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Homeopathy (Health)
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nemesis8


In: byrhfunt
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Ishmael wrote:
For, like [all] academic theories in every subject you could name, it is only a story .

Humans tell stories. Always have done. Always will. We are brilliant readers and story-tellers.........it is of course what we are good at....so let us not reject it, let us use it (wisely).
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Oh phuleeez.

Nemesis. We have a methodology here. It is called Applied Epistemology. It forbids story telling.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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The manufacturer will tell you that the important stuff is the herbs/flowers within the brandy.

Sounds highly mystical and thoroughly gimmicky. And yet, there's an awful lot we don't know about the properties, narcotic or otherwise, of flowers, eg. the blue lotus.

It is thought the lotus was soaked in wine which may be the equivalent of your brandy, on the other hand the combination with alcohol may have had an altogether stronger effect. I don't know enough about chemical reactions or botany but neither, it seems, do homeopaths.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Hatty wrote:
It is thought the lotus was soaked in wine...


Right! Fascinating.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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And on that subject...

Why do human beings try to make themselves smell like flowers?

If that smell is so attractive to us, you'd think our bodies would have learned the trick of producing the odor.

Perhaps again, there's something here about a combination.... ?
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nemesis8


In: byrhfunt
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Hatty wrote:
Sounds highly mystical and thoroughly gimmicky. And yet, there's an awful lot we don't know about the properties, narcotic or otherwise, of flowers, eg. the blue lotus.

From Wiki

"Bach thought of illness as the result of "a contradiction between the purposes of the soul and the personality's point of view." This internal war, according to Bach, leads to negative moods and energy blocking, which causes a lack of "harmony," thus leading to physical diseases.

Rather than being based on research using the scientific method, Bach's flower remedies were intuitively derived and based on his perceived psychic connections to the plants.If Bach felt a negative emotion, he would hold his hand over different plants, and if one alleviated the emotion, he would ascribe the power to heal that emotional problem to that plant. He believed that early morning sunlight passing through dew-drops on flower petals transferred the healing power of the flower onto the water,so he would collect the dew drops from the plants and preserve the dew with an equal amount of brandy to produce a mother tincture which would be further diluted before use. Later, he found that the amount of dew he could collect was not sufficient, so he would suspend flowers in spring water and allow the sun's rays to pass through them."

This is bonkers.

Please stop taking the remedies, Ish.

It is the brandy.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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This is bonkers.

How bonkers?

Different things (including different vitamins) dissolve in water, alcohol, oil... Sunlight causes chemical reactions [My dark green washing-up liquid has gone almost clear in the recent sunshine.] and might create compounds that weren't even there before... Chemical reactions are influenced by pH and concentrations of catalysts and inhibitors... We (at work) have had rubber seals that were OK with the main, aggressive ingredients in whatever cleaning product it was, that were destroyed by the thought-to-be-inconsequential perfume...
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nemesis8


In: byrhfunt
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It is bonkers.

Homeopathy is a multi-million pound industry, desperately trying to prove that its so-called 'remedies' have some medical effect.

The way to do this would be by setting up properly conducted 'double blind' tests. They can certainly afford to set these tests up.
The problem for the industry is no double blind test has ever shown any benefit from these so-called remedies, other than placebo.

What they always show, is the opposite... there is no medical benefit.

Let us ask if the 'experiment' that Ish conducted was valid? It certainly was not double blind. Both his wife and Ish knew that this was a remedy. So this experiment has no scientific validity. (You could also criticise the sample size, etc.)

To pursue a line of pseudo-scientific enquiry on the basis of limited personal experience when testing has already been carried out and an obvious explanation (the brandy) is, I am afraid, already known, is 'bonkers'.

I could go on........The theory behind how this works... is also 'barking'

But really, does anybody believe this?

If they do, fine....please just show me a double blind test.

That at least might be interesting.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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nemesis8 wrote:
The problem for the industry is no double blind test has ever shown any benefit from these so-called remedies, other than placebo.


Three things...

This isn't quite accurate. Some tests have shown some effect. However, as the orthodoxy has it, the more rigorous the test, the more likely are the remedies to fail against placebo.

Trouble is, the exact same is true of many medicines that are known to work. The placebo effect is now recognized to be more mysterious than conventional understanding has it. Exactly how placebos work has become a subject of scientific inquiry and one to which I suspect Applied Epistemology will one day contribute.

Finally -- if you thought I wasn't aware of the information you included in your post long before you looked it up -- you're an idiot. Always assume the people you are talking to here know something of what they are talking about.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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nemesis8 wrote:
To pursue a line of pseudo-scientific enquiry on the basis of limited personal experience when testing has already been carried out...


That's the very first problem I encountered: The problem of subjective experience (a problem I subsequently gave much thought to).

If you imbibed this "remedy" and experienced an effect, I should have no trouble dismissing your experience in light of my informed knowledge of chemistry.

On one hand, I have "Nemesis" -- an individual who has never to my experience demonstrated himself to be a particularly thoughtful or intellectually gifted human being -- while, on the other hand, I have the full weight of conventional chemistry which has proven the worth of its theoretical model with hundreds of years of industrial product development. In any conflict between those two, I should have no difficulty deciding in favor of orthodoxy.

But everything changes once the experience becomes personal.

It has proven impossible for me to dismiss my own reaction as illusory, though one would think that, rationally, I should be as duty-bound to do so as I would have been to dismiss yours. Both experiences would be of anecdotal quality and have emerged from singular testimony absent any experimental rigor.

Yet, ultimately, only an irrational person -- one who had lost his mind -- could dismiss personal experience of this kind in favor of a theoretical model -- no matter how well-attested to that model might be. The act of will required for an individual to deny reality, as experienced, in favor of a scientific model can only come from madness. Could the testimony even of God himself have convinced Galilleo that the moons of Jupiter, seen through his own telescope, were merely an illusion of his mind?

I imagine an Atheist waking in Heaven and insisting the experience only a dream. If there is a Heaven, doubtless there are madmen there who insist they are not. And madmen they are; for if you should visit Heaven, I should find it rational to dismiss your claim but, if I should experience such a visit, it would be madness to pretend I had not actually been.

That is the paradox of subjective experience. It is rational to afford it greater value than objective models of experience, no matter how well-evidenced those models might be.

And yet, I am not so dedicated to the subjective as to imagine that I have proven homeopathy to be curative. I know my own experience was real. That's where knowledge ends. There may be another explanation for that experience other than flower-power or the "memory" of water.
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nemesis8


In: byrhfunt
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Please, please keep going.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Homeopathy . . . is 'bonkers'.

That's not what I was questioning. The original "this is bonkers" came just after an account of infusing flowers in the presence of sunlight and/or alcohol: on the face of it, perfectly sensible practices. I was just asking how much we actually know about what is going on (and hinting that we ought to know before being dismissive).
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Perhaps I might remind contributors that it is not part of our remit to discuss whether homeopathy does or does not work. There are umpty trillion people doing that right now, several as knowledgeable and wise as we are. In so far as there is an AE position it must be that homeopathy doesn't work, because it doesn't conduct scientific trials.

There are however many aspects of The Homeopathy Debate that are of interest to us. And that does not preclude theories as to why it might.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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In so far as there is an AE position it must be that homeopathy doesn't work, because it doesn't conduct scientific trials.


My sources say otherwise.

There are umpty trillion people doing that right now...


That's never stopped us before.
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nemesis8


In: byrhfunt
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Well give us a double blind test.....or you could simply sign up and win a million from James Randi

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopathy.shtml

This is still unclaimed.

Surely the Mighty Ish, with his experience of pet remedy can manage this?
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