study

Modelling and Model Building

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…using the example of our study: “Identification of different factors associated with Covid-19 deaths in Europe during the first pandemic wave”

A large group of statistical techniques designed to explain past data and also to predict future data is statistical modelling. This means that for a given data set with very different variables, one finds a mathematical structure that represents this data set as well as possible, firstly in a purely formal way. This procedure can be used to examine the influence of different variables on an outcome variable. In the language of modelling, the variable that one wants to explain is the dependent variable or criterion or outcome variable, and the different variables that are supposed to contribute to the clarification of this one variable are several independent variables resp. predictors.

I use our recently published modelling study [1] as a concrete example. It was conceived by me, I calculated the first analyses, then my colleague Rainer J. Klement got involved, who as a physicist is much more nimble in dealing with such models than I am.

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Homeopathy Works for Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

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…and is helpful within limits in healing wounds.

Homeopathy and the results of two meta-analyses

A few years ago, the leader of the German Green Party, Robert Habeck, proclaimed in the heart of conviction, that homeopathy is no more than placebo. Many politicians and medical administrators dutifully agreed. Our health blabbermouth, Health Minister Lauterbach, wants to pour this into a set of rules and remove homeopathy completely from all medical books. Since then, it has become politically incorrect to be pro-homeopathy.

I still think homeopathy is good and have done for a long time, thus I have also been politically incorrect for a long time. Because I am less interested in the opinions of people who have only a very limited idea of the matter and certainly not in the arguments that proceed from unreflected theoretical presuppositions. What I am chiefly interested in, is the data. Because I am politically incorrect, a foundation that supports homeopathy a while ago removed me from my role as a blogger, where I used to comment on new data and studies on the blog Homöopathie.info. 

Nevertheless, I like homeopathy and engage with it when the opportunity arises, or I am asked. I take the publication of our new meta-analysis on the efficacy of homeopathy in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children [1] and our somewhat older meta-analysis on Arnica in wound healing [2], published last year in Frontiers in Surgery, as an opportunity to draw attention to homeopathy.

I would also like to take this opportunity to pass on some methodological knowledge on the subject of meta-analyses in my newest chapter of my methodology blog.

I will start with a small political preface to help understand the general situation, then for those who do not yet know much about it, a few words about homeopathy in general.

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