Results for: provings

“Urban Zen” and homeopathy at Beth Israel Medical Center, or: Dr. Gorski destroys his chances of ever being invited to join the faculty at BIMC or the Albert Einstein College of Medicine

I guess I never really wanted to work in Manhattan anyway. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. I mean, why on earth would I want to? What’s the attraction? Living in the heart of it all, all those shows and all those amazing cultural activities, all those world-class restaurants? Being close to Boston, Philadelphia, and other cool East Coast cities,...

/ November 3, 2008

51 “Facts” About Homeopathy

Fact 28 - Unlike orthodox medicine where two thirds of all conventional hospital admissions are due to the side-effects of pharmaceutical medicines, the bill for negligence claims soaring into billions, one U.K. leading insurance company reported only 'a couple' of claims against homeopaths in a ten year period! ... -------------- 1) Note: I said different, not better, he says in a feeble...

/ October 24, 2008

Prior Probability: the Dirty Little Secret of “Evidence-Based Alternative Medicine”—Continued Again

After the previous posting on the Bayesian approach to clinical trial data, several new comments made it clear to me that more needed to be said. This posting addresses those comments and adds a few more observations regarding the unfortunate consequences of EBM’s neglect of prior probability as it applies to “complementary and alternative medicine” (“CAM”).† The “Galileo gambit” and the statistics gambit...

/ February 29, 2008

Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine: Back to the Future Part V

Homeopathy and Science: Discussion, Summary and Conclusions I was not surprised by a couple of the dissenting comments after Part IV of this blog. One writer worried that I had neglected, presumably for nefarious reasons, to cite replications of Benveniste’s results; another cited several examples of “positive” homeopathy studies that I had failed to mention. I answered some of those points here....

/ February 8, 2008

Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine: Back to the Future Part IV

    Homeopathy and Science This week’s entry† is a summary of some of the tests of homeopathy. It is a necessary prelude to a discussion of how homeopaths and their apologists promote the method. Several tenets of homeopathy lend themselves to tests. The doctrine of similia similibus curantur (“like cures like”) was tested by Hahnemann himself, as introduced in Part I...

/ February 1, 2008

Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine: Back to the Future–Part III

“Symptoms,” Continued Part II of this blog† introduced the homeopathic understanding of “symptoms” as they pertain both to “provings” in healthy subjects (now called “homeopathic pathogenic trials” or “HPTs”) and to histories elicited from patients. Hahnemann conflated “symptoms” and every random itch, ache, pain, sniffle, feeling, thought, dream, pimple or other sign, and anything else that might occur to a subject or...

/ January 18, 2008

Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine: Back to the Future – Part II

Part I of this blog† summarized the origin of homeopathy, invented in 1790 by Samuel Christian Hahnemann. It discussed Hahnemann’s first two “homœopathic laws of nature,” similia similibus curantur (like cures like) and the “law of infinitesimals,” and showed that his rationales for each have long been refuted. Hahnemann proclaimed a third doctrine, the “law of psora” [“itch”], said by him to...

/ January 11, 2008

Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine: Back to the Future – Part I

Either homeopathy works or controlled trials don’t! —Scottish homeopath David Reilly at the 2001 Harvard Medical School Complementary and Integrative Medicine Conference. Reilly based that assertion on his own series of four small studies of homeopathic treatments of hay fever, asthma, and allergic rhinitis, the outcomes of which had been inconsistent and largely subjective. (1) Later he explained that small-minded skeptics in...

/ January 4, 2008