I think that it is touching that several of you miss me. It is ironic that some of you were worried that I was scared off. Heck, yesterday was Father's Day. I have a life (every heard of having one?).
That said...I'm leaving the country for a couple of weeks and will probably not do much internet stuff. That said...I am reiterating part of my old posting to this list (and adding to it) because all of these issues below remained unanswered by skeptics...
Sadly, I've grown tired of you, primarily due to your intellectual dishonesty. You claim that the homeopathic doses are too small to have any effect, and yet, you ignore the various basic science and clinical studies that I have referenced, only critiquing a small number of them, and even these critiques are usually inadequate.
No one has remarked about the work of the Italian chemist Elia:
--Elia, V, and Niccoli, M. Thermodynamics of Extremely Diluted Aqueous Solutions, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 879, 1999:241-248.
--Elia, V, Baiano, S, Duro, I, Napoli, E, Niccoli, M, Nonatelli, L. Permanent Physio-chemical Properties of Extremely Diluted Aqueous Solutions of Homeopathic Medicines, Homeopathy, 93, 2004:144-150 (once again, some of you make reference to this peer-review journal in a disparaging way, and yet, whenever it and other CAM journal publish negative trials, you are quick to quote and reference them...once again, this is part of the unscientific attitudes that pervades this list.)
The best critique that someone gave to the work of Swiss physicist Louis Rey who published in a major physics journal was a statement by Jacques Benveniste (whose words and experiments you ridicule! So what is it going to be: do you trust Benveniste's words or not?)
No one has remarked about the 3 large clinical trials in the treatment of influenza...and the best critique offered was that the medicine used was made from duck's heart and liver (obviously a "quack medicine"), despite the fact that homeopaths have been hip to avian sources and connections to flu virus since the 1920s!).
No one has remarked substentatively on the four trials at the University of Glasgow on various allergic disorders.
No one has given a scintilla of critique of the study at the University of Vienna Hospital in the treatment of people with COPD (the #4 reason that people die in the US):
--Frass, M, Dielacher, C, Linkesch, M, Endler, C, Muchitsch, I, Schuster, E, Kaye, A.. Influence of Potassium Dichromate on Tracheal Secretions in Critically Ill Patients, Chest, March, 2005.
I previously referenced 3 clinical trials in the treatment of children with diarrhea, including a meta-analysis of the 3 combined trials with a P-value=0.008. While one person on this list showed that 2 of the 3 studies had barely missed significance (P=0.06 and 0.07), intellectual dishonest again pervaded because s/he didn't acknowledge that combined statistically analysis (this is good science, especially when the clinical trial design was alike)...but the weasels come out and do what you can to look ONLY at data that serves your needs (and to hell with good science?).
The good news of this study is that all children were given oral rehydration therapy, and this study showed that homeopathic treatment provided additional benefits as compared with those children given a placebo (and isn't that the idea!?).
Ironically, one of you brought up ORT as an example of a "drug" that has persisted more than a couple of decades...and ironically, this "drug" is more of a public health measure than a drug (bless public health advocates out there!).
Here's the reference to a meta-analysis of these three studies. Although the lead research was the same MD, the actual prescribers for each of the three trials were different homeopaths.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/en...ubmed_RVDocSum
This meta-analysis was published in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal (I'm now waiting for someone to call this a "quack publication.")
I also referred you to the work of Rustum Roy and emphasize his previous article on homeopathy and the structure of water, and then, I made reference to a NEW soon-to-be-published study (not theory) using spectoscopic analysis of homeopathic medicines that differentiate one from another and one potency from another (just what YOU requested), and then, several of you write sloppy accounts of a non-homeopathic writing of Dr. Roy's.
Some of you even went off the deep-end by saying that the 13 papers that Dr. Roy got published in NATURE are meaningless (I will be surprised if anyone on this list has gotten a single paper published in NATURE, let alone 13). (Someone of this list got one "letter" published in NATURE, and s/he wondered if this counts as an article. Hmmm. Does it approach your own standards?)
