![]() ![]() #Law of infinitesimals character serialAfter all, given its twin pillars of “like cures like” and the law of infinitesimals, the former of which says that to relieve a set of symptoms you choose a remedy that causes those symptoms in healthy people and the latter of which says that those “like” remedies get stronger if they are highly diluted in serial steps-but only if they are vigorously shaken or “succussed” between each step. In any case, among highly implausible alternative medicine “healing systems,” homeopathy is at or near the top of the heap, reigning supreme. ![]() After all, if you want to come up with a list of the top three most ridiculous alternative medicine modalities with a large following, surely homeopathy will almost always be on the list, along with energy healing modalities (such as reiki) and a third nutty modality to be named later whose identity will be left for the reader for later given that there is likely to be some disagreement about it. Regular readers might have noticed that we write about homeopathy a lot on this blog. #Law of infinitesimals character trialThis article seems to be an attempt to put some meat on the bones of their initial trial balloon of this argument published last summer, which Steve Novella duly deconstructed.īefore I dig in, however, I think it’s necessary for me to “confess” my bias and why I think it should be your bias too. At least, that’s what Rutten and some other homeopaths have been trying to convince us. But to hear them tell it, homeopathy is rejected because because we scientists have a “negative plausibility bias” towards it. Guess which category homeopaths like Rutten fall into. There’s a difference between being open-minded and being so “open-minded” that your brains threaten to fall out. After all, why not test these therapies in human beings and see if they work? What’s wrong with that? Isn’t it “close-minded” to claim that scientific considerations of prior plausibility consign homeopathy to the eternal dustbin of pseudoscience? Still, this particular line of attack is often effective, whether yielded by a homeopath or other CAM apologist. Of course, his being a homeopath is about as close to a guarantee as I can think of that a person doesn’t have the first clue what is and is not scientific. I do not think it means what you think it means. Sweeping statements about the scientific impossibility of homeopathy are themselves unscientific: scientific statements must be precise and testable. Using the ‘crossword analogy’, we demonstrate that plausibility bias impedes assessment of the clinical evidence. Prior disbelief in homeopathy is rooted in the perceived implausibility of any conceivable mechanism of action. ![]() You’ll get an idea of what it is that affected us at SBM like the proverbial matador waving his cape in front of a bull by reading this brief passage from the abstract: That is the lesson that John Ioannidis has taught us and that I’ve written about multiple times before, as have other SBM bloggers, most prominently Kimball Atwood, although nearly all of us have chimed in at one time or another about this issue.Īpparently a homeopath disagrees and expressed his disagreement in an article published last week online in Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy entitled Plausibility and evidence: the case of homeopathy. In brief, positive randomized clinical trials (RCTs) testing highly implausible treatments are far more likely to be false positives than RCTs testing more plausible treatments. My extreme territorial tendencies (even towards my friends and colleagues) notwithstanding on this issue aside, if you read Mark’s post (and if you didn’t go back and read it now-seriously, go now), you might also remember that he was discussing a “reality bias” in science-based medicine ( SBM), a bias that we like to call prior plausibility. In other words, I was telling them all to back off. He knew it was coming because when I saw the article that inspired it, I sent an e-mail to my fellow bloggers marking out my territory like a dog peeing on every tree or protecting my newfound topic like a mother bear protecting her cubs. On Friday, you might have noticed that Mark Crislip hinted at a foreshadowing of a blog post to come. ![]()
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