Reputation as evidence now, is it? Well if it's in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, then it must be true. That;s appeal to authority. Besides, you say it's there for anyone to see and read. Well no it isn't, it's not there for all to see. We cannot go through the study piece by piece, because it's not there for all to see, unless we subscribe to the commercial journal. So come on then go ahead and subscribe and then post the article.So it;s links to tweets now, is it? Now you appeal to the authority of Edzard Ernst.From your own article.For more information about Hahn, please see two comments on my previous post (by Björn Geir who understands Hahn’s native language).
This is also where you can find the only comment by Hahn that I am aware of:Robert Hahn on Saturday 17 September 2016 at 09:50
Somebody alerted me on this website. Dr. Ernst spends most of his effort to reply to my article in Forsch Komplemetmed 2013; 20: 376-381 by discussing who I might be as a person. I hoped to see more effort being put on scientific reasoning.
1. For the scientific part: my experience in scientific reasoning of quite long and extensive. I am the most widely published Swede in the area of anesthesia and intensive care ever. Those who doubt this can look “Hahn RG” on PubMed.
2. For the religious part that, in my mind, has nothing to do with this topic, is that my wife developed a spiritualistic ability in the mid 1990:s which I have explored in four books published in Swedish between 1997 and 2007. I became convinced that much of this is true, but not all. The books reflect interviews with my wife and what happened in our family during that time. Almost half of all Swedes believe in afterlife and in the existence of a spiritual world. Dr. Ernsts reasoning is typical of skeptics, namely that a person with a known religious belief in not to trust – i.e. a person cannot have two sides, a religious and a scientific. I do not agree with that, but the view has led to that almost no scientist dares to tell his religious beliefs to anyone (which Ernst enforces by his reasoning). Besides, I am not very religious person at all, although the years spent writing these books was quite an interesting period of my life. In particular the last book which involved past-life memories that I had been revived during self-hypnotims. I am interested in exploring many sorts of secrets, not only scientific. But all types of evidence must be judged according to its own rules and laws.
3. Why did I write about homeopathy? The reason is a campaign led by skeptics in some summers ago. Teenagers sat in Swedish television and expressed firmly that “there is not a single publication showing that homeopathy works – nothing!”. I wonder how these young boys could know that, and suspected that had simply been instructed to say so by older skeptics . I looked up the topic on PubMed and soon found some positive papers. Not difficult to find. Had they looked? Surely not. I was a frequent blogger at the time, and wrote three blogs summarizing meta-analyses asking the question whether homeopathy was superior to placebo (disregarding the underlying disease). The response for my readers was impressive and I was eventually urged to write it up in English, which I did. That is the background to my article. I have no other involvement in homeopathy.
4. Me and Dr Ernst. I came across his name when scanning articles about homeopathy, and decided to look a bit deeper into what he had written. The typical scenario was to publish meta-analyses but excluding almost all material, leaving very little (of just a scant part of the literature) to summarize. No wonder there were no significant differences. If there were still significant differences the material was typically considered by him to be still too small or too imprecise or whatever to make any conclusion. This was quite systematic, and I lost trust in Ernst´s writings. This was pure scientific reasoning and has nothing to do with religion or anything else.
// Robert Hahn
