Fishing for links to woo research...

Cogwheel

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Ah the holidays... Family contraversies galore. But at least mine are ostensibly open-minded. A couple of my family members have shown an interest in at least considering the facts I share with them. Unfortunately, they're firm believers in everything that goes against the "status quo": alternative medicine, anti-vaccine, anti-milk, anti-war, anti-religion (hey, can't fault them for everything :P ). Anyway, I was wondering if people could point me to other sites (or other threads with links to sites) detailing some particular issues:

Homeopathy, Chiropractic, Accupuncture, Vaccination myths, and 9/11 conspiracies

I'm looking for either easily-understandable original research, or easily-followed summaries with citations of the original research. If there's a sticky I missed somewhere, I apologize and graciously accept a terse link. :)
 
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Well, people proving they don't work is what I had in mind... Though looking at how I worded the OP, my mind may not have been a factor... ><

Sorry for the confusion... to clarify, i'm looking for research that debunks these ideas.

Thanks for the links.
 
Homeopathy is an easy one. When the theory was first proposed 200+ years ago it actually made a little sense. They hadn't even yet developed the germ theory of disease. It was noticed that vaccines, by making the immune system respond as if it had been infected, would inoculate against future infections because the immune system already had the antibodies to fight back. So the bright idea was to take a poison that mimicked the symptoms of what you wanted to cure, dilute it, and give it to the patient. This had a number of theoretical problems even then. Since we have learned things that makes it absolutely absurd.

Even then you, at least theoretically, needed enough poison in the water to produce a reaction for you immune system to learn from. Yes it is generally a poison used as a medicine in homeopathy. With homeopathy the poison chosen is not necessarily the same substance your body needs to respond to to cure your sickness, it only produces similar symptoms. Another issue is that the greater the dilution the more potent it was thought to be. In a real vaccine there is enough of a real germ for your immune system to identify and make antibodies for, not so with homeopathy.

In those days we knew nothing about the molecular structure of matter. It was thought that any level of dilution would leave at least some small part of the poison in the water. Turns out, since the number of atoms in a given volume of water is limited, this is not true. In fact homeopaths dilute their poison so much that you have a better chance of winning the mega millions lottery than having a single atom of the poison left in your medicine. Modern homeopaths try to skirt this issue by postulating that water "remembers" what was in it. Not only is this silly, if it were true then all water would be homeopathic. It would remember all chemicals on Earth and be a cure for everything straight out of the tap.

The wiki article is currently locked due to a dispute but is a good read as is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
 
Cogwheel said:
Anyway, I was wondering if people could point me to other sites (or other threads with links to sites) detailing some particular issues:

Homeopathy, Chiropractic, Accupuncture, Vaccination myths, and 9/11 conspiracies

I'm looking for either easily-understandable original research, or easily-followed summaries with citations of the original research.
Click to expand...

I realize you were looking for web sites, but for your all of the first three topics you list there, the recently published book "Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine", by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, is an excellent resource. When you give it to them, be sure to point out that Edzard Ernst was himself a practicing homeopath as well as an M.D., so he knows both sides of the story.
 
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