quote: "The practitioner, while outwardly observing the patient and gathering a symptom picture, needs, like Janus, to be inwardly observing themselves for the effect the patient might be having on them (no mean feat)."

very nice. you know, this is "countertransference." freud discovered it ... and jung certainly was aware of it in his practice. i suppose i have more faith than you, that even the most entangled and mysterious of physical processes can be defined in reductionist terms. einstein, after all, believed that the events inside the little box could be known apart from chance.

overall an interesting post, a good tonic for the glib speculations about this or that process of physics as explaining the "mechanism of action." true or false, it indeed sets a framework, an agenda, for serious work in scientific research, to understand homeopathy.

but i still don't see why this can't be measured by the dbpc - mind you, i dislike the dbpc intensely, for the ease with which it can be mis-used, especially in applications to any clinical discipline. but it is silly to think that an appropriate regard for definitions and design can't render this little instrument useful, perhaps even amusing, though in the last analysis not really worth the effort. except politically. and, as we live in a political world, it is sometimes useful to put the ball in the other guy's court. i, for one, would like to see the very success of a well-designed dbpc, in proving efficacy of remedies, undermine the vain certitude of its most dogged adherents in their blind worship: it is in fact merely a very nice little tool to ferret out details of this or that, especially if the ferret has some capacity for analysis, as distinct from calculation.

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"The need to perform adjustments for covariates...weakens the findings." BMJ Clinical Evidence: Mental Health, (No. 11), p. 95.... It's that simple, guys: bad numbers make bad science.