Edmund,

You said: "The experimental set-up suggested shows both whether homeopathy works and whether the homeopath's claim to be able to detect a causal relation on an individual case basis is true."

Agreed.

So are you going to answer me that an important feature of any such trial of homeotherapeutics would be to eliminate as much as possible the variable of relative incompetence of homeopathic skill, and then do you want my list of such people to ask to engage in this test?

You guys have absolutely no conception of how difficult homeotherapeutics is, but a common demonstration of it is that NO allopath can do it.

That proves they're nothing and should go back to school to get it right and stop killing people with legal impunity.

You hear me call some high-potency pseudo-homeopaths, but these people are 100 times more advanced in the skill to cure than any allopath!

So don't get that wrong; we close ranks with them against assaults by allopaths and supporters of such quackery.

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Edit addition: Edmund, you finally said: "so I'll bid you farewell."

I hope not, but if so, Byeeeeeee!

[ 17. July 2003, 02:46: Message edited by: Hahnemannian444B ]

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Albert, also<br />Hahnemannian444<br />#5904

Shirley,

Aren't you a babe for pointing out the protocols for drug provings, for I'm now convinced he has no clue!

I again suggest Lachesis, because I'd like for him to cower in a corner and scream at the top of his lungs for an antidote.

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Edmund, get this, you don't have to sniff camphor to stop a proving; merely holding a sealed bottle of camphor will do it.

You tell us why that happens and you'll go down in history with us as being worthy of a Noble Prize!

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Albert, also<br />Hahnemannian444<br />#5904

bwv11,

You said this in closing your remarks back to me, which I then understood: "i don't think he likes being subject to logical (that is, common sense) scrutiny."

Agreed, and I'm getting a little annoyed with the guy now, but I still like him.

Moreover, if anybody has still never heard the 12-part, 30-minute-episode dramatic rendition of THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by BBC Radio, they're missing out on one of the funniest things I have ever heard!

Gotta love everyone involved in that.

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Edit addition: 42

[ 17. July 2003, 03:03: Message edited by: Hahnemannian444B ]

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Albert, also<br />Hahnemannian444<br />#5904

albert,

the translation for which you asked: nothing is knowable. mousie uses this line, variously couched, when the inadequacies of empirical practice are pointed out. when, on the other hand, he is characterizing clinical practice as empirically unreliable, he seems to forget these provisos, demanding instead that we (clinicians) submit to his (now somehow infallible) empirical protocols.

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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.

Thank you.

My reaction: Argh...

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Albert, also<br />Hahnemannian444<br />#5904

I clicked on the link that shows "Newest Member."

75kirushna says he is a Professor of Medicine with interests in "curing patients with single dose and drugless methods."

I wonder if he holds to our pharmacology being ultramolecular and thus a manifestion of the effects of non-physical or etheric particles.

They're clearly subAvogadrean, so I cannot understand any other conclusions.

That is the object of this discussion, so I here seek to bring it back to the theme.

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Albert, also<br />Hahnemannian444<br />#5904

albert and bwv11

There is simply too much in your replies to respond to it all, but one theme is common to both and so I shall try to pick up the theme rather than the specific elements if possible. albert especially says that testing etc is not a valid model for what homeopathy does and that every case is unique so that the prescribing path is unique to each case.

If every case was genuinely unique then you woold have no ability to prescribe to any new case because your past experience would not allow you to extend your actions into that new case. Clearly you do prescribe to new cases therefore you are drawing inferences from groups of past cases and the groups of subjects on whom provings were done, so you are bunching people into groups and not treating everyone uniquely. Similarly in asking me to take a remedy chosen by you and record symptoms, you are going to judge whether that remedy has had the effect in me that you expect by whether I produce the symptoms you were expecting by comparison with past provers. If what I take is supposed to produce nausea and agitation and that is what I report then you'll say 'Ah-ha, told you so', but if I say I felt lethargy and tiredness, which is not part of the list, would you dismiss my report, add those symptoms to the list, or just call me a liar? The first option is dishonest because you are then dismissing precisely the kind of information you claim is so important; the second option leads you nowhere because by that same token absolutely anything I report, and much that I forget to report, should be added to the list potentially without limit and this means that you can draw no rational inferences about any genuine effect that might occcur; the last option would seem to be a risk to me, because only I would know the truth and if you just dismissed me as a liar ony I would know this was unfair.

