Homeopathics exposed - Yay!

[RicodJour]

Name calling is not an emotional response, eh? ;)

R

[krw]

I call a spade a spade, idiot.

[krw]

It's interesting when someone on the Usenet openly defends fraud, even if he doesn't understand what he's said.

[RicodJour]

"for the most part charlatans" "biggest scam going"

Yessiree, that's openly defending fraud, alright. Thanks for pointing it out.

You really need to stop being so emotional. It's unseemly. Let me pose a hypothetical analogy: You wake up in a clearing in a very dense forest. How big is the forest?

What you are saying, in your emotionally-fraught state, is that you know how big the forest is from just standing there in the clearing. You seem to believe that all progress proceeds in a straightforward linear fashion with no errors, no backtracking, no lost knowledge and with absolute certitude. I can understand you believing that about yourself, as you frequently profess the same, but I am surprised that you think that about humanity and progress in general.

If someone disagrees with you, you call them an idiot. Many people disagree with you, so there are a lot of idiots out there, but miraculously you believe these idiots have no impact on life, knowledge and progress. How is that possible with so many idiots out there?

Progress is clearly not without drawbacks that may easily outweigh the benefits, as shown by lead pipes, the introduction of tin cans, tobacco and pollution from many sources.

Yet, you know. That's special.

R

[HeyBub]

I think you do not grasp the theory behing homeopathy. The theory is that something akin or affiliated with the malady under treatment, when ingested in minuscule amounts (I mean REALLY insignificant amounts) will trigger a bodily response to rehabilitate the diseased organ.

No, willow bark was ingested in therapeutic amounts. Homeopathic remedies are ingested in nanogram concentrations. A typical dose is equivalent to dropping one aspirin tablet in a five hundred gallon tank of water then asking the patient to place one drop of the resultant mixture under the tongue.

[krw]

Exactly my point. You even admit that they're frauds, yet defend them anyhow. Like I said, "even if he doesn't understand what he's said".

No, you're a fool. You think I'm emotional because I point out that obvious fact.

More lies, but that's to be expected of you.

You *ARE* and idiot. You prove it here daily.

More irrelevance; your best argument.

Well, I didn't say you took the short bus to school, but if you say so...

[krw]

It's not even that. The person sees *nothing* of the material, it's diluted so far (10:1 30 times, or some such). It's "benefits" are somehow impressed on the water molecules, making it non-toxic, yet beneficial.

It's even worse than that.

[RicodJour]

First off, what is a therapeutic amount? If you mean the minimum amount that will work, okay, how do you factor in the placebo effect? That means no amount of aspirin _can_ help you. And I am pretty sure that a nanogram is infinitely larger than none.

You are familiar with vaccines. A totally minuscule amount is injected and the body takes over from there. If it works for a vaccine, will it work for something not injected? Well, the Polio vaccine can be taken orally, and it's still a minuscule amount. Will it work with other stuff? I don't know, and neither do you - or anybody else for that matter. The immune system was around for a fair bit of time before it was discovered, yet it managed to work just fine before that.

Saying that you know something without a shadow of a doubt about something as complex as the human body is simply foolish. If you said take all of the blood out of a body, or cutoff it's head, and it will die, or something simple like that, I'd agree with you. But you're not, so I don't. I'll repeat - I'm saying I don't know and neither does anybody else.

We have just barely gotten started understanding the human body. Don't pretend we're done.

R

[Higgs Boson]

HB

[RicodJour]

I was curious, as I don't really remember much of what you say, and you seemed to be all over Usenet all of a sudden, so I checked out your posting profile. It seems I owe you an apology. You are clearly intent on going for the Usenet Newsgroup Posting Frequency record. A noble goal!

I really like newsgroups and enjoy the back and forth, and sometimes I wonder if I'm spending too much time doing it, but I stand in awe of your single-minded obsession. In 11 months you've posted almost 8600 times. You are truly a Newsgroup Ninja Master.

I will take this opportunity to admit that there is no way I could keep up with your lightning fast Send button and the raw speed with which you can type "You are an idiot" on this and other newsgroups, so I will no longer try.

Good luck going for the record.

R

PS You may want to invest in some backup keyboards.

[Tony Hwang]

Hi, Homeopathic is VERY, VERY symptom specific. Even you have use it properly like not handling the tablet with fingers, etc. No sense talking about it for some one who never tried it or does not understand.

