• The Quackford English Ducktionary

    The Quackford English Ducktionary

    The Quackford English Ducktionary is a dictionary of new and emergent terms in quackery non-traditional healing. Please let me know if you have ideas for the dictionary! See also quacktionary at RationalWiki.

Homeopathic rebunking: debunked

 Homeopaths say the funniest things!  No Responses »
May 232013
 

Homeopaths are crying into their infinitely watered-down beer about their treatment by the reality-based community, and the heartless refusal of the NHS, ASA and other TLAs to allow them to make incredible claims with no good evidence.

Part of this campaign is the endless rebunking of points refuted a thousand times. Here is their PRATT leaflet for people going to the demo outside the ASA at Mid City Place , 71 High Holborn, London WC1V 6QT at 11am on June 25. I sincerely hope no nasty skeptics turn up to mock them. Only nice skeptics.

The leaflet displays not just a misunderstanding of skeptic arguments but also fundamental dishonesty.

Rebutting skeptic arguments:

Homeopathy works by the placebo effect
The placebo effect depends on a person’s belief and expectations, so this cannot explain why remedies work on babies and animals or in provings, nor why they produce such a variety of other reactions apart from simply getting better. The mechanism of action of the placebo effect is also unknown – in fact less is known about how the placebo effect works than about how homeopathy works, so the “explanation” is less informative than what it claims to explain. This is not a scientific approach to knowledge.

Homeopathy is a placebo, but observations are also skewed by patient and observer expectations. That is why people falsely believe that it works on babies and animals. It is important to remember that not one claim for any mechanism by which the remedies could be anything but inert, has ever stood up to objective testing. In fact nobody has even produced a credible scientific proof that any effect remains after dilution, let alone that it is persistent, transferrable to an intermediary, and thransferrebale form there to a human.

There is no evidence for homeopathy
(see the sheet on Research)
When people talk about evidence they usually mean randomised control trials (RCTs), the method used to test individual drugs. 46% of conventional medical treatments in the NHS do not have RCT evidence of effectiveness, but these are not being attacked.

First, this is a straw man argument. skeptics do not say there is no evidence for homeopathy, only that there is no credible evidence (and certainly no proof). There is evidence for bigfoot, but it is junk. There is evidence for homeopathy, but it is junk.

Second, it is false to say that randomised controlled trials are the only form of evidence. Treatments used by medicine have a hierarchy of evidence: plausible mechanistic evidence, in the form of chemical and biochemical pathways; in vitro tests; perhaps animal tests; phase II and phase III clinical trials, and finally, after approval, clinical studies and meta-analyses. In the case of homeopathy, most of these forms of evidence are simply absent. The ones which are not (essentially equivalent to phase II trials in most cases) are prone to bias, and do not in any case provide any convincing evidence of effect. Meta-analysis, the most robust form of evidence, consistently shows that well-designed trials show homeopathy to be no more effective than placebo.

Third, for the treatments on the NHS which do not have RCT evidence, many cannot ethically be studied in this way. You cannot ethically compare surgery with placebo for cancer. There is no rational reason to conduct a randomised controlled trial to see whether broken limbs should be plastered or lacerations sutured or glued.

Fourth: mainstream treatments for which the evidence has been fudged or exaggerated are very much under attack – by much the same people as are criticising homeopathy, notably Ben Goldacre, co-founder of the alltrials initiative.

RCTs have weaknesses which can result in drugs being withdrawn because clinical use reveals serious side-effects. A a lot of the evidence for homeopathy is also from clinical use, and if this counts more than RCT evidence for conventional medicine, it should also count for homeopathy.

This is the distraction fallacy at work. Problems with medicine validate homeopathy in precisely the same way that plane crashed validate magic carpets. The “evidence” for homeopathy is not really from “clinical use” as such, it is due to confirmation bias. Homeopaths believe it works, when the patient gets better they attribute this to the remedies, when the patient does not get better they either rationalise it away or say it was the wrong remedy for that patient (so-called “individualisation”), if the patient gets worse they call it a “healing crisis”. There seems to be no outcome a homeopath will consider disconfirms the belief in homeopathy.

When a drug fails in an RCT or in clinical practice, doctors do not claim that conventional medicine does not work, but when a homeopathic remedy fails to produce a positive result in an RCT, it is claimed that the whole system of homeopathy does not work. The use of double standards like these is not scientific.

That’s because the tests of homeopathy are not designed to be specific tests of a remedy, but are instead designed to show that homeopathy itself is not a placebo.

Tests show convincing and specific effects for pharmaceutical treatments. There is no argument over whether administering measurable doses of substances with objectively testable pharmacological effects, will affect human physiology.

Tests show no specific effects for homeopathy. One of the things homeopaths bluster about is tests comparing different remedies; they assert homeopathy must be “individualised” (in practice, that the practitioner must be allowed to define success as whatever happened, good,bad or indifferent). Many poor quality trials assert that homeopathic remedies benefit X, Y or Z condition compared to placebo, but there are no robust studies which convincingly prove that only the right remedy has this effect. An effect which is non-specific, as homeopathy’s observed effects are, is much more likely to be an experimental error, bias or placebo effect.

