Q: Has she stuck to the issues and followed a disciplined analysis of her opinions?
A: No she has not.

Q: Is this unusual behaviour among sugar pill fans?
A: No it is not.

They think that we’re anti homeopathy because we love main-stream medicine and are blind to its down-sides. Like animal rights people who think that scientists don’t love animals and don’t care about the suffering they inflict.

It’s like thinking that someone in a third-world country drinking cholera infected water is doing so because they think it’s good for them and that’s what they prefer. Not that it’s all they have and it’s take that risk or die from thirst; or drink imaginary water because only then can you be sure that it’s free from disease.

I have written about the Cuban leptospirosis trial. If you wish to discuss that, then you can find it here.

http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2009/01/hasta-el-absurdo-siempre.html

One other thing. Our views on antibody titers related to protection is not always the case according to Gustavo. For Hep B it works well, but for some other diseases it doesn’t. Absence of antibodies does not always mean absence of protection, but of course it is difficult to measure. As well, having antibodies does not always mean protection. His research is trying to figure out why this is the case.

The immune system is more complex than we think.

The advantage of the Cuban system is that there is no friction between homeopathy and conventional medicine. They share information freely and support each other. Unfortunately here we have drawn battle lines and nobody wins those scenarios.

I disagree. In the thread so far Libby has been trying very hard not to make a point.

For a clinical dissection of this ‘evidence’ for homeopathy, see AP Gaylard’s Much ado about nothing. Of course, if you spot something wrong with his analysis, I see that comments are still open there.

I just had a short meeting with Dr. Gustavo Bracho from Cuba who was visiting my city. He is a medical researcher and they have been experimenting with vaccines for leptospirosis, a serious disease that invades the island during the hurricane season.

They used 3 study groups of mice. The 1st were unvaccinated, the 2nd vaccinated with a pharmaceutical vaccine developed by Findlay Vacuna, and 3rd vaccinated with a homeopathic medicine made by Findlay Naturals. All 3 groups were exposed to a massive dose of the leptospirosis bacteria. The untreated group all died, 100%. The vaccine group all lived, 100%. The homeopathic group had a 20% failure rate, 80% lived.

One of the reasons they now vaccinate with homeopathy for this disease is because of cost. The pharma vaccine costs $25US for each dose, where a homeopathic remedy costs 5-10 cents. That means they cannot vaccinate everyone with the pharma drug because they just can’t afford it. Secondly, they consider the pharma vaccine unsafe for anyone under 20 years of age. Thirdly, the doses they administered in the study were lethal, not anything that would occur in nature. So the homeopathic remedy gives enough protection in the field.

In fact from the 2007 and 2008 figures, not one person died from leptospirosis in Cuba using homeopathy in the provinces most at risk where they were treated. The experiment was repeated as you can see.

I am sure there are many bad things that happen in the world of corporate drug companies. This blog,however, is about quackery – pseudoscientific and superstitious health beliefs such as homeopathy. If you do not want to talk about that, then there are many other forums for your thoughts. Perhaps you could even set up a blog of your own from the perspective of someone in the ‘third category’ of people unaffected by side effects of a drug.

So your Shang game was a dead end? Again, the rules of this blog are simple : on topic, reasonably polite.