If you're a fan of science -- any field, really; or all -- then I'm sure that there are some common, popular misconceptions out there that just BUG you every time you hear them.

Just for fun, let's vent a little. What's a popular misconception that just makes you want to scream every time you hear it?

I'll start with mine: "We only use 10% of our brain! Think what abilities we would have if we could use more of it!"

First of all, nobody knows for sure where this piece of misinformation comes from, but people sure do love to repeat it.

One theory is that it's based on PET studies (those pretty colored pictures that show what parts of the brain are active during a particular moment in time), which tend to show that at any SINGLE moment in time, at most around 10% of the brain is "lit up" with activity.

But that 10% changes WIDELY over time, depending on what you are looking at, thinking about, or doing. It's not the SAME 10% all the time. Moreover, saying "imagine what how smart we'd be if we could use ALL of it" is just as stupid as saying "imagine how strong you would be if ever muscle in your body flexed at the same time!" You wouldn't be able to DO anything that way; that's not how the body works.

Another theory is that it's based on the fact that a large portion of the brain (volume and mass-wise) is taken up by connections between neurons, which (like any wire transmitting an electrical signal) are insulated. The dead "insulation" cells do not actually transmit information in the brain, and so maybe THAT is the "unused" part that this myth refers to? If so, it's still stupid.... it's just as necessary to have insulation that does NOT transmit electrical signals as it is to have the electrical signals themselves. Without the insulation, we'd get our "wires crossed" and wouldn't be able to think at all.

So either way.... there is no "un-tapped potenial" in the brain sitting around just waiting for people to "expand their consciousness and use" or whatever. BIG MYTH.

OK..... now that that's off my chest. :-) Who else has one? From any field of science... get it off your chest!

That little jewel predates PET scans by decades!

I feel like I'm opening a gargantuan can of worms with this one, but Intelligent Design.

After that, some others that spring to mind include:

- Thunder is caused by clouds crashing into each other (amazing that some grown adults still think this)

- Anthropomorphic Climate Change deniers

- Tabula rasa (perhaps not "popular" as in widespread)

So what sound do clouds crashing into each other make?

Robert

cloud1 - ummph
cloud2 - pardon me

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Ago 14, 2009, 12:12am.

The 10% of the brain one bothers me a lot because 1) it's used as evidence for so many wacko ideas and 2) it indicates a great lack of understanding on the perpetuater's part.

Another that bothers me is this belief that quantum events are only determined by the presence of sentient observers. This is probably driven by popular phrasings of Heisenberg and Schrödinger but has led to crappy but ostensibly academic work (e.g., revisions of the anthropic principle).

#6: That's another good one! Or, alternatively, people who think quantum mechanics is somehow the mechanism of "free will". The line of "reasoning" is usually something like:

A. If everything is deterministic, there can be no free will.

B. Quantum mechanics effects are not completely deterministic.

C. Therefore, quantum mechanics effects are responsible for free will.

FAIL!!!!!!!!!

Enjoying the topic, especially as a non scientist who has probably been guilty of many of the misconceptions.

In fact the 10% of the brain thing came to my mind just the other day. (Very glad I kept the thought, now forgotten, to my self. I guess it was lost somewhere in the 90% unused portion.)

So many of these phrases have developed cultural meanings outside of the science - evolution, quantum leap, relativity. The cultural nuances overwhelm the science meaning.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Ago 14, 2009, 2:27pm.

I don't know if it's a common misunderstanding, but I've heard several people have very specific misunderstandings of evolution by natural selection. A friend of mine in high school once explained to me that it didn't make any sense as follows: "So the idea is, the giraffes needed to reach the tops of the trees, so they stretched out their necks. And then, when they had baby giraffes, the babies had long necks because their parents had long necks. I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous."

And it was ridiculous. But it didn't prove what she thought it proved.

I suppose it's better than the "Then why are there still monkeys?" school of criticism.

Because I work on vision, my favorite is when people say the eye is so complex (which is true) that it never could have developed through evolution. Proof positive.

k4k

Wow! I was ~just~ thinking about that very bit of stupidity (which is a favorite 'straw man' of the IDites).

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Ago 14, 2009, 3:35pm.

#6: re: quantum events, sentient observers and the anthropic principle
You mean like this? Consider the formation of life and many subsequent mutations to be ultimately caused by quantum events. Lacking a sentient observer, the entire world and all life will be in some huge superposition of many many evolutionary paths until sentient life evolves in one of them, collapsing the wave function. I read that somewhere, but I think it was more as a wonderful reductio ad absurdum of the 'sentient observer needed' claims.

I tend to be annoyed by the constant misuse of 'lightyear', as in 'lightyears faster/more advanced/etc'. It's a measure of distance damnit! ;)

That science leads to certainty.

Can't say it's a pet peeve of mine, but some folks have a tendancy to casually attribute causality: A happens, B happens, therefore A caused B.

Linda

Di you think it's possible that because some folks have a tendancy to casually attribute causality, it might annoy you? Even just a teensy bit?

My guess is that Jesse is absolutely positive in thinking that it does.

I like Jesse's choice of misconception. That is one that actually *does* rile me. I hadn't seen it when I posted.

WHL, that a causal conclusion riles me would depend on who is doing it and what it is about. Once had a woman become *furious* at me because I wouldn't say for sure the next train down the track would be her train. Yeah, sure, it SHOULD be your train, ma'am, but I've waited on these trains for years, and really, I can't say for sure.

;)

For me, the idea that natural selection is progressing toward something (humans usually), makes me grind my teeth. The whole ladder-style evolution analogy with things advancing from "primitive" to "improved" makes me shudder.

Wow! I've ~never~ thought of Evolution in a ladder construct! The 'tree' analogy works until you have a previous (closer-to-the-trunk) ancestor die out. On tree, when something like that happens, everything else beyond that point dies first (or very soon thereafter).

I tend to see Evolution more as a 'fairy ring' of wild mushrooms, with each new year's growth being a bit further away from the point-of-origin than its 'parent', and more mushrooms in the ring. When the soil type changes, you have a variation in the makeup of that particular one, and some parts of the ring end for a variety of reasons.

But a ladder? Never heard that one. Humankind may be the dominant species (at the moment), but a huge cranium is no guarantee of survival - and in a lot of subtle ways, it's working against us.

And whenever someone describes some animal, like jellyfish, as more primitive because there were jellyfish hundreds of millions of years ago. Jellyfish didn't stop evolving and there's no reason to believe that today's jellyfish are exactly like those of yesteryear.

I am going to add a misconception that I am working to correct in my understanding - the orbital model of the atom. It has some benefit in its simplicity, but it seems to be necessary to unlearn that model to advance in understanding of truer models. There ought to be a way to teach early a model that can be built on as one's studies advance.

-20 I think the orbital model is very useful. It absolutely makes sense to think of electrons in orbits to understand chemical interactions. Problems with that model only emerge as you begin to learn more complicated physics, so I think that model still has a very important place for teaching beginning chemistry. The only misconception there is that the model is a completely accurate representation of reality, instead of a useful model, a difference which I do think science classes should emphasize.

Although all the mentioned misconceptions are annoying, I have another evolution related one that has yet to be mentioned - the missing link.

jlelliott: The orbital model is useful. However, it can LEAD TO misconceptions that are truly grating on the nerves:

"What if the solar system (which is JUST LIKE an atom, but bigger!) is just an atom in a really really big being!!!!"

"What if the solar system (which is JUST LIKE an atom, but bigger!) is just an atom in a really really big being!!!!"

EXACTLY!!!

:)

I understand that chemistry models work easier with the orbiting electrons. I guess that is because of the complexity of the math.

But I have struggled as a lay person to work through some of the more advanced physics concepts and I just could not put things together.

I think the problem was that I actually thought I had a good concept of atomic structure, but the quanta and wave particle duality and uncertainty just did not fit what I knew.

It was a revelation to me that I needed to unlearn some things. The unlearning process is helping.

-22, 24 Ah, I seem to remember a similar scene from some movie (Men in Black?). However I still think this "misconception" stands out from the others in that it does not lead to dangerous misunderstandings (the mentioned one is wrong but largely harmless), and is in fact pretty vital for understanding chemistry. Probability densities for the electron cloud are much less intuitive for understanding which types of interactions between atoms are possible. Thinking of electrons as waves is no more incorrect (or correct) than thinking of them as particles - while one might be useful for your current intellectual goals, neither is a misconception.

I totally agree, however, that it is frustrating to learn in each higher-level chemistry and physics course that everything they told you last year with such confidence is just an approximation, and that reality is much more complex.

>12 jlelliot

Ahh, but they just found the missing link! Didn't you get the memo? :-)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/m...

And to be fair, the dissenting opinion here:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17...

Haven't y'all heard that the European Organization for Nuclear Research is going to make a black hole that will destroy the world?

'nuff said.

I'm in theoretical particle physics, and there are lots and lots of misconceptions floating about. Few of them tend to bug me, because in many cases, confusion is reasonable -- it's hard to understand phenomena so far removed from everyday experience, and even harder to explain them! What is very irritating is when someone who clearly doesn't understand something very basic aggressively asserts something completely wrong, and dismisses all corrections, however clearly and politely (or not) stated. This is something I've seen from time to time on PhysicsForums.com.

Here is a small selection of perennial confusions:
* That quantum teleportation (or entanglement more generally) violates special relativity. (Bill Bryson mistakenly claims this in A Short History of Nearly Everything.)
* That particles with "spin" are actually rotating around an axis (another one Bryson gets wrong).
* That the dense, compact astronomical bodies dubbed "black holes" are actually "holes" that things can pass through. (I don't think Bryson fell for this one, but he did mention that CERN may make a black hole that would detroy the world!)

Some more severe distortions that I encounter less frequently are that Einsteinian relativity has something to do with cultural relativism, and the quantum mechanics/free will connection mentioned above. For some satirical material in this vein, check out Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. My favorite passages:

Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and "pro-choice", so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice...

...the pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity...

@20-25:

I think some of you are talking about Bohr's atomic model (which pictures an electron travelling in definite elliptical orbits around nuclei), while others are referring to orbitals, which (as evidenced by their successful application to chemistry) are in many circumstances reasonable approximations to the probability densities of the electrons' wave functions. This would be a reasonable mix-up: in the first case, "orbital" is an adjective; in the second, it's a noun.

To my knowledge, Bohr's model is useless in chemistry (I should mention I'm not a chemist), but it does correctly predict what frequencies of light can be absorbed or emitted by hydrogen, which was enough to win Bohr a Nobel Prize.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Ago 17, 2009, 5:38pm.

