Homeopaths and malaria (again)

[ssarkarnetip]

The trail was proved to be successful in treating malaria. The X2-test is 1.03 with a p-value of 0.31.(non-significant) is comparing with chloroquine. This means that individualized homeopathic remedies did the same as chloroquine in treating people with malaria. No larger studies have yet to be done. This study was pretty small. The debate here is of course should homeopaths prescribe malaria prevention treatments. They really do not have any medical basis in doing so. Homeopaths even acknowledge to treat the individual so giving everyone the same malaria prevention medicine does not make sense according to their own theories.

How many homeopaths were recommending this malaria prevention medicine? I would hope to would not be everyone one of them.

 

[Homeoproofer]

mojo:
The whole individualisation thing is generally just used as a post-hoc excuse. A patient has a self-limiting or chronic condition? It will eventually improve of its own accord. If it doesn't improve after the first consultation, just say the remedy wasn't properly individualised, and prescribe another. Keep doing this until the patient shows some improvement. Then claim success.

nonsense.
no idea about the finding of a remedy, I see...

Humans are no robots and it will never work like reparment of a car if you want to cure a person!
The point is, that there is a similimum and it cures then, even if the first tries did not work.

Why shouldn´t it be allowed/possible for a homeopath to make a mistake, while the schooldoctors make mistakes all the time??

If a doctor makes a mistake it will not be taken as a proof against his medicine, I am sure...but with the homeopathy you want to do this?

Who will take you serious with your imaginations ?

You write about the case of a not working remedy, but woun´t you be satisfied if the remedy cures you?
Will you fight against homeopathy after it has saved your life?

It's also used as an excuse for DBPC trials that don't show any effect: many of these test a single remedy for a single condition, so homoeopaths can simply shrug off any failures as "not proper homoeopathy". Of course, if the results can be interpreted as positive, then they'll get plastered all over the web by various homoeopaths, regardless of the lack of individualisation.

Homoeopaths will routinely claim that particular remedies cure particular conditions; arnica for bruising, for example. When this is tested and found not to work, they just fall back on good old individualisation as an excuse.

Its only a matter of selfaid if there is no homeopath there who can help you!
Same mistakes happen in the schoolmedicine when a patient buys a remedy on own behalf without asking a doctor!

Oh how easy it is for you to think only one-way and not globally...
it is like in the medicines: schoolmedicine thinks about single bodyparts only and homeopathy cares about the whole person!

I've yet to see a homoeopath objecting to the sale of over-the-counter homoeopathic nostrums intended to treat a single condition. these will, obviously, not be individualised. They will also lack the consultation that many homoeopaths claim is an essential part of the treatment (for an extreme example, see Milgrom's flapdoodle about "Patient-Practitioner-Remedy Entanglement").

And, as you say, they also claim that homoeopathy can prevent conditions that are yet to develop and which therefore do not even have any symptoms to which to match a remedy.

You are pittyful one if you can not imagine that an individual can not "learn" out of a remedy and is prepared in thi sway for future happenings.
The C-potency has about 35days lasting effect and that is why it can be used like vaccination.

it is so easy if you like to understand and do not get lost in theory...

 

[Asolepius]

http://www.d-n-h.org/Malaria Research - HWB.pdf



So which is the trial that "proved to be successful"?

This is a staggeringly poorly written paper. For a start, where was it published? I can guess that it never appeared in any journal, so it never had peer review. There is no information about how blinding was done. This can be done with individualised treatments but it would need an unblinded third party. Demographic data are not presented - vital to check balancing of treatment groups. In fact they look unbalanced from the different patient numbers - which suggests biassed patient selection. The results section is particularly bad, with no detail at all on what they mean by `improved'. The authors describe the parameters to be used and then don't say what results they got for each parameter. This study never aimed to test whether homeopathy is effective, as the research hypothesis was that homeopathy was better than standard treatment. It failed to find any difference, most likely because of small sample size and sloppy methodology and conduct. Interesting that we have lots of detail on `repertory' and `rubrics', and all the fairy tale rubbish that homeopaths love, and hardly anything on what really matters, the science.

 

[Asolepius]

Homeoproofer: I think you miss the whole point of this forum. It has evidence as its foundation. You can write all the words you like, but without providing evidence to back up what you say nobody will engage in useful debate with you. But do you know what evidence is? I could tell you to read some philosophy books, but it's simpler than that. Evidence comes from the scientific methods that have over the last 300 years told us what we know about the universe.

You are making claims about homeopathy, so you have to provide the evidence, not us. Anecdotes are not evidence.

