Homeopathy

[five bellies]

Show me one the results of one double-blind trial that has shown positive results for homoeopathy. Have you any idea how 'dilute' these solutions are? Have you never heard of Avagadro's Number? What diseases can be cured by hypnotherapy? I'll bet that if you are diagnosed with some horrible cancer, you will go straight to the best Oncologist you can find, not your local friendly homoeopath or hypnotist. I too have an open mind, but not to cr@p that has been proven not to work.

 

From the NHS Direct web site

One thing is sure. Homeopathic medicines are very safe. A wee bit of distilled water or sugar never did anybody any harm.

 

Do you really think that this voodoo should be funded from our taxes?

 

Really, do you know if your chiropractor was a 'straight' or a 'mixer'? Do you know what chiropractors actually beleive? Oh and BTW when are you going back again. Isn't it a bit strange that you need to keep going back to your chiropractor. (no pun intended)

 

 

I havent got a clue!!!!

 

He seemed a straight as a die to me but I dont see what that has to do with my BacK injury!

 

Joking aside I attended his clinic on recomendation from my JuJitsu instructer The Chap I saw was allso a martial arts instructer Goja ru Karate to be precise, The qualification he had, allowed him to advertise him self as a Docter of Chiropractic. He exrayed me at his clinic he explained to me what I was looking at on the films once they had been developed,He allso explained to be that there were Limitations as to how much he could help depending on what he saw on the exray films I was re exrayed after the course of treatment and the difference was quite noticeable on comparison. Also my range of movement and flexibillity increased Noticeably after the treatment and the pain subsiding this improved my martial arts to a degree,

 

I know plenty of poeple who have benifitted from complementry theropies/I also no plenty of poeple Who claim to have seen Ghosts, so I know where you are coming from cory I just think making a blanket statement that they are qaucks is a bit arbitary I worked for me so I cant agree with your statement If it didnt I wouldnt of its as simple as that.....

[gozzer]

I have been reading this thread with interest, and last night I was discussing it with my daughter.

She is about to start her final year at uni' studying Radiotherapy and Oncology. She has to spend a lot of her year on placement in the Radiotherapy units at a couple of hospitals. This subject has arisen, during lessons and while on placement.

They use several complementary therapies, (not alternative as some would call them) along side conventional treatments.

They, who work at the sharp end of the business, have found that a patients state of mind effects, how well they take to treatment, and if any complementary treatment improves that thinking then, if they can, they will use it.

This is of course cancer based treatment, and the traumatic effects it can have on the patients thinking are huge. The use of Aromatherapy, Reflexology and even what they call "Paint Therapy", (where a patient is encouraged to express their feelings through a painting), all help them to either relax, understand, or accept their condition, and thus move on with the treatment.

 

These are far removed from homeopathy I know, but there seems to be a grouping, and debunking of all treatments that are not based on scientific research, in this thread.

 

I do know if I, (or a loved one) was suffering from a life threatening condition, I have enough of an open mind to try almost anything if I thought it would help. (I suspect that most on here would feel the same way).

 

John.

[Steve Walker]

Some times witchcraft works magic Sid's garlic certainly does, what I would give for some of his faith.

 

Ken, I've no difficulty at all in accepting that the chemical compounds present in garlic may have medicinal effects. Herbal medicine is in a completely different ballpark to homeopathy, crystal healing, etc, in that much of it works and can be easily shown to work. "Herbal medicine" is just ordinary medicine carried out with untested medicines from ad hoc sources. It doesn't need any alterations to the basis of reality in order to work. Thing is, once a herbal drug is proven to work it ceases to be "alternative" and just becomes "medicine". So aspirin, digitalin, atropine, morphine, cocaine, curare, taxol, quinine, they're all herbal medicines which are used in evidence based medicine. OK, they are now mostly synthetic rather than produced from plants, but they are all substances or based on substances first identified by herbalists.

 

 

Its amazing........people take prozac yet the scientist don't actually know quite why it works (the obvious theories have been questioned many times)

 

That's slightly misleading. We have a very good understanding of what prozac does to the brain at a molecular level. What we don't understand is the cascade of effects that leads to, and how it affects cognitive function, because we don't really understand how cognitive function works in relation to brain structure. I personally don't understand the details of how a microprocessor works, but I can see that replacing the chip might be a feasible way of getting my computer to work again, while performing some crystal healing presents no way of working within the bounds of physics as we know it.

 

and whats more one of the biggers killers in the world today are the drugs we are prescribed.

 

Care to go back to pre-scientific medicine then, Phil? Reckon you'd have lived longer?

 

 

Ah, so you believe this amazing universe we live in just chanced itself here then? LOL, no more implausible than "God did it".