# 27 - Check this: Has CERN destroyed the world yet?

I teach art at a Kindergarten through eighth grade school, and woefully came to understand my concept of the electron orbital "configuration" was ... well, at least a century out of date. http://www.quantumintro.com
The above site helped both my students and myself tackle building a conceptualized model.
It was tricky as hell coming up with a concrete model... unlearning misinformation being more difficult than any of us supposed.
No surprise that the youngest of my students had the easiest time brainstorming.

29> Haven't you got the news? You're not allowed to say "brainstorming" any more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/... :) :)

Nit-picking had it's origin in the slave trade? I thought it referred to picking lice eggs out of hair.

>27 Very glad to read that the spin does not actually refer to physical particle rotation. That had bothered me a little and I had been afraid to ask. I could not find anywhere that explained the electron is not actually spinning. Though Asimov writes,"a fourth and last quantum number had to be introduced, the spin quantum number... This was visualized as representing the spin of the electron (analogous to the rotation of the earth about its axis)."

Some of this is tough enough without having to work through inaccurate and misdirecting analogies. If spin is an accounting tool, and not a physical attribute, it would help me not to have to unlearn the analogy.

What does the spin of the earth have to do with an exclusion principle?

The atomic model that I had accepted as true was probably closer to Lewis-Langmuir than Bohr. I do not think I was ever introduced to quantum ideas in school even in a freshman college chemistry class or a freshman physics class. Though it was quite some time ago.

Anyway I was proud this morning to divide h by momentum and end with units of distance. That was my accomplishment to start my day, though I am still stuck with the matter wave thing, and whether there is an truly exact position and momentum but we cannot measure either without our measurement tools effecting the thing observed.

BTW, is there any concept of what exactly is energy?

If you want misconceptions of science, I have a plenty. ;)

ETA to correct a spelling error.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Ago 17, 2009, 10:56pm.

-27 Good point. I always think of the two ideas as linked in a way, in that I can't imagine teaching introductory high school chemistry students orbital theory without using Bohr's model as a starting point. I think jumping into the whole unusually shapes of the wave probability orbitals is just too much to start with. For the purpose of knowing why carbon atoms can bind four other atoms and how ionic relationships form it isn't vital that you know an elliptical orbital from a more complicated density map, so I still think it is a useful model for people just learning science, though admittedly not important for advancing research. Also you would lose the whole Bohr-ring model joke, which would just make me sad.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Ago 18, 2009, 11:14am.

-26 Gah. This misconception is of course related to the idea that we are descended from monkeys, and not descended from a common ancestor with monkeys, that is so prevalent in the general psyche.

What about people applying stats from a group to each individual in that group?

36: That's not so much a misconception of a scientific idea, as it is just sloppy inference.

If we're going to include that kind of thing, I'm always seeing both Base Rate Neglect and "affirming the consequent" as logical inference mistakes that people make in their day-to-day lives.

"If a person is racist, then he will only be attracted to people of his own ethnicity."
"Person X only tends to be attracted to people of his own ethnicity."
"Therefore, Person X is racist."

But that's not really a scientific misconception. It's just bad logic.

22: "Just take another hit Pinto, the thought will pass".

35> So what was our common ancestor with the monkeys, if not a monkey? According to cladistics, it must by definition have been a primate; I guess making it a monkey would make monkey not a proper clade, but I suspect that if it fell through a hole in time, it would be classified among the monkeys.

-39 The general misconception is that we are descended from the monkeys that exist in the world with us today, as you can gather from any number of illustrations, jokes, and outraged religious rants on the subject.

The reality that is being misexpressed is that our closest animal ancestor is the common ancestor of both us and the other existing primate groups. That ancestor is not a modern primate any more than it is a modern human, and both modern humans and other modern primates are equally evolved and equally distant from that common ancestor.

That's the whole point about Ida. It is a proto-primate, if you will. A common ancestor of all modern day primates, which includes the Homo genus and the Pan genus.

Another "misconception" held by most evoluntary biologists (not really a misconception, but a simple error based on historical anthropromorphic bias) is the categorization of chimpanzees, both robust and Bonobo, as Pan troglodytes (Robust chipmanzee) and Pan paniscus (Bonobo), when strictly speaking they should be in the Homo genus.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Ago 18, 2009, 8:43pm.

Dear krazy4katz,
Does that mean you like cats?
Don't know you from a "bar of soap" - an old Aussi
saying - BUT I do respect your thinking. I recently bought
why evolution is true

The thingeys don't seem to be working thus I will ADD a direct link here.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?...

coyne
I had borrowed it from my Library and then said
"It is interesting, I want it"

ALL those standard cliche's DO annoy me, but after a while (sorry, cliche alert) they roll of like...

Yours, Guido.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Ago 18, 2009, 9:04pm.

How about centrifugal force?

{Probably not something to get riled up over, but a wrong understanding that is prevalent.)

The best explanation of centrifugal force I know: xkcd.com/123.

Probabilities and risk.

I know probabilities can be tricky an sometimes non-intuative, but really, doubling a miniscule risk to begin with still only makes it miniscule even if it's a 200% increase. Guess which version sells more papers though.

Thought of another one: The process of science.

A press release is not a scientific paper, neither is a conference poster. Even one single science paper is not sufficient for "scientists say that".

Experts are only experts in their own narrow fields. Just because you are a world authority on birds, doesn't mean you know more than joe bloggs about nuclear physics or global warming.

Not being a practicing scientist, I am puzzled by heated debates over "the scientific method." One side makes reference to it, and the other side argues that "there is no one scientific method".

Obviously, the content of the various specialties differs, but I had always taken - perhaps naively - "the scientific method" to mean, in pattern, the application of logic to sense experience.

To me, as a biological scientist, the scientific method means being able to replicate your data under identical conditions, having positive and negative controls to make sure you are measuring what you think you are measuring.

For an oversimplified example, let's say you are measuring blood sugar. You would want to have a sample with a known amount in it and a sample with no sugar in it, so that when you measure samples with unknown amounts, you can interpret them. You should be able to replicate this and other people should be able to repeat your experiments under the same conditions.

You can imagine that for some fields of science, these kinds of rigorous checks and balances may be difficult if not impossible.

Another aspect of the scientific method is to be able to test the null hypothesis. You may believe, for example, that exercising the muscle in your little finger will make it stronger, so you test the null hypothesis: that exercising it will have no effect. That is where the clash between religion and science comes from - it is difficult to test the null hypothesis -- that there is no god. You also have no positive or negative controls.

Alas....

I know probabilities can be tricky an sometimes non-intuative, but really, doubling a miniscule risk to begin with still only makes it miniscule even if it's a 200% increase. Guess which version sells more papers though.

A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper was a real eye-opener for me when I was younger.

@47, 48

It doesn't look like "the scientific method" has been mentioned yet in this thread, but in my experience objections to the concept are related to a simplistic mantra that historically has been taught by rote in primary and secondary schools in the US. In this framework, The Scientific Method consists of formulating a hypothesis, designing experiments to test it, and then modifying the hypothesis as needed to accommodate experimental results, leading to eventual certainty as per @13. The objections I've seen argue that this is too formulaic and divorced from real-life practice.

The sensible suggestions in @48 are what I would describe as basic elements of good experimental design, a subset of the broader issue of "scientific method".

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Ago 30, 2009, 1:45pm.

People often tend to conflate (physical) scientists with engineers, while they are obviously interrelated, they different professions.

"I don't need to vaccinate my kids, because we live in a good neighborhood/aren't poor/want to avoid autism." Not only annoyingly wrong about vaccination's purpose and use, but dangerously wrong!

One I was just reminded of by a news broadcast: Melting the Arctic ice will raise sea levels.

53>

Well, parts of the Arctic ice cap are on land (Greenland comes to mind). So I don't have a problem with that, even if most of the sea level rise will come from Antarctic rather than Arctic melting.

Misuse and misunderstandings of statistical methods and results are the worst in my opinion, and probably the problem I encounter most often with students. It's also rampant in the general public, but that's a whole 'nother world.

I'm also not happy in how science is presented in general press, the newsbites and misleading headlines (Cancer Cured! Pigs Fly, Sez Scientist!), although to tell the truth I don't know how that superficiality could be reasonably eradicated.

When I was a grad student, one of my professors told a story about how she had been doing research on gender differences in cognitive processing for decades, and had won a great deal of recognition in the field, but it wasn't until she was named in a National Enquirer article under the headline "Woman Are Smarter Than Men, Science Says!" that her parents really believed she had "made it" professionally.

LOL

This message in another Science! thread reminded me of a couple of nice articles by theoretical physicist Helen Quinn that may be relevant to this discussion.

"Belief and knowledge - a plea about language" discusses some of the confusion caused by the different significance some words have in science contexts, compared to everyday usage. Both that article and a newer one, "What is Science?", have some connection to the issue raised in @46, and the latter also mentions the "scientific method" issue raised in @47, @48, @50.

This should rattle a few cages...

Chiropractors are reputable health professionals with scientifically proven methods providing evidence based results.

Tell Simon Singh I sent you.

Oh, and the same thing goes for homoeopathy and its practitioners. Talk about quacks!

#58: Well, I definitely agree.

Would it be terribly self-serving and inappropriate if I were to take this opportunity to point people toward counterknowledge.com? :-)

Here's one that rattles me:
Stupid statements like #s 58 and 59.

My MDs (multiple) gave up on me and told me that I wouldn't live long enough to see my youngest son (Grade 11 at the time) graduate from high school. They was partially right. I didn't see him graduate, but it was because he boycotted the ceremony. That was 3 years ago.

I have a digestive disorder that prevents me from eating lots of different foods. Mine is mild, as most others who had this died as infants (a brother and sister of mine, for example). Part of the issue is enzymatic, and this causes a cumulative toxic reaction. Most of the time, the mere presence of the wrong food will cause an immediate breakdown of tissues in my mouth, esophagus, stomach and/or intestines. Bleeding ensues. I've got so much scar tissue in my guts, I don't absorb very much in the way nutrients anymore. There's too much to write to about the effects it has on the rest of my body, other than to say that I'm ineligible as an organ donor.

I've been seeing a doctor who has been trained in alternative medicine practices. His methods seem counterintuitive, yet he has an excellent reputation for diagnosis and remedy. Go figure! How is it possible that this one guy could figure out what 6 MDs (endocrinologists, internal medicine specialists...) couldn't?