What about the James Randi challenge?
James Randi is a magician, so he earns his living by fooling people into believing that something untrue is true. He has offered one million dollars to “anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.” However, a “paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event” ceases to be one the moment there is evidence of it. Instead it becomes a normal, natural, real, but unexplained event, so his money is safe. This is not a scientific challenge, but a stunt.

James Randi is not a magician, he is a conjurer. He cannot perform magic, and he will be the first to tell you so. He is, in his own words, an “honest liar” – an expert on deception and the mind tricks used by charlatans. Randi exposed Uri Geller, Peter Popoff, James Hydrick and many others, including of course Jacques Benveniste.

But this is again a distraction.  Randi is a figure of legend in the skeptic community, but the scientific consensus that homeopathy is inert is not founded on Randi’s opinion. It’s founded on an extensive review of the evidence and, more to the point, missing evidence.

The person could have got better anyway
When you hold something in your hand and let it go, what happens next depends on lots of factors but the theory of gravity can explain why a helium balloon goes up, a ball-bearing goes down, and a feather may do either. If there is no certainty in the explanation of what happens after a treatment, it is because there is not a scientific theory to explain it, so anyone using this argument is actually admitting that they do not have a scientific theory of medicine.

This argument is simply incoherent – in the words of Linus Pauling, it is not even wrong.

Helium balloons rise because helium is less dense than air, so the balloon moves towards a point of density equilibrium (or until it bursts). A feather is denser than air and will always fall unless there are air currents; a ball bearing is denser still so normally not affected by air currents. There is a very high degree of certainty in the outcomes of dropping any of these three objects, as long as the environment is known (and the factors which affect the movement of the objects can of course be objectively measured).

There is no parallel between these and the stochastic nature of disease outcomes when treated with placebo.

We should not waste limited resources on unproven therapies
The object of medical practice is to help people get well, and until there is a system of medicine based on a theory which works 100% of the time, no therapy can be proven or unproven.

There is no reason to think homeopathy should work, no way it can work, and no good evidence t does work other than as a placebo. And it is an expensive placebo. It is medically and economically unjustifiable.

This also displays the classic SCAM double-standard. SCAM must be allowed, funded, and left to make whatever claims it likes until science can prove with 100% certainty that it is dangerous and ineffective  Medicine should not be used until it can be 100% proved that it is safe and effective.

Skeptics, by contrast, think that all forms of treatment should be held to the same standard of evidence. No homeopath in the UK would allow this to happen, for obvious reasons..

Many patients have found that homeopathy benefited them when drugs did not, so this is an effective use of resources. Homeopathic remedies are also cheaper and do not produce side-effects or hospitalisations from overdoses, so their use may save resources rather than waste them.

This is an example of the fallacy of begging the question. Believing something is so does not make it so, especially if the belief is founded on the assurances of someone with a vested interest in selling you something.

People believe homeopathy helped them, but there is no good evidence to support this belief.

One of the reasons for resources being limited is the fact that the cost of health services continues to grow rather than shrink, suggesting that there should be an investigation into the effectiveness of both conventional and alternative medicine.

This is already going on. See for example House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy.

There is no credible reason to waste further resources investigating treatments that are not even remotely plausible.

Homeopathy has a long history of clinical success, so it is not a waste to spend money on research to discover why this might be the case, since the primary object of scientific research is to extend our knowledge.

Homeopathy has a long history of claimed success, but increasingly careful investigation has blown away the smoke, broken the mirrors and revealed the fundamental truth: it doesn’t work.

Scientific research is about proving the claims you make with objective tests that others can replicate. Homeopathy mixes religion with pseudoscience. Its doctrines are based on the word of Samuel Hahnemann and these are never questioned or tested, and all homeopathic “science” proceeds from the assumption that they are true.

Virtually every paper written by a homeopath starts with a preamble stating that homeopathy is a form of medicine whose mechanisms are strange and mysterious. This is false. As far as the scientific evidence goes, homeopathy is not a form of medicine, and its mechanisms are entirely mundane: placebo effects, cognitive biases, the natural course of disease.

If homeopaths want to do some real science, let them start with a generalised and robust proof of their core doctrines which accounts for the many inconsistencies with every scientific finding to date.

Homeopaths’ misleading letter writing campaign

 Homeopathy  1 Response »
May 232013
 

The homeopaths are crying into their infinitely watered-down beer over the withering of homeopathy on the NHS.

They want to write to your PCT and waste taxpayers’ money asking why they don’t waste taxpayers’ money on homeopathy.

I have a slightly amended version here:

Template Letter to the Chair of a PCT

 

Chair of the Board

[Your local PCT address*]

 [Your name]

[Your address]

 

[Date]

 Dear Sir/Madam

I am writing to you with reference to the Freedom of Information Act. Please could you inform me whether the ____ [Insert the name of your local PCT*] ___ PCT funds homeopathic treatment on the NHS, despite the findings of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and the advice of the Chief Scientific Advisor and Chief Medical officer.

