[Karellen]

"Patients experiment with alternative treatments like diets, supplements, or activities, and learn whether they work or not."

No, they learn whether they experience pareidolia or not, and that's how shit like homeopathy, cupping, rebalancing the humours, and, oh, every other non-scientific "modality" of "treatment" which doesn't work gets started.

"patient-to-patient healthcare is "crazy", "dangerous", or blasphemous"

"Blasphemous" - uh, WTF? "Crazy" - maybe, although I'd have gone with "foolishly optimistic disregarding the brain's ability to fool itself". "Dangerous" - definitely.

"Oftentimes I'm finding that hearing "no" means you're doing something right."

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan.

Oftentimes when you hear "no", it actually means you're just fucking wrong. Not always, it's true. But mostly.

[Alex3917]

"they learn how every non-scientific "modality" of "treatment" which doesn't work gets started."

You do realize this process is the foundation of the scientific method, right? It's not like new drug ideas come from the science fairy.

And also you are wrong on your history. E.g. homeopathy was derived from a theory, not from patient experimentation.

[jtheory]

Well, from a hypothesis. Not a theory, really, because it didn't really have a body of evidence supporting it.

Also worth pointing out, to anyone who might wonder if the ideas behind homeopathy might actually make sense -- that this was pre-germ-theory. I.e., he didn't know microorganisms existed, or that they might have something to do with illness.

[Karellen]

OTOH, people have been debunking homoeopathy for over 160 years, also arguably pre-germ-theory:

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/lessons-from-h...

[jtheory]

Good point, and neat link.

So let's go with "easily-invalidated hypothesis even at the time."

[Karellen]

"homeopathy was derived from a theory"

Sure, if, by "theory" you mean "outlandish idea someone made up without any basis in fact and might as well have pulled it out of their ass" ("just a theory") instead of "systematic framework of ideas intended to account for, explain and relate together a wide amount of existing observational and experimental data, and to predict the outcome of similar results in the same field in the future" ("scientific theory").

"Like cures like, and weaker is stronger" was not a "theory". It was a wild-ass guess which also turned out to be fantastically wrong. The thing that made homoeopathy practitioners think it worked was bad (non-blinded) patient experimentation, where things like the observer effect, confirmation bias, the placebo effect, regression to the mean, and a whole bunch of other psychological biases, all came (and still come) into play.

[Alex3917]

"sure, if, by "theory" you mean "outlandish idea someone made up without any basis in fact and might as well have pulled it out of their ass"

I meant it in the sense of classical greek philosophy, since that's what it seems most similar to. E.g. it sounds like an idea out of Phaedrus or something.

[anonymous]

You're right - they aren't treating their condition, they are trying to discover how not to aggravate whatever it is that's wrong with their system. And this really is something which doctors should know about and be able to prescribe: "Here, try this diet and tell me if you have any symptoms." before giving them experimental drugs with nasty side-effects. It won't help us understand how the condition works, why it happens and indeed, won't cure a person, but it will let them live like most everybody else at a minimal cost.