fastest upvote ever

Definitely seen this before but not a dupe. Maybe it was sifted some time ago. BTW his website looks rather 1990s, it could do with a revamp.

Go Randi... GO!!!!

I've been using homeopathics to treat our children's health issues since they were babies and I wouldn't be without it. Arnica is fantastic for when they have a fall, eases the pain and they hardly bruise at all. Our nine and six year old have never needed to use antibiotics. We've given them panadol about once each in their lives for pain. Homeopathics has worked the rest of the time for them.

The American govt has never funded homeopathic research, but there has been a significant number of published studies on homeopathy elsewhere.

"The British Medical Journal published a review of twenty-five years of clinical research on homeopathy.(1) The researchers described 107 controlled clinical trials, 81 of which showed successful results from the homeopathic medicines. Of these 107 studies, a significant percentage of the highest-quality experiments showed positive results from homeopathic medicines".

"A study of 487 patients with influenza showed that a homeopathic medicine, Anas barbariae 200C, was effective; almost twice as many patients given this remedy had their flu symptoms completely resolved within 48 hours, as compared with the patients given a placebo. This study was published in the British Journal of Pharmacology(2) and received special commendation from the Lancet(3)".

(1) J. Kleijinen, P. Knipschild, and Gerben ter Riet. "Clinical Trials of Homeopathy." British Medical Journal 302 (Feb 9, 1991): 316-323

(2) J.P. Zmirou, D. D'Adhemar, D. and F. Balducci. "A Controlled Evaluation of a Homeopathic Preparation in the Treatment of Influenza-like Syndromes." British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 299 (1989): 365-366

(3) "Quadruple Blind." Lancet (April 4, 1989): 91

Taken from: "Homeopathic Medicine for Children and Infants"
Dana Ullmann, Putnam, N.Y. 1992

Did you watch the video?

Publication bias and the placebo effect.

At least they're getting their 8 x 10¹⁵⁰⁰ glasses of water a day

Never underestimate the power of the placebo effect... Though, it's the fact that some people make a shitload of money, making this shit, that angers me...

Why are people so afraid of modern medicine?

They don't even use biological elements in homeopathy most of the time.

its not the making of the ineffectual 'drug' that should necessarily anger. its the true believer syndrome (on display here by persephone) which continues to perpetuate the nonsense even in the face of a devastating debunking such as this, that should bear large brunt of the blame too. if you don't understand anything at all about how science works you just wont get it. oh well, evolution at work I guess.

Arnica cream works wonders for bruising! But those little white pellets... what a scam .

I love this man. Any more lectures of his are always welcomed and appreciated.

Seen it as well, Deathcow, arnica cream works.

Gor, are you seriously suggesting that the British Medical Journal is skewed towards homeopathic medicine?

I for one am totally for modern medicine, but every once in a while, something happens that just doesn't work as per the standard medicine doctrine. To try and keep it as short as possible, my wife had a headache of which 3 trips to the doctor and some serious painkillers were not working at all. It had been 3 days and she was about to be admitted to Emergency. Her sister suggested seeing a chiropractor. After 5 minutes of talking with my wife (the only person who really talked to her about her pain) he figured out that it all came from her going swimming 4 days ago and doing laps. The neck twists had bunged something up in her upper back that mapped on one of his charts to the exact spot on her head where it hurt. He did his magic on her back and by the time we got back home all her pain was gone. And then she fell asleep and slept for about 20 hours. All the normal doctors wanted to do was use more and more drugs. I had never cared one way or another about chiropractors before, but this sure worked.

[more later]

"Gor, are you seriously suggesting that the British Medical Journal is skewed towards homeopathic medicine?"

That's not what publication bias is. It's the tendency for studies finding positive results to get published where inconclusive or negative ones don't. That causes problems with meta-analyses like the BMJ's.

Ahhh, I get it now. Thanks gorillaman.

Homeopathics are not expensive. A vial which costs about $8US lasts us a year. Don't presume to know anything about me, Farhad. I stick with what works, it's got noting to do with belief. Try sitting up all night with a baby screaming with symptoms that the hospital emergency ward can offer nothing other than antibiotics for, and no explanation for the child's symptoms and see how quick you are to try whatever seems to work.
I think you coud do with some real life experience to broaden your mind a little. I choose alternatives to antibiotics because I endured an entire childhood being fed them and they did more damage than good. Antibiotics are overused by many GPs and this is causing big problems for the fight against superbugs.

oh Darwin, could you have been more right? sigh.

