Mahatma Gandhi was once asked by a reporter what he thought about western civilization, and in light of the uncivilized treatment by the British government of his nonviolent actions, he immediately replied, "Western civilization? Yes, it is a good idea." Likewise, if he were asked what he thought about "scientific medicine," he would probably have replied in a similar manner.
The idea of scientific medicine is a great one, but is modern medicine truly, or even adequately, "scientific"?
Modern medicine uses the double-blind and placebo-controlled trial as the gold standard by which the effectiveness of a treatment is determined. On the surface, this scientific method is very reasonable. However, serious problems in these studies are widely acknowledged by academics but remain unknown to the general public. Fundamental questions about the meaning of the word "efficacy" are rarely raised.
For instance, just because a drug treatment seems to eliminate a specific symptom does not necessarily mean that it is "effective." In fact, getting rid of a specific symptom can be the bad news. Aspirin may lower your fever, but physiologists recognize that fever is an important defense of the body in its efforts to fight infection. Sleep-inducing drugs may lead you to fall asleep, but they do not lead to refreshed sleep, and these drugs ultimately tend to aggravate the cycle of insomnia and fatigue, while conveniently (for the drug companies) tend to create addiction. Long-term safety and efficacy of many modern drugs for common ailments remains unknown, despite the high hopes and sincere expectations from the medical community and the rest of us for greater certainty.
The bottom line to scientific research is that a scientist can set up a study that shows the guise of efficacy. In other words, a drug may be effective for a very limited period of time and then cause various serious symptoms. For example, a very popular anti-anxiety drug called Xanax was shown to reduce panic attacks during a two-month experiment, but when individuals reduce or stop the medication, panic attacks can increase 300-400 percent (Consumer Reports, 1993). Would many patients take this drug if they knew this fact, and based on what standard can anyone honestly say that this drug is "effective"?
To get FDA approval to market a drug, most of the studies for psychiatric conditions last only six weeks (Angell, 2004, 112). In view of the fact that most people take anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medicines for years, can these short studies be scientifically valid? What is so little known and so sobering is that research to date has found that placebos are 80 percent as effective and have fewer side effects and a lot cheaper (Angell, 2004, 113).
Marcia Angell, MD, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and author of the powerful book The Truth about Drug Companies, said it plainly and directly: "Trials can be rigged in a dozen ways, and it happens all the time" (Angell, 2004, 95).
She further expresses real concern about research reliability:
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. As reprehensible as many industry practices are, I believe the behavior of much of the medical profession is even more culpable.
Angell gives many examples of why reading research studies is not reliable:
A review of 74 clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that 37 of 38 positive studies were published. But of the thirty-six negative studies, thirty-three were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome (Turner, 2008).
Conventional drugs used today are so new that there is very little long-term research on them. There are good reasons why a vast majority of modern drugs used just a couple of decades ago are no longer prescribed: they don't work as well as previously assumed, and/or they cause more harm than good.
Sadly and strangely, many physicians do not see that there is something fundamentally wrong with the present medical model. Once a drug is found to be ineffective or dangerous, doctors and drug companies simply find another drug that, at least initially, seems to have good short-term results, that is, until longer term studies establish that it doesn't work as well as assumed and/or is more dangerous. Although some people consider these failures as evidence of the wisdom of the scientific process, these problems are evidence of the limitations of a model of medicine that over-emphasizes a biochemical, biomechanical pharmacological approach to healing that ultimately seeks to "attack" disease, "combat" illness, and wage "war on cancer" or on the human body itself (Ullman, 2009) This paradigm can be invaluable in emergency medicine and help us survive certain infectious diseases, but for the large majority of people facing day-to-day chronic illnesses, it provides short-term results, serious side-effects, and stratospherically high costs.
The vast majority of drugs have a quick turnover in the medical marketplace, making them more akin to fashion more than science. Despite this recurrent pattern, doctors are prescribing drugs at record-breaking rates. Polypharmacy (the use of more than one drug concurrently for a patient) is becoming routine, even though there is very little evidence for the safety or efficacy of such practice. Some scary details about the serious problems that result from polypharmacy was discussed in an earlier article.
The primary reason that modern medicine fails so many times is that it tends to assume that symptoms are just something "wrong" with the person that then needs to be managed, controlled, or suppressed. Distinct from this medical viewpoint is an ancient and futuristic model that recognizes that symptoms represent DEFENSES of the body that should be nurtured and augmented as a way to treat disease processes. This latter approach to treating the sick is the naturopathic and homeopathic models of the West, the Ayurvedic approach of India, and the various styles of acupuncture from the East.
