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House of Commons Committee advises end to NHS funding of homeopathy
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stray
stray
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Edited Feb 25, 2010, 01:51
Re: House of Commons Committee advises end to NHS funding of homeopathy
Feb 25, 2010, 01:23
Moon Cat wrote:
stray wrote:
Its a nonsense comparison though really mooncat, theoretical physics does after all have mathematical proofs.

Edit : You know, you do really have to put in some serious fucking effort to get your research funded. Unlike Homeopathy it seems where the plural of anecdote seems to be fact.


Yes, I was just playing devils advocate with that really. Although, it might be argued that mathmatical proofs are all well and good until, as seems possible, things 'down' there keep getting weirder and weirder. I've read that some physicists have admited the possibilty that our definitions of how things work may well be redundant if/when we find out the quantum world is even madder than we might allow for. I quite like those possibilities though.


Erm... all that does not distract from the fact that the methods used have produced solid reproducible results in different fields. The methods have developed from a long tradition that have produced traceable, proveable results and are internally consistent.

Remember dude, this kind of mathematical analysis and modelling of non-deterministic, non-linear and even recursively adaptive datasets was my thing for too many years. I don't actually make shit up everytime I approach a dataset or a problem. My thing was looking at data, the math used to analyse it, and say what assumptions it is 'safe' to draw from the method you are using. I did this by pulling from a long tradition of proven mathematical approaches.

Yeah, of course we can be 'wrong' but ffs a hell of a lot more thought, and an awful lot of rigid balances and checks are performed than simply collecting peoples anecdotes. We also say 'A positive correlation is not a proven truth' for example (er.. or that could just be me).

There may well be 'something going on' with Homeopathy, I'm willing to shrug and accept that, but that does not mean we have to be funding it when our standards in other fields are.. well, we actually have standards in other fields. I'm really surprised to discover that UK medicine and/or the NHS (maybe NICE) don't. Funding has to be just as consistent in how you get it as our science has to be consistent in it's research. Seen ? Or do we want to be shovelling shitloads of cash at some fruitloop, with fuck all qualifications or knowledge of physics, who 'thinks' he can build a perpetual motion machine harnessing zero point energy in his shed ? Actually don't answer that, you'll probably say yes.

This is the last time I intend to get sucked into a discussion relating to what sicence does, how maths work etc, etc with people with absolutely no grasp of what work is done or how. I love you mate, but damn this anti-science, psuedo philosophical anti-intellectual crap (which is becoming alarmingly common these days) annoys me as much as people saying KISS suck does you.

Edit : And most important of all, as amazingly elegant and internally consistent and whole as theoretical work HAS to be, we still call it theory.

Edit2 : AND ANYWAY, the placebo effect is known, and it is very, very well researched. In order for Homeopathy to deserve any kind of serious attention it has to prove (with a LARGE dataset, not just a hundred people) that it produces extremely improved results to a placebo. Show me the data, now, shoot it all over my face. A proper paper would be good too, detailing every step of the research study.

Hahah, I just realised a problem you would have doing that kind of 'grown up' research, which would be proving that the placebo does not already contain elements of the homeopathic cure already.
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