You guys are wrong, wrong, wrong.

To answer your question, Greg...
Unless you are an MD, or work for a Pharmaceutical company, or are an Insurance Company executive, the link you provided wouldn't be self-serving. On the other hand, it is terribly inappropriate. CK.c has a reputation for slamming anything that isn't 'mainstream'. That makes them narrow minded, not knowledgeable.

#60 So.... you're saying this guy cured you?

60> That's nice, but it doesn't change the lack of quality research supporting chiropractic or homeopathic methods despite decades of organizations attempting to produce such. This is a thread about popular misconceptions, and it is undeniably a popular misconception that studies on par with science-based medical research frequently support these modalities.

#59: gregstevenstx "Would it be terribly self-serving and inappropriate if I were to take this opportunity to point people toward counterknowledge.com? :-)"

Looks interesting.

Evidence wins, anecdotes also ran.

60: And here I thought you were rational.

Oh, and just to clarify to anyone who cares: the reason I made the "self-serving" comment, above, is because if you look on the site you'll notice I'm listed as a science editor for it.

> 60 WholeHouseLibrary

Point me to one, just one (a single example will do), of a peer reviewed, double blind study undertaken and published in a reputable medical or science journal that proves homoeopathy is anything other than bullshit.

Did you know that chiropractors claim they can cure asthma and allergies by cracking backs? Even ear infections?! Did you know that they claim that cracking the backs of infants is a good treatment? Simon Singh, a well respected UK author and scientist, wrote a piece in the Guardian paper exposing these charlatans, and they sued him. You can read about it here. Because of antiquated UK libel laws, he has to prove they cannot cure ear infections!

His latest, co-authored, book is Trick or Treatment. You may also be interested in How mumbo-jumbo conquered the world and Bad Science

I think you'll find that we are right, right, right.

Unless you can PROVE we're wrong that is!

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 3, 2009, 9:14pm.

I can't comment on any of those claims above. I've never heard of them.

Re: #61
No, I am not cured. There is no cure. This "quack" has provided me with (so far) 3 years of a fairly productive, and the most creative phase of my, life. The MDs told me to get my affairs in order.

Re: #64
I am offended by your statement, even if you meant it in jest.

Re: #66
You are wrong because I am alive to tell you my story. I may not be for much longer, but I am still here because of homeopathic and holistic medical wisdom.

67: I didn't mean it in jest. Believeing in homeopathic medicine is entirely anti-rational. It is like believing in pixies and fairy dust.

Homeopaths believe that by taking a substance that causes symptoms similar to those experienced by the patient and diluting it in water to extreme dilutions (most of which are so diluted that none of the original substance remains) creates effective medicine. In homeopathic jargon, one dilution involves taking nine parts of water, and one part of the substance and shaking it up. The second dilution takes one tenth of that resulting dilution and diluting it in nine parts of water againb. Often homeopathic substances are diluted by 10, 20, or 30 times. Every dilution is, according to homeopathic medicine, increase the effectiveness of the resulting solution.

Zicam which asserts itself to be a homeopathic medicine is ciritcized by homeopaths because it contains 2 parts per 100 of active ingredient. Of course, homeopaths probably want to distance themselves from Zicam since is has been shown to cause the loss of smell in those who use it.

In a 30 times diluted substance, to be certain you have one molecule of the activie ingredient, you would have to have a container of water 30 billion times the size of the earth. This limit is set by Avogadro's number, which means that any substance that is diluted using homeopathic methods to 24 times will have, at most, one molecule of the active substance in the resulting dilution (i.e. one molecule out of 10 to the 24th power molecules). Using the logic of homeopathic medicine, you should be able to get better results taking half of the treatment prescribed, since that would dilute it even more.

To date, there are no legitimate medical studies showing that homeopathic medicine has any effect more significant than a placebo. To cover up this lack of effectiveness in clinical trials, homeoppathic advocates say things like Jack Killen, acting deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, who says that homeopathy "goes beyond current understanding of chemistry and physics." However, in a moment of lucidity he also said that "there is, to my knowledge, no condition for which homeopathy has been proven to be an effective treatment."

Alternative medicine is by definition something that has not been proven to have any useful effect. If it is demonstrated to have a useful effect (using clinical trials for example), then it is adopted and becomes simply "medicine". Homeopathy has been tested over and over again, and hasn't shown itself to be any more useful than eating sugar pills. Which isn't surprising, since most homeopathic remedies are essentially sugar pills or some similar substance. You are likely to get more of the substance your homeopath is treating you with by going to your tap and drinking straight from it, since regular tap water is an extreme dilution of almost every substance known.

So, feel offended that I called you anti-rational. That's fine with me. It doesn't change the fact that you believe in a treatment method that has as much validity as waving Harry Potter books at someone and saying pseudo-latin phrases.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 4, 2009, 1:10am.

I'm sorry you are so narrow-minded.
I hope you are never in a medical situation even remotely similar to my own.
Goodbye.

69: I like that. Believing in silly things like "evidence" is narrow-minded. But believing in fairy tale stories about super diluted medicine is somehow not irrational. Heck, even some of the most prominent CAM advocates (Jack Killen for example) admit that homeopathy hasn't been shown to be an effective treatment for any condition.

You are the guy who decided to tell everyone that they were "wrong, wrong, wrong" about homeopathy. Yet when confronted with actual facts about homeopathy you either claim ignorance of them (in response to omaca), or act offended. I'm sorry, but the facts are biased. And the facts show that homeopathy is entirely ineffective for any purpose.

To expect to get a single molecule of the "medicinal" substance in 30X pills, you would have to consume about two billion of them. I hope you've been bellying up to the pill bottle, because otherwise you've basically been taking sugar or chalk.

If I have a medical problem, I figure I'll avoid the snake-oil salesmen and the witch-doctors and rely on treatments supported by actual scientific evidence.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 4, 2009, 2:09am.

If I have to choose to believe in lots of detailed scientific papers or I have to believe in personal experience I choose to believe in personal experience (but strictly that - not what my brother's cleaner's sister once heard about happening to her uncle's child).

Let me state very firmly that I believe that Homeopathic medicine is something of a contradiction in terms and like most of you above I recognise that there is no scientific evidence at all. But WHL feels better and ultimately that's a result.

What I can't stand is when the woomonsters do one of the following:
- tell you that Homeopathy (etc) can cure cancer, AIDs etc
- exploit poor stupid people in order to make money
- encourage you to only follow their type of medicine and ignore conventional cures
- run down conventional medicine and accuse them of being frauds, in the pay of big pharma etc.

WHL isn't trying to convert anyone beyond telling them that for him it worked. He tried conventional medicine and I'm sure that if tomorrow someone invented a real conventional cure for his specific condition he would be beating a path to the doctors door. Almost certainly he is only benefiting from a placebo effect but there is plenty of scientific evidence that a placebo effect can have very real consequences and as far as I understand then the more convincing a placebo is the better its results will be. As you all point out Homeopathic remedies have very little (OK normally none) active ingredients so they should at least be side-effect free ;-)

My 8 year old son is at home in bed today as a result of an ear infection. He seems to suffer from these more than his siblings and when my wife came home from the doctors with some Homeopathic remedies I went on my little quack rant - but of course I'll let him have them, what harm can it do (and of course thanks to our socialised medicine it's free) but he also gave him first and foremost antibiotics and a whole bunch of other stuff to treat various symptoms.

So guys get real and get this subject off the thread. I'm sure that even WHL would agree that there is no scientific proof that Homeopathy etc works in general but if it works for him who cares. Please go and direct your efforts against the real criminals of this game who bully and cheat using Homeopathy or go out and do something to help the billions of people worldwide who have no significant access to healthcare of any sort, homeopathic or otherwise.

71: "It works for me, who cares" is simply excusing snake oil.

On June 6, 1942, Joe Toi survived not one, but two grenade detonations within mere feet of his body. He was completely unprotected from either of them, but escaped without a scratch. Should we then conclude that hand grenades don't hurt people? That it is safe to stand near them when they detonate?

No. That would be silly. Most people intuitively understand this. Yet they also seem to want to push anecdotal testimonials of the efficacy of demonstrably ineffective treatments as somehow being persuasive.

Homeopathy is built on flimsier foundations than concluding hand grenades are safe. All the Joe Toi example and the WHL andecdote demonstrates is that sometimes odd things happen. In WHL's case, it is possible that he does feel better, but attributing it to CAM is simply silly. If it is preventing him from continuing to seek actual treatment, it may be actively harming him.

Homeopathy is quackery of the highest order, and should be treated as such.

(Interesting that you mention the billions of poor who don't have access to medicine. Advocates of homeopathy are trying to spread their brand of fairy dust to the third world as a cure for malaria, AIDS and other ills. They are misleading uneducated poor people in such places into thinking their lactic acid pills have value. This is a travesty.)

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 4, 2009, 3:17am.

Sorry StormRaven, I don't mind that you disagree with me and I quite enjoy the lively banter of these threads but I do object when people don't read replies before commenting.

You said,

(Interesting that you mention the billions of poor who don't have access to medicine. Advocates of homeopathy are trying to spread their brand of fairy dust to the third world as a cure for malaria, AIDS and other ills. They are misleading uneducated poor people in such places into thinking their lactic acid pills have value. This is a travesty.)

I said,

What I can't stand is when the woomonsters do one of the following:
- tell you that Homeopathy (etc) can cure cancer, AIDs etc
- exploit poor stupid people in order to make money
- encourage you to only follow their type of medicine and ignore conventional cures
- run down conventional medicine and accuse them of being frauds, in the pay of big pharma etc.

I'm just pleased that WHL feels better and I frankly wouldn't care if he blamed it on the fairy dust as long as he personally doesn't try to sell me a bottle of dust.

Barry wrote: So guys get real and get this subject off the thread.

You've seen the title of the thread, right? This is exactly what we're here about. Homeopathy is bumkum. The belief in its pseudo-scientific veracity is a "misconception that gets me riled up."

Chiropractors, whilst not complete quacks (insofar that manipulative therapy of the musculo-skeletal system can work for certain things) have pushed their position far into farce. Cure allergies by cracking my spine? Indeed.

Disclaimer: My wife has dual Masters Degrees in Sports Physiotherapy and Manipulative Physiotherapy. She thinks (actually, knows) that much of what chiropractors do is useful, and actually works, but she considers them dangerous as they do not undergo the same training as real physios. She also thinks the more outlandish claims by these people is ridiculous and dangerous. Don't get her started on the safety, let alone appropriateness, of manipulating the spine of a 14 month old infant; something chiros promote.

Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science mentions interesting research which I think is relevant here.
If I remember correctly it says that of terminally ill cancer patients who are diagnosed to have less that six months to go, about one percent are still alive five years later, without doing anything. This is simply the combination of variability (while doctors give the average and not the standard deviation), spontaneous regression, etc.

Even though there is no pattern in what the survivors did in the mean time, many of them confuse correlation with causation and credit something they were doing. Quacks have the tendency to be very nice, and have you coming back for years to get more money out of you, so are a common candidate for this.
All of this is of course, a very human thing to do, and I can't be sure if my rationality would survive such an ordeal.

Of course WHL et al, should not confuse herbal 'alternative' medicine with homeopathy. While many of the practitioners of herbal medicine have the same distressing lack of evidence and sound methods, herbal medicines do contain active ingredients in pharmacological significant doses, and may be actually effecting cures beyond placebo level. Of coruse if they'd done any proper trials, and standardised the ingredient load then we'd know for sure. However there is an oft confused, but significant difference between the two.

I'm sure nobody wishes WHL anything but the best of health, and everybody does recognise that 'modern' medicine does not yet have a cure for many illnesses - so anything at all that works, or appears to work, in those situations does provide very very valuable relief to the patients. But equally, such patients are also a goldmine for scammers of the worst degree.

Misconceptions that get you riled up is the title. And Omaca you are quite right to say that Homeopathy is bunkum and it was a very worthy addition to the thread. WHL just disagrees with you that's all. For him it helps but I haven't seen anyone disagreeing with you about the lack of scientific evidence.

I probably could have chosen my words a bit better but what I meant was if you want to debunk Homeopathy then fine go ahead and start a thread about it and I'll stay away as I consider it already debunked. I was just hoping that we might get back to a more general range of topics like where nit-picking came from or the common ancestor of Humans and Chimpanzees.

And by the way I'm completely with you on Chiropractors. At least for the most part Homeopathy in the developed world won't do you any harm (unless you do it to the exclusion of conventional medicine). No one is going anywhere near my spine.

Barry,

Duly noted and accepted. I hope I didn't come across as an ass. :)

Medicine isn't science, medics aren't scientists (a frightening proportion I meet isn't even reasonably intelligent, or scientifically educated), and I'm not terribly surprised that somebody out of field could or has helped someone's problem.

Does it happen "as a rule"? No. Does it happen occasionally? Certainly.

How about confusing mass and weight, and not really getting that weight is force?

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 4, 2009, 9:11am.

#79: LolaWalser "Medicine isn't science, medics aren't scientists"

Medics aren't (usually) scientists, but they are usually trained to follow scientifically based procedures. Engineers aren't scientists either, but they can build good stuff following scientific results. I don't think I would want to use a bridge built on homeopathic principles.

Have homeopaths branched into engineering? Wow.

#80

That would be annoying in a student or a scientist, but in daily routine, eh. Might as well complain about the sun "setting" and "rising".

79: The problem with saying "somone is occassionally helped" is that there is no evidence that someone outside the field actually helped them. As pointed out before, a small percentage of people given short time frames to live, actually live much longer than that. Odd things happen. Homeopaths live in the nether world of odd happenstance. That's why their advocates always cite anecdotes, but when subjected to actual clinical trials, homeopathy always fails to show any actual results. In other words, the evidence is that homeopathic medicine hasn't ever helped anyone. Merely that someone who happens to be taking sugar pills got lucky.

73: I didn't mean to say you didn't necessarily know, but your implication at the end of your post was that poor people could benefit from homeopathy because they didn't have access to actual medicine. I was pointing out that homeopaths are actively trying to branch out into the third world, that's all.

Also, suppose WHL came here and said that a leprechaun gave him some magic beans and by eating those he got better. Would anyone be upset if someone called him anti-rational for that statement? I doubnt it. Would anyone defend him by saying "it works for him!" I doubt it. Homeopathic remedies are magic beans. Worse, because beans might actually confer some nutritional benefit that milk sugar pills don't.

76: If herbal remedies show any kind of actual effect via clinical double blind trials, they are adopted by actual medical practitioners and used. They then stop being "alternative medicine" and become simply "medicine". "Alternative medicine" is simply a pretty way of saying "things for which there is no evidence".

This is what riles me up: the confusion of correlation with causation.

One book I've recommended in other threads is Voodoo Science by Bob Park. It's a quick read, which briefly surveys several popular pseudo-scientific misconceptions and deceptions, from perpetual motion to "natural" medicine, transcendental meditation, cold fusion, missile defense, astrology, and UFOs/alien abductions.

While Park focuses on the specific case studies, he also tries to develop an argument that many of these ideas started out as honest mistakes or misconceptions (propelled by poor experimental design or wishful thinking), but as the evidence against them mounted their proponents made the choice (conscious or not) to become outright frauds. This story fits his discussions of perpetual motion and cold fusion particularly well, some of the others not so much.

#83 you're absolutely right and I am again guilty of typing before engaging my brain and thus leaving a yawning gap of misinterpretation available. I actually think that one of the biggest dangers from homeopathy is when they do go out to the developing world and peddle this nonsense. It's a lot less dangerous here where we have (sometimes) choices available to us and at least good access to information, although admittedly this is also of dubious quality. If people consult those sources seriously ie go to their doctor but still end up with a CAM remedy which they find helps them then I won't interfere even if it was magic beans from a leprechaun. Although I would also probably join in with the calling him "anti-rational" but sometimes it makes me feel good being "anti-rational" too.

79: The problem with saying "somone is occassionally helped" is that there is no evidence that someone outside the field actually helped them.

The man thinks he was helped. Who are you to say he wasn't? He suffered, did the rounds with the MDs, and found relief in a different camp. It's anecdotal, not scientific evidence, and I wouldn't build a theory on it, but so what?

I said, (see above), these things don't happen as a rule. (People aren't stupid. If homeopaths and alternative medicine folks did routinely a better job than institutional sawbones, there'd be fewer conventional hospitals, and more vegan/crystal/aromatherapy healing... spas.)

But institutional medicine is in a large part quackery too. Oh, excuse me--art. Yeah.

86: He can think fairy dust helped him too. That doesn't mean that it actually helped. All of the evidence available indicates that he wasn't helped by it any more than he would have been helped by casting magic spells on him.

As I pointed out, this is a confusion between correlation and causation.

The problem isn't necessarily that he places faith in fairy dust (he can waste his money and time on fairy dust, magic beans, snake-oil, and waving magic wands about for all I care). The problem is he came in here to tell everyone that we were "wrong, wrong wrong" about homeopathy being complete bullshit. Bluntly put, that's entirely irrational. There is no evidence at all that homeopathy works. Inother words, he is the one who is "wrong, wrong, wrong".

Conventional medicine (or rather simply "medicine") is backed by actual scientific testing. That's more than can be said of any CAM remedy (which should be labeled more accurately "fraudulent medicine", or more charitably "wishful thinking").

My pet peeve is the way people misuse statistics to try to make a point. As in "Wear your seat belt on short trips because 99% of accidents occur less than 25 miles from home." Are we supposed to believe that people drive worse in their own neighborhood? Or that 99% of mileage is logged close to home? I know too many people who stubbornly believe the former.

>87, Is this what people mean now when they talk about the "correlation vs. causation" fallacy? It seems to me that the fallacy you're trying to point out here is better termed "post hoc ergo propter hoc" than "correlation vs. causation." To even speak of there being a "correlation" between two events is to speak of a statistically significant co-incidence between them. If I understand you correctly, you are taking the position that there is no correlation between (1) trying homeopathic remedies and (2) achieving positive medical results. And if you're right, then the grounds for invoking the "correlation = causation" fallacy are absent, because no correlation exists. Right?

89: You are correct. Homeopathy is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. This fallacy also annoys me.

And just to be clear, I'm not taking the position that there is no correlation between taking homeopathic remedies and achieving positive results. I am accepting the available evidence on hand that all says there is no correlation.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 4, 2009, 3:14pm.

#88> I think we're supposed to understand that "I'm just running down to the store, therefore I don't need to put on my seat belt" is bad logic; that driving is an inherently dangerous process that should never be done without the appropriate safety precautions even in routine circumstances.

Statistically, I think the problem here is that people understand that something hasn't happened to them, and correctly derive from that that the event is of low probability, but fail to multiply by the negative consequences.

I'll jump in a little late on this topic. I'm a scientist by trade so my opinions may be biased, but here's what I've observed.

1) Science is based on facts.

Actually often science is based on partial facts (limited instrumentation for instance), mingled with opinion, and mixed in with a little ego. Scientists are people. They study a problem as best they can, but they don't know everything and often have to make conjectures. They also have careers to worry about, so if someone can come up with a novel or interesting explanation for something, they might be able to make a mark for themselves and advance their prestige.

2) Scientists are rabid atheists who denounce religion.
Not from my experience. Most scientists are people. As a whole they may be less interested in attending church, but most scientists I know are pleasant tolerant fellows who keep an open mind to the more mystical subjects.

3) If it's printed, it's right. If it's believed by many scientists it's right. Science is always right.
See #1. It's amazing to look back what the scientific establishment believed 30 years ago that is no longer accepted. Science is ever changing.

Aaron

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 6, 2009, 1:54am.

Ok - one more peeve.

Science by authority.

Two recent well-publicized controversial issues have been intelligent design and global warming.

With both issues I think the leading scientists have handled them wrong. Rather than arguing or addressing scientific points the scientific leaders have dismissed all naysayers as 'unscientific', 'wrong', or 'ignorant'. As if addressing these naysayers is below them.

I know there are a fare number of scientists, engineers, and people in general that are skeptical of global warming (I've met them!) but global warming proponents have simply come out against this crowd with arguments like "X number of leading scientists believe in global warming" or "The government panel of blah blah blah shows incontrovertible proof of global warming." This isn't science. This is consensus.

A much better tactic would be to address skeptics' arguments and concerns head on. Show the world the data. Bring out the science, rather than hiding it. If someone says global warming isn't happening, use data, facts, and scientific theories as your tools to show him or her why global warming is occurring due to human activities.

Hiding behind the curtain of scientific authority does nothing to advance science.

Aaron

93: Well, with respect to intelligent design, the problem with arguing or addressing scientific points is that most of the proponents of intelligent design seem to be impervious to evidence.

