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Big Pharma plotting against itself!

Mojo

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Spotted this via the Anomalous Distraction blog: Canadian Homeopaths plan astroturf-war, and the Quackometer's Twitter updates.

There's a programme on CBC this evening about homoeopathy. Canadian homoeopaths have been complaining about it for about a week:

Shocked Canadian Homeopaths and Homeopathy Supporters Ask, “Is the CBC Marketplace Show Infiltrated by Pharmaceutical Company Sponsored Skeptics?”


Meanwhile, the page linked from the Anomalous Distraction blog says:
Skeptics belittle Homeopathy as worthless yet the pharmaceutica giant Merck sell homeopathic products. They own Seven Seas who own the New Era brand, who do biochemic salts. Do I need to say more??


Obviously "Big Pharma" hasn't got all its ducks in a row on this one...
 
There's some more information on the CBC programme in this post:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6769754&postcount=12

And homeopaths are revealed showing their nasty side here:
This was an e-mail sent out by the "Ontario College of Homeopathic Medicine":

Dear Homeopathic Community,

It has come to our attention that CBC will be running a newstory on Marketplace on Friday Jan 14th at 8pm that may have deleterious effects on the Homeopathic community. "Homeopathy: Cure or Con" appears to present a biased review of the effectiveness of this 200 year old system of medicine.

We are urging everyone who supports Homeopathy and has had a positive experience with homeopathic remedies to share their position on the following link: http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/blog/

Positive feedback will help derail the merits of this newstory.

In good health,
Ontario College of Homeopathic Medicine


Read on...
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/302598
 
Meanwhile, the page linked from the Anomalous Distraction blog says:
Skeptics belittle Homeopathy as worthless yet the pharmaceutica giant Merck sell homeopathic products. They own Seven Seas who own the New Era brand, who do biochemic salts. Do I need to say more??


That page seems to have been taken down, but it is still in Google's cache, and there are FreezePage versions here and here.
 
Being involved in pharmacy as a student, it is hilarious to see this crap. And the fact they rally against laws that simply ask them to prove their products work.

I mean really, if any rational business did this people would instantly say " oh, it is obvious they are doing something sketchy." but the homeopath worshipers ignore this completely.

I mean imagine the abuse that would be heaped upon Microsoft if they opposed a law that would make them have to prove their programs work. If you stuff works , it works, and you can prove this, if not, well you shouldn't be allowed to sell it.
 
Methinks you have too much faith in humanity, SH. The thing is, actually in almost any other domain, there _are_ people who think they're seeing/hearing/feeling something that can't be measured by any instruments and/or that there is some conspiracy that makes some people say otherwise.

E.g., you can work your mouth till you lose your voice to convince an "audiophile" that his 500$ power cable or wooden volume knob (!!!) doesn't produce any measurable difference in the signal, and even prove that no "audiophile" hears it in a double blind test, but they'll still think they hear a fuller and more nuanced sound.

Pretty much the funniest was a dude on a site that had gotten into his head that, basically, let's put it like this: hard drives store things magnetically, right? They have a magnetic coating and a head and generally are kinda like using the same principle as a cassette, right? And on cassettes different coatings had different frequency response, right? Like, you had iron, chrome, and whatnot, and some were better for higher frequencies, others for bass and so on. So it stood to reason to this particular gentleman that playing the same MP3 off different hard drives would sound differently. And he even convinced himself that his educated audiophile ear actually does hear something that he never had until that thought hit him.

No amount of reasoning moved that guy, lemme tell you.

Ditto for almost anything else. Miracle additives for cars, 4" exhaust pipes on 1.1l/1100cc cars that claim to add 100bhp to the power, quantum chi crystals, woowoo power-of-magic-thinking books, etc. There are people who'll swear by them without and often in spite of evidence. And I'm pretty sure that a lot of those take it as a conspiracy if their government stops one of those snake oil vendors from making bogus claims. E.g., it's just the petroleum cartel that tries to hush the miracle fuel additive which would make you buy less of their gasoline, see?
 
Methinks you have too much faith in humanity, SH. The thing is, actually in almost any other domain, there _are_ people who think they're seeing/hearing/feeling something that can't be measured by any instruments and/or that there is some conspiracy that makes some people say otherwise.

E.g., you can work your mouth till you lose your voice to convince an "audiophile" that his 500$ power cable or wooden volume knob (!!!) doesn't produce any measurable difference in the signal, and even prove that no "audiophile" hears it in a double blind test, but they'll still think they hear a fuller and more nuanced sound.

