Falcon
RE: Old Adages

A fool learns from nothing but personal experience. — Gray Falcon

I know a better adage.

A wise man learns from other peoples experiences. Most men learn from their own experiences. A FOOL never learns.

I think my ‘old adage’ has more authenticity than your made up one.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out….skeptics are ‘incompetent’.]

TO: lilady
RE: Too Phunny

I think we have a good handle about what makes Chuck tick.

He lives in the past…during his time in the military as an NCO, is pugnacious and fixated on gonads. — lilady

You couldn’t hold a train of thought with a pair of pliers.

Yes. I WAS an NCO, but I retired an LTC. Something of the difference, that.

As for your racist comments….I’m reminded of a famous First Shirt’s reply to allegations of racism….

When I look at that formation, I don’t see red, black, white, yellow or brown. ALL I SEE IS ‘GREEN’.

So kindly play [race cards] with yourself. Otherwise, you appear the ‘racist’. [NOTE: And don’t get me started with my ‘coming of age’ in Louisiana in the late-60s. You’ll find you’ve bitten off more than your poor bicuspids can ‘chew’.]

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Boredom, n., having nothing better to do that attack actual thought.]

Mr. Freedman opines,

If we can’t accept the basic premise that quotes reflect a person’s beliefs, at least in a reputable publication, we are truly wasting our time with journalism.

Sir, are you really that naive, or do you just think that we are? A cursory reading of Orac’s archives will bring up countless examples of selective quotation used by woo-purveyors to bolster their position. That’s the stock-in-trade of a lot of groups.

TO: [The] Gray Falcon [Sheesh, will these people EVER have the gonads to use their REAL name? It’s like playing Dungeons and Dragons from my bygone college daze]
RE: Are We Learning, Yet?

Chuck, you haven’t learned anything. — Gray Falcon

Look who’s talk’n. You and all the other sceptic skeptics in this blog. They couldn’t ‘learn’ anything on their own hook than the Pope could become a homosexual. You and they are all locked into a dogma that surpasses everythink the RCs are taught.

You’ll NEVER learn ANYTHING, based on current evidence, unless the AMA/FDA/NPR/whathaveyou spoon feed it to you.

It’s blatantly obvious to the most casual [and objective] observer, as you won’t test anything for yourself.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. It’s not MY problem if you insist on ‘suffering’…..

Chuck:

TO: [The] Gray Falcon [Sheesh, will these people EVER have the gonads to use their REAL name? It’s like playing Dungeons and Dragons from my bygone college daze] RE: Are We Learning, Yet?

You did threaten us, remember? We’re not fools. Still, if you’d like a name, call me Maxfield Stanton. After all, you can trust an absolute stranger on the Internet, right?

Look who’s talk’n. You and all the other sceptic skeptics in this blog. They couldn’t ‘learn’ anything on their own hook than the Pope could become a homosexual. You and they are all locked into a dogma that surpasses everythink the RCs are taught.

Which dogma? We actually admitted that cholesterol wasn’t as bad as we first thought, that’s hardly dogmatic. Even you admitteed that.

You’ll NEVER learn ANYTHING, based on current evidence, unless the AMA/FDA/NPR/whathaveyou spoon feed it to you.

Of course we listen to them, they’ve proven themselves right again and again. Care to prove otherwise? And don’t bother with eggs or alcohol, correcting an error is honest, not shady.

It’s blatantly obvious to the most casual [and objective] observer, as you won’t test anything for yourself.

Some of us did, and it didn’t work any better than if we left well enough alone.

I threw my back out, for the first time, several years ago, while preparing a birthday cake for my Mother-in-Law, God rest her soul.

I’m sorry, but this recital of what for all the world sound like canonical drunken mishaps is starting to crack me up.

“P.S. It’s not MY problem if you insist on ‘suffering’…..”

no one here insists on that, so cut that lie out right now.

TO: All
RE: Gray Falcon & ‘Threats’

You did threaten us, remember? — Gray Falcon

I wonder how ‘sensitive’ the Gray Falcon is in order to call anything I posted here a ‘threat’.

