SO, THIS IS A THING. Holist, you around?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am going to go right ahead and state that I am fairly confident that I know far more about chemistry than you have even slightly delved into, and homeopathy is completely preposterous for anyone who has a greater that 17th-century comprehension of molecular behavior.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

But, you know, quantumz and all that (say people who haven't even taken so much as statistics and don't know what probability even means).

[Dildo Argentino]

Not that we know everything. Far from it; we are only starting to gain glimpses into that which we do not know. But there is simply no empiric support for homeopathy. I have slightly more respect for faith healing.

Thank you for meaning well. (<-- just to be clear, that is a completely sincere sentence)

I don't wish to go into it again. I have taken chemistry, I have reviewed the matter quite excessively, and I have been thoroughly convinced that discussing it on PD is a BAD IDEA. So I'm just not doing it.

If that's something you people won't get over, that's just my tough luck.

Yeah, I find it hard to even imagine what kind of incredibly abbreviated liberal-arts version of chemistry you could possibly have taken that would permit you to still believe in the fairies of homeopathy, but go for it, champ.

Look, as you have yourself said, our science is not complete.

I am agnostic about homeopathy (I wouldn't have said this three years ago, I do now).

I am quite certain that the sceptical campaign against homeopathy and many of the so-called studies are unfair, unsuitable for deciding the question, and morally reprehensible in exactly the way Dawkins and his merry band of militant atheists are.

I can imagine homeopathy being merely a particularly effective ritual for turning on the placebo effect. That is interesting in its own right.

I can also imagine homeopathy having an underlying mechanism that we don't know at present. The research into higher-level structures in water seems vaguely promising, but really, I just don't know. I do know that received scientific knowledge can fall. Look at Newtonian mechanics (so elegant, so simple, so beautiful: it must be true!), or, more recently, genetic determinism (one of the most exciting developments I can think of in the life sciences).

[tyrannosaurus vex]

If my hate could be described on a scale like the Richter Scale, the things I hate about homeopathy would register roughly like this:

Magnitude 1.0:  Homeopathy is junk pseudo-science. This isn't really all that bad, considering all the other junk pseudo-science most of us are familiar with and sometimes consciously subscribe to just because it makes us feel good (marijuana cures cancer, Lou Reed makes decent music, etc).

Magnitude 3.0: Homeopathy kills people who refuse real medicine. This is worse because it involves death of course, but still not a major event, because it isn't like these idiots were forced at gunpoint to choke down some awful mixture of stagnant water and mint leaves. Plus, it helps out the funeral industry so it isn't all bad.

Magnitude 10.0: Homeopathy's believers (and "agnostics") are so willfully ignorant of actual science, and so loudly obnoxious about it, that alternative medicines and treatments that might actually work are dismissed prematurely by doctors and scientists just because it is easier to count them in the same column as homeopathy than it is to take research on them seriously. It has tainted the entire notion of medicine outside of the mainstream.

[LMNO]

Not that we know everything. Far from it; we are only starting to gain glimpses into that which we do not know. But there is simply no empiric support for homeopathy. I have slightly more respect for faith healing.

Thank you for meaning well. (<-- just to be clear, that is a completely sincere sentence)

I don't wish to go into it again. I have taken chemistry, I have reviewed the matter quite excessively, and I have been thoroughly convinced that discussing it on PD is a BAD IDEA. So I'm just not doing it.

If that's something you people won't get over, that's just my tough luck.

Yeah, I find it hard to even imagine what kind of incredibly abbreviated liberal-arts version of chemistry you could possibly have taken that would permit you to still believe in the fairies of homeopathy, but go for it, champ.

Look, as you have yourself said, our science is not complete.

I am agnostic about homeopathy (I wouldn't have said this three years ago, I do now).

I am quite certain that the sceptical campaign against homeopathy and many of the so-called studies are unfair, unsuitable for deciding the question, and morally reprehensible in exactly the way Dawkins and his merry band of militant atheists are.

I can imagine homeopathy being merely a particularly effective ritual for turning on the placebo effect. That is interesting in its own right.

