Wikipedia:Peer review/Homeopathy/archive3

Homeopathy

Previous peer review

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for February 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
Homeopathy has been a controverial subject, but has finally reached a reasonably stable, high-quality form. I think it's time that we begin - finally - to move it towards FA. Please review it in that light, with advice on moving forwards.

Thanks, Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 23:41, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Review of the lead by Eubulides

Wow, that's a big article. I haven't had time to look at the body, but I did walk through the lead and have some comments. Disclaimer: I know little about homeopathy. I used this version, dated 2009-02-08T14:52:54 UTC.

• The following phrases in the table of contents are not summarized or mentioned in the lead. That's pretty weird: the lead should summarize every topic that is worth putting into a section header, and the big mismatch between section headers and the lead raises serious WP:WEIGHT issues. Either these phrases should be removed from section headers (which would be plausible for, say, "isopathy"), or their topics should be summarized in the lead (which would be plausible for, say, "provings").

• "18-century medicine"
• "rise to popularity and early criticism"
• "Revival in the late 20th Century" (that "Century" shouldn't be capitalized, by the way)
• "law of similars"
• "miasms and disease"
• "succussion"
• "coverage in the mainstream press"
• "provings"
• "repertory"
• "isopathy"
• "flower remedies"
• "veterinary use"
• "Research on effects in other biological systems"

• The lead illustration is not useful. It could just as easily illustrate an article on conventional remedies, or on poisons. Its caption doesn't help advance or explain the article. Instead, I suggest using a single product with a label explaining what it is, e.g., something like Image:Arnica montana homéopathie zoom.jpg with the caption "The homeopathic preparation Arnica D 6 contains one part extract of Arnica montana diluted with one million parts water." (Please correct me if I have the caption wrong.) You can see what this'd look like to the right of this paragraph. (image removed, as WP:PR asks not to use images in peer reviews) Fixed.

• The lead paragraph is in the wrong order. As per WP:LEAD, the lead sentence should be a simple, straightforward definition of homeopathy. It shouldn't be distracted by etymology and it shouldn't mention Hahnemann or 1796 or anything like that. It should say right off that homeopathy treats people with heavily diluted substances. Move the etymology (which is unnecessarily distracting) from the lead sentence to a separate box, as is done in Chiropractic. Put Hahnemann's name and the history snippet later in the lead, in the last sentence of the lead paragraph, say. fixed

• The lead sentence shouldn't be citing Hahnemann 1833. That's a primary source. For history, cite a recent reliable source discussing the history of homeopathy. For the definition of homeopathy, cite a recent reliable source that defines homeopathy.

• If homeopathy is part of Indian traditional medicine, then how could Hahnemann have defined its principles? Those two statements in the lead don't seem consistent. Please reword to explain or avoid the seeming inconsistency. Source was misinterpreted - fixed.

• Don't wikilink to Similar or to Suffering in the etymology. That's WP:OVERLINKING. fixed when creating etymology box

• The 3rd sentence says "patient" twice. It should say it zero times; see WP:MEDMOS #Audience. Try to avoid "patient" throughout the article. fixed - [1], [2]

• It's strange to see the lead cite Ernst 2002 (PMID 12492603) when the body does not. Generally speaking, the lead should never cite a source that is not also cited by the body; otherwise it's not merely summarizing the body but is introducing new evidence. I see now that the lead is citing 12 sources that the body does not. This should be fixed, in the case of Ernst 2002 by also summarizing it and citing in the body. fixed 12492603 (currently ref. 5)
  • Current version is fixed (mostly by integrating references into the body), except for the OED (appropriate) and a pair of Hahnemann references which should be replaced by a modern overview.