Does any of you see the contradiction between claiming that every case is unique, but the using information derived from groups of people who were patients and provers?

If every patient is unique how come patients that seem superficially similar to me do indeed receive the same remedies from homeopaths? That doesn't sound like unique prescribing, that sounds like rational prescription to a patient that is assessed to be a member of a frequently encountered class of patients who all get the same treatment, just like a conventional medic would do. This really does undermine the appeal against the applicability of trialling.

Lastly can I also comment on the fact the homeopathy claims to be a rational system of medicine. It has rules. The purpose of these rules is to enable extrapolation from the general to the particular and vice versa. It therefore must abide by the rules of rational discourse. If you want to deal with it as an essentially magical porcess in which the practitioner somehow has access to revealed knowledge and has some mysterious ability to 'know' when he has done good then I have no means to address this. It seems to me that albert does regard it as a magical system based on revealed knowledge, thus when asked as an example, something about the actual numbers of etheric particles and why it shouldn't be some other number, the answer was based on an authority who had vouchsafed this information to him. I cannot disprove such a thing. However, it seems that everyone else is a rationalist and so must accept subjecting their views to rational scrutiny, else they must leave the field of play. Do you see the interesting consequence of this? If you said, 'I have received wisdom that this works. I cannot predict the case for which the action I am about to take will not work and I cannot predict the case in which it will work, but provided I use the system given to me the Authority from whom I learned this wisdom has told me that when I see benefit I am truly the cause of it, and this is true because the Authority has access to wisdom that puny rationalists can never reach', then I would have no effective response. Without wishing to be inundated with abuse, am I right in seeing albert's position as essentially of this 'received wisdom' type and everyone else is a rationalist? In that case I can demonstrate to rationalists why the system is logically-flawed, but the faith-basedmagical-thinker will never believe me. Albert, I have assumed this to be the case which is why I have for the most part not responded to you, because I think your position is effectively unassailable by rational debate, but for the rationalists, the recent considerations of causality have for me now reached the point where your internal contradictions have become explicit. This is why I previously mentioned that the reasons for people believing whatthey do about homeopathy are to me more interestng than what they believe. I would be interested to hear everyone's comments.

p.s. I seem to have become 'Edmund' in albert's posts. Is this a private joke or am I allowed to know why?

Edmund Mouse,

Edmund because of what you said on the BBC Current Science board.

My earlier post on this forum: "He claimed to be a member of the cast of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" 20 years ago, i.e., Edmund Robinson as Benjy Mouse."

You can "come out" now, Edmund...or shall I paste in the bits you wrote in the BBC message board?
Be a man, not a mouse.

On further research, I find that there were two people cast as Benjy Mouse; one for the BBC Radio series in 1978 (voice by David Tate), and Edmund Robinson was Benjy Mouse in the six-part BBC Television series. (I also found a Richard Vernon in there??)

http://www.bmds.bm/archive/show.asp?I=1527

http://www.thelogbook.com/b5covers/hhg/year1.htm

Therefore, he is either David Tate or Edmund Robinson - suspect the former.

[ 17. July 2003, 11:57: Message edited by: Timokay ]

mouse -

you simply repeat your statements over and over without incorporating counter arguments. i said earlier, for example, that "the issue is really one of continua and definitions: there are elements of both processes - objective and subjective - in both clinical and empirical applications. as a clinician, in short, i do not operate without training and structured intellectual guideposts and (clinical) 'data,' and as an empiricist, in short, you do not operate free of the bias and blindness we all share...." but once again you return to a restatement of your position, that empiricism is applicable to our clinical work, yet fail to acknowledge that our clinical assessment procedures have standards that are also relevant to assessment of your work. a golfer has a set of standard procedures used in swinging a club, yet adapts those standards to each individual situation he encounters on the golf course.... never mind, you don't seem to get it.

SNOOPY. where are you with your demerits when we need you?? stop us! this has been somewhere, i think, but is currentl going nowhere.

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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.