Homeopathy in the British Dental Journal

A while ago, the British Dental Journal published a quite good opinion piece entitled Unethical Aspects of Homeopathic Dentistry. The following issue was full of angry homeopaths, livid that someone would have the temerity to point out that homeopathy is perhaps a little bit silly, of which the most irritating was a lengthy opinion piece entitled Homeopathy and its Ethical Use in Dentistry. I wrote a letter in reply to this, and apparently so did a couple of other readers, because the current issue is full of letters from actual scientists, laced with varying degrees of sarcasm. I think my favourite line is from R Levy’s letter:

On the positive side, however, I am always happy to be reminded of the tale of the homeopath who forgot to take his medicine and died of an overdose.

Here is the full text of my letter:

There is an interesting and ongoing debate about the ethics of using placebos in medicine, so I was disappointed that the response to Unethical aspects of homeopathic dentistry has focused instead on disputing the overwhelming scientific consensus that homeopathy is baseless and unproven.

It is well known that people are prone to trust experiences and evidence that support their preconceptions. It is therefore inappropriate to challenge such an established consensus in the letters and opinion pages, particularly by citing personal experiences, individual studies and one’s own website. To make a convincing case, a large, unbiased systematic review is needed. The Cochrane Collaboration has already done this for several conditions, but has yet to find compelling evidence of any benefit. Usually, few or no well-conducted trials exist.

In the absence of evidence that homeopathy works, one is forced to estimate its priori plausibility as the homeopaths do – by comparing it to experience. The two founding principles of homeopathy are that a patient presenting with a given symptom is best cured by a substance known to cause that symptom, and that diluting medicine makes it stronger – including well beyond the point where no medicine remains. I wonder how your readers’ clinical experiences compare to these principles.

References are included on the journal’s webpage, including links to all the silly pro-homeopathy letters and articles. Here are links to the other responses:

Quackery Risk, R Levy (quoted above)
Ethically Unacceptable, K G Icaacson (“Lest your readers begin to think that there may be possible benefits of homeopathy…”)
A Substantial Gap, G Chapman (“Any ethical practice involving homeopathy must necessarily begin by telling the patient that it is scientifically implausible…”)

There was also one letter praising the silly pro-homeopathy article.

I like this kind of thing. You do see pseudoscience sneaking into places where it really shouldn’t be, but for all that nonsense does seem to be everywhere, people are actually pleasingly good at spotting and laughing at it.

My Contribution to the Dundee Comedy Festival

NHS Scotland are advertising a job for a ‘specialty doctor in homeopathy’, which pays up to £68,638. They are also letting go of hundreds of other staff who have actual jobs. Obviously this is fucking stupid, and so several bloggers have applied for it already, and obviously so have I. You can read their supporting statements at the following URLs, and you can read mine below those links.

Update: there’s no point us both maintaining a list, so here’s Zeno’s.

Statement in Support of Application – please tell us your personal qualities, skills and attributes, experience and any major achievements and show how they match those needed for this job.

While I have had no formal training in homeopathy, I have a very good understanding of the theory and practice of, and the evidence base for, the discipline. While I understand you may be reluctant to hire a specialty doctor with no formal training in the field, I should point out that my outside viewpoint grants a certain clarity, and I am therefore unencumbered by various misconceptions which are common within the industry – such as the idea that homeopathy has any power to heal illnesses or injuries. My research background will be useful in keeping up to date with the latest research in case anybody ever proves that it does – as will my Master’s degree in physics, which allows me to see through the misguided and fraudulent appeals to quantum strangeness which riddle much of the published literature on homeopathy.

My second degree allows me to call myself ‘doctor’, however I am not a medical doctor. In fact I have a PhD from Manchester University’s award winning School of Dentistry. I believe this non-medical doctorate would be very useful to this role, categorised under “medical and dental”, because homeopathy cannot be considered ‘medicine’.

I would be a valuable supervisor to the Tayside Postgraduate Homeopathy Group as I am passionate about raising awareness of homeopathy. Indeed, I have already participated in a large-scale campaign to this end, known as “ten twenty-three”, in which healthy volunteers (including myself) deliberately swallowed massive overdoses of homeopathic arsenic. This has been reported as an ‘anti-homeopathy’ demonstration, but in fact the result was quite balanced: the volunteers suffered no ill effects, and indeed no effects at all, thereby demonstrating both the safety and inefficacy of homeopathic preparations.

