katie, you have enough reading material. The original discussion was about how stupid it is to take sugar pills to prevent malaria. The discussion is now badly off topic – a tactic that is often deployed by those whose beliefs do not want to be challenged.

There is nothing more to say here and comments will be closed.

Thanks for all the care taken by all those who have tried to explain.

I already asked her about that on Saturday, but it seems she has been too busy “constantly answering insults”.

As an aside, this is such a familiar pattern we see in SCAM believers, a constant whingeing about the terms of the debate and how unfair it is that they have their legs pulled for spouting hilarious nonsense all the while failing completely to progress the discuss of the actual topic. At the same time we are usually asked to acknowledge that they are original thinkers who have gained an ability to think ‘outside the box’, an ability they demonstrate by repeating a familiar list of fallacies, lies and misrepresentations.

I predict more of the same from Katie and nothing useful on the actual subject of false claims being made for homeopathy.

Unless Katie returns with something more interesting to say I’m going to bow out.

Although it may be very good, the Linde review has odds ratios which a layman will not understand.
To understand a report, you must understand all of the report, not just the conclusion. If you do not understand part of the report, the conclusion is just a bit of text.

I can understand the results of clinicaltrials.gov, but if you think it fails by not having a conclusion, then tell them that they should have a conclusion, and add it to the list for the new database people want.

I’m just going to go back to this (my emphasis):

The criticaltrials are actually reports in themselves, but it would be nice to have a print button that gets rid of the search stuff at the top and to have a similar summary report for all the trials with the results, rather than having to go into each separate trial.

What you are describing here is a systematic review. Precisely the sort of study you have rejected because, you claim, its results are too difficult for a layman to understand.

You seem to be using the word “biased” to mean “I don’t agree with it”.

I think that the info in clinicaltrials.gov is easier for a layman to understand.

I call BS on that. Most of the trials listed there don’t even have results available, and even when there are results, there’s no interpretation/conclusion. I don’t doubt that you understand the general explanation of what the trial is about and what they did, but how do you interpret the results?