Mod+ UPCOMING INTERVIEW: DR. LARRY MALERBA

Super post, Bucky. I hadn't heard about LDM before you mentioned it. Maybe it's hypocritical and face-saving, but a part of me thinks so what? A rose by another name smells just as sweet, no? If they have to save face but the end result is effective medicine, does it matter? It might, I suppose, if they try to proprietise LDM and run it the same way as Big Pharma: get it regulated and base it all on dilutions of orthodox drugs, trying to regulate out traditional remedies. But if not, and this stuff works, does it really matter?
Yeah, I understand your pragmatism.
I predict that we will see the usual double standard for all of the other elements in homotoxicology that don't fit within the mainstream paradigm.
Many of these modern homeopathic remedies use a range of low, high and very high potencies that will still trigger the scorn and hostility of conventional science. The expected reaction will be that Reckeweg was probably lucky in accidentally finding what LDM does today, but essentially it's a medical practice based in "hocus pocus", with no detectable scientific mechanism. The usual litany and no hope for further investigation of the other principles in the methodology.

The best we can hope is that some of those principles will leak into modern medicine because they still have a basis under a materialistic approach. Anything else will get the usual treatment and brushed aside as snake oil. Low Dose Medicine, as proposed by mainstream research, will still hold true to the pill-per-ill, mechanistic approach that we all know.

The hypocrisy part is that... science didn't even care to look at Reckeweg's medical ideas.
30 years later they discover by accident what someone had already done with success since the early 1930s, so they need to make it sound as a revolutionary scientific discovery and pretend it's not even remotely connected to the concepts in homeopathy.

Does this improve the already precarious credibility of conventional medicine and related industry?
 
My perspective is similar to Dr. Malerba's. It seems a bit strange to find people who balk at homeopathy, when their thought processes have brought them to belief in psi and 9/11 conspiracies. I understand the desire not to turn this into a referendum on homeopathy or evaluations of evidence. But realistically, the strength of the evidence for homeopathy is better than it is for many of the beliefs defended by Alex and others, such as belief in psi. And in a forum where personal experience carries weight, it is reasonable to expect that pretty much anyone can have the experiences reported by Bucky and David.

I suspect that the reason people here have mentioned some residual skepticism about homeopathy (excluding non-proponents) is because of unfamiliarity with the information which is used to support the idea. This seems an ideal opportunity for Skeptiko fans to be informed in a way which feels comfortable to them.

Linda
never mind :) let's make this thread mod+

(no more posts please)
 
I'd say all those processes probably have a ψ component. Look for example in Irreducible Mind for examples of hypnotically induced telepathy. Homoeopathy clearly must involve a ψ component if it works, and the placebo effect seems to be mind over matter, but medical research simply has to take it into account to get any consistency in its results.

David

There's a clip from Closer to Truth where neuroscientist Peter Tse mentions how nobody's found a good explanation for hypnosis. Will try and dig it up.

I'm willing to give homeopathy a chance, though I know little to nothing about it beyond these resources arguing for its plausibility (and of course these resources may themselves have been proven incorrect awhile back for all I know):

John Michael Greer on the X Factor that works outside conventional science

Review of the Fourth Phase of Water

Prescott noting the questionable tactics that went into discrediting Benveniste
 
Dating back to the time of Hahnemann and continuing to present day, homeopathic medicines have been developed by conducting “provings.” This is where a group of volunteers agree to receive an unknown homeopathic dilution several times per day for a specified number of days. Before taking the dilution, all baseline symptoms for each individual are documented. Individuals then document all symptoms in great detail as they develop while taking the remedy. This includes all physical signs, symptoms, and sensations, along with changes in mood, mental states, dreams, food desires, etc, etc. For example: "pulsating pain at my right temple beginning at 3pm, accompanied by an anxious feeling, compelling me to lie down on my right side to gain relief." Of course, if the remedies were nothing but placebo, there would be very few if any new symptoms to report.

Once the proving is completed, all symptoms are collated, with particular attention paid to symptoms that were experienced by multiple individuals. This is how an understanding of the medicine is fleshed out. Subsequent success in using the remedy can help to further develop and/or reinforce the defining characteristics of the symptom picture of that substance.

