[slackline]

No I'm not a regulator, I'm a statistician and would like to see a body of evidence that demonstrates that something works beyond chance/randomness alone.  I find the regulations that govern the work that is required to prove this to be cumbersome and tedious, but they are there for a reason and that is to protect the individuals who are involved in a study and ultimately to test whether the results could have occurred by chance alone*.

I think I've said all along that if a homeopathic treatment is so effective then why hasn't it been tested and proven to work so it can be more widely prescribed rather than languishing on the shelves of Holland & Barrat?

It sounds as though your treatment for nail fungus is herbal based as opposed to homeopathic and there is a BIG difference between the two that I pointed out a few posts above (but I've no idea what you have and haven't tried and what you found to work).  I've also said all along that I personally don't think there is such a thing as "alternative" medicine


* Nothing is black and white anyway, everything is a probability, some things are highly probable (drop an apple and chances are its going to hit the ground), some are highly improbable (me winning a nobel prize), but there is only one certainty in life (i.e. its antonym).

[Johnny Brown]

Nothing is black and white anyway

You say you know that, but do you really know it?

You can't force regulation on one section of alternative medicine (by which I mean unproven medicine) because 'it sounds like bullshit', but not on another 'cos it sounds like it might work'.

Again, too much regulation restricts innovation.

Some of those old wives were pretty wise you know.

[Houdini]

No I'm not a regulator, I'm the Boffinator

[Sloper]

Nothing is black and white anyway

You say you know that, but do you really know it?

You can't force regulation on one section of alternative medicine (by which I mean unproven medicine) because 'it sounds like bullshit', but not on another 'cos it sounds like it might work'.

Again, too much regulation restricts innovation.

Some of those old wives were pretty wise you know.

There's no such thing as alternative medicine, there's medicine that works and medicine that doesn't.

Your comment about 'regulation stiffling innovation' misses the point; regulation is designed to prevent ineffective or dangerous drugs reaching the market, yes I suppose it stops people innovating magic magnet beans and selling them to cancer patients as a cure.

Anyway I think that Dave got it spot on, the people that were ripping the appaci stuff because it was clearly bollocks somehow apply categorically different standards here.
As for the wise old woman thing, yes, plenty of old remedies have been brought into the main stream, but that's because they work.

Tiger penis, bear bones and all that sort of thing aren't medicines.

[petejh]

Sorry to butt in here,

No I'm not a regulator, I'm a statistician and would like to see a body of evidence that demonstrates that something works beyond chance/randomness alone.  I find the regulations that govern the work that is required to prove this to be cumbersome and tedious, but they are there for a reason and that is to protect the individuals who are involved in a study and ultimately to test whether the results could have occurred by chance alone*.

Statistically life on Earth shouldn't exist should it?
Couldn't it be agued that statistically, Science has been incorrect 100% of thetime ever since year 0 because it's a continously evolving form of knowledge which can never reach an end point?

That said the 'current' science behind Homeopathy is bullshit, and Homeopathy is bullshit as a lot of todays Science will be said to be 'currently bullshit' in 800 years from now by statistician-droids.

[slackline]

Nothing is black and white anyway

You say you know that, but do you really know it?

You can't force regulation on one section of alternative medicine (by which I mean unproven medicine) because 'it sounds like bullshit', but not on another 'cos it sounds like it might work'.

I'm advocating testing all drugs for efficacy in the same manner, be that a synthetic statin to lower lipid levels a homeopathic treatment for gout or vicks vapo rub for nail fungus.

If these things do genuinely work then this will demonstrate it, and the knowledge can be shared and more people helped/benefit from it.  Of course not everyone will respond in the same way which is where pharmacogenomics comes in.

Again, too much regulation restricts innovation.

Yes I do agree too much regulation does stifle innovation.  There are good cases (as has been done in Iceland) to make studies all inclusive and opt-out (as opposed to opt-in), but each individual should have the choice.

But that doesn't detract from whether an observed effect is purely coincidence or truely being caused by a particular mode of action.

Some of those old wives were pretty wise you know.

No disagreement here either, this is how medicine has developed originally, and a lot of knowledge, particularly from for example tribes in the amazon rainforest is being lost.  Fortunately some companies have seen that there is a lot of potential knowledge waiting to be tapped and are investigating these avenues.

[SA Chris]

Tiger penis, bear bones and all that sort of thing aren't medicines.

Yes they are, they are traditional medicines, and nothing to do with homeopathy.

btw I've seen what a sangoma is capable of doing for people, some of it herbal, some of it traditional, some of it nothing more than homeopathy/placebos / power of the mind / good old fashioned voodoo.