Sorry Farhad, my point about using what works was actually in reaction to Gluonium's presumption about me having "believer syndrome". If I'd double-checked the line up of name to comment, I would have realised my mistake.

So, Gluonium, have you even managed to make a baby, least of all sit up in the wee hours of the night trying to soothe one screaming from pain? No? It takes a big brave heart to get through parenting the early childhood years. In case you haven't been there yet, don't be too quick to rule out what you'll try, in an effort to care for a child in great need.

8$ for a year? I can sell you useless tap water for less than 8 dollars per year!!!

Homeopathy is a code phrase for NO ACTIVE INGREDIENTS (examples include Head On etc)

Persephone, have you ever read up on the actual articles cited by the book you're quoting from? Here's what little tidbits I have from scanning the article.

J. Kleijinen, P. Knipschild, and Gerben ter Riet. "Clinical Trials of Homeopathy." British Medical Journal 302 (Feb 9, 1991): 316-323

"CONCLUSIONS--At the moment the evidence of clinical trials is positive but not sufficient to draw definitive conclusions because most trials are of low methodological quality and because of the unknown role of publication bias. This indicates that there is a legitimate case for further evaluation of homoeopathy, but only by means of well performed trials."

Note also that the conclusion and analysis portion of the paper recommended publication bias as a serious concern for the legitimacy of a meta-analysis.

J.P. Zmirou, D. D'Adhemar, D. and F. Balducci. "A Controlled Evaluation of a Homeopathic Preparation in the Treatment of Influenza-like Syndromes." British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 299 (1989): 365-366

"Despite the use of terms such as "attributable fraction" which have specific meaning in clinical epidemiology parlance, it would be unwise to claim that the study has demonstrated a cause and effect relationship between the drug and the recoveries.""

What's also good to note is that the "difference in efficacy" for the control and variable group for recovery time was about 7%, while upwards of 12% of patients who were supposed to submit post-sickness data failed to. Also, note that the p-values compared were those typical for a clinical trial, although this had none of the legitimacy of such a trial, due largely to the fact that patients were treated for flu-like symptoms but were not even checked to see if they had the actual disease, as well as the fact that all data measurements were taken by the patients themselves, rather than physicians.

"Quadruple Blind." Lancet (April 4, 1989): 91

What's funny is that, due in no small part to this article, the Lancet has refused to lend editorial support to the article past its publishing and has recently dismissed even the possibility of homeopathy as a legitimate form of treatment.

I will also note that proving the efficacy, or lack thereof, of homeopathy has nothing to do with antibiotics being overused, nor does it have anything to do with calling into question fellow sifters' "life experiences" nor one's own experiences, which are anecdotal and biased in nature and thus not viable as factual evidence in an overall scientific analysis.

Well, the bizzaro non-sequitur babygloating aside; yeah, I think I'll presume to suppose that by the time that day rolls around I'll have proven to my own satisfaction that spending eight dollars on a small vial of plain water that is supposed to cure diseases because the water has a magic memory of what USED to be in it is uhhhh, daft. But, you know, that's just me.

Difference there mega is that the water won't help her child.

And wouldn't you agree that if you try two different solutions for a problem and one works and the other does not, that there has to be something to it?

Exactly, CrushBug, which is why doctors prescribe drugs to treat illnesses and not homeopathic remedies.

And how do you know the water won't help her child? The placebo effect has been found to have a statistically significant positive effect on recovery time for a variety of illnesses.

I don't think an infant is subject to the placebo effect. The placebo effect requires you to believe that you're being given a cure. An infant wouldn't have the awareness to believe that.

It's due to change in manner from the parent treating the infant, Overcast. Parents have been known to do funny things. Change in manner of the person delivering the treatment has been proven to have an effect on experimental results, which is one major reason for double blind experiments.

Haven't you heard of 'kissing it better' overcast?

Okay I think it's unfair to gang up on Persephone, I known many parents and they have done far worse then her to try out homeopathy, like giving their kids Ritalin, Valium and every other prescription drug on this planet. But I also understand the enormous pressures parents feel towards taking care of their young and their zeal sometimes to do anything possible to end the pain.

