Today is the day to admit it: we all owe a big THANKS to the worldwide homeopathy community. We should be most grateful to them all for selflessly demonstrating so indisputably something of fundamental importance:
homeopaths do not believe in their own outlandish, science-defying assumptions.
Yes, I really do appreciate the courage and altruism that was required for this epoch-making step!
Perhaps I better explain.
On 10 November, I issued ‘a challenge for all homeopaths of the world‘.
The deal was structured around a homeopathic proving (or, if you wish, around the assumption that highly diluted homeopathic remedies can have any noticable effects) and went as follows:
- you, the convinced homeopath, name the 6 homeopathic remedies that you cannot possibly miss when doing a proving on yourself;
- I order them in the potency you wish (only condition: it must be higher than C12) from a reputable source;
- I have the bottles delivered unopened to a notary where I live;
- the notary fills them into containers marked 1-6 (if you wish, you can send the notary empty containers for that ppurpose);
- the notary keeps the code under lock and key that links the name of the remedies to the numbers 1-6;
- he then mails the coded 6 remedies to you;
- you can use the proving method which you consider best and do as many provings as you like (the only limiting factors are the number of globuli in the containers and the time you have to crack the code);
- I give you 100 days for conducting the provings;
- once you are ready, you send your verdicts to the notary (e.g. 1 = rhus, tox, 2 = sulfur, 3 = arsenic, etc., etc.);
- the notary looks up the code and lets us both know the result.
I am happy to pay all the costs involved in the experiment (notary, remedies, postage, etc.). We can also discuss some of the details of this challenge, in case they run counter to your views on provings, rigorous science, etc.
To make sure we both ‘mean business’, once we both accept these conditions (you can flesh out the missing details as you wish), we both transfer a sum Euro 2 000 to an account with the notary. If you want to increase the sum, please let me know; as I said, we can discuss most of the details of my challenge to suit your needs. If you manage to ‘crack the code’ 1-6, the notary will transfer the sum of Euro 4 000 (your deposit and mine) to your account. If you fail, he will transfer the same amount to my account.
__________________________________________
In my original post, I made it abundantly clear that the entry to the challenge would close at the end of 2020. While it was still open, I did everything I could to let homeopaths know about the challenge. Because homeopathy originated in Germany and is still fairly popular there, I even re-published my challenge in German. In addition, I and others tweeted many times about it (in English, German, French, Spanish and possibly other languages as well), even directly to homeopaths across the globe.
As no homeopath has come forward to take up the challenge in time, and as no sound argument has emerged to convince me that my challenge was unreasonable, unscientific or unfair, it now is an indisputable fact that:
homeopaths do not believe in their own outlandish, science-defying assumptions.
I am most grateful to the worldwide community of homeopaths for heroically documenting the truth so clearly. It can’t have been easy to be so honest at the cost of homeopathy’s reputation. But I believe that this is an important and honourable step into the right direction. It provides essential information for non-homeopaths who want to understand the practice and profession of homeopathy.
MANY THANKS AGAIN
PS
In the interest of progress, please publicise the news as widely as you can.
132 Responses to A big ‘THANK YOU’ to homeopaths worldwide
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It was a bit of a giveaway, one feels, that the ‘homeopathy as adjuvant therapy in cancer treatment’ trial reported on in this Blog, was only for homeopathy as adjuvant, not the main treatment for cancer. It sems, to me, to be somewhat in the same vein as the re-branding of homeopathic hospitals (in the UK) as centres for ‘integrative medicine’ (or similar wording).
Why integrate, or have as adjuvant, a treatment that you believe works in its own right? Why is it not the main treatment?
The degree of surprise that no-one came forward for the Challenge is not, one feels, jaw-dropping……
David,
I hope you don’t mind me pointing out that a huge proportion of the activity of oncology departments is delivering adjuvant treatment (radiotherapy and chemotherapy). This can be post-operative or pre-operative (neoadjuvant). Without it we know that the outcomes of surgery alone would be much worse, and adjuvant treatment is the focus of a great many clinical trials.
I don’t mind at all – I am grateful! I think I was careless in my wording.
At any rate, homepaths don’t seem to suggest (perhaps a few do) that homoepathic remedies are an effective MAIN treatment modality for any type of cancer, instead of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
I wonder what Hahnemann would say about homoapathy as an adjuvant to anything!
Hahnemann did say something:
,Homeopaths who use treatments other than homeopathy are traitors’ [or similar]
he called them Halb-Homoeopathen [half-homeopaths]
Yes, so one assumes the “true” or “classical” homeopath would not be allowing surgery for tumours…..
“homeopathy as adjuvant, not the main treatment for cancer”
a.k.a. AltMed takes all the credit while Medicine does all the work. A fairly common theme in glowing “AltX cured my Y!” testimonials where only after prodding do they admit to receiving conventional treatment too.
Breast cancer’s a good example of that where the initial surgery is frequently curative in itself and the followup chemo is just to mop up any remaining cancer cells yielding maybe an extra 5-10% improvement in survival rates. So swapping the ebil artificial chemeekuls for lovey-dovey naaatural ones will still yield a large number of success stories; and survivor bias, human ego, and need to feel “back in control” pens the rest of the narrative from there.
“Why integrate, or have as adjuvant, a treatment that you believe works in its own right? Why is it not the main treatment?”
To paraphrase Voltaire: “Homeopathy is the art of amusing the practitioner while nature heals the disease.” Of course, that only works in practice on self-limiting diseases, and I suspect all but the most rabid of believers will find ways to rationalize their hedging of bets when others’ lives—and, more importantly, their own continued liberty—are on the line. Again, the goal is to take credit, not risks.
Which also explains the lack of interest in Prof Ernst’s challenge: What would the homeopath gain by winning it? Not more sales. I suppose there’s a few like Dullman or Hümmer who’d enjoy some smug satisfaction at rubbing Prof Ernst’s face in a successful result, but even they aren’t going to take a chance that they might fail. If they wouldn’t risk it for Randi’s $1M, they certainly aren’t going to do so for a paltry $2K; heck, they pull more than that in a month just from peddling their nostrums. Why spoil what works?
Yes, I recall seeing a TV programme years ago, where a lady went to a ‘naturopathic’ clinic for post-operative treatment for breast cancer (not instead of surgery, mark you) and attributed her remission to the clinic’s treatment (laetrile or something). But her oncologist pointed out that she had also all the while been on Tamoxifen, the best drug at the time for the cancer she had. But she gave the credit to the clini, who gladly took it.
I’m sorry, this is an anecdote!
The only reason for this refusal that I can think of is that deep down they also think they’re running a massive scam.
exactly!
this is why the demonstration of their own disbelief in their assumptions was important.
You havent thought very deeply then. Think again. If you want to be a proving subject, let me know.
You love provings, Roger, so why didn’t you take up Prof Ernst’s challenge? Surely it’s an easy couple grand for you, on top of doing homeopathy a powerful solid. I’m sure if you ask nicely Prof Ernst would agree to extend his original deadline just so you can finally prove him wrong.
You dont understand the time and the numbers of people involved for a single proving, much less 6.
You willing to pay for the time involved?
I offered to do a single proving if you skeptics would be the provers. Willing to volunteer?
@ Roger
so-called “provings” are one of the most irrational and illogical and ultimately most pseudoscientific elements of one of the most pseudoscientific SCAMs out there.
has it never occurred to you how prone they are to the possibilities of just collecting a plethora of totally random and unrelated irrelevant symptoms?
that they are almost guaranteed to put those involved on high alert for any and every minor physical and mental “awareness” and for them to report even the most trivial sensation no matter how irrelevant?
One has only to read the results of the so-called “provings” of any substance to realize how truly laughable these events are. There is no means of determining whether any of the “sensations” reported by those engaged in a “proving” really have any real relationship to the substance in question – especially since it will almost certainly have been diluted out of existence in the first place.
And all of this is rendered even more hilarious by the pseudoscience used by homeopaths to determine which reported effects of the “proving” will go on to be recorded as meaningful. It is “science” as dreamt up by a not very bright 4 year old! It is all make believe!
What is truly astounding is that any rational person could actually believe that it means anything at the end of the day – when all it really adds up to is random noise!
Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 1842, wrote in “Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions” (written while Hahnemann was still alive) the following as part of a scathing take-down of what he saw as an absurd practice on the subject of “provings:”
“I might extend this catalogue almost indefinitely. I have not cited these specimens with any view to exciting a sense of the ridiculous, which many others of those mentioned would not fail to do, but to show that the common accidents of sensation, the little bodily inconveniences to which all of us are subject, are seriously and systematically ascribed to whatever medicine may have been exhibited, even in the minute doses I have mentioned, whole days or weeks previously.”
Sadly homeopaths have learnt nothing in the intervening years but instead continue with their theatre of the absurd producing unicorns out of vials of ultra-dilute solutions of nothing all the while claiming significance for every passing sensation.
But then what can one expect from practitioners who claim to be able to capture moon-beams in a jar and Saturn’s rays in a sugar cube?
https://sciencebasedpharmacy.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/homeopathy-harnesses-the-power-of-saturn/
https://www.homeopathycenter.org/medicine_finder/luna/
https://frankvanderkooy.com/2017/12/21/ten-ridiculous-super-gross-and-weird-homeopathic-remedies/#comments
https://edzardernst.com/2019/09/homeopathic-provings-bullshit-about-dogshit/
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/homeopathic-x-rays/
John, if provers are “prone to the possibilities of just collecting a plethora of totally random and unrelated irrelevant symptoms” then why are they repeatable?
They did a repeat of Hahnemann’s Belladonna proving 100 years later, with provers and supervisors all over the world who were “blind” to the remedy and they got the same results.
If you had the courage of your convictions you could do a proving and experience the same.
You apparently dont understand the process of the proving. An intake of each prover’s health history is taken before the proving starts and all symptoms that reoccur during the proving are excluded from the results. Symptoms during a proving are collected the same way conventional docs collect “side effects” of the drugs they prescribe.
@ Roger
“You apparently dont understand the process of the proving. An intake of each prover’s health history is taken before the proving starts and all symptoms that reoccur during the proving are excluded from the results. Symptoms during a proving are collected the same way conventional docs collect “side effects” of the drugs they prescribe.”
On the contrary Roger I am not sure that YOU understand “provings!”
