More Fun with Homeopath Dana Ullman, MPH(!)

Mojo said:
JamesGully said:
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.
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Note that in the letters above, Darwin refers to Gully's regime as "the Water Cure". Note that he describes Gully as acting as a "Hydropathist", who needed a second "doctor", one "Dr. Chapman", to provide homoeopathic treatment for his daughter. Note the description of Gully's regime in this letter, from which you quoted the last time you told your Darwin story.
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And, I've noticed that someone who "JamesGully" might consider to be a reliable source has recently posted something that may throw some light on whether Gully should be considered to have been a homoeopath:
This practitioner may also be prescribing homeopathic medicines, but this doesn't mean that s/he is a homeopath.

Source
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In all due respect, your and Orac's emails are hardly worthy of a response. Either you didn't read the study on homeopathy and COPD or you have little understanding of statistics. The very minor and statistically insignificant (!) differences between the treatment and the placebo groups is a totally inadequate "explanation" for the SUBSTANTIAL differences in their results. These results showing efficacy of a homeopathic medicine was way beyond "statistical significance."

And yes, the word "homeopathic" is not in the title of the article because researchers have found that editors discriminate against good research on homeopathy...just as the people on this list have a knee-jerk reaction to homeopathic everything, even though the majority of homeopathic medicines sold in health food stores and pharmacies are still in the molecular range. But heck, this fact doesn't stop the sloppy thinking of the anti-homeopathic skeptics were use a broad paintbrush to attack everything homeopathic.

And yet, you think of yourselves as defenders of science! Whooops.

If you or Orac still feel that your explanation of the COPD study is valid, please send your letter to the editor of CHEST to see if they consider it worthy.

As for your or anyone's wonderings about the real James Manby Gully, he himself considered himself a homeopath, as have most Darwin scholars (sadly, there are not too many Darwin scholars here). Yes, there is some irony here (whoops again).
 
JamesGully said:
In all due respect, your and Orac's emails are hardly worthy of a response. ....
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When did I ever email you?


If you think Orac's analysis was flawed, then go back to the blog posting and tell him exactly why:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/07/homeopathy_in_thecringeicu_1.php

Respond to him by posting a reply to that blog posting. It would seem you lack the knowledge and willingness to actually engage is a real online debate. It is not that Orac's blog posting is "hardly worth a response", but that you actually have NO response.

The fellow who did have a reply published in the Chest also has a blog, you may want to tell him why his reasoning is flawed:
http://dcscience.net/
 
Part of the problem here seems to be a misunderstanding of statistical significance. Indeed, the results of the Chest study were statistically significant. But that significance tells you nothing about methodological flaws in the study. That the treatment and placebo groups were not equivalent is a flaw in the study. The question is, did that flaw affect the results? As Orac wrote, we don't know because the data are not presented in a way such that we can find out. But it's certainly a danger signal that the results may not be all they're cracked up to be, regardless of their statistical significance.
 
Oh, I should also say that someone who says that p=0.008 "means that there was a 99.2% chance that this treatment was effective" should probably refrain from accusing others of not understanding statistics.
 
JamesGully said:
In all due respect, your and Orac's emails are hardly worthy of a response. Either you didn't read the study on homeopathy and COPD or you have little understanding of statistics. The very minor and statistically insignificant (!) differences between the treatment and the placebo groups is a totally inadequate "explanation" for the SUBSTANTIAL differences in their results. These results showing efficacy of a homeopathic medicine was way beyond "statistical significance."
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You make several common errors. The results do not show efficacy of a homeopathic medicine. They show the two groups were different at the end. Now, clinical trials are usually set up so that the only reasonable explanation for any differences is because of the effect of the tested treatment. Since nothing's perfect, there can be other explanations for why the groups are different, but concluding that the treatment led to the difference depends upon the treatment being the most reasonable explanation. Unfortunately, while "this homeopathic treatment had an effect" can be considered one of the explanations, without any other substantiating evidence, it cannot be considered the most reasonable explanation. Especially since the randomization process led to an important difference between the groups at the start of the trial That's mistake number one.

Your second error is in confusing "statistical significance" with a measurement of the size of the effect.

Your third error is in confusing type I and type II error. You make the claim that the important difference between the groups at the start of the trial (sicker people in the placebo group) was statistically insignificant. However, a quick power calculation shows that there was a 70% chance of missing a significant difference. Hardly reassuring. Especially since a small difference would be expected to have a very large effect on outcome in this situation.

So does this assumption of arrogance whilst making multiple errors go over well with your colleagues? It would explain a lot.

Linda
 
This comment illustrated why the groups were not equivalent:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/07/homeopathy_in_thecringeicu_1.php#comment-485918


Of the two groups the "placebo" group had more severely ill patients to begin with... with 9 instead of 5 patients on home oxygen therapy... and when the group size is only 25, that is pretty significant.