I understand you may also be reluctant to appoint a specialty doctor in homeopathy who does not believe that homeopathy can be used medicinally, however the guidance handed to the NHS from Parliament suggests that homeopathic preparations may be offered not for their efficacy but to provide patients with a greater range of choice. I would be the ideal candidate for this role because I offer a yet greater choice than more mainstream homeopaths, since I will ensure that patients’ choices are informed by all the relevant facts, including the fact that homeopathic preparations are pharmacologically inert.

I appreciate that this is an unorthodox application, however I hope you will consider it given the unorthodox nature of the position being advertised–that of a doctor of non-medicine. This happy alignment of post and applicant seems apt given the first law of homeopathy, and I am keen to apply the second law to my work as soon as I start.

Obviously I’ve got this post pretty well sewn up, but in case I am unavailable you might want to apply here.

Mariopathy

Cherry-Picking the Society of Homeopaths

To discover how honest homeopaths are, here is a passage from the Society of Homeopaths’ website, edited for accuracy:

Homeopathy simply explained: What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is an effective system of healing which assists the natural tendency of the body to heal itself. It recognises that symptoms of ill health are expressions of disharmony within the whole person and that it is the patient who needs treatment not the disease.

In 1796, a German doctor, Samuel Hahnemann, discovered a different approach to the cure of the sick which he called homeopathy (from the Greek words meaning ‘similar suffering’). Like Hippocrates two thousand years earlier, he realised there were two ways of treating ill health: the way of opposites, most commonly used by conventional medicine and the way of similars.

Hahnemann discovered that diluting and succussing (shaking) remedies, which homeopaths call potentisation, not only produced fewer side effects but also produced better results. Homeopathic remedies are drawn from the natural world and prescribed on the principle of treating “like with like” or the way of similars.

How does it work?

Scientists cannot yet explain the precise mechanism of action for homeopathy but there is published evidence of its efficacy. It is believed that homeopathic remedies work by stimulating the body’s own healing abilities and that this stimulus assists your own system to clear itself of any expressions of imbalance. For more details on research evidence, please see the Society’s website at www.homeopathy-soh.org.

That’s not too bad. I’ve crossed out very little by homeopathic dilution standards.

“Choice” in Medicine

A theme I’ve heard a lot about from alternative medicine types is “choice”. Homeopaths in particular are extremely keen that everyone be given a choice between ‘conventional’ and homeopathic medicine. Choice is, of course, a good thing. People should have a choice wherever possible. But the way alternative medicine practitioners use the word is disingenuous at best.

I’m going to skip over the argument for choice within the NHS, as I think that’s more to do with entitlement issues and the persecution complex fringe groups always adopt when their absurd privileges are taken away — hence every ‘attack on Christianity’ news report you’ve ever read or the endless ‘put the football on the BBC’ petitions on the 10 Downing Street website. The problem with ‘choice’ as an argument for providing alternative remedies is that their practitioners are intent on taking away any choice you may have.

A particularly gutsy Deal Or No Deal contestant may find themselves offered the swap with only the 1p and £250,000 boxes in play. Their dilemma, essentially, is between the prize in box 4 and the prize in box 17. One of them is life-changing money, the other won’t cover their bus fare if they live down the road. If they call it wrong, we wouldn’t incredulously ask them why anyone would want 1p instead of £250,000. They were never given a meaningful choice.

Both extremes of the ‘choice’ argument can agree on one thing: homeopathy and evidence-based medicine do not both work. One of them cures diseases, and the other is a waste of time and money. A patient given a choice between homeopathy and real medicine is in the same position as the Deal Or No Deal contestant above: they want the medicine that will cure their disease, but they don’t know which box it’s in. The patient has no meaningful choice until they’re told which medicine works (at which point they still have no meaningful choice since one option just seems silly).

An uninformed choice is no choice at all, so the people pushing for consumer choice are the skeptics who work to disseminate evidence of efficacy or lack thereof, to expose quacks and to debunk media scare stories. They are giving people the information which enables them to make a choice. Homeopaths are effectively arguing that we are ‘anti-choice’ because we want to give people information that will make the choice so easy it will cease to exist. I think they are anti-choice because they deprive people of information that makes the choice meaningful — and often give out misinformation that makes the answer to their dilemma both obvious and wrong. When they die of a treatable condition, will the homeopath stand up in court and say ‘this is what he chose’?

Nobody is arguing that consumers should have a choice between conventional business deals and Nigerian princes who e-mail them opportunities.

