On a plate

Homeopath handed his arse on a plate on the Edzard Ernst blog by a real scientist and medical researcher... 

It never ceases to amaze me how much people want to believe in magic. Of course, the reality of nature, how molecules work and the science behind understanding it is of no interest to people like this, they seem content with confirmation bias and quick-fix answers. Just like the regular at the bar (with a hacking cough) who insists that smoking is harmless because his granny used to smoke and she lived to 90; their world is full of well rehearsed false-positive anecdotes and apologetic scripts, we hear the same things over and over again, "you don't understand", "you're closed minded", "it worked for my mate down the pub" yada, yada..

Deflection and obfuscation like this are used to shore up opinions that focus only on results that support the narrative, simultaneously ignoring the vast majority of outcomes where there is demonstrably no effect at all. Of course this is a very common fallacy, practiced in many fields of Human endeavor, not just medicine. In the end, people are entitled to believe whatever they like but at the same time it's a real shame if they choose this path of least resistance. Imagine how things could be if these people used their time, intelligence and energy to properly study what is really going on and how placebo actually works, medicine might even make some kind of advance. Until then they might as well be flogging Harry Potter wands and chicken bones in a sack. 

Magic is easy, it requires no effort whatsoever, medical science on the other hand is hard and requires time and dedication, the difference is that science works, magic never has.