What's wrong with the following example:

Homeopath examines 150 patients all suffering from the same complaint.

Homeopath chooses to prescribe different remedies to some people based on something he/she sees in them that conventional science might ignore.

Patient is assigned a remedy and told how to take it. They are not told what the remedy is called so they can't look it up. They are not told how it works for similar reasons.

Pharmacy equivalent - whatever you call homeopathy shops, I failed to look this up just for the sake of this post - delivers the appropriate remedies, 50 of which are homeopathic, 50 of which are placebo to a random selection of 100 of the patients.

See what happens.

Is there anything in this idea that you would object to? I'm a layperson with an interest in science, not a scientist. I remember someone somewhere saying that they wouldn't feel right giving some people the real stuff and some the fake, but that is the essence of a controlled trial, and the patients would know this going in.

Moopet posted:"Patient is assigned a remedy and told how to take it. They are not told what the remedy is called so they can't look it up. They are not told how it works for similar reasons.".........................................

My reply: Many, many Homeopaths DO NOT tell their patients what remedy they have been given to take.Many patients do not ask either.
The remedy is custom made at the Practicioners office then sent to the patient.
With directions for dispensing.
On some occasion the patient must purchase their own remedies from a homeopathic pharmacy- so of course then they know wht the remedy is.

Placebo or no placebo,most patients do not know the remedy they are taking. Its been done for 200+ yrs moopet.

Here is another one: Homeopaths give remedies to plants(agrohomeopathy) and Animals (homeopathicvets) and to tiny infants/babies. All the above have no clue as to the remedies they have taken,nothing to analyse,only the homeopath knows what remedy has been given.Yet the remedies work!

Whats your reply to this?


Does homeopathy work? (Of course it does!)
Watch Homeopathy - Quackery Or A Key To The Future of Medicine?-- a historic debate that took place in October, 2007


Here's another debate sponsored by the Natural History Museum of London about this subject between one of England's leading homeopaths, Dr. Peter Fisher, and a skeptic.
Selected journal articles, controlled and laboratory studies, cost effectiveness research.

__________________
"Great ideas often recieve violent opposition from mediocre minds"...................Einstein

Dear Moopet you posted:"I'm a layperson with an interest in science".......................................... .................................................. ........Hpathy: Scientific Research Bibliography
1 2
I posted this link long ago Still no reply? You ask questions,we give you links,answers,Its obvious you have another igenda.



Homeopathic medicines undergo a scientific 'Proving'
where a control group of 50+ healthy volunteers ('Provers') are instructed to keep taking a remedy under trial until they develop symptoms which they must record in detail. Substances that have been rigorously tested include nearly everything on the Periodic Table - metals, minerals and gases as well as plants and even things like snake venom.

The Provers are given a bottle of a new remedy being tested in the 30c potency and must keep taking it until they develop symptoms, which must be carefully recorded and then submitted to a database. The Provers must be healthy and symptom-free to start with so that the symptoms they experience are new ones CAUSED by the remedy.
They must keep a careful daily note of what happens and not discuss it with any of the other Provers. Whatever symptoms the Provers all experienced in common become the black type symptoms of the remedy which are then added to the Materia Medica of homeopathic medicines and Homeopathic Repertory (encyclopedia of symptoms). Thus the curative indications of a remedy are obtained for clinical use.

Symptoms have also been obtained through historical records of accidental poisonings, such as Arsenic and Belladonna. For example, poisoning by Arsenic causes vomitting, diarrhoea, restlessness, anxiety and extreme chill. Therefore you might get a patient in this state (possibly after food poisoning) and Arsenicum in a homepathic tablet will quickly alleviate them.

There are more than 4,000+ homeopathic medicines including nearly everything on the periodic table. But of course all of the remedies tested have been diluted and succussed (potentised), so they are not toxic like modern drugs.

The Homeopathic Materia Medica and Repertory are extremely large books or divided into volumes. The Repertory is divided into sections in this order: Mind, Vertigo, Head, Eye, Vision, Ear, Hearing, Nose, Face, Mouth, Teeth, Throat, External Throat, Stomach, Abdomen, Rectum, Stool, Bladder, Kidney, Prostate Gland, Urethra, Urine, Male, Female, Larynx, Respiration, Cough, Expectoration, Chest, Back, Extremities, Sleep, Dreams, Chill, Fever, Perspiration, Skin, Generals. Obviously some sections are bigger than others!

In the various Repertories, remedies are listed alongside the full range of symptoms (rubrics) in abbreviated form - all information being systematically taken from Provings and clinical practice. Every human state of mind, emotions and body is listed. Symptoms that would mean nothing to a medical doctor can be looked up and the curative remedy found in these huge books. Homeopathy is a study of human nature, endlessly fascinating and how negative states of mind and emotions affect the physical body culminating in illness. Nowadays many homeopaths use computer software programmes which contain all this information.

__________________
"Great ideas often recieve violent opposition from mediocre minds"...................Einstein

Very little- it sounds like a great idea and would probably give a better measure of homeopathy's effectiveness than a RDBPCT. A more important question - would this satisfy the scientific community? I suspect it would be criticised as not being totally objective.

However there are still problems even with this approach:

1. It is more a measure of the competence of the homeopath than of homeopathy's effectiveness. This would be true of any such trial. The homeopath should have a proven track record in the particular condition being treated with a satisfactory 'first precription success rate'.

2. It is VERY difficult to get consistently good results first time in homeopathy. Few homeopaths outside of India are able to achieve this. Sometimes it is impossible to differentiate between two remedies because the patient is not able to provide us with the information we need to differentiate- we have to teach some patients how to observe their symptomatology in greater detail and that takes time.