If  access to homeopathic treatment is provided by the ____ [Insert the name of your local PCT*] ___ PCT, could you please answer the following questions (A-D):

  1. Is such treatment actively promoted?
  2. If access is controlled by the patient’s GP, what procedures exist to make sure that GPs follow best practice re. informed consent, and ensure the patient is not misled?
  3. What guidelines are in place to ensure GPs who recommend homeopathic treatment unprompted, are made aware of the ethical and evidential issues?
  4. What procedures exist to minimise costs of homeopathic and other worthless forms of treatment?

If the ____ [Insert the name of your local PCT*] ___ PCT does not provide access to homeopathic treatment, could you please provide answers to the following questions:

  1. Have you been subject to what appears to be organised lobbying organised by the homeopathy industry?
  2. What is your best evidence of the cost of dealing with these frivolous demands?

Thank you for your help

 

Yours faithfully

[Your signature]

[Your name]

* You can find the address of your local PCT at: http://www.pctdirectory.com/

Please send a copy of the reply to H:MC21, Poppyseed Cottage, High Street, Stoke Ferry, Norfolk PE33 9SF.

Feynman on knowing about homeopathy

 Homeopathy  No Responses »
May 172013
 

It doesn’t matter how fluently you speak Klingon, you still won’t know anything about space travel.

Well, not directly, but pretty close. In a few debates recently skeptics have been accused of not knowing anything about homeopathy; the claim is based on the fact that we cannot recite lists of “remedies” or any of the other arcana of the faith.

Richard Feynman provided a fund of pithy phrases and anecdotes, one of which is directly relevant here:

[W]e kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.).

Feynman’s gift for communication is clear when he relates this:

Homeopaths know the name of something without knowing something. Just like all the other archaic forms of shamanistic medicine, they “know” about humours, miasms, vital force and so on without actually knowing about them – because knowing abut them involves knowing why people once believed these things, and why science  no longer does, because they are based on magical thinking and lack of sound empirical knowledge.

Homeopathy is based on sympathetic magic, like the cargo cults of the Pacific Islands or the popular conception of the voodoo doll. Or, to use a nerd analogy, it doesn’t matter how fluently you speak Klingon, you still won’t know anything worth knowing about space travel.

Suck puppetry

 Ducktionary  2 Responses »
Apr 302013
 

Suck puppetry is sock puppetry done by someone who sucks at it.

Example: @BurzynskiSaves (credibly identified as @AzadRastegar, a director of the Burzynski Clinic) operated sockpuppet @Ac2cSheila and probably @Burzynski_Heals, but due to rank incompetence ended up tweeting to himself and sending the wrong tweets from the wrong accounts, exposing as a sham the attacks on skeptics for (wait for it) accusing him of sockpuppetry! You couldn’t make this up.

More at http://storify.com/_JosephineJones/conversation-with-burzynskisaves-2, http://storify.com/_JosephineJones/conversation-with-burzynskisaves-1

sock1

sock2

 

Homeopathy Action Trust: a charity which exists to benefit its trustees

 Homeopathy  No Responses »
Apr 292013
 

Homeopathy Action Trust (HAT) exists to promote homeopathy. If you are a homeopath this is necessary work because the noose is tightening. Scientific consensus is clear and is increasingly clearly articulated.

Professor Sir John Beddington, outgoing chief scientific adviser to the UK Government, said “homeopathy on the NHS is mad“. Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer, described homeopathy as “rubbish”. The new chief scientist, Sir Mark Walport, said “My view scientifically is absolutely clear: homoeopathy is nonsense, it is non-science“.

These are not lone voices in the wilderness, they represent the scientific establishment, an establishment dedicated to investigating and testing ideas. And the idea of homeopathy has been investigated and tested enough to be very confident that it is indeed nonsense, non-science.

So HAT exists with the following aims:

Homeopathy Action Trust is the membership charity that encourages and supports public understanding of homeopathy, for the benefit of patients, practitioners and students.  We believe Homeopathy is invaluable to many people and plays an important role in maintaining their health and wellbeing.  The Trust advocates that patients retain their right to choose Homeopathic treatment and access to it through our projects, on the NHS or privately.

The Charities Act is pretty clear on the acceptable purposes of charities – public benefit is the core value. There is comprehensive guidance including the following headline points:

  • Principle 1: There must be an identifiable benefit or benefits
  • Principle 2: Benefit must be to the public, or a section of the public

What is the public benefit in a political campaign to retain a treatment that has failed to establish any measure of scientific credibility? And as for the funded activities, they are scary. Homeopathy for addictions. Homeopathy in Swaziland, Ghana. As if they don’t have enough witch doctors.

The trustees are:

Any campaigning for NHS funding in the UK would be illegal under the Charities Act as it would result in direct financial benefit for the Trustees.

The problem of Islamophobia

 Politics  3 Responses »
Apr 262013
 

Richard Dawkins is being castigated for “racism” as a result of a number of statements about Islam. Specifically, he has said that Islam is “one of the great evils in the world“.

The problem is that for a significant subset of the Asian community, their cultural identity is tied very strongly to their religious identity. They assert that an attack on Islam is an attack on their culture, and that is interpreted as an attack on their race.