How Homeopathy Works

This Saturday, a lot of people are going to publicly overdose on homeopathic medicine, to prove that the pills are totally inert. This is part of the ’10:23′ campaign. Personally, I love homeopathy. Its practices read like a scathing satire of alternative medicine. Literally every part of it is wrong. Just as you think it’s done being silly, you read the next bit and if anything it gets more absurd. Allow me to explain.

The way homeopathy works — I say ‘works’. The way homeopathy is thought to work — I say ‘thought’. The way homeopathy is believed to work is by a principle called ‘like cures like’. So you cure a disease using something that causes the same symptoms (even though they tell you that homeopathy treats diseases, not symptoms unlike, they say, something which they call ‘allopathy’ and which everyone else calls ‘medicine’). So, for example, say you have fractured limbs. As any player of Theme Hospital will tell you, Fractured Limbs is caused by falling from high places onto concrete, so you might get some concrete, put it in a glass of water and call it medicine. That’s a rather facetious example, but you can genuinely buy homeopathic remedies made with dolphin song or the light of Venus. The light of Venus? What disease does that cause? I think if you’re exposed to significant amounts of Venus-light then the terrible heat and the atmosphere of sulphuric acid will be what does for you. Homeopaths work out what diseases to flog these esoteric tinctures for by giving them to healthy people and writing down what it does to them. In case nothing happens, they omit such extravagances as a control group or any statistical tests, so they get the same guaranteed results as the N = 1 science of Braniac. They call these experiments ‘provings’, which is a bit like me writing ‘working’ on my timesheet when I was actually doodling: it is what I would like people to believe I was doing.

Anyway. You take your medicine, which you’ve carefully selected to be the worst possible thing you could give the patient, and dilute it. This, homeopaths conveniently assert, reduces its harmful effects while amplifying its presumed healing properties. You take a drop of the water with your medicine in, and put it in 10ml of fresh water, which is assumed to be about a 1:100 dilution, which they call “1C”. Then you shake it, or hit it with a book. (That obviously achieves nothing, so it can be fun to leave it out, thereby making homeopaths say amusingly daft things like ‘well of course it’s going to sound silly if you don’t mention the succussion’, which is the word they invented for hitting things with books.) Then you repeat the dilution, and succussion, so you have a 1:10,000 dilution, which they call “2C” and then again so you have a 1:1,000,000, or “3C” dilution. They call it a ‘potency’ instead of a ‘dilution’ because that sounds more like it might work, but chemists may recognise this as the technique used to remove all trace of a chemical from titration pipettes (except they’re delicate so you don’t hit them with books). Homeopathic remedies are routinely sold at a potency of “100C”, which means…

The problem with a 100C dilution is that it’s beyond analogy or satire. A 60C dilution would have to literally fill the entire universe before it had even a remotely realistic chance of containing a single molecule. When homeopathy was first imagined, we didn’t know about Avogadro’s Number, but now we know that beyond 12C there are generally no molecules left of the original medicine. It’s just a glass of water. So modern homeopaths have invented a thing called the ‘memory of water’. Some of them write long pieces of gibberish about quantum theory which read like a shooting script for one of the sillier episodes of Star Trek Voyager, but mostly they pin their meagre hopes on some kind of unspecified crystalline microstructures which they say form around molecules in water, and which heal your body somehow and don’t get damaged by being repeatedly hit with a book. Of course nobody has ever shown the memory of water effect in a laboratory or that homeopathic remedies have any therapeutic effect, but they write a lot more entertaining but merit-free quantum bullshit to explain that away. This empty water can optionally be soaked into a sugar pill if liquid medicine isn’t your thing, so my advice would be not to give hyperactive children homeopathic sleeping pills.

The problem with the ‘memory of water’ hypothesis (aside from the fact that it isn’t true) is that beyond a 24C dilution there is none of the 12C solution left either, so water would not only have to remember what it contained, but communicate this information to some future water. A 100C dilution would have had to do this at least four times. This aqueous Chinese-whispers obviously has no active ingredient, and homeopaths therefore believe that the real power of homeopathy is that it activates the body’s own healing powers, which sounds very natural and healthy but raises two rather important questions, the first of which is ‘why doesn’t the body just use those powers in the first place?’, and the second of which is ‘what environment did mankind evolve in where this was the best system?’. Developing an immune system that needs kick-starting by some water which used to have poison in it seems to me like an evolutionary mis-step.