[RicodJour]

There are people who have not tried things, and people who do not understand, and then there are people who do not try to understand things.

Of these, clearly the last are the worst.

R

[JoeSpareBedroom]

Dogs poop in your backyard - kill them off!

========

Dogs. Mosquitoes. Same thing. SWAT!

[krw]

More proof that you're just stupid.

Good grief you're stupid.

But you *ARE* an idiot. It's time for you to admit it.

I buy good ones. The last one went 18 years. Perhaps you could learn

*something* here.

[krw]

You continue to defend what even you admit is fraud. What a dummy!

[RicodJour]

I can't speak to the homeopathy guy, and it sounds perfectly plausible, but as to the placebo effect it's everywhere and you see it every day.

In relatively recent news.

In personal relations:

I find it curious that some people feel that things such as acupuncture and the placebo effect are assaults on science and rationality. My view is that if people who are looking for relief, find it in a placebo effect or anything else, whether it's considered science or not, who cares? If they feel it works, for them, and they feel better for it, why try to argue that it isn't helping them because they don't have scientific proof? That's just cruel and stupid.

There are a number of books on the mind-body connection, and I'd doubt anyone would seriously argue that people that are stressed and depressed don't have higher disease and mortality rates, so I'm not quite sure why someone would argue that a person's beliefs have no effect on other factors related to the body.

When was the last time that you saw hundreds of nearly universal 5 star ratings on a health book on Amazon? Sarnow has had amazing results with people with debilitating back pain. His method? He talks to them. I find it highly amusing that the people that are so positive that there's nothing to it - the people who think they have _really_ strong minds and are skeptics - are actually saying, my mind isn't really that strong.

R

[HeyBub]

The amount necessary to achieve the desired result.

You don't.

Sorry, I don't understand those two sentences.

"Miniscule" was not the proper word, and for that I apologize. In homeopathy, the amount of the presumed "active ingredient" is present in undetectable amounts. The amount of the "drug" is essentially zero and no known test can find it.

No. Injectable drugs are injectable for a reason and the reason is that they won't work if introduced in any other manner. That is, if given orally, stomach acids will destroy them, if attempted as nose drops or suppositories or some other vehicle, the body will destroy any efficacy long before the drug can do its work.

And minuscule is way greater than zero.

Ignorance is not a reason to implement anything. If someone has terminal cancer, no physician is going to say "I don't know if waving chicken claws over the body while dancing a jig will cure the disease, so let's try it." You go with what is known to work.

In the case of Homeopathy, there is no instance where it has been shown to be effective. There are, conversely, hundreds of trials and thousands of examples in which Homeopathy has been found to NOT work. And "well, it might work this time" is not a reasonable position either.

Again, ignorance is not a reason in deciding a course of treatment. Those who administer treatments, however, are NOT ignorant. They do know that Homeopathy does not work, never has worked, and cannot be made to work. They know this because the theory behind Homeopathy does not follow the provable laws of biology or physiology and that thousands upon thousands of controlled tests have NEVER demonstrated efficacy for ANY Homeopathic regimen.

We know a lot more than we did in the late 18th century when Homeopathy was concocted.

[HeyBub]

Oh, the placebo effect exists.

Suppose I concoct a pill, a sugar pill, and in controlled tests my pill was found to alleviate the symptoms of the common cold in 30% of the testees. I take it to the FDA for approval and they ask "what are the physical principles behind the active ingredient?" Suppose, then, I respond by saying "There is no active ingredient. The pill relies entirely on the placebo effct for its efficacy."

Will the FDA approve the drug?

Let me think...

[Kurt Ullman]

My more anal retentive side may be kicking in, but there is really no such thing as a therapeutic amount. There is a therapeutic window being the lowest dose where you see results and the highest dose where there are no nasty side effects

>

[Kurt Ullman]

The FDA would make you test your placebo against another placebo, probably. Controlled tests means, by definition, that you are looking at two groups. One administered the active drug, the second some other (not all are placebo-controlled. For example, most cancer treatments are controlled by using standard cancer treatments.) Telling the FDA it was able to alleviate symptoms of the common cold in 30% of the testees means nothing to the FDA. They want to know if there is difference and if the difference is statistically significant.