It's on the news that a priest was stopped at the exit of the Milano-Torino autostrada with a blood alcohol level of 0.08% (the legal limit in Italy is 0.05%) and had his licence taken off him. He had to call “friends and family” to come and take him home.( Read more... )

BPSDB There's a plethora of a letter at A Case of Chiropractic Manipulation Immediately Relieving Depression with Chronic Pain:

Patient A, a 41-year-old Taiwanese male, suffered from intermittent dysthymia which presented with minor low mood, insomnia, anxiety, chest tightness, back pain, and subjectively mild occupational difficulty... patient A received a single chiropractic spinal manipulation. The chiropractor noticed a minor deformity in the thoracic spine, and a traction technique was administered. He experienced immediate relief from back pain. The following day he reported complete relief of chest tightness, dysthymia, fatigue, and insomnia, with HAM-D, TDQ, and VAS scores of 0 for all.

“No, no, I'm fine now, no need to do any more chiropractic on me, I'll be off then...”

Reminds me slightly of various Blue Jam sketches. (Meanwhile, proper holistic back-pain suggestions.)

Ho appena sentito, sul Radio Monte Carlo, qualcuno (una “farmacista”) che spiegava quale sono le remedie omeopatiche di portare in vacanza. Volgio dire, in italiano (ma non so se i motori di ricerca troveranno comunque) che omeopatia è una grande cagata che non funzione per niente e non ha nessun base nè scientifico nè medico, ed è presente in farmacie solo così che Boiron possono pigliare soldi. Evitalo.( Leggi di più )

... which aren't actually there at all

[BPSDB] It's Homeopathy Awareness Week, and I can think of no better way of stopping people wasting time and money on homeopathy than by making them aware of exactly what homeopathy thinks it is. To this end, we have jdc325, Zeno, APGaylard, AndyD, Zygoma, The Quackometer, David Colquhoun, Orac, and Steven Novella (Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week) helping to spread awareness of what a great big pile of nonsense homeopathy is. ( Read more... )

[BPSDB] I don't want to spend too much time picking apart Lionel R. Milgrom's¹ reading of Sir Michael Rawlins's speech in his J. Alt. Complement. Med. editorial which has very little to do with Otto Weingärtner's² recent defence of the attempts of Shang et al. and Maddox et al. to teach homeopaths about doing experiments properly^3,4 instead of craply.^5,6 Holfordwatch have already taken apart Patrick Holford's attempt at quote mining it, and Badly Shaved Monkey introduced the subject at JREF and badscience.net, and I've tried to explain how the DBRCT is just the most reliable way of working out if your intervention is actually doing anything or not, to minimize the errors and converge on the right answer in the way which Weingärtner² describes (and it wouldn't be necessary to be scrabbling about in the statistical noise if homeopathy worked as well as some of these people claim it does). ( Read more... )

[BPSDB] I haven't really been able to keep up with all the stuff going on with Simon Singh and the British Chiropractic Association... has anyone linked to youtube.com/watch?v=jZG10g2HOw0 yet?

[BPSDB] Recently I have been mostly reading “Homeopathic Pathogenetic Trials Produce Specific Symptoms Different from Placebo”¹ and at first sight the result looks very interesting: homeopathic remedies or placebo were given to healthy volunteers in a double-blinded manner, “proving symptoms” were assigned to their remedies by a materia medica expert, and it turned out that the symptoms matched the remedies the participants were taking. In fact they matched very well: out of the 165 symptoms experienced by the 25 participants during the four day trial, on average the participants in the two groups taking different homeopathic remedies experienced five or six symptoms specific to those remedies each while the participants in the placebo group experienced about 10—11 “non-specific” symptoms each. The number of inconsistent symptoms experienced in each group (i.e. non-specific symptoms or symptoms associated with the wrong remedy experienced in the homeopathy groups) was zero. These impressive results even contradict some of the rubbish results in the literature.^2,3 Out of the discussion at JREF, where you can find many quotes from the paper which I don't want to reproduce here, I've developed the following thoughts.( Read more... )

[BPSDB] Otto Weingärtner explains, in the latest issue of J. Alt. Complement. Med.,¹ that in clinical trials more accurate results come from those trials which have larger numbers of participants, supporting the methodology of Shang et al..² Shang et al. ranked trials of both homeopathy and proper medicine according to the “quality” and number of participants, and found that better quality trials of homeopathy with larger numbers of participants tended to show smaller differences between homeopathy and placebo. This is in accordance with Bernoulli's “weak law of large numbers” which explains how data scatters randomly about the true value but the mean converges to be as close as you like to the true value as you obtain more and more data. By taking more and more data, by performing trials with many participants and by performing meta-analyses to pool the results of trials, the effects of random scatter are slowly averaged away.

Of course, that's not what Weingärtner thinks that he has explained.( Read more... )

I know I haven't posted in ages, but http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/11/italian-bloggers-cal.html...

[BPSDB]Good news and bad news: Ben Goldacre has won an internet against AIDS-denier and vitamin-pill mercenary Matthias Rath, while Sabina Guzzanti apparently faces up to 5 years in an Italian prison for insulting the pretentious old idiot who runs a big house in Rome where lots of men live together.( Read more... )