Talk:Homeopathy/Catalogs

At Larry's suggestion, I created this on a subpage. The first column text was written to be a little light-hearted. It certainly can be refined, but the refinements must add precision, rather than attack it.

I propose that the bulk of effort go into the second and third columns. In some places, I clearly do not know the homeopathic term for something that still, apparently, exists. Replacing question marks with unambiguous terms would be greatly appreciated.

By unambiguous, I do not meaning redefining a term of art from the other discipline. For example, it seems fairly clear that homeopaths and mainstream physicians do not think of "symptom" in the same way. Were someone to disambiguate symptom (homeopathic) and symptom (medical), and do all of the needed changes in articles that already use the term, that would be one way to resolve such a difficulty.

Also, I would request that comparative terminology be as specific as possible. Homeostasis (biology) and immune systems are extremely broad topics, at too high a level for direct comparison. There are a number of articles, in various levels of development, about specific immune mechanisms; more are needed (e.g., basophil and mast cell). In some cases, all that may be needed is a subsection (e.g., how medicine and homeopathy stabilize mast cells, if, in fact, they agree they do that.

There's certainly nothing wrong with adding additional concept rows. Howard C. Berkowitz 17:43, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

I added more descriptive headings. Feel free to edit further, but please don't make them absolutely vague.

I don't like the red text, underlined text, etc. Can we please exclude it?

Also, coming from a fresh point of view, I have to wonder if it is necessary to couch all this stuff in terms of what Hahnemann defined, etc. Why not just put it in terms of homeopathy?

The table implies that conventional physicians do not prefer to refer to homeopaths as homeopaths. Really? They don't?

The table currently says that, for "Someone who believes that Hahnemann defined an essentially perfect system that needs only minor refinements, and that every case is inherently different," the term that non-homeopath physicians use is "Physician, biomedical specialist, non-homeopathic physician, mainstream medicine". Huh? Really?

"Biomedical scientist, one trained by the evolved system proposed by Abraham Flexner" is surely wrong in many ways. It is surely wrong to attribute the whole system to Flexner alone. Moreover, "biomedical scientist" surely does not mean or entail "Someone who believes that Hahnemann defined a system that was superior..." etc.

Etc.! One line that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to me here begins with "Opinion and trust not based on statistical analysis".

In short, this table is potentially very useful, but it needs a lot of work. --Larry Sanger 03:25, 22 October 2008 (UTC)