Homeopathy

gurusan said:
See, I much prefer medicines which work even if you don't want them to or completely believe they won't.
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Don't assume the placebo effect won't occur if you don't want it to work or know that what you are taking is a placebo... There have been studies which show that even if you are aware that you are taking something that is nonsense, it can still have a beneficial effect.
 
naffa said:
I used to think homeopathy was utter rubbish and was purely the placebo effect (and to be honest I still do, but this is interesting). HOWEVER, a couple of years ago some of our cattle had become infected with ring worm and we'd spent weeks and weeks trying to find a medicine that would actually get rid of it and nothing was working. We'd literally tried ten or so different treatments and none worked, so we tried a homeopathic treatment and hey presto, cured! I'm pretty sure that the placebo effect wouldn't really work on cows, but the homeopathic remedy to ring worm did. I'm more than aware that this could have been a fluke, or perhaps this is a singular instance where the treatment does work (as that's what I believe happened, but it's somat else to think about :)).
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Magic water cured your cows...do you have any thoughts as to how it did so? I think coincidence is more likely.
 
Evangelion said:
Homeopathy is not thousands of years old.
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My snake oil is brand new, manufactured using the latest techniques and is guaranteed to solve your ails. I create it by taking 1 ml of snake oil then put it in a 999ml of water. I then shake and take 1ml of that solution and put that in with 999ml. I then shake and take 1ml of that solution and put that in with 999ml. I then shake and take 1ml of that solution and put that in with 999ml. I then shake and take 1ml of that solution and put that in with 999ml.

I do this 200,000 times.

This is how to create the most powerful snake oil.
 
oli collett said:
http://www.leecrandallparkmd.net/researchpages/placebo1.html

This is the classic study that most people cite - I'm sure more has been done since then but it'll take some more digging.

Yes, it's a small group with no control, but you can see what i'm getting at.

I'll try and find some more on this later if you like
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This is a very poor study.

1) Not blinded
2) No control group
3) No statistical significance/analysis (confidence interval etc)

Not sure if anything can be inferred from this at all. Not that i disagree with the placebo effect at all, just pointing out this study is severely flawed.
 
osc89er said:
My snake oil is brand new, manufactured using the latest techniques and is guaranteed to solve your ails. I create it by taking 1 ml of snake oil then put it in a 999ml of water. I then shake and take 1ml of that solution and put that in with 999ml. I then shake and take 1ml of that solution and put that in with 999ml. I then shake and take 1ml of that solution and put that in with 999ml. I then shake and take 1ml of that solution and put that in with 999ml.

I do this 200,000 times.

This is how to create the most powerful snake oil.
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z0mg I'm a believer! :eek: :p
 
Dolph said:
anything apart from a priori assumption to support the above?

I'm not a supporter of homeopathy really, but statements like the above are no better than blind faith in the process
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They're nothing of the sort; they're simply possible alternatives for what happened. Correlation is not causation. If someone has flu and rubs a magic bead on the 5th day of the illness, and each time they have flu they do this and then recover from the flu, does this mean the magic bead has cured their flu? Is it blind faith in the alternative to 'magic bead' healing to suggest it's not necessarily the magic bead causing them to recover?
 
Monkey Puzzle said:
They're nothing of the sort; they're simply possible alternatives for what happened. Correlation is not causation. If someone has flu and rubs a magic bead on the 5th day of the illness, and each time they have flu they do this and then recover from the flu, does this mean the magic bead has cured their flu? Is it blind faith in the alternative to 'magic bead' healing to suggest it's not necessarily the magic bead causing them to recover?
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It's faith in a priori assumption to state that it was one of the alternatives without any investigation, which is how that post read.

If he'd have said 'it is much more likely to have been X, Y or Z', that would be different (which is the crux of your argument, you have read caution into the post that was not present the way it was written originally).

And this is without pointing out that the placebo effect is very poorly understood itself anyway, it's more of a way of saying 'we don't think it was the test subject, but we don't know what it was' than anything else.
 
frosty03 said:
This is a very poor study.

1) Not blinded
2) No control group
3) No statistical significance/analysis (confidence interval etc)

Not sure if anything can be inferred from this at all. Not that i disagree with the placebo effect at all, just pointing out this study is severely flawed.
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Yes, I already pointed that out, and the conclusion is obviously another "more research needs to be done". I am intrigued about this because in everything i've read it does seem to be a commonly held belief that placebo works even when the patients are aware it is a placebo, so I'm off to find some more evidence..

Either way, I don't think that it is fair to conclude from this that the stance that you need to believe in the placebo for it to work is a logical one either - the point being we don't know either way.
 
Dolph said:
It's faith in a priori assumption to state that it was one of the alternatives without any investigation, which is how that post read.
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No, that's how it read to you. It's actually slightly ambiguous as to how to interpret it. You read "x,y or z" as "No, can't be true, has to be x,y or z". I read it as "alternatively; x,y or z." Not that it particularly matters.

If he'd have said 'it is much more likely to have been X, Y or Z', that would be different (which is the crux of your argument, you have read caution into the post that was not present the way it was written originally).
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And you have read it as the stubborn denial of the possibility of homeopathy having clinical effects, which was not present in the way the post was written originally.

And this is without pointing out that the placebo effect is very poorly understood itself anyway, it's more of a way of saying 'we don't think it was the test subject, but we don't know what it was' than anything else.
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Not sure how the placebo effect works on animals - do cows have a concept of medicine?:p
 
.one. said:
But surely ring worm needs tobe treated it will not just go on it's own or am i wrong ?
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Maybe it was cured by one of the ten other treatments they mentioned.

I've just checked - it seems that ringworm will heal by itself in otherwise healthy cows, given enough time.
 
probably always will be people dumb enough to believe in this nonsense

I mean most newsapapers contain a horoscope page - lots of women read that stuff for 'fun' but a decent enough portion are actually dumb enough to take it all seriously

ditto to homeopathy, accupuncture etc...
 
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