By the rules of homeopathy every glass of tap water you drink should have a memory of all the drugs ever created and all the poisons for that matter. This is because all these things were in water at one point or another and were diluted.
Completely ridiculous.

The people I know who are into homeopathy go to their homeopathic "doctors" more times in a year than I have been to a real doctor in my life. They always seem to be sick of something. No wonder it works, because most of their ailments were made up.

I posted this as a bit of blunt information on the subject.

CrushBug made a fun comment about chiropractors; if anyone can find a similarly blunt analysis or chiropractic literature and teachings, I can gaurantee it will rocket up to the top 15.

persephone, the fact that you believe that these lactose tablets are doing anything is all well and good bar these few things:
* They are doing NOTHING other than any placebo effect, they truly do contain NOTHING at all that could possibly help.
* You are paying for sugar/lactose tablets, you are being conned
* I agree with the over prescription of antibiotics, and I have THREE kids. Two of which we try to never use them on. One we do because he has a series of congenital heart defects which makes the chances of him getting an infection in his heart quite high. For the two kids of ours who don't have this problem we quiet happily give them nothing but panadol or the like for whatever pain they may have, and that's it, let them ride it out and become stronger for it. We would NEVER use homeopathy to treat our heart kid, because if we did, and the infection spread to his heart because, well, the homeopathy does diddly squat, we'd never forgive ourselves.

The few times we do give our kids pain relief, it works a charm because they hardly ever have it.

Stop being part of the problem and spreading the misinformation about homeopathy.

Now, in regards to your Arnica, if you're using it as an external ointment with an actual amount in it, then yes
"There is some positive evidence that arnica has some anti-inflammatory activity when applied externally."

HOWEVER in all other cases:

"A recent review of all placebo-controlled studies related to the clinical efficacy of oral arnica found that the homeopathic remedy is no more efficacious than placebo."

And:

"A placebo-controlled study examining the possible ameliorative effect of oral arnica on the tissue trauma following removal of impacted wisdom teeth found more pain and swelling in the arnica-treated group than in the placebo group. "

Quotes from here

Basically it's bunk... for bumps and scratches use a tea tree ointment, it's in no way homeopathy (it has actual, measurable concentrations), it is a wonderful antiseptic, and reduces swelling etc. and is still nice and natural if that's what you're after.

Try and think a little scientifically when using these things, think about whether there's anything else that you're doing at the same time that may actually be doing the good, and also about your mental state where you 'believe' that it's going to work.

And also stop assuming those who don't believe in homeopathy haven't tried it and haven't sat up at night with a collicy baby, or heaven forbid, one with a nasal gastric tube and acid reflux. Because, you know, some of us have.

Just because there was some coincidence that some of this nonsense appeared to work please don't turn your back on modern medicine and trust your life to what is just super dilute toxic material. Just a few points from the wiki if I may:

'Homeopathic formulas are based on the theory that even when a remedy is diluted with water to the point where no starting material remains, the water will retain a "memory" of what it was once in contact with.'

'Homeopathy views a sick person as having a dynamic disturbance in a hypothetical "vital force", a disturbance which, homeopaths claim, underlies standard medical diagnoses of named diseases.'

This stuff cant do any harm but I cant stand it when I see charlatans taking advantage of the poor saps that will fall for it. What can hurt you is if you rely on this crap instead of going to a medical professional when you get a serious disease. You would have to be pretty stupid if your doctor told you you had high blood pressure and were at risk of a heart attack and you just took some pill with no medical ingredients, placebos cant prevent death.

"...by the time you get to 10^24th, you've got one chance in ten of the molecule being there [in the mixture]..."

That's per mol, Randi. Great vid, but get the chemistry right.

I like the solar system rice grain model, but whats with the "do it two billion times" at the end of the analogy?

Dilute the rice powder in the solar system sized ball of water, then repeat that dilution 2 billion more times for the final product.

No, see the maths don't work on that one. You only have to dilute the rice powder in nine times as much water 1500 times to get to 10^1500; I think he got two analogies mixed up there.

Let's not underrate the size of 10^1500 though; I think the estimate of the number of grains of sand on earth is somewhere between 10^21 and 10^23.

