User talk:Andrea Lawson

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List of pseudosciences and pseudoscientific concepts
Hello Andrea, welcome to Wikipedia and thanks for creating an account. You seem to have chosen your real name as your editor name. That's excellent (I have done the same), but do keep in mind that this is a potentially dangerous website. I was once involved in a deletion discussion about a non-notable piece of physics; for some reason I seem to be cc'd whenever one of the participants sends death threats to another participant (who is fortunately anonymous and probably lives at the other end of the world). Note that I am talking about two professional physicists who might meet at a conference.

I would like to try clearing up some potential misunderstandings. If your knowledge about Wikipedia comes mostly from what ScienceApologist told you, you need to know that his online personality has several severe behavioral issues that may not appear to be consistent with what you know about him in real life. It would be prudent to check the information you are getting from him. For example he called me a "homeopath" and "a misguided mathematics post-doc, judging from his bizarre levels of insistence at homeopathy and elsewhere". You were perhaps not alluding to me when you mentioned "homeopath and acupuncture and chiropractor 'doctors'", but I could easily have been offended in this context.

Now what is this misguided postdoc doing on Wikipedia when he is not opposing ScienceApologist on the homeopathy article? E.g.:
 * researching or giving talks
 * Privately rewriting an article on prehistory (Doggerland, see User:Hans_Adler/Sandbox for my progress).
 * Apothecaries' system – writing a huge articles on science history from scratch.
 * Asynchronous_method_invocation – rescuing a technical applied computer science article from deletion by rewriting it.
 * Partially rewriting an article on a branch of mathematics (Model theory)
 * Creating decent articles on core mathematics concepts, with illustrations (Modular lattice).

Now where did my involvement with the homeopathy article come from, which brought me into a conflict with ScienceApologist? It was a conscious decision to get involved with one of the contentious areas of Wikipedia, in which editors are being blocked all the time, in order to help. I chose this particular subject because it kept appearing on the noticeboards, and because I have some decent half-knowledge about the subject. I am also using it occasionally against hay fever. (It seems to help better than standard medication. The reason I even tried it when my physician prescribed it to me was: The stuff isn't so strongly diluted (several ingredients, D3-D6 or so, and I had noticed that when suffering from asthma I got an instant reaction from taking a conventional antihistaminic which could only be explained with the placebo effect.)

Initially I expected that the pro-homeopathy side would be the main problem, but it turned out that it's easy to deal with any problems from that side using the existing processes, and the child/bathwater problem caused by the other side is much worse. I don't have much sympathy with editors like ScienceApologist who seems to think it doesn't matter what (counter-)factual statements we make about homeopathy so long as they are negative. This has led to situations like the one in a recent discussion about homeopathy.

You should also be aware that Wikipedia, although operating from the US, is a global project. While homeopathy was almost extinct in the US in the middle of the 20th century (one of many things I learned from editing Wikipedia), it is still part of the establishment in some European countries, with substantial numbers of ordinary physicians getting some training in homeopathy as part of their normal education (Germany) or even publicly funded homeopathic hospitals (UK). Similar things hold for acupuncture and probably also for chiropractic (with which I am not familiar). It's easy to overlook such differences. --Hans Adler (talk) 23:49, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Dear Hans,

What does your decent half-knowledge of homeopathy entail? Your perception of the remedy helping you is most certainly related to the placebo effect. If you are aware of this, why do you take a homeopathic medication? You could manufacture your own placebo much more cheaply.

I am very much aware of the differences between countries. I worked for five years in Spain. I have not met any medical professionals in my travels who believed that homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, or other bad medicines were effective for treating ailments beyond providing comfort to those who could not be helped otherwise. Good reference materials indicate this. Information that people find on the internet should too.

Sincerely,

Andrea Lawson (talk) 01:50, 10 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Your question suggests to me that you have no intuitive feeling for how the placebo effect might work. Please try to understand that not everybody works the same way, prejudices probably being an important factor in the placebo effect. It's well known that the mind has a lot of influence on the body. But the mechanism is currently not understood at all. In this situation it's not scientific to make any assumptions about how the placebo effect can be achieved and how it can't. An obnoxious but very intelligent editor once tried to push a connection between magic and homeopathy into the homeopathy article. I opposed him because it was "original research" (hereabouts that's a bad thing), but I think he was probably right; except for the presumption that since it's magic it can't work. I am not using my home-made placebos because it would be too much effort to come up with something sufficiently convincing to get the effect. The stuff I occasionally take has not been diluted into nothing; there is some plausibility to it, it was recommended by a physician I trust, and a lot of people say it works. Apparently that's enough for me to get a placebo effect. Eating an apple is not enough to get a placebo effect. Why should eating a sugar pill that I know is just that give me a placebo effect?

Old studies suggest there is a strong placebo effect, more recent studies suggest that's not true. Perhaps the more recent studies are better. Or perhaps, since many people stopped believing in "conventional" medicine (witnessed by the rising popularity of CAM), the placebo effect has been affected. When the old studies were made, doctors could still impress their patients with very effective substances such as aspirin. Now that they have been abused (mostly by patients, but also by physicians) for half a century for treating minor ailments, or as alternatives to proper placebos, they are not that impressive any more; also a lot of patients are very worried about potential side-effects of their medication. What I am trying to say is: CAM has its place, if only because it offers a wide range of placebos that "conventional" medicine cannot offer.

I am confused about what this means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MEAT#Meatpuppets

I was introduced to pseudoscience on Wikipedia by ScienceApologist through a presentation. He showed me and other interested scientists some things, and I decided that I could help with on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy. Now I wonder whether this is appropriate. Please advise.

Andrea Lawson (talk) 02:00, 10 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I think you need not worry much about accusations of being a meatpuppet so long as you are not blindly following instructions from ScienceApologist. Since you didn't reply for so long I actually thought I wasn't going to get one, and that you were somebody's sockpuppet and had now been abandoned. ScienceApologist has used such improper methods himself in the past, and they have been used to get him into trouble. That's one reason not to take too much advice from him.
 * If you are a real person, and not going to play a proxy for ScienceApologist (who recently got himself into real trouble and promised to stay away from Wikipedia until the new year), it's perfectly appropriate for you to go to the homeopathy article right now. But this article has a very special atmosphere, and it would be wise to build up some credibility first by editing some articles about the place where you live or any fields that interest you. Once you have been in an edit war about whether it is allowed to call a settlement with a population of almost half a million (Leeds) a "city", or something else equally silly, you are in a better position to understand that not all conflicts around pseudoscience related pages are really about pseudoscience. That really helps to stay constructive in some situations. --Hans Adler (talk) 08:36, 10 December 2008 (UTC)