Substances are supposed to be tested on “healthy” subjects – yet no effort is expended to demonstrate that these subjects ARE in fact “healthy.”
The fact that you are talking about excluding prior symptoms would appear to indicate that subjects complaining of collections of symptoms can be included in provings and therefore unhealthy subjects can take part.
They are made to sound like some sort of scientific trial whereas they are in fact pseudoscientific claptrap.
The number of subjects taking part is too small to be of any significance – usually around a dozen or up to twenty or so often less. Statistically this is meaningless.
The collection of “sensations as I previously stated is random and meaningless.
“The left side of my neck just below the ear itched a bit after supper.”
“My right foot felt a little numb after I had been sitting awkwardly on the sofa watching TV.”
“I was aware of a slight sensation of heaviness in my right calf after climbing the stairs on going to bed.”
It gives enormous weight to very subjective sensations most of which are meaningless crap.
“As the “symptoms” are most often described in the most abstract sense possible, it’s difficult to see how they can be classed as new or old except in the most subjective of senses. Identifying gaining weight as a “new” symptom seems to imply that the prover has never, at all, ever, gained weight from eating too much – a highly unlikely, if not impossible, situation. It’s for precisely this sort of reason that established medical practice is highly suspicious of such “self reported” data.
There is no attempt to correct for selection bias, nocebo effect, comparison with a placebo group (i know, I know always a problem in Homeopathy when the “treatment itself is nothing but a placebo) or any of the other conditions that are usually taken into account in a properly conducted clinical trial.
Instead homeopaths throw all cautions to the wind and just have a random free-for-all where they collect random subjective sensations and at the end select the ones they like best and call these the indications for which the substance is best indicated.
Traditionally there was no attempt at blinding and even now it is unusual for the “master prover” to be blinded even if the others are allegedly meant to be so, so there are all sorts of means for these daft proceedings to be tainted.
It’s the old story of a blind man in a dark cellar looking for a black cat that isn’t there – except that a homeopath always finds one.
” In other words: a remedy is never even tested on real patients, let alone in any scientifically rigorous way. This alone already means that proving, by definition, produces totally meaningless results.”
As an aside I recently came across the following from a Homeopathy site i n the UK which I think summarizes the kind of thinking not just homeopaths but SCAM merchants in general tend to use – i.e. rationalizing why their particular SCAM can’t be judged by regular scientific standards and why only “special” SCAM artists will be able to sense the particular qualities and benefits of their SCAM.
It also explains why some patients just can’t be cured – they aren’t sensitive enough!
If you can’t see the reasoning or sense the benefits then you “just don’t have the required sensitivities.!”
It’s a case of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” don’t you know!
All of us scientists are just insensitives who just think that the Emperor is – well darn naked!
“Provings
Provings or human pathogenetic trials (HPT’s) are best conducted with ”sensitives“ (people who appear to respond to virtually any homeopathic medicine given) because only then will the full range of experiential effects of medicines be displayed. A random cross section of the population are not a suitable study group [8] since a high proportion of those volunteers will produce no symptoms at all and the rest are likely to produce only small numbers of poorly differentiated symptoms reflecting their own low levels of sensitivity rather than the nature of the medicine itself. ”Sensitives“ are exceptional people and this highlights an important prerequisite of homeopathic studies- that until a theoretical framework exists it is essential that subjects and conditions are chosen that maximise effects wherever possible. This is true not only for HPTs but also for assessing the curative effect of homeopathic medicines.
Clinical trials
The normal criteria used to select subjects for clinical trials are unlikely to be those that will maximise homeopathic effects. This is because what needs to be measured and evaluated in homeopathy has not yet been clarified, but is unlikely to be the same as that which is measured and evaluated in conventional medicine.
Whilst ”sensitives“ have a general sensitivity to homeopathic medicines, illness confers a specific sensitivity and it is this specific sensitivity which must be fully appreciated if convincing and reproducible results in clinical trials are to be obtained. Sensitivity underlies degree of response to homeopathic medicines and is dependent upon how intensely an illness is experienced. Subjects for a clinical trial should therefore be chosen firstly by matching their experiences as closely as possible (i.e choosing subjects with as similar symptoms and emotional states as possible) and secondly choosing subjects with intense experiences over those whose experiences (symptoms and emotional state) are mild. Such a selection procedure would tend to maximise the effect of a given medicine.
Choosing subjects for a clinical trial on the basis of disease diagnoses is not a sound basis for assessing how effective homeopathic medicines are. How an illness is experienced is a much more reliable criterion. If homeopathy is a radically different approach to illness then the criteria used to assess effectiveness in mainstream medicine are unlikely to be transferable.
Ultimately homeopathy can only be judged and its results understood in the light of its
own theoretical framework. I hope the above discussion will go a small way to providing such a framework.”
Aside from all the special conditions and other hoopla this guy is insisting on – he wants to specially select all the patients and conditions IN ADVANCE of any study so that he can GUARANTEE that any study will turn out exactly the way he wants!
And rather than science being a tool to dispassionately evaluate homeopathy just like anything else, he is using buckets of special pleading to insist that homeopathy must be evaluated in a special manner and that perceptions of illness rather than illness processes themselves should be used to evaluate it!
Placebo effects anyone?
Roger
If so, homeopaths would have demonstrated their ability to blindly tell remedies apart by means of provings and hence unarguably shown the miraculous powers of their remedies.
They haven’t. And have never been able to. Ever.
Provings are laughable and pathetic exercises in confirmation bias, Roger, and a shining example of the delusional thinking of homeopaths.
Yes Roger, I know. I should do a proving, shouldn’t I?
Pathetic.
“You dont understand the time and the numbers of people involved for a single proving, much less 6.”
Ah, ever dependable Roger. If only you could sell Courtier’s Reply at sixty bucks a bottle.
Roger,
Really? Are they? Do you have evidence to support this contention?
Do you have a reference for this? Is it the only such study you know of, the only one of many which has produced the desired result, or part of a larger body of evidence?
If this were the case, it would be easy for homeopaths to do correctly-blinded provings and repeatedly tell one remedy from another.
But they haven’t.
Because they can’t.
The Belladonna repeat proving would have been unblinded. The same as Mad Sam’s original one. Just a load of homeopathy freaks engaging in a circle-jerk of idiotic confirmation bias.
You do yourself no favours with your arguments, Roger.
travis,
First you should understand the purpose of a proving. Its not to make statistical analyses to satisfy So-called Skeptics (SS). Its to get a strong indication of the effects of a remedy so that it can be prescribed to heal the sick. A small number of provers is usually adequate for that purpose. If more are available and more supervisors, all the better.
Usually there is no option to choose “sensitives”. It might be nice but you choose whoever is available. Or rather they choose to be a part of the proving. Dr Hahnemann says in the Organon that only for very mild medicines is it necessary to have a very sensitive person do the proving. By repeating a remedy often enough anyone will start to experience symptoms caused by it.
But a proving is just the beginning of the journey to understand a new remedy. As it is used over time on sick individuals the symptoms that it cures are collected. New symptoms are added and existing ones are emphasized in the materia medica for the remedy. If some “noise” (a few invalid symptoms) appear in the proving it wont drown out the signal of the strong indications for that remedy. The strong indications will become emphasized in the literature and the noise will be ignored.
Subjects of provings are supposed to be healthy. But health is of course relative. No one is perfectly healthy. Provings are done with the individuals who volunteer to do them. An in-depth health history is done to ascertain that they are healthy enough and if they have any current minor symptoms, those symptoms can be eliminated from the results of the proving.
There is a careful consultation between the provers, supervisors and the proving manager to identify and qualify all the symptoms that arose during the proving, that were not there before the proving and went away after the proving. Only those are added to the materia medica.
And you don’t understand homeopathy. A person’s subjective experience of their disease is very important for determining a remedy. So the subjective experience of the provers is very important. Anyone comparing the provings of different remedies will see very specific unique indications for the remedies, especially in the subjective experiences of the provers.
Lots of people might have the common symptoms of a disease. But each has a different subjective response to it. One is angry that is interfering with his life. Another is sad. Another is fearful that it’s a sign of their imminent demise. Etc, etc. The subjective experiences of the individual symptoms are very important as well. The headache feels heavy or “like a knot”, like a “band around the head”, or like being “stabbed”, etc.
Symptoms are described in a very detailed manner in provings. A well described symptom has as many as possible of the following aspects: Side of the body, Time of occurrence, Modalities (what makes it better and/or worse), Does it extend to another part of the body, Exact location in the body, Quality of the Sensation. Provers are asked to qualify the symptoms and their modalities as much as possible.
Provers and supervisors are usually blind to the proving; not told what the substance is. And remember this is a remedy that has never been proven before. By definition they are blind to it. No one can possibly know what kind of response is to be expected from this entirely new remedy.
Anyone with a little bit of curiosity can do a proving and personally experience that the effects of the remedy are not placebo.
@ Roger
” And you don’t understand homeopathy. A person’s subjective experience of their disease is very important for determining a remedy.”
The problem is I understand homeopathy all too well!
This is all just more “special pleading” – “homeopathy is special so your science can’t test it crap.”
You are just justifying the small numbers, that testers have to be specially picked to be “sensitive” and so on – all of which massively skews the results! By doing this you could get any result you wanted!
It’s the same way American lawyers try to skew juries by picking women/Jews/blacks etc depending on the case.
Trying to justify it because “homeopathy is a special case” doesn’t make it any less skewed.
“The subjective experiences of the individual symptoms are very important as well. The headache feels heavy or “like a knot”, like a “band around the head”, or like being “stabbed”, etc.”
And where is the evidence that any of these subjective and trivial responses actually have any real meaning or any impact on the selection of a remedy?
At the end of the day the evidence that Homeopathy can actually treat or cure and disease is still signally lacking!
It’s all tooth fairy science.
@Roger: Prof Ernst has already told you politely to knock off your “SS” crap.
Show some fricking manners when you’re in someone else’s house.
he’s very close to getting banned
I’m not a trained homeopath, but sure, if you want me to participate in a properly conducted randomised double blind controlled trial, sure. But the procedure would need to follow standard procedure, be transparent, agreed to in advance and neutrally overseen.
But why didn’t you agree to participating in Dr Ernst’s trial here? What was wrong with it? What would you want to change?