 

[zooterkin]

Goodness! Have you got a handy metaphor to describe this, like one drop in a container the size of Jupiter, or something?

How about this one:

Robert L. Park, Ph.D., a prominent physicist who is executive director of The American Physical Society, has noted that since the least amount of a substance in a solution is one molecule, a 30C solution would have to have at least one molecule of the original substance dissolved in a minimum of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water. This would require a container more than 30,000,000,000 times the size of the Earth.

ETA: Jupiter is (according to wikipedia) 1321 times the volume of the Earth, so that would be 1 molecule (not drop) in a container the size of 22,710,000 Jupiters.

 

[Mojo]

The trail was proved to be successful in treating malaria. The X2-test is 1.03 with a p-value of 0.31.(non-significant) is comparing with chloroquine. This means that individualized homeopathic remedies did the same as chloroquine in treating people with malaria.

It also says that they don't know how effective the chloroquine was "as the level of resistance against chloroquine is not known in the population studied".

So all it found (regardless of any other weaknesses in the study) was that homoeopathy was as effective as a treatment of unknown effectiveness.

No larger studies have yet to be done.

Or at least none have been published, in over 15 years after that study concluded that larger studies were needed.

 

[Mojo]

This is a staggeringly poorly written paper. For a start, where was it published? I can guess that it never appeared in any journal, so it never had peer review.

It was a paper presented at a meeting of the "Groupe International de Recherches sur l'Infinitésima" in 1994, and published in a volume of selected papers from that and the preceding meeting: http://www.entretiens-internationaux.mc/giri.html

 

[Acleron]

Goodness! Have you got a handy metaphor to describe this, like one drop in a container the size of Jupiter, or something?

Its ever so slightly worse than that. If one drop is 0.1 ml, it would be in a spherical container with a diameter about 50,000 times the distance from the sun to Pluto.

I'm only half way through my first coffee of the day so I may be out by a few magnitudes.

This is just extremely good rinsing.

 

[Madalch]

Goodness! Have you got a handy metaphor to describe this, like one drop in a container the size of Jupiter, or something?

One molecule in ten tons of water.

(Sorry- I was thinking 30X, not 30C. 30C, as Zooterkin pointed out, would be one molecule in 10^30 tons of water.)

 

[steenkh]

nonsense.
no idea about the finding of a remedy, I see...

Quite the contrary! You do not seem to know how homoeopaths work!

Humans are no robots and it will never work like reparment of a car if you want to cure a person!

Exactly. Cars do not repair themselves, but humans do! Many conventional doctors have found this to their advantage too. For homoeopaths, this is the only kind of healing they can provide.

The point is, that there is a similimum and it cures then, even if the first tries did not work.

The point is that you cannot prove this. There have already been made plenty of real scientific research (also by homoeopaths) and homoeopathy have failed to produce better healing than what happens naturally when you do nothing. Homoeopaths just invent excuses to get around this problem.

Why shouldn´t it be allowed/possible for a homeopath to make a mistake, while the schooldoctors make mistakes all the time??

Mistakes are OK, but there should be some successes also. Homoeopathy has in 200 years of existence not presented a single success that could not be explained by other means. Conventional medicine can present such successes every day. (This is the question about a single healing of a non-self-limiting condition, that you have been asked to provide).

If a doctor makes a mistake it will not be taken as a proof against his medicine, I am sure...but with the homeopathy you want to do this?

Present us with a single success, and things would look brighter for homoeopathy.

You write about the case of a not working remedy, but woun´t you be satisfied if the remedy cures you?
Will you fight against homeopathy after it has saved your life?

How would I know if homoeopathy had saved my life? African witch-doctors can also quote thousands of satisfied patients who think they owe their lives to the witch-doctor's remedies. Would you think that is warranted?

Oh how easy it is for you to think only one-way and not globally...
it is like in the medicines: schoolmedicine thinks about single bodyparts only and homeopathy cares about the whole person!

Which is of course pure nonsense, but it sounds kind of nice! Conventional medicine is about the entire person, and more so, because conventional medicine is concerned about the deeper cause (like the viral actions) and not just magic thinking like "this stuff causes the same symptoms, so this must be good to have on the label of a bottle that contains not a single molecule of the active substance".

it is so easy if you like to understand and do not get lost in theory...

Yes, real knowledge is much too difficult to handle. Better settle for magic.

 

[luchog]

The trail was proved to be successful in treating malaria. The X2-test is 1.03 with a p-value of 0.31.(non-significant) is comparing with chloroquine.

No it's not, it's comparing with the untreated group. It has a non-significant effect compared to no treatment at all.

Sorry, homeopathy fails again.