Monthly Archives: February 2011
Homeopathic Blues
One of the things that scares me as a skeptic is the possibility of someone I care for, someone close to me, falling victim to some quack alternative medical scam because they weren’t thinking critically at the time.
Alternative medicine?
Alternative to what, medicine that’s based on genuine evidence?
For one thing, it’s inventing a false dichotomy of alternative vs. science-based medicine, since if the majority of alleged alternative treatments actually worked, and could be shown to work in properly controlled studies, they wouldn’t BE alternative.
They’d be, well, medicine, and that would be it. Some of them are, despite being hijacked by Alt med advocates as their own.
Those claimed alternatives that really do work, and I mean better than placebos do, better than sugar pills, have been shown to work and are currently being used as part of regular medical practice.
But it’s not the alternative treatments that have some small efficacy that bother me, it’s the treatments that have no real support from reasonably-conducted studies, many of which are based on debased magical ideas with no scientific plausibility to begin with, much less being not even being supported by the data.
It’s no surprise that those who practice such implausible modalities shun the use of controlled and blinded experiments because those things rather inconveniently ‘don’t work for them.’
I wonder why….? *crickets chirping*
There is a spectrum of efficacy for differing medical modalities, all the way from the completely worthless, implausible treatments to those well-supported by medical research.
The more implausible treatments have either not been shown to work under reasonable test conditions or have been shown not to work under those same conditions.
I have yet to see someone suffer from even frequently repeated overdoses of entire bottles of, say, homeopathic sleeping pills much less just doze off into la-la land, despite the recent spate of skeptics overdosing all over the world, to no effect, not even a yawn.
What’s kept me from doing it is the fact that the local pharmacies I’ve been to so far have more integrity in the stock they carry than I’ve anticipated. Damn. Well, maybe I should be pleased – bully for them.
I’m afraid the only thing homeopathy will ever cure is your thirst, and to paraphrase comedian Dara O Briain, while you can’t overdose on it, you can f**king drown from it. After all, it’s just water.
By the way, my diabolical Big Pharma paymasters have just emailed me to inform me of the payment in my sooper sekret Swiss bank account for writing this post. Baaah!
Wow, It’s Been Four Years Already?
Well here I am, going into my fifth year as a self-described skeptic, and I’ve met a lot of awesome peeps along the way; Maria, Kat, Kriss, Aliman, Skeptic Cat, Terry, and all the others who make posting on this blog so interesting and warming to my eldritch heart.
But I sometimes wonder, though it doesn’t keep me up at night, “Will I continue being what I am, thinking the way I do, a month, a year from now? Will I ever get tired of it, and leave it in the past, and stop being a skeptic?”
I can’t honestly tell myself, or anyone, for that matter, with any certainty what I will think, feel, and believe a year or more from now.
Peeps change, and over the past four years, so have I. I’ll continue to do so, since that’s how things happen.
It’s irrelevant what I’ll be like in the future, just as it’s irrelevant what I was like in the past, and the past is dead, with only fallible memories and a few physical reminders of what’s gone before.
I’m a skeptic now, and that’s what counts.
In an earlier post this year, in a poor attempt at humor, I referred to the skeptical community as a ‘Wave of Reason,’and maybe it is, but I have to admit, it sounds a bit self-congratulatory in retrospect, and ‘skeptics movement,’ as misleadingly connoting of a monolithic entity as it is, seems more my style.
I might get disillusioned, but that seems less likely now, since I didn’t get into this with unrealistic expectations to begin with. Over time, my views, such as they are, have become more robust, better grounded. As the mystics would say, I’ve found my center. I’ve found myself.
While I might change my views in the future, that’s a matter to think over when it happens, and no sooner. What’s important is keeping myself thinking and learning in the here and now.
Teh kittehz, teyh R teh Cyoot!
The suffering these kitties had to endure for this, the sheer humiliation…
Web Picks Sceptique for Feb. 23, 2011
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Yes, the debate over the existence of Gliese 581 g continues, at least in some venues…
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Anonymous gives their ultimatum to the Westboro Baptist Church…
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It seems that the Oregon legislature is going to end legal exemptions from child-abuse laws for faith-healing couples with dying children…
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Who says that some annoying things can’t explained by science?..
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By Steven Novella: Body Snatchers, Phantom Limbs and Alien Hands…’nuff said…
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…the discovery of a possible precursor to crabs and spiders — very interesting…
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Yes, out-of-body experiences are all in your head, interestingly enough…
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Could the LHC prove the existence of the Higgs Boson in only two years? Maybe…
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This looks like the discovery of the ‘Thunder Thighs’ dinosaur…
