Annotated captions of Richard Dawkins vs Homeopathy in English
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It's the hottest alternative health fad |
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It boasts an impressively vast and well stocked medical cabinet |
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It's endorsed by royalty and the stars |
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& it's doing a booming trade in high street pharmacies |
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500 million people worldwide claim to use it |
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What is it? |
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It's a system for dosing up on a dilute solution of |
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Water |
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Welcome to the bizarre world of homeopathy |
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Homeopathy was dreamed up in the late eighteenth century |
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as a way of boosting the bodies vital spirit |
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One of the central tenets handed on by it's founder |
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Samuel Hahnemann was that like cures like |
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Superficially this might sound faintly plausible |
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but unlike a vaccine that introduces a diminished form of a virus into the body |
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in order to provoke it's immune system |
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like cures like, makes the unfounded assumption |
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that what causes similar symptoms can cure those symptoms |
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In Hahnemann's world dilute poison ivy |
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cures skin rash because undiluted |
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it causes a rash if touched |
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By the same principle |
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red onion can alleviate streaming eyes |
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and snake venom stiffness |
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But amazingly |
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homeopathy gets even stranger still |
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Homeopaths claim that the |
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more you dilute an active ingredient in water |
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the stronger medicine it becomes |
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Most homeopathic remedies're marked 30C |
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What does that mean? |
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It means 1 part medicine to |
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100 to the power of 30 parts water |
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How much? A drop in a fish tank? |
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No. A fish tank is nowhere near big enough. |
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The swimming pool doesn't provide enough dilution |
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Not even a lake |
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What about the drop in the ocean? |
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But it turns out that even the sea isn't big enough |
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For the really approved homeopathic recipes |
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in order to get 1 molecule of the active substance |
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you need to embay all the atoms in the solar system |
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To science just doesn't make sense. |
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Even homeopaths acknowledge |
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that there is not a single molecule of active ingredient |
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in the bottle they sell you, it's just water |
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So how can it possibly work? |
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In an attempt to resolve the paradox |
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homeopathy boldly paddles further up the creek of pseudoscience |
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claiming that water somehow has a memory |
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of the now completely absent active ingredient |
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But wouldn't water also have memory |
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of other more common impurities |
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it's coming to contact with? |
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Salt, urine? |
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Scientists have calculated |
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that in each glass of water we drink |
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at least one molecule has passed |
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through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell |
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Incredibly you & I are paying for this |
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unproven industry through our taxes |
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despite the national health service's net |
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540 million £ deficit for 2006 |
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the refurbishment of the royal homeopathic hospital |
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was part-founded by the NHS |
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to the tune of 10 million £ |
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That's equivalent to 500 nurses salaries |
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Right here on the floor, here is a point wheeler straight |
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wooden floors. Very unusual in a modern health care |
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This hospital was only completed 18 months ago |
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So this is our main clinical area... |
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The homeopathic profession is unregulated |
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by government. You can call yourself |
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a homeopath without any qualification |
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training or even insurance, after all |
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all you are doing is dishing up water solution |
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But Peter Fischer, clinical Director |
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of the hospital, is a medically trained rheumatologist |
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I see Prince Charles over there |
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Yeah, ow yes, great friend of ours. |
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These are the homoepathic medicines |
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that are in daily use. This is one |
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you know? For instance it has quite a strong |
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evidence by it's Rhus radicans. It's |
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Poison ivy |
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Right, ok. |
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I want to know how someone highly qualified |
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in real medicine can make such a leap |
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of faith. |
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I agree there is a plausibility problem |
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You know & I pinch myself from time to time |
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I quite regularly pinch myself, you know |
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is this really happening, you now? |
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The fact is I couldn't stop what I do now |
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even if I wanted to |
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My patients wouldn't let me |
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They say it helps |
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So how are things? Well very much better |
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since I last saw you. No pain at all. |
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You know, if I'm aware of a symptom to |
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come start the pain |
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I start taking it again & I can feel |
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the improvement & get back to until I need it |
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again, you know. Good! Well that's |
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pretty straight forward just bash on the same |
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Don't we? Yeah. I'm still taking the remedies |
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but you said to me, ahm, you know, if you |
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get little reaction to just hold off taking the |