Another rebuttal to the placebo argument is that one can conduct a proving on oneself by repeatedly taking doses of a fully developed medicine while noting the symptoms that emerge. All the better if the chosen medicine is unknown to the person taking it. A placebo should generate very few, if any symptoms. If symptoms develop that correlate to the unknown medicine taken, that would be evidence of more than just a placebo effect.

Cynical attempts to discredit this have been undertaken by people claiming that they ingested a whole bottle of a remedy all at once and felt no symptoms at all. This only demonstrates their lack of understanding of how homeopathy works, since effects are a function of the intensity of the stimulus (potency), and frequency of dosing, not quantity taken at any given time.
 
A couple of questions if I may:

1 How do you know symptoms reported are a result of the homeopathic treatment? People often get headaches for all kinds of reasons for example.

2 If people are receiving conventional treatments for conditions, do homeopaths require them to suspend or stop such treatments while they are treated homeopathically?

3 an earlier poster recommended a particular homeopathic remedy for a headache. Since headaches may have a number of different causes - how would this work if the aim of homeopathy is to address the underlying causes?

Thanks.
 
A couple of questions if I may:

1 How do you know symptoms reported are a result of the homeopathic treatment? People often get headaches for all kinds of reasons for example.

2 If people are receiving conventional treatments for conditions, do homeopaths require them to suspend or stop such treatments while they are treated homeopathically?

3 an earlier poster recommended a particular homeopathic remedy for a headache. Since headaches may have a number of different causes - how would this work if the aim of homeopathy is to address the underlying causes?

Thanks.

Obiwan,

The real answers to these questions are long and complex but I will be short.
1. They would be symptoms that deviate from the baseline established before the proving began.
2. I treat people on meds all the time. It is less than ideal but sometimes necessary. When someone begins to show improvement, we then consider tapering meds that were previously difficult or unsafe to discontinue.
3. Symptoms are just the clues. Symptom relief is not the goal. The clues lead to a prescription which is intended to bring general global improvement. The situation is different when it comes to treating acute vs chronic conditions. The goal, for example, in case of the flu, is to recover from the flu. The goal in case of arthritis, for example, is to heal the person because arthritis is just one aspect of the sickness of that person. This entails viewing all aspects of that person as one because to think of them as separate is one of those biases of conventional medical reductionism. So that person's arthritis, his headaches, his fear of dogs, his craving for sweets, and his lack of confidence in social situations, for example, are all symptoms of the whole. In chronic prescribing, treatment of the whole is the aim.

Best, Larry
 
Obiwan,

The real answers to these questions are long and complex but I will be short.
1. They would be symptoms that deviate from the baseline established before the proving began.
2. I treat people on meds all the time. It is less than ideal but sometimes necessary. When someone begins to show improvement, we then consider tapering meds that were previously difficult or unsafe to discontinue.
3. Symptoms are just the clues. Symptom relief is not the goal. The clues lead to a prescription which is intended to bring general global improvement. The situation is different when it comes to treating acute vs chronic conditions. The goal, for example, in case of the flu, is to recover from the flu. The goal in case of arthritis, for example, is to heal the person because arthritis is just one aspect of the sickness of that person. This entails viewing all aspects of that person as one because to think of them as separate is one of those biases of conventional medical reductionism. So that person's arthritis, his headaches, his fear of dogs, his craving for sweets, and his lack of confidence in social situations, for example, are all symptoms of the whole. In chronic prescribing, treatment of the whole is the aim.

Best, Larry
Thanks Larry
 
Cynical attempts to discredit this have been undertaken by people claiming that they ingested a whole bottle of a remedy all at once and felt no symptoms at all. This only demonstrates their lack of understanding of how homeopathy works, since effects are a function of the intensity of the stimulus (potency), and frequency of dosing, not quantity taken at any given time.
Thank you for posting this.
The infamous James Randi "homeopathic suicide" was actually a credibility suicide, his own, played out in front of a mass of faithful, ignorant devotees.

cheers
 
Thank you for posting this.
The infamous James Randi "homeopathic suicide" was actually a credibility suicide, his own, played out in front of a mass of faithful, ignorant devotees.

cheers

That Randi, a man using questionable tactics if not an outright fraud, opposes homeopathy is one of the reasons I'm willing to try it.

