Just a short personal experience anecdote: I went to the homeopath here in Zurich because I had been feeling very depressed. After taking the liquid for a while, nothing changed with my mood. Oh, except one thing. I found out I was pregnant. It hadn`t crossed her mind to ask about the possibility . Is this not something one might consider as a medical practitioner? Later, after I had abandoned the treatment, I rang her to ask for the number of a colleague she had mentioned at our appointment. He used both Western and alternative medicine. She then proceeded to ask me how I was. BANG! A month later I got an CHF80 bill for the phone call . Money, money, money. I rang her enraged as only a woman in her first trimester can be, and told her I was refusing to pay .
Unfortunately this was my first experience with homeopathy and it killed my desire to have anything to do with it, and I am pretty open minded.
So we should stop doing clinical trials for all medecines? If the only valid proof for homeopathy is personal experience, why not for everything else too?
Don't believe all those hard-to-understand statistics! You can prove anything with statistics!!
Unfortunately, it is also true that you cannot prove anything WITHOUT statistics.... They may be boring to do, hard to get right and hard to understand, but there is no other way.
Who would take dangerous drugs that had not been extensively tested using the best methods that science can provide?
Oh, by the way, I've already admitted I have no scientific training above O level, but on what MEDICAL basis do you (and Tom) base your patronising prognosis that most illnesses disappear by themselves and that coincidence/placebo effect of the temporal relationship with the practictioner caused an improvement in my case? Certainly, some symptoms DO disappear without treatment. Some don't - but I think 3.5 years is long enough to wait to decide that they aren't just going to fade away. Then there is the probability they will become (are already) chronic, (which in case you don't know) means, as opposed to acute, that the symptoms are there long term. Chronic illnesses are those which most are most resistant to conventional medicine and with which most doctors have the least success.
As Frank Zappa already pointed out, statistics can be manipulated to prove/disprove anything,but has anyone ever analysed the reports of people who HAVE had positive experiences with homeopathy?
Science I always compare to mechanics messing about with a car engine and discovering lots of interesting things about how the motor works, there's the piston, this is how the battery works and lots of other fascinating laws and things that hold the car together. But the ONE burning question that I really want to know the answer to, i.e., who is the engineer /designer/inventor behind all this? And this question, to date, has no scientist ever been able to answer.
Human Biology is the only aspect of science that was needed when training as a nurse. (If that has changed? )
One last post on this subject before I forever hold my peace:
If the scientifically orientated have a problem accepting the efficiency of homeopathic medicine which cannot be verified by the usual empirical methods and natural science, perhaps they could be persuaded to look at homeopathy in the light of moral science or human science which has been identified as an extension of natural science.
Human science has been described as "a philosophy & approach to understanding human experiences in SUBJECTIVE, PERSONAL, historical, cross-cultural and spiritual terms. A science of qualities rather than quantities
and which closes the gap between objective and subjective experiences."
Reading: David Hume's Moral Science, also E.G.A. Husserl & Rudolf Steiner
Hume was writing in the mid 18th century, so what passed for "science" then was not what we have now. No Karl Popper to emphasise the central position of falsification over proof (theories cannot be proved, only not falsified with tests of increasing difficulty). Almost no statistics to test the probability that observations were valid, etc. So claiming moral or human "science" as science was perhaps credible at the time. The idea does not have much merit now from this scientist's point of view.
Hume undoubtedly had a lot of interesting things to say. It just ain't science.
Are you alluding to some sort of God? You are of course assuming that such an entity exists. The idea of an intervening God is difficult to reconcile with the scientific approach to solving problems. In this case, you need only invoke God to explain anything. This approach has little predictive or explanatory power, in the scientific sense. Reproducibility of results is difficult, and it is difficult to come up with consistent hypotheses as to why God intervened here, but did not do so there.
For a non-interventionist God, it seems to me that its existence or non-existence is a moot point.
So far science has no need to explain God. I feel this is because there is no objective evidence in support of this idea.
Interesting thread. I have not met a single person that has been cured by homeopathy.
A 30C dilution is like one molecule of the original substance diluted in lake Geneva. All you get is water. Oh, wait no. It is actually little sugar pellets that are supposed to have captured the benefit from the water dropped on them.
Think you will find that Anthrosana, the Verein for Anthroposhophisches Medizin in Arlesheim, are quite active in conducting tests and trials on a scientific basis on their medicines