Pretty much the funniest was a dude on a site that had gotten into his head that, basically, let's put it like this: hard drives store things magnetically, right? They have a magnetic coating and a head and generally are kinda like using the same principle as a cassette, right? And on cassettes different coatings had different frequency response, right? Like, you had iron, chrome, and whatnot, and some were better for higher frequencies, others for bass and so on. So it stood to reason to this particular gentleman that playing the same MP3 off different hard drives would sound differently. And he even convinced himself that his educated audiophile ear actually does hear something that he never had until that thought hit him.

No amount of reasoning moved that guy, lemme tell you.

Ditto for almost anything else. Miracle additives for cars, 4" exhaust pipes on 1.1l/1100cc cars that claim to add 100bhp to the power, quantum chi crystals, woowoo power-of-magic-thinking books, etc. There are people who'll swear by them without and often in spite of evidence. And I'm pretty sure that a lot of those take it as a conspiracy if their government stops one of those snake oil vendors from making bogus claims. E.g., it's just the petroleum cartel that tries to hush the miracle fuel additive which would make you buy less of their gasoline, see?

And that , i understand, but what boggles my mind is the following.

If one convinces themself something works, should one , then , not have the confidence that they can prove it works? Or at the very least, expect the people manufacturing this product to be able to do so? I mean they are not talking about ghosts, they are talking about pills ( for the most part) that they say have a real effect.

I am kind of in the middle of all of this, and if i heard " They will just ignore our results.", yeah i could get that, typical ctish thinking , but i could understand it.

What we hear though is simple claims of " it is unfair to ask us to do this. " , " it has already been proven. ", and stunningly enough " this will cost too much.".

And this is from everyone from the customer to the spokespeople for homeopathy.

Essentially they are complaining about having to go through the same type of testing real medicine does. And i just can't wrap my brain around someone , on one hand saying " I know this works, it is a great product." and on the other " of course you can't make us prove it works, that would be a pain in the ***." and not thinking there is something amiss.
 
Dunno. Don't underestimate the power of cognitive dissonance and basically anti-intellectualism.

But, anyway, the way it goes is kinda this:

P1: I, as an elite and trained audiophile, whose sound perception far exceeds that of ordinary plebs, can hear a difference.

P2: Science and all those expensive electronics can't detect any.

So, take your pick of:

C1: so I'm probably full of it, and fooling myself.

C2: so all that science is bogus, and those millions of dollars of sound processing equipment are no match for my l33t skillz.

The normal human way seems to be to go with C2.

In fact, as I posted recently about a recent study, it turns out that people don't conclude just "science isn't applicable to this cable/pill/lubricant/whatever" or even "science isn't applicable to this whole domain", but are more likely to conclude that science is just bogus and inapplicable to just about anything else.
 
I mean imagine the abuse that would be heaped upon Microsoft if they opposed a law that would make them have to prove their programs work. If you stuff works , it works, and you can prove this, if not, well you shouldn't be allowed to sell it.
A bit of a derail, but have you ever read a EULA? They all basically say "this program is not guaranteed to do anything". Microsoft would certainly oppose such a law. And people would still buy their stuff, as they've already invested heavily into it (training, infrastructure, etc.).
 
In fact, as I posted recently about a recent study, it turns out that people don't conclude just "science isn't applicable to this cable/pill/lubricant/whatever" or even "science isn't applicable to this whole domain", but are more likely to conclude that science is just bogus and inapplicable to just about anything else.

That sounds interesting. I would have expected the former. Can you post a link?

Linda
 
In fact, as I posted recently about a recent study, it turns out that people don't conclude just "science isn't applicable to this cable/pill/lubricant/whatever" or even "science isn't applicable to this whole domain", but are more likely to conclude that science is just bogus and inapplicable to just about anything else.


I'd say that "science is not applicable to this" is probably a more common response (in the case of homoeopaths it usually involves an attempt to claim that RCTs can't be used to test homoeopathy, for one reason or another).
 
I'd say that "science is not applicable to this" is probably a more common response (in the case of homoeopaths it usually involves an attempt to claim that RCTs can't be used to test homoeopathy, for one reason or another).

Well, what I was trying to say is that while they do go "science isn't applicable to this", they don't stop there. The result seems to also be an erosion of trust in science over a whole lot of other domains.
 
Well, what I was trying to say is that while they do go "science isn't applicable to this", they don't stop there. The result seems to also be an erosion of trust in science over a whole lot of other domains.


But not from their point of view, hence all the cargo cult science, and appeals to quantum mechanics, for example. Many of them seem positively desperate for their enthusiasms to be backed up by science.
 

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