Talk:Homeopathy/Archive 2

message: You can get "homoeopathy-friendly" toothpaste that contains no menthol, because it is "considered an antidote to many homoeopathic remedies". How is menthol supposed to change the effects of homoeopathy? What about menthol diluted to 30X, will it have the same effect? Are there other substances with similar effects?
--Stereo 04:36, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)
:homeopathy has a huge list of antidoteing substances. They make a hand excuse for when the remedy fails.Geni 14:15, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Menthol

message: The over-the-counter drug Zicam displays the word "Homeopathic" on the box. Why does it say this? Does it actually have something to do with homeopathy, or is it some sort of legal thing, or what? Noser 04:47, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Zicam

message: :These medicines rely on the basic theory of treating a symptom with its cause; however, they in no other way resemble the treatments offered by traditional homeopaths.  Traditional homeopathy is arguably more recognized and accepted in continental Europe, perhaps because there its practitioners rely on more tradition and treatment with the "potentized" formulae recommended by Hahnemann.
I have removed this text, because IMO it doesn't make much sense in the current context. If someone familiar with the situation in the UK can elaborate on real differences (if there is in fact any difference) from "traditional" homeopathy (which isn't defined clearly anywhere), the text may be put back in some modified (clarified) form.
I also moved the text about the OTC sales in the UK closer to a similar passage about the US.
Paranoid 13:31, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some text removed 

message: Wow! What an amazing example of non-NPOV!
Nevertheless, I will attempt a rational reply.
In the first place, if you find the article "subjective", "biased", "outdated", "inaccurate", and "ridiculous", then please fix the spots you can improve, rather than just declaring it all "an utter crock of lies" and a "joke".
It is not quite clear what your objection is. Are you suggesting that homeopathy works because, in practice, the dilution used is small enough to leave some active substance? That is, that the effect is simply a chemical one? Do you know of any double-blind study proving the efficacy of belladonna 7C?
Why do you consider explanations of the reported success of homeopathy in non-controlled studies in terms of the placebo effect to be a "joke"? The placebo effect is well established and can be quite powerful. Do you have evidence, with anything approaching a scientific nature and with statistical significance, indicating that the successes of homeopathy are stronger?
I think you will find the authors (not one just one author) of this article are quite willing to discuss with you how the article can be improved, in particular made more objective. You will need to be a bit more specific though. (Being calmer and more courteous would help, too, though it is not a prerequisite.)
Art Carlson 18:56, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: IMO, you are wasting your time, Art. That guy was either a troll or a moron. In either case the best strategy is to revert and forget, not waste your time on a rational reply (that it might be useful to somebody else is not a justification). Paranoid 22:45, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right of course. I'm kinda new at this game, but I should know better. I am fascinated by irrationality, and it has cost me a lot of time over the years. Art Carlson 19:36, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Re: Forewarning remark 

message: An anon user added the Category:Protoscience tag.  The definition of that category states that a protoscience is "a new area of scientific endeavor in the process of becoming established. While protoscience is often speculative, it is to be distinguished from pseudoscience by its adherence to the scientific method and standard practices of good science ...."  Homeopathy is not new.  Its adherents almost never conduct double-blind studies, and its tenets aren't based on the results of such studies.  The field has had 200 years to develop and it still can't satisfy the practitioners of mainstream orthodox science.  Its adherents are free to believe that the scientific method isn't the only path to the truth, but there's certainly no basis for saying that homeopathy is proceeding along the road of the scientific method and just needs a little more time to get going.  For these reasons, I'm removing the "Protoscience" categorization. JamesMLane 07:14, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Protoscience... that's a new one on me. Scientific investigations themselves don't evolve in the sense of moving from 'speculative' to 'established', although a body of knowledge might. Either an area of investigation follows the laws of scientific research, or it doesn't. If it does follow then but is as yet not well understood, then it's just a little-understood area of scientific investigation, not a 'protoscience'. Gzuckier 18:33, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Protoscience

message: Please take a look at the last changes by 24.34.159.181. I don’t want to revert the article to my own version, but if not reverted, those editions at least need to be corrected:
The dilution process:
Critics argue that homeopathic substances are so diluted as to contain nothing of any value: indeed, that no molecules of the supposedly active substance remain in the most dilutions. However, nanochemistry differs
significantly from macrochemistry, and the macro-dilution process is quite different from the
stagewise dilution-succussion process of homeopathy [ see http://home.comcast.net/~brc1717 for an update review of the pertinent "science"].''
Misconceptions about homeopathy:
Another difference is that though both do use herbs, in herbology measurable amounts of the herb(s) are in the remedy, while in homeopathy it gets 'diluted' beyond measurable quantities.Further,
the homeopathic remedy is subject to a cavitation process ('succussion')between dilution stages
which changes the structure of the aqueous solvent....akin to doping a silicon crystal with trace impurities to create a transistor. Thus, a 'diluted' remedy is not what it seems....the remedy is actually the structured solvent(water) and not the original solute!''
:: removed this one. You can't have a long standing structure in a liquid and the cavitation process if it did occure durring shaking would only help to destry any structer even quickerGeni 11:24, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I undid the first one, as it links to a completely unrelated webpage and seems rather completely bogus. Why not step through each of the others one at a time, and save your changes with a comment so that a reason is given for each ? - Nunh-huh 04:20, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Last changes by 24.34.159.181

