From: Ian Goddard (Ian@Goddard.net)
Date: Thu Aug 05 1999 - 12:00:23 MDT
At 10:33 PM 8/4/1999 +0200, you wrote:
>Ah, I love it. Has anybody else noticed how people (not only kooks)
>love to refer to how their pet idea is receiving more approval in
>other countries? Alas, this works increasingly less well with an
>international audience.
IAN: Fuzzy logic has been receiving far
more approval in Japan than in the U.S.,
but that doesn't mean it's wrong or that
refering to that makes you a kook. What
makes homeopathy wrong is that it's fraud.
Now, there are some medicinal preparations
sold by homeopathic companies that actually
contain standard quantities of, for example,
herbal extracts. But the "philosophy" that
water from which virtually all medicinal
contents have been removed still imparts
the therapeutic effect of those now-absent
chemicals by some kind of "water memory"
is simply fraud. Never before has such a
cover story been used to sell placebos.
Medical studies show that placebo patients
tend to report more symptoms than they did
before taking the placebo, which means that
the mind is superimposing its expectations.
Also, a sizable non-zero percentage of those
on placebo report getting better. If you took
the same placebo pill and put it on the market,
a sizable non-zero percentage of people taking
that phoney medicine would report getting better,
and they would go tell their friends and you'd
have an constant non-zero market for sugar pills
and bottles of water without medicinal content.
That's how homeopathy works, placebo effect.
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