[Sloper]

Don't you mean that they're traditional quackery?

[slackline]

Sorry to butt in here,

No I'm not a regulator, I'm a statistician and would like to see a body of evidence that demonstrates that something works beyond chance/randomness alone.  I find the regulations that govern the work that is required to prove this to be cumbersome and tedious, but they are there for a reason and that is to protect the individuals who are involved in a study and ultimately to test whether the results could have occurred by chance alone*.

Statistically life on Earth shouldn't exist should it?

Why not?  Are you trying to apply the principles of entropy and the fact that we exist far from chemical equilibrium? Or are you getting at the fact that the eye is such a complex organ it couldn't possibly have evolved by many small incremental steps over millions of years?

If its the entropy that you're getting at, then look at the sky and you'll see a big ball of gas and fire that provides constant energy input to the earths system.

If its the complexity of the eye then you have misunderstood Darwin's principles of evolution by natural selection (and its more modern neo-Darwinist refinements).

Greater clarity as to what you mean is required though.

Couldn't it be agued that statistically, Science has been incorrect 100% of thetime ever since year 0 because it's a continously evolving form of knowledge which can never reach an end point?

See my post way above with the cartoons, to save you having to search back here's what I wrote...

And yes, the "SCIENTIFIC method" has undergone revision and refinement over the years, that is integral to the objectivity of the process itself.  You will end up with far more reliable understanding of the world around you than blindly "believing" something works.

[SA Chris]

Don't you mean that they're traditional quackery?

No trying to drill into your head the difference between homeopathy, herbal and traditional medicine / quackery.

[Johnny Brown]

For supposed scientists folk make a lot of sweeping generalisations. Where's the rigour?

My beef with accapi is its is currently being aggressively marketed in the media I encounter daily. With a lot of pseudo-scientific bollocks as well. I've never had Homeopathy pushed on me, I am aware of it, that's all. No one has ever even suggested I try it. I 'm strongly against either being banned, or even having to prove effectiveness before being sold. Hence my dissing of accapi and defence of homeopathy - context.

[Sloper]

As I have said repeatedly there's a sound evidence base for a large number of herbal medicines.

There's no evidence base for homeopathy or other 'alternative' remedies suck as reiki.

The fact that the bollocks is long standing and historical doesn't suddenly equate to evidence.

[Sloper]

For supposed scientists folk make a lot of sweeping generalisations. Where's the rigour?

My beef with accapi is its is currently being aggressively marketed in the media I encounter daily. With a lot of pseudo-scientific bollocks as well. I've never had Homeopathy pushed on me, I am aware of it, that's all. No one has ever even suggested I try it. I 'm strongly against either being banned, or even having to prove effectiveness before being sold. Hence my dissing of accapi and defence of homeopathy - context.

So you're happy for people to be lied to about the efficacy of a product?

What's the context within which you're happy for people to be (in effect) defrauded?

Personally if you make statements about a product you should be able to back them up with reliable and sound evidence.

[Johnny Brown]

When, say, a political party espouses a position you think is nonsense, do you encourage them to engage in public debate where their hypocrisies will be exposed, or try to ban them?

[webbo]

Guess what Slackers, you can do both. Allowing unproven drugs on the market doesn't devalue the proven ones.


On the one hand you laugh at the fact that homeopathic cures are only water, the next you insist on regulation. Since you're king of black-or-white, either allow it may work and insist on regulation, or accept it is just water and make it freely available.

One of the several points I've made on this thread which folk have chosen to ignore is that of cures for nail fungus. The ones that have been researched and 'proven' by the medical companies are shit. Long term pill-taking, poor rates of effectiveness, high rates of subsequent reinfection and a catalogue of common side effects from liver damage to suicidal tendencies (nearly lost my dad to that). For whatever reason there isn't much ongoing research or development. Search the internet though, and you'll get a load of topical alternatives that actually work - Vicks vaporub being the lead contender. Should I wait until its sanctioned by the WHO?

Too much control restricts innovation.

i had a chronic nail bed fungal infection.i took terbinafine(lamisil) orally for about 6 months and it cured it.got rid of my athletes foot as well.
hows that for a bit of research.

[Johnny Brown]

Tried that for nine months, didn't work. My dad did the same, it worked about 50% for hi, has since regressed. Unfortunately he missed a pill one day and nearly topped himself.