I await your response.
Hi Yakaru, send me an email at rrandor at gmail and I will try to find you a proving that you can participate in.
I just sent you this email from my gmail account (yakaru at-)
—
Hello Roger,
I’m responding to your offer on Prof. Ernst’s blog where you made this offer: “If you want to be a proving subject, let me know.”
However I doubt you will find any such proving that is controlled, randomised and double blinded. But I’d be perfectly prepared to participate, and curious to see how homeopaths manage to control all the possible variables.
Let me know when you find one and I’ll send you my details.
Best wishes
Yakaru
—
Unfortunately there are two common tropes used by SCAM artists.
One is to use one of their fake diagnostic methods to “diagnose” a malady the mark (sorry – patient) does not have. Iridology, hair testing, Bio-resonance etc to say the mark has a real disease that is just not present – e.g.cancer or alternatively a fake disease such as “adrenal fatigue” or “chronic Lyme.”
Then after prolonged and expensive and perfectly useless “therapy” the fake diagnostics can be re-applied to pronounce the mark “cured.”
The other devious approach is when a patient has been diagnosed with cancer in a real medical facility and had received conventional medical treatment. In many cases such as testicular cancer and early breast cancer surgical treatment alone may often be curative and in some instances adjuvant radiotherapy or chemotherapy may be recommended to improve the chances survival depending upon a host of facors.
As one example say surgery may give a probability of 70% survival whereas adding radiotherapy and chemo may increase those odds to 95% in a particular case. Unfortunately it is usually not possible to accurately predict who among the 70% might be cured by the surgery alone and therefore who might actually need the additional adjuvant therapy as “insurance,” meaning it may be necessary to offer it to all of them.
In cases where SCAM artists claim cures for cancer it is so often the case that in fact the patient has previously had a full course of surgery and perhaps adjuvant therapy but for some reason it is the SCAM that gets the credit.
What is particularly egregious is where in the 70%/95% cases mentioned above where for whatever reasons patients may understandably decline what they see as “toxic” treatment and instead plumb for “natural” SCAM therapy in its place – it is then trumpeted that “they said it was essential to poison him with X-rays and toxic chemo but we cured him with diet and homeopathy instead!” However of course it is perfectly likely that this patient fell into the group of 70% that would have been cured by surgery alone and wouldn’t have needed the adjuvant treatment anyway – although there would have been no means of discerning this in advance.
I think one of the biggest “handicaps” conventional medicine has versus SCAM is that we are limited by the bounds of truth, integrity, ethics, and what as individuals we think is the right thing for an individual patients and for the public at large. I am using the word “handicap” in a real sense in terms of argument but in an ironic sense otherwise.
Real doctors and scientists feel they have to give guarded prognoses, to use terms that indicate less than certainty.
They use words like “may”, “could”, “possibly” and so on.
Instead of bandying around words like cure it is more likely that more vague terms will be used like “we should be able to get it all out”, “there’s a 70% chance of a remission” or “most patients in your situation do very well.”
Some may avoid it altogether and simply say they are going to start treatment without addressing the prognosis.
But there is always the sticky problem of being bound by reality and the truth – whereas SCAM artists living as they do in a fantasy land where anything goes are free to invent an alternate reality and promise cures and any number of fantastical outcomes completely unhinged from reality. And since there are no standards of care in SCAM land they can never be accused of violating them.
It will always be an unequal battle.
On the one hand: “Mr Jones – you have cancer. We are going to disembowel you, blast you with X-rays and give you toxic chemicals that will make you sick and your hair fall out. Then you will have a 30% chance of living for the next 5 years.”
On the other: “Mr Jones – your doctor is lying to you. I can cure your cancer with a special diet of raw vegetables and some special herbs. No side-effects whatsoever. I have cured hundreds of people already – read these testimonials.”
When presented with a choice like that patients often see it as a choice between which is the more “pleasant” treatment? Which would I “rather” be true? It’s a kind of false balance that journalists use. And they are swayed by emotion into believing in the word “cure” instead of the words “30% and “5 years. ”
When the patient has the “emotional investment” in the decision like that they can end up seeing the two as being equal options and choosing the more pleasant even though it’s a total lie.
In my view it’s akin to having a choice between investing your savings in a bank offering 0.5% interest versus an advert offering 25% interest in the local paper. If you give them equal credence you would plump for the 25% but………why is anybody offering that rate of interest? Who are they? Is it safe? But you say…. it’s too good a rate to turn down isn’t it? 25%!! Better get in while the going’s good.
And that is what SCAMmers rely on – that people will give equal credence to the two rates and think “that’s too good to miss!” Forgetting that 25% of nothing is less than 0.5% of something.
So SCAMmers can promise the earth – and some people will compare it with what real doctors are offering them – and SCAM will always come out ahead. But what these people always fail to realize is that empty promises always amount to 0% and will always be less than whatever else was on offer – and by then it may be too late.
Are you going to pay a reasonable hourly wage for all the time involved? Homeopathy may seem to defy _known_ science. Perhaps there is some principles of the Universe that genius So-called Skeptics don’t know. The mechanistic paradigm cant explain consciousness or life itself. Maybe there is some room there for homeopathy!
“The mechanistic paradigm cant explain consciousness or life itself.”
VERY LAME EXCUSE!
my test would have allowed you to include whatever you want: consciousness, life force, prana, nano-particles, water memory, chi, psora, quantum theory, entanglement, string theory, etc., etc.
Sure. And how would you like to receive that payment: in kitten smiles or sunbeams?
Oh wait, did you mean in cold hard green cash? How very… Allopathic of you.
……
Still, it is one of the best AltMed excuses there is: “We won’t prove our claims unless you pay us!”
And yet, these same Alties are perfectly fine with receiving frequent payments for not proving their products work, from suckers—I mean “patients”—who are happy to accept their unevidenced statements that it does.
So what school of Complementary And Alternative Economics did you attend exactly? ’Cos I could use some free money too.
personally, I find the excuse that NOT EVERYTHING GOES WITH YOUR PARADIGM even better.
I laugh tears every time I hear it.
@Roger
Um, yes, it can. Some time ago, you asked the same question, and I gave you answers, see https://edzardernst.com/2020/09/homeopathic-mercurius-solubilis-for-the-covid-19-pandemic-surely-no-reputable-journal-would-publish-such-nonsense/#comment-126847
But your ‘reasoning’ does not make sense even if there were no mechanistic explanations – it is akin to the reasoning of other religious zealots, who ‘explain’ anything they don’t understand with one phrase: “goddidit“.
Homeopathy is not compatible with science in any way, and pointing to things that science cannot (yet, fully) explain does not infer even in the slightest that homeopathy might be viable after all. Also note that countless trials of homeopathy have not produced even a single consistently repeatable effect, whereas the existence of both consciousness and life are pressed upon us, literally every waking moment of our life.
You didnt give me an answer. You gave me a theory that is not close to proven. Let me know when it is proven. Saying that consciousness just “emerges” from a chemical soup is magical thinking.
An alternate explanation that makes more sense and fits with the evidence of homeopathic provings is panpsychism i.e. all matter has consciousness. The process of making a homeopathic remedy tunes the matter, whether alcohol, water or lactose, with the “mind” of the original matter.
Homeopathy is not compatible with your limited conception of science.
The meta-analyses that skeptics point to “proving” their negative point about homeopathy (Shang, et al, and the Australian NHMRC study) looked not at countless trials, but only 8 and 5 respectively, after they ruled out all the positive studies.
In August 2019 NHMRC finally released the draft 2012 report in which the author concluded that there is “encouraging evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy” in five medical conditions. NHMRC say they rejected the first report because it was poor quality despite it being undertaken by a reputable scientist and author of NHMRC’s own guidelines on how to conduct evidence reviews. The actually rejected it because it didnt come to the conclusion that they wanted.
@Roger
Sorry old chap, but these hypotheses about consciousness and life have FAR more evidence going for them than homeopathy. In fact, my description of the process of life is exactly what science sees happening.
The claim is that consciousness emerges from a neural network of sufficient complexity, not just ‘chemical soup’. (And oh, believing that water turns into a medicine by simply shaking and diluting is not magical thinking?)
But as I said earlier, these questions and hypotheses are irrelevant for the plausibility of homeopathy. Life and consciousness exist without a shadow of a doubt. Effects of homeopathy do not exist in any provable manner.
My concept of science is irrelevant as well. Homeopathy is not compatible with science – ALL of science, period.
Well, then it should be easy for you to come up with lots of studies and simple experiments that prove real effects of homeopathy in a consistent, repeatable manner. Unfortunately for you, there is not a single such study or experiment to be found. Mind you, there are some positive homeopathy studies, but these suffer from the same shortcomings:
– any effects found are inversely proportional to the quality of the study,
– even the ‘strongest’ effects found are still quite weak,
– very few positive studies have been replicated with a similar outcome, and, most important of all:
– there are no clearly positive studies or experiments that can be replicated at will. None whatsoever.
Sorry to shoot down your illusion, but the NHMRC’s current statement on homeopathy is very clear:
The NHMRC’s conclusion is in line with conclusions from academies of science worldwide. Let me put this in all caps to press the message home:
THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SCIENTIFIC BODY SUPPORTING THE NOTION THAT HOMEOPATHY IS AN EFFECTIVE TREATMENT FOR ANY CONDITION WHATSOEVER
Homeopathy Does Not Work, no matter how fervently you claim that it does.
“The mechanistic paradigm cant explain consciousness or life itself.”
That was an important and valid criticism when it was first directed at Descartes in 1650. Oddly his worldview lives on today in modern esoteric spirituality, where people ask “How can life arise from inanimate matter?”, without realising that chemistry went through a revolution shortly afterwards, as did biology some centuries later. The only place where your “mechanistic paradigm” exists in the minds of those who missed the 450 years of science.
…And, as a reason to refuse doing Dr Ernst’s trial it’s a bit off topic isn’t it? Especially given that homeopaths themselves alternate between claiming homeopathy has been confirmed by modern science, and claiming it can’t be because it is superior to the (non-existent) “mechanistic worldview” of modern science.