Plus I dislike the paternalism of evangelicals (materialist or religious) telling me what I should and shouldn't try on the basis that something doesn't jive with their faith.
 
Plus I dislike the paternalism of evangelicals (materialist or religious) telling me what I should and shouldn't try on the basis that something doesn't jive with their faith.
There does seem to be an excess of evangelists of one sort or another attempting to exert control over the lives of others. They sometimes offer the argument that in doing so they protect people from harm, but that explanation very rarely stands up (there are exceptions). It seems to me much more plausible that the exerting of power for its own sake is the real motivation.
 
Perhaps of greater interest to Skeptiko followers would be some of the implications of homeopathic theory and practice, that is, if you buy into homeopathy to begin with. First and foremost, to me, is the idea that the potential solution to all humankind’s ills is right here in front of our noses. Illnesses exhibit predictable patterns that are reflected in the substances of the manifest universe. In other words, the same archetypal energies make themselves known in disease, in personality types, in body types, in mental/emotional complexes, and in matter. Homeopathy works by bringing together the energetic signature of an illness and the energy of a substance that matches it, creating a type of constructive interference that brings about a resolution to the condition.

Each illness, including the most organic of conditions, has its roots in an energetic vortex that holds the vital force (life force) in place, thus depriving it of its ideal state of health. In a state of perfect health, the vital force responds and adapts appropriately to whatever comes its way. A weakened vital force is more susceptible to influences that can further weaken it. A healthy vital force interprets an insult, for example, as an unfortunate shortcoming of the person voicing it. A weak vital force internalizes that insult to greater or lesser extent, which, in turn, contributes to the potential eventual manifestation of overt illness. This is why when someone suddenly develops migraines for the first time, there is often a long history of hidden factors that preceded their onset.

Although the answer to most of our problems may be at our disposal, this is significantly complicated by the vast number of synthetic substances created by mankind, many of which are directly applied to people as medicines, thus spawning an entirely new realm of “unnatural” diseases. Undaunted, homeopaths have potentized a number of these synthetic substances in attempts to use them as medicines for the problems that they have created in the first place.
 
Yeah, I understand your pragmatism.
I predict that we will see the usual double standard for all of the other elements in homotoxicology that don't fit within the mainstream paradigm.
Many of these modern homeopathic remedies use a range of low, high and very high potencies that will still trigger the scorn and hostility of conventional science. The expected reaction will be that Reckeweg was probably lucky in accidentally finding what LDM does today, but essentially it's a medical practice based in "hocus pocus", with no detectable scientific mechanism. The usual litany and no hope for further investigation of the other principles in the methodology.

The best we can hope is that some of those principles will leak into modern medicine because they still have a basis under a materialistic approach. Anything else will get the usual treatment and brushed aside as snake oil. Low Dose Medicine, as proposed by mainstream research, will still hold true to the pill-per-ill, mechanistic approach that we all know.

The hypocrisy part is that... science didn't even care to look at Reckeweg's medical ideas.
30 years later they discover by accident what someone had already done with success since the early 1930s, so they need to make it sound as a revolutionary scientific discovery and pretend it's not even remotely connected to the concepts in homeopathy.

Does this improve the already precarious credibility of conventional medicine and related industry?

Dating back to the time of Hahnemann and continuing to present day, homeopathic medicines have been developed by conducting “provings.” This is where a group of volunteers agree to receive an unknown homeopathic dilution several times per day for a specified number of days. Before taking the dilution, all baseline symptoms for each individual are documented. Individuals then document all symptoms in great detail as they develop while taking the remedy. This includes all physical signs, symptoms, and sensations, along with changes in mood, mental states, dreams, food desires, etc, etc. For example: "pulsating pain at my right temple beginning at 3pm, accompanied by an anxious feeling, compelling me to lie down on my right side to gain relief." Of course, if the remedies were nothing but placebo, there would be very few if any new symptoms to report.