I can also imagine homeopathy having an underlying mechanism that we don't know at present. The research into higher-level structures in water seems vaguely promising, but really, I just don't know. I do know that received scientific knowledge can fall. Look at Newtonian mechanics (so elegant, so simple, so beautiful: it must be true!), or, more recently, genetic determinism (one of the most exciting developments I can think of in the life sciences).

I just facepalmed so hard, I can feel the concavity of the back of my skull.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Breaking News: EMERGENCY DECLARED! Newtonian Mechanics Fail, Objects Begin Drifting into Space

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

There's just no dissuading someone who has decided that they Have Faith, regardless of actual evidence and a body of knowledge that completely fails to support their belief.

Studies that fail to show evidence for homeopathy's effectiveness? Unfair and unethical! Conspiracy!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Breaking News: EMERGENCY DECLARED! Newtonian Mechanics Fail, Objects Begin Drifting into Space

I actually don't even know what he was talking about there, so I disregarded it. I'm not aware of any particular failure of Newtonian physics except that they don't apply at the particle level.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Holist, if homeopathy was in fact a "particularly effective" method of administering placebo, you might have an argument there. As far as I'm aware, it isn't "particularly effective", though. If it was there might be something to research.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I can imagine a pink unicorn on the dark side of the moon, and trees that grow chicken legs.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I can imagine a pink unicorn on the dark side of the moon, and trees that grow chicken legs.

It doesn't work that way. Science* has proven that the dark side of the Moon, being shielded from Thetan radiation, is far more likely to produce BLUE unicorns.



*Source: Assclown, et. al., Journal of Asstrophysics and Homeopathy, 1983

[Dildo Argentino]

Breaking News: EMERGENCY DECLARED! Newtonian Mechanics Fail, Objects Begin Drifting into Space

I actually don't even know what he was talking about there, so I disregarded it. I'm not aware of any particular failure of Newtonian physics except that they don't apply at the particle level.

What I was thinking of was that Newtonian mechanics doesn't apply at the macroscopic level, either, at relativistic speeds. Along with special relativity, the term 'graviational lens' may also be worth a look.

The light - is it made of particles or electromagnetic waves debate was also a point at which there just seemed to be no room for a logical answer to, say, diffraction patterns generated by a single photon. Then: paradigm shift: suddenly, it is okay for light to be both particulate and wavy.

In distantly related news, in 1878 the German physicist Philipp von Jolly, a highly respected scientist, advised a 20-year-old Max Planck not to go into physics, because "in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes."

[EK WAFFLR]

You're severely mentally deficient. Seek help. And go away.

[Dildo Argentino]

You're severely mentally deficient. Seek help. And go away.

Impressive! Why?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Breaking News: EMERGENCY DECLARED! Newtonian Mechanics Fail, Objects Begin Drifting into Space

I actually don't even know what he was talking about there, so I disregarded it. I'm not aware of any particular failure of Newtonian physics except that they don't apply at the particle level.

What I was thinking of was that Newtonian mechanics doesn't apply at the macroscopic level, either, at relativistic speeds. Along with special relativity, the term 'graviational lens' may also be worth a look.

The light - is it made of particles or electromagnetic waves debate was also a point at which there just seemed to be no room for a logical answer to, say, diffraction patterns generated by a single photon. Then: paradigm shift: suddenly, it is okay for light to be both particulate and wavy.

In distantly related news, in 1878 the German physicist Philipp von Jolly, a highly respected scientist, advised a 20-year-old Max Planck not to go into physics, because "in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes."

I'm well aware of the gravitational lens. I'm also well aware that light being both a particle and a wave is still merely a descriptive hypothesis, and that it may in fact be a particle interacting with a wave.

The thing you seem to be missing here is that while our scientific knowledge is still expanding at a rapid rate, new information that actually contradicts rather than enhances existing knowledge is exceedingly rare and requires great evidence. There is no evidence supporting homeopathic principles, so why do you insist on clinging to the belief that it's real, except out of some weird superstitious, fetishistic fantasy?