[petejh]

'Why not?  Are you trying to apply the principles of entropy and the fact that we exist far from chemical equilibrium? Or are you getting at the fact that the eye is such a complex organ it couldn't possibly have evolved by many small incremental steps over millions of years?
If its the entropy that you're getting at, then look at the sky and you'll see a big ball of gas and fire that provides constant energy input to the earths system.
If its the complexity of the eye then you have misunderstood Darwin's principles of evolution by natural selection (and its more modern neo-Darwinist refinements).
Greater clarity as to what you mean is required though.'

It was more a flippant comment aimed at an implication that Statistiscs are the be all and end all, sorry. But what I meant was, statistically, intelligent life shouldn't exist because 'thinking' type intelligence isn't neccessary for evolutionary survival. Quote from http://www.execulink.com/~louisew/life.htm:
'The evidence so far seems to agree with the hypothesis that given a suitable environments, we can expect life to exist on many planets in our galaxy. The Drake Equation popularized by Carl Saigon is that intelligent life such as ours occurs regularly on a small percentage of planets that produce life. This however does not convey the uniqueness of self conscious intelligent life! Nature is more likely to produce the sea horse or the platypus duck than anything like the human brain. All of these structures are unique or exceedingly rare. Normal life in the universe consists mostly of sausage shaped organisms metabolizing simple molecules or photons.
Humans are very strange creatures, there is nothing in nature that came before with abilities anything like hominids. Whereas other organisms use variations on physical themes such as swimming or more efficient digestion, Humans have been successful by thinking. This is a strange and unique ability. Yet it seems to be just a chance outcome. A creature similar to modern chimps had the need to carry stuff and throw rocks. These abilities are all that is needed to explain human anatomy. Intelligence followed much later. Try running a computer simulation that ends in intelligent life as we know it!
Let us never forget that most (80%) of life on this planet is bacteria. Statistically the strangest part of all is that life in any form has persisted for over 3.5 billion years on this planet Earth without a cataclysmic event making the planet inhospitable for all life. Or even more likely, an environmental change that destroyed all complex life forms. For life to exist liquid water is required over this entire period.
Life is common and cheap and we will find many planets just like Mars, where life existed at one period in time, but not for most, or even a significant fraction of these planets histories.

Almost completely    now. Basically all I was trying to say, in a rather convoluted way, is that statistics don't adequetely explain huge areas of the universe, or they just reinforce why something shouldn't work without adding anything insightful to explain how it somehow does work.

[cofe]

Statistics aren't the be all and end all?!!!! What?!!!   

[slackline]

It was more a flippant comment aimed at an implication that Statistiscs are the be all and end all, sorry. But what I meant was, statistically, intelligent life shouldn't exist because 'thinking' type intelligence isn't neccessary for evolutionary survival.

Quite, we are not the end point of evolution since there is no goal to evolution, we (and all other species) are just a product of the process of natural selection.  Clearly "intelligence" isn't a pre-requisite for survival of a species (life had been around for several billion years before homonids turned up), but selection pressure, at some point in our evolutionary history, favoured (i.e. increased their fecundity) those with slightly more cognitive ability, and this selection pressure continued which resulted in homonids with a degree of what we would now call intelligence.  There's nothing in statistical or evolutionary theory that says this can't happen, it clearly has we're here chatting on the internet.  What would be strange and and statistically unlikely is if the exact same conditions occurred elsewhere in the universe and produced exactly the same species as ourselves.  To duplicate the contingency that has resulted in us would be exceptionally rare.

Quote from http://www.execulink.com/~louisew/life.htm:
'The evidence so far seems to agree with the hypothesis that given a suitable environments, we can expect life to exist on many planets in our galaxy. The Drake Equation popularized by Carl Saigon is that intelligent life such as ours occurs regularly on a small percentage of planets that produce life. This however does not convey the uniqueness of self conscious intelligent life! Nature is more likely to produce the sea horse or the platypus duck than anything like the human brain. All of these structures are unique or exceedingly rare. Normal life in the universe consists mostly of sausage shaped organisms metabolizing simple molecules or photons.
Humans are very strange creatures, there is nothing in nature that came before with abilities anything like hominids. Whereas other organisms use variations on physical themes such as swimming or more efficient digestion, Humans have been successful by thinking. This is a strange and unique ability. Yet it seems to be just a chance outcome. A creature similar to modern chimps had the need to carry stuff and throw rocks. These abilities are all that is needed to explain human anatomy. Intelligence followed much later. Try running a computer simulation that ends in intelligent life as we know it!
Let us never forget that most (80%) of life on this planet is bacteria. Statistically the strangest part of all is that life in any form has persisted for over 3.5 billion years on this planet Earth without a cataclysmic event making the planet inhospitable for all life. Or even more likely, an environmental change that destroyed all complex life forms. For life to exist liquid water is required over this entire period.
Life is common and cheap and we will find many planets just like Mars, where life existed at one period in time, but not for most, or even a significant fraction of these planets histories.