I bet James Randi gets all the chicks.

> I bet James Randi gets all the chicks.

Hell thats probably been true since he started acting back in the early 1960's:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Sam+the+Snowman+&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2

Before we get too hung up on modern medicine it's worthwhile noting a major limitation. It is disease-centred. Doctors focus on the etiology of that disease and then work from there. It's one view of how to treat disease but you're not actually treating the person holistically. This doesn't always get results, what works well for one person might not do it for someone else.
I feel like I'm stating something rather obvious as we know medicine will make strides and improvements but it has that core approach which can be viewed as a weakness.

Remember that homeopathy has little to no relation with herbal medicine. Herbal medicine is things like arnica and willow bark that have all been turned into pharmaceuticals. Willow bark has the same active ingredient as Aspirin, Foxglove as Lanoxin, Poppy as Codeine, Valerian root as Valium, etc. The pharmaceuticals are refined and have controlled dosages, but are not necessarily better and may miss other balancing ingredients found in the natural source. Homeopathy is as described in the video. To cure anthrax, take some anthrax and mix it with enough water to fill the solar system. And you thought bottled water was a scam. So this video is in no way debunking arnica or other herbal remedies.

I do not know, but from the video I gather that homeopathy started in europe. The church stopped anything that actually worked, so they had to resort to things like this. Herbal medicine comes from everywhere else. In europe you were burned as a witch for practicing herbal medicine.

I refuse to upvote this at the moment, although I want to, because it will strip my video of its number one title. Damn you, Randi!

Willow bark has the same active ingredient as Aspirin, Valerian root as Valium

Correct on asprin, but valerian root most certainly does not contain any diazepam (Valium). It seems to have a related action at the GABA sites, so it's probably similar in some ways, but it is a different chemical.

thanks farcrafter and codenazi. i hadn't been keeping up with how this comment were rolling. added a note under the video to make sure the distinction was clear.

If it helps someone like persephone, why call it a waste of money? Placebo effect can be quite powerful and superior to any active ingredients in some cases. For instance the article below shows that placebo effect stimulates release of natural endorphins, which are better than morphine for many reasons (for instance, you can't overdose on them)

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20050725232410data_trunc_sys.shtml

A related issue is the debate over acupuncture. Some people argue that the reason acupuncture works is because of a placebo effect. But the influence of extend of placebo effect isn't really something you can test in acupuncture. My question is -- if it works, who cares what you call it?

Yaro, the influence of the extent of placebo effect is something that is very measurable in acupuncture, and some studies (though still debated) have shown evidence that acupuncture may actually provide benefits beyond that of the placebo effect. (I'll see if I can dig up an article later to post, it's a terrifically interesting read.)

The reason we should care what we call homeopathy/the placebo effect is that first of all, the health/recovery benefits created through the placebo effect can be replicated WITHOUT the use of placebo, even if drugs are not necessary. Sure, a doctor could give a mother a few empty pills, tell her to feed them to her baby, and get the placebo effect, but he could also tell the mother that her baby is sick with a common cold and just needs love, attention, and some extra water to feel better. The healing/recovery effect will be the same, but in the latter situation, the mother will also not have been lied to.

Secondly, we are a civilization that owes much of its advance to science, medicine, and the search for truth, and it would be a disservice to turn our backs on that quest for knowledge. What if, back in the old days, a medicine man would feed a feverish kid a certain type of root because he said it contained the spirits of Mother Earth that would heal them, and nowadays doctors feed kids suffering from the flu the same root because it contains a certain chemical that is effective in limiting certain mechanisms for vasoconstriction, which in turn lowers fevers. Why not just stick with the spirits explanation? Well, first of all because the chemical could then be extracted and created artificially or enhanced, but what if that were all not possible and the root was the only way to use get the chemical? Why not use the spirits explanation then? 'Cause that explanation is wrong. And that alone should be reason enough.

No, see the maths don't work on that one. You only have to dilute the rice powder in nine times as much water 1500 times to get to 10^1500; I think he got two analogies mixed up there.

