Questions about the placebo effect.

[qII]

Re: Piercing attack

Olaf, I appreciate you have some history with Rolf but simply flinging an ad hominem like that does not do you or your cause any credit.

I'm open-minded about it acupuncture (I know little about it and have heard good and indifferent reports).

How about you and/or rolf start a new thread and try and convince me one way or the other.

A couple of ground rules;
Attacking someone's character will not sway me in any direction.
Repeating the same information ad nauseam will not increase it's potency.

she called me an old nag even though i am about 14 years younger than she.

i am not a nag

 

[Rolfe]

Xanta doesn't understand how easy it is to convince oneself that a useless intervention has had a beneficial effect. Real doctors and vets try hard not to fall into that trap (though I have to say the track record is still a bit patchy). The altmeddlers are really just the ones who don't try.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Re: Re: Piercing attack

she called me an old nag even though i am about 14 years younger than she.

Coming off the ignore list just for a moment....

Poor baby!

Looks like my clever pun on "you can lead a horse to water...." was entirely wasted on this desert air.

Rolfe.

 

[qII]

All those aztecs can't have been wrong can they?

completely different situation. besides if they really did kill someone every day (i am somewhat doubtful) maybe it was for some other reason than stated such as getting rid of the homely ones.

 

[geni]

How are they differen't? In both cases people are confusing causation.

 

[qII]

this "ignore" business is really starting to disturb me. first zep then richard and now you. who else?

 

[geni]

What do you expect if you spam stuff that has been debunk a hundread times rather than producing a valid argument?

 

[Rolfe]

It's astonishing how much better sense quite a few threads make if you just hit the "ignore olaf" button. And you can review them in half the time!

I'm still taking a glance at her new posts, for now, but this may well stop if she doesn't actually engage with an argument sometime.

Bored with this mousie, no catnip in it.

Rolfe.

 

[Kumar]

We need to know that the drugs we're giving them actually are doing them real good. Rolfe.

Rolfe,

This is only the differanciating point, because everyone consider that his durg/therapy is the best. Everyone tries to prove himself as best & others as worst. But something can be best & worst everywhere, out of which best should be respected & worst should be rejected.

 

[geni]

Rolfe,

This is only the differanciating point, because everyone consider that his durg/therapy is the best. Everyone tries to prove himself as best & others as worst. But something can be best & worst everywhere, out of which best should be respected & worst should be rejected.

Not one homeopathic remedy has been shown to work in a well controled RDBPC trial. Every new drug in conventional medcine has to pass such a trial. I think I know which system is best.

 

[Corallinus]

This is just not true. There are plenty of drugs that have been sent for trial. They have been given some kind of trial which has obviously not been thorough. They have then been passed and then released to be prescribed. It is once they have been prescribed that problems, some major problems have occurred and there are plenty of drugs that have had to be totally withdrawn from the market due to unacceptable side effects all because the supposed trial was not good enough.

If the trial had been undertaken thoroughly, then these should have been detected well before releasing the drug onto the market and prescribing it, so what you have just stated definitely is not true at all.

I also know which one I would prefer to use too and it would not be a drug that has been trialled and then withdrawn.

 

[geni]

How much do you know about the process involed in t drug trial? Thee trail has to show three things:
1. The drug works
2. The side effects are not worse than the thing it treats
3. It does at least of the above better than what is on the market

Unfortuntly there is a praticle limit to the size of a trial. You can't test several million people to if there is a rare side effect it is going to be missed. This is why there is and adverse effect reporting system. If say there is a side effect that only truns up in 1 in 10,000 people then the trial is going to miss it. However this is not common and the number of drugs withdrawn is small. You say plenty. At short notice I can name 2. How many can you name?

In the end if the value of n in a trial is sub infinte you are going to get a few false posertives and unfortunetly despite the best effeots to avoid this this soemties happens.

Homeopathy by comparison has not had a single remedy get pass this test.

 

[Benguin]

I'd actually say if Homeopathy had some side effects (beside a lighter feeling in the wallet) I might be more inclined to believe there was a chance it could be doing something beneficial.

 

[geni]

I'd actually say if Homeopathy had some side effects (beside a lighter feeling in the wallet) I might be more inclined to believe there was a chance it could be doing something beneficial.

homeopaths claim that there are things that the medical profesion would call side effects (agrivations etc). It can be interesting to see how much damage they do to the english language in order to claim that these are in fact no side effects.