Also, it seems that more of the "placebo" patients were in a higher catagory of illness severity.

They "stacked the deck", working deliberately to get more favorable numbers for the homeopathic remedy.

That comment was noted here: http://www.dcscience.net/improbable.html#chest (which has a pdf link to the comments on that Chest article).
 
The Nernst equation and homeopathy!?

Does anyone out there know anything about the Nernst equation?

On March 10, 1994, NATURE published an article called "Less is More," in their Daedalus column in which the author suggests that homeopathy may be explained by this electrochemical effect.

As the author says, "The Nernst equation asserts that this potential grows montonically more negative as the concentration of the solution declines."

I'm trying to create intelligent conversation. Anyone want to try that?
 
I don't think that "intelligent conversation" will be possible. After giving up on Googling for "Nernst equation". The best I could understand it, is that it seems to be a sort of reverse EMF.

I then Googled <Daedalus column Nature> based on a Small Voice in my head saying, "Isn't this column supposed to be a joke?" "Why yes, Small Voice it is."

To quote from one site at random:

David Jones is a true genius and a hero of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Between 1964 and 1996 he wrote the “Daedalus” column for New Scientist and later Nature. Each week he would propose a different completely implausible scheme based on entirely plausible scientific principles — like coating the moon in magnesium oxide to make it twenty times brighter.
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http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/2006/02/14/126/ since you ask.

Can you homeopathically shorten your leg when it has been stretched? Maybe a highly diluted solution of magnesium oxide?
 
JamesGully said:
In all due respect, your and Orac's emails are hardly worthy of a response.
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By the way, have you found that url yet?
JamesGully said:
Get a chance to read it. I don't have the URL right now, but I still assert that this response blows Orac out of the water, especially Orac is simply the theoretician, while Frass and his colleagues are the scientists and researchers.
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Maybe it fell down the back of your sofa, or your dog ate it.
 
JamesGully said:
As for your or anyone's wonderings about the real James Manby Gully, he himself considered himself a homeopath, as have most Darwin scholars.
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Got any evidence for that? Remember that, according to Dana Ullman, the fact that a "practitioner may also be prescribing homeopathic medicines, [...] doesn't mean that s/he is a homeopath".
 
JamesGully said:
Does anyone out there know anything about the Nernst equation?

On March 10, 1994, NATURE published an article called "Less is More," in their Daedalus column in which the author suggests that homeopathy may be explained by this electrochemical effect.

As the author says, "The Nernst equation asserts that this potential grows montonically more negative as the concentration of the solution declines."

I'm trying to create intelligent conversation. Anyone want to try that?
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http://www.science.uwaterloo.ca/~cchieh/cact/c123/nernsteq.html

And have you seen a battery with infinite voltage?

Based on the equations and the principles outlined in that link show why it doesn't happen.

Hint: taking an idealised model and applying it literally to extreme situations is not appropriate.
 
Second hint: Try applying that equation to a practically constructable cell taking into account the various factors that complicate the idealised situation.
 
JamesGully said:
Does anyone out there know anything about the Nernst equation?

On March 10, 1994, NATURE published an article called "Less is More," in their Daedalus column in which the author suggests that homeopathy may be explained by this electrochemical effect.

As the author says, "The Nernst equation asserts that this potential grows montonically more negative as the concentration of the solution declines."

I'm trying to create intelligent conversation. Anyone want to try that?
Click to expand...

Perhaps you could suggest a plausible mechanism that would explain how reindeer could fly while you're at it...
 
JamesGully said:
Does anyone out there know anything about the Nernst equation?

On March 10, 1994, NATURE published an article called "Less is More," in their Daedalus column in which the author suggests that homeopathy may be explained by this electrochemical effect.

As the author says, "The Nernst equation asserts that this potential grows montonically more negative as the concentration of the solution declines."

I'm trying to create intelligent conversation. Anyone want to try that?
Click to expand...
The author is trying to make an amusing spin on the idea of increasing homeopathic dilutions having a physiological effect. He talks about the Nernst equation because it has a concentration term in the denominator, and because it is used to describe membrane potentials. By decreasing concentration in the denominator term - having a greater dilution - you would increase the value of the equation. But you can't achieve a dilution by giving a remedy. (I suppose you could imagine creating a dilution by giving a chelator, but the more dilute the chelator, the less of a dilution in the chemical of interest.) So the author goes on to imagine that homeopathic remedies contain traces of exotic minerals as impurities, which have their effect because the concentration of the exotic minerals is so low naturally in the body. But now the imagined remedies are not acting by dilution but by the actual presence of materials, and the more material, the greater the imagined effect. So his mock explanation for the effect of homeopathic dilution doesn't actually describe an effect by dilution. It's just a bit of silliness.
 
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