message: Hi folks,
I added a few lines about an interesting paper in Physica A which doesn't quite decide the issue, but adds more fuel to the fire regarding possible mechanisms for homeopathic effects. Personally, I don't believe in the stuff, but am always curious to hear about experiment results claiming to be for or against one pseudo/proto/fringe scientific theory or another.Mycophile
:I agree completely. Still, I worry about the best way to deal with these studies in Wikipedia. I would like to see for each study cited the best references available on the Web, though it seems the original papers are seldom there for free. And I would like to see some critical evaluation based on the information available. Art Carlson 08:49, 2004 Oct 11 (UTC)
::I second that, and checked some of the references for a few of the others cited. Links to abstracts at the journals' online homes (which in turn would link to full-text articles that some might be able to access) seem to be a good idea to me. Might it also be worth dividing papers cited into clinical and theoretical categories (i.e. moving the Physica study up to 'Reconciliation with Molecular Chemistry'?) --Mycophile 05:23, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added info about new study 

message: Wouldnt it be worth mentioning that vaccination works on the same principle?  Like cures like?
:no becuase it doesn't. Vaccinations are not sucessed and work on the priciple that simular or the same antigents can stimulate the immune system to produce the right T cells to produce the antibodies to fight the desease if it is encountered for real. They do not work on the priciple that like cures like.
::I agree with the foregoing comment by Geni (who forgot to sign it).  Nevertheless, the incorrect analogy between homeopathy and vaccination was also brought up by an anon on Talk:Alternative medicine.  Perhaps the article should include a passage explaining the difference between homeopathy and vaccination?  JamesMLane 21:16, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  The difference between homeopathy and vaccination is best explained using an example how should the vaccination work to be analogous with homeopathy: it would mean injecting active virus, not deactivated one, after the infection we are curing has already taken place, not before the infection we are trying to avoid, and in the amount of zero viruses in the cubic centimeter of water. But that would still be quite inaccurate, since unlike homeopaths, we would treat viruses as causes, not effects, of disease. 83.31.40.72 23:28, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I'm the guy who put in the vaccination piece, and I'd have no objection if you (or somebody) replaced it or modified it with the above explanation.  Gzuckier 15:28, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm afaraid I can't really see any way of modifying it so it might be best just to cut it and shove a "common missconceptions about homeopathy" inGeni 16:47, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I’ll try to merge the above explanation with the second paragraph of the Lack of logical consistency section somehow, but the resulting text will most probably have to go to the Misconceptions section or be splitted between other sections. There are few issues here. It is certainly worth mentioning that vaccination is rejected by homeopaths, as an important fact. It is also important to mention that this rejection seems inconsistent with the very fundamentals of homeopathy, while in fact it isn’t. It may be inconsistent with medicine and science, but not with homeopathy in general and like cures like in particular. Rafał Pocztarski 17:34, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Strangly despite what homeopaths say clasical homeopathy should support vaccination. see § 46Geni 17:48, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, I am not quite sure about that. See the Underlying theory: “The homeopathic concept of disease differs from that of conventional medicine—the root cause of disease is believed to be spiritual rather than physical [...] As the disease process is thought to begin long before any physical manifestations appear, it logically follows that bacteria and viruses must be effects, not causes, of disease.” If viruses are effects, then the vaccination doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. (What is §46?) Rafał Pocztarski 19:08, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The orogon of the medical art is devided into short one to two paragraph sections §46 is the 46th of these. Hahnemann admits in passing that vaccination works although the reasons he gives for this are rather oddGeni 02:09, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Vaccination

message: Moved from User talk:Rfl
You have labled homeopathic proving nad homeopathy reportry as needing to be merged with homeopathy. However the homeopathy article is already fairly long and there is very little overlap between the articles.Geni 11:30, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Homeopathy is long but well organized, unlike Homeopathic repertory and Homeopathic proving. The only link to Homeopathic repertory on the entire Wikipedia is in the Homeopathy article, nota bene in the same paragraph where it links to Homeopathic proving. The only links to Homeopathic proving other than said link on Homeopathy, are in Samuel Hahnemann, James Tyler Kent (a stub with, again, the only link in the very same paragraph of Homeopathy), and in... Homeopathic repertory. Those two articles, Homeopathic repertory and Homeopathic proving, seem to be used only to explain the first paragraph in the Homeopathic remedies section of the Homeopathy article with slightly more details, and as such should be subsections of Homeopathic remedies. I would say that the overlap is almost complete, or at least it should be. Both of those articles can be compressed to single paragraphs. There is no need to have an article on Homeopathy thoroughly explaining every concept, except for the two short and simple definitions explained somewhere else. Rafał Pocztarski 17:26, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: However neither of those explanations are complete. What you are doing is the equalivalnt of saying that effecicency testing should be combiended with medcine (with the exception that effecicency testing is a science)Geni 23:44, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  I don’t think I am saying anything more than I have explicitly stated above. When we have the Homeopathy article explaining every single concept and aspect of homeopathy, except for only two short and simple definitions explained somewhere else, both of which can be written as single paragraphs, and both of which are referenced only in one paragraph of the main Homeopathy article and virtually nowhere else on Wikipedia, then it seems rather obvious that those paragraphs should be included in the main article itself. Note that besides the List of homeopathic remedies there are only two articles with “homeopathic” in the title: Homeopathic repertory and Homeopathic proving. Every other concept is explained in Homeopathy. Their what links here pages show that they are needed for only one purpose: to explain one paragraph of the Homeopathy article, the first paragraph of the Homeopathic remedies section. But I think I’m repeating myself. If you disagree, then I will wait with the merging while you explain why the homeopathic repertory and homeopathic proving—unlike all other concepts of homeopathy—need to have separate articles. I’ll wait for comments before I do anything. Rafał Pocztarski 02:15, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  The reason is that both of these can be expanded to a far greater degree. Most of the concepts are pretty stable and are largly drawn from the orogon. Homeopathic provings and repitories are drawn more from given praticeGeni 02:23, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Merging with homeopathy