One hopes that the American public would greatly benefit from receiving the "best" and certainly most expensive care that modern medicine has to offer. However, this simply isn't true. In fact, the following statistics powerfully state the results from what some people mistakenly refer to as the "best" medical care in the world:
Even "Good" Research is Often Bad
Medications that can allay pain or any type of serious discomfort are a great blessing, but let's not fool ourselves into believing that modern pain drugs are curative agents. In fact, although they provide blessed short-term relief, they create their own pathology, addiction, and demand for increasing doses over time.
Such pain relief is akin to unscrewing a warning light in your car. It does turn off that irritating light, though it does nothing to change the underlying problem.
However, when a drug company's scientific trial "proves" that their drug reduces pain, it then markets this treatment as "scientifically proven" and is able to sell the drug to doctors and to consumers with a marketable spin that makes them the big bucks. What is so brilliant about the cozy relationship that drug companies have with "science" is that most people have insurance these days and don't have to pay out-of-pocket for these "proven" drugs. Even though their (and our) insurance premiums sky-rocket, many employers distance the patient from the real costs of paying the bill.
It is so impressive how proving that one can use conventional drugs to "unscrew a warning light" can make big big bucks. My previous article noted that the combined profits ($35.9 billion) of the ten largest drug companies in the Fortune 500 in 2002 were more than the combined profits ($33.7 billion) of the remaining 490 companies together (Angell, 2004, 11). In a civilized world, no industry should have this amount of profit without being considered a criminal enterprise.
And let's also not fool ourselves into believing that conventional medical treatment is the sole method of providing pain relief. Back in 1983, I coined the term "medical chauvinism" as a common assumption that there is only one type of education with which to learn the science and art of healing or that there is only one type of health professional suitable to provide health care (Ullman, 1983a; 1983b). Despite its recent prevalence, medical chauvinism is an anomaly historically and internationally.
Equally problematic to medical chauvinism is "scientism," which is the common assumption that science is the only way to acquire knowledge about reality. There is a great amount of human experience that cannot be tested in a "double-blind and placebo controlled trial," and the lack of "scientific evidence" for these experiences does not make them invalid, unproven, or non-existent.
It is more than a tad ironic that there are extremely few double-blind and placebo-controlled trials testing surgical procedures, and yet, physicians and skeptics do not refer to surgery as "quackery." Surgeons appropriately note that it is impossible to conduct such studies because it is unethical to open up a patient for surgery to provide a "placebo surgery." And yet, these same physicians and skeptics use this offensive term, "quackery," with regularity and without parity, to a host of alternative therapies that have similar challenges to providing placebo treatment. How does one give a placebo meditation, and how can many naturopathic protocols be tested when the combined treatment regiment includes an herb, a vitamin, a homeopathic medicine, AND some type of physical therapy.
Scientism is a type of fundamentalism where science is the religion (Milgrom, 2010). A significant problem with scientism is that its believers are often even more arrogant than religious fundamentalists. Perhaps worse, they don't even acknowledge that their belief system is a belief system. This problem may explain the lack of humility of many doctors and scientists.
Understanding and Rewriting History
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell, author of 1984
History provides us with diverse evidence about our past, but ultimately, only a small portion is told in history books. The interpretation of our past and the select use of facts and figures influence our understanding of what happened.
Historians commonly remark that whichever country wins a war or whichever worldview dominates another, the history is told through that country's perspective or that dominant point of view. This is certainly true in the history of medicine. For instance, medical historians commonly portray conventional medical practice of the past as barbaric and dangerous, and yet they have asserted that today's medical care is at the apex of "scientific medicine." The assertion that today's medical care is "proven" is a consistently repeated mantra.
History also tends to portray those who lose a war and who represent a minority point of view as having less than positive attributes. For instance, those physicians practicing medicine differently than the orthodox medical practice might be called cranks, crackpots and quacks. Such name-calling is a wonderfully clever way to trivialize potentially valuable contributions, whether or not one understands what these contributions really are.
