Does Homeopathy Work?

Lately I have been reading the internet differently. Usually I read a page and open all the interesting looking links in it in background tabs, then when I’ve finished I go through them one by one and read them. Today I didn’t do that. I started at one page, and hit an interesting link so I opened it on top and read that. Then another, and another, and at the end I went back and finished off the other pages. The end result was like reading a Billy Connolly routine.

But the deepest page in there was this video, because of course it had no links in it. The video is of a debate entitled “Does Homeopathy Work?”, and it features Doctors Ben Goldacre and Peter Fisher, a homeopath. And there were a few things that struck me, but the most striking thing was that while, in all, I think four people spoke at any length what I’d call ‘strongly’ in favour of homeopathy, and all sounded very convincing, their arguments were all distinctly at odds with each other.

Once, Fisher was speaking out against the idea that homeopathists are against conventional medicine, but since he referred to it as “those nasty toxic drugs” I wouldn’t call it exactly ‘balanced’.

But my main problem with the arguments in the video is that they were largely contradictory. Fisher claimed there was “pretty incontrovertable” evidence that homeopathy did indeed work, but then another homeopathist, said the opposite (and utterly redefined homeopathy) by saying medicine was “one of the reasons why these kinds of trials that both parties tried to mention do not work, and it’s quite obvious, is … the homeopathic remedy is only homeopathic when it is used and has been shown to be effective”. No, that would be conventional medicine. You can’t say a clinical trial won’t work because your medicine can be shown to be effective. If that’s true then the clinical trial must work. Essentially, his argument was that (a) if the trial fails then by definition it wasn’t proper homeopathy anyway, and (b) a homeopathic medicine is specific to a patient; that rather than just saying “ah, you have condition X, you need remedy x”, you have to try things out until one works. “This,” he says, “is quite easily proved.” His proof is to ask homeopaths, and they will tell you that “they have had patients where they have prescribed remedies to them and they have not worked and they have reanalysed, reanalysed and perhaps again reanalysed the case, and eventually they’ve come up with the correct remedy, and that correct remedy has miraculously changed the patient.” This, to me, smells distincly of bad thinking: ill people either die or get better. That’s what happens to ill people. That’s how life works. So if you find ill people, and keep trying different ‘remedies’ on them, eventually most of them will get better. If you’re trying a different remedy every week then you’ll have to be trying one when they recover. Then you call that the “correct” remedy and announce your treatment a success. And if the patient dies? Well, they were proably going to die anyway and you obviously just didn’t find the right remedy in time. Can’t win ‘em all. But far more to the point, this goes directly against everything everyone else said, because he then said “so it isn’t the procedure of sitting in front of a homeopath for an hour and a half; it isn’t any other thing that you might think; it isn’t placebo; it is purely the correct substance being found which is homeopathic to the patient”. This got a round of applause, despite being directly opposite of what Dr Goldacre had said in his opening speech.

The video is a very good thing to watch for any scientists wondering if homepathy works. The homeopathists’ arguments convinced me they were all batshit insane.