But the best outcomes seem to come out of homeopathy, which is as perfect of a placebo arm as one can get.
I did expect to be surprised by the post given the title, but I did not expect this surprise.
I have previously heard lots of advocates for evidence-based medicine claim that homoeopathy has very weak evidence for effects (mostly the amount that one would expect from noise and flawed studies, given the amount of effort being put into proving its efficacy) – do I understand correctly that this is an acceptable interpretation, while the aggregate mortality of real-world patients (as opposed to RCT participants) clearly improves when treated homoeopathically (compared to usual medicine)?
More generally, if I assume that the shift “no free healthcare”->”free healthcare” does not improve outcomes, and that “healthcare”->”healthcare+homoeopathy” does improve outcomes, wouldn’t that imply that “healthcare+homoeopathy” is preferable to “no free healthcare”?
of course, there are a lot of steps in this argument that can go wrong
but generally, I would expect that something like this reasoning should be right.
if I do assume that homoeopathy is practically a placebo, this can point us to at least some fraction of treatments which should be avoided: those that homoeopathy claims to heal without the need for other treatments
That looks like an argument that an approach like your “What I do”-section can actually lead to strong benefits from the health system, and that non-excessively complicated strategies are available.
I did expect to be surprised by the post given the title, but I did not expect this surprise.
I have previously heard lots of advocates for evidence-based medicine claim that homoeopathy has very weak evidence for effects (mostly the amount that one would expect from noise and flawed studies, given the amount of effort being put into proving its efficacy) – do I understand correctly that this is an acceptable interpretation, while the aggregate mortality of real-world patients (as opposed to RCT participants) clearly improves when treated homoeopathically (compared to usual medicine)?
More generally, if I assume that the shift “no free healthcare”->”free healthcare” does not improve outcomes, and that “healthcare”->”healthcare+homoeopathy” does improve outcomes, wouldn’t that imply that “healthcare+homoeopathy” is preferable to “no free healthcare”?
of course, there are a lot of steps in this argument that can go wrong
but generally, I would expect that something like this reasoning should be right.
if I do assume that homoeopathy is practically a placebo, this can point us to at least some fraction of treatments which should be avoided: those that homoeopathy claims to heal without the need for other treatments
That looks like an argument that an approach like your “What I do”-section can actually lead to strong benefits from the health system, and that non-excessively complicated strategies are available.