Besides name-calling, practitioners of the conventional and dominating paradigm often spin facts to make the strong and solid features of a minority practice into something strange and weird. Homeopaths are accused of using smaller doses than used in orthodox medicine, and this is portrayed as homeopaths using doses that "theoretically" could not have any physiological effect. The medical fundamentalists purposefully ignore the significant literature that posits different theories about how homeopathic medicines work (Chaplin, 2010; Bellavite and Signorini, 2004; Homeopathy, 2010), and they (again) show their lack of humility because there are innumerable conventional medical treatments today for which the mechanism of action remains unknown. Even good skeptics know that we still do not understand how tobacco smoking causes cancer, and yet, no one advocates that we ignore this good health information just because the precise mechanism remains a mystery (Spector, 2010).
Accusations that homeopathic medicines could not possibly have any effect are made without knowledge, experience or humility. Such accusations simply become evidence of the accuser's unscientific attitude and his or her ignorance of the diverse body of basic scientific work on the effects of nanodoses of certain substances in specific situations.
The fact that homeopaths have used their medicines for more than 200 years is spun as evidence that this system of medicine has not "progressed." Another interpretation here is that the same homeopathic medicines used 200 years ago are still used today, along with hundreds of new ones, primarily because the old ones still work. The art of using homeopathic medicines is that they are not prescribed for a localized disease but for a syndrome or pattern of symptoms of which the localized disease is a part. It is clever how some people try to spin positive attributes in hyper-negative ways.
The fact that homeopaths interview a patient to discover his or her unique symptoms has been spun to make homeopathy seem like a quirky system that revels in inane facts about a patient. However, the detailed symptoms and characteristics of the patient that homeopaths collect may not be comprehended by those unfamiliar with the unique and critical nature of individualizing features in each person. Homeopathy provides a sophisticated method by which a patient's characteristics are applied to selecting and prescribing the most effective homeopathic medicine. Today, a large majority of practicing homeopaths use expert system software to help them prescribe their medicines in a highly individualized way to patients.
Homeopaths use the term "vital force" in a fashion similar to how acupuncturists use the term "chi" to refer to the underlying forces in a living system that connects mind and body. Although antagonists to these systems of natural medicine try to make them sound "woo-woo," homeopaths and acupuncturists confidently respond by asserting that living systems are not machines or simply bodies of chemical interactions.
I personally have no problem with "skeptics" of homeopathy, though most people who think of themselves as skeptics are really simply "deniers" or "medical fundamentalists." A skeptic is one who may not believe that homeopathy works, but che (my preferred alternative to s/he) strives to be familiar with the body of literature, not just the "negative" trials. Further, a good skeptic evaluates clinical trials, basic science trials, animal studies, cost-effectiveness comparisons, outcome studies, consecutive case reports, and epidemiological data. A good skeptic is simply a good scientist who evaluates a whole body of evidence.
Sadly, most deniers of homeopathy simply and directly lie about the subject. They commonly assert that "there is no research on homeopathy" or "there is no possible mechanism of action for how homeopathic medicines work". These fundamentalists KNOW that this is not true. Several of my previous articles have referenced this body of evidence (Ullman, 2009b; Ullman 2010a, Ullman, 2010b).
Some of the most recent reviews of research include one meta-analysis of clinical research published in the prestigious Journal of Clinical Epidemiology (Ludtke, Rutten, 2008) and two full issues of the peer-review journal, Homeopathy (2009, 2010) which reviewed basic sciences research.
What is so interesting to watch is the questionably honest or ethical behavior of these medical fundamentalists. They have been informed of the many studies and meta-analyses that have verified the clinical efficacy of homeopathic medicines, as well as hundreds of basic sciences trials, many of which have been replicated by other researchers. One review of replications of basic science work is of special interest (Endler, et al, 2010).
The deniers of homeopathy love to say that homeopaths "cherry-pick" the positive studies and ignore the negative ones. They then incredulously assert that we should ignore ALL of the positive trials. Such statements and viewpoints are profoundly misguided and simply daft. Will these same people say that Thomas Edison "cherry-picked" his positive study and ignored all of his "negative" studies in his efforts to invent electric lights? The (il)logic of the deniers is that they would recommend ignoring Edison's discovery because the vast majority of his studies were not positive.
Finally, medical history sheds light on what is and isn't real.
In 1832, the esteemed founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, MD, was granted honorary membership in the Medical Society of the City and County of New York. And yet, 11 years later, the minutes of this medical society confirm that once this conventional medical association recognized the "major ideological and financial threat" that the growth of homeopathy represented, the medical society rescinded his membership (Gevitz, 1988, p. 102). It is the ideological and financial threat that homeopathy poses that motivates the antagonism to it, not whether it works or not.