For example 'I have a headache' is not a symptom to a homeopath. 'I have a boring pain in the left temple extending to my left eye that gets worse when I bend down and is better after a hot bath' is more useful. I often ask the question what makes your headache better or worse? I often get the response 'painkillers make it better'. This is not what I was looking for!

It would more interesting if the homeopath could rate their level of confidence in their individualized prescription and this could be somehow incorporated into the results- but again, this would be criticized as being subjective and therefore invalid.

3. Some cases are incurable - a competent homeopath would be able to identify these cases and modify their prognosis.

4. Patient compliance could be a problem. How could we be sure that the subjects would take the remedies correctly and avoid all possible antidotes for the duration of a trial? It has been reported that one cup of coffee can antidote some remedies in sensitive people (although not in my experience).

5. To individualize 150 cases would be around 500 hours work for one homeopath and yet would only be considered a preliminary study to the scientific community.

Any audit of a competent homeopaths practice is all that is needed to verify homeopathy's theory and prove that infinitessimal medicines are effective. If a patient who has had eczema for 10 years despite the best efforts of their conventional doctor goes to see a homeopath and is eczema free three months later would one consider that convincing evidence? Any competent homeopath could provide many such cases and the grateful patients would be happy to verify it was so. Oh yes, I forget, this is anecdotal evidence and is therefore considered invalid.

Homeopaths do not have the resources or influence that pharmaceutical companies have. We are individual practitioners, not global corporations. Yet the fact that homeopathy is the second most popular system of medicine worldwide, that it is the fastest growing of all the non-conventional therapies, that a significant number of medically qualified doctors dedicate their professional lives to the study and practice of homeopathy, that millions of people are happy to pay for homeopathy when they could get free conventional treatment for their condition on the NHS... isn't this sufficient evidence in itself? Why homeopathy? Why not some other therapy? Because homeopathy is the Science of Medical Therapeutics and the Law of Similars is the Curative Principle in medicine.

More for Moopet
Try and keep up with the links I have posted,seems like you have NOT responded to any of my links?
Is there a point to all these ambiguous questions?

• Research reviews
  • Professor Iris Bell
  • Dr Wayne Jonas
  • University of York
• Clinical trials
  • Fibromyalgia
  • Chronic fatigue syndrome
  • Asthma
  • Arnica in hand surgery

__________________
"Great ideas often recieve violent opposition from mediocre minds"...................Einstein

Two points: first, I ask you to answer some questions, all of which you ignore. Second, I ask you to answer in your own words, which you seem unable to do. The above tract was copy-pasted from elsewhere, *again*, see "The Provers are given a bottle of a new remedy%2 - Google Search without even any attribution.

Who has the agenda? Seriously, if you cannot answer a straight question and have to resort to other people's words for even the simplest one, don't bother posting at all.

It's fair enough, in as far as the animal/child thing is something I have yet to look into. What I would like to know before that is that if homeopathic prescription is going on already in a manner compatible with my blinded protocol above, why can such blinded tests not be done to prove homeopathy works? Why does the "FACT" up there, oft-repeated by advocates, say that you can't test homeopathy with blinded studies? That's still my question.

I'm beginning to think you just post whatever google finds you. I've just watched this, and it was pretty useless - a video of people making presentations without showing the presentations? The presenter simply exclaiming, "look at the blue line. It proves everything" is pointless when we can't see the blue line! I'll see if I have time to view the second one at a later point.

I notice a lot of things wrong with this, but after finishing watching, am left with the same old problem - Why are you showing me a link? How is it related to the rest of the thread? If it's not directly related, start a new thread. All you are doing is attempting to distract from the OP.

I don't think anyone has a problem with using blinded studies to test homeopathy. I think the difficulty here is that 'individualised' and 'randomised' are mutually exclusive terms. RDBPCT's are designed to show the efficacy of pharmaceutical medicines and, as I have explained, are not ideally suited to homeopathic medicines- the best they can hope to show is the efficacy of specific homeopathic medicines to specific diseases. We are disadvantaged from the outset but the scientific community will not accept anything else as evidence that homeopathy works.

My question is why so much faith in these kinds of trials? The trials are designed to show that a medicine has an effect above that of placebo. Yet in clinical practice, most licensed pharmaceutical medicines will only work on 30% of the population with the condition for which they are prescribed- roughly equal to placebo. As all licensed medicines will have shown in clinical trials that they have an effect ABOVE that of placebo one must question whether RDBPCT's have any value at all.

Hahnemann was a man of science. He tested and verified his theories through scientific experimentation and observation. He was the first man in history to think of testing medicines on healthy subjects to assertain their effects before administering them to the sick. His work was a precursor to the RDBPCT's of today. Homeopathy has its own clinical trials - they are called Provings. They are of far more value, and a great deal more scientific, than any Randomised Double Blind Placebo Controlled Trial.

It is healthy to be sceptical. I would always rather treat a sceptic than someone who has blind faith in homeopathy. But homeopathy is a pure science in it's own right and as such can withstand any amount of scrutiny. If you are sincere then we welcome your questions and will do our best to answer them. There is an abundance of evidence for homeopathy if you look for it. However, I would encourage you to investigate the science within homeopathy itself rather than to ask for proof by placebo controlled trials- you will find more useful answers that way.

I find this statement very interesting. My understanding is that the placebo effect is much smaller than this, that medicines will have an effect much more than 30% of the time if not work more than 30% of the time and that placebo cannot really "treat" anything more than simple self-limiting problems or short-term pain problems.
For example:
A placebo for a stress condition might work even if it was dubiously ethical.
A placebo for sepsis would not work at all.

Can you back up your claim?