Carrot Flower King
Janitor of Lunacy
Dear Caroline, many, if not most, of the posters on a site like this have some sort of relevant background, some science education, some of us come from a healthcare background, we have spent years upon years looking at, reading about, talking about the claims made by and for conventional medicine and alternative medicine. Our scientific education teaches us to be even-handed when approaching evidence and the means by which that evidence is produced.
However, after years of this, reading as much of the available literature as possible, one can safely conclude that homeopathy is pre-scientific nonsense with no evidence to support it, that acupuncture is, at best, a theatrical placebo based on pre-scientific ideas of physiology and anatomy and all the rest...
One can also conclude that a number of practices of conventional medicine are similarly lacking in evidence, which is why we in the UK have a body called NICE to assess and promote best, evidence-based clinical practice and why it is professionally ill-advised not to follow their guidelines, as your practice is not defensible.
Reaching these conclusions after a lot of thought, discussion, reading and the like is not being closed minded in the slightest (man, the decade long discussion I had with a particular colleague about how we assessed evidence of efficacy in our field...), it is having been open enough to bother looking and reading in the first place and finding there is nothing concrete to back up the claims.
You are the 5 millionth (probably) person to wander along and trot through The Alt Med and Anti-Vax Play Book, so it should not surprise you that no-one bothers with playing nice, as we have heard it all before. You have not offered anything new or different to that which is thoroughly discredited over and over and over; you have not responded to requests for the "science" you claim exists.
However, after years of this, reading as much of the available literature as possible, one can safely conclude that homeopathy is pre-scientific nonsense with no evidence to support it, that acupuncture is, at best, a theatrical placebo based on pre-scientific ideas of physiology and anatomy and all the rest...
One can also conclude that a number of practices of conventional medicine are similarly lacking in evidence, which is why we in the UK have a body called NICE to assess and promote best, evidence-based clinical practice and why it is professionally ill-advised not to follow their guidelines, as your practice is not defensible.
Reaching these conclusions after a lot of thought, discussion, reading and the like is not being closed minded in the slightest (man, the decade long discussion I had with a particular colleague about how we assessed evidence of efficacy in our field...), it is having been open enough to bother looking and reading in the first place and finding there is nothing concrete to back up the claims.
You are the 5 millionth (probably) person to wander along and trot through The Alt Med and Anti-Vax Play Book, so it should not surprise you that no-one bothers with playing nice, as we have heard it all before. You have not offered anything new or different to that which is thoroughly discredited over and over and over; you have not responded to requests for the "science" you claim exists.
