Aug
31
MEA CULPA AGAIN (not from me!)
Filed Under health
My friend Marco rightly made a correction following a recent comment made by James Randi, about omeophathy, in SWIFT. Here are Marco’s comments :
I watched the video of your talk at Google with pleasure, but I was a bit surprised by your reference to Switzerland. Is really a disproportionate amount of woo-woo things coming from home?
Hahnemann was not Swiss but German, and I don’t think he ever lived in Switzerland. And even if he did, given the state of
medicine at the time, late 18th - early 19th centuries, when blood-letting was a cure, his idea was wrong but worth a try, not that far from contemporary Jenner’s [valid] discovery of vaccination. Avogadro’s Law was published in 1811, though the value of Avogadro’s Number was only estimated much later, in 1865.I′ve been looking for the date when double-blind testing was invented. It looks like it wasn’t available to Hahnemann at the time, but that it was invented in 1835…to debunk homeopathy! :
The organizers concluded that the symptoms or changes which the homeopaths claimed to observe as an effect of their medicines were the fruit of imagination, self-deception and preconceived opinion if not fraud.
Homeopathy gave us randomized double-blind testing: how sweet!
Only 170 years later (2005) the Swiss government removed homeopathy and other quack medicines from the list of treatments covered in mandatory health insurance (all were provisionally included in 1999). Only acupuncture remains listed. Progress! Here in Switzerland!
And (part of…) Randi’s answer 
:
Sorry, Switzerland
> Read it
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