Wow…it is hilarious that you are actually saying that conventional medical treatment was the “primary” therapy in that study by Frass where homeopathic medicines were used as an adunct. Do you have no memory or no knowledge of that study? If you did, you’d KNOW that the group of subjects given adjunctive homeopathic treatment were compared with those given simply conventional medical treatment. IF conventional medicine treatment was the “primary” useful therapy, then there would be NO differeneces between the groups. #DUH!
However, the study actually showed substantial benefits in patient who were given adjunctive homeopathic treatment.
It is so much fun watching seemingly smart people twist and spin information to create misinformation. I assume that you know exactly what you’re doing and that you’re purposefully misinforming people.
It is no wonder that homeopaths do not trust the people here to do any objective research.
https://edzardernst.com/2020/10/homeopathy-prolongs-survival-of-lung-cancer-patients-can-it-be-true/
No surprise there … Homeopaths will never willingly cooperate to put their belief system to the test – because they know that the outcome will be failure.
This also erodes the often-heard excuse that they never willingly defraud their customers because they are (or were, in some cases) Believers with a capital B.
Anyone dabbling even superficially in homeopathy cannot be unaware of the massive criticism from ALL of science – criticism that is extremely well-founded and supported by massive amounts of evidence, quite contrary to their own notion that homeopathy actually does something. They all know that the evidence against their belief system far outweighs the scant evidence that they base those beliefs on – yet still they maintain that homeopathy is a viable system of ‘medicine’, quite often even to the extent that they denounce real medicine as inferior. Which, in my opinion, makes them deliberate SCAM artists all the same.
As a result, we almost invariably see that ‘successful’ homeopaths are hugely arrogant nitwits – because only the most arrogant self-deluded fools manage to keep up the appearance of someone knowledgeable about sickness and health, whereas in reality they usually lack the anatomical insight even to locate their own behind with both hands.
Edzard:
Why didn´t you and repeatedly do not go into the argument that the experimental set-up does not include the main law of homeopathy (simile-principle!)?
So I say again what I said bevor:
“Sorry to say and also to contradict some other homeopaths, the above challenge cannot function, because it contradicts totally the law of similarity:
If this law is right, one person can only react to 1 (ONE!) remedy, the remedy to which the one person goes into RESONANCE.
I know, I am a heretic in that sense, but I see homeopathy working very well, when considering this law of resonance!”
and I said and say it again:
“….you make a different impression. And, I did not think that you are so inflexible that you cannot change the experimental arrangement in the interests of a correct understanding of homeopathy.”
So the question arises, if you mean ist serious or it is one more of your phenomenal good jokes?”
“Why didn´t you and repeatedly do not go into the argument that the experimental set-up does not include the main law of homeopathy (simile-principle!)?”
MAINLY BECAUSE IT’S NOT TRUE.
It’s almost as if Herr Hümmer doesn’t want to understand that the point of your experiment is not to test all of homeopathy’s tenets at once, but to test a single one of them to see if that holds up, before [presumably] proceeding to test the others in similarly controlled isolation.
This does not surprise me as Altie “research” typically means generating as much noise from as many variables as possible (“But it’s Holistic!”), then torturing the resulting numerical mess to make it say whatever they want it to mean. But I might have expected better from someone with a “Dr” in their name. Ah well, my bad.
Obligatory.
I think I’m going to use that in school! (if we ever get back in the classroom).
@Dr. Heinrich Hümmer,
Please allow me to intrude on your amicable exchange with Prof. Ernst.
Ah, right away I see where the main problem lies: the ‘simile-principle’ has never been proven to exist. It is simply an assumption by Hahnemann, based on misinterpreted personal observations.
So you might want to heed the banner at the top: first provide evidence for the actual existence of the ‘simile-principle’ before using it in an argument. And as far as calling it ‘the main law of homeopathy’: I have found a far better main law of homeopathy: the ‘delusional principle’, which posits that homeopathy is based on first deluding oneself and then one’s customers that one can actually intervene in a person’s health in any beneficial way, by means of plain shaken water, or sugar crumbs exposed to the aforementioned plain shaken water. The importance of this delusional principle in homeopathy is further underscored by the fact that ‘delude’ sounds very similar(!) to ‘dilute’, one of the core practices of homeopathy.
Momentarily ignoring the fact that even the mere existence of this ‘law’ you refer to has not been proven so far, this still is a novel and intriguing notion. And as I am knowledgeable in the field of physics, with electrotechnical sciences as my main expertise, dealing with all sorts of resonance on a daily basis, your claim raises several questions:
– Exactly what is it that resonates? I have never come across any scientific description of let alone evidence for ‘persons going into resonance’. By their very nature, human bodies have very poor resonance characteristics in a mechanical or electrical sense, mostly due to damping through energy losses.
– How can one objectively measure or observe this resonance?
– If only 1 (ONE!) particular ‘remedy’ causes only one person to ‘go into resonance’ as a result of the unproven ‘simile-principle’, how on earth can a homeopath locate that 1 (ONE!) remedy? Given that most homeopathic ‘remedies’ are associated with dozens of ‘symptoms’ finding the one ‘resonating’ with the whole spectrum of a person’s symptoms and characteristics is like finding a needle in a haystack. And because many symptoms are transient to boot, that needle arbitrarily changes haystacks as time goes by.
This means that even if homeopathy’s principles were viable as you assume, the rate of success in treating people should still be extremely low, simply because it is very unlikely to hit on that 1 (ONE!) ‘remedy’ that actually causes said ‘resonance’.
– Your claim with regard to exclusive resonance is also somewhat contradicted by the very meaning of the word ‘simile’, which I read as ‘more or less like’, and not ‘exactly matching’. Can you elaborate on this?
Yes, this is to be expected, based on my main law of homeopathy. All homeopaths claim that they see homeopathy working very well.
I have seen ladies being cut in half and then put together again (and, importantly, survive the process) on multiple occasions, together with hundreds of other eyewitnesses.
Yes Richard!
I often use this argument too – I find it very compelling! One can not believe the evidence of one’s own eyes and as you say with the presence of many fellow witnesses.
You have seen it happen – there is no obvious alternative explanation – any YET……..it cannot be true!
Cognitive dissonance.
Our senses are easily fooled. Many years ago I attended an exhibition at the Science Museum in London which was devoted just to this subject. There were many displays that demonstrated how our senses of vision, hearing, touch, temperature, sense of depth, proportion, proprioception etc could all easily be fooled.
This was our own body sensations telling us lies about our immediate environment.
Our eyes lying to us and the evidence immediately apparent – but the “illusion” still appeared real when you revisited the original display.
Our brains compensate for certain distortions/effects automatically and even if we try we are not always able to switch these off or decompensate.
It is the same with bias – even if we are honest enough to admit to this we are not always able reliably to compensate for it.
It has always been my view that science tries to adjust for these effects – for the many ways that our senses and biases can be fooled and misjudgements can be called into play.
It always seems to me the more one can exclude any possibility of observer error or bias then this must increase the accuracy of the outcome.
However SCAM practitioners always seem to have outsize confidence in their personal experience and what they “see.”
Belief in “testimonials” and biased reporting.
It seems they want to believe in unicorns and ladies genuinely being sawn in half.
@Richard Rasker:
Thanks for your (mostly) serious discourse!
“Ah, right away I see where the main problem lies: the ‘simile-principle’ has never been proven to exist. It is simply an assumption by Hahnemann, based on misinterpreted personal observations.”
If you are free enough in your mind, you may agree, that the “Simile-principle” is nothing else but RESONANCE, and this principle can be found in all nature and is an essential component in almost all physical reactions (as you admit, you are “dealing with all sorts of resonance on a daily basis”)
“By their very nature, human bodies have very poor resonance characteristics in a mechanical or electrical sense”
and
” as I am knowledgeable in the field of physics”:
Have you never heard of anything other than electrical resonance phenomena in physics?
“Exactly what is it that resonates?”
Be shure, physics will find out one day!
“how on earth can a homeopath locate that 1 (ONE!) remedy?”
That´s indeed most of the work and art of practicing homeopathy!
Fortunately, every living body emits manifold symptom signals of dysbalance which, if one is ready to perceive them and take them seriously [the SCSUM (So Called Sientific University mMedicine) does not always do so], point the way for a homeopath …
But a little hint: A computer -programm helps me with this!
I think you might brush up on what a homeopathic proving is and how it is done; this is from the ECH (https://homeopathyeurope.org/research/provings/#:~:text=In%20homeopathic%20provings%2C%20a%20homeopathically%20prepared%20substance%20is,the%20state%20of%20health-disturbance%20that%20the%20substance%20induces.)
Homeopathic provings, also known as homeopathic pathogenetic trials (HPTs), are a fundamental principle of homeopathy. In homeopathic provings, a homeopathically prepared substance is tested on healthy volunteers – provers – in order to reveal, through recording the effects, the state of health-disturbance that the substance induces. The provers are not told what the substance is, and they are not in communication with each other, and their responses are recorded by themselves and by observers, who also do not know what the substance is. The records of the provers’ reactions are collected together as the proving of the remedy.
These responses are temporary and vary from person to person, but the total information has a pattern unique to that substance and is used as the basis of treatment. By using provers with as wide a variety of differences as possible, the maximum amount of information can be gathered, enabling the fullest understanding of the general and specific properties of the substance.
Provings and treatment are two sides of the same coin that is homeopathy. Treatment addresses states of ill-health – provings induce states of ill-health. Recognising the state of ill-health of an individual subject and matching them with the state of ill-health induced by a homeopathic proving is considered to be a key element in the successful practice of homeopathy.
A considerable number of HPTs have been conducted in the past 60 years and have been systematically reviewed. Methods have varied considerably and there have been efforts more recently to incorporate relevant contemporary research methods into homeopathic provings.
…. every medical specialty has developed further, recognized false conclusions and learned from them. I am confident of homeopathy in this sense ……
Belladonna: This is an interesting compare and contrast view of history and very early clinical research. Belladonna provings were mentioned earlier in this thread.
The first link is from the American Association of Homeopathic Pharmacists and quotes several historical studies and edicts purporting to demonstrate the incontestable efficacy of Belladonna as a prophylaxis for Scarlet Fever from the 18th and 19th centuries. And a very convincing tale it is too with references to boot.
The second link is to a paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine which quotes what must be some of the very earliest clinical studies including clinical controlled trials and attempts at randomization from the 19th Century.
