Olaf/QII said:
Only true if you want to keep fibbing to yourself.
3. Results
3.1. THE EFFECT OF BELLADONNA (B) DILUTIONS ON THE NORMAL TONE OF THE RAT DUODENUM
The effect of D water was a statistically insignificant rise in the tone. The D aqueous solutions of alcohol 70° had no effect.
The N aqueous solutions of B had the effect of lowering the normal tone of the isolated rat duodenum, only up to 6 C (unidirectional, monophasic effect) (Figure 1).
The D dilutions of B exerted an effect up to 45 C, i.e. relaxation between 1 C-20 C and contraction between 30 C-45 C (bidirectional, biphasic effect) (Figure 1).
At the same degree of dilution, the D dilutions had a more intense effect than the N solutions (Figure 1).
Oh, what the heck, here's one for old times' sake.
1. Do you understand why measuring "tone" in isolated bowel segments is a notoriously difficult model to use? Yet another dodgy model being used by dodgy homeopaths. How's that for a remarkable correlation that keeps defeating its null hypothesis!
2. Do you understand why their statistical analysis is invalid? I'll give you a hint for this one: what hypothesis were they testing for the effect of their test solutions. Having obtained these results as a preliminary pilot study how would they confirm that they have not enaged in a data dredge to produce their results? As a last question, I'll give you another to test your understanding of what they did. What is the Bonferroni adjustment and how would it be applicable to the multiple statistical tests they performed? How many tests for statistical significance did they perform on a single series of datasets?
3. Why is this statement a serious problem: "During a working day, in the same bath, the low solutions were tested in an increasing order of concentrations and the high dilutions were tested at random."? What confounding effects have they failed to deal with?
4. Let's look at the data as reported. Examine one data point: Belladonna C45 produced a response reported as "+67.60±0.10" (Mean + sem). With n=8, that means that the standard deviation of the responses was 0.28%. In other words, with 8 samples they all probably lay in the range 67.1-68.1%. While it would be lovely if biological experiments could work so neatly, these are the tolerances that you find in physics and engineering, not biology. I don't know what was going on in their tissue baths but the least likely way that numbers like this could be produced is by any biological process acting on a tissue sample.
In a similar vein, you should look at these successive data points.
- 45______________ +67.60±0.10
- 55______________ -27.80±0.30
- 75______________ +95.45±1.20
- 80______________ +82.39±0.60
It is biologically unfeasible for sems to be so small with such large differences between successive dilutions. Now, I have no way of proving what was going on, but just bear in mind that if these data were graphed, the sem error bars would not be visible beyond the thickness of the line used to connect the points. Have a look at any pharmacology paper involving dose-response curves and see whether that ever occurs. It does not.
5. Does this paper exist in a peer-reviewed form? Why not?
Rolfe, Hans et al. One interesting feature of that farrago is that it gives an estimate for the concentration of a pharmacologically significant substance in a homeopathic "mother tincture":
"The Belladonna (B) tincture (containing 0,03g% total alkaloids, expressed in atropine) " i.e. 3mg/l.