This chain of logic is broken.

Sharia law is unjust and in some ways monstrous. It is may not be necessarily so, but it is so in practice. Stoning to death, inequality between the rights of men and women, judicial amputation and so on, are frankly barbaric. And the worrying fact is that some people believe that Islamic law should be applied regardless of whether it is in accord with local statute law or not. The fatwā against Salman Rushdie is one well-known example. Rushdie did nothing illegal, but an Iranian cleric chose to impose sentence of death anyway, and there is credible evidence that there were attempts to apply this manifestly unenforceable sentence.

Radical Islam is not a force for good. This is not about 9/11 or Afghanistan, it’s about the determination to apply Islamic law and values to civic life; in an Islamic country there can be no separation of church and state, and in some cases Islamic parties have assumed power in formerly secular countries, rolling back hard-won gains in human rights.

Christianity has done this in the past (the Crusades, for example). It is no longer part of mainstream Christianity, though it is arguable that the Shrub administration was trying to evangelise fundamentalist Protestantism in the Middle East and there is little doubt that fundamentalist protestants in the US (and Catholics in Ireland) materially degrade human rights – of women and the LGBT community especially –  as a result of illiberal laws that they force on their legislatures through undue influence.

Nobody claims that attacks on protestant creationists are racist, although almost all are American and many assert that their identity as Americans is defined by their faith.

In the same way, calling out the misogyny and brutality of Sharia law is not racist. Muslims could, if they wished, choose not to behave in this thuggish way. Alom Shaha has described himself as a “secular Muslim”, and even observant Muslims have spoken out against sharia.

Richard Dawkins is opinionated, a militant atheist, and something of a blowhard, but I have no reason to believe that he focuses hate against people based on their race, nationality or colour. I don’t even see any evidence of targeting people based on their faith. His beef is, it seems to me, with Islam, and Catholicism, and every other religion that excuses, enables or enforces illiberal policies and acts.

I don’t feel particularly well disposed towards Dawkins, as a theist myself, but  do not feel personally threatened by his criticism of my faith. Neither should you, whatever your faith might be.

SCAM: The Holy Trinity

 Woo  No Responses »
Apr 132013
 

Many claims are made for the profitable and heavily promoted products that form the world of Supplements, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (SCAM).

In days of yore most such claims were simply bogus. Now there are controls on misleading advertising so most of the claims are implicit or sly. The sciencey-bullshit commercials used for shampoo and washing powder have become the model for SCAM advertisements.

There are three tests you should apply before buying any product.

  1. Is there a credible reason to believe it should work? 
  2. Is there a reasonably plausible mechanism by which it could work?
  3. Is there solid evidence it does work, in the shape of randomised double-blinded clinical trials on humans?

“People have used it for years” is not solid evidence it does work. Claims to stimulate the immune system, well, there’s no reasonably plausible mechanism by which it could do that (and a nobel prize waiting for the person who finds one). If it claims to correct imbalances in your body’s vital energy, then there’s no reason to suppose it should work because there’s no evidence that any such thing exists.

Simple!

Homeopaths: Your problem is, Wikipedia is not censored

 Homeopathy  No Responses »
Apr 132013
 

The quacks’ problem with Wikipedia is not that it is censored; it is that Wikipedia is not censored to protect their cherished delusions.

Wikipedia is marvellous. It is the most visited informational site on the internet, and is run on a budget of peanuts, almost entirely by volunteers.

Article quality is variable of course. All articles are a work in progress and vulnerable to agenda-driven edits, but the more contentious a topic is and the more people feel strongly about a subject, the better and more neutral the content gets. Consensus is the term Wikipedia uses; it’s not really consensus as such, but it certainly is compromise.

Homeopathy is covered on Wikipedia. And the quacks hate the way it’s covered, because the Wikipedia article includes the scientific consensus as well as their beliefs. This is a feature, not a bug. Homeopathic critique of Wikipedia misrepresents the application of Wikipedia content policies as censorship.  In reality, Wikipedia is neutral, documenting both the beliefs of homeopaths and the scientific consensus view of those beliefs. The process at work is editorial discretion not censorship.

An example from the hilariously batshit and reliably wrong Hydrogen2Oxygen (“alternative science”? No, you mean alternative to science!):

Homeopathy and Wikipedia Censorship

Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body. It can be done by governments and private organizations or by individuals who engage in self-censorship.

Yes, that’s what censorship is. Self-censorship is an interesting one; it’s an important part of being a social animal.

There are a lot of Wikipedia User who censor articles on homeopathy. They remove links which refers to other articles which provides the proof for homeopathy or at least explanations how homeopathy works. This kind of censorship can easily be tracked, because the people who censor this articles are members of so called “skeptic communities” (Pseudoskeptics).

Wrong. Wikipedia does not censor information on homeopathy. A classic case is the recent comment on the Talk page by an anonymous user demanding inclusion of positive trials for homeopathy. We do include them. But we do not censor the fact that systematic review of these trials fails to support the idea of any effect beyond placebo. We include the fact that homeopaths claim to act on the cause of disease, but we do not censor the fact that there is no evidence to support this. We report the fact that they believe like cures like, but we do not censor the fact that there is no evidence to support this.

