Hey, everyone needs friends :)

Welcome to the site - maybe I'm a bit young according to your topic title but I can damm we still say hi.

Hi!

Enjoy it here, it's a gas :)

Hey, the South seems to be the direction you need to be heading :p Pity you're all the way up north really, though if you're ever down my way don't hesitate to look me up :p

M

Hi to the new girl!

Mike - does exactly what he's told 32.8% of the time ;)

And apologies for the double post... but I've just stumbled accross a most informative site on the subject.

http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/

Childish, but fun :D

M

Alas, tis akin to the herding of cats.

Hungry cats.

On a large field.

Covered in catnip.

For all I love the circles of high-end academia some of the people in these institutions can drive one crazy and very quickly. I'll quantify this below.

Bearing in mind that I chose not to go to University at all. I left after A-Levels and started working - pursuing my dream of becoming a Pilot. I'm probably driven by an element of envy for the people who have the opportunities offered by Universities.

My experience of Cambridge undergraduates (possibly not the majority, but a significant subset) is that they've always been clever and bright, always been at the top of their classes and haven't really considered the possibility they were not going to get into Cambridge. This leads to a level of the mundane entering into their experience of University and they pass up opportunity and privilege that many do not even entertain as a possibility. Whereas this is probably inevitable, it does make me immensely cross.

However, this is probably only a personal issue for reasons that I'll not air in public. And now that I've had my little rant now and I can safely get back onto topic...




Firstly, you need never apologise for being argumentative with or towards a Mike :)

And secondly - yes I quite agree with the point you're attempting to clarify for me. We should not assume the PhD is correct. However, you do concede the general scope in which my original comment was made.

It would be foolish indeed to stand up and say that all viewpoints are equal. To assert that everyone carries the same weight in any given topical discussion would be absurd, fallacious and I would even wager it would be damaging. Luckily for us as a species we have the ability to specialise and as such we can expand our collective understanding infinitely further than we would otherwise achieve.

As an aside - does anyone know who the last person to realistically claim to know everything was, or when they lived? I'll assert that it certainly wasn't in the last 200 years.

By this very nature we -have- to have situations where a person's opinion on a given topic is more valid than another's. However you're absolutely right in that assigning any given qualification or threshold, quantifying this by any other process than experience and reputation, or indeed quantifying this at all we leave ourselves open to the possibility of taking something for granted via assumed authority.

And we can tie this whole argument back to topic very nicely.

Wouldn't someone stood there, telling someone else that a small quantity of Onion juice, when diluted and diluted until it's statistically highly improbable that even a single molecule even remains in the final 'solution', even if 'Shaking' is involved in this process. Someone stood there, with an air of scholarly understanding stating that this, this water, has healing properties similar or comparable to mainstream medicine - nay better - for it is not under the control of the government or major pharmaceuticals. Now say that this person actually happens to hold a Doctorate.

Then consider a 19-year-old school drop-out, with no interest in furthering their academic understanding and with a profound and deep-seated interest in the Jeremy Kyle show and the X-Factor.

I don't care how authoritative our first personage is, if our second asserts that Homeopathy is complete tosh, I'm going to have to agree with them, for they have demonstrated a more considered, evidence-based and, truth be told, accurate understanding of medicine.

I rather enjoy that little scenario :smiling:

M

Oh hell yes. Canon all the way. Who wants a mechanical linkage for aperture? *shudders*

I'll go with this.

You run a very strong argument and I feel that attempting to shout it down would be an attempt to save face rather than a considered view. I think I misread some of what you were implying by saying we should treat doctorates with a level of scepticism, and now on clarification I can't find any major point upon which my original argument stands tall and unopposed.

We both agree that a level of education signified by a qualification such as a doctorate is impressive, and people holding PhD's are certainly qualified above the layman to comment on fields either adjacent to or related to their field of study. However, gaining this level of qualification in no means guarantees that their opinion is better than or worth more than any other, less academically-celebrated, person's opinion - there are too many variables involved for such sweeping generalisations.

As such, I have an admission

I was wrong.

*tips hat*


Now.
All that considered, argued and a fairly stable conclusion reached (at least in my head), can we say that the mere fact that there are Doctorate-holding professionals practising alternative medicine in France (though probably in America and Britain too) actually adds no weight to the cause of alternative medicine?

Added - I'm (surprisingly) Mikebert4 on Flickr :p

Maybe this should be in the science section.. but I think everyone'll be able to appreciate this, so I'm posting it in here


http://vimeo.com/9410195?hd=1


Wow.

