I know I'll see your face again

[venta]

Newsflash! Science can save you money!

I take glucosamine tablets, because I have lots of joint problems. I don't know whether it does any good, but it seemed like a worthwhile idea. I'm running out of pills.

Just before popping out to the shops, I idly went to Wikipedia to read up about glucosamine. Among other things, I have discovered that according to a Cochrane review, it doesn't do much (although they were looking more at effects on athritis). So maybe I won't bother.

If, in a few weeks time, bits of me are hurting more, I may go back to taking them because I'm willing to pay a few quid for a possibly placebo-based effect. If not, hurrah, money saved.

Comments

[ar-boblad.livejournal.com]

I completely agree that the line you've quoted is a spurious argument, I mentioned it as the major reason why a little research on animal placebo wasn't going to be productive for me.

People who specialize in terrible arguments and who quote results of badly defined trials are making a variety of posts about animal placebo and as such obscuring any actual science that might have gone into this. Therefore it would take actual research rather than a light googling to find anything scientifically valid on the subject.

I wasn't intending to make any statement about the validity of "if animals can't experience placebo then dog homeopathy seeming to work is proof that homeopathy isn't nonsense", as irrespective of the arguments clearly sugar pills that have "the memory of water with the memory of arsenic" aren't going to do anything that regular old forgetful sugar pills won't.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Let us not forget, though, that homeopaths could easily be so utterly incompetent that their dilutions fail to eradicate the original substance. As such, I'd be very cautious about making an argument against homeopathy based purely on the supposed physical mechanism :-)

But thanks, I didn't mean to imply you were agreeing with the nonsense, I just didn't (until your second comment) understand why it was muddying the issue.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

until your second comment

By which I mean, third comment. Dated a few minutes ago...