And a quick search on the term ‘Maxfield Stanton’ reveals ‘squado’, for a REAL person. This, as opposed to searching the web of MY REAL name.

So much for this cretin…..

’nuff said.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out. Cretins amongst the sceptic skeptics abound….]

TO: All
RE: ‘Suffering’

no one here insists on that, so cut that lie out right now. — Dedj

Au contraire [please pardon my French]…..

…..anyone who doesn’t have the courage to take my proposed test INSISTS on personal suffering.

Just because Dedj gets upset about my pointing that out, is just more ‘evidence’ to the group-mind—crowd, e.g., mob—mentality at play amongst the sceptic skeptics.

They, as a group, don’t have the courage to step outside the box, that more rational people have. So, like the characters in Niven & Pournelle’s Inferno they reject the concept that there is a way to achieve relief. And, instead, reject the ‘messenger’.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Life is tough. It’s tougher if you’re ‘stupid’.]

Chuck, you can’t throw your back out. Ever.

“…..anyone who doesn’t have the courage to take my proposed test INSISTS on personal suffering. ”

Totally false, refusal to try your own personal cure on the basis that you say we should is not equivilant to saying that we should never try any of the various examined and tested treatments.

It’s not all about you and what you think.

MESSAGE BEGINS——————————-

Shills and Minions,

What a dreadful, humorless little man this author appears to be. Really rather clueless as regards his critical myopia, but in a dreary, droning sort of way. Almost reminiscent of the AugieDrone Mk II. The attack on his screed seems to be making headway among the shills and minions. ORAC and his cohorts seem to have spanked his little, pink monkeybottom rather authoritatively, so I’ll refrain from adding anything to the fray.

That said, it does my cold, cold heart good to see you gleefully batting your new drone about.

At first I was concerned the Glaxxon Practice Drone GPDv27hl5 [ChuckDrone] would be quickly spotted as it’s programming is a bit “over the top” as you say. The ladies down on level 7 assured the Third Terran Affairs Council that we should stimulate the shills and minions with some mindless positivity. Those darling little smug taglines are a work of pure genius, if I do say so myself (and, of course, I do).

Continue sharpening your mental claws my minions. Make them as polished and sharp as my my physical ones.

Remember, it’s almost PharmaCOM Orbital Picnic time. Cindy is open to suggestions for this year’s theme.

Lord Draconis Zeneca, VC, iH7L
Forward Mavoon of the Great Fleet, Suzerain of V’tar and Pharmaca Magna of Terra
PharmaCOM Orbital HQ 0010101101001

————————MESSAGE ENDS

“Chuckie said: “P.S. About ‘slipshod’….
…yeah….all of you sceptic skeptics would be ‘slipshod’ too, if you tested the hypothesis for yourselves…..”

That would be correct. We would be slipshod and illogical to test your hypothesis on ourselves – because that would not be a valid test.

Remember Chuckie: you’re the coward, here.

TO: All
RE: Heh

Said the man whose insistence on using sugar pills instead of real medicine to treat his gout has resulted in serious and permanent damage to his toe… — Krebiozen

Krebiozen lacks the necessary intellectual curiosity to be involved with any blog involved with ‘science’. Hence, my suspicion that this blog is not about ‘science’ at all.

Just look at the likes of Krebiozen and the vast majority of those who don’t have any ‘intellectual curiosity’ themselves posting comments here.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. Let alone Krebiozen’s inability to appreciate the more recent successful efforts of using homeopathy against gout.

Talk about ‘stupid’….

Stupid, adj., Ignorant and proud of it.

What’s your point? That chiropractic techniques don’t work?

Or that, by inference, homeopathic techniques don’t work either?

Are you REALLY a member of Densa?

Wow. Just… wow. I state the one specific situation in which chiropractic works, and explain various situations in which is doesn’t work (but chiropractors claim to be able to do), and you try to counter that with.. describing a situation that fits the area *which I just said* works.

As for the homeopathy (which doesn’t work at all, regardless of your claim otherwise), I had used the *previous* paragraph to talk about that. Is your reading comprehension that bad? I remember stupid people when I was in the Army, but, dear god, you make them look like geniuses. Did you get in with an ASVAB of 31? Your claim that the government had told us “facts” which have been wrong in the past, therefore homeopathy works, despite the gov’t claiming that it doesn’t work today, is absolutely laughable. And that is the inferred argument that I countered in the first paragraph.

