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Science vs. Homeopathy
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Sep 14, 2007 06:34 PM
from the five-bucks-says-science-wins dept.
from the five-bucks-says-science-wins dept.
Mr. E writes "Ars Technica has an interesting look at pseudoscience as it applies to homeopathy. While most discussions about what science is get derailed by the larger controversies surrounding them, Ars chose a relatively uncontroversial pseudo-science to examine so that they could examine the factors which make homeopathy a psuedo-science: ignoring settled issues in science, misapplication of real science, rejection of scientific standards, claims of suppression, large gaps between the conclusion and evidence, and a focus only on the fringes of what we currently understand."
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Submission: Science vs. Homeopathy by Anonymous Coward
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Marriage is between a MAN and WOMAN! (Score:4, Funny)
Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a good thing, when one is trying to heal, it is a good idea to know as much as possible about the treatment protocols involved. One of the reasons why acupuncture is being given an increased role in medicine around here is the serious amount of study that the Chinese government in particular has put into it over the last 50 years or so. Up until the middle of last century things were much more empirical than they are now.
Any legitimate medical treatment should go through great pains to at least do no harm. If it can't do that at least, then it isn't something which has any right to be considered legitimate. The next step is that it should help ease the symptoms or cure the disease outright. That's where things tend to get a bit more difficult.
The big issue I'm seeing with the article is stated in there, if one wishes for the result to be a specific result, then one really has to be careful about contaminating the study. There's a reason why, despite the inconvenience, that double blind studies are so common. Believe me they aren't doing them because they're fun, they do them to try and keep the observations normative.
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Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, we can pretty much write off Prozac because it has become the Ritalin of middle-age. By that I mean that a wide array of causes, behavioral, social, or chemical, are causing a problem, and instead of resolving it (through behavioral therapy or psychological analysis) the doc is just writing for the same treatment. Bobby is loud, give him Adderall. Bobby is sad, give him Prozac. Some people really need the chemically altering action of Prozac to be happy- some people just want to buy a month's worth of 10mg Problem Solver from CVS... i digress..
When administering or justifying a placebo as a treatment, take care not disregard the importance of real medicine. Placebo effect is significantly less present with things like hypertension, electrolyte imbalance, heart problems, diabetes, kidney and liver diseases, obesity, hypercholesterolemia, and other more corporal diseases. There is no "I think this will resolve my congestive heart failure" placebo effect that stands on its own.
As far as "sugar pills have no side effects" is concerned, look at and drug study that reports side effect profiles - placebos can have many of the same adverse effects as the "medicine" medicine. People will report dry mouth, sweating, fatigue, headaches, sleeping problems, and even sexual problems because ordinary people will have all of these things randomly on a day to day basis. The only thing thats different is that the FDA makes them report every single thing as a "possible side effect" if it occurs during a trial.
If you wanted to market sugar pills as an FDA approved drug, your drug monograph would be as bleak as that of any other drug with regard to side effects. I'm not trying to say that pharmaceutical compounds dont have side effects, but the same effect that makes people feel better regardless of drug action can also make them feel worse.
Homeopathic drugs will never be superior to prescriptions because they are just water. Literally, in some formulations there is actually NO drug - just the solvent, because they have diluted it to such a degree that you could have an entire lot without a single molecule of the effective chemical. It would be nice if all of our healthcare issues could be resolved by just "thinking and feeling as though one is receiving a cure," but almost every time, this is not the case. People who have needs for medicinal intervention can not afford to be distracted by things like this at a cost of delaying real medicine. Real medicine and real doctors and real pharmacists who make people better through real science.
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Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price (Score:5, Insightful)
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Uncontroversial? Hardly. (Score:4, Interesting)
Homeopathy is controversial, in that some people actually believe it and loudly proclaim its wonders. That's like saying that evolution vs. intelligent design is settled just because science overwhelmingly supports the former, ignoring that many people still believe the latter.
Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly. (Score:4, Funny)
Which reminds me, that "Head On" junk advertised on TV is homeopathic. My advice is to use bottled water instead:
"Evian: apply it directly to the gullible"
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Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly. (Score:5, Informative)
>
> "Evian: apply it directly to the gullible"
"Evian: apply directly to the naive."
Fixed it for ya. I always wondered if having your product be "Naive" spelled backwards was an inside joke on the part of some marketroid.
With that out of the way, my go-to site for debunking quack medicine is Quackwatch [quackwatch.org]. Debunks all the health scams from homeopathy to ear candling to colloidal silver to chiropracty, all on one convinient page.
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Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Those are all very good things for the human body. They lead to relaxation, reduced stress, reduced physical tension.
Which are further very good things for the human body. All together and individually, these actions and effects are known to be good for you, promote wellness and improve health.
The rest is mostly innocent quackery. Except for "adjusting" infants. That's dangerous quackery.Dangerous quackery.Probably something that can be sold for a profit. Fraudulent but harmless quackery.It pokes holes in you and irritates tissues normally protected by your skin. Other than that, lots of nearly untestable placebo effect.The word you're searching for is "bullshit". Homeopathic medicine has lots of well-diluted bullshit and will be more than happy to sell you not-really tainted water at a price that makes bottled water vendors blush.That's a great start. Keep it up. Skepticism can be tiring, but is incredibly rewarding.
Regards,
Ross
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Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly. (Score:5, Informative)
Vibration. You assume the whole mass would oscillate/vibrate at some frequency. I'm extremely curious as to why you would believe that. Are you under the impression that typical molecules vibrate in funny patterns?
Physically, water molecules in the liquid form experience Brownian motion, true, random motion due to heat. It's chaotic, though, certainly not regular, doesn't really have a measurable frequency (an intensity, sure, in Temperature). Furthermore, supposing there was a regular vibration of some physical sort in water, and the energy of such vibration were somehow to remain in the water instead of dissipating like most vibrations do (try ringing a bell and then putting it down on a table, eh?) it would be readily disturbed and dwarfed when someone sloshed it around or drank it. It certainly could not be expected to persist in the body beyond the esophagus and, if it did somehow maintain this vibrational quality after that, it is sufficiently weakly-interacting that it oughtn't have any effect on the body. (There are plenty of little quantum states which one could maybe possibly call "vibration" if you were feeling poetic, but they're largely irrelevant at super-atomic scales, or else - like magnetism and electron spins - pretty trivial in effect compared to the effects of fields orders of magnitude more intense.)
If there's any sort of "vibration" left, it's a metaphysical pseudospiritual "vibration".
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Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly. (Score:5, Funny)
Wait! You mean those irritating ads are for something that isn't even real medicine? That's it! I no longer have any reason not to burn down their company for those awful ads.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
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Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Homeopathy is controversial, in that some people actually believe it and loudly proclaim its wonders.
"Some people" also claim the holocaust never happened, but I don't think anyone would seriously claim that the holocaust is controversial.
I'm sure if you looked hard enough, you could find someone that still believes in geo-centrism as well.
There's always a few nuts around that will believe crap. The existence of those nuts doesn't mean something is controversial. If anything I'd say it's the percentage of the nuts in the general populace. Even for homeopathy, I'd say that percentage is quite low.
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Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Herbalism and natural remedies aren't suitable for everything, but some of them can help and have been proven to. Some of them are the source of things like aspirin.
Homeopathy on the other hand is total quackery.
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Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, the term "natural" doesn't really have much meaning in this situation. At one end of the spectrum, you could say that everything is natural, since it's made from atoms that were found here on earth. At the other end, you could say it's only natural if you're taking a bite out of a plant or animal that you found in the wild, without even cooking it or washing off the natural dirt and bacteria. Most people draw an arbitrary line somewhere in the middle: some amount of processing is OK, but any more than that and it's suddenly "unnatural".
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All UK ciizens should be angry about this! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this! (Score:5, Insightful)
The same exact thing could be said for tribal medicine men and other shamans.