For example, many proponents of intelligent design will say "there are no transitional fossils", but when presented with examples of such will deny that those fossils are transitional, asserting that there are now two gaps in the fossil record where previous to the discovery of say tiktalik there was one.

In other words, in many cases arguing the scientific evidence with many intelligent design proponents is a lost cause. Because their conclusion was reached independent of the facts, the introduction of facts to them won't serve to change their minds.

I found #92 very interesting and wise. I am a scientist too and I have more or less the same opinions. I just want to add some more notes:

1) A fact in today science is not just simple as observing an apple or the sun. It is something more complex, based on previous theories. A gamma-ray detector can measure gamma-rays, but how we define gamma-rays, their interaction with a particular material, the electronics necessary to build the signal that we observe on our computers, the interpretation of these signals, and so on... everything is based on theories. So, facts today are based on theories used to build the instruments necessary to make facts. And, as theories, are biased as described by Aaron.

2) This is not true for me too. I believe in God, I am Catholic and I am an astrophysicist. I found no contradiction between these two activities. In addition, as established by the II Vatican Council, science is a way to be closer to God. In my country, Italy, most of researchers are of marxist inspiration and thus against religion, particularly against the Catholic Church. But "most" does not mean "all".

3) I agree on this too. Also among my colleagues there is the bad custom to believe this, with particular reference to Nature or Science journals. But I have found often some very rough errors on Nature papers. Just to cite one: I remind a Nature paper on a Gamma-Ray Burst, where the lightcurve of the event continued even below the instrument sensitivity....

Luigi

93> As to global warming, the science has been argued for years but you're never going to get 100% of scientists to agree on anything, even gravity. So at some point you have to decide how to make policy decisions based on science and one way is that enough of the relevant scientists agree.

Another factor is that those who dislike a policy on non-scientific grounds, such as economics, can sponsor research into other causes. As PortiaLong (I think) said on another thread, scientists are always trying to refute the current hypothesis, that's what they do. So you'll find plenty of scientists who will take the money and do the oppositional research.

So, how many scientists is a fair number anyway? Even 1% of all the climatologists in the world is a fair number and from what I've seen of those lists of scientists who don't believe global warming is happening, a lot of them are from are from areas that aren't relevant to the question.

StormRaven (94): You may be right that some proponents of intelligent design may not want to see any evidence contrary to their own beliefs. But that is no excuse for bad logic. Scientists still have a job to do - present science to convince others.

This whole intelligent design vs evolution debate really has been sad. You have extremists on both sides talking past each other in yelling matches "I'm right!". If you have truth you should be able to explain why it's truth. You should do this rationally and intelligently, even if the other side won't listen. Neither side of the debate seems willing to do this.

There are holes in the theory of evolution and the ID people have tried to exploit them. Evolutionists should address the shortcomings of evolution, rather than ignoring them. I fear their reluctant to do so because this could be taken as a sign of weakness. Again, science by authority, consensus, or strength is not science. He who yells loudest is not always right.

What makes you think that scientists aren't working on filling any holes that remain in the theory of evolution by natural selection? I'm sure any scientist worth his salt would relish the opportunity to make a name for himself. I think though that you may have been oversold on how serious these "holes" are.

Where has this shouting been going on anyway? On the internet? In school board meetings? In neither place is science going on.

jjwilson61: I speak of shouting in a metaphorical sense. Just because one has the best advertising, buzzwords, degree, background, etc. doesn't make their position right.

I haven't tried to sell any of the 'holes' in evolution because I haven't mentioned them. ANY scientific theory has flaws. I simply mention evolution because it is a high-profile topic.

You'll see the same sort of back-and-forth at many scientific conferences on a variety of scientific issues, or in the scientific journals. One side will have a set of evidence and push forth a particular hypothesis/theory, while another side will have another set of data with an alternative explanation. Both sides will stand firm in their beliefs rather trying to reconcile their differing opinions. There is atmosphere in science that I believe in many cases has driven truth to the back burner in the name of one's own career, opinion, and prestige.

This was present in Greg Bear's Darwin's Children. I think in general his presentation of scientists were overly stereotypical, but he did have one group of 'old-school' scientists that held to a particular viewpoint and would not consider other viewpoints, evidence to the contrary. These 'old-school' scientists exist, and they are willing to castigate any one who disagrees with them.

There's a misconception in the general public and lawmakers that people simply can't falsely confess to crimes, and yet it happens with alarming frequency. Also, eyewitness testimony is often unreliable, but people accord it a truthful status far out of proportion to its accuracy. I've read a lot of articles on how the brain works, and I've concluded that false confessions and inaccurate eyewitness testimony have perfectly understandable scientific explanations, but people just don't want to believe them.

On evolution, I found this from talkorigins.com describing some common misconceptions. The site was recommended by fredbacon here.

This is a misconception that I have worked to overcome.

"The theory of evolution says that life originated, and evolution proceeds, by random chance."

There is probably no other statement which is a better indication that the arguer doesn't understand evolution. Chance certainly plays a large part in evolution, but this argument completely ignores the fundamental role of natural selection, and selection is the very opposite of chance.

As a non scientist, I have had difficulty grasping the significance between the role of randomness and the role of selection. It is subtlety that I missed, even without being a creationist.

It may be that the debate on evolution is too much between Creationism and Darwinism, and not enough simply focusing on clarification for non scientist, non creationists.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 6, 2009, 12:53pm.

#99 . One side will have a set of evidence and push forth a particular hypothesis/theory, while another side will have another set of data with an alternative explanation. Both sides will stand firm in their beliefs rather trying to reconcile their differing opinions

But that is the way of science. Admittedly it can be unedifying for the public and the media can blow it out of proportion or take a hypothesis and report it as the latest fact. But generally over time a consensus congeals around one camp or the other. Sometimes it takes a short time for this to happen, sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes the old guard never change their mind - Fred Hoyle springs to mind.

ANY scientific theory has flaws.

Well I probably wouldn't call them flaws as such. But yes any scientific theory can be challenged and may well be modified as a result. The creationist / ID camp make a big thing about evolution only being a theory. But of course in science "theory" has a different meaning to that of the real world. A theory is about as good as it gets.

#87

He can think fairy dust helped him too. That doesn't mean that it actually helped. All of the evidence available indicates that he wasn't helped by it any more than he would have been helped by casting magic spells on him.

Do you EVER stop to think before you post? You are committing one of the errors I always admonish students against: applying averages to unique instances. What "all evidence"? You have zero evidence about the unique instance of WholeHouseLibrary's problem. You cannot know, I cannot know, and WholeHouseLibrary cannot know that the homeopath helped him. But there is some probability that he did. However low or high. As I said above (twice), yes, statistics do not sustain the idea that homeopathy is more efficient than conventional medicine--but in any. given. unique. instance. we. cannot. know. whether. it. helped. or. not.

So, the most you could say to WholeHouseLibrary is that you think the probability that the homeopath had helped him is low (for my part, not knowing anything about the problem, the healer, or WHL, I'd prefer not to say anything--beyond what I said above, that it is possible he was helped).

Your rudeness to the man is not just uncalled for, but stupid.

97: In my experience, most scientists who address the subject of evolution vs. intelligent design (or simply out and out creationism) do so on the basis of facts rather than an appeal to authority. Even on YouTube, a hotbed of ranting and screaming, you mostly find refutations of ID/Creationism that take the form of fact laden explanations primarily addressing the arguments made by ID/Creationism proponents rather than rants about how ID/Creationism is stupid.

In fact, from what I have seen, most of the appeal to authority comes from the ID/Creationism side, as they try to quote-mine statements by scientists of note to come up with some sort of authoritative sounding sound bite that is supposed to support their position. Usually, however, it turns out that the scientists doesn't actually support ID/Creationism at all, and the full quote says the exact opposite of what the ID/Creationist proponent claims it says. Or the ID/Creationists will publish a list of "500 scientists who doubt evolution", which is, of course, an appeal to authority. (And upon investigation, it seems it always turns out that the list is woefully inaccurate).

I'm an atheist scientist (like the majority), but I wouldn't call myself a "rabid" atheist (unless you make me very, very mad :)).

However, I am newly and increasingly rabidly anti-Catholic Church, because it threatens the well-being, human rights, culture and progress of society.

103: No, we can have a pretty good idea whether homeopathy helped WHL based upon the evidence available about the efficacy of homeopathy. Claiming that "it worked this time!" isn't evidence of any kind. It is evidence that something unexpected happened. Just like a man surviving a point blank hand grenade detonation. Twice.

The unique circumstance argument is simply bullshit. There is no probability that homeopathy helped him, since there is no evidence that homeopathy has ever helped anyone. This is not a case of "averages". This is a case where the evidence shows no connection between homeopathy and any benefit ever. Statistics don't prove homeopathy is less efficient than conventional medicine. Statistics prove that homeopathy is completely ineffective. Giving credit to homeopathy for some sort of benefit is like giving credit to magic wand therapy. There is simply no basis for concluding that it helps anyone, ever.

WHL is the guy who ran into the thread shouting about how everyone who dismisses homeopathy is "wrong, wrong, wrong". His argument is wholly irrational, which is what I pointed out. And now, because in a thread about science I had the temerity to point out that homeopathy is snake-oil fairy dust, that makes me rude? I don't think so. Your whole argument is also completely irrrational, since it is founded on the idea that somehow, despite there being no actual evidence that sugar tablets dipped in massively diluted solutions has any effect at all, somehow we must believe that because a circumstance is "unique" that this time it helped.

There's a reason why I stopped bothering to have your posts show up, and I can't remember any good reason why I stopped that.

#106

My god, and still it squawks. Not only are you wrong--AGAIN--you really and truly don't bother thinking about your mistakes.

Please, do everyone a favour, and stop blathering about science and statistics.

Richard

As a non scientist, I have had difficulty grasping the significance between the role of randomness and the role of selection. It is subtlety that I missed, even without being a creationist.

Quickly (with low precision): mutations are produced randomly, giving rise to a diverse population. Selection derives from external (or some kinds of internal) pressure: the weather, the climate, predators, presence or absence of nutrients, toxins etc. In a changed environment, selection will favour whatever mutation confers best adaptation to the changed environment.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 6, 2009, 1:40pm.

107: No one is talking about statistics. At least not in the sense you think is being done. There has been shown no correlation between use of homeopathy and benefits. This isn't the case of saying "on average, 10% of people are left-handed, so this person isn't left handed". It is saying "no evidence has ever been produced showing this works". The clinical trials show that all responses to homeopathy fell within the range of a placebo. Saying "he said it worked so we must not say it didn't" is like saying "he said he was helped by a telepath so we must not say he was not".