Once the proving is completed, all symptoms are collated, with particular attention paid to symptoms that were experienced by multiple individuals. This is how an understanding of the medicine is fleshed out. Subsequent success in using the remedy can help to further develop and/or reinforce the defining characteristics of the symptom picture of that substance.

Another rebuttal to the placebo argument is that one can conduct a proving on oneself by repeatedly taking doses of a fully developed medicine while noting the symptoms that emerge. All the better if the chosen medicine is unknown to the person taking it. A placebo should generate very few, if any symptoms. If symptoms develop that correlate to the unknown medicine taken, that would be evidence of more than just a placebo effect.

Cynical attempts to discredit this have been undertaken by people claiming that they ingested a whole bottle of a remedy all at once and felt no symptoms at all. This only demonstrates their lack of understanding of how homeopathy works, since effects are a function of the intensity of the stimulus (potency), and frequency of dosing, not quantity taken at any given time.

That Randi, a man using questionable tactics if not an outright fraud, opposes homeopathy is one of the reasons I'm willing to try it.

Plus I dislike the paternalism of evangelicals (materialist or religious) telling me what I should and shouldn't try on the basis that something doesn't jive with their faith.

Sometimes I wonder how strongly many (if not most) people nowadays are immersed in the "Newtonian" mechanistic type of thinking, with its "direct cause - direct effect" chain of reasoning and "the more the dosage, the stronger the effect" assumption. This is the reason why so many people - from agressive skeptics to gullible weird TV show spectators - simply cannot understand magick. They think that spells and rituals should work as a kind of direct action, a simple cause producing a simple effect. Yet a magickal ceremony is not, as and in itself, a "cause" of anything; it is a catalyst for one's unconscious will, which initiates its action and awakes it by fulfilling the mind in hypnotic-like way with archetypal, mythic imagery and narratives - combined with the concentrated intention of performing the deed. Volition is the fundamental cause; imagination is provider of the meaningful symbolic path for the volition to fulfill.

Therefore, magick, as Robert Anton Wilson rightfully noticed, is "neither real nor unreal". Hardcore skeptic who claims that it is "unreal" by pointing that he cannot comprehend how the ceremony can have an actual, not merely psychological, effect, is as wrong and confused as superficial wannabe mystic who takes the magick literally and thinks that rituals "do" something themselves.
 
Perhaps of greater interest to Skeptiko followers would be some of the implications of homeopathic theory and practice, that is, if you buy into homeopathy to begin with. First and foremost, to me, is the idea that the potential solution to all humankind’s ills is right here in front of our noses. Illnesses exhibit predictable patterns that are reflected in the substances of the manifest universe. In other words, the same archetypal energies make themselves known in disease, in personality types, in body types, in mental/emotional complexes, and in matter. Homeopathy works by bringing together the energetic signature of an illness and the energy of a substance that matches it, creating a type of constructive interference that brings about a resolution to the condition.

Each illness, including the most organic of conditions, has its roots in an energetic vortex that holds the vital force (life force) in place, thus depriving it of its ideal state of health. In a state of perfect health, the vital force responds and adapts appropriately to whatever comes its way. A weakened vital force is more susceptible to influences that can further weaken it. A healthy vital force interprets an insult, for example, as an unfortunate shortcoming of the person voicing it. A weak vital force internalizes that insult to greater or lesser extent, which, in turn, contributes to the potential eventual manifestation of overt illness. This is why when someone suddenly develops migraines for the first time, there is often a long history of hidden factors that preceded their onset.

Although the answer to most of our problems may be at our disposal, this is significantly complicated by the vast number of synthetic substances created by mankind, many of which are directly applied to people as medicines, thus spawning an entirely new realm of “unnatural” diseases. Undaunted, homeopaths have potentized a number of these synthetic substances in attempts to use them as medicines for the problems that they have created in the first place.

I'm sorry but much of this sounds like new-age waffle. Many of us are sympathetic to the ideas that "the mind" is key to understanding some "non-mainstream phenomena", but I would caution you against underestimating your audience in the upcoming interview.
 
