Wikipedia:Peer review/Homeopathy/archive1

Homeopathy

Following peer review

I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to see it improved and I would like a wider range of opinions on how to improve it. I would like to see it be a FA one day however I think it sill needs some improvments. I would like editors not involved in editing the article especially to review it for me and give detailed and constructive input on how to improve it.

Thanks,

Wikidudeman ^(talk) 12:59, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

• Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, APR _t 03:29, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is generally in very good shape. I have suggestions about the prose in places and Manual of Style issues in other places. The article seems comprehensive, and it held my interest all the way through. "Research and medical effectiveness" and "Ethical and safety issues" are perhaps the two sections that need the most attention in terms of prose-tightening. Here are suggestions for improvement from top to bottom:

Lead

• "Practitioners select treatments according to a patient consultation that explores both the physical and psychological state of the patient, both of which are considered important to selecting the remedy." - Repetition of "patient" and of "both". Suggestion: "Practitioners select treatments during consultations that explore the patient's physical and psychological states, which are considered important to selecting the remedy".
• "Claims to the efficacy of homeopathic treatment" - Should that be "claims about"?
• "Common homeopathic preparations are often indistinguishable from the pure diluent because the purported medicinal compound is diluted beyond the point where there is any likelihood that molecules from the original solution are present in the final product;[8] the claim that these treatments still have any pharmacological effect is thus scientifically implausible[9][10] and violates fundamental principles of science,[11] including the law of mass action." - Too complex. Suggestion: Full stop after "final product".
• "The lack of convincing scientific evidence supporting its efficacy and its use of remedies without active ingredients have caused homeopathy to be regarded as pseudoscience or quackery." - Maybe "... have led critics to regard it as pseudoscience or quackery" would be more accurate.
• "Current usage around the world" - It would be better to specify the year. Suggestion: "As of xxxx, use of homeopathy in any one year varied around the world from two percent of people in the United Kingdom and the United States to 15 percent in India, where it is considered part of Indian traditional medicine".
• "GPs" - I'd probably spell this out on first use: general practitioners (GPs)
• "remained popular worldwide, with the president of" - I'd replace the comma with a full stop.

Hahnemann's concept

• "Hahnemann believed that large doses of drugs that caused similar symptoms would only aggravate illness, and so he advocated extreme dilutions of the substances; he devised a technique for making dilutions that he believed would preserve a substance's therapeutic properties while removing its harmful effects,[8] proposing that this process aroused and enhanced "spirit-like medicinal powers held within a drug"." - I'd suggest a full stop here too instead of a semicolon.

Revival in the late 20th century

• "Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act - Remove italics

Provings

• "would make it impossible to determine which symptoms came from the remedy and which from the disease itself" - Delete "itself".

Treatments

• "This is partly due to the insurmountable complexity" - "irreducible"?

Remedies

• "Materia medicae" - Italics here and in the next sentence

Flower remedies

• "such as placing flowers in bowls of sunlit water, and so on" - Delete "and so on".

Veterinary use

• "FDA" - Spell out on first use and wikilink: U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
• "Other studies have also found " - Delete "other" and "also" since this is the only study mentioned in this section.

Medical and scientific analysis

• "Thus critics contend that any positive results obtained from homeopathic remedies are purely due to the placebo effect. Critics cite the lack of viable scientific studies for the effectiveness of homeopathic remedies as evidence that they are not effective and that any positive effects are due to the placebo effect." - The two sentences repeat essentially the same idea in similar language.
• "have caused homeopathy to be regarded as pseudoscience" - Maybe "have led many scientists to regard homeopathy as pseudoscience" would be better. I'm fishing for a replacement word for "critics", which is already used more than once in this section. "Most scientists" is probably accurate but apt to be challenged.

High dilutions

• Use block quotes as you have for the other long quotations. Fancy quotes are deprecated by the Manual of Style.
• "is roughly equal to homeopathic potencies of 12C or 24X (1 part in 1024).[112][124][73]" - It's a good idea to re-arrange serial citation numbers in ascending order: [73][112][124]. This ordering problem occurs in other places in the article; this is just an example.

Research on medical effectiveness

• "NCCAM" - Spell out and abbreviate on first use.
• "Positive results have been reported, but no single model has been sufficiently widely replicated, local models proposed are far from convincing, and the nonlocal models proposed would predict that it is impossible to nail down homeopathic effects with direct experimental testing" - I find this sentence confusing. I'm not sure what "model" refers to, and I don't know what "local" vs. "nonlocal" model means in this context. Why "would predict" rather than "predict"? Also, "nail down" is slang. Perhaps "establish" or "demonstrate" would be better.
• "although it's probably an involuntary bias" - This needs a citation to a reliable source unless the sentence is re-cast to make clear that the systematic review includes this conclusion.
• "most of the reviews on CAM journals avoided noting the lack of plausibility, unlike the ones on mainstream journals who" - "which" rather than "who"
• "FASEB" - Spell out and abbreviate on first use.
• "These 19 studies showed a pooled odds ratio" - Wikilink "odds ratio"?
• Do the quotes have to be this long to be effective?

Research effects in other biological systems

• "INSERM" - Spell out and abbreviate on first use.

Ethical and safety issues

• "12 million U.S. dollars" - "$12 million"
• In 1978, Anthony Campbell, then a consultant physician at The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, criticised statements made by George Vithoulkas to promote his homeopathic treatments." - This paragraph echoes one that appears in the "Miasms and disease" section. Did you mean to use it twice?
• "Some homeopaths suggest that vaccines be replaced with homeopathically diluted "nosodes", created from dilutions of biological agents – including material such as vomit, feces or infected human tissues." - Since nosodes were explained graphically in the "Remedies" section, this seems like overkill.

References

• A few references like citation 13, which lacks an access date, are incomplete.

I hope you find these suggestions helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 04:34, 8 February 2009 (UTC)