Not only that, there isn't even a viable mechanism for homeopathy to work. Homeopathic remedies use massive dilutions of the alleged reagents (which are chosen using a process that, in itself, makes little sense). The dilutions of a typical homeopathic remedy are so susbstantial that the likelihood that a single molecule of the original reagent is in a given pill is infinitesimal. As in, something on the order of a billion tablets will have a single molecule. At that point does it matter if that statistic is off by a factor of ten or twenty (or even a hundred or a thousand)? The medicines are given in the form of water that has had reagent diluted into it, or sugar pills dipped in that water.

How diluted? a 10C homeopathic remedy will be diluted ten times. That means you take the reagent and dilute it into ten times as much water. Then you take a tenth of that solution and dilute it in ten times as much water. And then you do that again and again ten times. Homeopaths use dilutions that are at least 10C, but more often 20C, 30C and beyond, up to 1,500C. Somewhere around 24C you run into Avogadro's number.

And homeopathy asserts that the more diluted a substance is, the more effective it is. Think on that for a while.

It isn't just that there is clinical evidence that homeopathy doesn't work. There's simply no way for homeopathy to work. Homeopathy is so silly that it is amazing that anyone bothered to actually do clinical trials. Testing homeopathy is like testing magic wandism, or fairy dustism or similar magical practices. There is no evidence that homeopathy works and no way that it actually could work. Yet you think that we need to defer to WHL's claim that it helped him and not call his claim that those who think homeopathy is bullshit are "wrong, wrong, wrong" is irrational. And I'm the one who is wrong? Get serious.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 6, 2009, 2:08pm.

#109

Yes, you are wrong. Going on and on, repeating trivial claims, while persistently avoiding what I said isn't going to change that.

This is the crux: it is possible that WHL was helped by the homeopathic treatment (by the way--yes, I am assuming that the anecdote is true as WHL reported it. I've seen WHL around on LT and I think I'm justified in assuming that--also in that no magic wands and fairy dust was involved.) That is all I said, and then expanded on, from my first post on the issue.

Whatever you, or I, or anyone, think about homeopathy and alternative medicine, WHL underwent some sort of treatment after which he received relief (one that has lasted for several years now). Perhaps the treatment had nothing to do with his improvement. Perhaps it did. WHL believes it did, you believe it didn't, and I am saying--yes, as a scientist--that, given the circumstances*, we don't know whether he was helped by that treatment or not.

(MOREOVER, this is often the case in medicine: that one cannot prove unequivocally that a treatment worked or how it worked. Many therapies and remedies rely on statistical results, derived from groups; when individual outcomes conform, we take it as a proof of treatment's quality; when they don't, we say "oh well, statistics".)

*If WHL were one of my mice, I could poke and prod and open him up and tell you more, but that's not the case.

I've said everything I had to say about this--four times over if I counted right. Enough.

Originally posted by richardbsmith in post #101
As a non scientist, I have had difficulty grasping the significance between the role of randomness and the role of selection. It is subtlety that I missed, even without being a creationist.
Consider rolling a die and taking a step forward on 1,2,3,4 and a step backward on 5,6. Even though every step is guided by random chance, you will move forward over time with high probability.
Likewise in evolution, very 'fit' animals may be hit by a truck, neutral or deleterious mutations can spread, but fitness is expected to increase over time.

#110: Would you include placebo effects as 'helping' ?

110: Thus far, you've said exactly nothing. You haven't even addressed the fact that homeopathy is ludicrous on its face. This isn't me saying "this is how homeopathy is done", go look up what homeopathy advocates say they do. The dilution increasing the effectiveness of the compound is one of the four tenets of the pseudo-science.

This isn't trivial. This is the heart of homeopathy. The fact is that not only is there no evidence that homeopathy works, there is no way it could work. You've gotten all riled up about one part of the argument (i.e. that there is no clinical evidence that homeopathy works) without bothering to even consider the other half (homeopathy is based upon claims that are the equivalent of fairy dust).

Claiming that somehow we must accept that WHL was helped by homeopathy is like saying that astrology actually predicts the future, or that mediums actually do talk to spirits. (By the way, strology doesn't, and mediums don't). Similarly, homeopathy doesn't actually do anything (other than increase one's sugar or water intake by some small amount). If you want to make the claim that WHL has "benefited" because of the placebo effect, there's no reason to doubt that. That's awfully weak tea though: by that argument he could also have been helped by magic wands, fairy dust, crystal therapy, and indian shaman's rituals, or any number of other magical effects so long as he belived them. But to claim that there is some sort of actual benefit not only goes against all evidence, it goes against all reason.

WHL's belief is irrational. Your arguments in support of his belief are also irrational. Sorry, but there it is.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 6, 2009, 3:21pm.

LolaWaiser said: Your rudeness to the man is not just uncalled for, but stupid.

Anyone else see the irony here?

This thread has begun to degenerate into pettiness, as most (I daren't say "all"! :rolls eyes:) threads debating this topic always... erm, statistically speaking, have a higher than average probability... do.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 6, 2009, 7:43pm.

"76: If herbal remedies show any kind of actual effect via clinical double blind trials, they are adopted by actual medical practitioners and used. They then stop being "alternative medicine" and become simply "medicine". "Alternative medicine" is simply a pretty way of saying "things for which there is no evidence""

Yes. But whether they work or not is independant of whether they've been tested. Until someone has identified the active ingrediant, produced and patented it, no-one will fund the trials. But that doesn't change the nature of the compound. Is it preferable to take medicine you know (well believe that for a significant proportion of people) will help you? sure it is. But when that doesn't work, or there isn't any, then taking a medicine for which there is no evidence that it doesn't work, is not such a bad idea.

On another note... my "favourite" bugbear is the claim that such-and-so a product "contains no chemicals at all".

Really? You can drink/wash your hair with/eat pure energy? Genius!

114> One problem is that many of these herbal remedies duplicate prescription medications and are used instead of going to a doctor, and are not chemically inactive. For one example, St. John's Wort is used for depression despite there being thirteen generic drugs for that that my health plan will cover for cheaper than the herbal medication, and the FD points out known issues with AIDS medications and concerns about interactions with a hosts of medications.* A lot of these herbal medications have alternatives that are known to work.

Yes, if you have hyperplasticamorapathy, and your doctor just shakes his head and gives you a year to live, then go ahead and try anything you think might work. But even all put together, there's not many people suffering from those diseases, and if the herbal medication is worth the shelf space at your local drug store, then medical science has done something for it.

* http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/Publ...

#114

Exactly. I've never had any truck with alternative medicine personally (I already do my best to avoid the conventional one), but I think traditional remedies are often used--at least if one goes by the abundance of books on the subject, herbalists etc. The problems with determining the value of certain remedies in the lab are, as reading fox said, partly economic--is it going to be profitable?--but also scientific. A little plant will contain thousands of organic compounds, varying in amount and composition with another dozens of circumstances, and possibly interacting between themselves in specific ways to give a specific effect. I don't think we have a complete catalogue, let alone a complete description of biochemical interactions and effects, for any humble herb so far. So, we simply don't know, in many cases, what is going on. Drug research roughly has two approaches--one beginning with something that's reputed to have certain properties (willow bark to salicylate), and another trying to synthesise a new drug based on what we know about the properties and actions of old ones. It could be that the second approach is more fruitful. You control the purity of the sample and at least know what you're working with at all time. Then you pray for a potent effect without death or sprouting feathers on the side...

But that still leaves the conundrum of the traditional remedies--what are they? Do they work, and if they seem to work, how do they work? And, if no one is taking up serious research on them (whether it's too expensive or too difficult or both) I don't think it's entirely fair to denigrate en masse those who use them without the blessing of science.

#116

if the herbal medication is worth the shelf space at your local drug store, then medical science has done something for it.

I wish this were true, but it isn't. There are tons of traditional remedies that are still unexplored (some for reasons mentioned above). Still, drug companies are scrambling to get patents on plants and organisms for which they barely know what they're supposed to "do"--let alone what the active agents and mechanisms are. Considering that we have trouble describing exactly how a single compound causes the myriad bioeffects in an organism, it's not all that surprising.

This is NOT to say that grabbing whatever is packaged as the next "natural" wonder drug is going to heal you.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 7, 2009, 2:25pm.

#118: what I meant by "has done something for it", is "has done something for the disease or symptoms", not necessarily "has studied that herbal medication".

Can I distract you by mentioning the misconception that women talk more than men?

114: The bulk of CAM has not been tested and in many cases it has not been tested because the advocates don't want to test it. I think the figure I saw was that about 80% of CAM has never been subjected to any kind of testing at all. Doing small studies doesn't cost comparatively that much to do, and if the initial trials show promise then funding would come quickly. Medical researchers have careers to build, and there is no better way to do so than to prove a particular remedy actually works.

I suppose one of the benefits of using CAM is that since most of the touted remedies don't actualy do anything at all (crystal therapy, applied kinesology, homeopathy and so on) that there aren't going to be side effects. Herbal therapy, on the other hand, has the potential down side of side effects, since there is actual content in the pills. And don't think that because something is "natural" it is good for you. Snake poison is natural. Cyanide is natural. Neither are good for you.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 7, 2009, 4:08pm.

115: Related to this is the misconception that something that is "natural" is better for you than something that is "artificial". Suzanne Sommers has been touting "natural" hormone replacement as being superior to using "artificial" hormones. Never mind that they are chemically identical. According to her there is something superior about having the label "natural".

A related point to StormRaven's is that if somehing is "natural" it is non-toxic. Botulinum is natural and it is among the most potent (if not the most potent) poison ever identified.

#121, 122 and 123.

I quite agree.

"Doing small studies doesn't cost comparatively that much to do, and if the initial trials show promise then funding would come quickly" seems somewhat optimistic to me, but basically you are right, they aren't tested because they don't want to test.

But it doesn't change Lola's point in #118 "I don't think it's entirely fair to denigrate en masse those who use them without the blessing of science.
"

124: One thing to remember, is that for some of the CAM remedies, the market is huge. Homeopathy, for eaxmple, is pretty big business. If they wanted to fund studies, the makers of things like Head On could probably fund one on their product for the cost of a single day's worth of television commercials.