Either way you have to put your faith in some far fetched and unproven way that 'we' got here!

 

What "far fetched and unproven" way are you thinking of? Are you a creationist, then? Or is Intelligent Design more your bag? We exist, that is undeniable (see Descartes, R for proof ) We know that to be true. We can explain evolution by the extrapolation of processes we can see empirically to be working. Evolution is happening right now, and we can prove it. We have a fossil record of what existed in the past. We can put together a plausible explanation which relies only on processes which we can show to be real. Yet, somehow, you think the equivalent of "A big boy made it and ran away" is equally plausible? Please, there's having an open mind and there's allowing people to use it as a skip!

 

I asked why do some double blind trials show negative results, some positive? I won't bother to post an example from those on Google showing positive results. Instead I'll leave you and others to read them.

 

Assuming that they are using the normal standards of statistical rigour, though, you would expect one study in twenty to throw up a positive result through sheer chance. You have to ask whether it is consistent and repeatable. The other factor which I find worrying is mentioned in several meta-studies, and best summed up by this one:

 

"There is some evidence that homeopathic treatments are more effective than placebo; however, the strength of this evidence is low because of the low methodological quality of the trials. Studies of high methodological quality were more likely to be negative than the lower quality studies. Further high quality studies are needed to confirm these results."

 

Evidence of clinical efficacy of homeopathy. A meta-analysis of clinical trials.

 

Effectively, the more badly designed the experiment, the more chance it has of giving a positive result.

 

I just need stronger evidence before I'm willing to believe in magic.

Edited August 29, 2007 by Steve Walker

[Ken Davison South Wales]

There is that old saying "A little of what you fancy does you good"

 

In Sid's case he swears by garlic and for him it works, now personally I do not think the garlic is having any medicinal effects that are keeping him alive and fighting on, but mentally it relieves the stress and worry he might other wise endure, making him relaxed and ready to take on the world.

 

I know nothing of homeopathic treatments but if a person feels it is doing him/her some good and relieves stress which has been proved to be the making or breaking of medical cures then I can see little harm in it being offered as an addition to other medical treatments providing the substances used are safe and will not cause additional problems.

 

Like Five Bellies I had a back problem, I visited hospital as an out patient for several months but the problem persisted, I then went to a chiropractor who again failed to cure the problem. One day whilst working on Fleets Bridge Sewage system I was struggling to straighten my back after reading a dumpy level and a chippy called Harry Earnshaw commented on it and said maybe he could help. To cut an very long story short Harry cured my problem without disclosing the fact that he was a Christian Scientist and what he did was in actual fact faith healing. That was forty years ago and a part from a little back ache after being over enthusiastic with my beach casting I have had no further problems. He also went on to teach me the power of the third eye including self hypnotism which I have used to great effect to relieve head aches and other body pains, it also helps you to concentrate on problems without causing stress or relax the body after a hard physical day.

 

Strength of mind can over come many medical ailments or improve your ability to deal with them in conjuction with other medical treatments. That strength of mind can take many forms and be obtained in many different ways, as I first stated a little of what you fancy does you good.

[Steve Burke]

Steve, a scientific reply at last! Thank-you.

 

I'll forgive your reference to magic though. I'll (somewhat mischieviously) simply quote Arthur C. Clarke again, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

 

To requote from the conclusion of the meta-study you referred to:

 

"There is some evidence that homeopathic treatments are more effective than placebo; however, the strength of this evidence is low because of the low methodological quality of the trials. Studies of high methodological quality were more likely to be negative than the lower quality studies. Further high quality studies are needed to confirm these results."

 

Note the words "more likely to be negative" rather than "always negative". In other words, some high quality studies were positive.

 

I have an A-level in statistics so at least am able to follow most of the maths in such studies. I therefore accept that in some small studies in particular there may be freak positive results. However it's impossible without some kind of qualification to quantify the chances as 1 in 20. I'm guessing by the 1 in 20 that Steve is referring to 95% confidence limits. However, unless my memory is rustier than I thought, a 95% confidence in a particular result not being down to chance is not the same as 5% of the results throwing up a freak positive.

 

I mentioned earlier that I was indirectly involved with homeopathy wearing my business consultant's hat. I'm not of course at liberty to give full details as I'm still bound by a confidentiality clause. However, part of the consultancy involved a takeover offer, and tied up with this was analysis of double-blind trials. The evidence then was also inconclusive, and I remember a lot of discussion by medical practitioners, research scientists and statisticians as to possible reasons why.

 

I retained a healthy scepticism at the time, and indeed still do. I also retain an open mind.

