Talk:Commission E

The huge extract from Jonathon Treasure's book seems highly inappropriate, and the page as whole seems to take a single opinionated stance on the value of Commission E rather than providing descriptive information about it. Danja 07:54, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

"Huge" is way too strong to describe four paragraphs of a 31K free download. Huge would be more than half. The extract also meets all the copyright fair use rules. Fair use is easy to decide when there is no effect on the market for the work. J. Treasure is not only not selling the work, but actively inviting people to make personal copies.

Commission E is controversial, and Wikipedia is supposed to describe controveries. Ok, that part is done.

The problem is, what is there good to say about a book that seems to be something that it is not, because it has been removed from its proper context in a way that its foreign government authors never intended? Perhaps that it earns money for its sponsor and publisher? How many people should Wikipedia persuade to buy it for that reason by rewriting the publishing blurb here? Somewhere in the Wikiguides, it says that one need not try to find good things to say about things that aren't good. Milo 09:26, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Danja, that the article needs to be descriptive and that the quote was way, way too long. Also, per Wikipedia:Quote, "Extensive quotation of copyrighted text is prohibited."

It sounds like the book is really lacking citations, which is really, really bad. In that case, it may be more a work of bureaucracy for Germany, than a scientific work, but we need to try to be as objective as possible when writing the article.

WriterHound (talk) 18:32, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm familiar with the technical details of the field and its historic players including Tyler. Since you described the carefully considered and vetted quote as "crazy" [1], I'll describe its simplistically dismissive removal as "ignorant".

"try to be as objective as possible" Objective means the book gets trashed as it logically and scientifically should. That's exactly what Treasure does that no WP editor can do. No editor can do that without casually seeming unobjective, since most stories have two or more sides. This one doesn't.

This is the most deceptive book in its class published in English. By removing the Treasure quote, you've also removed Treasure's independent interview evidence of its regulatory bias of science. Because of its faux imprimatur, and outrageously untrustable endorsement by the long-questionable Tyler, it is difficult or impossible to describe the book objectively in an article – without quoting the exacting scientific-legal-technical language signed by the sovereign-licensed medical herbalist authority of J. Treasure.

WP:QUOTE:"Extensive quotation" "Extensive" is a non-quantifiable subjective opinion. My opinion is as good as yours (or better if you don't understand the issues), and compared to the original at 31k, four paragraphs is not extensive.

WP:QUOTE: "...editors should avoid long quotations if they can keep them short" Those four paragraphs are the shortest that authoritatively summarizes what is multiply and critically wrong with the book:

• Abstract (warns healthcare professionals against the claims of the publisher!)
• Lack of references (not just missing – legally secret!)
• Lack of scientific authority (inexpert authors of scientific administrative law!)
• Lack of cross-referenced dosages (misleading of safety and effectiveness!)

Ordinarily, a book with so much wrong under color of so much false authority would never be published. But it was, and only counter-authoritative quotes can counteract the deception visited on allopathic dupes, who know even less about effective use of herbs than Tyler did. Your deletion of Treasure combined with your quote of JAMA's embarrassingly unauthoritative review created a textbook example of why Wikipedia's knowledge model is not trusted by academia.

Since you've totally removed the evidence supporting this unique quotation circumstance , I've reproduced the Treasure quotation here:

Abstract: "A review of the ABC's English translation of The German Commission E Monographs. The essay critically examines the monographs and the publisher's extensive additions to the volume. The author disputes the publishers claims of scientific accuracy and contemporary therapeutic relevance of the Commission E Monographs. The reviewer concludes that healthcare professionals in North America needing accurate information regarding safety, efficacy and administration of herbal medicines will not find this book to be an appropriate or useful resource, and that it may in fact be misleading, contrary to the claims of the publisher."

Lack of references: "The brevity of the monographs is compounded by the complete absence of any citations or references to the sources that formed the basis of the Commissioners deliberations on the herbs. These sources are apparently only accessible when legal cases are brought under the German Medicines Act. The failure to include verifiable scientific primary sources necessarily places the entire Commission E Monograph corpus irredeemably outside the most elementary accepted standards of academic requirements for rigorous scientific publications. The uninformed reader is thus obliged to accept as an article of faith the veracity of the information in the text." [Emphasis is in current source.]

Lack of scientific authority: "...former Commission members themselves might consider the publisher's claims about this edition to be inappropriate. Most revealing in this connection are the candid personal communications from Professor Heinz Schilcher quoted in the introduction. Prof. Schilcher was the Vice-president of the Commission and in response to a query from the editors regarding the apparent lack of scientific substantiation for the Commissions' claimed risks of Sarsaparilla use, Schilcher replied that the cautions made by the Commission were actually based on "a theoretical standpoint and we have in Germany little experience with Sarsaparilla". This extraordinary admission leaves one wondering how many other conclusions the Commission made based on theoretical speculation as a surrogate for the "doctrine of absolute certainty". " [Emphasis is found in web archive version of this document. [2]]

Lack of cross-referenced dosages: "Dosage is a crucial matter in administering herbal medicines safely and effectively. The Approved monographs contain dosage information, which in line with German practice, is mostly given in terms of dried herb for aqueous infusions or decoctions - generally in the range of 2-10 gms daily. For certain herbs with more potent drug-like constituents (such as Ephedra) maximum daily doses are given appropriately in terms of mg calculated "as mg active constituent", such as "total ephedrine alkaloid". The problem for potential users of the Commission E in the US is that hydroethanolic extracts, (usually tinctures, or solid preparations derived from such extracts) often derived from fresh rather than dried herb material, are the form of herbal remedies commonly used in clinical practice - not teas. Unfortunately conversion between dried herb infusion and fresh plant tincture data is not straightforward. Equally, the trend in North America toward use of standardized herbal material is not easily related to the infusion based dose data in the monographs. Finally where figures are occasionally given for tinctures and fluid extracts, they do not always correlate. For example the single dose for valerian tincture (herb/menstruum ratio not stated, but usually 1:5 in Europe) is given as 1-3ml, but the single dose for a fluid extract (Fluid extracts are 1:1 and hence more around 5 times more concentrated) is given 2-3ml whereas it should obviously be less rather than more. "

— Jonathan Treasure © 1999-2000, Making Sense of Commission E

<ref>Fair use rationale: Mr. Treasure's strongly critical and detailed reviews of Commission E are difficult to paraphrase with legal accuracy, and the technical details of Lack of cross-referenced dosages are risky to paraphrase as dose safety and efficacy information. These long quotations are expected to be a fair use of Jonathan Treasure's copyright, especially considering that the author's website offers a free download of this review in printable PDF format.[3]</ref>

Milo 08:20, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

JAMA Citation

I was unable to find "Journal of the American Medical Association. 1999;281:1852-1853.". http://jama.jamanetwork.com/advancedSearchResults.aspx?journalID=67&y=1999&v=281 does not show anything that I could identify as the cited content. Does anyone remember the title or authors or whatever? Richiez (talk) 19:52, 7 March 2013 (UTC)