Wikipedia is not censored. In this case, it is not censored for the protection of your cherished delusions. You find the inclusion of the scientific consensus inconvenient. And you hate the fact that it is the scientific consensus, not the evidentially unsupportable beliefs of homeopaths, which sets the tone of the article. Please report your concerns to our helpdesk at www.boohoohoo.com.

Dull-Man Law: Another data point

 Homeopaths say the funniest things!  No Responses »
Apr 132013
 

The Dull-Man Law:

In any discussion involving science or medicine, being Dana Ullman loses you the argument immediately…and gets you laughed out of the room. (source)

Who is Dana Ullman? He is homeopathy’s most tireless shill. And also one of the most consistently mendacious. He was still punting the “Swiss report” after the relevant Minister had published a letter explicitly contradicting Ullman’s misrepresentation of it.

He can’t resist comically bad attempts to take down the reality-based community. The latest gem to come to my attention is a purported rebuttal of a Popular Science article.

Here’s what Dull-Man said:

This article is totally theoretical and doesn’t choose to cite any of the many (hundreds!) of basic science or clinical trials, most of which have found biological activity and/or clinical effects of homeopathic medicines as distinct from placebo.

A classic evasion used by every homeopathy troll who comes to Wikipedia (including of course Dull-Man himself, who was banned for precisely this kind of crap). No, “most” of the studies have not found biological activity. There are no reputable peer-reviewed and replicated findings of biological activity in homeopathic preparations at the potencies in normal use. Any such findings would make international news as they would undermine quantum physics and violate the laws of thermodynamics.

In fact, meta analysis of the clinical trials finds the opposite of what Dull-Man claims. The clinical trials that are of a methodological quality sufficient to be worth analysing, show, on balance, no effect beyond placebo. As expected.

First of all, using market samples of metal-derived medicines from reputable manufacturers, scientists at the Department of Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology have demonstrated for the first time using Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), electron diffraction by Selected Area Electron Diffraction (SAED), and chemical analysis by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Atomic Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-AES), the presence of physical entities in these extreme dilutions in the form of nanoparticles of the starting metals and their aggregates.

This finding is by homeopathy believers and has not been validated or replicated. Even if it was, it would not prove homeopathy because (a) most homeopathic remedies are not metallic, (b) there is no known connection between the remedies and the diseases they purportedly treat, and (c) there is no mechanism by which the purported effect can be transferred via the intermediary of a sugar pill, into the human body.

The # of nanoparticles remaining in EACH of the 6 samples were considerably higher than the # of many hormones that circulate in our bodies (which are often in extremely low doses!).

Nano. You keep using that word, but I don’t think it means what you think it means. Nano is one part per billion. 30C is one part per million billion billion billion billion billion billion. There is no evidence that “nanoparticles” exist in homeopathic remedies, but feel free to provide objective physical measurements that show clear and identifiable differences between remedies at normal homeopathic potencies.

I assume that your magazine will next assert that the atomic bomb was also a placebo because those exceedingly small particles could not “possibly” have significant effects. Well, so much for theory. Please refer to RESEARCH next time.

The article refers to research. Obviously RESEARCH is a bit like research only carefully constructed to give the answer you want. I call this presearch.

As for Avogadro’s number, such important concepts are not relevant when dealing with complex systems such as water and vigorous shaking in glass vials (do you understand that 6 parts per million of silica fragments fall off the glass walls from shaking?)(do you understand that the shaking creates bubbles and “nano-bubbles” that dramatically change the water pressure?)(is it possible that these factors influence what is being diluted?…the answer is CERTAINLY!).

LOLWUT? Avogadro’s constant does not apply when you shake water? What are you smoking and can I have some?

This is an oblique reference to water memory. The transient structures in water have a life measured in femtoseconds. Either homeopathy has one hell of a distribution network, or this phenomenon is of no relevance to homeopathy. I say the latter.

Homeopathy and angry dolphins

 Homeopaths say the funniest things!  No Responses »
Apr 132013
 

This tweet from @EllenKramer, a homeopath, neatly demonstrates an ongoing problem:

Homeopathy & the Skeptics; a fight for our health freedom and the choice to choose our own healthcare  ~> http://bit.ly/j9khvT

The article itself demonstrates a total misunderstanding of skeptical activism and our problem with homeopathy. Homeopaths are at crossed purposes*: they do not understand the objections skeptics have to homeopathy. Or maybe they are just in denial. It also repeats the canard of “health freedom”.

Let’s go through it.

I am deeply concerned by the current orchestrated campaign against homeopathy, which is led by a self-appointed pressure group, Sense about Science, and a number of bloggers.

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a consensus. That’s how science works.

It’s not led by Sense About Science. It’s not led by anyone in particular. It’s spontaneous. Almost any skeptic with an interest in health will rapidly find homeopathy and realise the problems with it. It’s a teaching tool for critical thinking, because it is so trivially easy to demonstrate the flaws and because the inferential errors that cause people to falsely believe it works, are common to so many delusions.

