On Wed, 30 May 2001, siobhan wrote:

> As far as I can tell, he
> relies mostly on testimonials, and there is no bibliography.>>
>
> His explanations make sense physiologically.

Yes, but so do lots of explanations that turn out to be false.

> Seeing as how most studies are
> funded by pharmaceutical companies (or those who take money from
> pharmaceutical companies) no one would want to fund studies like this.
> There's no money in water.

I don't buy this.  First of all, studies funded by pharmaceutical
companies are not necessarily invalid.  Second, not all studies
are funded by pharmaceutical companies, nor do studies have to be
profit-driven to get funded.  I recently read of a study of the
effects of yoga breathing that was funded by an NIH grant.
Nobody's making money on air either.

> But, there's also nothing wrong with
> testimonials.  We give them here all the time.

What's wrong with testimonials is that there is a selection bias.
In this case we only see the ones that the author chooses to
include.  We don't see the ones that he chose to leave out, and
we don't know how many people who didn't get results didn't write
to him at all.

We give them here all the time because there's not much else for
us to do, and at least there's nobody picking which ones shall
appear.  So when people don't get great results we hear about
that too.  It's still no substitute for a properly done study,
but it's all we have.

> <<On the other hand, his method is so simple and harmless that
> there is absolutely no reason not to try it and see what happens.>>
>
>   Exactly.  My experiences have been quite positive.

And your testimonial and others are good enough reason for me to
give it a try.  I'm not going to let the lack of studies get in
the way of that.  But if he had studies to cite, that would be
even better.

Todd Moody
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