Just… wow.

TO: Dedj
RE: Yeah….

And as we’ve told you repeatedly, this is a very poor substitue for having a great number of people try it for you, under controlled conditions, with expert oversight. — Dedj

….and a ‘great number of people’ told you that (1) alcohol was bad for you, (2) eggs were bad for you, (3) chiropractic techniques didn’t work and (4) acupuncture techniques didn’t work.

ALL THOSE ‘great number of people’ worked for the (1) federal government and/or (2) various highly invested organizations in the Big Pharm/AMA/Etc medical-industrial complexes.

However, THEY WERE LYING TO YOU.

And you believed them. And you STILL BELIEVE them.

Who is more the fool?

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. — old adage]

P.S. Are we learning yet?

Chuck.. I just countered that point about the government that you’re still making (without countering my argument). And yet you still use it as if a counter argument was never brought up.

Here, you seriously need to read this:
http://www.midmichiganobjectivists.org/Debate-Flow-Chart1.png

TO: Gray Falcon
RE: ‘Brainwashing’

I think the main purpose of Chuck’s “try it for yourself” rant is because he believes that we only think homeopathic remedies don’t work because we’ve been brainwashed by the government/medical companies. — Gray Falcon

Well. That’s how the Roman Catholic Church did it in the Middle Ages. People took their ‘official word’ on what was written in that big Old Book.

When Guttenberg came out with ‘mass productions’ of the big Old Book, the RC went ballistic, because EVERYONE could read it for themselves.

You people remind me of the RC from that Dark Age. You take the ‘priesthood’ at their word. Without question.

And you think you’re ‘scientific’. There’s a big laugh.

He probably thinks that if we tried it for ourselves, we’d immediately see that the they were lying, or something. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t realize that what he’s proposing involves attributing any improvements to his remedy, without any way of knowing whether those improvements are due to the remedy or in spite of it! — Gray Falcon

Whatever you ‘see’ for yourselves will be fine with me. Whether or not you have the intellectual capacity to recognize what works or doesn’t is another matter for discussion…..

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The proof of the pudding….and all that rot….]

TO: All
RE Jarred C’s Debate ‘Flow Chart’

A fascinating demonstration of how most of the people commenting here behave.

I’m particularly impressed with how most of them fall out at the first point in the flow chart….

Can you envision anything that will change your mind on this topic.

I offered something and everyone here seems to refuse the simple ‘test’ proffered.

On the other hand we have the follow-on point….

If one of your points is proven to be faulty will you stop using that argument….

The point here being that just because something didn’t work on one occasion, it should be dropped?

Gosh! Where would Thomas Edison have been with regards to the invention of the ‘light blub’. I think it took him hundreds of tries.

Based on that ‘arg’, I suggest that the flow chart offered by Jarred C is somewhat….uh….’suspect’.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Where you ‘sit’ determines what you ‘see’.]

Can you envision anything that will change your mind on this topic.

A well-designed double blind randomised clinical trial of the effect of homeopathic cantharis on minor burns that showed a statistically significant effect of cantharis over placebo. If that was replicated by a few different research groups, I would change my mind. I would be astonished, but I would change my mind.

So far all I can find is the study I linked to earlier which found that a placebo reduced the pain of minor burns by 66%, cantharis tablets only by 61%.

So I have a choice between believing a double blind study by two British doctors (bear in mind I am British) that found cantharis had no effect, or some bloke on the internet who believes that the Bible is the literal word of God, that the rapture is imminent, and doesn’t seem to understand anything at all about logic or the problems with anecdotal evidence.

I don’t find that a difficult choice.

It’s like playing Dungeons and Dragons

Ah D&D. I do so love that game. I always thought that it was such a fascinating tool to teach young folks how to separate fantasy from reality.

Looks like Chuck never learned that lesson.

Homeopathy = fantasy, not reality.
Acupuncture = fantasy, not reality.

