List: If these comments don't hit the nail on the head, I don't know what will. Could there be something here to "awaken" your own allopathic physician? Roger
"I think you people are talking to one another too much, and you're not talking enough to the ordinary Tom, Dick, and Jane out there. You have your shared assumptions, your shared jargon, and your shared jokes. But you're not reaching those people. That's part of the reason I wanted you to get on some of the ordinary health lists and field the kind of questions that I try to field. When a mother tells me that her child was miserably ill for years, and she took him to this doctor, and the doctor didn't help; and then she took him to that doctor, who was even worse; and finally she took her child to a homeopath, and the homeopath's treatment works, and now she has a happy, normal child -- am I supposed to tell her that that happened because she believed it would? Or because the child believed it would? Where do you think she'd tell me to go? These people don't know how to analyze a study in a medical journal--and they don't trust the study anyway because they figure it was funded by drug companies--but they do know what works for them and what doesn't work. Some of them have had very bad experiences with alt. practitioners. But others of them have had just as bad experiences with mainstream doctors, and they've had good experiences with alt. practitioners. There must be reasons why these things happen in each case--but you're not even looking for the reasons. You're endlessly recycling wastebasket explanations like "it was a placebo effect," or "it was going to happen anyway," which completely fail to meet the challenge presented by real people. I'm not a doctor or an expert in any scientific field. I can't answer their questions. I don't know whether you can or not, but from the things you say here I don't see much evidence that you've ever tried."
