Medical science doesnt work very well, when we see dangerous procedures, treatments like SSRI foisted on the public, only later to have labels detailing their dangers AFTER theyve injured the public:

http://www.ssristories.com/

Why do u persist in the illusion that medical science can be trusted by the public?

thats wishful thinking. Evidence for the success of homeopathy goes back to near its inception. A trial was conducted during a cholera epidemic, in which patients in alondon hospital were tested with botu conventional and homeopathic medicine. The results were to be tabled in parliament. The day came when the conventional results were presented, but the homeopathic were not. But homeopathy by then had friends in high places and the results were demanded to be shown. They showed homeopathy to be successful in reducing deaths to 16% (compared top 49% in conventional medicine).
Its written up in Divided Legacy, vol 2.

Those who say there is no evidence may as well say there is no evidence for aspirin.
Jeff Garrington is just as biased as the conventional doctors in that test. His Hawks-handsaw blog is a geologist’s blog, who pontificates on what he is not qualified to. he is entitled to his opinion, but thats all it is.

Disappointing of you Jeff!

Oh and science, i am doing it all wrong! What is science but a way of knowing. It is knowledge gained through study or practice. There is no clear definition of how to go about “science”, so to say i am doing it wrong smacks of ….. well arrogance really.

Oh and, Science: you are doing it wrong paul!

“We have no idea how infentissimal doses interact with organisms.” better make that “no doses” for dilutions more than 12C.

With your last comments both of LMSO and paul (invoking QM, human consiousness, quoting Tiller etc), it has become evident to anyone reading this thread that you are implying that science has shown homeopathy to be just a placebo, but hey, there are other ways of knowing, science is not always correct, and we have many gaps in our knowledge.

Fair enough, that’s all I have been saying from the beginning: that homeopathy fails in science. In other methodologies homeopathy might prove efficacious -like what paul proposes: give treatments to patients until one of them works, and observe the changes! Way to go paul. Very scientific. No windows open for bias, human errors, and oh, our old friend, placebo effect, getting into the picture.

Science: you are doing it wrong paul!

i understand your arguments very well.

But they are the same old arguments that have always been presented. And as once said by some geezer who lived around the same time as homeopathy came to be formulated. “They come on in the same old way, and we shall knock them down in the same old way”. Duke of Wellington.

And that way is that we shall go on treating those who come to us. We shall observe the reactions they produce and assess whether the prescription was correct or not. And how shall we know this, through observing the changes. You think that we have no concept of “cognitive bias”?

If all the reactions were due to placebo why do we see restoration of health in a systematic way
return of old symptoms
from internal to external
from top to bottom

And why when an incorrect medicine is give are these things not seen? If as you say it was all due to placebo how are these things possible?

This is just a strawman. There are other lines of evidence as well, and homeopathy fails at every single one of them! Molecular biology? No effect. Maybe there is a chemical mechanism? No, nothing there. Nothing at all at the level of basic science. So, we can only do clinical trials. And guess what is the outcome? Failure.

Molecular biology, and chemical mechanisms. Are these all that we know of how things interact? We have no idea about the sensitivities of organisms to various stimuli? We have no idea how infentissimal doses interact with organisms. There are certainly many theories that relate to how they may act, but they are not of any importance in comparison to our goal which is to observe the restoration of health of our patients after a correct remedy is given. And it is this last point which people find the most difficult to comprehend.

And thak you for no longer participating in this discussion. You are entitled to your opinion that my arguments are based upon a false reasoning, based upon my understanding of your understanding of how things work that is actually quite reassuring. This discussion is ultimatetly about things much weightier than our OPINIONS. I am happy with knowing that my knowledge is limited, it is because of this that i constantly check and recheck what i am doing.

LMSO, before we get too deep into quantum mysticism let’s talk about simple facts. You say that “Rutten and Stolper’s comments on cut-off values for sample size are particularly telling” and cite them with

“Cut-off values for sample size were not mentioned or explained in Shang el al’s analysis. Why were eight homeopathy trials compared with six conventional trials? Was this choice predefined or post-hoc? [...] We can think of no criterion that could be common to the two cut-off values. This suggests that this choice was post-hoc.”

Now, if you had read Hawk/Handsaw’s postings on this issue (linked in the very first comment by jeff garrington above) or if you had read Shang et al (2005), then you would see that this argument is bullshit. Shang et al clearly defined in their Lancet paper that

“Trials with SE [standard errors] in the lowest quartile were defined as larger trials.”

So that’s it. The interesting question is: Why was such an unfounded and ridiculous accusation published in the allegedly peer-reviewed journal called “Homeopathy”? I would like to answer by citing from Ars Technica:

“Homeopathy is not science. The journal has a negative scientific value because it does not distribute scientific knowledge, but rather disseminates wishful thinking about reality. It is the very essence of anti-science.”