The 30 most recent comments from all posts are listed below. Click on the post title to go to the comment on the post’s page.
- Comment by Talker on Neurodoron, the anthroposophic remedy for neurasthenia, is unsurprisingly useless Saturday 27 April 2024: 04:04 Magic or snake oil? I think it’s one and the same, as long as people are buying them by gallons. Salesmen on the other hand are driving away with chestfull of cash.
- Comment by on Neurodoron, the anthroposophic remedy for neurasthenia, is unsurprisingly useless Friday 26 April 2024: 22:04 @JK The Kali phos is potentised That’s just homeospeak for ‘diluted’. Its a kind of magic. I guess you’re right. Which implies that homeopaths etc. have the intelligence level of a 6-year-old.
- Comment by on Neurodoron, the anthroposophic remedy for neurasthenia, is unsurprisingly useless Friday 26 April 2024: 22:04 @Pete Attkins, JK It’s pretty simple: 83.3 mg of a 1:10¹⁰ dilution of gold = 8.33 picograms of gold. So a thousand kilograms would be about 12 million times as much = 100 micrograms, so it’s pretty close to being 3 orders of magnitude off. Of course all this is a complete waste of human intelligence, as is anything to do with homeopathy or anthroposophic nonsense.
- Comment by on Neurodoron, the anthroposophic remedy for neurasthenia, is unsurprisingly useless Friday 26 April 2024: 21:04 The Kali phos is potentised Richard . Its a kind of magic. If you think that ‘there is no such thing as magic’ then you are just like Harry Potter’s Uncle Vernon. In this scenario Homeopathy is Harry Potter. Edzard is Dudley.
- Comment by on Neurodoron, the anthroposophic remedy for neurasthenia, is unsurprisingly useless Friday 26 April 2024: 21:04 ‘JK’ asserted: “This means that 1000Kg would only contain 0.1g of Gold.” Not bad: on this occasion, you are in error by only 3½ orders of magnitude.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Friday 26 April 2024: 16:04 Wow! Person has a nice, relaxing holiday and feels better for it! Whoever would have thought it? Better yet, they didn’t have to pay for it, then was paid for writing about it. I’d certainly feel better for that.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Friday 26 April 2024: 14:04 I think that “balance” should not be confused with false equivalency–something we see all too much of in science reporting.
- Comment by on Neurodoron, the anthroposophic remedy for neurasthenia, is unsurprisingly useless Friday 26 April 2024: 12:04 If I’m not mistaken, Kalium phosphoricicum trit. D6 is probably just tripotassium phosphate (K3PO4) in a dilution of one part per million, and 83.3 milligrams of this means a total dose of 83.3 nanograms. Upon dissolving or ingestion, K3PO4 immediately dissociates into potassium ions and phosphate ions – both of which we already ingest in pretty large quantities (several grams) on a daily basis. So an extra 83.3 nanograms can’t possibly do anything at all. This is in other words just as stupid as those homeopaths who claim that the endlessly diluted ghost of ordinary table salt (‘Natrium muriaticum’) has special medicinal properties. The only difference being that with this potassium stuff you still get a few molecules – not that it makes any difference, of course.
- Comment by on Neurodoron, the anthroposophic remedy for neurasthenia, is unsurprisingly useless Friday 26 April 2024: 11:04 Another waste of money trial when this product will sell anyway. Why do these companies persist in clinical trials when us punters will just buy the stuff. Anyway someone told me that there was this Neurodoron product around that contains Gold. Well being into CAM and obviously only concerned about money I dropped everything to buy as much as possible. Unfortunately my sources were non evidence based rumours rather than the evidence based anecdotal gossip that I usually rely on. On evaluation i realised that the Gold (Aurum) was added at D10 level. This means that 1000Kg would only contain 0.1g of Gold. My get rich quick plans have again been thwated and all i have now are 1000s of pots of Neurodoron. I might market it as a ‘quantum’ product as that might help shift it.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Friday 26 April 2024: 10:04 Mr Ullman, for the 79th time I ask you to name a laboratory that can distinguish homeopathic water from other water, which you say in this Blog ‘only fools or liars’ doubt can be done. And then you told an outrageous lie, saying you had answered “many times” despite not having done so once. It is all very well to swan in here by Professor Ernst’s gracious permission and dispense ill-considered epithets. But readers of this Blog will be able to form their own opinions as to who might or might not be a fool, a liar, a mountebank, a poltroon, a varlet, a charlatan, a ne’er-do-well, a snake-oil salesman, a chump. You called me a nobody in here a while ago. I’d rather be that than be you.
