... 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] 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... )

There's an excerpt from Rowena Ronson's book, Looking Back Moving Forward [1] featuring an interview with Lionel Milgrom, at Galahomeopathy:

.. I Leick it (aha, aha)

Philippe Leick [1,2] wrote a letter [3] (as did many others) to Homeopathy to comment on papers by Lionel Milgrom [4] and Otto Weingärtner [5]. Milgrom responded [6], as did Harald Walach [7] (a coauthor of the Weak Quantum Theory paper [8], previously criticised by Leick [1]) and Leick dealt with this in a JREF thread.

These are the key points from Milgrom (another point is addressed elsewhere on JREF) which Leick deals with, to which I'll add my own comments:

Comment on “Macroscopic Quantum Coherence in Patient-Practitioner-Remedy Entanglement: The Quantized Fluctuation Field Perspective” [eCAM Advance Access published online on May 14, 2008].

Submitted 8^th July 2008, online 11^th July 2008

Alex Hankey (1) has written to support and defend Lionel Milgrom (2,3), but does so in his own terms of “quantum fluctuation fields” in biological systems (4) rather than Milgrom's model (often referred to as a metaphor (5)) of patient-practitioner-remedy entanglement (6) via “weak” quantum theory (7). Quantum fluctuation fields are supposed to demonstrate quantum coherence on a macroscopic scale, but the reasoning behind this is flawed; in any case, a link between these two models is not to be taken for granted (8,9).

... do not in fact have anything to do with each other

While writing my eLetter regarding Alex Hankey's (1) support and defence of Lionel Milgrom (2), I took a look at a short letter written by Hankey entitled “Weak Quantum Theory: Satisfied by Quantized Critical Point Fluctuations” (3). Only the first page is freely available, but I’m assuming his reference to Walach is Ref. (4) and the reference to weak quantum theory is Atmanspacher et al. (5).

Lionel Milgrom's latest paper, “A New Geometrical Description of Entanglement and the Curative Homeopathic Process” [1], as introduced by Alex Hankey (“Self-Consistent Theories of Health and Healing” [2]) quotes Hahnemann saying that

“The unprejudiced observer is well aware of the futility of transcendental speculations which can receive no confirmation from experience.”

Milgrom's futile transcendental speculations have been going on for six years. This latest paper is light on equations but heavy on pictures and mysticism and further from science (and indeed reality) than ever. But it's still possible to find some things which are meaningful enough to be wrong.( Read more... )

In his editorial introducing Lionel Milgrom’s latest paper, “A New Geometrical Description of Entanglement and the Curative Homeopathic Process” [1], Alex Hankey (“Self-Consistent Theories of Health and Healing” [2]) can’t even spell homeopathy: he cites Simon Baker’s letter to eCAM (in response to “Journeys in the country of the blind” [3]) as “Re: Homeoathy and hubris”. There’s also a citation to a letter written by someone called “Chrastana”. (This is after Lionel Milgrom got confused between Simon Gates and Simon Baker and ended up replying to Simon Bates.) There’s clearly little hope for any sort of scientific or technical accuracy when basic proof-reading is clearly beyond both Hankey and the staff of J. Alt. Complement. Med in which this is published.

Weak Quantum Theory isn't that weak

Another comment on “Journeys in The Country of The Blind: Entanglement Theory and The Effects of Blinding on Trials of Homeopathy and Homeopathic Provings” [eCAM 4 (1) 7-16 (2007)].

Submitted 13^th January 2008, accepted 4^th February 2008, online 13^th February 2008

I certainly am entertained by Milgrom’s new notion of “the importance of isolation from the external environment (the consultation) in order for coherence and decoherence to bring about the possibility of cure.” It formalizes the position that homeopaths, and the people who feel a subjective benefit in going to them, have lost contact with reality. Indeed, my experience is that a lack of coherence is often seen in homeopaths with whom I try to interact. I am also pleased to note that Milgrom admits that “the wave functions of orthodox quantum theory represent quantifiably measurable observables of physical particles. This is not what the ‘wave-functions’ in PPR [patient-practitioner-remedy] entanglement or WQT [weak quantum theory] [1] represent... They represent more qualitative and subjective observables”. This makes it clear that WQT [2,3,4,5] is useless for answering objective questions such as “does homeopathy work?”