No, the immune system evolved to try its level best to fix anything that might go wrong in the body, but it’s a bit of an ad-hoc job and doesn’t always get it right. Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it fails, and sometimes epically backfires and kills its owner. Modern medicine works by giving a group of intelligent people a deep understanding and knowledge of anatomy, asking them to interfere with the natural progression of a disease, and banking on their expertise to make a better fist of it than the body’s in-built system, which by the way is the same system that reckons if you don’t wash your face enough you need a load of spots that hurt to clean. It’s a slightly messy process, obviously, because there’s a finite number of options available, so we do massive amounts of research to discover every effect that every chemical and surgical procedure we can think of has on the body. Doctors look through that research to find one which will do what they need it to, and anything else it happens to do is called a ‘side effect’ and the patient has to put up with them or take their chances with the disease.

Homeopaths, on the other hand, insist their medicine has no side effects. Much like the Daily Mail, they see the world as divided into ‘healing’ and ‘disease-causing’ things, and like the Daily Mail put everything on both lists. It’s just a pathetic piece of magical thinking which belies a complete lack of understanding of how the world works. It’s not divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things; things are right or wrong for a particular purpose. It’s this kind of thinking that leads to people putting deisel in a petrol engine, assuming they haven’t ruined it already by using 100C unleaded.

Homeopathic medicines in Boots, labelled with poncey Latin names to appear more credible. Hence the alternative spelling ‘homœopathy’.

photo credit: Gwyn Richards

And obviously people are perfectly free to think this way and to spend many a happy afternoon pointlessly diluting glasses of water and hitting them with books. Probably the ritual will make them feel better. But if people rely on this voodoo nonsense instead of real medicine, they die. And when they promote it over real medicine, they kill. Boots the Chemist have admitted in Parliament that there is no evidence that homeopathic medicines work, but they sell them anyway, alongside the real medicine, because “[their] customers think they work”. Campaigns like 10:23 are important to minimise the harm these things do.

Homeopaths will tell you that 10:23 does nothing to disprove homeopathy. The stunt is for loads of people to each chug an entire box of pills all at once to demonstrate that nothing happens. Such homeopathic overdose stunts have been done before, and homeopaths have got their excuse down pat by now: they say that any non-zero number of pills, if swallowed all at once, is the same as one pill. (I agree, apart from the ‘non-zero’ part.) They can say this, and indeed anything they like, because once you’ve effectively invoked magic, all bets are off. But the point isn’t to convince homeopaths — they’re far too invested to quit now — but to show everyone else how silly it is. If you have a bit of a cold and someone suggests you try homeopathy, and you do and you get better because it was only a cold, that can be quite convincing. But if we can goad the homeopathic community into publicly saying something as patently absurd as “one hundred pills is the same dose as one pill” then that’s a valuable victory. Anyone who’s seen that will think twice before entrusting their health to a homeopath. It also raises questions about why the packaging of these pills says to take a dose of two. That’s the business plan of a dodgy plumber.

That’s the point: we don’t need to disprove homeopathy. Aside from the fact that it is the homeopaths’ responsibility to prove their theory, all you need to do to homeopathy is hand it enough rope. A public awareness campaign is exactly the last thing homeopaths need.

I am being inexpertly censored!

I have just been hilariously banned from commenting on the homeopathy blog ‘homeopathy4health’ after this discussion. Why?

Andrew’s comments are no longer allowed on this blog. This is because he has a tendency to write opinions based on logic and not from experience or facts. He is a programmer by profession.

Dammit, I do have a tendancy to write opinions based on logic. Oh, she really nailed me there. ‘Zing’, I should think, and probably even ‘oh, snap’. And so forth. Feel free to visualise Jon Stewart-style gesturing if it helps.

Goodbye, then, anonymous homeopath. Live long and prosper.

A Sub-Molecular Dilution of Credibility

A couple of hours ago, the anonymous quack who calls herself homeopathy4health posted an article entitled “James Randi avoids homeopathic challenge for $1 millionÂ prize” and, in true cowardly fashion, immediately disabled user comments. She links to, and characteristically copy-pastes most of, a page called “the facts about an ingenious homeopathic experiment that was not completed due to the ‘tricks’ of Mr. James Randi”Â apparently written by someone called GeorgeÂ Vithoulkas,Â who had taken up Randi’s $1m challenge. (Randi offers a million dollar prize to anyone who can prove something supernatural, a category in which he includes many alternative ‘therapies’ such as homeopathy.)

