Bibliographic record
Abstract
To the Editor; As paediatricians and physicians who practice or take an interest in homeopathy, we broadly welcome the Canadian Paediatric Society's position statement on homeopathy (1). Specifically, we welcome the recommendation that physicians should respond to questions about it in an informed and nonjudgemental manner. Regrettably, because of its bias against homeopathy, we wonder whether the statement will contribute to this laudable objective. The bias is most clearly manifest in the very different treatment of criticisms of trials with positive and negative results for homeopathy. For instance, a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of a homeopathic preparation for chemotherapy-induced stomatitis in children with a positive result is described as suffering from “multiple design problems”. What exactly are these design problems? Not only are these problems not specified but no criticisms of this study have appeared in Medline-listed journals. We are unable to detect any serious flaws beyond the relatively small sample size, and this study would achieve a high Jadad score. In contrast, the position paper makes no criticism of a negative study in asthma of which multiple criticisms have been published (2). The Community Paediatrics Committee was aware of these criticisms (they appear in the reference list, references 48 to 51) yet did not mention the highly critical reaction. This trial could not have had a positive outcome because of a “ceiling effect” (ie, the values for the principal outcome were normal when patients entered the study, and could not have been expected to improve further). Some of the secondary outcome measures also suffered ceiling effects, but those that did not consistently favoured homeopathy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".