There are a couple of provisos regarding clincal trials:
- It must be a properly conducted DBRCT.
- It must be replicated.
The first eliminates the placebo effect.
The second ensures it was not a chance result.

So, no, it is not sufficient just to have a single positive result.

PLEASE 8 emails from one person in 20 minutes is too many for me...thank you







-----Original Message-----
From: homeolist (AT) otherhealth (DOT) com
To: homeopathy (AT) homeolist (DOT) com
Sent: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 4:13 pm
Subject: [H] Re: @ gimpy: proof of homeopathy











"That is why the skeptics are always pointing to poorly designed DBCTs
that show homeopathy no better than placebo.

Occasionally the circumstances are such that homeopathy comes through
anyway. It is really a credit to homeopathy when it does well in a trial
with the deck stacked against it."

I think you may missing the point. DBCTs will not effect the efficacy
of any homeopathic remedy: what they do is compare the performance of
-remedy- versus -control,- while at the same time removing as much as
possible any extraneous variables that may affect the results
unneccesarily. If homeopathy works it will perform better than placebo.

regards

c


--
colmcq
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View this thread: @ gimpy: proof of homeopathy

Not quite correct, in your analogy the demonstration of one black swan does prove that at least one black swan exists. This is because everyone can agree that the swan is black.

In a clinical trial, the results have to be examined statistically. Why, you might ask? The answer is that many other factors may influence the outcome after treatment, plus the general variablility of biological systems. The standard in clinical trials is that if the results are more likely than a probability of 5%, they are considered significant. A problem with this test of significance is that if you tested pure water against pure water for a disease then 5% of the time pure water will be better than pure water at the level of 5% significance. This is a consequence of the mathematics of randomness.

When there is an accepted mechanism for action in any part of science and a single experiment (trial) shows that there is a significant probability that it shows the correct effect, it is incorporated into the corpus of knowledge. If the experiment significantly shows that the accepted mechanism is incorrect, it will be viewed with suspicion and will need to be repeated by different people to confirm the result. This is how science has advanced and achieved such stunning results.

Just to add that Acleron's post is an expanded version of my very concise post. :)

WHy does nobody say that for a really correct trial you would need to find a large number of people HAVING THE SAME DISEASE (to assure the standard of action, that is to permit a resonably good comparison with control - placebo) and NEEDING THE SAME REMEDY at the same time. This, given that any homeopath will say that the frequency of prescribing the same remedy even for people with different sort of complaints is not quite high to say the least - this is something that is being dismissed as far as I was able to ready any discussions, - is something it would be very difficult to do without support from a large number of homeopaths, maybe, or in any case, something rather difficult to deal with.

For obvious ethical reasons you would not want to suppress the condition in people with a superficially "similar" but unindicated remedy, if you are familiar with the homeopathic method enough to see this?

Do you mean that it is impossible to test homoeopathy using a DBRCT because, for such a trial, you would need to obtain a LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE all with THE SAME DISEASE and all being given THE SAME REMEDY and this is not how homoeopathy works?

If so, I have a trial which would be suitable if I have understood you correctly and if you are interested.

"Do you mean that it is impossible to test homoeopathy using a DBRCT because, for such a trial, you would need to obtain a LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE all with THE SAME DISEASE and all being given THE SAME REMEDY and this is not how homoeopathy works?"

That would never, ever work!!

Different people have different energies! The symptom may well be the same, but the underlying cause - an energy imbalance - will be subtly different from person to person and will require subtly different remedies.

regards

clone.

I posted a suggestion for a clinical trial which could test the claims of homeopathy on another thread.
Here it is:

What do you think?
Could it work and, if not, why not?

BillyJoe, your protocol should work with one proviso.

The two groups, treated and placebo, will have to be matched. For example, it would not be a fair test if the treatment group contained a smaller proportion of self-limiting conditions. Another problem with ill-matched groups would be the duration of treatment and end-point of the test for success or failure. Dana Ullman says that there are certain disease states where an identical homeopathic treatment can be indicated. Perhaps these could lead to a more powerful test.

The Chest study attempted this but the results are in doubt because of differences between the treatment and placebo groups. Perhaps a larger study would have eliminated this problem.

Well, I'm not sure if I was understood - people NEEDING the SAME REMEDY - as prescribed by a "classical" homeopath, NOT "PEople with the same disease receiving the same remedy", but even then the potency they need might be different - that's to make the results reproducible. But in addition to this there is also a chance that the homeopath will not obtain (through analysis) the true, curative, similimum from the first go. For me personally we had to change 3 remedies before it has started to work, my daughter finally gets better after 5 changes of the remedy and my husband gets the 5th remedy which finally works as well.

And did you note that I mentioned suppression? People might well react - as with the Kali bichromium study, but one needs to do follow-ups for a couple of years to see if the response was due to curative or suppressive action as per Direction of cure.

How would you deal with this possibility in terms of control with placebo? THe homeopath will see no result - I hope noone supposes that people in the trial would all show sufficiently clear remedy picture form the start and consequently sufficiently visible results after just one dose of the remedy? - and the homeopath will think that the case needs to be reassessed if the study is blinded... MY opinion is that it is really not possible to determine anything in a short-time protocol, people often need more than a year to show any objective improvement, because obviously the statistically minded people will refuse to accept any subjective improvements that the patients might report.

I recall that there was a follow up study that covered periods for 5-6 years of treatment which showed definite improvement in people who received real homeopathic treatment.

After all - is medicine for people intended to cure people, or people for medicine - people used as guinea pigs to test if someone's theory is right or not? I'm rather in favour of the first "option" - and therefore I think that anything else than long-term clinical observations are simply unethical from a humanitarian point of view, be it allopathic medicine or homeopathic medicine or Chinese Medicine - or whatever.

Have you ever thought about this?