 

[Corallinus]

I can think of a few more than that, which number about 5 or 6. However, reporting of side effect of drugs does not always take place and there are lots of quite unscrupulous doctors out there who purposely do not report all the side effects, so that they can keep the drugs on the market.

I would have thought that the 'side effects' of any homeopathic remedy would be its complete proving picture from a materia medica, so I think it would be extremely hard for any manufacturer to print the whole of a materia medica profile on the side of a remedy like Lachesis for example, as the picture is so wide spread and anyway, if a person is not sensitve to it, they will not get any of the symptoms anyway.

 

[geni]

I can think of a few more than that, which number about 5 or 6. However, reporting of side effect of drugs does not always take place and there are lots of quite unscrupulous doctors out there who purposely do not report all the side effects, so that they can keep the drugs on the market.

Why should a doctor want to keep an unsafe drug on the market (and before you say profit check my location)?

I would have thought that the 'side effects' of any homeopathic remedy would be its complete proving picture from a materia medica, so I think it would be extremely hard for any manufacturer to print the whole of a materia medica profile on the side of a remedy like Lachesis for example, as the picture is so wide spread and anyway, if a person is not sensitve to it, they will not get any of the symptoms anyway.

If things were that simple homeopaths would have run out of excuses long ago If the paicent gets worse in any way short of perhaps death a combination of agrivation and hering's laws provides them with plenty of excuses.

 

[Rolfe]

Re: Re: Piercing attack

she called me an old nag even though i am about 14 years younger than she.

i am not a nag

OK, this is petty. But if anyone would like a sample of what Xanta's been calling me (and completely unprovoked), have a look at this thread here, third post down.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

This is only the differanciating point, because everyone consider that his durg/therapy is the best. Everyone tries to prove himself as best & others as worst. But something can be best & worst everywhere, out of which best should be respected & worst should be rejected.

Bringing this one up may get the thread back on track.

Kumar, I think you do most physicians a disservice when you say that everyone is trying to prove that his own approach is the best. Most physicians try to find out what the best treatment is, then use it. If someone comes up with something better, or good evidence that what's being used isn't much good after all, then anyone with any ethics at all will change their practices. However, it is usually necessary to make a good case if you expect someone to modify a procedure they've been using successfuly for some time.

This is what the placebo-controlled trial is for. It is to allow people to know objectively what the actual drug is doing, separated out from the effects of expectation and gratitide and so on.

And as Geni said, no homoeopathic remedy has ever shown a significant difference from placebo in a properly controlled and blinded trial. If they had, they would be regarded differently by the medical establishment. Most medics are pragmatic - if something demonstrably works, they'll go for it, never mind how it works. The trouble with homoeopathy is that when you look for the objective evidence, it doesn't work.

I wish we could get it through to you that this isn't partisanship. We don't defend what's "ours" and dismiss what's "yours". We want to use what works. Just show it works. We really are prejudiced against things that don't work, I'm afraid.

Rolfe.

 

[jj]

Rolfe,

To date I have received 4 private emails from long time members here who have backed acupuncture. All you are doing is losing credibility with people when you unfairly attack it.

Just because you are an angry spinster does not mean that you can unleash your rage on anything you see fit.
Rolfe quit LYING about acupuncture!

over 100,000 Medical Doctors!!!!!!!!!!

Dear Olaf, please provide us the evidence for your claim of 100,000 Medical doctors. Please point us to where we can obtain the list of signed affadavits, at the very least.

 

[Rolfe]

Dear Olaf, please provide us the evidence for your claim of 100,000 Medical doctors. Please point us to where we can obtain the list of signed affadavits, at the very least.

The 100,000 medical doctors have as much reality as the four long-time members who have emailed Xanta/Oaf.

But this spam has been going on (in H'pathy) since about February. They finally banned the sceptics for pointing out the obvious about the Emperor's wardrobe a bit too clearly, and Xanta felt so lonely that she came here to continue. The logical fallacies in her position have been explained to her often, but she simply ignores this and continues to spam the same pathetic post. "100,000 medical doctors!"

Even she can't surely think this is any sort of an argument. "She only does it to annoy because she knows it teases." Your ignore list is your friend.

Rolfe.