EvC Forum: Is there anything up with the "Altenberg 16"?

I am considering a formal complaint for your needless and baseless insults of charging conspiracy, which has no place here.

Well do complain or don't, although I can't see it getting you very far. Just don't make threats. Put up or shut up.

Fact is there are other inquiries that work even better than science because they have quicker results sometimes. For example, the decisions one makes in his or her personal life are often shown to be correct or incorrect much faster than the scientific process of consensus which takes time, sometimes a very long time.

The fact that it is impossible to base most of ones decisions on scientific studies means that you have no means of comparison to say which has quicker or better results. This impossibility makes a point a moot one. Surely you must realise this.

I'll give a recent, personal example. A friend of mine was dying of cancer. I found an experimental nutritional product that had anecdotal reports of cancer cells, particularly for her form of cancer being destroyed....almost overnite. Now, we also laid hands on her and prayed. The doctors at Duke gave her 2-3 months at best, maybe just 5-6 weeks. It was pretty grim.

I can't scientifically say why she recovered. Anecdotally, she said she immediately felt relief when she took the product. Of course, we had been praying as well. Maybe God did it without the product's effects. Who knows?

But if we waited for science to tell us the right thing to do, she'd be dead for sure.

I'm sorry to hear that your friend had to go through that and delighted to hear that she is still around to tell the tale. Nonetheless, you can't say that it was your nutritional product that actually cured her. Maybe it was. Maybe it was the power of prayer, although I doubt it. Maybe it was something else. Maybe her favourite brand of milkshake contains a hitherto unknown sovereign remedy against cancer. Maybe she just got better, for no reason that anyone understands, which can and thankfully does occasionally happen. The point is;

I can't scientifically say why she recovered.

So your following statement;

if we waited for science to tell us the right thing to do, she'd be dead for sure.

is a non-sequitur. For all you know she might have got better anyway. Sorry to burst your bubble. You are employing the same kind of flawed logic that perpetuates homoeopathy, reiki, crystal healing and other such mumbo-jumbo.

This is why empirical evidence is so important in determining objective reality, especially in medicine. Alone, your story is just an anecdote, interesting and perhaps worthy of future study, but ultimately useless to doctors. Actually, I would argue that your experiences do constitute empirical evidence, after all, you are drawing conclusions based on direct observation. It's just that this anecdote constitutes extremely weak evidence, since it involves a sample group of one, with no controlled testing to eliminate other variables.

If you had reliable empirical evidence that your nutrient product was the key factor, that would be a different matter and you would be receiving your Nobel prize any day now. But you don't.

Edited by Granny Magda, : Expanded the two last paragraphs slightly.

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