The bottomline here is that whether you agree with Dr. Roy or me or whomever, be intellectually honest. Acknowledge positive and negative studies.
When I referenced a four university replication study led by M. Ennis (a former skeptic of homeopathy), someone properly (!) made good reference to a failed replication study. Although this negative result was published in a CAM journal, I referenced one of its authors, Stephan Baumgartner, PhD, as an obviously honest researcher (he can and will publish whatever real data he gets, whether it is pro homeopathy or not). I encourage people to review the MANY studies he has done...and the best criitique that you folks get provide is that he is not the FIRST author on every study (wow...that was a weak critique...and yet, no one here critiqued this critique).
And please (!) do not make reference to the "junk science" efforts that the BBC's Horizon programme did or ABC's 20/20 did. For a critique that blows these junk journalism/junk science reports out of the water, go to:
http://homeopathic.com/articles/media/index.php
For the record, I previously asked if ANYONE on this list wants to stand up and say that this stand by and stand with the "researchers" for the BBC and ABC-TV. Come on...who has the courage?
And the reason why I consider totally bogus James Randi's proposal to give $1 million to someone who will prove that homeopathy works is that James Randi has stood with the BBC's and ABC's researchers and has not condemned their studies as "junk science." James Randi will deserve credit when he stands with good science and when he condemns junk science, and as yet, I haven't seen that happen as this incident has shown.
I will be the first to acknowledge that good research is very hard, especially on "frontier subjects" in science. Further, I am suspicious and cautious when researchers report consistently positive results on these frontier subjects. I am therefore pleased when my colleagues report both positive and negative results. This is good science, not party line junk science.
I sincerely hope that the SILENT people on this list read inbetween the lines to see the elephant in the room. In your efforts to be the "defenders of science," you have been shown to have a very unscientific attitude towards homeopathy.
But heck, don't just listen to me...listen to your hero, Charles Darwin.
Sometimes study with an N=1 provide important substantiation.
I take great pleasure to telling you a historical fact. Our greatly beloved Charles Darwin not only sought care from a highly respected homeopathic physician, it is unlikely that Darwin could have completed his seminal work, Origin of Species, in 1859, if he didn't receive this homeopathic care 10 year prior to its publication.
Just read Darwin's letters to read about this story and learn something about his life...
From 1837 onwards Darwin was frequently incapacitated with episodes of stomach pains, vomiting, severe boils, heart palpitations, trembling, and other symptoms. In 1847, Darwin's illness worsened. He was again experiencing frequent episodes of vomiting and weakness, but he now was also experiencing fainting spells and seeing spots in front of his eyes. Darwin wrote that he was so sick that he was “unable to do anything one day out of three.” He was so ill that he wasn’t even able to attend his father’s funeral when he died on November 13, 1848.
He went a month without vomiting, a very rare experience for him, and even gained some weight. One day he surprised himself by being able to walk seven miles. He wrote to a friend, “I am turning into a mere walking & eating machine” (Quammen, 2006, 112)
And after just a month of treatment, Charles had to admit that Gully’s treatments were not quackery after all. After spending 16 weeks there, he felt like a new man, and by June he was able to go home to resume his important work (Grosvenor, 2004). Darwin actually writes that he is “of almost perfect health” (Burkhardt, 1996, 108).
Although some medical historians have referred to Gully as a hydrotherapist, this is just the historians way of writing homeopathy out of history. Gully considered himself to be a homeopath, and while his staff provided various treatments to Darwin, Gully's treatment was primarily homeopathic medicines.
And for the record, there are many tangents of homeopathy, including those machines to which Mr. Monkey and Hans have repeatedly referred. Please evolve past your present state and listen when I say that I do not know about every tangent in homeopathy, nor does proving one tangent wrong disprove anything else.
Best of all...I love it that some of you have declared that all of Georgetown's school of medicine is a quack institution. The wide paintbrush that you use is evidence of the sloppy-thinking and unscientific attitudes that you embody.
Good-bye for now...