- Comment by on Neurodoron, the anthroposophic remedy for neurasthenia, is unsurprisingly useless Friday 26 April 2024: 10:04 … and that’s probably why it still exists!
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Friday 26 April 2024: 09:04 @Dana Ullman I must say that your comment is quite impressive – if only for its profound ignorance. Sure, real medicine isn’t perfect. When scientists try to replicate research or investigate pharmaceutical products, they quite often find that things don’t pan out, that the research doesn’t show what the original researchers claimed, and that the medicine doesn’t work as well after all, or even has some pretty bad drawbacks. However … a huge amount of research IS valid, and a lot of pharmaceuticals DO work as claimed, and oncology HAS made tremendous progress in the past half-century. Less children die than ever before, people grow older than ever before, and in better health than ever – barring of course the toll taken by the COVID pandemic, and even in spite of lifestyle problems such as the obesity epidemic. None of this applies to SCAMs like homeopathy or ayurveda. NOT A SINGLE HOMEOPATHIC PREPARATION ACTUALLY WORKS, and there is NO EVIDENCE AT ALL that ayurvedic treatments are any good. And perhaps even worse: completely contrary to real medicine, the SCAM that you are so fond of does not learn from its mistakes – otherwise it would have ceased existing long ago. Just take another look at your own comment: those failings that you mention are not a sign that real medicine is useless and should be distrusted(*). Quite the contrary, it’s a clear sign that people are actively working on improving it, signalling errors and weeding out the things that are no good. Otherwise we wouldn’t be hearing from these people, now would we? Also notice that it is real doctors and real scientists who spot the various problems, never homeopaths or other SCAMmers. These suspected failings are then examined, and, if found to be true, the medicine or treatment is abandoned. Sure, this may take a while – not only are there quite strong incentives to keep selling stuff that has cost a lot of money to develop, but there’s also something called ‘due diligence’: you can’t go and discard treatments at the drop of a hat (i.e. after just one negative study). You want to be certain that something is indeed no good before you pull it from the market, or tell doctors to abandon it. This of course also depends on the nature of the failing; if a new drug unexpectedly causes clear, serious health problems, it can be pulled from the market within days if necessary. But when the situation is less clear-cut, it may take a while for changes to happen. But they DO happen – in real medicine, that is, not in SCAM. And yes, you are right: we don’t apply the same standards of research for SCAM that we do for real medicine – we still take things like homeopathy far too seriously. If homeopathic ‘remedies’ would be held to the same standards as real medicines, they would have been pulled from the market decades ago already, simply because they’re no good at all – there is, after all, not a single homeopathic preparation that shows any consistent, repeatable effect. *: And it sure as hell isn’t a sign that we should trust quackery for our health.
- Comment by on Neurodoron, the anthroposophic remedy for neurasthenia, is unsurprisingly useless Friday 26 April 2024: 09:04 I’m surprised to see that awful journal still exists. Back in the day it was the the one you went to if you were absolutely desperate to get the paper published and everybody else had rejected it.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Friday 26 April 2024: 07:04 Seeing what a fan of the BBC you are, Dana, I’m sure you’ll be delighted by the findings they made when 22 years ago they conducted an investigation into homeopathy. https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopathy.shtml And 22 years on, absolutely nothing has emerged to alter those conclusions.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Friday 26 April 2024: 06:04 “Are you actually saying that reporters should never write about their own experiences?” I did not say that; it seems you need to lear how to read without the foam from your mouth obstructing your view.
