Timeblog.net

Bausell points out that penicillin cures pneumonia even if you’re in a coma, but alternative medicine only seems to work when you are awake.

Science Based Medicine » Snake Oil Science

A very good blog article that talks about a book by Barker Bausell on the analysis of “snake oil medicine”, e.g. acupuncture or homeopathy in trials, and about how these trials themselves are often so unreliable that many result in seemingly mildly positive reviews. But all the studies done with care - that involves a lot of factors - produce negative results. Especially when analyzing whether a medical effect is real or a placebo effect (by real, I mean reproducible effect->cause), small deviations during trials, e.g. in choosing the patients (patients that believe in homeopathy might be more inclined to participate in these studies), in analyzing the psychological effects (did they patients guess in which group they were?) crucially influence the outcome.
This article answered some questions I didn’t have answers to so far. Good to know.