Maybe in the USA, from what I've seen in the UK (I'll address my sampling bias soon, don't worry) Degrees are common as much, Masters are better and actually require people to know something, but are subject to your point of either requiring drive OR intelligence and rarely requiring people to pull on both. Doctorates are still quite rare and precious - requiring both a depth of knowledge and a drive to learn and discover more.

Doctorates -have- to be published and peer reviewed in order to get awarded their PhD - they also have to defend their publication thesis against attacks from a panel of experts and career academics in the field. PhD's are not easy, they're not simple and people who own them really, really earn that Dr before their name. A few of my friends are going through doctorates at the moment and I'm happy, very happy, to say that their doctorates will AUTOMATICALLY grant them authority to comment on their fields of study. That's basically what a Doctorate -is-. It's proof that you can contribute to your field and deserve to be taken seriously within it.




Now, I quite agree I'm subject to a sampling bias that's hard to shake. Every career academic I've had the pleasure of talking with has either been a fellow of, professor at, or graduate from Cambridge (and a couple from Oxford). That's a fairly high skim to take off the academic pool. Many studied their doctorates at other universities, one I keep in regular contact with is currently working on the CMS experiment at CERN.

So yes, I'm probably seeing the higher end of the scale here, but that said, these people respect, quote and refer constantly to other doctorates in their respective fields - from 'redbrick' institutions or not. This leads me to my conclusions that a PhD grants you an authority to comment.

Sure, people abuse this. People abuse this just as people abuse their driving licences. It's just a factor we have to live with. I don't think we should default to cynicism because of the minority of disingenuous examples.

You're on!

You don't happen to be on Flickr do you chap?

Also, yes, it is all about the DSLR

That lightening shot is grand - I tried at least 30 times to get decent lightening ***** in Spain but never managed it :(

It's true - Vlad the impaler gained his name by having (the number varies depending on source) somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 turkish soldiers impaled. The story then goes that he met with the Turkish amidst the forest of 10ft-high wooden impaling spikes (each complete with their own turk) to discuss their surrender...

This guy was epic!

Pity 'everything' isn't really a valid answer for a 5-week stay .

Well, Shout me when you're over and if you fancy getting up a hill or three - and especially if you're lacking someone to talk you round the local ales, I'm -very- partial to playing guide to that tour :)

Well, I suppose this makes up for firing the chief science advisor for presenting the science behind drugs - that whole fiasco about cannabis being less dangerous than alcohol (which, apparently, it is).

I'm going to read this report in full, but for those who don't want to sift through it's 275 pages I'll produce the overall conclusion (page 51) for you here:



If you're going to argue against that quote, please -please- read the report first and have something to bring to the debate other than 'they can't take away what I believe' or 'they just aren't open-minded enough'. We're dealing with legitimate and research science here and arguments of that nature serve no purpose other than a more subtle method of forcefully removing toys from your pram.

M

EDIT--

I forgot to say Thanks for digging up the report :D

Wales wales wales wales!

*cough*

Lemmie show you what I mean...

View of the Youth Hostel from Tryffan


View of the cliffs on Glyder Fach (about 2km from that first pic)


The ex and I on the top of some unnamed hill in the depths of winter. Awesome!



and just because I can't resist...



It's Harlech Castle a-la-Mike


M

I await the source eagerly - currently the majority of quality studies supporting Homeopathy suffer or are very likely to be suffering from publication bias, which taints their findings and provides not insignificant doubt over the evidence they actually provide.

I don't like the term 'open mind' used in the context you make use of it. It implies that anyone who plainly disagrees with you is close-minded and opens us up to the possible scenario where people refuse to take an absolute stand, even when supported by absolute evidence for fear of being called close-minded by people who are willing to ignore the evidence to maintain their beliefs.

I'll go where the evidence leads, if the evidence is leaning (and it really, really is) towards homeopathy being bogus, then how can I not follow it there. If evidence shows otherwise I'll change my stance accordingly. Is this not open-mindedness?

Who would want to?!

I grew up on RAF stations, I know the life. Ahhh Happy times :)

However, they also say:


http://vsearch.nlm.nih.gov/vivisimo/cgi-bin/query-meta?query=Homeopathy&imageField.x=0&imageField.y=0&v%3Aproject=nlm-main-website

in other words, I'm unable to find a reference to to quote you give, and the closest I can find to it in sentiment from that body is guarded in the extreme. Can you quote source?


... revise the above, I found the quote I think...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10853874



I do wish people wouldn't take quotes out of context...