I'm sorry but much of this sounds like new-age waffle. Many of us are sympathetic to the ideas that "the mind" is key to understanding some "non-mainstream phenomena", but I would caution you against underestimating your audience in the upcoming interview.

I think the argument would depend on the efficacy of homeopathy. Seems to me it was reflecting on the implications IF homeopathy works for a person, rather than saying the efficacy should be accepted based on that argument.
 
Contrast this to conventional medicine which, in my opinion, is so wrapped up in mechanisms of action, proofs supposedly provided by research, diagnostic disputes, and rational explanations, precisely because its therapeutic options are so limited and the results so weak. It keeps docs occupied with activities that make them feel knowledgeable and professional.

More important to me are the issues that such a phenomenon raises. It lays bare the obvious fact that conventional medicine is severely hampered by its antiquated metaphysical beliefs: materialism, mechanism, objectivism, conformism, dualism, and so on.
Larry

wow... this is a great point... gives me a whole new perspective. it's not just about homeopathy, it's about homeopathy compared to a conventional medical system built on false assumptions about our very nature.
 
I have got to add this!

As you know if you read my discussion with Linda, above, I got burned by statins, and before I realised that the answer was to simply stop taking statins, I cast around for anything that might make a difference. I bought some Arnica 30C (dilution by 100 repeated 30 times!) and it maybe had some effect, but it was awfully hard to tell because if I was off the statins things were improving, and if I was back on them, things were going down hill again.

Anyway, last week I found my bottle of Arnica 30C in a drawer, and because I have a little arthritis that was bothering me slightly, I started taking the stuff. It wiped out the discomfort of arthritis almost overnight! Maybe it is placebo, or maybe I am super suggestible (but I don't think I am), but to me homoeopathy, with its impossible dilutions, is as much a ψ phenomenon as telepathy. I can't imagine ever persuading Linda that the effect is real, but I think I will know after (say) a couple of months!

David
 
I have got to add this!

As you know if you read my discussion with Linda, above, I got burned by statins, and before I realised that the answer was to simply stop taking statins, I cast around for anything that might make a difference. I bought some Arnica 30C (dilution by 100 repeated 30 times!) and it maybe had some effect, but it was awfully hard to tell because if I was off the statins things were improving, and if I was back on them, things were going down hill again.

Anyway, last week I found my bottle of Arnica 30C in a drawer, and because I have a little arthritis that was bothering me slightly, I started taking the stuff. It wiped out the discomfort of arthritis almost overnight! Maybe it is placebo, or maybe I am super suggestible (but I don't think I am), but to me homoeopathy, with its impossible dilutions, is as much a ψ phenomenon as telepathy. I can't imagine ever persuading Linda that the effect is real, but I think I will know after (say) a couple of months!

David

Hi David

You're off the statins but has your cholesterol I proved?
 
Contrast this to conventional medicine which, in my opinion, is so wrapped up in mechanisms of action, proofs supposedly provided by research, diagnostic disputes, and rational explanations, precisely because its therapeutic options are so limited and the results so weak. It keeps docs occupied with activities that make them feel knowledgeable and professional.

Right - and the stunning thing is that it is beginning to leak out that some of the most cherished advice from orthodox medicine has been just plain wrong! There is a near flood of articles (many from doctors) now, explaining that the demonisation of saturated fat was based originally on a bogus graph created by Ancel Keys to promote his idea, and that there has never been much evidence for the idea. Someone else discovered that this graph was cherry picked, but it didn't even slow the bandwagon!

Some parts of medicine are just amazing nowadays - you can get badly smashed and there is a good chance that you will be put back together again almost as good as new. But I guess these areas of medicine rely far more on the skill of the surgeon - interacting with an individual patient, not a trawl through reams of statistics.

David
 
I was just thinking today about how people are naturally very suspicious of psychics who charge large amounts for their services, and are also suspicious of people who write books about NDEs, etc., because they think maybe they're just making things up for the money. But does anyone stop and think about how a similar argument would apply to the medical industry? They sure do make a heck of a profit from people's belief that they know how the body works! And even if they have doubts, it's definitely not in their economic interest to own up to them!
 
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