Note that no one is denigrating all CAM. Some herbal rememdies could very well have some sort of actual, albeit thus far untested and unproven, effect. But things like homeopathy, applied kinesology, and the "magical" chiropracters (the ones who claim to be able to cure ear infections and the flu) not only have no scientific evidence to support them, they cannot even come up with a method by which they could work that doesn't involve magical effects like "water memory" or "energy pathways". They aren't just unsupported by evidence, they are patently silly - as silly as people using magic spells to cure disease.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 8, 2009, 2:32pm.

It's always struck me as a shame that the homeopathy movement has gone down the multiple dilutions road.

If you go back to a basic definition of the hypothesis - a little bit of something that creates the symptoms can cause bodily defenses to activate and resolve the greater problem - it's not irrational. After all, that's what a vaccine is - a little bit of something bad (cowpox) stimulating the body to defend against a big bad (smallpox).

It seems as if an area of possibly valuable investigation has been derailed by focusing on the wrong part of the hypothesis.

126: The problem with equating a vaccination (for something like smallpox) with the homeopathic solutions is that vaccinations like the smallpox vaccine are prophylactic - you get them before you get sick, and the process of giving a weakened version of what it is to guard against is supposed to trigger your body's defenses to create antibodies.

Homeopathic remedies, on the other hand, are given when the patient is already sick (let's skip the fact that the only thing homeopathy looks to do is replicate the symptoms, and doesn't worry so much about making sure that the substance is actually related to what is causing the illness). Such a patient's immune system would be expected to be already producing antibodies as fast as it can, so the homeopathic remedy, even if not diluted, wouldn't normally be expected to be helpful in the same way a conventional vaccine would.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 11, 2009, 8:31am.

@126: Dilution has been a central concept of homeopathy since it was developed in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Its main initial promoter, Samuel Hahnemann, actually did some testing of various concentrations, discovering that less-concentrated solutions had the best effects. This is not hard to understand, since the active ingredients were often toxic! After all, they were selected to produce the symptoms (chills, fevers, rashes, etc.) that they were supposed to treat.

Homeopathy is not even remotely analogous to vaccination, which has been verified through rigorous, repeated and extensive testing, and can be justified by what we know about the immune system. Homeopathy is much more primitive and essentially boils down to "starve a cold, feed a fever" -- only doing so to such a small extent that you don't actually change the amount or composition of what you eat at all!

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 10, 2009, 11:17pm.

Dear Group,
I think I am a little drunk, OK I am only 170 cm tall...
But why such a Bru.Ha.Ha about such a trivial topic?
If you want diluted water, just have a sip from the ocean. I think you will find molecules from "every one" who has ever lived. Just take a breath and you have some molecules of Jesus/Hitler and any other name that is important/interesting/... to you.

Sorry, tomorrow I will be sober, but tomorrow you will still be...

Not exactly a misconception, more group ignorance:

Whenever I tell people I am a space historian, INEVITABLY they ask me, "So, do you believe we landed on the moon?"

This is sad for two reasons.

1) Either the person really believes we may not have landed on the moon or...

2) The person knows nothing about space history except that there is a controversy about whether or not we landed on the moon.

Dear neopeius,
When did this stupidity, re. the moon landings start? I am fairly sure I didn't hear of it until, say 10 or less years ago.
Is it an age thing or... WHY?

edited to change my estimate of when I first noted the myth.
Guido.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 11, 2009, 7:06pm.

I'd say about 10 years ago is when it got big. Perhaps coincident with the rise of the internet. It also accompanied a general amnesia about the space program. Until the early 80s, people were still pretty big on space exploration. Kids still wrote letters to NASA applying to become astronauts (including me!).

Challenger focused attention on space briefly but Discovery pushed it all back into mundaneness. Since space travel makes few headlines these days, it's the sensational crap which catches the eye.

My humble opinion.

sighs with sorrow

You have to remember that man hasn't been on the moon for over a generation now. People have grown up and had children with no direct memory of it. Also there was a 6 year gap between the last Apollo mission and the first Shuttle launch (which I remember well as there was a telly set up in the school hall and anyone interested could go and watch the launch). Although for at least some of that time hope was retained by the various testing aerodynamic test flights. But very quickly (probably before Discovery's first flight) it soon became clear that the Shuttle had been over-promoted and didn't live up to our hopes of continuing exploration or the moon ... and beyond (at least not by itself).

Exactly. So now it's a self-perpetuating problem. People no longer remember space travel nor do they ascribe any importance to it.

Maybe someone needs to turn the Space Race into a 1st Person Shooter or something. "CALL OF DUTY: One Small Step"

Some people will believe anything. Isn't that the whole point of this thread? :-)

So some poor deluded souls believe the whole moon landing was a hoax. Apart from pointing out their ignorance, what else should we do? Who really cares?

People have believed nonsense from time immemorial. Without even going back too far (and most people today would label the ancient Greek, Roman and Eygptian religions as nonsense), we have the purveyors of saint's relics in the Middle Ages, snake-oil salesmen in popular US Western folklore, the promoters of such drivel as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and even (dare I say it?) the farce of Xenu and his Intergalactic Space Empire and Thetan infection/possession.

I differentiate between believers of this kind of rubbish (ie, complete quacks), and those who honestly just misunderstand or confuse regular scientific concepts. Whilst I don't believe in the more outlandish claims of chiropractors, and even acupuncturists, the fact remains that their treatments are at least based on proven medical procedures. Not so the promoters of such claptrap as mystical gems, ley lines, Chariots of the Gods and other such bunkum. The former can be reasoned with or educated. The latter just pitied.

As long as chiropractors stick to physiotherapy, they can do some good, though I would rather go to a physiotherapist, who has been better trained than a chiropractor. But acupuncture? Where is the basis in proven medical procedures there?

137 > I'd have to do some looking to find them, but I believe there has been some positive correlation between acupuncture and the relief of symptoms it is supposed to correct. Most western doctors don't know why or how it works but many now agree can be effective.

ETA: Though you'd have to knock me out to even think of sticking me with those needles.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 14, 2009, 5:20pm.

I believe there is quite good evidence that it works in the relief of pain. I believe the current top theory is that it works by causing something in the skin (nerve endings?) to release endorphins. The theories that the originators of the technique have used to explain it have not managed to pass scientific muster in the west.

@138: ...I believe there has been some positive correlation between acupuncture and the relief of symptoms it is supposed to correct.

Beyond what one might expect from a placebo effect?

My wife is a practicising physiotherapist. Not only did she study and qualify with honours in her first degree, she went on and took two more additional Masters degrees in physio; a Masters in Manipulative Physiotherapy and a Masters in Sports Physiotherapy. This puts her in the top 3% of her profession in the country. I base my comments above on her professional opinion, which I obviously trust. :)

So, yes chiropractors can offer some good manipulative treatments. Like you jimroberts, I would prefer physios, and will stick to them (as I know for a fact that their study of human anatomy and the muscelo-skeletal system is much greater and detailed than that of chiros, and most doctors), but that doesn't change the fact that the basis of chiropractics is sound. Just their outlandish claims to be able to cure allergies, common colds and the like is rubbish.

It is generally accepted that acupuncture functions on the basis of something called "trigger points". I don't believe the "lines of life force" nonsense, but the fact that nerve endings and muscles can be stimulated by carefully inserted pins is proven. It's on that basis that I made the post above.

Where is the basis in proven medical procedures there?

IIRC, it's also been effective with breech births, too.

Personally, I think the placebo effect gets a bad rap. If your goal is pain reduction (rather than curing the cause of the pain), then placebo effect is as good as anything else, no?

Well, it works one third of the time. So two in three will not be satisfied.

I TAed a Chinese Medicine class in college. One of our multimedia materials was a film from China made in the 70s which espoused the miracle of acupuncture. It featured a girl getting a tonsilectomy with no anaesthesia and a bunch of needles poked in her.

It turned out that she had been somewhat anaesthetized and the film was propaganda.

We also had a practitioner come an ply her craft on a student who mostly complained of how the needles hurt.

I'm not saying all Eastern medicine is quackery any more than I would argue that all Western medicine is rigorous science. But all medicine should be subject to the scientific testing. Part of the problem is that Eastern medicine just hasn't been very rigorously tested yet.

Personally, I suspect most of it would fail such tests, but perhaps there's an amazing discovery yet to be made in the testing of Eastern medicine.

#144: For the record, I was being fairly tongue-in-cheek with that previous comment. :)

#144: acupuncture has been tested rather extensively, and it's very interesting to see the improvements in doing double-blind tests here. How would you ensure the person giving the treatment doesn't know whether it's placebo or not, when they're poking needles in someone?

AFAIK the first tests were mainly about whether the exact positioning of the needles matters (it doesn't). After that you're basically left with "does poking needles in someone help or not?", because it's rather questionable whether it can still be called acupuncture. Still, the idea that this would trigger some physiological response is at least somewhat plausible.
More recently, using blunt needles that retract back into the needle hub after hitting the skin, it's been shown to be "no better than poking patients gently with toothpicks" (of course, as long as they still think they are going through the more invasive treatment).

some sources 1 2
3

145: I figured you probably were, but just in case someone takes it seriously: wouldn't a medicine that actually does something more than a placebo plus the placebo effect be even better? The placebo effect is essentially that you think you will feel better so you do, and wouldn't conventional medicine have this effect as well as the actual benefit testing has shown the medicine to have?

Skin apparently has many more functions other than just holding things in.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

Which is about capsaicin but lends credibility to some use of acupuncture as well.

Robert

Sorry, slightly off topic, but has any/much serious work been done on the Placebo effect. I know I could wiki etc. but I thought some one might know some latest info.

Spelling and added "much"

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 16, 2009, 12:53am.

Yes, lots and lots of studies since all medical trials have to account for the effect. I couldn't cite you examples, though.

Yes, lots and lots of studies since all medical trials have to account for the effect. I couldn't cite you examples, though.

Yes, lots and lots of studies since all medical trials have to account for the effect. I couldn't cite you examples, though.

149>

Quite a bit, actually. There was an interesting article just a week or so ago (http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magaz...) summarizing some of the interesting findings .

#153: Nice bit of history and examples in the sidebar, but I've seen several replies to that article challenging the claim that 'placebos are getting stronger', giving alternative explanations for this phenomenon (example: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=1...)
Some more examples of results of placebo research: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4151

Patients who receive placebos from someone in a white labcoat get better results than when the placebo is administered by someone not wearing a white labcoat.

