Friday, January 27, 2006

The More Things Change (the Less Homeopathy Does)...

The Australian Skeptics site has a very interesting excerpt from the May 1957 issue of Heal magazine.
It is becoming clearer every year that polio will be the scourge of mankind. Whatever may be said in official publicity, it is a fact that this disease as now experienced, is the result of modern "scientific" medical methods. [...] A case of paralysis of the type now known as paralytic polio was so rare that very few people had ever seen one. What a difference from today, when most parents are scared stiff lest their children "get the polio." Today, there are vast chemical combines, ever seeking to enlarge their trade by the production and sale of new weird vaccines against whooping cough, diphtheria, poliomyelitis, and many other perils of which we, in healthier days, were never or seldom aware.

Read that paragraph again, but replace "polio" with "autism".

Just like the "autism epidemic" today, the alternatistas have no capacity to understand cause and effect. Polio was an increasing epidemic before vaccination. Polio is no longer found in the wild in the western world because of the success of vaccination (except amongst groups, for example, that refuse vaccination for religious reasons). Polio is still found in the third world where vaccination levels are low or nonexistent but is also being increasingly eradicated there as well due to vaccination. The parallels to the wild terror-mongering about autism today are uncanny.

Then there's more gross misinformation and distortion. A member of the UK Committee for Polio is quoted as saying
neither the Salk nor the British vaccine was 100 per cent safe...

Note the dots at the end of that quote indicating an elision. The implication here is that polio vaccine (or mercury today) is not 100% safe, therefore it is 0% safe, whereas the truth is that any vaccine has the possibility of some side affects. The affects (let alone the side affects) of polio are, however, far far worse.

The World Health Organisation comes in for a bashing as well, particularly for trying to prevent disease in third world countries (including using large quantities of insecticide against malaria - probably DDT).
The World Health Organisation is not concerned with homoeopathy which does not provide fortunes for drug houses.

Funny thing, that. Homeopathy didn't work in 1957, and it still doesn't work now. If it worked, by the homeopaths' own twisted logic the Vast Chemical Combines (or Big Pharma today) would be selling it just as readily as real treatments. The argument of fear and terror that alternatistas love to revel in is stil the same as well, only the words now are "autism" and "mercury". Meanwhile, DDT is no longer used because science recognised the dangers of it and, however reluctantly, changed its approach.

It's very nearly the 50th anniversary of the publication of this trash. EoR wonders if the homeopaths will be celebrating "50 Years of Terror and Fear". Or maybe "Half a Century of Lying for Profit".

6 comments:

  1. I hate the 100% safe crap. Hello, alties! Pay close attention to the following:

    1. It's called the "perfect solution fallacy". A good answer today is better than a perfect one never.

    2. Additionally, safety is a negative claim: It's the absence of dangers and risk. I'm not 100% certain that there isn't an invisible dragon in my garage. Just very, very confident.

    3. It's equivalent to what ID has been trying to do to evolution: You can't prove a hypothesis by bathmouthing the competition. You have to test your hypothesis under proper conditions. Showing me one positive double-blind controlled homeopathy study will do far more to impress me than a parade of evidence-based medicine's flaws.

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  3. "Showing me one positive double-blind controlled homeopathy study will do far more to impress me than a parade of evidence-based medicine's flaws."

    Don't forget 'reproducible'. I can show you a couple of double-blind studies showing homeopathy works, but have they been replicated? Nope. They were one-shot deals. You can do a scientifically valid experiment over and over again, and it works every time.

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  4. True, replication is necessary, but even an unreplicated experiment would at least show some effort, even if it is just learning how to lie to impress a skeptic.

    Now, if they can independantly replicate AND get consistently positive results, they will have my undivided attention. And probably Randi's million.

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  5. They stopped using DDT yes, but it has a half life that is still affecting people today and by the way Homoeapthy does work - perhaps you need to do more research and stop reading half coked reviews - didn't your science teach you anything?

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  6. @anonymous: Yes, EoR's science works quite nicely, thank you.

    Please explain how yours works. Perhaps providing proof of your assertion that "homeopathy works" would be a start.

    Would a "half coked review" be something partially written under the influence of illegal drugs?

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