Neither is fun to read. Quacks do love to go on, possibly because simply saying a lot of things is an effective way to stop sceptics from being able to counter them all — it takes a second to say ‘miasmas exist’ without a reference but it takes a good five minutes to properly explain why they don’t. Throw in a stock ‘reference’ and a response might take an hour to craft. Of course, you can just say ‘prove it’ but that won’t convince anyone who doesn’t already have a healthy respect for science. It also doesn’t help that the English is somewhat broken. Possibly it is a second language. (In the quote below I have refrained from adding ‘[sic]‘ after errors, as it would be appended to every other sentence and just look like Vithoulkas had been at the sherry.)

Apparently, Randi fell ill and the challenge had to be postponed, by which time a change of management meant the centre would not be willing to participate. I can sympathise with this — the research unit I work for has this kind of problem all the time. Almost exactly this has happened at least once. That’s one of the problems, unfortunately, with doing proper science: everything has to be planned so meticulously that the slightest detail can throw it out and cause long delays.Â VithoulkasÂ claims that this was a trick to avoid ever having the experiment:

In 7.4.2006 Mr. Gindis wrote to Mr. Randi in order to signal to him that the homeopathic team was ready to start…Â But instead Randi suspended all activities of the experiment attributing it to his supposedly state of health!

Mr. RandiÂ knew very wellÂ that this period was crucial for us to start the experiment and we had made this urgency explicit by sending several e-mails urging them that it was necessary to go ahead immediately. But Mr. Randi needed …six months “to recover” denying to assign a collaborator.

James Randi is 80 years old. Is it really that hard to believe he might be ill?

Vithoulkas and his team refused to accept this change to the schedule and have decided to do the experiment without Randi, which Randi.org quite accurately described as a withdrawal from the challenge. Randi points out that as his foundation is the one offering a million dollar prize, he gets to set the terms. Vithoulkas has decided that this is unfair and then, brilliantly, written Randi a retraction for him to post. He hasn’t. It seems to me that as a homeopath Vithoulkas is unfamiliar with the problems faced by real scientists doing actual clinical trials and is presumably used to ploughing on in an ad-hoc fashion and knocking the whole ‘study’ out in a week. Â I can see how in that case Doing It Right might look like stalling.

Still, whoever is right, I presume that since homeopathy4health is now in the business of chastising sceptics who she feels are shirking from a challenge, she will be immediately getting six bottled remedies and negotiating with Andy Lewis to find a trusted third party so she can participate in his far easier, lower-stakes challenge.

Otherwise frankly she’s fooling nobody but herself (and that’s only because herself is so very credulous).

Homeopathy Awareness Week II

A few days ago I corrected a Telegraph article about homeopathy, as part of Homeopathy Awareness Week. (That is of course not the official ‘week’ website but it is better.) Today, as the week ends (after eight days for some reason), I will apply much the same corrections to another homeopathy article, this time courtesy of Cancer Research UK, whose Cancer Help website carries a page of what I will generously term “information” about homeopathy. It is split into the following sections:

What homeopathy is
Why people with cancer use homeopathy

Strangely, the word “ignorant” does not appear in this section. It does say “Some people choose homeopathy because it offers a completely different type of treatment compared to conventional medicine.” Which is true, but it’s a bit like saying “some people choose spaghetti because it offers a completely different type of support compared to a conventional bungee cord”.

Evidence on using homeopathy in cancer treatment
What homeopathy involves
Side effects
Who shouldn’t use homeopathy

Ooh, I know! Is it “anyone who wants to get better or has a finite supply of money”?

What homeopathy costs
Finding a homeopath
Homeopathic hospitals in the UK
Homeopathy organisations

For context, this page sits in their “complementary and alternative therapies” section, (surely by definition all therapies are either complementary or an alternative?) which lists a huge number of options including the harmless, the spiritual and the quackerific. They’re all split into the same sections as the homeopathy page. They’re mostly good stuff:

There is no evidence to suggest that acupuncture helps in any way with treating, preventing or curing cancer. Both the World Health Organisation and the Cochrane Library have published reviews on chemotherapy related sickness, concluding that acupuncture can help.
There is no scientific evidence to prove that Aloe vera can help treat, prevent or cure cancer in people in any way.
There is no scientific evidence to prove that aromatherapy can cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer.
Many people say these therapies help them to cope better with cancer and its treatment. But there are treatments which are part of ayurvedic medicine such as special diets and herbal remedies that we don’t know enough about to support their use. These treatments could be harmful to your health or interfere with your conventional treatment.
Some people have claimed that black cohosh may reduce your risk of getting breast cancer or prostate cancer. There is not enough evidence for this at the moment.