Critical analysis of homeopathy is everywhere. It happens on blogs because blogs are where people talk about stuff, but it’s also in books (earliest of which was probably Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr  in 1842, Homeopathy And Its Kindred Delusions), films, in classrooms, wherever minds meet and wherever the subject comes up.

These people are funded by the drug companies, so surely their PR science makes them unfit to comment objectively on homeopathy in the national press. With the strong PR campaign by BigPharma to discredit homeopathy, all homeopaths must now, more than ever, unite in their resolve to give patients a truly alternative choice in Medicine.

This is called the pharma shill gambit. It is fallacious for two reasons: first, it is untrue; second, it is not relevant to the objections to homeopathy. Even if I were paid by Big Pharma (which I am not), the criticisms of homeopathy – its lack of evidence, its lack of any mechanism for self-correction, its unethical practices – would remain entirely valid.

Adolf Hitler was a strong advocate of homeopathy and vegetarianism. The relevance of this to the validity of homeopathy and vegetariansim is precisely nil.

We are not a complementary medicine, which is trying to be tagged onto allopathy, we offer a genuine alternative to modern chemical therapy.

This is a non-sequitur. Nobody claimed homeopathy was trying to be an adjunct to medicine. The issue is that it’s wrong, not that it’s not the right kind of wrong.

As to being a genuine alternative, it would appear that it is a genuine alternative to medicine in the same way magic carpets are a genuine alternative to aeroplanes.

Most Sceptics do not understand how homeopathic remedies work, they exaggerate and misconstrue what homeopathic remedies are and ironically see themselves as the defenders of medical science, but in truth they have an embarrassingly poor scientific attitude when evaluating homeopathy and the remedies. Homeopathy – comes from the place that the power of healing lies within the patient & the remedies stimulate the body to do its own healing – they have no power beyond stimulating self healing and they must be individualised to suite the needs of the patient.

This is patently false. Most skeptics do understand how homeopathic remedies “work” – placebo effects, cognitive bias, natural course of disease and so on – and they make this very plain. In fact, it’s the homeopaths who don’t understand, as the rest of the paragraph makes clear. The remedies do not stimulate the body because there is no way they can. They contain no active ingredient. Individualisation is a fantasy since all the remedies in common use are identical and identically inert.

Let me make it clear: I will happily retract all my objections to homeopathy if any homeopath can show me an objectively provable difference between any two similarly prepared and presented remedies of 12C or greater. Show me a remedy that changes blood glucose levels in a diabetic, and another which does not, and I will be interested. Tat’s science. Claiming that homeopathy is “individualised” and thus can’t be objectively tested is not science, it’s religion.

This is what makes it difficult to do clinical trials using conventional scientific methods and why sometimes remedies work and sometimes they don’t – this is because the remedies have to be individualised to the patient. They will work if the prescriber understands why the symptoms are there – Cause → effects → and obstacles to cure.

It is perfectly possible. Many means of testing have been suggested, the most obvious being a simple double-blind  randomisation between individualised homeopathy and placebo.

This is not a reason, it’s an excuse. An escape hatch. Scott Adams nailed this one: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1999-05-06/ ”This is our most reliable computer unless you try to use software. It’ll freeze several times a day but you can restart it by poking a spoon into a hole in the back” “Has that ever worked?” “We think people are doing it wrong”.

Something that works as powerfully as homeopaths suggest homeopathy works, will be objectively testable. hey never propose objective tests that they accept are valid (try it!), they only reject tests they know do not or will not deliver the result they want.

Without understanding the cause in the long run, you will not be able to remove the effects (symptoms) – the obstacles to self healing need to be addressed if the body is to self heal. So from this place, how can homeopaths discuss health with a lobby group whose main aim is to subvert any real discussion on health and take away people’s rights to health freedom choices?

Homeopaths have no clue about the cause of disease. Straight homeopaths are germ theory denialists. They claim that diseases are caused by miasms disturbing the body’s vital energy. This is pre-scientific claptrap which was refuted in the 19th Century. They have no idea what causes cancer (all the advances there are by doctors; for example, new genetic cures for specific cancers). They make vague references to things that sound like medicine, but there is no requirement for a homeopath to have any training at all, diagnostic or otherwise. How would they diagnose coeliac disease? That requires tTG and generally a duodenal biopsy. How would they diagnose osteoporosis? That requires a DEXA scan. How would they tell if a patient has an aneurysm? Venous insufficiency? Polycythaemia?

Ah, you say, but they are talking about the cause of disease. So they might, but that is what is known in the trade as bullshit. They have no idea what causes autoimmune disorders, they have neither the training nor the biological diagnostic tools to understand. Remember, most homeopaths have not even gone to a proper university, let alone studied a five-year accredited medical course.

They need to explain what they base their science on? Medicine or rather Scientism has no principals for healing, no observational tools, no understanding of the evolution from constitutional health to suppression and then pathology. They have done a fine job in mapping the human body, but remain ignorant about how to support self-healing. This is like having a leaking roof – a homeopath would get on the roof and find out where the leak originated and sort it out from there.

Whilst an allopath would simply keep painting over the water stains in the ceiling, as the hole on the roof grows bigger and bigger until the ceiling eventually falls down.

