Homeopathy: Medicine for the 21st Century

hmc21.org & homeopathyworkedforme.org

Blogging Advice

‘Question everything’ is the primary rule:

  • Challenge any assertion made by an anti-homeopathic blogger before accepting it, and accept it only when its nature has been defined and shown to be scientifically well-founded.
  • Do not answer a question, however innocuous it seems, until you have confirmation of what it actually means, and therefore what the answer will mean.
  • Don’t assume that what you mean by a term is what anti-homeopathic bloggers mean by it.
  • Make sure you are clear about what you mean by terms too, and use them clearly.
  • Assume that an anti-homeopathic blogger’s reference to ‘personal experience’ is simply a debating point without any basis in fact, and regard it as an unsupported assertion.
  • Provide references, but expect them to be ignored, denied or belittled.
  • Do not accept references to other blogs, online dictionaries or Wikipedia, and check whether the references are relevant.
  • Make sure that the basis of the argument is clear before pursuing it, or else you will find that it gets diverted into irrelevant details or becomes distorted.
  • Refuse to be side-tracked into irrelevancies or trivia. If necessary, clarify precisely what you meant rather than argue about it.
  • Anti-homeopathic bloggers often do not know what they are talking about.

General points about methods:

  • Keep it short. If you post a long comment, anti-homeopathic bloggers tend to ignore the inconvenient bits and focus on a minor detail.
  • Think carefully about how you can follow up what you say.
  • Do not assume that anti-homeopathic bloggers are honest or interested in genuine arguments. They may turn on you after appearing to accept what you have said.
  • Being polite all the time is difficult but can be a very effective contrast to the posts of anti-homeopathic bloggers.
  • Questioning the basic principles of the arguments of anti-homeopathic bloggers may make them hysterical, and an anti-homeopathic moderator is likely to censor your posts afterwards. This can be great fun, so do it occasionally.

Other useful points of argument to remember:

  • Any effect which does not follow a cause 100% of the time is the product of more than one cause, and to ascribe the effect to the one cause is a logical and scientific error.
  • Reliance on a statistical result of an experiment is an admission that not all the causative factors are known, which means that the relative significance of those factors in producing the result is also unknown.
  • There is no such thing as ‘objective evidence’. All evidence, including the results of experiments, depends on a theory for its interpretation, and the theoretical basis of this interpretation should be made clear before accepting the evidence as proof of anything.
  • There is no evidence to support the theory that responses human beings have in common are a firmer foundation for a medical science than individual responses.
  • Complex systems (such as homeostasis in living organisms) can produce consistent results through processes which are in themselves unpredicatble.
  • Clinical evidence outweighs RCT evidence (leading to drugs being withdrawn, for example).