And so on, all the way down to

There is no scientific evidence to prove that yoga can cure or prevent any type of cancer. But there are some studies to suggest that it might help people with cancer sleep better and cope with anxiety.

Yeah, it’s tiring is yoga.

I also like that they discuss the evidence in an adult way, rather than simply saying “this works; this doesn’t work”. The point is, though, that I can’t help think that the following text lends far too much weight to the insane fringe view that there is even the slightest possibility that homeopathic ‘medicine’ could cure cancer:

There are over 100 published clinical trials looking at how well homeopathy works in treating various illnesses and symptoms. None of these trials provide us with any scientific evidence to prove that homeopathy can cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer. Many individuals say that homeopathy has helped their symptoms. And some small trials have shown that homeopathy can have a positive effect. Two studies suggest that homeopathy may help women with breast cancer to cope with menopause symptoms. But these are small clinical trials and they don’t provide enough evidence to show if homeopathy really works, or how.

Remind me again why I should give you money, Cancer Research UK? This is sort of implying you’ll waste it.

We don’t really know whether the effects of homeopathy truly come from the homeopathic medicine or if they are simply a placebo effect.

…

Using homeopathic medicine is generally safe. Some homeopaths warn people that their symptoms could get slightly worse, before they settle down and improve.

Sort of like illnesses do on their own, then..?

But this does not happen very often. A Swiss meta-analysis of homeopathy trials in 2006 found homeopathy applied appropriately by a trained homeopath to be safe and with few side effects.

Yes, because it’s totally inert!

If you are having treatment for cancer it is important that you let your specialist doctors know if you are planning to use homeopathic medicine.

It’s a difficult thing to do, of course, because it’s important to say “look, here is the evidence, do you still think water is magic medicine?” rather than “it just doesn’t work, okay?” because it’s the only way any real progress will be made against the nonsense we’re all surrounded by. But equally, there really is no good evidence at all on the homeopaths’ side, so representing the evidence in a truly balanced way looks a lot like saying “it just doesn’t work”.

Ultimately, though, it’s the links sections at the bottom that annoy me. They link, for example, to the CORH, saying “look on their website for a list of the organisations who are members,” but the CORH are happy to link uncritically to the almost totally mental Society of Homeopaths, whose record on such things is pretty dismal (and it’s hard to over-state their satisfaction), and to the Faculty of Homeopathy, whose president I recently caught on television endorsing the Faculty while claiming to be an ordinary member. She said:

If people have a serious medical condition I would strongly advise them to approach [the Faculty of Homeopathy].

Homeopaths have a record of giving bad advice, mostly by recommending people avoid real medicine (or as above failing to recommend they seek it out), and I don’t think it’s appropriate for a cancer charity, or indeed anyone else, to endorse their organisations in this way without a large disclaimer saying “warning: many homeopaths are a bit mental and think their water is magical. If they tell you they can cure cancer or AIDS or that they can basically do anything at all apart perhaps from making you feel vaguely better, leave and report them to their governing body and Trading Standards”.

For all I know practitioners of the other alternative therapies are no better, but I’m aware of a lot more evil done in the name of homeopathy than in the name of acupuncture or yoga. Generally, homeopathy and ‘herbalism’ are the pseudosciences most likely, in my experience, to have delusions of efficacy beyond palliative care, and that makes them dangerous.

Just because the pill is harmless doesn’t change that.

Homeopathy Awareness Week I

It is Homeopathy Awareness Week. Has been since Saturday. That’s right, the week starts on a Saturday if you’re a homeopath. I am, as ever, happy to do my bit for this kind of cause, so here are a couple of articles I saw this week with misconceptions about homeopathy I’d like to clear up. The first is from the Telegraph, which contains this fantastic but only tangentially relevant passage:

A Government report yesterday called for “urgent” controls on herbalists, acupuncturists and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, amid fears over patient safety. Its recommendations, to be considered by ministers, include a proposal that new practitioners would have to study for a degree in their field before they could practise.

Yes, that will help a lot. Can’t have people doing acupuncture wrong, can we? (Answer to rhetorical question: yes.)

These are the homeopathy mistakes:

A £40’‰million industry in the UK, homoeopathic remedies claim to be able to prevent yellow fever, typhoid, polio and even leukaemia, as well as cure symptoms ranging from toothache to hearing loss. But there are growing concerns over whether the homoeopathic remedies have any effect.