- Comment by on Homeopathic manufacturer to close North American subsidiaries Thursday 25 April 2024: 23:04 LOLOL I’m late to this party but this response and the ones by David to the ugly troll are soo good! Oh snap!! Thanks to veterinarians like you, my pet rabbit was able to get this in shots administered subcutaneously during a majorly long gastrointestinal illness caused by an antibiotic resistant bacteria that caused enough pain and discomfort to stop him from eating and slow the digestive system.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Thursday 25 April 2024: 22:04 Are you actually saying that reporters should never write about their own experiences? Is you insist that reporters ONLY reference placebo controlled clinical trials, then ALL stories about surgery should be deemed to be totally inappropriate. Further, according to the work of Stanford professor John Ioannidis: A group of researchers sought to replicate 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research, and only 6 could be proven of value. If almost 90% of the “best” cancer research is not replicable, please know that MOST research is not “the best,” and if 90% of the best research shows that what we thought worked doesn’t work, modern-day oncology is built on jello, not firm ground…and the costs of modern oncology care is obsene. Next, on average, every man, woman and child in the US is prescribe 13 prescription drugs. And if you didn’t get your 13 (!), someone else got them for you! Do you know what research is conducted to prove the safety and/or efficacy of multiple drugs given concurrent exists? No…no one does, but this research isn’t done. I could go on… https://nihrecord.nih.gov/2019/05/03/scientists-must-replicate-findings-ioannidis-says Oh…it is so interesting that you and your cult do not provide the same standards of research for Big Pharma medicine as you do for CAM. How convenient.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Thursday 25 April 2024: 20:04 @Dana: Are you defending Ayurveda, which is an allopathic system?
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Thursday 25 April 2024: 18:04 outrage? which expression, word or phrase signals ‘outrage’ to you? You probably mean ‘criticism’? And did you not know, that critcism of something wrong is a good thing?
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Thursday 25 April 2024: 18:04 As I told before, a close friend of the family also died from a heart condition that was initially quite curable (a leaking valve). But because he believed the nonsense from a homeopath and did not go to a real doctor (‘they will only cut, burn and poison you’), this simple problem developed into congestive heart failure, which has no cure. And by the time he realized his huge mistake in trusting this homeopath, it was too late.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Thursday 25 April 2024: 17:04 You should complain to the BBC about lack of journalistic balance.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Thursday 25 April 2024: 15:04 There are no diseases in India; homeopathy prevents them all… Joking apart, I recall seeing a documentary years ago which featured a young woman in India with a heart defect that was affecting her health in various ways. It was treatable by surgery, but she opted for Ayurvedic “treatment”. Massages with scented herbal balms must have felt nice, I am sure. But she didn’t continue the ‘treatment’ – I forget exactly why. And tragically, she died a little while later. The Ayurvedic centre said, If only she had completed the course of ‘treatment’….. Well, no. If only she’d had the defect repaired by surgery. More than 30 years ago the younger son of friends of mine died in hospital aged 18. He had been born with a very complicated heart defect resulting in, among other things, Eisenmenger Syndrome. It had been deemed too complex and risky to attempt any repair in his childhood or youth. He was always very cyanosed, and sadly the condition overtook him while in hospital. Perhaps today, techniques and materials might have made a surgical repair possible; I don’t know. But I’m certain that no amount of Ayurvedic herbs, oils, massages, poultices etc, could have repaired the cardiac defects.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Thursday 25 April 2024: 13:04 Your outrage at the BBC is so predictable…I suggest that people at this website instead do a Zoloft enema. It is more attune to your condition.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Thursday 25 April 2024: 12:04 A few days in a health spa, gentile pace of life, no outside stressors, simple diet, no alcohol. Heck, I’d probably come out feeling great too. But I can probably do this here in Canada thouch I have long wanted to visit Kerala. I think the BBC is not what it used to be.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Thursday 25 April 2024: 11:04 What a disgusting shit. The article is very long and a massive PR for tourism in India. There are urls in that article, directly targeting tourists. The BBC should down that mess immediately.
- Comment by on Dangerous BS from the BBC Thursday 25 April 2024: 09:04 If we take this report at face value, India’s population should be one of the healthiest and longest-lived on the planet, with no chronic diseases to speak of. In reality, India’s health index ranks somewhere in the bottom half, and the only reason it’s not way lower still is that India has a relatively wealthy upper caste of people who have access to modern, science-based medicine. Before the introduction of said modern medicine, the average life expectation was an absolutely appalling 25 years, in spite of its much-lauded traditional system of lifestyle and medicine.
- Comment by on Yesterday, I received a ‘Magic’ letter Wednesday 24 April 2024: 18:04 And they walk amongst us…
- Comment by on Yesterday, I received a ‘Magic’ letter Wednesday 24 April 2024: 16:04 Hanlon’s razor comes to mind: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- Comment by on Yesterday, I received a ‘Magic’ letter Wednesday 24 April 2024: 12:04 I always find it remarkable how people make a fool of oneself. M. Magic is a very special example. 😀