Aside from being fascinating in their own right these studies were able once and for all to demonstrate clearly that Homeopathic Belladonna was nothing but humbug and nonsense and could safely be abandoned.
It is still widely promoted for a broad variety of ills and also for prophylaxis against epidemics including cholera.
Not of course that any research or evidence has ever changed the practice of any homeopath ever.
https://www.theaahp.org/articles/belladonna-clinical-snapshot/#_edn2
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2789015/
@Dr. Heinrich Hümmer
First off, having a ‘free mind’ should be totally irrelevant for dealing with any real phenomenon. I have been working in biomedical electronics for several decades now, and both my education and my work never required me to have a ‘free mind’ to observe, work with and ultimately measure and calculate anything whatsoever.
Literally ALL phenomena that I encountered in my career have a relatively simple explanation based on physics and/or chemistry, and usually required nothing more than proper equipment to be objectively observed.
If anything unexpected and/or unexplained happened, this invariably turned out to be due to a mistake or lack of knowledge on my behalf (and believe me, that happened a lot – especially in the beginning) – NOT because of any shortcomings or unknown areas in science.
No, I cannot agree with what you’re saying here, and it is also mostly wrong. Physical and chemical reactions hardly ever involve resonance in any way – and where it occurs, it almost always a side effect of particular events, not an essential part of it. In nature, resonance is quite rare because most materials (including living tissue) have completely the wrong properties for any type of resonance to occur.
Yes – usually as something to eliminate or limit when it may occur. Resonance is mostly unwanted in electronic circuits and physical constructions, as it interferes with the desired functionality of said things and can even lead to disaster. Admittedly, resonance is quite useful when dealing with transmitters and receivers, but that encompasses only a minor part of electronics. And even then, one must be very careful to control that resonance in order to avoid distorted signals and interference.
Apart from electrical resonance there are two other known types of resonance: mechanical resonance and nuclear magnetic resonance or NMR. Neither of these have any bearing on real medical interventions (or on homeopathy, for that matter).
[“Exactly what is it that resonates?”]
So all that you are saying is that the ‘simile-principle’ is based on ‘resonance’, but you can’t tell me what either of these things are – and what’s more: you can’t even show us that either of these things actually exist.
You might just as well ‘explain’ that the simile-principle of homeopathy is based on fairy dust. No, it is not the same as household dust, but it is quite plausible all the same, as ‘dust’ is a basic principle found everywhere in nature, so that explains it – it just requires an open mind to really recognize and accept it. Ergo: homeopathy works. Not.
So let’s once again ask the simple question: can you provide convincing evidence that homeopathy’s simile-principle is a real phenomenon?
The answer is clear: no, you can’t – as no homeopath has ever succeeded in objectively demonstrating the existence of the simile-principle, or the effect of potentization, or even the efficacy of homeopathy as a whole.
It is quite simple: the first homeopath to prove any of these things in a scientifically acceptable manner would undoubtedly get awarded Nobel prizes for chemistry, medicine, and physics, and would finally give homeopathy the credibility and respectability it utterly lacks since its inception, well over 200 years ago.
However I, for one, will not be holding my breath.
Hold your breath, high quality is avaliable. Begin the fall of Ernst’s era!
Show it. And prepare yourself to be laughed at.
200 years of nonsense, Have. You are unlikely to overturn it.
Credit where due: “RESONANCE” is a refreshing change from “Quantum”.
“Hold your breath, high quality is avaliable. Begin the fall of Ernst’s era!”
https://youtu.be/hWJX9yUKJeQ?t=18
Hahaha, poor Lenny, he is unable to show their basic education.
Oh dear, Have. Just the comment we’d expect from someone who is unable to back up his witless assertions with any evidence.
I’m educated to degree level in science, kiddo. You appear to need to take your shoes and socks off if you’re counting anything in double digits.
Put up or shut up, Have. Your manic bluster does not count. Even Hümmer provides citations, as underwhelming as they are.
Dr Hummer,
You are clearly using the term resonance differently from the way it is normally understood. Perhaps it would clarify this discussion if you could give us the definition that you are using.
I am baffled by this answer. Or is it simply a roundabout way of saying you don’t know?
“After their discovery by the Curies, these were initially not only considered harmless, but also beneficial to health – even though Marie Curie was already showing the first signs of radiation sickness at this point: lesions on the hands, pain in the limbs, fatigue and anemia.”
…..they had no explanation for the effect at this point …..
“Exactly what is it that resonates?”
Be shure, physics will find out one day!
After finding out she became the Nobel price….:-)
@Dr. Heinrich Hümmer
Allow me point out some fallacies here:
– The discoverers of radioactivity started out by finding a real, objectively observable phenomenon, i.e. the fact that some materials emitted a type of radiation that was unknown to science up until then.
Homeopathy, on the other hand, was completely made up from the start. There is no objectively observable phenomenon supporting homeopathy, only conjecture, speculation and uncritical thinking on behalf of its believers. Yes, Hahnemann thought he stumbled upon a real phenomenon, but even his contemporaries quickly found that they could not replicate Hahnemann’s findings.
– Marie Curie did not discover radioactivity; Becquerel did – and Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the related phenomenon of X-rays. Curie started out by replicating(!) Becquerel’s experiments, and later also worked with Röntgen’s X-rays.
There are no experiments in homeopathy that can be independently replicated.
– Within a few years of Becquerel’s and Röntgen’s discoveries, lots of scientists worked with radioactivity and X-rays, determining the nature of both, and finding real and effective applications.
Homeopathy, however, is still in the hypothetical stage, without any reliable proof of efficacy, even after more that 200 years.
You talk about the ‘simile-principle'(*) as if it were a real phenomenon. However, no evidence for its existence has been found so far. It is still a purely hypothetical — and extremely implausible — effect, lacking even a proper definition and clear demarcation, not to mention an explanatory mechanism of action. And no, “resonance” does not explain anything, especially when you can’t even remotely specify what exactly is resonating, and how, and at what frequencies, and what types of energy are involved etcetera.
What this means is that you are simply making things up.
*: Actually, it is called the similia-principle, but let’s not descend into linguistic nitpicking (although I think it’s rather embarrassing for a convinced believer in homeopathy to even get the name wrong of its supposedly main principle …)
Dr Hummer,
I didn’t ask you to explain the mechanism of the effect, I asked you to define what you mean by resonate, since you are clearly not using the word in its normal sense.
“the ‘simile-principle’ has never been proven to exist”
Perhaps it was meant as a metaphor?
/coat
“Sorry to say and also to contradict some other homeopaths, the above challenge cannot function, because it contradicts totally the law of similarity:
If this law is right, one person can only react to 1 (ONE!) remedy, the remedy to which the one person goes into RESONANCE.”
can you show us where it says so in the current instructions fro conducting provings, please?
https://homeopathyeurope.org/downloads/project-one/Main-guidelines-v1-English.pdf
“I see homeopathy working very well”
but not better than placebo.
a malignant lymph node that begins to go away a day after starting homeopathic treatment is with absolute certainty a placebo effect or a random coincidence ….
Since these and similar effects have been happening every day for 34 years, I seem to trigger monstrous placebo effects …
yes, strange things happen every day – also without homeopathy.
How is the beginning of going away measured? How do you know on which day the going away began? How long did the entire going away take until it was entirely gone away?
(I presume you are saying that a malignant growth within a lymph node started to go away – not that the lymph node itself started to go away?)
I would hazard a guess that the patient goes in for a standard round of chemo treatment; then afterwards, being a bit woo-ey, heads over to Hümmer to get their boo-boos made to feel better. Whereupon Hümmer, in the manner of the Rooster Who Makes the Sun Rise, declares that it is HE who made those tumors shrink—because the shrinkage occurred on his watch.
At least, I hope that’s the correct explanation, because the other possibilities are even worse. Untreated cancer is no joke, despite Herr Hümmer’s loathesome attempts at humor.
Please first read the most precise description of the healing process with the most precise and irrefutable close-knit diagnostics – then you will judge
https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/500122
https://homoeopathiewirkt.wordpress.com/2020/06/16/when-is-sole-adjuvant-homeopathic-tumor-therapy-permissible-and-useful/
“……She starts from July 18, 2018 with the intake of 1 granule Conium 30C daily from the company Homeoden / Belgium. Already on the following day she noticed a decrease in the feeling of tension in the area of the enlarged left linguinal lymph node and in the next few days a clear, steady decrease in the size of the lymph node.
After the patient’s subjective impression is confirmed in the clinical examination, a new sonographic assessment by the local radiology department will be arranged for her on July 25, 2018 to externally check the change in size of the inguinal lymph node and will be carried out on the same day, which will reduce the size to 28 × 12 mm previously confirmed to be over 4 cm in diameter.
In view of the clinically and sonographically clearly detectable size reduction of the pathological lymph node, after the above-mentioned consultation with the oncologist, the recommendation for lymph node extirpation is made in order to be able to plan the further oncological procedure.
On August 1st, 2018, the excision of the pathologically enlarged lymph node takes place in the local surgical clinic. The histological work-up results in the finding shown in Figure 2 of a complete remission of the aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosed in the punch biopsies….”
If tumour remission had immediately begun, I don’t understand why the lymph node was excised?
@David B
1) The oncologist recommended this approach
2) Isn’t it entirely plausible that you want to make sure that chemotherapy is not necessary after all?
3) “It can’t be that homeopathy influences a malignant process …..”
“Adjuvant homeopathic tumor therapy”
Adjuvant to what? I’m afraid I don’t speak German. I tried running it through Google Translate, but the following:
“Die am 11.7.2018 durchgeführte Lymphknoten-Stanzbiopsie des inzwischen auf sonographisch 4 cm Durchmesser angewachsenen Lymphknotens ergibt den in Abbildung 1 wiedergegebenen histopathologischen und histochemisch bestätigten Befund eines malignen Non-Hodgkin-Lymphoms der B-Zell-Reihe vom Typ eines diffus großzelligen Lymphoms, nicht-Keimzentrums-Typ nach Hans.”
came out as (emphasis mine):
“The lymph node punch biopsy carried out on July 11, 2018 of the lymph node, which has since grown to a sonographically 4 cm diameter , does not give the histopathological and histochemically confirmed findings of a malignant non-Hodgkin lymphoma of the B-cell series of the diffuse large-cell lymphoma type shown in Figure 1 – germination center type according to Hans.”