It was probably 1 grain of rice in 2 billion balls of water that size. It is an exponential scale so while the number of grains of sand is 10 to the power of 23, the number of atoms in our galaxy is "only" 5x10to the power of 68, while the number of atoms in the entire universe is "only" a 4 followed by 79 zeroes.. (4 times 10 to the power of 79)

Yup, I think that's what he meant, or at least what the guy that provided him with the illustration meant.

"can be replicated WITHOUT the use of placebo" -- my point is that placebo effect should not be replicated with alternative means, not that it can't be. Natural release of endorphins due to placebo effect *could* be simulated by Oxycotin, but if the placebo effect does the job, why bother with the extra risks/side-effects?

Sure, some people would rather suffer from pain than "be lied to". But also, I'm sure many people are happy in their ignorance by being able to take advantage of the healing power of the placebo effect.

If someone benefits so much from the placebo effect that they are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on such medicines, why should we try to take it away from them? Placebo effect induced by expensive homeopathic medicines is not something you can replace by giving people generic sugar pills because the marketing of the product has a large role in enhancing the effect.

As far as acupuncture goes, there are many different forms of acupoint therapy, which all basically come down to some form of skin stimulation. You can't trick a person into thinking his skin is stimulated when it isn't really, so you can't test for the placebo effect. You are probably thinking of some study which gauges the relative importance of some particular aspect of acupuncture, like point placement, skin penetration, use of electricity, etc

I think rembar was referring to affection and care as alternatives to blind-placebo pills (not an actual drug). The idea being that a baby with a cold is given a homepathic placebo and gets better not because of the pill but due to the attention and care.

Similarly, an adult is sick, goes to the doctor, is told they have a cold, then is given tylenol for the headache and told to take it easy. They get better because they are taking care of themselves better, paying closer attention to their needs, etc. Alternatively, a homeopathic practitioner could take some water that they're convinced will cure their problem, take it easy for a day and eat/sleep well, ... same difference.

You can imagine that problems might arise in the second case if it were something serious, though (homeopathic alternative to malaria prevention drugs, for example). But I can understand why some may want to avoid hospitals and doctor's offices,... $$$

If you want to go into acupuncture, chiropractics, traditional medicines, etc., please post a cool video on them. Homeopathy is 100% placebo, which makes it distinct from other non-traditional medicines.

A simpler way to think about it ... instead of using huge globes of water multiplied by billions, is this.

Every compound and chemical that exists on earth has, at one time or another, passed through the water supply. The free water on this planet is therefore already the perfect homeopathic remedy.

It is also amusing to bear in mind that current estimates of the number of atoms in the universe is 10 to the 80th power, which makes some of the homeopathic solutions so dilute that it would be as if there was only one chance in 15 that there would be an atom of the compound in this entire universe.

Or so it seems.

Excellent point, Doc! Just as the last breath of yours contained an oxygen molecule that passed through the third iguanodon from the left. But perhaps the base water supply has "memory" of so many compounds it has turned back into plain water.

Excellent! Tap water has made me immune to all poisons and diseases, has given me the attributes of every species that has ever lived, and I know all of your secrets!

Thank you homeopathy!

Bamdrew has interpreted the correct. I meant increased attention and care as a duplicate of the placebo effect, not additional drugs as a replacement.

"Sure, some people would rather suffer from pain than "be lied to". But also, I'm sure many people are happy in their ignorance by being able to take advantage of the healing power of the placebo effect."

lol. are you serious? Count me as one of those people who'd rather not be lied to then. Thanks, but I'd rather suffer with some pain and live in reality than persist in a perpetually boggling world of incomprehensible self delusion merely for the sake of possibly duping myself into a few placebo induced headache remedies. Hint: no one ever tricked themselves out of terminal glioblastoma.

My point is that the recovery boost from the placebo effect is replicated by people having confidence in a real method of treatment, even if it involves just getting more rest and drinking more water. The difference is not people suffering pain and knowing the truth and people not suffering pain and not knowing the truth, the difference is people not suffering pain and knowing the truth and people not suffering pain and not knowing the truth. The healing effect is not DUE to the placebo effect, the placebo effect is just one way of triggering the healing effect. That same healing effect can be tapped into without lying to people, with the same results.

