Here’s a link to an introduction to it by a Harvard doc and another respected scientist:

http://www.badscience.net//?p=498

What is additionally impressive is that there have been “negative” results from scientists who have shown positive results from other studies. My point is that I do not know any “homeopathic researchers”; that is, these people are “researchers” who are doing all that they can to evaluate objective various phenomena. These researchers are simply

It is strange that French reseacher, Jacques Benveniste, and Irish biochemist, Madeleine Ennis, have been called “homeopathic researchers” just because they found some positive results from homeopathic doses. The bottomline is that these people have/had integrity and a backbone.

Finally, one thing that I agree with you: extremely small doses of anything may not have any effect; however, there may indeed be something significantly different about how homeopathic medicines are made. That is, the process of making serial dilution, with vigorous shaking, in a double-distilled water and in glass bottles, may create something other than “small” doses. The “silica hypothesis”, that is, the “silica fragments that fall off the glass walls of the bottle, may interact with the medicinal substance, thereby changing the structure of the water in unique ways for each substance that interacts with the silica chips. Implausible becomes plausible.

This is a common straw man. “Implausible” is a matter of degree. Science needs to push beyond the edge of current knowledge. There is a sweet spot where we are reaching far enough to discover new stuff about the world, but not so far that the probability of success becomes negligible. It’s like making sound investments vs playing the lottery.

Extreme scientific implausibility is a waste of time. In order to counter extreme implausibility there would have to be rock solid evidence, which is lacking in homeopathy. There is a great deal of bad research in homeopathy (there is a great deal of bad research in all of medicine) so we need plausibility to guide us through the complex maze of poor methodology, publication bias, placebo effect, etc.

Also – medicine is an applied science. We have to make decisions that effect real people’s lives. This is not just abstract knowledge.

What we have not had in homeopathy is a consensus trial – one designed and monitored by skeptics as well as believers, that is replicable by anyone. Positive effects tend to go away under replication.

What would happen to science and medicine if researchers chose not to study things that were “seemingly invalid” or simply “unlikely”?

In actual fact, there is a body of in vitro studies testing homeopathic medicines: A group of German and Swiss physicians, scientists, and professors conducted a systematic review of the in vitro evidence of homeopathic high potencies (Witt, Bluth, Albrecht, et al, 2007). From 75 publications, 67 experiments (1/3 of them replications) were evaluated. Nearly 3/4 of them found a high potency effect, and 2/3 of those 18 that scored 6 points or more and controlled contamination. Nearly 3/4 of all replications were positive. Design and experimental models of the reviewed experiments were inhomogenous, most were performed on basophiles. These researchers concluded that even experiments with a high methodological standard could demonstrate an effect of high potencies. [Witt, CM, Bluth, M, Albrecht, H, Weißhuhn, TER, Baumgartner, S, and Willich, SN, The in vitro evidence for an effect of high homeopathic potencies-A systematic review of the literature, Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 15,2, June 2007: 128-138]

The July 2007 issue of the journal HOMEOPATHY devoted itself to “plausible” mechanisms of action, including several researchers showing replicated data and some showing new data that awaits replication.

I have no serious problem with people questioning homeopathy, though I hope that we can agree that the case for homeopathy is not closed. Those who do feel that way, IMO, are not good scientific thinkers.

This is an unsubstantiated assertion. The whole point of scientific research is to find new and unconventional treatments. This is happening all the time in scientific medicine. In my opinion, this is just standard CAM apologist propaganda.

You also stated that there are other legitimate ways (other than placebo-controlled trials) to scientifically investigate treatment. I agree, as I stated, and mainstream medicine uses a variety of scientific methods to assess new treatments and ideas. This is why I advocate for “science-based medicine” and not merely “evidence-based medicine.”

But the part of science that the homeopaths (and CAM proponents in general) miss is the very critical one of scientific plausibility, which is a way of assessing prior probability. If you have a modality that is difficult to study, that has ambiguous clinical evidence, and a prior probability of essentially zero due to an utter lack of any scientific plausibility – this modality is probably not real. Simply appealing to ignorance is insufficient defense – we are not talking about uncertainty as to the precise physiological mechanism of a treatment, but a complete lack of physical plausibility. You cannot overlook this and claim to be science-based.

The trouble is that that’s all homoeopathy does.