Frankly the whole thing reads as garbage but that’s often the case with machine translated documents, so I’ll have to defer to Prof Ernst and other German-speaking physicians/scientists to do it the old-fashioned way. Still, N=1, oncologists simultaneously advising chemo and surgery, patient “noticing” shrinkage, and Hümmer’s natural inclination to interpret absolutely everything as confirmation of his own personal greatness; I suspect I’ll end up less impressed rather than more.
@Dr. Heinrich Hümmer
There are at least three more possibilities:
– the patient also received other, actually effective treatment for their cancer(*), or
– there was no malignancy in the first place, just a random swelling, or
– you just make this up.
*: And please confirm that these patients DID receive real treatments, and not just homeopathy. Yes?
Chances are that the other, real treatments did the job, and that you fell victim to the delusional principle of homeopathy.
Or else you might be one of the many SCAM practitioners who misdiagnose innocent, self-limiting afflictions for serious diseases, claiming success after ‘treating’ those hapless, frightened customers
“a malignant lymph node that begins to go away a day after starting homeopathic treatment is with absolute certainty a placebo effect or a random coincidence ….”
The burden of proof is not on us to show that it is coincidence, but on you to show that it’s not. It is entirely possible for tumor growth to slow or even reverse during the normal course of the disease. A real scientist would consider all the factors and control for them, so that the only variable left to be measured is the treatment being tested.
Heck, weren’t you posting a link the other day touting homeopathy as a complementary therapy to conventional oncology (aka stealing all the credit while real medicine does all the work)? Of course you’re going to see tumors wane when the patient is also receiving standard treatments—confounders don’t get much bigger than that!
(Or are you telling us that you sell cancer victims your “treatments” to the exclusion of all else? ’Cos you’d better not be.)
“Since these and similar effects have been happening every day for 34 years, I seem to trigger monstrous placebo effects …”
And you are no scientist. You see what you want to see, conclude what you want to conclude, and make absolutely no effort to prove yourself wrong (which, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, is the only way to show you are right). Confirmation Bias declares absolute unconditional surrender if the face of you. You’re your own biggest rube; and if it was only your life on the line then nobody would care, but it’s not. You’re a priest, Hümmer, not a doctor. Act accordingly FFS, man, and stay in your goddamn lane.
Dr Hummer,
This is an extraordinary claim, and very important if true.
Since you seem to have treated more cancer patients over the course of your career than I have, with more success, and your claims imply that conventional treatment was not involved, I would be very interested if you could supply some more details.
How are these malignant lymph nodes diagnosed? That is, how do you know that they are lymph nodes and that they are malignant? How are they being measured, and do they have any other salient characteristics? How is their going away assessed? Since the initial response of a lymph node is not the same as a successful cancer outcome, can you tell us anything about the further progress of these patients of yours? Is the improvement transient or sustained? Is it associated with a change in any other measures of disease, and what might these be? Have you audited your results so that you can tell us what proportion of patients show an improvement and indeed what proportion might experience a complete response or even a cure? And very importantly, what proportion of them have had other treatment in addition?
@Dr JMK: “I would be very interested if you could supply some more details.”
Pretty sure the answer is: “Every day for 34 years—RESONANCE!!!1!1!!”
Please first read the most precise description of the healing process with the most precise and irrefutable close-knit diagnostics – then you will judge
https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/500122
https://homoeopathiewirkt.wordpress.com/2020/06/16/when-is-sole-adjuvant-homeopathic-tumor-therapy-permissible-and-useful/
“……She starts from July 18, 2018 with the intake of 1 granule Conium 30C daily from the company Homeoden / Belgium. Already on the following day she noticed a decrease in the feeling of tension in the area of the enlarged left linguinal lymph node and in the next few days a clear, steady decrease in the size of the lymph node.
After the patient’s subjective impression is confirmed in the clinical examination, a new sonographic assessment by the local radiology department will be arranged for her on July 25, 2018 to externally check the change in size of the inguinal lymph node and will be carried out on the same day, which will reduce the size to 28 × 12 mm previously confirmed to be over 4 cm in diameter.
In view of the clinically and sonographically clearly detectable size reduction of the pathological lymph node, after the above-mentioned consultation with the oncologist, the recommendation for lymph node extirpation is made in order to be able to plan the further oncological procedure.
On August 1st, 2018, the excision of the pathologically enlarged lymph node takes place in the local surgical clinic. The histological work-up results in the finding shown in Figure 2 of a complete remission of the aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosed in the punch biopsies….”
I know you are very proud of your only publication – and we now have probably all read it, some of us might even know it by heart.
there are several more plausible explanations here than “Homeopathy dunnit.”
1) the original punch biopsy was erroneous – the patient never had Hodgkins in the first place
2) the patient underwent spontaneous remission
3) the patient didn’t tell her homeopaths that she had real treatment elsewhere
4) the whole report is fraudulent
5) she was abducted by aliens who cured her and sent her back
It would be medical malpractice to treat any malignancy with homeopathy alone. Completely and utterly bonkers.
Just about any explanation is more believable that that homeopathy cured her of Hodgkins or of anything else except by coincidence!
or perhaps the patient passed a Reiki healer in the street and was accidentally cured by the healing energy?
“The histological work-up results in the finding shown in Figure 2 of a complete remission of the aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosed in the punch biopsies….”
I assume this was a histological examination of the newly excised lymph node performed in a real hospital’s histopathology department?
If so, by far the simplest and most obvious explanation is there was no cancer in the first place, the initial swelling was due to some other cause (of which there are plenty), and the earlier assessment of the biopsy was simply wrong. That happens too, you know.
(If not, well it’s just a joke from the start.)
So what exactly did you do prior to writing this paper to confirm the patient did indeed originally have Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and not merely some passing infection that made their glands swell up which was subsequently (and conveniently, in your case) misinterpreted? And what is German for “due dilligence” anyway, so we know what to look for in any future papers?
what is German for “due dilligence”?
“Sorgfaltspflicht”
“Sorgfaltspflicht”. That is such a wonderful word that I have had to say it aloud to enjoy it. ltspfl – what a great combination of consonants! Not to be forgotten is the English place name with ghtsbr in the middle; also six consonants.
@john travis: #5 is a stretch even for this forum, so let’s dismiss that; but I did think of another:
5) The histology lab mixed up the slides, and another poor woman was sent home with a prescription for antibiotics only to die of Hodgkins some time later.
Which would be a horrific case of real medical malpractice if that were the case. And if you’re wondering what sort of incompetent hospital would allow that to happen, then a hospital that allows someone like Herr Hümmer anywhere on its grounds would be a logical place to start.
Dr Hummer,
The paper is in German, but there is an abstract in English. It begins:
I know what a large-cell B-cell non-Hodgin’s lymphoma is, but I don’t understand the word bioptically – are you referring to the use of a binocular microscope?
The recognised way to diagnose such a lymphoma is by histological examination by an expert pathologist specialising in lymphomas (they are too easily confused with other pathological changes for a non-specialist to give a reliable diagnosis). The process requires enough tissue to assess the architecture of the node – ideally the whole node should be excised for examination, which clearly was not the case here, though a decent core biopsy may be sufficient in some cases. A fine needle aspiration (which many peoople confuse with a biopsy) is of little use diagnostically when it comes to lymphomas as this shows only individual cells, not the structure of the tissue. Special stains are also required (immunohistochemistry) to establish which surface markers are expressed by the cells in the node, and by what proportion of them; before these became available diagnosis of lymphomas involved a lot of guesswork.
I would expect any case history to include this essential information, and in the absence of it my first thought is to question the diagnosis.
I think we have had this conversation before, but I can’t remember which thread to refer to.
Anyway, if resolution of a lymph node following homeopathic treatment has been a daily occurrence for you for 34 years you must have many thousands of such cases, probably more than the average haematologist specialising in lymphoma sees in their career. They must represent the majority of lymphomas occurring in your catchment area, which itself must represent a population of several million. If your treatment is as successful as you claim, then this will be obvious from national cancer statistics as a local anomaly. However, I don’t know where your practice is based so I don’t know where to look for this.
David,
I agree, it is a wonderful word. It reminds me of when I went to Poland for my brother’s wedding and realised that the natives pronounce each and every letter in their clusters of consonants. I also notcied that everybody else on the aeroplane looked like baddies from a 1970’s spy movie.
I expect there are several places in England containing “hgtsbr”, though only Knightsbridge comes to mind. There is another English word that I used to use a lot when I was treating gynaecological tumours where the letter o appears three times consecutively, with all of them pronounced:
Salpingooophorectomy (I suppose you might spell it salpingo-oöphorectomy for clarity, though I don’t think the hyphen and diaresis are strictly necessary).
Well I am sorry, but Salpingooophorectomy has reminded me of Sissy and her ‘Hysterical Rectomy’: https://youtu.be/oVLtJxBqtSA
Quality.
@ Heinrich Hummer
“That´s indeed most of the work and art of practicing homeopathy!”
Exactly “art” and NOT “science.!”
That’s how you manage to fool yourselves into believing all this nonsense actually means anything!
With “intuition” and “experience” and “perception” and “art” and all these inexact touchy-feely vague perceptual notions that can be made to mean anything and nothing and that are the hallmark of pseudoscience.
“Provings” are the most excellent stamp of inexactitude and pure pseudoscience there is.
If one set out to parody a SCAM it would seem almost too absurd, too over the top!
Whenever I try to explain Homeopathy to the uninitiated I always have to show them a legitimate website in order to prove that I am not making this stuff up – it just seems too absurd to be the real beliefs and practices of people who genuinely believe that they can treat disease.
Instead of “art” try science and your delusions will all evaporate.
I don´t know what untrustworthy craft you are doing, but as AS EVERY SERIOUS WORKING MEDIC, I´m trying to do what is called HEALING ART according to the HIPPOCRATIC OATH……(and that INCLUDES SCIENCE)
@ Heinrich Hümmer
homeopathy is not science. it contradicts multiple tenets of physics, chemistry, medicine, logic and rationality.
anyone who prescribes or gives homeopathic remedies to people who are ill in the place of remedies that are scientifically and medically known to work does them a grave disservice.
homeopathic remedies are acknowledged by all responsible medical authorities as being useless for any medical purpose. one may as well give nothing.
in my own view that is medical malpractice and is not compatible with any Hippocratic oath.
it is immoral and inhuman.