I know, I know, those things actually exist, unlike the unicorns of the bible; but to believe that they work is a fantasy.

Also, chuck, there are things that would change many folk’s mind about homeopathy. To name a few: mechanism of action; detection of the medicine in the human body; a t1/2, Km, and Vmax value; an explanation that doesn’t involve breaking the laws of physics and chemistry; and double-blind random trials that are reproducible which show positive effects significantly better than a placebo.

Get all those things, and every person in this thread, including Orac, will change their minds.

TO: All
RE: Krebiozen’s ‘Limited’ Mental Capacity

A ‘well designed’ double-blind randomized clinical trial — Krebiozen

As if we haven’t seen such from various Big-Pharm/FDA-Approved, e.g., officially ‘approved’, sources….that have lied to US over the last four decades.

However, Krebiozen—and so many others here—doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to test something for himself.

What a bunch of ‘losers’….listening to the latter-day ‘priesthood’, who’ve already been proven to lie to them about health-related matters.

Talk about the ‘blind’ leading the ‘blind’….

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Life is tough. It’s tougher if you’re ‘stupid’.]

Chuck, you never provided examples of the FDA lying, you provided examples of them being in error, and correcting themselves. Do you treat everyone who makes a mistake this way? I should also note that “try it yourself” assumes infallibility on the tester’s part. Do you consider yourself infallible?

Krebiozen—and so many others here—doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to test something for himself.

I have plenty (some would say an unhealthy excess) of intestinal fortitude and intellectual curiosity. I refer you to #197 above. Neither commercial nor homemade homeopathic remedies worked for me, or for some members of my family who have tried them.

“However, THEY WERE LYING TO YOU.

And you believed them. And you STILL BELIEVE them. ”

What evidence do I have that you are not lying to me?

Hell, I’ve already caught you at it once, so there’s no reason to trust you when you say that you haven’t been at it since the beginning.

In addition, if you think the only people who has stated that alcohol is bad or that eggs are bad are the US federal government or the US pharmacomplex, then you seriously need to broaden your horizons beyond the borders of the US.

In the meantime, carry on conducting your free-to-us and free-to-bigpharma experiments. I’m sure they won’t mind you saving them the cost of recruiting you and supplying you with the product.

Carry-on nibbling your nice lettuce leaf little guinea pig. As long as you joyfully risk yourself on our behalf, you can have all the cheap lettuce your furry chops can eat.

TO: All
RE: Dedj

What evidence do I have that you are not lying to me? — Dedj

He can ‘believe’ whatever he wants. And suffer accordingly.

But I did offer a simple ‘test’ he could prove or disprove the hypothesis….if he had the ‘courage’ to try it himself.

Not my problem. But he does make for a good example of the ‘True Believer’.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out.]

TO: All
RE: The Delusional Grey Falcon

And you knew they were deliberate lying, and not simply making a mistake, how exactly? — Grey Falcon

Only government agencies take DECADES to admit to the truth.

Or are you so ignorant of MacNamara and LBJ lying about the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’? A lie that was perpetrated in 1964 and lasted until 1992, when MacNamara wrote a book wherein he admitted to lying about what happened. And the result….

• 58K American dead
• 2-4M Southeast Asians dead

Stupid people never learn….

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out…..]

TO: All
RE: These ‘People’….

….e.g., Grey Falcon, Dedj, et al,, like to THINK they are ‘scientific’. They are not. They are as close-minded as the priests of the Roman Catholic church in the Middle Ages.

The evidence—provided in this thread—is blatantly obvious to the most casual, objective observer.

I don’t really care much that the objectors here don’t care for their own personal health. However, I DO appreciate the opportunity to display their curious comportment about testing thinks for themselves.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out…..]

TO: Andrew
RE: How Did I Know?

How did you know their reports were a lie? Are you psychic? Or did you do extensive double-blind tests and then keep the results a secret? — Andrew

Probably because I’ve got more than two synapses to rub together. Unlike a lot of others around these parts.

Chuck(le)
P.S. We’ve been ‘sucking eggs’ since we crawled out of the swamps. As for alcohol….I’m a descendant of Vikings……

TO: Andrew
RE: Making Up ‘Stuff’?