In light of the fact that history tends to be written by the victors, this writer predicts that history will soon be rewritten.
References
Angell M. The Truth about Drug Companies. New York: Random House, 2004. This fact is extremely startling, but the source is reputable: Marcia Angell, MD, is former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Angell M. Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption. The New York Review of Books. 56, 1: January 15, 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/
Bellavite P and Signorni A. The Emerging Science of Homeopathy: Complexity, Biodynamics, and Nanopharmacology. Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2002.
Chaplin M. Water Structure and Science. London South Bank University. http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/homeop.html and http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/memory.html
Consumer Reports, High Anxiety. January 1993, 19-24.
Endler PC, Thieves K, Reich C, Matthiessen P, Bonamin L, Scherr C, Baumgartner S. Repetitions of fundamental research models for homeopathically prepared dilutions beyond 10-23: a bibliometric study. Homeopathy, 2010; 99: 25-36
Gevitz N. The Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University: 1988.
Homeopathy (a peer-review journal published by Elsevier) (October, 2009)
Homeopathy (January, 2010)
Levi R. Science Is for Sale, Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 2006, 30:4, 44-46.
Ludtke R, Rutten ALB. The conclusions on the effectiveness of homeopathy highly depend on the set of analyzed trials. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. October 2008. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2008.06/015.
Milgrom L. Beware scientism's onward march.
Roberts WH. Orthodoxy vs. homeopathy: Ironic developments following the Flexner Report at the Ohio State University, Bulletin on the History of Medicine, Spring 1986, 60:1, 73-87.
Spector R. The War on Cancer: A Progress Report for Skeptics. Skeptical Inquirer. January/February, 2010.
Turner EH, et al., "Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy," The New England Journal of Medicine, January 17, 2008
Ullman D. Beyond Medical Chauvinism, California Living (the Sunday supplement magazine of the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, August 21, 1983a, 4-7.
Ullman D. Medical Monopoly vs. Alternative Health Care, Social Policy, Summer, 1983b, 27-28.
Ullman D. 2009a. When Militarism 'Invades' Medicine...Doctatorship Happens
Ullman D. 2009b. The Epidemic Of 'Medical Child Abuse' And What Can Be Done.
Ullman D. 2010a. The Case FOR Homeopathic Medicine: The Historical and Scientific Evidence
Ullman D. 2010b. Homeopathic Medicine: Europe's #1 Alternative for Doctors
Walsh JJ. History of the Medical Society of the State of New York. New York: Medical Society of the State of New York, 1907.
Dana Ullman, MPH, is America's leading spokesperson for homeopathy and is the founder of www.homeopathic.com. He is the author of 10 books, including his bestseller, Everybody's Guide to Homeopathic Medicines. His most recent book is, The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy. Dana lives, practices, and writes from Berkeley, California.
Follow Dana Ullman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HomeopathicDana
Dana Ullman: Unplugging From Your Medicine Cabinet: Respecting the Body's Intelligence
Dana Ullman: How Scientific Is Modern Medicine Really?
Dana Ullman: Do Antibiotics Make People Fat?
Medical research - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Medical Research : Medical Research News and Photos ...
Journal of Medical Internet Research
In March of 2010 he met with representatives from the US agency NCCAM to ask that they do no research into CAM medicines. He also asked that NCCAM be shut down.
Needless to say, he went away with the promise that MORE research will be done into CAM and with the reminders that there is a body of scientific evidence which cannot be ignored, that there are compelling reasons to further research CAM and that the body of scientific work speaks for itself.
One of those pieces of evidence supporting homeopathy could well be the study conducted of 6,500 patients at the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital. The study showed that over 70% of patients reported complete cure or significant improvement in their symptoms as a result of using homeopathy.
Homeopathy is a system of medicine that every government should put into effect in any national health care plan because it is so efficacious, safe and inexpensive.
"But again, it says that it contains remedies for 120 conditions. That certainly sounds like its a "cookie cutter" system to me, especially if one can self-diagnose with charts.'
Not 120 conditions, but rather little things like insect bites, occasional constipation etc. The self-assesment charts have to do with constitution... every day self-care, not a detailed diagnosis of any current medical pattern... that would be clinical care, and involves seeing a professional.