• In what is currently footnote 7, which cites Altunç et al. 2007 (PMID 17285788), the other two citations (to Linde et al. 2001 (PMID 11416076), and to Report 12) are duplicates of citations in in the body. Please fix the duplication by removing the duplicates in the lead and using ref name= to cite the citations in the body. fixed

• Some of the citations use PubMed abbreviations of medical journals without periods (e.g., "Br J Clin Pharmacol" for citation [2]); others use the PubMed abbreviations with periods (e.g., "Trends Pharmacol. Sci." for citation [10]); others use full names in lower case (e.g., "Cochrane database of systematic reviews (Online)" for citation [5]); still others use full names capitalized (e.g., "Social Science & Medicine" for [15]). Please be consistent. I far prefer the PubMed abbrevations without periods, as the long names chew up space and do not help either naive readers (who don't know the publications) or expert readers (who know the abbreviations), and the periods waste space too. The lower-case names are clearly incorrect, in any event.

• Similarly, some of the citations use medical style for author names (e.g., "McCarney RW, Linde K, Lasserson TJ") and some use full first names (e.g., "English, Mary"), and some use periods after initials (e.g., "Saxton, J.") and some use firstname first (e.g., "Stephen Barrett"). Please pick a single style. I suggest medical style, since it's a medical article.

• When citing BBC News, say "|work= BBC News", not "|publisher=BBC" or "|publisher= BBC News". And don't wikilink to BBC News in citations multiple times; that's overlinking.
  •  Done publisher --> work  Not done not linking multiple times. Links on citations are not the same as links on the article body. They are moved around, so you never know if the first instance of the word will be linked or not. Also, citations get removed, so the only link can disappear. People click on citations and they get dropped in the middle of the citation list, so they will only see the link that appears on that citation, skipping links that appear on previous citations, and a host of other problems, that's why I always link everything on citations. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:56, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
• Change "the pure diluent" to "pure water" in the lead. "The pure diluent" is technically more accurate but is much harder for the new reader to follow. fixed with rephrasing - "pure water" would be too specific, so rephrased

• The following phrases in the lead introduce POV. I assume they are not well-supported by the sources, but are linking text inserted by Wikipedia editors. They should be removed. Rewrite the text so that these inserted-POV phrases are not needed.

• "Critics also object that" fixed
• "However" Fixed.
• "Nevertheless" Fixed.

• "Current usage around the world varies from" Remove this phrase, unless you can find a source that directly supports it. The cited sources don't support the claim that usage varies from 2% to 15%. The text should not be written as if the true range among countries was known. fixed

• The detailed statistics about the UK are out of place in the lead. As far as I can tell, homeopathy is not centered in the UK and there's no reason to spend such a large fraction of the lead on UK statistics. The lead should focus on global statistics. UK statistics can go into the body of the article. Fixed.

• The claim "Homeopathy remained popular worldwide" is not directly supported by the cited source and should be either sourced or removed. Fixed.

• There is no need for the phrase "president of the French Association for Homeopathy Research stating in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization that". Just summarize the president's claim (rather than quoting it). The claim that homeopathy is widespread is well-supported by a reliable source, and does not need quoting. Doing it this way will be shorter and will avoid putting undue weight on that particular claim. Fixed.

Also, I did a very brief independent search for recent reliable sources on homeopathy and found a couple of things. First I was surprised to see that Dantas et al. 2007 (PMID 17227742) wasn't cited in the lead. Second, I found the following source on veterinary homeopathy, which looks like it'd be worth citing somewhere.

• Rijnberk A, Ramey DW (2007). "The end of veterinary homeopathy". Aust Vet J. 85 (12): 513–6. doi:10.1111/j.1751-0813.2007.00174.x.

Hope this helps.