Just speaking from personal experience I can say that when acupuncture needles are placed properly, they don't hurt going in or while they're in. I'll never forget watching my kung fu teacher revive a student who had been knocked unconscious by placing a single needle into the groove between the nose and the upper lip. I leaned over the guy and saw his face, which had been green, immediately flush pink. He was sitting up a moment later. My teacher also used needles as conduits for electrical pulses to reduce swelling and inflammation from injuries we received in class. It felt a lot like ultrasound therapy.

My teacher also was skilled with herbs, many of which do have proven medicinal effects. But he was always the first to say that Western medicine was better for some conditions, particularly when surgery was called for.

155: The herbs with proven effects, do Western doctors use them?

Sure. The main ones I remember Sajo putting in his mixtures were ginger root, ginseng, and licorice. There were probably others I might have recognized, but not under their Chinese names. He used to burn mugwort for various conditions also. Supposedly the burning of mugwort (moxibustion) can increase blood flow, particularly in the pelvic region, but I don't think it's been that well studied yet. Sajo used it to move the blood flow through our bruises quicker, to clean them out and take down the swelling. He also stimulated bruises with small sterile needles that were inserted and left in place for several days with bandages over them.

On a different note, I had some punch once that a friend made with mugwort she'd gathered. It turned out to be unexpectedly, weirdly mind-altering. We had no idea.

157: Then that instance of the use of herbal remedies isn't really alternative medicine, it is simply medicine.

>156

Yes.

Fish Oil for high triglycerides (Omega-3 Fatty Acids) (the prescription version of this is Omacor: http://www.drugs.com/pro/omacor.html).

Niacin also for high cholesterol.

Black Cohash for hot flashes associated with menopause.

Glucosamine-Chondroitin for osteoarthritis.

St. John's Wort for dysthymia (minor depression) has SSRI effects.

etc.

One problem - even with the herbal treatments that have been studied and shown to be beneficial - is that the individual products sold in health stores (GNC etc.) are not regulated the way that pharma grade meds are. So if you buy Prozac 10mg you are getting within a fraction of a percent of 10mg because it is regulated and required to be within a certain very narrow range. If you buy St. John's Wort 200mg you are getting anywhere from a fraction (or none) of that to several times (including orders of magnitude) that per capsule depending on the manufacturer and the dose can vary from pill to pill and bottle to bottle.

Of course, many of the herbal remedies that have been studies have shown no benefit or clinically insignificant benefit but people continue to spend money on them so they will continue to be promoted/sold.

The real harm, as I see it, is when herbal medications do actual harm or interact negatively with other meds that a patient is taking that have proven benefit. For instance ginseng - a common herbal additive and promoted for use in many medical conditions (including CHF, COPD, and diabetes/diabetic neuropathy among others) may be associated with tachycardia, hypertension, prolonged qTc interval. May cause low blood sugar in patients taking diabetic medications (which can be variable due to the fluctuating amounts of active herbal ingredient in many preparations). Is associated with bleeding issues in people with ulcers or those on blood thinners (for stroke or heart attack treatment or prevention) such as coumadin or aspirin/NSAIDS (including over the counter ibuprofen or naproxen) and should be discontinued at least 14 days before any surgery or procedure (including dental procedures) due to the risk of bleeding). Ginseng is also associated with a syndrome of diarrhea, hypertension, nervousness, dermatologic eruptions, and insomnia (Ginseng Abuse Syndrome) after prolonged use or high dosages.

Large doses of licorice are associated with hypokalemia:
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/81...

Anything that changes how your body functions is a drug. Some drugs are studied, some aren't. Some drugs are regulated, some aren't. Just because a drug is "natural" doesn't necessarily mean that it is safe - it means that the manufacturer isn't required to warn you about the potential side effects (because it is a "dietary supplement" - does the label on the can of coffee warn you that excessive use of caffeine can exacerbate hypertension, gastritis and insomnia?).

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 17, 2009, 12:00am.

Sorry, folks. I didn't realize how long my (above) rant was until I posted it (but will let it stand - feel free to skip over it).

Regarding two alternative therapies that have been discussed in this thread:

Homeopathy - this is a harmless crock, the only harm comes when people who have a serious and treatable (by conventional medicine) problem use homeopathy instead of a proven therapy. If people want to waste their money on very expensive distilled water that is their call.

Accupuncture - the theories as to why it works are varied and unproven but several studies have suggested that it does help with certain problems that conventional medicine is notoriously poor at treating (chronic pain syndromes for one). Again, as it has no downside (no serious harm - at most a mild discomfort) if someone has been disappointed by the results from conventional medicine then I don't see a problem.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Set 17, 2009, 12:12am.

#160: You're on a site called librarything. I'm sure people here are used to reading, so please don't hold back making long but interesting posts. :)

re homeopathy: I disagree. Accepting and understanding homeopathy requires rejecting a lot of physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Of course most quack cures are pretty harmless when used for colds and such, but believing in them can be dangerous when you go looking for, say, malaria prevention (which 10/10 random homeopaths asked in England claimed to be able to do in a recent test). The main problem is that the principles of homeopathy imply it is a cure for anything.

re accupuncture: Which studies? In any case, I agree that this is less of a problem
as the claims are less broad, and at least somewhat biologically plausible.

122, 123, et al,

The Dose Makes the Poison treats this subject very simply and elegantly.

Astrology
a) Those who carelessly confuse it with astronomy
b) The number of column-inches newspaper editors assign to the former vs. how many they assign in total to all science topics

Anthropogenic Global Warming
a) The subtle shift of this label to the more marketable weasel words "climate change"
b) Otherwise respectable and established science writers who, in promoting the concept, use ad hominem attacks on the "denialists", thus demeaning their own stature and credibility.
c) The uncritical acceptance of the concept by media, policitians, teachers . . . Whether or not AGW is occurring, these phenomena hurt proponents and provide easy, undeserved ammunition to opponents.

"Alternative" medicine, therapy and pharmacopeia
a) How did chiropractic practitioners ever get licensed again?
b) A growing disease in itself, which, due to the multibillion nature of its revenues, governments seem reluctant to reign in.
c) A topic given a free get out of jail card, where no one seems to demand clinical data proofs.

Cole_Hendron

So you believe AGW (itself a weasel word, if ever one was coined) does not exist?

I'm just curious. I'm not sure if I infer your position correctly.

I find it fascinating that the anti-climate change brigade are now moving towards the "high moral ground" and defending their objection to overwhelming scientific opinion on the basis of victimhood.

I see no reason to assume a stance here.
Merely to express dismay when David Suzuki rants about putting 'deniers' in prison.
I'd like to see better coverage of the issue in the popular media. I see too many scientifically illiterate journalists writing about this. There's no lack of papers on either side.
But does the IPCC adhere to proper and ethical standards? If no, does THAT get the coverage it deserves?
Is the claim that *tenured professors* at the University of Ottawa, or elsewhere, are on the 'payroll' of ExxonMobil legitimate? Or ad-hominem avoidance of the issues raised?

#165 " I see too many scientifically illiterate journalists"

Nothing more need be said.

How about scientifically illiterate politicians?

Montreal may soon elect a mayor who is sceptical of Apollo 11's trip to the moon.

"Mr. Bergeron calls into question whether man effectively did ever walk on the moon. In an interview granted to Le Journal de Montréal on April 19th 2006 Mr. Bergeron said : 'Are you sure we went to the moon?. I am not so sure. I'm not saying that we didn't go there. I have questions and have read up on the issue. It's a funny coincidence because I thought of this yesterday. I don't know what happened. I must have connected with your brain waves yesterday.'"

http://www.cnw.ca/fr/releases/archive/Oc...

I don't think I would trust any man who just goes and connects with someone else's brain waves. That sounds way more dangerous than living next to a cellular base station.

Is anybody interested in colliding galaxies?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjRJeaNtx...

169, Jim, that's the thing. The truth is kind of boring. I prefer the movie makers' take on it; let's call that science.

Robert

Mr. Bergeron said : 'Are you sure we went to the moon?. I am not so sure. I'm not saying that we didn't go there

I'm fairly certain neither Mr. Bergeron nor the interviewer went to the moon, but the fact that he can't remember is somewhat worrying ;)

As a trained dynamic meteorologist, I find the debate about climate change frustrating. The vast majority of "balanced" material out there puts science on the same footing as myths and rumors, too similar to the debate on vaccinations or evolution. Or worse, popularized garbage about how science is conducted and the theory simultaneously, as in State of Fear. As someone who had worked on many weather models, taking about a month to learn how to run just one, I was dying with laughter when I read about someone murdering a grad student to break into the lab and run their forecast model. Best of luck out there to anyone who thinks they can go cold into a new system and figure it out!

The big problem with climate change is that the effects are uncertain, and are described by general climatological (mean averaged) trends. So, one hurricane or heat wave does not provide concrete evidence, but rather an increasing frequency of these events beyond "regular variability". As a result, it's difficult to verify predictions until years after the fact, but that does not mean they are not occurring.

Yes, I'll conceded that much of the evidence for climate change is correlational based -- a statistically significant correlation between temperature and CO2, a significant rise in CO2 levels in time, which includes notably a peak around the time of the industrial revolution, an inability to predict observed frequencies of events without incorporating CO2 into weather models, etc. However, the preponderance of these events and their links to key historical periods make this evidence much more compelling.

#165, what are the concerns about the ethical standards of the IPCC scientists? Much of the research in that report is based on careful studies of a multitude of scientists throughout the years. It is interesting to note that those scientists who are researching the theory and support climate change have nothing to gain (and even lost the vast majority of their scientific funding in the US in the last few years), while those funded by questionable sources have far more to gain in the argument.

PS -- For those interested hearing really good arguments against the pseudo science debate about vaccinations, check out the blog http://genome.fieldofscience.com/ by reputed computational biologist Steven Salzberg at the University of Maryland.

Some interesting links here. Thanks. I've not read all posts, but am interested in finding a site to help me 'debunk' (or perhaps 'bunk') some claims made for 'Indian Fungus'. Any suggestions?

Have any of you scientists come across this stuff?

Edited to add that perhaps I should post the above in the 'Off-topic' group, which I shall do, but still wouldn't mind hearing if anyone on this thread knows anything about this 'fungus'.

Mensagem editada pelo autor, Nov 12, 2009, 5:44pm.

Message 172: ejfertig

IPCC

I did not say IPCC scientists. I said IPCC, as in the overarching organization. Their publications are problematic: oversimplifying, sometimes notoriously caught out fudging the data to fit the desired result.

Nothing to gain? But now there is an industry, and careers, riding on the politics. Keep those grants flowing.