Almost completely    now. Basically all I was trying to say, in a rather convoluted way, is that statistics don't adequetely explain huge areas of the universe, or they just reinforce why something shouldn't work without adding anything insightful to explain how it somehow does work.

Statistics (at least the ones I'm talking about) aren't trying to explain huge areas of the universe (besides you have to observe something before you can possibly start trying to explain it, and we've not really observed very much of the universe yet).

I don't quite get what the section you quote is getting at when it says that life should have been wiped out by a cataclysmic event?  There have been four (or five, can't remember exactly from APS101, depends how you're defining mass though) mass-extinctions in the history of life on earth that have wiped out large proportions of all species (at the animal/plant level, coming to microscopic life).  The above quote also points out that there most life is bacterial, and its bacteria that will persist all cataclysmic events since there are extremophiles that live in the most inhospitable environments on earth such as thermal vents on the sea floor, or endoliths which literally live off of (and in) rocks and don't require the sun as an energy source.

So even if a cataclysmic event that the author is proposing had wiped out "all" life on earth it wouldn't, there would still be life in these extreme environments, plodding along doing their thing.

Of course confusion could arise from what is being meant by Life (generally homeostasis and replication) and the above quote is a little unclear (like me sometimes!) as it uses "life" and then "complex life".

NB - The author of the above quote you pasted made a rather ungracious typo as I suspect they are referring to Carl Sagan and not "Carl Ho Chi MinSaigon"

[JonI]

It's too easy to label the majority of people who use or are willing to try homeopathy as ill-informed hippies.  If people feel excluded from scientific debate then it's easy to see why they are happy to dismiss scientific arguments in favor of other sources.
Part of this may be due to worsening education in the sciences, poor media reporting and other factors, but scientists should also be willing to shoulder some of the blame.
Trust in science is best gained by open discourse, and there is more than a touch of condescension to this kind of debate that is not productive for either scientists or the general public.

[slackline]

The point about scientists shouldering blame and needing to be responsible about communicating their work to the general public is spot on and compounded by the fact that many scientists are not great communicators.

However, this needs to be met half-way by the public who if interested in a given topic need to be pro-active in educating themselves and when they don't understand something not be afraid to ask questions.  Unfortunately by their very nature a lot of the topics are complex areas that often can be simplified to sound-bites without completely loosing context, there is only so much you can simplify somethings (e.g. with somethings such as statistics/maths/physics the simplest explanation is for example an equation, but thats not going to make sense unless you understand the notation and maths thats used, to explain some equations in words would be exceptionally long and verbose and by the time you'd finished you'd probably have forgotten what was at the start).

Scientists spend quite a few years, sometimes decades, learning the background knowledge and intricate details of the topic they end up working on and you can't always just strip this down and convey it in five minutes to a lay person (unfortunately!).

I, despite appearances, have work to do, so may well not have explained myself as clearly as I could have done in some instances in this thread but have never intended to be condescending.  Don't think I called anyone an ill-informed hippy though (and can't be arsed checking).

As for open discourse in science the Sheffield Café Scientifique is quite good (used to work with Tony Payton who talked in November) and there are others others around the country.

[JonI]

Apologies if my last post seemed accusatory, it was more about scientific discourse in general.  Not anything in particular that you've posted.  I've been working in science for the past couple of years and this is an issue that resonates with me based on some of the attitudes that I've come across, which may have made my wording a bit sharp!

[Johnny Brown]

Trust in science is best gained by open discourse, and there is more than a touch of condescension to this kind of debate that is not productive for either scientists or the general public.

Amen to that. Especially when you talk about banning something that you're simultaneously stating is harmless.

[SA Chris]

Apologies if my last post seemed accusatory

I wouldn't apologise, it isn't the first accusatory post on this thread.

[Sloper]

The point is JB that homeopathy isn't harmless.

People pay a lot of money for it, and that to me is a harm.

People use it instead of going to a proper doctor, that is a harm.

Belief in it degrades our collective intellectual standards, that is a harm.

Compare homeopathy with creationism, there's very little / no evidence for creationism / ID and the same arguments that you advance are used by the creationists to argue for teaching it as science.

I don't object to creationism being taught as an element of religion, I do take issue with it being taught alongside evolution.

Anyway I have the flu / heavy cold, can everyone wave their font guides in front of their screen to cure me.