Homeopathy Literature

Maxwell's Demon

New Blood
M
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Feb 1, 2006
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Hello - I'm currently trying to convince a friend of mine that homeopathy is grade A bunk. Rather worryingly, she is a medical student, so I feel that this is an important one to win; I have been so disturbed at the fact that her medical school are allowing a total woo to come in and teach this carp in the first place. :mad:

I've ran through all the usual arguments against it and have made some headway, but she is insisting that trials have proven it to be effective in some circumstances - hence I want to give her some good hard scientific literature explaining that it is not. I've pulled the recent article by Egger et al. from The Lancet, although I worry that it is a little heavy on the stats for her. Does anyone know of any other good papers that are less heavy on the maths that do a similar job? In particular, any papers that compare the efficacy of homeopathic solutions with normal distilled water in a RC-DB test?

I've got access to most journals so just the journal name/number/pages etc will be fine. Thanks for any help!
 
White et al: Individualised homeopathy as an adjunct in the treatment of childhood asthma: a randomised placebo controlled trial is quite a nice one to cite because it tested individualised homoeopathy in a DBPC test. One of the objections that homoeopaths often raise to DBPC tests is that most of the ones carried out so far have been looking at the effectiveness of a single remedy for a specific condition. Homoeopaths claim that this is not how proper homoeopathy is carried out.

Note also that it is testing the effectiveness of homoeopathy for childhood asthma. The (unblinded, uncontrolled) study published last year by the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital (actually more of a customer satisfaction survey than a proper study of the effectiveness of homoeopathy) produced particularly positive results for childhood asthma. So good, in fact, that they've selected childhood asthma for their next unblinded test of homoeopathy.
 
MD, the Lancet article is crap.

How about stop playing God and letting your medical student friend determine for herself. Do you have that little respect for her abilities? Sheesh, she got herself into medical school. She may find, as so many of us have, that homeopathy can be very effective, either by itself or in combination with allopathy. If homeopathy doesn't work for her, then she won't use it. Quite an easy solution, really.
 
Perhaps it may not be too late for Maxwell's med student friend to understand that it's possble to engineer apparently favourable publications for absolutely any bizarre idea that takes your fancy, and that there are quite a number of ways of going about this - publication bias, poor study design and misinterpretation of statistics are the ones that spring most immediately to mind. Also to learn that there's no idea so bizarre that some nutter with a medical qualification can't be induced to believe it, and that some delusions are so widespread that they have become politically inexpedient to expose.

It's a shame it's way too late for Bowser to understand this.

Rolfe.
 
Sheesh back

Bowser said:
MD, the Lancet article is crap.

How about stop playing God and letting your medical student friend determine for herself. Do you have that little respect for her abilities? Sheesh, she got herself into medical school. She may find, as so many of us have, that homeopathy can be very effective, either by itself or in combination with allopathy. If homeopathy doesn't work for her, then she won't use it. Quite an easy solution, really.
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I reckon he's concerned about his friend and doing what he thinks is right. I wouldn't call that playing God...

Playing God is pretending to know something about medicine despite the fact that you have no real idea whatsoever. Pretending to have an idea about how to treat a patients very real and distressing disease. Then taking someone's money and giving them, in return, a cure that consists of distilled water or sugar and claiming that it's gonna make them better.

I'd like to think at medical school the practioners are taught how and why a particular treatment works for the symptoms and illnesses it targets. If you are so passionate on the subject perhaps you'd like to explain how any one of the 1000s of Homeopathic treatments actually work?

I'll start you off:

A. Patient is suffering from Asthma

B. Patient takes homepathic cure (combination of active ingredients diluted to such an extent that none remain, cure is basically distilled water)

C. <fill in here>
 
Bowser said:
MD, the Lancet article is crap.

How about stop playing God and letting your medical student friend determine for herself. Do you have that little respect for her abilities? Sheesh, she got herself into medical school. She may find, as so many of us have, that homeopathy can be very effective, either by itself or in combination with allopathy. If homeopathy doesn't work for her, then she won't use it. Quite an easy solution, really.
Click to expand...

Bowser - to accuse me of playing God here is just silly. I am engaging in an intellectual process with my friend and trying to convince her that my model of the world is more true than hers - precisely what good scientists do and have been doing for generations.

And to her full credit, she happily engages with me in this process and I enjoy our discussions (as frustrating as it can be). Most importantly, she is open minded enough to engage me in these discussions and is prepared to review her views of the world. Unlike yourself it would appear.

Thanks for the links/papers, I'll certainly be pushing them her way. Todays letter from leading doctors to NHS Trusts should help a bit as well!
 
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