At 08:43 AM 12/11/2002 -0800, Tim May wrote:
On Wednesday, December 11, 2002, at 01:31 AM, Morlock Elloi wrote:In a way, Mathew's and Choate's attack upon the list has done us a favour. The list is now effectively restricted to those with the will and ability to use filters, which raises the required intelligence level.Does this vindicate homeopathy ?No, it vindicates the vaccination approach, the antigen-antibody approach.
Detweiler was the first wave :-) I'd forgotten about Matthew X ; if he's still sending anything, my filters kill it all.
Or, more pedestrianly, simple learning. Those who learn to filter do so. Others drown.
A central tenet of homeopathy is the bizarre and acausal notion that dilution of the agent by 100x, by 1000x, even by one billion times, makes no difference. "If there is just one atom of arsenic, maybe just one quarter of an atom, in this liquid, your body will learn to later tolerate arsenic!"Homeopathy is a bogus quack theory backed by 200 years of trial-and-error experience.
Experimentation is much more efficient when you use the scientific method
and don't have totally bogus assumptions underlying your work,
but they have developed some useful products.
(Actually the dilution theory says that the more dilute the preparation,
the _stronger_ it is, at least if it's diluted by the people who sell it
and not by the people who buy it. It's rather like somebody's theory of
making a dry martini, which is that you take the vermouth bottle
and gesture meaningfully in the direction of the shaker of gin. :-)
And unlike herbal medicines, some of which can be quite harmful,
the inherent quackery in homeopathy means that the "stronger" medicines
are unlikely to do any actual damage, because they're too dilute.
I wouldn't trust the stuff for actual diseases that can be treated with
modern medicine, because it's a quack theory that doesn't include germs,
but for relief of symptoms (for allergies, or for diseases like the flu
that don't have useful medical treatments) sometimes it's quite effective,
and it's reasonable to compare the effectiveness and side effects of
various products, such as drowsiness from some antihistamines vs.
nausea from some homeopathics. In particular, there's a flu medicine that
doesn't leave you feeling good, but takes you from feeling awful to
feeling not so hot, which is a major improvement, at the cost of a
small amount of ipecac in the pills.