Should your government fund them as part of their healthcare system too?
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So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspiracy.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac (Score:5, Informative)
-jcr
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Here's VERY simple proof it's a fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
Now ask yourself, where did you get the pure water for the dilution, since all water has the memory of all substances that it has ever been in contact with?
How do you remove the memory of X from water so the water can become pure again and suitable for another round of dilution with substance Y?
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Re:Here's VERY simple proof it's a fraud (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Here's VERY simple proof it's a fraud (Score:4, Insightful)
The only way to do it is by a double blind test [wikipedia.org].
Having said that, double blind tests have shown that homepathy is bogus too.
My point is that making reasoned arguments why some treatment will or not work is basically pointless. Even if you had infinitely good science that knows every possible physical law and understands every metabolic pathway to the extent that we could design drugs it still wouldn't be safe to use that science to decide which untested drug to use, because the rules might interact in an unexpected way.
It's a bit like software really. You can understand a programming environment pretty well - i.e. know all the rules, but you still get some nasty surprises when you actually test something because of some interaction between the rules that you didn't think of.
Or the weather - in principle humans understand all the necessary physics to predict it, but in practice chaotic effects mean that we cannot.
I don't disagree with you about homeopathy though, my point is just that even though the theory behind it is clearly nonsense, there's a slim possibility it did work but just for a different reason so you still need to test it.
There have been cases of this - e.g. Chinese medicine uses Artemisinin [wikipedia.org] to treat malaria. Now I'm sure the Chinese medical theory as to why it works would be nonsense. But it does work pretty well in double blind trials (unlike homepathy) and there's a plausible scientific explanantion why it does.
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No (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't need double blind tests to know that air breathing animals won't survive in a vacuum.
You don't need double blind tests to know that jumping off a tall bridge is going to hurt.
You don't need double blind tests to know that homeopathy has an internal inconsistency: pure water is required but by definition can't exist.
Some things are just provably wrong and don't need experimentation.
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Re:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac (Score:5, Insightful)
If so, were the testing methods determined to be sound upon peer review and was it reproduced by others?
Unless you answered yes on all counts, passing it off as a valid treatment *is* fraud
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Re:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac (Score:5, Informative)
As the Wikipedia article states, when Ennis's tests are repeated with a proper protocol in place, the results likewise disappear. The conclusion is straightforward: Ennis is a sloppy experimenter - probably honest, but incompetent.
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James Randi! (Score:5, Informative)
Homeopathy is a terrible scam and I know too many people that have been sucked in to it due to lack of education, and the ability for critical thought.
Re:James Randi! (Score:4, Informative)
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How do homeopaths wash dishes? (Score:5, Funny)
Enjoy your placebo effect, people.
Re:How do homeopaths wash dishes? (Score:5, Funny)
They don't use soap - they apply "like cures like" and wash dirty dishes in half-done compost.
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Rx: Placebo (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Rx: Placebo (Score:5, Funny)
Also, funnily enough, they look at taste like M&Ms.
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Re:Rx: Placebo (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Rx: Placebo (Score:4, Interesting)
Homeopathy is interesting from a historical standpoint, because it's really the only semi-mainstream form of quackery to have survived the fall of the alchemical age.
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Homeopathy and the power of the mind... (Score:5, Interesting)
In general, homeopathy is essentially tolerated, and as the article humorously points out, it tends to not do much harm because things are dilute. From the Wikipedia article, which nicely summarizes it:
> any positive effects of homeopathic treatment are simply a placebo effect.
That has pretty much been my experience -- and it is difficult for an individual (even a doctor) to tell somebody to NOT do something that is not harmful, and (very, very unlikely) may be beneficial. Physicians joke about "homeopathic" doses of drugs when we think a drug is significantly under-dosed (usually when beginning somebody on a new medicine to see how they react to it.)
It is really funny the ritual surrounding this -- you wouldn't believe the people that adhere to homeopathic remedies and spend hundreds of dollars on these cure-alls, yet still "struggle" to afford the copay on the drugs that are actually keeping them alive. However, something that reinforces positive thought (which indeed can have an effect on your health) is good, and the placebo effect is undeniable.