I see – you’re making up stuff, and insulting people who ask for evidence. Good luck with that. — Andrew

Hardly. Show me your Mensa membership number. And I’ll call you ‘bro’.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Dull as dirt;
You can’t assert;
The kind of Truth that will convince;
An eskimo to renounce fur;
To make a vegetarian barbeque hamster.]

TO: Matthew Cline
RE: Mistakes

So, if someone is mistaken, it’s impossible for them to remain mistaken for decades? — Matthew Cline

Most individuals will confess to a ‘mistake’, much earlier than decades. Governments tend to hide their ‘mistakes’ from decades. Or are you not such a scholar of history?

On the other hand, we have the latest government ‘mistake’, DoJ’s Operation Fast & Furious. It was discovered after a few years. And yet the government refuses to admit to the ‘mistake’.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out…..]

I’m pretty healthy. I suspect he’ll, eventually, ‘suffer’.

Pretty healthy, eh? Your obsession with having been “lied to” about EtOH, mysterious ‘gout’ consonant with a peripheral neuropathy, and obviously compromised cognitive function are painting an increasingly compelling, yet different, picture for me.

@Chuck:

So….
….you got any evidence to say they ARE ‘bad’ for you?

I have no evidence that eggs are bad for you, good for you, or anything else. I’m just saying that it’s not obvious if they’re bad, good, or neutral, and that common sense isn’t necessarily going to give the correct answer.

Despite blatant evidence that they were wrong all that time.

I’m curious as to what this blatant evidence was.

Chuck reminds me of this classic stand-up from Dara O’Briain.

TO: Narad
RE: Heh

Pretty healthy, eh? Your obsession with having been “lied to” about EtOH, mysterious ‘gout’ consonant with a peripheral neuropathy, and obviously compromised cognitive function are painting an increasingly compelling, yet different, picture for me. — Narad

Believe what you wish. Not MY ‘problem’.

On the other hand…..

….if you haven’t the courage to try the ‘test’ I propose, you’re just another one of the ‘True Beleivers’ I’ve addressed here.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Courage is your current greatest need.]

P.P.S. Skeptics—of the sort encountered here—are the TRUE ‘cowards’.

TO: All
RE: Grey Falcon…..

So, since the government lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, they lie about everything. — Grey Falcon

….the government’s ‘bozo’?

Argument ad absurdium.

’nuff said.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. He, like so many others will ‘throw up’ whatever args they can to avoid taking the ‘test’. It’s pathetic how gutless these people are.

They’d spend eternity in Hell, give the chance to escape….

Chuck, my argument was no less absurd than yours. You were trying to use something unrelated as evidence, I pointed out why that doesn’t work. Now stay on subject: What evidence do you have that homeopathy works? “Try it for yourself” requires we assume personal infallibility, which we don’t. Are you infallible? Do you think that because you believe something, it must be true? We don’t. We’re not scared of the test, we just find it completely pointless. Big difference. You’re always so quick to assume evil in others, so one is left wondering about your own virtue…

TO: All
RE: Back On-Topic

It’s really quiet simple. You either have the courage to test the reality for yourselves. Or you are gutless and bound to the ‘word’ as preached by people you know lie to you.

The choice is yours.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out….whether or not others accept it.]

P.P.S. Furthermore, I think I’ve spent more time in at T10 than he’s spent in his favorite t-shirt.

@Chuck:

….explain away the Gulf of Tonkin business. PUHLEASE!!!!

The government told a huge lie for a long time, so it always lies about everything?

But, back on topic, take the ‘test’ I propose and give us your results.

Like I said before, a “heads I win, tails it’s a tie” test like that is useless.

Novalox, maybe he’s lying. He did work for the government, after all.

Got a comment in moderation (too many links). Hope it comes through soon.

Seriously, Chuck, we don’t care what your past career in the military was like. It has absolutely no bearing on the present discussion. If you’re stupid enough to think that a sample size n=1, uncontrolled, unblinded “test”, coupled with your execrable reasoning (ably lampooned by many here), is sufficient to convince readers around this forum, no amount of military glory is going to cover it up.