Comments on: tests

By: Zep

Zep — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:59:57 +0000

@Maggs: The very fact you are dosing yourself means you KNOW you are dosing yourself. Therefore your “testing” was unblinded and wide open to placebo effect. A better test would be if half your Nurofen pills were randomly replaced with identical looking Arnica tablets. Then measuring if there was any difference to your pain relief.

@GnotG: Placebo is just one reason homeopathy doesn’t work. Other reasons include and are not limited to patient expectations, self-limiting and cyclic illnesses, VERY poor initial diagnoses, and very poor testing and reporting processes by homeopaths anyway. Generally speaking, the homeopathy research field is an object lesson on how NOT to do it.

By: Maggs

Maggs — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:45:47 +0000

G not g – Yes it is incredible. Thanks for that.

By: Maggs

Maggs — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:44:35 +0000

Zep, Yes it was proper homoeopathic Arnica, no, I didn’t expect it to work but I did wonder if it would. Also, as I already said, if I stopped it there was too much pain and the Neurofen only did half a job; in other words, I experimented. It was no placebo effect. The Neurofen was what I expected to work.

Anyway, you probably won’t come back and look here as time has marched on.

By: Godless not gormless

Godless not gormless — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:16:06 +0000

Maggs,

Isn’t it just incredible! If you’d gone to the doctor “with the express purpose of getting” something to treat your ailment and “therefore you expected it to work” and it did, “*for whatever reason*” no one would be saying it was just placebo. But when you do something else and it works, it doesn’t matter what the circumstances were, these guys just cannot accept that it worked! It MUST be placebo. Such open mindedness!

By: Zep

Zep — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:00:37 +0000

@Maggs: Two issues at work there for you: (1) Definitely some placebo effect. You went to the health shop with the express purpose of getting Arnica, therefore you expected it to work. So when the pain went, *for whatever reason*, you attributed it to the Arnica. (2) Was it “genuine” homeopathic Arnica? Check the ingredients and their strength of it to see. If unsure, let me know what it was and I will explain for you. Often herbals are marketed as “homeopathic” when in fact they contain measureable, full-trength herbs and/or modern pharmacy compounds. Such is the (lack of) legislative regulation currently.

By: Maggs

Maggs — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:22:47 +0000

I took extra potent Arnica for pain relief after breaking my arm. If I didn’t take it I had too much pain, if I took Neurofen I had mild pain like a nagging toothache, when I took the Arnica I had no pain at all. I didn’t have an attentive homeopath, I had a health food shop round the corner and a vague understanding about Arnica and bruises. I didn’t know if it would work or not, I had no particularly strong belief in it and it wasn’t expensive. There would seem to be something in this but in the absence of traceable scientific evidence it does look like mumbo jumbo. All I know is it took away the pain from my broken arm and I’ll try it another time if there is one.

By: Norbury

Norbury — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:29:02 +0000

@godless not gormless
The placebo effect is powerful and weird, and probably understudied. That doesn’t mean science can’t explain it, but it hasn’t yet. Have a read of the book ‘Bad Science’ for a good intro to the placebo effect (and to medical trials for that matter).
Your therapist did help you, I’m not denying it, and that’s the most important thing for you.

By: Godless not gormless

Godless not gormless — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:52:20 +0000

@Norbury

Ok. I didn’t realise that so thanks for pointing it out. So I accept it wasn’t a double blind trial, but surely what happened was pretty impressive, even if it wasn’t a controlled scientific experiment? This woman found something which couldn’t have been obvious and which I hadn’t told her about (BTW, she had just finished her training and was continually referring to her text books as she went along which didn’t exactly give me the immpression she was an expert) set about fixing it without me knowing what she was fixing’ and I found it to be fixed.

So it’s not strictly a double blind test, but it’s still pretty good is it not? And yet although you can see this and admit it up to a point, you still say:

“Iâ€™m not saying you werenâ€™t helped, but itâ€™s a little hard to know for sure what helped you”

It’s pretty clear to me, however it happened, it was what this woman did that helped but there is a total refusal to accept this just because it’s not conventional medicine.

Then we have Sister Marie now telling us that even double blind tests are not infallible. I agree that it’s only one instance and this can’t be hailed as conclusive proof that APPLIED KINESIOLOGY (there Kiyaroru! Happy now!!) works 100% of the time, but it worked for me.

Even if it was just placebo, (and I’m unconvinced of that) if it works it works. That’s what’s important. And if placebos work, then that tells us there is more to us than just what science, conventional medicine or statistics tell us.

I like to keep an open mind, but I’m happy to change my view if there is good reason to. So far what I see with conventional medicine is that most, if not all drug type treatments have some sort of side effects which are not good and may require additional drugs to alleviate those side effects – which is just great if you’re in the business of making drugs but not of you’re the patient.

By: Kristian

Kristian — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:47:39 +0000

@Daoloth; it is dishonest if a therapist already knows that a given remedy is placebo only. The therapist should not prescribe anything if he/she does not have anything better than a procedure known to have no effect.
In the real world, however, known prescription of placebos happens all the time: medical doctors of all people really should know that hardly anything except time or (too) expensive therapies do not work for viral infections.

In those cases, homeopathy can play a role. At least it’s harmless. Except for your wallet.

Re Boiron. I don’t know to whether laugh or cry.

By: Daoloth

Daoloth — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:45:49 +0000

@ Zep. I bet that there is much more to placebo than just attentiveness. Men are more effective than women at creating it, injections are better than pills, even different coloured pills have statistically significant (although small size) effects.
There is undoubtedly much more to be discovered here and I would hazard a guess that its the kind of things that psychologists tend to investigate and, I’m afraid, some doctors can be rather dismssive of!
We are very social creatures, our endocrine levels being something that are very responsive to status, social stress etc.