Not to mention medications such as Prozac(a single example) where the data is intentionally distorted and studies showing side effects or lack of efficacy are hidden away and not published. Is this the type of peer reviewed, double blinded, placebo, cross over, controlled clinical trials that CAM should aspire to?

Isaac, thankyou for all of your hard work and dedication. I reccomend your books to all my clients who are questioning vaccination because your approach is so straight down the line and commonsense. Questioning whether to vaccinate their child or not is usually a difficult time for parents and I feel their is an overuse of scare tactics by both sides of the debate. I love your grounded approach.

Warm regards
Sarah

We are here to learn to create our lives based on the wisdom of the ancients: wisdom which has been swept aside by rationalists with small minds and superiority complexes. Of course, the ancestors of whom I speak are not medieval surgeons indulging in barbary but pre-industrial people who faithfully followed the directives of their elders and managed to live extremely healthy, robust, useful lives into old age - accidents bared. They also birthed easily offspring who expressed perfectly and with great beauty and grace their genetic blueprint for many hundreds of generations. We here can clearly see that this is no longer happening and we are grateful for any knowledge we can gleen from each other that will help return us to our physical and spiritual glory.

I’m pretty sure readers are not interested in arguing the points raised. We’ll leave that to other sites. Thanks for your patience Isaac. The discussion was interesting but no longer fits the purpose of this gathering of human minds and hearts.

May I respectfully suggest that before you rush to reply to Majikthyse that we both wait until he replies to my question. If he doesn’t do that, then his true position will be established for all to see.

We know he is a completely biased commentator, e.g. (1) he kept asking me for a refernce which anyone who had carefully read my article would have seen (2) the Meta analyses he quotes are not all anti-homoeopathy (3) we know that Hahnemann was attacked, many times, and it is easy to find negative quotes, and the reason why he was attacked was because he was costing the pharmacists of his day money (a bit why Majikthyse gets on web sites like this) because he was proving low costs medicines to people, (4) and he said “Isaac here claims that homeoprophylaxis is proven, yet on his own admission he can only present a result that is statistically non-significant”, but of course that is also untrue - he quoted an abstract of my thesis (the caution of which I explained above), in fact IF he had read my thesis he would have read on page 113 that “Thus we can say with 95% confidence, based on the data provided, that the effectiveness of Golden’s long-term HP program ranges between 87.6% and 93.2%” - this is a very strong result within the accepted level of confidence of 95%.

But Majikthyse is a spoiler, he says he is not associated with pharmaceutical companies, but we can’t know that. But even if he is not, it is now his turn to answer the following question before we say anything else. I will repeat it
“I am after the reference to any RCT measuring the long term impact of any vaccination on the overall wellbeing of recipients, (not just single effects), i.e. I am looking for a “scientific” reference to the true long-term safety of vaccines.”

best wishes

Isaac

“….never have I known a local physician who was so avaricious or practised so much charlatanism as Dr Hahnemann. ”

This was in relation to his supposed cure for epilepsy. Hahnemann then turned to psychosis, an enterprise which ended with his last patient threatening Hahnemann with death and setting his house on fire. This prompted yet another relocation, one of 18 in the first 24 years of his professional career. But enough of Hahnemann’s chequered life story - read it yourself: http://www.minimum.com/b.asp?a=samuel-hahnemann-haehl.

You seem to be unaware of the amount of clinical research that has been carried out on homeopathy. It’s not true that we lack evidence because of lack of research. We lack it because the research has been done and it doesn’t show anything. I don’t have the space or the time to list the whole lot, but look up the Cochrane Collaboration meta-analyses involving 16 trials and over 5,000 patients, the Linde et al meta-analysis of 1999, and the Shang et al one of 2005. All showed no significant effect of homeopathy.

Now, what is proof? Well in fact there is no such thing as proof, there is only a level of confidence. Isaac here claims that homeoprophylaxis is proven, yet on his own admission he can only present a result that is statistically non-significant. This means that we have very low confidence that there is anything genuine happening. As I have said, I am not here with an axe to grind for the pharmaceutical companies, but all they are doing is providing data to the regulatory authorities that meet standards laid down in legislation. Yes of course they have a burden of `proof’, but there is no `always’ or `never’ in medicine and doubt can’t ever be eliminated. You might argue about how rigorous the standards are and that’s a perfectly reasonable argument. Do you not agree though that the same burden of `proof’ should be borne by anyone making a claim? In particular, because there are robust data for the efficacy of most vaccines (how else did we render smallpox extinct?), some would perceive dangers in avoiding vaccination. This has actually happened in the UK when there was a drop in MMR vaccination - the prevalence of measles in particular increased, and it’s a potentially dangerous disease. So claiming that vaccination is unnecessary is an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence (Carl Sagan 1934-1996) - which I don’t see here.

To return to the `ancient wisdom’ argument: Would you want to be operated on by a medieval surgeon?

DISCLAIMER:
I don’t have any connections with vaccine companies.

I didn’t misunderstand you, and I was not trying to make you buy my book. The reference you ask for is shown in my article (reference 4). If you are not aware, Homoeopathic Links is possibly the foremost international homoeopathic journal, and is strictly peer reviewed, usually by medical practitioners who are also homoeopathic practitioners (as many are in Europe).

I am pleased that you speak in a spirit of goodwill, and in the same spirit let me ask my question again, because I am yet to have any “scientific” person answer it - “I am after the reference to any RCT measuring the long term impact of any vaccination on the overall wellbeing of recipients, (not just single effects), i.e. I am looking for a “scientific” reference to the true long-term safety of vaccines.”

I am sure you can appreciate my question, because if in fact there is no answer, it makes the “scientific” argument supporting the relative safety of vaccination one of simple hypocrisy, not science.

Thanks

Isaac

Are parents who immunize their children aware of the risks in their choice?

I mitigate the risks I take by ensuring their bodies fulfill the potential of their DNA to it’s utmost. I do this by nourishing them as their ancestors (who did not suffer the diseases modern people do) were nourished. I am adequately convinced by the scientific and anthropological studies Weston Price and his peers undertook that superior nutritionally, dense food will create superior immune systems. While other children may succumb to common ailments, bone breakages, dental decay and communicable disease, mine have not. That’s proof enough for me.

Many of the articles and posts on this website don’t have the level of proof science requires.

In a perfect world, scientific exploration would have, long ago, proven many of the recommendations we make. Who, though, will pay for scientific study that proves Homoeopathy is cheaper, more effective and less damaging than pharmaceutical drugs? Do we really have time to wait until someone does? Homoeopathy is a developing science/art and is much older than many of the medicines that are NOT working and that ARE harming humans. The principles that form Homoeopath were used by ancient healing systems, that worked. How arrogant are we to assume that modern science based medicine is the only way to heal? And How Wrong?

You also misunderstand the principle of evidential support for claims. I have not come to your site making claims about vaccination. I found your site while researching the field in general and I am genuinely interested in whether there is truth in your claims. I can only do this by reading original research results. I am not here to defend the pharmaceutical industry, I am here to challenge your claims in the true spirit of science.

No, I don’t have the slightest problem with Nature using a magician to investigate a matter of logic. He entertains by misleading people, and knows how it’s done. As for the other studies, without examining them in detail I can’t say what errors occurred. If I have time I’ll look at them and come back to you. I won’t dismiss what you say out of hand, but I think you have agreed that the Benveniste study was flawed, and that’s what I was talking about.

I just want to thank you for publishing this exchange as the vast majority of homeopaths purge dissenting comments from their sites.