So I can't have a belief based on my own experience and my interpretation of that experience without having to defend it to someone I have never met and someone who thinks I am a weasel? Please. I have every right to believe in the effectiveness of homeopathy based on my experience.
Of course you have the right to believe what you choose, for whatever reason you choose. The problem comes when you present it as EVIDENCE.
I give "science" the same credence you guys do.
Excuse me, but I don't believe that. If you did, you would be prepared to discard your belief-based system if observational evidence contradicted it. I have had a number of very intriguing experiences in my life, several of which I initially took as sign of paranormal events. I have eventually had to discard them all in the face of evidence.
I have been on the recieving end of drugs that had been approved for my condition based on the scientific studies - until people started dying and whoops we need to take it off the market.
Drugs get taken off the market sometimes based on a handful of adverse events, out of tens of thousands of treated patients. There is no way to foresee such events for sure. Only by rigorous reporting systems can such risks be minimized. In comparison, no such follow-up systems exist within homeopathy. You may say that homeopathy does not have long-term effects, but the truth is that you simply don't know.
Science in my opinion is no better than experience - you can disagree - you can say I am a loon, heck you guys have already said worse.
At least I would say that you are wrong, and that you evidently do not understand how science works.
In fact let me ask a genuine question. I am a patient with a chronic incurable disease. Itis debilitating. I was diagnosed a decade ago and spent about 7 years seeing MD's, specialists, etc and being put on one drug after the other with NO amelioration of my symptoms. Some of the drugs caused severe side effects, others had mild side effects but none helped the condition AT ALL. I lost a baby from one of the medicines because it had been considered safe during pregnancy - until that study changed and they decided that the drug was lethal to an unborn fetus. I never questioned my doctors (several) and I was a very dutiful patient - always doing what I was told. This went on for so so long. If you haven't suffered a debilitating illness you just can't sympathize with the frusteration adn utter hopelessness of the situation. Finally - after 7 years I gave up, sick and tired of it all. I began searching for alternatives and found chiropractic. I went to the chiropractor for a year with no results, although I did develop a back pain that only subsided after I stopped treatment. I saw an accupunturist twice with no results and I hated that. I tried herbal medicines, stuff from the health food store and the internet - still no results. One day, while searching for information on an herbal product I came across a homeopathy site and was intrigued. I started looking into what it was and it took awhile but I finally decided to go for treatment. I was so amazed at the results I scrapped my previous professional plans and decided to become a homeopath. After a recent evaluation by my specialist he said my results were so good he can't really say if I still qualify as havign the diseas anymore. He told me "whatever it is you are doing - keep doing it."
Yours is a story of an "incurable" disease that went away. You tried a lot of different treatments, but since the disease, whatever it is, has been deemed incurable, it is not surprising that results were unsatisfactory. However, one day, despite odds, you got better. This happens, and it is very usual for patients like you to assume that the treatment that they happened to be trying at that time was the one that cured them. What else should you think? From a scientific POV, however, that is not good enough: It is no more than circumstantial evidence, only after thorough tests can we conclude that the treatment was actually the cause of your cure.
SO here is my question - I consider the turning point of the story when I stopped allopathic treatment - what would you have had me do? How would you guys have rewritten this story? Would I still be at the doctors, a guinea pig for different meds? continuing to suffer from side effects (some of which were pretty serious?)
Seriously, how do you, the scientists, the skeptics, change this story???? You guys think I am an idiot for believing in homeopathy - I look back at those 7 wasted years and think I am an idiot for believing in allopathy for my condition for so long.
That is understandable, but intellectually, you should be able to concede that there is no proof of a causality. Maybe your illness lasted 7 years, then went away by itself. Maybe it would have done so without treatment, or with another treatment. Let me ask you a "rewrite story question": Let us imagine that the treatment you were attempting when you became better was, say, Cranio Sacral Therapy. Would you now be a firm believer in CST?
Further - how can I not believe in homeopathy? If you lived my story - how could you not? Because the studies disagree - well, I say screw the studies. I have my life back and it was the studies that had me sick from meds that did nothing. It was the studies that took the life of my first child. Yeah - screw the damn studies, to me they mean nothing. Defensive about homeopathy, wouldn't you be???
However, you might be wrong. Not knowing neither your disease nor the treatment you received, I cannot judge if your doctors made a mistake (and I'm not qualified to do that anyway), but studies cannot guarantee everything. In short, you cannot prove a negative; you can make studies that prove what a medicine DOES, but you cannot make studies that proves what it DOES NOT do.
So skeptic friends That is why I believe in homeopathy. Is my "cure" a coincidence???? I am willing to say it is possible though a pretty darn good one if it is. Have I seen a bunch of these coincidences?? Yes.
Phil/Barb, EVERY regimen can present stories of remarkable cures; "allopathy", aroma therapy, crystal therapy, primitive witch doctors, faith healing, prayer healing, holy places, etc. etc. I could line up thousands of such stories. They can't all be true.
Instead of focusing on studies that are difficult to do concerning homeopathic treatment due to the nature of homeopathy and that there are 3000 remedies and the right one must be chosen on an individual basis and this can take a long time depending ont he pratcitioner - I would find it interesting to examone the records of homeopaths who have "cured" incurable diseases and see if the cures can be verified by diagnostic tests and see if the homeopathic cures are greater than spontaneous cures for the same diseases.
Youp, fine, but that is not enough. You need to look at ALL their cases, not just the ones that went right. For example, Samual Hahnemann practiced homeopathy for several decades, yet all we have from him is a dozen case stories. That is not much from a lifetime of practice. Who selected which ones to record? Are they representative?
And, of course, for the trial you propose, since homeopathy does not recognize diagnosing a disease by name, how could a comparison be made?
The End
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