We base “our” science on the scientific method, often characterised as the crowning achievement of humanity. It is an amazing tool for separating truth from untruth, and anybody can use it. At its simplest, you take a premise, you devise a test which will tell you if the premise is wrong, and you run the test.

Scientism is a straw man. Religions have imutable truths: God exists or homeopathy works. These are not open to debate. Everything in science is up for debate, and few things are certain. The conservation of energy, entropy, that sort of thing. Most of the time science says that something is consistent with the observed facts, or the available evidence does or does not support a conclusion. That is not how religions talk.

Yes, science explains healing. Not everything about it, but enough to know how to suppress the immune system in transplant patients, how to guide new bone fibres using carbon fibre matrices, how to transplant tissues and organs, and resect damaged structures. The phrase “evolution from constitutional health to suppression and then pathology” is meaningless homeopathy jargon for their purported mechanism of disease. There are no objective diagnostic criteria by which any of these things can be tracked. Is it really likely that there is an entire course of disease that only one doctor – Samuel Hahnemann – has ever stumbled on? And that over 200 years ago when the optical microscope was about the most advanced piece of scientific apparatus available?

The claim that doctors “paint over the water stains” is pejorative nonsense. A doctor faced with a diabetic patient will prescribe a course of treatment that will enable that patient to live near-normal life. A homeopath faced with a diabetic patient will be lucky to work out the ailment before the patient dies. Insulin-dependent diabetes requires insulin. Show me a homeopath who can take a medically diagnosed type 1 diabetic and provably cure them without the use of insulin. I do not think this can happen. Prove me wrong, with solid evidence.

Science works. It has given us lasers, GPS, supercomputers, the internet. The technologies that do this depend on quantum physics. Quantum physics tells us that matter exists in irreducible quanta. It tells us how they interact. Homeopathic dilutions are predicated on matter being infinitely divisible, and on effects being conferred by low kinetic energy striking (ask a homeopath the force required i succussion, in Joules – trick question, there is no agreed figure).

Homeopathy focuses on the patient, because the answer for health lies there;  allopaths focus on the symptoms,  develop drugs for that symptom and forget that health is more than just symptoms.

Rubbish. A doctor who only looked at symptoms would be struck off rapidly. The top advice doctors hand out is around diet and lifestyle, preventive measures. Take more exercise; eat less and better; drink less alcohol; stop smoking; don’t use sunbeds. Doctors can also prescribe drugs, some of which are for symptomatic relief and some cure the actual underlying disease. Of course a germ theory denialist will not accept that vaccines prevent illness or that antibiotics cure bacterial infections. The technical term for this viewpoint is: wrong

Homeopathic remedies are gentle, non toxic and non addictive – if skeptics do not have the science to understand how remedies stimulate self healing, then surely it is up to allopaths to prove that the body cannot heal itself,  and that only drugs can do that.

Allopathy - comes from the place that healing lies outside the patient and all you have to do is find a pill that fixes the symptoms.

No, homeopathic remedies are simply inert (at least at virtually all commonly used doses). We have the science to understand them: placebo effects, regression to the mean, cognitive errors. A collection of things lumped together under the heading “null hypothesis”.

Every doctor knows that some diseases heal themselves. These are known as self-limiting ailments, and include a huge range of things from the common cold to a broken rib. They don’t even bother to x-ray most broken ribs these days: they get better on their own. No doctor asserts that the body does not heal itself, therefore no doctor need prove it. Doctors do know that the body cannot heal some diseases, or not quickly enough to avoid the patient dying. Some of these have effective medication. Antivenins, antibiotics, insulin and so on.

More to the point, homeopaths have absolutely no science to show how these things supposedly work, because every time they start trying to talk science they immediately invoke empirically unverifiable concepts. The pseudoscience of homeopathy is self-referential, an endless circular series of arguments. Hahnemann said X; assuming X then Y; we say Y therefore Hahnemann is right. If at any stage you accept a scientific alternative explanation for any part of the chain, the entire chain falls apart. There is no consilience – no independent fields of study yield similar or even consistent conclusions.

If that doesn’t work, then they must cut, burn, or poison; to make the symptoms go away.  They do so-called clinical trials,  yet they ignore the feedback from the body and call it a side effect – when it is really a direct affect of the drug.  Surely this is bad science,  ignoring the evidence!!! .

If the disease is not self limiting then medical science may use surgery, drugs or (for cancer) radiotherapy. Robbed of the pejorative language, that sounds perfectly reasonable doesn’t it? So, how would a homeopath cure, say, a ruptured appendix? A ruptured spleen? A defective heart valve? We know whathappens to patients with these conditions without surgery, because we had over a hundred years or more of homeopathy before surgery got to the point of being anywhere close to reliable. We know what happens: people die.

So despite all the clinical trials to make chemical therapy safe up to 40,000 people a year die from adverse drug events in the UK alone – the BMJ Clinical evidence makes very interesting reading? In fact, there are many clinical trials done by homeopaths. The evidence can be found there, as to whether homeopathy works or not.

