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Originally Posted by vanblah
So what was the purpose of asking? You basically said ...
"Hey, should I say something to someone that they may not agree with? Oh, by the way, only respond to this thread if you agree with me."
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I almost didn't mention homeopathy, but I figured if I just called it 'something I know is a placebo' I'd get a thread full of "what is it?!" I wanted to discuss the philosophical implications, not the medical ones.
However, since I'm satisfied with the philosophical answers that I got, we can move on...
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You must have missed the part where I said that if you have definitive proof that the product is a placebo then it probably wouldn't hurt to bring it up.
Besides, we aren't really talking about a placebo here. We are talking about a product that contains ingredients which are presumably sold as a treatment. I mean, have you analyzed the product and determined that it is indeed a sugar pill?
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No, we really are talking about a placebo. Homeopathy contradicts everything we know about material, and specifically what we know about atoms and molecules. A 5 gram bottle of a 30X dilution (pretty much par for the course) means that it has been diluted to 1 part per 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. (10^30). Which is unfortunate, because 5 grams of sugar only has 8.8 x 10^21 molecules in it. This means that for every 5 gram bottle of homeopathic preparation, you have approximately one chance in 100,000,000 (one hundred million) of getting a SINGLE MOLECULE of the 'preparation'
Another example, from the wikipedia article:
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One example inspired by a problem found in a set of popular algebra textbooks states that there are on the order of 10^32 molecules of water in an Olympic-size swimming pool and if such a pool were filled with a 15C (edit: that is, 30x) homeopathic remedy, to have a 63% chance of consuming at least one molecule of the original substance, one would need to swallow 1% of the volume of such a pool, or roughly 25 metric tons of water.
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Where do you get your evidence that it does or does not work? The internet? Trade journals? Other doctors? Pharmaceutical companies? Pharmacists? So-called "Naturopaths"? All of them have a bias; with the possible exception of the internet which is so full of misinformation on BOTH SIDES that it's laughable.
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Originally Posted by wikipedia
Claims for efficacy of homeopathic treatment beyond the placebo effect are unsupported by scientific and clinical studies.[7][8][9][10] Meta-analyses of homeopathy, which compare the results of many studies, face difficulty in controlling for the combination of publication bias and the fact that most of these studies suffer from serious shortcomings in their methods.[11][12][13] The ideas behind homeopathy are scientifically implausible and directly opposed to fundamental principles of natural science and modern medicine.[14][15] The lack of convincing scientific evidence supporting its efficacy,[16] and its contradiction of basic scientific principles, have caused homeopathy to be regarded as pseudoscience[17], quackery,[18][19][20] or in the words of a 1998 medical review, "placebo therapy at best and quackery at worst."[21]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
Go read the sources in that article if you are still curious curious.
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For instance, there is new evidence that "the power of positive thinking" doesn't actually work either. So everyone who claims that just because a product made the patient "think" they felt better are full of shit according to this study.
Personally, I don't use ultimatums or broad-generalizations such as "all [insert generalization here] is bullshit." I am an open-minded skeptic ...
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Open minded I'll grant you, but if you're still not willing to admit that homeopathy is anything but snake oil, you're not much of a skeptic.