As for acupuncture, I am not mistaken at all about what I was saying. First of all, acupuncture is not mere "skin stimulation". Acupuncture is not people poking needles into people, it's centered largely on other concepts like the placement of the needles on certain points in the body. One study I read compared non-acupuncturists trained to imitate the manner of acupuncturists without learning the locations of needles that acupuncturists do and thus poking in random spots, with the result being the non-acupuncturists's patients recovered significantly slower than the acupuncturists'. This is one example of how a method of acupuncture can be tested in an experiment, while ruling out the placebo effect. And of course it's going to isolate a particular kind of acupuncture, with certain factors being tested. They're called variables, it's how science works.

Methods of acupuncture are inherently testable, and that particular subfield of research is expanding widely. I highly suggest if people want to continue this discussion, they sift something on the topic. Otherwise, I want to keep this discussion centered on homeopathy.

There's an obvious problem the homeopathic medicines being marketted to heal something that consumers can't measure, like gall-stones, but what is the problem with homeopathic medicines being marketed to help with pain or lack of energy?

Nobody's forcing people to buy those medicines if they don't work for them, and people can tell for themselves whether their pain is gone. Sure, someone may be to get the same effect by drinking unlabeled tap water, but I doubt that's true for many people that respond to homeopathic medicine.

For acupuncture, you must be thinking of the traditional acupuncture, whereas I was referring to acupuncture in general, which has recently expanded with many new acupuncture points and ways to stimulate skin without needle penetration (ie lasers)

"what is the problem with homeopathic medicines being marketed to help with pain or lack of energy?"

I guess its just a matter of opinion. If you think your lucky brown socks give you an edge on days when you're going to need to impress the boss, you do what you gotta do. If you think some chalk pills that you threw 10 bucks down for are helping with your back pain, whatever!

In my opinion, its important to know when you're fooling yourself, and when others are fooling you.

Yaro, that was one example, I am not mistaken at all about what I was thinking of. Just because there are new methods of acupuncture doesn't mean they can't be tested as well. New acupuncture points can be tested. New methods of skin stimulation can be tested. Acupuncture is scientifically testable. End of story.

And you keep missing my point about homeopathy, largely because you're misinterpreting what the placebo effect is doing. Homeopathy results in the placebo effect, but the placebo effect is only one way of generating the same results. It's not the misunderstanding of medicine and science that creates the healing effect, it's the fact that people believe they are being treated. If people who took homeopathic remedies had the same amount of respect for modern medicine and science and listened to their doctors with the same amount of respect, they would get the same EXACT SAME healing effect as downing placebos. The ONLY difference in these cases is in one case, people are lied to, and in the second case, people aren't lied to. The healing effect remains constant.

"Health and responsibility have been made largely impossible from a technical point of view.
This was not clear to me when I wrote Medical Nemesis, and perhaps was not yet the case at that
time. In hindsight, it was a mistake to understand health as the quality of "survival," and as the
"intensity of coping behavior." Adaptation to the misanthropic genetic, climatic, chemical and
cultural consequences of growth is now described as health. Neither the Galenic-Hippocratic
representations of a humoral balance, nor the Enlightenment utopia of a right to "health and
happiness," nor any Vedic or Chinese concepts of well-being, have anything to do with survival in
a technical system.
Health as function, process, mode of communication, health as an orienting behaviour that
requires management - these belong with those postindustrial conjuring formulas that suggestively
connote but denote nothing that can be grasped. As soon as health is addressed, it has already
turned into a sense-destroying pathogen, a member of a word family that Uwe Poerksen calls
plastic words, word husks that one can wave around, making oneself important, but which can say
or do nothing.


The situation is similar with responsibility, although to demonstrate this is much more
difficult. In a world that worships an ontology of systems, ethical responsibility is reduced to a
legitimizing formality. The poisoning of the world, to which I contribute with my flight from New
York to Frankfurt, is not the result of an irresponsible decision, but rather of my presence in an
unjustifiable web of interconnections. It would be politically naive, after health and responsibility
have been made technically impossible, to somehow resurrect them through inclusion into a
personal project; some kind of resistance is demanded.
Instead of brutal self-enforcement maxims, the new health requires the smooth integration of
my immune system into a socio-economic world system. Being asked for responsibility is, when
seen more clearly, a demand for the destruction of sense and self. This proposed self-assignment to
a system that cannot be experienced stands in stark contrast to suicide. It demands self-extinction
in a world hostile to death. Precisely because I also seek tolerance for suicide in a society that has
become a-mortal, I must publicly expose the idealization of "healthy" self-integration. One cannot
feel healthy; one can only enjoy her own functioning in the same way as one enjoys the use of her
computer.
To demand that our children feel well in the world that we leave them is an insult to their
dignity. Then to impose on them responsibility for this insult is a base act."
Ivan Illich

Just thought id ad a little spice to the discussion.

rembar -- can you rely on your "respect of science" to induce your pituitary to pump out endorphins when drinking tap water? That's essentially what pain-killer homeopathic remedies do.

