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Wicknight wrote: »

Any time anyone has tried to demonstrate properly that homoeopathy does something they have failed to find any statistical evidence it does.

On the other hand studies on the effects of ginger have found that it can ease nausea.

Just because something is natural doesn't mean it won't work. The issue is that people want certain treatments to work so they convince themselves that they do. If homoeopathy worked it should be easy to demonstrate that it does. The claim that it works but there are all these convoluted excuses as to why it cannot be demonstrated to work, is simply silly.

Yes this is typical of woo logic, when defending Homoeopathy they'll switch in some natural cure which "Big Farmer" doesn't like. Nobody is denying that the active ingredient of aspirin naturally occurs in willow bark, nor that lots of plants such as poppies, cannabis, coca etc contain drugs which affect humans. And who knows how many more will be discovered?

None of this has any relevance to the central claims of homoeopathy.

1 - Like cures like - Something that makes you cough will (in a small enough dose cure your cough) - It's laughable, it's more like a children's game than medicine.

2 - Dilute it until nothing is left - Now you dilute the active substance until there's none of it left. Homoeopaths see the problem here and now present "the memory of water" which basically requires all of chemistry and physics to be rewritten for it. However they now have another problem in that at the dilution levels they're talking about all water on the planet should pretty much remember all other substances. They now try and get round this problem by telling us they shake it in a very special way!

It's all silly beyond words, and really shows that people will pretty much believe anything.

Bogwalrus is not interested in reading the link to the ebook on how to construct a clinical trial, and to be fair this isn't that surprising.

I'd suggest reading :

Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking by Thomas E. Kida, which covers :

Mistake #1: We prefer stories to statistics. Even a bad story is preferred over great statistics, and this shouldn’t be surprising. We’re social animals, so whatever seems to connect us to others will have a bigger impact than cold, impersonal numbers. This leads us to making decisions based upon a single story which may not be representative of larger trends while ignoring the statistics that tell us about those trends.

Mistake #2: We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas. Everyone wants to be right and no one wants to be wrong. This may be the primary driving force behind the fact that when people look at neutral evidence before them, they almost invariably focus on what seems to confirm what they already believe while ignoring what might count against their beliefs.

Mistake #3: We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events. Odds are that any randomly chosen person has no idea how odds, chance, and randomness affect their lives. People think that unlikely events are very likely while likely events are very unlikely. For example, people forget how large the numbers around them are — an event with a million to one odds against it will happen given a million tries. In New York City alone, this means that several such events could happen every day.

Mistake #4: We sometimes misperceive the world around us. We simply don’t perceive things happening in our vicinity as accurately as we think or might like. We see things that aren’t really there and we fail to see things that are. Even worse, our level of confidence in what we have perceived is no indication of just how likely we are to be right.

Mistake #5: We tend to oversimplify our thinking. Reality is a whole lot more complicated than we realize. Indeed, it’s more complicated than we can deal with — every analysis we make of what goes on must eliminate lots of factors. If we don’t simplify, we’d never get anywhere in our thinking; unfortunately, we often simplify too much and thus miss things we need to take into account.

Mistake #6: Our memories are often inaccurate. To be fair, this isn’t a mistake because we can’t help the fact that our memories are unreliable. The real mistake is in not realizing this, not understanding the ways in which our memories can go wrong, and then failing to do what we can to make up for this fact.

(from http://atheism.about.com/od/bookreviews/fr/DontBelieve.htm )

Here's a brief overview in the form of an interview with Kida:
http://libsyn.com/media/pointofinquiry/7-14-06.mp3
(Kida's bit starts about 9 minutes in)