Can God suffer?, page-165

  1. 23,532 Posts.
    Wow, Tig, you are getting frantic with your multiple posts and reliance on maverick personalities in the face of a clear lack of evidence to support the efficacy of homeopathy for the treatment of disease.

    It's getting old.  There has been thorough testing on the efficacy of homeopathy, up to 1,800 studies have been reviewed and homeopathy has been found wanting.  It just doesn't work as claimed by its practitioners, supporters or fan club.

    I have given citations to multiple reliable, respected sources, so there is not much more to say. The studies speak for themselves.  I doubt that you would even attempt to read consider any of them.  As it stands, homeopathy has not proven itself to be an effective treatment or therapy.

    Robert Hahn puts in an admirable attempt at salvaging the wreckage but the bottom line is that there are too many good quality double blind experiments that show poor results in terms of therapeutic benefits over and above placebo.

    Here is a critique of Robert Hahn:
    Quote:
    ''Forgive me, if this post is long and a bit tedious, but I think it is important.

    The claims continue that I am a dishonest falsifier of scientific data, because the renowned Prof R Hahn said so; this, for instance, is from a Tweet that appeared a few days ago

    In 1998, he [Ernst] selected 5 studies using highly diluted remedies from the original 89 and concluded that homeopathy has no effect [5].
    In 2000, Ernst and Pittler [6] sought to invalidate the statistically significant superiority of homeopathy over placebo in the 10 studies with the highest Jadad score. The odds ratio, as presented by Linde et al. in 1999 [3], was 2.00 (1.37–2.91). The new argument was that the Jadad score and odds ratio in favor of homeopathy seemed to follow a straight line (in fact, it is asymptotic at both ends). Hence, Ernst and Pittler [6] claimed that the highest Jadad scores should theoretically show zero effect. This reasoning argued that the assumed data are more correct than the real data.
    Two years later, Ernst [7] summarized the systematic reviews of homeopathy published in the wake of Linde’s first metaanalysis [2]. To support the view that homeopathy lacks effect, Ernst cited his own publications from 1998 and 2000 [5, 6]. He also presented Linde’s 2 follow-up reports [3, 4] as being further evidence that homeopathy equals placebo.

    _________________________________________________________________________


    And that’s it! Except for some snide remarks (copied below) in the discussion section of the article, this is all Hahn has to say about my publications on homeopathy; in other words, he selects 3 of my papers (references are copied below) and (without understanding them, as we will see) vaguely discusses them. In my view, that is remarkable in 3 ways:
    • firstly, there I have published about 100 more papers on homeopathy which Hahn ignores (even though he knows about them as we shall see below);
    • secondly, he does not explain why he selected those 3 and not any others;
    • thirdly, he totally misrepresents all the 3 articles that he has selected.


    After re-studying all this in detail, I get the impression that Hahn does not understand (or does not want to understand?) the research questions posed, nor the methodologies employed in my 3 articles. He is remarkably selective in choosing just 3 of my papers (his reference No 7 cites many more of my systematic reviews of homeopathy), and he seems to be determined to get the wrong end of the stick in order to defame me. How he can, based on his ‘analysis’ arrive at the conclusion that ” I have never encountered any scientific writer who is so clearly biased (biased) as this Edzard Ernst“, is totally beyond reason.

    In one point, however, Hahn seems to be correct: IDEOLOGY PLAYS A PART (NOT IN MY BUT IN HIS EVALUATION).
    Last edited by DBT9: 07/03/21
 
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