"Sacha" wrote in message
. uk...
On 30/4/07 19:40, in article , "Des
Higgins" wrote:


"Sacha" wrote in message
. uk...
snip
Homoeopathy was tested
on animals some years ago and appeared to work but the animals hadn't
read
the books....

But their owners had.

Des

Which doesn't explain why one farmer saw a 40% drop in mastitis in his
milking herd. The remedy was put into the drinking water. This was a tv
programme I saw many years ago which was frankly sceptical but produced
some
extraordinary examples of these treatments working on animals. I think
that
particular one remained in my memory because at the time I lived on what
had
been a dairy farm, where the farmer still grazed his cows. There was a
vet
called Buster Lloyd Jones who also found them to be very efficacious but
he
also believed dogs could/should be vegetarian which I can't go along with!
--

If you give patients inert tablets and tell them that they contain active
drug; the patients will report an (placebo) effect. Most of them will tell
you the tablets worked. To test if a drug works or not you have to give
half the test patients a placebo and half the drug and neither the patients
nor the administers must know which are which. If there is then a
significant difference between the real and placebo drug groups, then the
treatment works. When Homeopathy has been tested in this way, no one has
found an effect. This says that the effects are imaginary. As it happens,
the underlying theory that is used to explain homeopathy is daft
(scientifically) but if the double blind tests had worked then we would have
to accept or explain them. They didn't so the daft explanations are then
especially silly.

Des


Sacha
http://www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
(remove weeds from address)
Devon County Show 17-19 May
http://www.devoncountyshow.co.uk/