Treat this figure with caution. It includes people who would undoubtedly have died without the drug, and where the drug gives a good chance of success but a small chance of serious adverse events. Warfarin, for example.

Do remedies work like drugs – no they don’t? It would be like me asking a doctor to prove that drugs stimulate the body to heal itself?  When we all know they are designed to override natural bodily processes  and the side effects in the clinical trials tell you that, this is what they do.

Do remedies work, like drugs? – no they don’t! – that’s better. You can’t ask a doctor to prove that drugs do something they don’t claim to do. I can ask a homeopath to prove that his remedies do something they claim to do. No such proof exists. If it did, we would not even be having this conversation.

Homeopaths claim all sorts of things as proof; these are the same as the things religious believers claim as proof of miracles. That is, they work only as long as you reject all pragmatic explanations.

Hence, most patients end up on long term drugs, adding more and more new ones to cover up the side effects of the original drug, and unless you keep taking the drug, the symptoms keep coming back.  In the meantime, all the feedback from the body (side effects) are ignored;  so from this perspective,  the only real science in modern medicine is the chemical cocktails they create and re-create in the laboratory.

Patients end up on long-term drugs because medical science has doubled the human lifespan in only a few generations, and many people have not amended their lifestyles accordingly, so we have epidemic levels of obesity and its sequelae for example.

Old people get sick as their bodies start to break down. It’s a fact of life. Show me a 150-year-old homeopath.

This is not health or healing from a homeopathic paradigm of health. Therefore any discussion about how homeopathic remedies work; their effectiveness; and how they should be labelled – means they need to be placed in the context to which they are used and prescribed.

Paradigm. That is a much abused word. What they mean is, they don’t believe in it. But the thing about science is it goes on being true whether you believe it or not. It doesn’t matter how fervently you believe that the universe is 6,000 years old, the global climate is not changing, that species were created individually by a supreme being, science finds that you are wrong. The difference with homeopathy is that the classical religious ideas talk about things in the long past, where we can only infer the truth. Homeopathy makes claims about the here and now, and those claims do not stand up.

The claims they make are not verifiable. It is that simple. Science says “prove it” and all they can do is argue that they should not have to prove it because they don’t believe in science.

As Alan Sokal memorably put it: “Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor)”.

The sceptics are looking at remedies as if they are drugs, which they are not  and they seem to think that homeopathy is summed up by its remedies – when in fact the remedies are merely the tools homeopaths use to stimulate the body, to do what it does best – which is to heal itself.  We need to be clear that the purpose and use of remedies comes from a very different health paradigm to allopathy and pharmaceutical drugs.

No we’re not, we’re looking at homeopathy holistically, to use one of your favourite phrases. we are looking at the claim that like cures like (it doesn’t); that dilution increases potency (it doesn’t); that disease is caused by miasms (it isn’t). It is you who say, in answer to the total lack of any credible evidence for any part of the theory of homeopathy  that “it works”. To which we say: prove it. We can account for every observation using the null hypothesis, you have to prove your claims.

For many years, it was thought that ulcers were caused by stress. Then the scientific method proved they are caused by helicobacter pylori. A wrong idea was discarded.

I cannot trace a single example of homeopathy discarding a wrong idea, however trivial. I do’t see how it can, because no part of homeopathy is objectively verifiable. You can insist until yo are blue in the face that this is because of some mystical properties of matter and the human body which are not amenable to objective measurement, and that amounts to a claim hat yo have a unicorn in your garage.

In a democracy in which the West prides itself on it is a fundamental right of any citizen living in it, to have ready access to the healthcare options of their choice. It is up to us, as homeopaths, to campaign for the health freedom choices that many patients are seeking; especially when chemical therapy doesn’t work for them.

People find homeopathy in their own way, and we must make sure it is always available to them in the future.  People must continue to have the right to the freedom and the availability of health choices; so that they can choose natural alternatives if they wish to – especially when it comes to taking care of their own health.

It’s not about democracy, it’s about consumer protection. You cannot prove your claims. At some point you either have to prove them, or stop making them. We do not allow people to advertise perpetual motion machines, engines powered by water, pyramid investments. we do not allow it because we know it to be false. For 200 years you have got away with claiming to have an understanding of human physiology and disease which is entirely at odds with anything any objective investigation has ever found. it is time for you to put up or shut up.

Its not about freedom to choose, it’s about your freedom to deceive. No such right exists. Penelope Dingle believed in homeopathy and died a horrible agonising death because of it, and because her homeopath poisoned her mind against the idea of life-saving surgery. It’s not a game. You are playing doctors, but the patients are real and may have real diseases.

Science has explanations for everything you show us. Everything. You have no credible explanation for most of it, and the incredible explanations you do offer are completely inconsistent with things we know and use every day. Why should we believe you? Honestly?

Science is genuinely open minded. Even Newton and Einstein have been challenged. If you can prove the doctrines of homeopathy – similars, infinitesimals and so on – then go right ahead. But until you do? We have a more parsimonious explanation. And ours is consistent with the physics that allows this post to reach you, wherever you are.

* Cross porpoises = angry dolphins. Bad pun. Bad.

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