I think it is somewhat hypocritical on your part to suggest that I may be practising anything that is untrustworthy. what is your basis for this suggestion? I am not the one propounding baseless homeopathic theory.
I have never practised or suggested anything that is in the least unscientific or not recognized by mainstream practice.
However it would seem that you are the one who is attempting to defend a practice that is widely labelled as “total quackery” and a “complete sham.”
Parliament in the UK and Australia both strongly agreed that it should not be used by the Health Service in either country.
When presented with a vial of their own concoction even homeopaths are completely unable to determine what is in it except by the label – there is NO means even by the most intense available scientific examination spectrographically or ultra-microscopically or by any other means to distinguish any nostrum one from the other if the diluent is the same.
If it looks like a duck…….QED.
I just hope that you are treating your patients with more than homeopathic diluent and sugar cubes.
It is honestly frightening to see a (real) practicing physician actively promoting play-medicine. I share your concerns for patients.
“I just hope that you are treating your patients with more than homeopathic diluent and sugar cubes.”
I sincerely hope he is not treating them at all and that it is conventional oncologists who are doing all the real work, even if Hümmer must strut and crow in service to his own grandiose delusion.
Hahahaha, every pseudoskeptic is unable to show how homeopathy contradicts the alleged “logic and rationality” or “physics, chemistry and medicine”.
Have
Every eleven year old with a basic grounding in science is able to show how homeopathy contradicts multiple tenets of physics, chemistry, biology, logic and rationality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dose%E2%80%93response_relationship
Hahaha, again and again every “skeptic”is unable to specify their allegede “contradicts multicple tenets. Poor “has”, he only have a Wikipedia page without mention the another types of D-R curves. I remember that Ernst is not a expert in pharmacology, but Edward Calabresse is a pharmacologist and expert in toxicology.
@John Travis:
“However it would seem that you are the one who is attempting to defend a practice that is widely labelled as “total quackery” and a “complete sham.””
1) Seems as if the over 70% of the patients think different and make different experiences….
2) Who says so? The ones from whom the patients come to us because they have not received any help?
“Parliament in the UK and Australia both strongly agreed that it should not be used by the Health Service in either country.”
1) “Has Australia’s Medical Research Council been caught producing highly problematic research to discredit homeopathy?”
https://www.theepochtim
“When presented with a vial of their own concoction even homeopaths are completely unable to determine what is in it except by the label – there is NO means even by the most intense available scientific examination spectrographically or ultra-microscopically or by any other means to distinguish any nostrum one from the other if the diluent is the same.es.com/when-bad-science-discredits-good-medicine_3242959.html”
1) Still living in middle age?
2) Only what I can hold in hand or see microscopcally can work?
“I just hope that you are treating your patients with more than homeopathic diluent and sugar cubes.”
WITH EVERYTHING, THAT WORKS!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray
@ Heinrich Hummer
“WITH EVERYTHING, THAT WORKS!”
alas said with typical SCAM ignorance, fatuousness, hubris and a total lack of self-awareness.
How do you “know” that it works? Only by your own perceptions, testimonials and that many of your marks keep coming back. Not by any scientific rubric or independent mechanism. Only by confirmation bias and other logical fallacies that enable you to keep you to keep deluding yourself.
This is why Homeopathy is so often referred to as a “religion.” Its adherents believe in it as in a deeply held faith. It is unshakeable, immune to rational thought or argument and challenging its tenets is akin to questioning the existence of “God.”
I fear that you are totally beyond any form of rational discussion or argument.
(btw your link doesn’t work any better than your homeopathy – and homeopathy doesn’t need any help from anybody to get discredited: it does a very good job on its own of doing that.)
“1) Seems as if the over 70% of the patients think different and make different experiences….
2) Who says so? The ones from whom the patients come to us because they have not received any help?”
Where do you get “70%” from – what is this supposed to mean? Anyway any appeal to popularity is meaningless – truth is not a popularity contest – another logical fallacy you ought to be aware of!
And what evidence is there that homeopathy has wonderful cures for any ailments that conventional medicine doesn’t?
But no doubt you are happy to promise all sorts of wonderful things where conventional medicine is bound by reality and proper ethics.
Perhaps if you practised somewhere other than a fantasy world where moon beams can be trapped in a bottle then patients might get a more reality based service.
The “theepochtim” link is invalid.
Dr Hummer, I know that English is not your native language. I have to mention that in your sentence “WITH EVERYTHING, THAT WORKS”, the presence of the comma makes this sentence have more than one possible meaning.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/when-bad-science-discredits-good-medicine_3242959.html
(with my computer it is valid)
or
https://releasethefirstreport.com/the-full-story
WITHOUT ANY PRECAUTIONS I APPLY OR RECOMMEND THE THERAPY (BE THAT ANTIBOITICS, CHEMOTHERAPY, RADIATIO, BIOLOCICALS OR HOMEOPATHY) WHICH IS REQUIRED IN THE SPECIFIC SITUATION
AND WHICH PROMISES SUCCESS
It’s not about my conviction but about the patient’s salvation!
That’s interesting. You don’t follow Hahnemann, then.
How do you decide which treatment to give?
@ Heinrich Hummer
you really have not the faintest idea about science or the scientific method do you?
in rebuttal you provide links to two articles in publications of unknown provenance by a writer who by her by-line is clearly a homeopathic acolyte and ardent fanatic and not even a science journalist much less a scientist.
From her self-styled description it is abundantly clear that she would be completely incapable of providing any kind of unbiased account of homeopathy – yet you blithely cite these two scrappy articles as though they were “proof” of anything!
Here she is described:
“Ananda More: After her own seemingly miraculous cure from a lifetime with depression using homeopathy, she decided to dedicate her life to this medical system. She began her professional homeopathic practice in 2005 specializing in autism, vaccine injury, and immunity. As owner of Riverdale Homeopathy, a homeopathic dispensary, bookstore, and clinic, she is intrinsically connected with the homeopathic community.”
So she believes in miraculous cures from homeopathy, is a homeopathy zealot, and an anti-vaccine nut who campaigns for homeopathic nosodes to be used in place of vaccines and has dubious ideas about autism. She supports CEASE, dubious cancer treatments and many other quack therapies. From her website:
” extensive training which the Regulatory College of Homeopaths of Ontario has deemed unacceptable to list in any advertising, so you will have to reach out and ask for her CV.” !!!!
If this is how you receive what you consider to be reliable medical and scientific information then I despair. You do realize that this is not a peer-reviewed well-respected medical or scientific journal don’t you? And that the author is not a trained scientist presenting established facts or findings but a zealot with an obvious agenda that just happens to align with your own? More confirmation bias – you seem to be living in a bubble where all you see is information that confirms your pre-existing beliefs.
Furthermore this woman is quite patently a science-denying radical fervent believer in homeopathy who has some very dangerous ideas that could quite possibly be harmful if someone were to follow them in place of conventional medical advice. Her anti-vaccine campaigning and zealotry in quite likely to cause harm and or death especially in view of Covid-19. Yet you refer to her fetid rantings as though they were some oracle or holy words of scripture – or even better some clear results from a well-conducted clinical trial.
BTW I am a little concerned about your phrase “WITHOUT ANY PRECAUTIONS” – I should rather have hoped that you would use every precaution whatever method you are using as anything else seems rather reckless.
It is comforting to hear that you are using conventional methods for some of your patients at least – but your last sentence cannot possibly be true.
“It’s not about my conviction but about the patient’s salvation!”
You must have some conviction that in certain cases homeopathy is the treatment of choice if you are in fact using it in place of conventional therapies. Upon what else could that decision be made if not your own convictions?
Do you have some device that decides for you – a sort of Star Trek Tricorder that tells you to use it?
Or is it Divine Intervention – or maybe the Ghost of Samuel Hahnemann?
Or is it decided upon the throw of a die and left to chance?
Pray tell us how your patients’ fate is decided if not by your religious faith in the healing powers of Homeopathy?
“It’s not about my conviction but about the patient’s salvation!”
I appreciate that your English, as good as it is, is not your first language so feel it fair to point out “salvation” is a term normally employed by Christian evangelicals, not by medical doctors. Just in case you’d like to fine-tune your word choice.
/vocabulary-pedant
but isnn’t HH a religious believer in homeopathy?
he might have chosen his words correctly.
The Epoch Times? A religious-backed† newspaper‡ with an opaque money trail that has found recent success praising Donald Trump and the far right? Please. You’re mere inches away from Scopie’s Law. At least try to find somewhat credible sources if you don’t wish to appear an even bigger fool than we already take you for.
—
† Falun Gong
‡ Caution: May not contain actual news.
Poor has, when a religious backed newspaper publishes a negative report about homeopathy “has” celebrate without any exception. When a religious backed newspaper publishes a positive report about homeopathy, then “has” invoke any conspiracy theory relating conservatives and Trump. Pathetic troll.
@has on:
“If so, by far the simplest and most obvious explanation is there was no cancer in the first place, the initial swelling was due to some other cause (of which there are plenty), and the earlier assessment of the biopsy was simply wrong. That happens too, you know.”
Si tacuisses…..:
read the first Assessment (and what the pathologist wrote about the first assessment in the second assessment…..)
but to your excuse: he was also a little confused like you
“I appreciate that your English, as good as it is, is not your first language so feel it fair to point out “salvation” is a term normally employed by Christian evangelicals, not by medical doctors. Just in case you’d like to fine-tune your word choice.”
Si tacuisses…..:
Are you a medical doctor? Otherwise you would know that:
The Art and Science of Healing: From Antiquity to the Renaissance
https://exhibitions.kelsey.lsa.umich.edu/art-science-healing/index.php
@David B and @ Edzard
“That’s interesting. You don’t follow Hahnemann, then.”
Yes, because I stick to Hahnemann’s “Aude sapere” or Kant’s “Sapere aude”: I dare to look EXACTLY what helps, then form my own opinion and take what´s good!
