Oops, slight point of correction to my last sentence. It *should* read:

'You do know that there is no evidence (the claims of the usual quacks notwithstanding) that *EMF from* high voltage power lines have any adverse affect on human health?'

Obviously if one were to, say, whizz on a high voltage power line, the adverse affect on one's health would be immediate and probably quite spectacular.

Clownfish,

Have I ever claimed anywhere that love changes chemistry?

All I said, is that water (or alcohol, sugar, etc.) can be qualified by the fact of having been instilled with love by a homeopathic doctor who used some specific tincture in the process.

This is no different than claiming, for example, that a bottle of water is qualified "by having been in the Jordan river (and in no other water-body since)". I suppose you would be one of those who would find nothing wrong with cheating and replacing that bottle with ordinary water so long as the chemistry is the same.

Obviously, the claim that the water is qualified is not identical with the claim that it is chemically-qualified (another simple example of non-chemical qualification would be heating/cooling). There is more information there, other than in the water's chemical structure, but then if one is colour-blind one also thinks that two pictures are identical only because they look exactly the same to them even while others see different colours in those pictures.

True to a reasonable extent Clownfish

"Vaccination basically works by exposing the immune system to a small dose of a pathogen to stimulate an immune response.
Homeopathy does not, nor has ever, operated on such a premise.
In fact, homeopathy often actively denies the germ theory of disease. Homeopathy is predicated on the belief that substances that mimic the symptoms of a disease are capable of curing it."

It does and it does not: It followed the premise that exposure to the pathogen in small doses would help the immune system build up (which in itself is quite true- minus they had no idea why)- except that, exactly like you said, they assumed that whatever would cause symptoms would be the same sickness, and assumed only that an altered dose of hayfever tablet would cure it's more serious cousin, the flu.

-
"Homeopaths don't adjust dosages to suit patients: that would imply some sort of evidence-based approach, which homeopathy entirely lacks. Homeopaths dilute substances, usually beyond the point of actually being present, to satisfy a nonsensical magical formula, including among other things, the crazy notion of 'constitution types'."

They do cater dosages- but it's mainly based on old-fashioned, crude measurements and assumptions based on symptoms. As such, they view the severity of the symptoms, guess the fragility of the patient and diagnose entirely based on that and a few other considerations that only made sense back in the 1800s.

Now, King Hazza, there you go taking all the fun out of it! We're almost in agreement :(

Yuyutsu, sadly I cannot say the same, mostly because your answers almost no sense at all.

How can water be 'instilled with love'? What mechanism can you put forward for any such thing to happen? What evidence do you have that any such thing *can* happen? (no anecdotes, please: real evidence only).

What do you mean by 'qualified'? The only sense that I can think of is, 'modified, limited, or restricted in some way' (however, although this sense does include 'modified', it's not in the usual sense of merely being changed, but in a specific sense of being restricted or limited).

How can water carry information? What physical mechanism do you propose for it do so?

Clownfish you can accept you were being disingenuous in not taking my meaning about (harmful) chemicals in the food chain or you can continue to play game of semantics.

You know it, I know it, it is transparent. As I said you can choose to be an informed consumer or not - simply it is your choice. I have given you the links above to start you off on your journey of exploration and learning.

Are we having fun yet?

Clownfish,

I am not aiming for agreement: all I aim for is respect, which ultimately means to prevent the government, acting as an agent of the AMA, from prohibiting spiritual practices and life choices on the supposed grounds that they are "not scientific".

How can water be instilled with love? isn't the fact that someone in the past instilled them with love sufficient? in other words, that someone performed a procedure with that water and with a loving intention?

You see, the past of an object, its timeline, is a physical part of it: even if there are no discernable differences in an object's 3-dimensional appearance, there still are differences in the 4th dimension - Time. How many more possibilities exist then when frontier science discusses the presence of 10 dimensions, where matter is connected by invisible strings.

Though I do not propose to claim to know how it works, or how exactly is the information carried, still apples used to fall from trees also before Newton's times.

The question is whether or not you accept that differences in the Time-dimension are material. For example: suppose by some fluke of nature 2 babies are born to two sets of parents at the same hospital at the same time and have exactly the same set of genes. They look like identical twins, but they are not. Would it be right by your standards for the doctor to tell the mother: "just take any of them at random, they are exactly the same - after all, the fact that one baby came from your womb and the other did not is only a matter of history and therefore immaterial"?

Or suppose you kept your teddy-bear since you were small. Would it be right for someone to replace it with someone else's teddy-bear that looks and smells exactly the same? Wasn't the reason you kept that bear that it was YOUR childhood-teddy-bear, not just any teddy-bear? Is this reason illegitimate? Does it give grounds for the government to forbid you to keep your bear?

(continued...)