1. A large part of the placebo effect is the expectation that a pill will work. In one study, depressed people who expected the anti-depressant drug to help them fared significantly better than those who didn't.

2. This power of expectation can quite powerful, beyond what people can induce by "willing" themselves to get better. In addition to helping with pain, there are studies that showed placebo helped with Parkinson's, by increasing level of dopamine in the brain, and with depression, by causing significant changes in the brain
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42930-2002May6

My point is that if homeopathic medicine is cheap, and works for someone through the "power of expectation" effect, why not use it?

3. There's a kind of knee-jerk reaction in US against using this effect. In Denmark and Israel, 50% of the doctors admitted prescribing placebos regularly. Is their health-care much worse? So why is US different in this respect? I would guess that a strong pharmaceutical lobby has something to do with it. Sometimes both a traditional course of treatment and an equivalent placebo treatment are effective at treating the symptoms, but who has better marketing staff?

As far as acupuncture goes, my point was not that it's untestable, but that it can be hard (and perhaps irrelevant?) to determine which fraction of the benefit comes from the placebo effect. Here's an anecdote I came across in NY Times journal

"""r. Howard Brody, a professor of medicine at Michigan State University who is the author of a coming book on placebos, tells a story of two Korean acupuncturists who met at a conference of alternative practitioners and chatted amicably until they discovered that each practiced a slightly different form of acupuncture. They then viciously accused one another of purveying a placebo."""

"rembar -- can you rely on your "respect of science" to induce your pituitary to pump out endorphins when drinking tap water? That's essentially what pain-killer homeopathic remedies do."

Short answer, YES, that's what I've been trying to tell you all along. My trust in scientifically-proven methods of treatment will cause my body to react in the same ways that the bodies of people who think homeopathic remedies work do. (It's not just the addition of endorphins, there are other mechanisms involved in the process.)

Everything else you said is moot after this point, especially after I've responded several times in the same manner. Properly educated people will gain the same benefits as people who have had the wool slipped over their eyes, the only difference is the properly educated people will be more knowledgeable.

As for the acupuncture, it's absolutely ridiculous to suggest that it's irrelevant to determine what fraction of the benefit comes from the placebo effect, because the fraction not coming from the placebo effect is what's important, especially when determining how effective the treatment is and if whatever is working in the acupuncture can be isolated. That's exactly why clinical medical trials exist in the first place. Korean acupuncturists being collectively stupid has nothing to do with this.

rembar -- the real question is not whether *you* can cause your prefrontal cortex to get rearranged, raise dopamine levels, pump out endorphins by using your trust of science, but whether everyone can. There are studies that show that placebo effect works through the expectation effect (the anti-depressant study I mentioned), so pulling "wool over the eyes" is an important component of how it works

You're changing your questions on me, Yaro. I was responding precisely to your question whether *my* "respect of science" could create the same healing effect as people getting the placebo effect. You were not asking me about whether everyone can. You were questioning the specific possibility of such a phenomenon. As such, the answer is factually, yes.

And furthermore, if people weren't so ready to doubt working medicine because of stuff like this, if people were better educated, yes, anybody could gain the benefits of the healing effect. Sociologically, the answer to your new question again, is, yes. And we should be working toward that idea, not away from it. Lying to people is just driving the problem, and is only a short-term fix with negligible benefits for what is a long-term problem.

"if people were better educated, yes, anybody could gain the benefits of the healing effect" -- that's a fairly optimistic view, not born out by evidence. In fact, there's significant variability in the individual sensitivity to the placebo effect, and evidence that this variability is driven by genetics.