No, there aren’t. There is a total consensus that homeopathic remedies are nothing more than placebo. (Obviously I’m aware that there are people who dispute this consensus, but those people are cranks, or ignorant, and in any case too few in number to count — remember, there are those who dispute the holocaust.)

Homoeopathists differ from herbalists, who use a variety of plants to combat diseases, because their treatments are heavily diluted. There can often be as little as one millionth of the original ingredient in a homoeopathic remedy.

Setting aside that this last sentence doesn’t actually mean anything, the fact is that most homeopathic remedies do not contain even one molecule of the original ingredient. None at all. That’s not the same as “heavily diluted” or “one millionth”. That’s the same as a nice glass of water.

Then the Telegraph invite readers to “Have Your Say: Do you believe in homeopathy?” Because what we need to settle this one isn’t evidence, my word no. It’s the ill-informed rants of internet cranks such as Mike Abrahams, who says (all links and emphasis in these are mine; I’m sure you’d have worked that out soon enough):

At the moment, “properly applied/prescribed” medical intervention “accidentally” kills over 250,000 people a year in the USA alone (Journal of American Medical Association)…

I didn’t know it was possible to commit libel using only punctuation marks.

…So let’s get a perspective on this. Just how many people are killed by homoeopathy – last year? – in the last 50 years? …

(Answer to rhetorical question: lots, and here are 8 that even Dave Hitt can’t argue with.)

…Even if Homoeopathy used just the placebo effect it is much safer than orthodox drug treatment.

…because it doesn’t do anything. Or Graham, who says:

i think that you can apply the one rule for all principle here, that is when doctors have their medicines and procedures, in all combinations tested with randomised control trials and they are proven to be safe, then perhaps other CAM therapies would do the same. … i thought the idea was to heal people, this homeopathy does with out a doubt, or it would have died out years ago. i gave my son a remedy for a croup attack when he was about 14 months old. within 30seconds he was calm and breathing normally, from being blue and gasping for breath. i don’t really give a flying fig how it worked, i just know that it did, its called imperical evidence its what doctors use when they give new mixes of medicines that have not been tested together. the difference is i saved a life doctors are often just trying to clear up their own drug induced side effects…

Or “Cured!”, who says:

Perhaps the medical profession is sceptical of hoemopathic remedies because they are not patented, can’t be licensed and can’t be used to derive monopoly profits.

No, but these would be the same homeopathic remedies that are made out of pure water and sell as a “£40’‰million industry in the UK” according to the article Cured! just commented on, yes? Yes. Yes, they would.

Lucy Puglia says:

MY DOG HAD SKIN CANCER ON HER PAW,IT WAS MALIGNANT,AFTER IT WAS REMOVED ,WE CHOSE TO GIVE HER VITAMINS AND HOMOEOPHATIC REMEDIES,SHE LIVED A FULL LIFE ,RUNNING AND HAPPY, … .HAD WE CHOSEN ANOTHER TREATMENT ,SHE WOULD HAVE SUFFERED SIDE EFFECTS.WE HAVE SEEN A HOMOEOPHATIC DOCTOR FOR OVER 20 YEARS,AND IT WORKS FOR MY FAMILY,INDIVIDUALS SHOULD HAVE A CHOICE,ON THE TREATMENT THEY WISH TO HAVE ,AFTER ALL DOCTORS ARE NOT ”GODS”,PEOPLE ARE DYING IN HOSPITAL FROM ALLERGIC REACTION TO DRUGS EVERYDAY,I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW MANY ARE DYING FROM ”HOMOEOPHATIC REMEDIES SIDE EFFECTS”.I AM ALLERGIC TO GRASS POLLEN,THERE IS NO MEDICATION THAT HELPS,IN 32 YEARS OF SUFFERING ,THE ONLY MEDICATION THAT HELP ME ,IS HOMEOPATIC,THE NOSESPRAY,EYEDROPS,DROPS TO KEEP MY NOSE CLEAR,PILLULE .I TOOK ANTIHISTAMIN TABLETS FOR YEARS,AND HAD 2 CAR ACCIDENTS ,BECOUSE OF THE SIDE EFFECTS,AND NEARLY FELL OFF THE BUS,MISSED THE STEP.WE SHOULD HAVE MORE HOMEOPHATIC HOSPITALS ,AND CHOICE,INSTEAD ,THE HOSPITALS ARE BEING CLOSED BY THE TRUSTS,LIVING PATIENTS WITH NO CHOICE…AFTER ALL THIS IS A DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY…LUCY,ISLINGTON..