Be patient, I cannot spell out the depth of Ayurveda to you in a few posts, but have a look at these links... the first person is also an MD.
http://niam.com/corp-web/index.htm
http://www.ayurveda.com/
http://www.himalayahealthcare.com/researchpaper/index.htm
I'm not saying Ayurveda is not without any merit, nor have I ever suggested such. What I have repeatedly said (and you often avoid) is that you have not provided any evidence that the Ayurvedic approach is actually any better than modern medicine. Your basic proof of that is your vague over-generalizations of both modern medicine and now Ayurveda as well. Perhaps you are starting to see that your generalized, unsupported statements are not really getting you anywhere.
Applying some of the above suggestions, and more that fit the individual case, on an everyday basis is part of treating the person and not the disease.The other part of that is to use methods/substances to improve various bodily functions, while the main disease is being managed. How would this not be better than mostly focusing on using a pharma drug against inflammation in RA, or any other "disease"? The disease is an abstraction, the whole person is the reality. Ayurveda is just holistic care... its not about dissing pharma drugs, but doing a whole lot more so that less drug might be needed for a shorter time.
"The idea of scientific medicine is a great one, but is modern medicine truly, or even adequately, "scientific"?"
If I had a dime for every shark Ullman has jumped, I would retire immediately.
Skeptics disagree.
Further, he rails on homeopathy “deniers” for not acknowledging the “body of evidence” that supports its, um, efficacy, many of which use double blind, placebo-controlled trials themselves.
In reality the scientific method does work. Our exponential advancement in all areas of technology that has happened in the last few centuries is proof of this. That’s why we need to look at a body of evidence not any single study. We should put more weight into large, well-controlled studies, and build on past knowledge that provides a reasonable mechanism to support it but when one looks for a trend of efficacy with larger and better-controlled homeopathy studies, the evidence is lacking. As for a mechanism, a “body of intriguing but not yet fully verified theories” as Ullman puts it, is not compelling. Should a drug company use this low of standard as support for not just a single drug but an entire modality drugs they would be shot down, and rightly so. I see no reason to treat homeopathy any different.
Empiricism vs. Experimentation: Let me first say that I respect both approaches towards knowledge, but they both have liabilities and strengths.
To carefully observe and come to better understand what enables an individual to lose or create health is a time tested method. This method has been employed by Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine in making their models of the disease and health creation processes. Here, the individual is paramount, rather than the individual as a miniscule part of a large statistical sample. Its not so that all individuals have the same requirements... the model of constitutional types in Ayurveda accounts for this fact. There is no such modeling in Allopathic Medicine so it misses out on clinically utilizing this aspect of reality. The wonderment of why this drug/herb seems to work for this person, but not that person might be quelled if an Ayurvedic constitutional analysis were part of the clinical study.
Experimentation, double blind studies etc are designed such that they ignore the individual and her/his own environment and circumstance. An individual in a study is supposedly like everyone else in the study... except he isn't in reality. So the individual factors which may be involved in any improvement or worsening of a person in a study remain unknown... in fact, they are not even looked for. In exclusively following this road to knowledge we come to believe in magic bullets which will work for everyone... except that this is almost never the case.
Experimentation is simply the way to derive empirical understanding of reality, it is not experimentation vs. empiricism. Double blind studies are not the be all end all of evidence and no scientist will suggest they are. We have discussed previously that it is possible to design individualized double-blinded studies so to suggest that double-blind studies cannot cope with individualized treatments is a bit disingenuous.
"In exclusively following this road to knowledge we come to believe in magic bullets which will work for everyone... "
No, that is your interpretation and talking point about conventional medicine. Please show me the doctor who says, "This treatment will work for everyone"? The only ones who ever seem to claim to have all the answers are those selling unproven treatments.
Someone below suggested genetic testing in order to improve the understanding of how patients react to different treatments and potentially allow for individualized treatments.
As useful as it might be, the statistical, clinical trial method is simply not enough to know what might work for a certain individual in a particular circumstance. Yet the various 'alternative' therapies are asked to follow this road to prove themselves even though this would obviate the very genius of their own holistic approach... more below.
A Naturopathic dictum: "Treat the patient, not the disease". Different persons can manifest very similar clinical pictures, though the causative factors are very different. If the treatment is to address causative factors and correct for whatever imbalances have accumulated in their particular cases, then the treatment of these two patients will differ from eachother. If a clinical trial demands that all person with a similar clinical picture (same allopathic disease name) must be treated by the same drug/herb, then this is a strait jacket to an holistic approach. Very similar, but not identical symptom pictures will respond to different homeopathic remedies, but if it is stipulated that only one particular remedy can be part of a clinical trial, then this will not work, and this then becomes a test designed to fail Homeopathy.