Here's a relevant quote from "The placebo response in human evolution" Medical Hypotheses (2005) 64, 414–416
"Being the ‘‘enhanced CNS–body interactions/placebo sensitivity’’ a biological trait, it was and is susceptible to bear genetic polymorphisms and suffer spontaneous mutations; this would explain the well known interindividual variation in the response to placebo [27]"

The bottom line is that some individuals may be responding to placebos like homeopathy not because of their "mindset" and "ignorance of science", but because they are genetically wired that way

As far as the potential harm to science and "real" medicine, I find that such concerns are overly paranoid. If a homeopathic medicine doesn't treat someone's pain, they will likely switch to a synthetic substance, so in the end, the best pain-killer wins.

Randi never says that it harms science/medicine, his objection is that homeopathic medicine is based on deception. However, I contend that it's "benign deception", and may result in an improved quality of life to people with proper genes.

The real debate is not whether people healing themselves through self-deception harms science, but what the doctors should do about it.

Consider the two scenarios:

1. An old lady comes to the doctor's office asking to renew her prescription for a tonic, which she says did wonders for her back. The doctor knows the tonic has no active ingredients, should he renew?

2. The doctor has recently learned that fake brain surgery that which actually just drills holes in the skull but does no brain manipulation has a significant benefit to Parkinson sufferers. However for the benefit to occur, the person has to think that real surgery took place. Should the doctor recommend this procedure? Should they charge the cost of full surgery in order to enhance the "expectation effect"?

Both examples are real situations faced by doctors I came across when doing some research on this. The first case seems to be pretty clear cut -- tonics have no harmful effects, and are cheap to boot, so most doctors would renew. The second case is much more controversial, especially if they charge for the full procedure.

yaro, please post links if your research is web-based.

Drilling holes in head -- http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,20197,00.html?iid=chix-sphere
The genetic effect article you have to pay for (but maybe your school has online subscription) http://www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/ymehy/article/PIIS0306987704004955/abstract

My point is not that we should do fake surgeries, but that that's where the real controversy lies. Outside of videosift community, few people would object to someone recommending a cheap placebo pill that works, certainly no US doctor would lose their license for prescribing one. (I challenge you to find a single instance)

The lecturer confuses expectation with probability in his explanation of dilution. If you repeatedly do the 10x dilution process he describes 23 times, the number of molecules of X in the solution is binomially distributed with a mean of 6. If you do it 30 times, the mean is 0.0000006. There's still a slight chance of having a molecule of active ingredient in there.

Homeopathy is a way of parting fools from their money by selling them placebos. All homeopathic and herbal supplement promoters should be required to do double-blind clinical trials to prove all their advertising claims before they're allowed to sell a remedy, just like every other prescription drug. Naturalness doesn't make something safe or effective. Black Widow venom is perfectly natural. The FDA loophole for herbal "supplements" that make drug-like claims is ridiculous and opens the door to all kinds of new snake-oil salesmen.


It's sad that he has to explain powers of ten. That's core 2nd grade curriculum where I come from.

Random late comment: You might want to strike out the "proportedly" from the description, from that little thingy on the right side of the stage, it's obvious that this was given at Richardson Auditorium at Princeton.

homeopathy is not regulated, therefore SOME commercial preparations that say "homeopathic" are in actuality herbal preparations, NOT actual homeopathic preparations - arnica cream/gel/oil is an example. I get annoyed when people defend homeopathy by discussin herbal preparations. Herbal medicines have been scientifically studied and a great many herbs DO work. Homeopathy does not work. Thems the facts. I'm sorry some people do not know the difference between the two but there IS a difference. Randi explains the "rules" of true homeopathy and hence iron-clad reasons to not be conned by it. It is NOT the same thing as herbalism.

It's *dead Jim, pity I wanted to send this to someone.

This published video has been declared non-functional; embed code must be fixed within 2 days or it will be sent to the dead pool - declared dead by Deano.

rasch187 has fixed this video's dead embed code - no Power Points awarded because rasch187's points are already fully charged.

Homeopathy hard at work saving lives!

http://www.videosift.com/video/Homeopathy-What-s-the-harm

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That was really good!

"The claim that homeopathic arnica is efficacious beyond a placebo effect is not supported by rigorous clinical trials." http://archsurg.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=211818

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Awarding eric3579 with one Power Point for fixing this video's dead embed code.