Eos of the Eons said:
Yeahhhh, that's right, quote the flawed study 
I quoted the poster's (Peter's) comments.
More of what Peter said.
The study is yet another reflecting the trend for many acupuncturists, homeopaths, chiropractors (with at least certain conditions) and others to have given up on the task of showing that their methods act as anything other than an elaborate placebo c.f. the comment: "The study ignored the question of how homeopathy might work and focused on how well it performs."
But there is another way of looking good. What you do is compare the apparent outcomes of two very different medical scenarios.
One scenario involves a boring treatment of limited efficacy and patient appeal i.e. bog-standard, ho-hum normal medical care.
The other scenario includes the "special treatment". The "special treatment" is little more elaborate, theatrical, mysterious, intensive, or "hands on".
It also involves practitioners who are a little more desperate to get the right result and who may thus try so hard as to trigger answers of politeness or experimental subordination in their subjects, or who may unconsciously fudge the results slightly when involved in unblinded assessment of them, as in the above study.
A third component is to carefully select conditions where placebos can appear to have pronounced effect (note the "selected chronic diagnoses" chosen for this trial) if only because most patients get better over time.
All that has been proved is that a lot almost any kind of nurture makes peoples feel better or makes them less likely to say they have NOT been helped by the care.
He's saying pretty much the same as we've been saying in this thread. The study is really designed to demonstrate how well homoeopathy applies the placebo effect.
Barb, whenever a well-designed, blinded and controlled study shows null effect for homoeopathy, you seem to find some way to declare that homoeopathy isn't susceptible to scientific study. Why, then, when an allegedly "scientific" study seems to have given the results you wanted, do you simply chip in with the "p<0.001" comment (which, to be frank, makes you sound exactly like Xanta)?
If you were trying to point out that this was an alleged effect on children, do we really have to go over yet again how the problem of observer bias rears its ugly head when dealing with patients by proxy (parents or animal owners) and how an unblinded study is even
more likely to give the desired result under those circumstances?
It's obvious to anyone with even half a brain cell that this study design is deliberately contrived to show homoeopathy in a positive light, by concentrating on the Hawthorne effect (or therapeutic consultation, if you like) rather than actually trying to demonstrate whether the sugar pills are doing anything.
Why do you think this is? Why do you think that studies designed to show that "any kind of nurture makes people feel better or makes them less likely to say they have NOT been helped" invariably do show exactly that, but as soon as you design the study to find out whether the sugar pills themselves contribute anything, you find that there's nothing there?
You repeatedly say that the people you "treat" say they feel better, and their response validates your beliefs. Can you not see that this study is yet one more piece of evidence that it is your sweet smile and sympathetic manner that is doing the trick, and that the suger pills are a sham and a deception?
Rolfe.