How great is she!? Peter Walton says:

Homeopathy does work, which is exactly what the major pharmaceutical companies are fearful about. They put their money into supporting those who outwardly conduct research supposedly disproving the efficacy of homeopathy. Most of this research is based upon double blind tests which may have some value, were it not for the fact that homeopathic treatment, unlike allopathic, uses individualised remedies. …

(Double-blind trials can account for this. Many do. Homeopathy still doesn’t work.)

…The ï¿½researchersï¿½ carrying out double blind testing on homeopathic remedies of course must know this, and therefore one may conclude that they have alternative agendas.

One other point; arguments are put forward that there is no scientific evidence for homeopathy. May I suggest that science will one day be able to provide that evidence, it is for ever amending its theories to explain the observed, unlike homeopathy which has essentially remained unchanged for 200 years. There is no need to change that which is correct!

Let’s not mention the inconvenient advent of Avogadro and germ theory during those 200 years, though, eh? Or the countless other wrong ideas science has failed to eventually prove. Or…

G Payne says:

Just because, like all remedies, it is not and does not clainm to be a panacea, is not a reason for the attacks upon it by allopathic doctors and chemists – except for their inbuilt self interest. The point is, that the proof lies in the fact that, in so many instances – called “anecdotal” homoeopathy does work.

Steve Scrutton (which is a name I recognise from other homeopathy rants) says this:

It is remarkable that spokesmen for conventional medicinem, and ConMed drugs, like Ernst, can still believe that seeing a doctor, and taking ConMed drugs, is safer than seeing a homeopath. What they consistently deny is that ConMed is killing more people year on year, and that the more drugs we take, year on year, the greater the rise of disease epidemics (Alzheimer’s, Autism, et el) -

Can you have an epidemic of a non-infectious disease? I suspect you can’t.

- many of them diseases that were unknown prior to drug taking becoming ‘free’ on the NHS…

The prevalence of a disease which predominately affects the elderly rose sharply when medical care became free? Clearly medical care causes Alzheimer’s. There’s no other explanation!

…He also ignores another undeniable fact – that tens of thousands of people have been treated successfully by homeopath, many after failing to get better with ConMed. When they hear Ernst, and others telling them that homeopathy is ineffective, they yawn, wonder why he should consistently come out with such nonsence, ponder who is speaking for, and tell their friends.

The drug companies are under pressure as more of their drugs are being withdrawn, and they face an increasing number of law suits in the USA.

Keep your campaign going, Professor Ernst – perhaps one day you will actually be able to convince us that ConMed is safe too!

Jayney says:

I think these attacks on homeopathy are just providing a smoke screen to take the emphasis off the 40,000+ deaths that occur each year due to totally avoidable medical blunders (quoted in the BMJ.) Close to 1 million people are injured by conventional medicine too – every year. Agsin this is a matter of public record . There is only one record of a homeopath being linked to a person dying – this was a doctor who told her patient that she should stop takng her heart medication. This doctor is now being investigated by the GMC.

Shathejas says:

in my shortlife i saw various patients who got remedy by homoeo,while modern medicine said goodbye in such cases. many many examples can be given. but iam not a homoeopathistic.

No. No, you are not. And lastly, a homeopath speaks. Francis Treuherz says:

How do I prove that my work as a homeopath is successful? I suggest just as hard with my wrong remedy as my right one in almost 25 years of practice my patients know when they receive the right remedy…

Well, yes, because you define “the right remedy” as “whichever one you’re doling out when the patient happens to get better on their own”.

…The way we decide what makes a remedy is known as a proving. We test potential medicines on healthy humans and the symptoms and signs which appear are then used to inform treatment. I suggest that Professor Ernst, or any one else who does not think that homeopathy works, undertakes a proving of Aesculus hippocastanum and observes the effects. This is a remedy used in painful haemorrhoids.

This is a common brain-failure experienced by homeopaths: they refer to something as “a proving” and assume that therefore it proves something.

This was rather longer than I expected, because I hadn’t planned to do the comments, so I shall post the second article I want to criticise some other time. If I remember. Hopefully, I’ll get it out within the Awareness Week.

Also, look out for another bit of Homeopathy Awareness Week fun that I’ll show you when it’s finished.