Eubulides (talk) 05:27, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

We try to use articles from the journal Homeopathy with great caution: it's a fringe, crank journal. It's published articles like, well, a reprint of this article, which explicitly and seriously proposes magic as the reason homeopathy works. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 08:25, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up about Homeopathy, but isn't that irrelvant to the Rijnberk & Ramey 2007 citation? That source appeared in the Australian Veterinary Journal. Eubulides (talk) 08:32, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

That one should almost certainly go in. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 14:02, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

If the journal Homeopathy has published articles that seriously propose magic as a potential mechanism, why is that not in our article as an example of what homeopaths claim? SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

I think that, in the end, the problem is, basically, that homeopaths are quite happy to just engage in wild mass guessing about how water memory could work. There's dozens of conflicting... ideas as to how water memory could work, from magic, to gross misunderstanding of quantum mechanics, to quotemining descriptions of water structure, to claiming silicon particles knocked off the glass during shaking somehow encode the memory. It's hard to see how to treat it without giving a lot of wild mass guesses undue weight. (Yes, I can back up my examples with sources, if needed). Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 14:02, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Nitpicking from Natural Cut

You have a run-on sentence in the lead. I think the sentence(s) in question could also use a little tweaking but wanted to get your input since the change might be controversial: 'Although several studies support the efficacy of homeopathy, they are not definitive and have not been replicated.[19] Other studies show no such evidence, and studies of homeopathic remedies have generally been shown to have problems that prevent them from being considered unambiguous evidence for homeopathy's efficacy.[20][11][13][21][14]' I would also briefly elaborate on what problems exist with the evidence, presumably the placebo effect.

The 18th century section mentions laxatives and enemas were in use by the medical profession - they still are. I'm somewhat familiar with Mr Kellogg's ideas on the subject, which I think is what you're getting at here. I also renamed the section to historical context since it was really both the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, and the first sentence mentioned the 18th century anyway.

In the revival section, is the bit about homeopathic remedies being recognized as drugs meant as a positive or negative thing to homeopaths? It sounds positive, but the next sentence states there were only 75 by the 1950s.

I would like to see more detail about how/why 'the medical profession started to integrate such ideas in the 1990s'. The inclusion of something previously seen as pseudoscience by the mainstream deserves more than a sentence.

The article switches between between US/UK spellings regularly. I had changed a couple of places based on the lead before I stopped because the earlier Americanisms might have just crept in over time.

Dilution and succussion - Uses both diluent and dilutant. The spellchecker in Google Chrome oddly marked the latter as a typo, but both appear correct in English.

I was tempted to break dilution and succussion into two sections, or a subsection about the debate over dilution. I did move the Lake Geneva paragraph down so it would flow better.

The press coverage section felt like someone just threw it in because they didn't know where to put it. Rather than an '...in popular culture' trivia bit, I made this the debate subsection but added a clarification tag for how diluted the mixture they used was.

In the provings section, it's redundant to say 'and most modern provings are carried out using ultradilute remedies in which it is highly unlikely that any of the original molecules remain'. Just say they're closer to his original method or the later one - it's not clear which you mean at present.

Reportory - was the inclusion of homeopathic in italics next to materia medica intentional? Looks like a typo.

Treatments - I don't doubt the truthfulness of the information, but the first paragraph only has a citation from the FDA early on. The rest looks like original research/synthesis without cites.

The isopathy section should give more info since the term itself redirects to this section.

On scrolling down further and seeing the 'high dilutions' section, it's probably a more appropriate place for the BBC/ABC bit unless there was a specific reason for it being up where it was before. If it has particular relevance to the high/low dilution issue, leave it where it is.

I also think, in line with the original comment about article length, a sub-article about the efficacy debate is probably warranted. I don't expect the topic to go away any time soon, so there's no shortage of information to put in there.

The regulation and prevalence section only talks about Europe. Maybe this is because homeopathy is primarily popular there, but it comes off as Eurocentric to the casual reader.

I'm sure you're aware of the fact tags already present in the article so I won't mention those spots. Overall, as someone who had never heard of homeopathy outside some cheap ad on the radio, it was a great read for me. I admittedly started skimming at times because of the sheer length - 100kb! - but I think you'll be fine in that area once you get efficacy of homeopathy or homeopathic efficacy or whatever you want to call it going on. Natural Cut (talk) 03:54, 2 March 2009 (UTC)