 

What I'm not prepared to do though is to dismiss homeopathy using bad science - as some on here (not Steve) have done.

Edited August 29, 2007 by Steve Burke

[Steve Walker]

Steve, a scientific reply at last! Thank-you.

 

I'll forgive your reference to magic though. I'll (somewhat mischieviously) simply quote Arthur C. Clarke again, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

 

That quotation may have been at the back of my mind when I wrote that

 

However it's impossible without some kind of qualification to quantify the chances as you did in saying that it would be 1 in 20. I'm guessing by the figure 20 that you're referring to 95% confidence limits. However, unless my memory is rustier than I thought, a 95% confidence in a particular result not being down to chance is not the same as 5% of the results throwing up a freak positive.

 

I wasn't really thinking of confidence intervals, I was thinking of the setup for the basic T-test (or non-parametric alternative) that underlies the comparisons made in these studies. (They will usually use some variation on ANOVA, but it all boils down to the same thing at the end of the day.) So the researchers will set up a hypothesis that homeopathic treatment gives better response than placebo, and a null hypothesis that there is no difference. In the case of a finding significant at the 5% level, they will reject the null hypothesis on the basis that there is less than a 5% chance that the observed difference between treatment and non-treatment groups was the result of random variation.

 

OK, all straightforward. But what we are effectively doing by testing our null hypothesis is asking "do these two samples come from the same underlying population". We pick our 5% level of difference such that if we took pairs of random samples from the underlying population, only once in 20 pairs would we find them different enough to exceed it. If we assume for a moment that this is indeed what happens with homeopathy, that there is no effect and we are therefore always comparing samples from the same underlying population, we are saying that we have set our standard of evidence such that we would only get a false positive one time in twenty. If we repeat the whole experiment, we would expect to come to the same conclusion 95 times out of a hundred. But five times out of a hundred...

 

I retained a healthy scepticism at the time, and indeed still do. I also retain an open mind.

 

I retain an open mind, in that while I do not think that homeopathy works, I will happily change my position if it is proven otherwise. I just take the view that when the evidence in favour is poor, and there is no plausible mechanism for how it might work, there isn't any reason for me to believe otherwise. The comment about magic was flippant, but currently the only possible explanation for homeopathy is a supernatural one. If I start believing in one aspect of the supernatural, where do I stop?

[DavyR]

I'm guessing by the 1 in 20 that Steve is referring to 95% confidence limits. However, unless my memory is rustier than I thought, a 95% confidence in a particular result not being down to chance is not the same as 5% of the results throwing up a freak positive.

 

Steve, the 95% CI (Confidence Interval) used in research studies indicates the likelihood of a particular result falling within in a range of figures, e.g. If the number of patients who needed to be treated in order to achive one "cure" was 10, and the 95% CI was 5-15, the possibility of a result occurring outside of that range is only 5% (but the "true" figure could still be anywhere between 5 and 15.

 

So yes, you're right in saying that it isn't the same thing as 5% of the results being due to chance.

[Ken L]

You might as well give up guys. Evidence is finite but it seems that credulity is infinate.

 

There's always going to be someone who will attest to having been cured by a faith healer or a chiropractor or a homeopath in the same way as there's always somebody with a 95 year old grandad who's smoked 60 a day all his life without ill effects.

 

Peronally, I say let them have their Soma but don't expect the NHS to pay for this hokum.

[Guest Brumagem Phil]

You might as well give up guys. Evidence is finite but it seems that credulity is infinate.

 

There's always going to be someone who will attest to having been cured by a faith healer or a chiropractor or a homeopath in the same way as there's always somebody with a 95 year old grandad who's smoked 60 a day all his life without ill effects.

 

Peronally, I say let them have their Soma but don't expect the NHS to pay for this hokum.

 

 

Why not, it pays for various other forms of hokum! Not only that, it treats people who are overweight through greed, have heart problems due to laziness, cancer due to smoking or clapped out livers due to drinking.

 

Who are you or I to say what treatments should and should not be given to patients based on our own prejudices?

 

Steve Walker.......I'm pretty much an atheist, but open minded. That said, even evolution takes a leap of faith in that your mud puddle had to come from somewhere just as God would have to if you believe in creation. What I'm saying is that just because you don't understand how something might work doesnt mean it doesn't.

 

I also never suggested we should go back to the days without drugs, but was merely pointing out that drugs not only do good, they also do much harm too, ie they are not the be all and end all of treatment.

[Ken L]

Who are you or I to say what treatments should and should not be given to patients based on our own prejudices?

Its not about who should recieve help or about my predjudices, it's about whether certain practices can legitimatly be labeled "treatments".