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remedies until they then subside |
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so therefore I've been doing that |
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so for example I haven't had a remedy |
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for a week now |
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& last time you said you were getting a bit |
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of an emotional sort of upset. Yeah. |
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The day after you took the medicine |
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It was the day after I took the medicine |
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I was impressed by the amount of time & |
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care Peter Fischer devotes to each patient |
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Far more than an ordinary doctor. Uhm |
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but in terms of the treatment |
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I would be, you know, reluctant to make a |
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big change. I think this is the right stuff |
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what we may need to fit around at it |
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Like a GP, Peter Fischer prescribes |
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medicine, but in this case the medicine is a |
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bit of a surprise. Thank you very much |
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Common salt, natrum muriaticum sodium |
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chloride, again in an .. dilution |
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I mean obviously, since it's common salt |
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I mean she is obviously taking in |
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a hell of a lot of common salt anyway. Yes |
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Ow sure. How does the one..? The truth is |
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nobody knows. I don't know |
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nor does anybody else. Yeah. |
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&, you know, the question is |
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Do you think that because we don't know, |
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because it seems implausible, it can't work? |
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& that may be where you & I differ |
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The most recent problem was your skin |
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Wasn't it? That's right, yeah my hands they |
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cleared up quite well & my scalp's a lot lot |
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better. While patients like these provide |
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positive anecdotes for homeopathy |
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subjective stories are not enough |
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for science |
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I want to pin down precisely what double |
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blind trials have been conducted |
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Over 100 have been done, some by me |
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On my whole were positive |
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& I have, you know, I worked hard on it, ahm |
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but in the face of great skepticism |
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in the face of many people who say well |
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we are not gonna found homeopathy |
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it's got to be a load of rubbish |
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Why do you think they say that if there really |
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are controlled trials which |
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I think you are much better place |
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to comment on because |
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you are the sort of person who says that |
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Well, because I have red studies which |
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have a meta-analysis on things |
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which suggest that, yes occasionally |
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there's a slight suggestion of something |
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maybe in a slight suggestion there |
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But if you take all the studies that have |
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been done it doesn't add up in the way that |
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Ow, I don't agree with that at all |
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Now if a double blind control trial |
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really does show that it works |
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then that suggests we're dealing |
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with an entirely new force of physics |
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something unknown to science |
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I think that's a slight exaggeration |
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I mean, there are various hypothesis |
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Remarkably nobody |
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knows what the structure of liquid water is |
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So there is room, you know, |
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for a phenomenon analogous |
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to, I'm not saying the same |
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but analogous to the storage |
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of information by a magnetic medium |
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by a floppy disk or video tape. Yes, if I were |
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a doctor, doing what you do, & |
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was convinced that it really worked |
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I would drop everything & really really try |
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to demonstrate that & win |
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the Nobel prize for physics |
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I mean it would be an |
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astonishing, totally astonishing finding |
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That's, to be honest, one |
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of the main reasons I got into it |
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Plain ambition got me into it in the first place |
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But I agree it would be nice to see |
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You know, a really serious program |
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of research done on it |
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Well we are saying it has been done & |
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Well no, I'm saying that quite lot of research |
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has been done |
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I don't claim it's conclusive. |
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Why not? I mean it sounds as though |
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Well because it's very diffuse |
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& of course it does depend what |
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question you're asking, you know. I use a |
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does it benefit people? Do people feel |
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better? & I think |
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actually there's no doubt about that |
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people who go to homeopathic hospitals |
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have a treatment do feel better but |
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of course you will say that it's all |
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because you are nice to them |
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This is all rather contradictory so let's be |
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clear about the latest evidence |
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In 2005 the medical journal The Lancet |
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surveyed all the meta-analysis |
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the analysis of the analysis |
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& failed to find any reliable effect |
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of homeopathy |
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Tellingly, for me, in the bigger trials, |
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less prone to chance anomalies |
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homeopathy was more likely to show |
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0 demonstrable effect |