For most cases, two qualified doctors should reach the same decision as to the cause of the condition.
I'm assuming that the same is true of a naturopath. When presented with the same patient, they should come up with the same course of treatment. So how is it much different from what real doctors do?
www.spandidos-publications.com/ijo/36/2/395
"There are compelling reasons to explore many CAM modalities, and the science should speak for itself.
http://nccam.nih.gov/about/offices/od/director.htm
And that study, as I've pointed out to you numerous times in the past, doesn't enable one to conclude that homeopathics kill cancer cells. It is a horrible study rife with bad flow cytometry, poor statistics, and even poor controls and one can certainly not draw any useful conclusions from it.
Statistically about 60% of all doctor visits are unnecessary as the patients would recover in a reasonable time without any medical intervention. Alternative medicine practitioners are thought to have an even higher number of unnecessary visits. This means that over 60% of all homeopathic and other alternative medicine patients fully recover and mistakenly credit the treatment because the supposed cure happened after treatment. Actually no cure has taken place because the patient would have gotten well without it.
Also, many researchers believe there is an animal placebo effect and it is related to the Pavlovian response of animals. You can read about it at the links below.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=263
http://www.skeptics.org.uk/article.php?dir=articles&article=it_works_in_animals.php
lff
I say the bubbling controversy of medicine - much built on good habits of hygiene & rigorous practice - deserves a solid examination of motives after more than a century of dominance. If you are unsure then look at An Illustrated History of Western Medicine [Loudon, I. 1997. New York: Oxford University Press.]
Federal Reserve taipan Alan Greenspan didn't want discussion of the housing bubble "so that the Fed wouldn't lose control of the debate to people less well-informed than themselves" [story elsewhere today on this site]. But it does seem time.
Greenspan said, according to the transcripts of a March 2004 of the now-discredited Federal Reserve, "We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand." The key word is "control'.
Only if you want someone to take you seriously.
lff
OK, how do you propose we do that?
How do you make sure the sample of homeopathy users weren't sicker or healthier to begin with (the criteria you propose IS self-selecting, after all)? What determines if someone is healthier. I feel great, but I take a pill everyday for a chronic condition. Am I unhealthy?
The problem with Ullman is that he wants to pretend like medicine is needlessly complicating things. The reality is that life is complicated as hell, and anyone trying to sell you simplicity is probably trying to sell you something else, too.
"His [Ullman's] primary strategy is to point out weaknesses in the practice of science (not the underlying philosophy or methods), as if this is news to anyone. Science is a human endeavor, and is subject to all the frailty of humans. Skeptics and science educators (like Carl Sagan) are the first to point this out. The application of science can fail in a hundred ways, which is why we need to be vigilant, exacting in our evaluations, and rely upon consensus of evidence and consensus of interpretation. Ullman, of course, simply does not like the consensus of logic, evidence, and opinion that homeopathy is pure bunk, and so he rails against the practice of science as if it will save him and his preferred belief."
The point I am making is to leave one's investigation of homeopathy to trials, not theories of how it might work.
This is a non sequitur.
Science is a method of testing ideas against reality, not a collection of facts. While it isn't perfect, science is the only method we have for separating effective treatments from quackery.
And your universe analogy is completely invalid. The universe exists and is verifiable and demonstrable. The efficacy of homeopathy beyond placebo is NOT demonstrable, not verifiable and, according to the trials, does not exist.
The scientific method is fine... just not the practise of medicine as it currently conducted as explained above.
I would ask people to be as skeptical about Homeopathy as they are about Science based medicine,
and remember what modern medicine has done for us the lives it has saved the pain it has alleviated,
Where Homeopathy has little more the hear say and anecdotal evidence,
Science based medicine has decades of documented proven success, and most importantly learns from mistakes, as opposed to a an almost dogmatic approach to homeopathy .
I highly recommend anyone who is even a little bit Skeptical about Dana Ullmans claims to please read this Blog post investigate what Mr. Ullman claims versus Dr. Stevan Novella Approach
http://skepticblog.org/2010/05/03/more-anti-science-at-the-huff-po/#more-7950
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_randi.html
http://kitsrus.com/pdf/nejm_998.pdf
My question is the same as it always is. Why not require that all treatments undergo the same FDA safety and efficacy testing whether they are natural products, homeopathic remedies, or pharmaceuticals? Make the bar even for every treatment. Some things will slip through the system, but the system does work to correct itself.