“In 1783 Immanuel Kant wrote his personal translation of “Sapere aude!” formulated as the essence of the enlightenment thought:
“Enlightenment is the outcome of a person from his or her self-inflicted immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s mind without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-inflicted if the cause of it is not a lack of understanding, but of lack of resolution and courage to use it without guidance from someone else. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment. “[Kant, Immanuel, 1783, work edition vol. XI, p. 53, Suhrkamp 1977]”
what’s the German word fro SMUG?
Dunno, but knowing the English meaning of “Hummer” I’m content to let it lie.
“The Art and Science of Healing: From Antiquity to the Renaissance”
The Renaissance ended over 300 years ago, and the so-called “physicians” of that time killed far more than they ever cured thanks to their blind veneration of Galenic nonsense. You’re not making your case, you’re making yourself a fool. Well, more of a fool.
“he was also a little confused like you”
I am confused because 1. I’m reading a machine translation of dubious quality, and 2. because I flunked out of premed so never got as far as histopathology class. In fact, about the only things I did learn from that abortive experience are 1. my own limitations and 2. “it’s a bit more complicated than that”, so at least I still know two more things than you do.
has,
Actually the diagnosis of lymphomas is so difficult and specialised that an undergraduate histology class isn’t much help here. It is all a bit easier these days thanks to antibody-based stains which can identify markers on the cell surface, and lymphomas have been completely reclassified as a result, including the identification of types that nobody even knew existed. When I was learning oncology there seemed to be as many classification systems as there were centres treating these tumours and we had to know several of them.
I have been away from clinical practice now for four years, though by the time I became a consultant lymphomas had become the province of haematologists, not oncologists so it is a long time since I last treated one. I expect the diagnosis now also involves some sort of DNA analysis to look at the pattern of mutations. Things change so quickly in medicine these days and I am getting quite out-of-date.
“Actually the diagnosis of lymphomas is so difficult and specialised that an undergraduate histology class isn’t much help here.”
This does not surprise me one whit. Identifying even normal cells under microscope was challenging enough. Biology is incredibly messy and it’s easy to make (understandable) mistakes, hence the importance of checks upon checks to verify earlier interpretations before arriving at a final conclusion.
And yet I’m still waiting on Herr Hümmer to detail exactly what steps were taken to confirm the excised lymph node was indeed cancerous to begin with. His silence on this critical point is quite deafening, telling us everything we need know about his Sorgfaltspflicht.
I thought, you can read and let be tranlated, when I gave you the link…..
So specially for the one, who also lacks a bit discussion culture*:
“The lymph node punch biopsy carried out on July 11, 2018 of the lymph node, which has since grown to a sonographically 4 cm diameter, showes the histopathological and histochemically confirmed findings of a malignant non-Hodgkin lymphoma of the B-cell series of the diffuse large-cell lymphoma type shown in Figure 1 – germination center type according to Hans.”
(*seems as if Dr Julian Money-Kyrle has a bit more of it…)
@Dr Julian Money-Kyrle
Now if only homeopaths would at least admit to this too, even if it is after 234 years …
IMO, the initial success of homeopathy hinged on two things:
– the fact that in those days, not actively treating patients – i.e. administering homeopathy – had on average rather better outcomes than the treatments of the day, and
– Hahnemann’s relentless promotion of his newly devised system of medicine.
In fact, even Hahnemann’s rejection of ‘allopathic medicine’ was largely justified back then, for the reasons given above. IIRC, he started his experiments leading up to homeopathy because he was appalled by the state of regular medicine by the end of the 18th century.
But as we all know, regular medicine has improved dramatically since then – yet a large proportion of homeopaths still follow Hahnemann’s long-obsolete precepts to the letter, up to and including looking down upon regular medicine as ‘inferior’ and ‘harmful’. One only has to look at some of the regular visitors here …
“Now if only homeopaths would at least admit to this too”
And demolish their entire world view, and their place at its apex? You must be kidding.
Like the swaggering lunatics invading Capitol Hill last night, there comes a point where it becomes infinitely easier to continue forward than to reverse course, for backing off forces you to retread the evils you have already wrought whereas charging ever onward confirms they were both absolutely necessary and not that bad at all. This is why there is no such word in AltMed as “Sorry”.
“But as we all know, regular medicine has improved dramatically since then – yet a large proportion of homeopaths still follow Hahnemann’s long-obsolete precepts to the letter, up to and including looking down upon regular medicine as ‘inferior’ and ‘harmful’. One only has to look at some of the regular visitors here …”
…..Yes and one of the regular visitors here knows exacly about the great value of regular medicine, as he himself has long enough also worked in ICU and as a blue-light doctor and his wife and son would no longer live without it……
haven’t you yet understood that, even if everything about this case is as you said, it proves nothing?
why then get so heated up about it?
Dr. Hümmer is acting like President Eject Trump to defend a lost cause. He blathers on about evidence about his “case” that does not exist or rather is built on such weak foundations that it can be dismissed in two short sentences.
What is going on in a person who gives himself up to ridicule and mockery like that?
you must understand: homeopathy is not medicine, it’s a religion.
@Edzard Ernst
Yes, it seems the only logical conclusion. I expressed the same thought some time ago in another blog.
@Herr Hümmer: “…..Yes and one of the regular visitors here knows exacly about the great value of regular medicine, as he himself has long enough also worked in ICU and as a blue-light doctor and his wife and son would no longer live without it……”
Oh, so it’s real medicine for your own and quackery for your
patientsvictims? How on Earth you think that Chairman Mao defense works in your favor is beyond even me.i erased your last sentence
I find it refreshing, broadening my own horizons and sharpening my own chain of arguments, when I am allowed to discuss with honorable gentlemen here who, in a fair discourse, bring sound arguments instead of cheap ad hominem failures. All others just unmask their polemic thinking, which just needs anonymity in order not to reveal the demagogic background of a certain person.
@Dr. Heinrich Hümmer
I am very pleased to hear that you appear to have derived so much intellectual satisfaction from the exchange with quite a few other visitors of this particular blog thread, including yours truly. And I am quite certain that our generous host Prof. Dr. Ernst agrees.
However, there is just one more thing. You still have not contributed any credible evidence for the following:
– the existence and viability of the similia-principle,
– the nature of this ‘resonance’ you posited as an ‘explanation’ for the above principle,
– your vehement claims that you have seen literally thousands of lymphomas respond quite dramatically to homeopathic treatment.
No no, it is nothing serious, just a minor matter with regard to your tenets of belief, but all the same rather crucial for those who might be inclined take your word for anything you say, e.g. your current and future customers.
So if you could just clear up these little things, then we can all go about our business again and I’ll leave you in peace.
Appallingly telling that while we’re here to discuss the health and wellbeing of other people, Herr Hümmer is here to win Debate Club.
Nice try. However…
Your horizon does not go beyond the edge of yur own table. Your argmuments are on very shaky ground or rather completely worthless.
Oh, you took a look in the mirror? Frightening what you have to see then, isn’t it?
@ Heinrich Hummer
“broadening my own horizons and sharpening my own chain of arguments,”
as for the former, it sounds as if that would not be at all difficult……….
and as for the latter – if there was a rational, logical and compelling scientific argument anywhere from you I seem to have missed it. Could someone perhaps direct me to it?
All I remarked were baseless wild claims without any form of support beyond the usual anecdotes, magazine articles, case reports and other similar dross.
There would appear to be an unwarranted faith in “seeing is believing” and the confirmation bias school of thought rather than in what is generally known as the “scientific method.” One of the reasons it was developed was precisely to avoid the kind of errors humans are so prone to introduce into their thinking and observations……….those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Perhaps you can begin broadening your horizons by learning what is and isn’t ad hominem.
1. Homeopathy is quackery. = Not ad hominem.
2. Hümmer is a quack. = Not ad hominem.
3. Homeopathy is quackery because Hümmer is a quack. = Ad hominem.
4. Homeopathy is quackery and Hümmer is a quack. = Not ad hominem.
Fill your boots, champ. Once you’ve mastered simple logic, we can talk about your bloviating evasion, advancing your own personal religion above the health and needs of the patient, and your shocking willful ignorance of what does and does not constitute good scientific evidence.
And then, when you’ve corrected all of that, perhaps we can discuss the evidence for and against homeopathy in a manner that does not involve you spewing your tediously repetitive Humpty Dumpty alt-reality effluent over everybody here. Because your pompous pretentious finely-mannered courtier’s language does not hide the fact that you are insulting our logic, our honesty, our integrity, and our intelligence at every single opportunity you are provided; and were Prof Ernst to enforce his rule against commenters not insulting one another on those grounds too your ass would now be orbiting Mars.
So if we cannot tear apart the scientific evidence for and/or against homeopathy, then tearing into the psychopathology of its quasi-religious cultish shills is the next most productive analysis, as that at least explains how and why homeopathy still exists despite its absolute failure to explain itself in scientific terms.
Provide the evidence. Or be the evidence. Your choice.
1) The nature of the specifically homeopathic resonance phenomenon is CURRENTLY NOT explainable (see also example from Madame Curie)
“Resonance phenomena occur with all types of vibrations or waves: there is mechanical resonance, acoustic resonance, electromagnetic resonance, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), electron spin resonance (ESR) and resonance of quantum wave functions. Resonant systems can be used to generate vibrations of a specific frequency (e.g., musical instruments), or pick out specific frequencies from a complex vibration containing many frequencies (e.g., filters)”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance
2) As homeopaths, however, we observe the effects on a daily basis, including the ABSENT IMMEDIATE ONSET of action after the administration of a product – but which is required as a sign of the effect – although the remedy was selected to the best of our knowledge.
3) The problem of the choice of remedy in homeopathy remains the subjective factor of the homeopath and possibly the missing, pioneering symptoms.
4) I NEVER CLAIMED “have seen literally thousands of lymphomas respond quite dramatically to homeopathic treatment.”
5) BUT, I have seen one lymphoma, which IMMEDIATELY (ONE DAY) after the start of homeopathic therapy began to regress and go into remission, which could be verified with the greatest possible diagnostic accuracy.
6) AND: such IMMEDIATE processes have been described in thousands (!) of case-presentations in the homeopathic literature and even often in malignant tumors (but [unfortunately] never before with the same diagnostic accuraracy)
@ Heinrich Hummer
1) – 6)
so like some of us have been saying all along – it’s all pure fantasy!
QED
1) Basics of statistics: correlation does not equal causality.
2) One swallow does not make a summer.