Atheist worldview is unintelligible | INFORUM | Fargo, ND

Atheist worldview is unintelligible | INFORUM | Fargo, ND

I'm not sure now to make sense of this quote:

An atheist cannot really tell you what is true, what is real or what is right or wrong. His worldview just doesn’t allow it.

Has this person never looked out how we form our arguments? We do it through the observation of evidence? A good atheist/sceptic wouldn't even make the claim to know the truth because we can never know with certainty, claiming to know the truth is foolish as the evidence could change tomorrow. The evidence allows us to have a pretty good guess, which is not a weakness.

Homeopathy will not be banned by NHS despite critical report - Telegraph

Homeopathy will not be banned by NHS despite critical report - Telegraph

Bad news of the UK. Quackery has won out over reason and science, for now.

From Richard Alleyne:

Health minister Anne Milton said complementary and alternative medicine "has a long tradition" and very vocal people both in favour of it and against it.
A report by a group of MPs said homeopathic medicine should no longer be funded on the NHS and called for a ban on the medicines carrying medical claims on their labels.

The Commons Science and Technology Committee said there is no evidence the drugs are any more effective than a placebo - the same as taking a sugar or dummy pill and believing it works.

Last month, doctors attending the British Medical Association (BMA) annual conference backed this view, saying homeopathic remedies should be banned on the NHS and taken off pharmacy shelves where they are sold as medicines.

The treatment was described as "nonsense on stilts" and that patients would be better off buying bottled water.
Ms Milton said the Government welcomed the MPs' report but "remain of the view that the local National Health Service and clinicians are best placed to make decisions on what treatment is appropriate for their patients".

These decisions should take account of safety, and clinical and cost effectiveness, she said, adding that the Government remained committed to providing good-quality information on the treatments.

Homeopathy, which dates back 200-years, has been funded on the NHS since the service's inception in 1948.
It differs from herbal medicine in that it relies on substances being diluted many times, something the MPs said could not be scientifically proved to work.
There are four homeopathic hospitals in the UK, in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow.

Estimates on how much the NHS spends on homeopathy vary, with the Society of Homeopaths putting the figure at £4 million a year including the cost of running hospitals.

Former Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, who was a member of the Science and Technology Committee when it published its report, said: "This is not a good start for the new Health Secretary when it comes to evidence-based policy.

"How does the Government justify allowing treatments that do not work to be provided by the NHS in the name of choice, when it allows medicines which do work to be banned from NHS use?"

The Great Beyond: Homeopathic treatment works! (But not in a good way.)

The Great Beyond: Homeopathic treatment works! (But not in a good way.)

Good news for proponents of alternative medicine: a paper published in a prestigious medical journal appears to demonstrate that a homeopathic remedy really does have a pretty powerful biological effect. Unfortunately, this effect is to rob some users of their sense of smell.

Concerns that popular ‘homeopathic’ cold remedy zinc gluconate can cause a loss of smell have been around for a while. Now an analysis by two San Diego researchers shows these concerns may be well founded.

Terence Davidson and Wendy Smith, of the University of California, San Diego, looked at a set of nine criteria* for establishing a causal relationship and concluded that zinc nasal therapy can cause smell loss (anosmia). Their paper also details 25 patients who turned up at their Nasal Dysfunction Clinic complaining of smell loss after use of homeopathic zinc gel – which, unusually for a homeopathic treatment, does have an active ingredient.

They are now calling on the Food and Drug Administration to step up and do something.

“Given the rapid expansion of the homeopathic drug market into a multimillion-dollar industry, it is clear that more stringent FDA regulation is needed to monitor the safety of these popular remedies,” they write in Archives of Otolaryngology.

“... Protecting our patients from the potential risks of intranasal zinc medications and other homeopathic drugs, especially ones with limited proven therapeutic benefit, should be a high priority of the FDA.”

Last year the FDA called for three specific zinc nasal sprays to be pulled from the market amid concerns over asnosmia. It said then it had received over 130 reports of smell loss associated with such products, which continue to be widely available.

Davidson and Smith’s paper notes that evidence zinc nasal sprays help with colds is “questionable”.

YouTube - Homeopathy Debunked Compilation

YouTube - Homeopathy Debunked Compilation

It's water for fuck sakes!

Homeopathy Course Under Review

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10654034

From The New Zealand Herald:

Victoria University is distancing itself from a course it is offering in the controversial alternative medicine homeopathy.

The course "Homoeopathy: increasing your health awareness" is being offered through its Community Continuing Education programme in a one-off two hour lecture.

The lecture by Art Buehler, a senior religious studies lecturer advertises it will teach participants about the "internationally recognised, scientific medical system"

I'm *sure* that as a religious studieds lecturer, Buehler is well versed in what is and is not science. Or more likely, he's full of woo and crap.

Victoria University's humanities faculty pro-vice chancellor Professor Deborah Willis told the Dominion Post that the lecture was not an approved course saying "that the lecture should have been advertised with more careful wording".

She said they were reviewing whether the lecture would go forward in its current form.

Homeopathy is an alternative theory of medicine which advocates treating patients with heavily diluted amounts of substances which would cause similar symptoms in a healthy person.

Medical practitioners and scientists are critical of the technique and say it has no scientific basis.

I have a suggestion for how they can reword the advertisement. Homeopathy: Come and learn how to con gullible fools out of their hard earned money through the use of dilutting water and using ideas that go against everything science has to say!