Despite their benign nature, the aggressive marketing of these substances to vulnerable groups (the sick) disagrees with me. I mean, look at this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=homeopathic+remedy&btnG=Google+Search [google.com] and some of the wild claims they make for cure. I can't make these outlandish claims for most of the drugs I prescribe, so how can an honest doc compete?
Where is your gumption? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do so few doctors speak out? Where is their courage? Where is their integrity?
Some day we may have a public who is completely unable to differentiate between true medical doctors practising evidence-based medicine, and a vast array of charlatans and witch doctors, and the doctors will wonder what happened.
Your tepid and spineless response to alternative medicine is what happened.
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Re:Homeopathy and the power of the mind... (Score:4, Informative)
Same.
Unfortunately I disagree with this statement. While most homeopathists generally don't do harm I have seen plenty who have. Things that I've personally seen:
1) Patients who are struggling with money spending more than they can afford on bogus treatments. Depriving them on money they could have spent on other things.
2) Patients refusing or delaying treatment to see try homeopathy. While people have the right to chose their own treatment, a faith heeler and homeopathest misled people by saying that their treatment works. One case springs to mind of a patient in their mid 30 with Duke's A bowel cancer. This should have had a good chance for cure, but after 12 months of "trying the homeopathy first" the cancer had disseminated (liver/retro-peritoneum etc).
3) I've also seen direct harm based on dangerous advice. When I was a house surgeon we had a patient come in with seizures due to a low serum sodium. It turned out that her homeopathists had advise her to drink about 5-7L of water per day. The little old lady did this and essentially diluted herself with excess water until she almost died. (BTW drinking so much water that you do this is REALLY HARD. It requires a lot of will power to drink much beyond your thirst.)
So, while its nice to say homeopathists etc do no harm, its simply not true. I suggest reading this article on quack watch. [quackwatch.com]
elivs
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Re:Homeopathy and the power of the mind... (Score:5, Informative)
> 1) Patients who are struggling with money spending more than they can afford on bogus treatments. Depriving them on money they could have spent on other things.
From my OP:
>you wouldn't believe the people that adhere to homeopathic remedies and spend hundreds of dollars on these cure-alls, yet still "struggle" to afford the copay on the drugs that are actually keeping them alive.
Appreciate you bringing up the second and third dangerous anecdotes -- however, from my original post, I said it is difficult to tell somebody to do something that is NOT harmful, and clearly instilling polydipsia (excessive drinking) to the point of seizures from hyponatremia (low sodium) IS harmful. I stay involved with my patients that desire homeopathic remedies, and ask them what they have been doing in this regard. They *know* how I feel about the practice, (waste of time and money, largely,) but I don't beat them over the head with it. Clearly if they told me that they were spending large amounts of money or drinking themselves to death, I would step in with appropriate force.
Think of an analogy to religion. The vast majority of medical doctors tolerate if not support religion, with similar benefits that I eluded to earlier. Would you then disagree with this and come out with the counterarguments:
"I've seen somebody who prayed to their god instead of seeking a doctor!!! They died of infection instead of just coming in."
Clearly homeopaths can do harm. This is quite a different statement than what I was saying though.
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Too bad this isn't a controversy (Score:4, Interesting)
The writers picked the topic because of a relative lack of controversy. This is unsurprising to me, but not for a good reason. My experience - I would love to see some research, hopefully proving me wrong - has led me to believe that a majority of people accept the spurious claims of homeopathy advocates. I'm disheartened about this by the number of otherwise perfectly reasonable people who have insisted that I should pay money for a homeopathic dilution of zinc [wikipedia.org] to fight a cold virus.
"My last cold only lasted three days, must have been the Zicam," is so wrong on multiple levels, and it's a sad commentary on the state of education that such thinking is so widespread, although it's only fair to note that such has always been the case with regards to medicine.
My favorite part of the article is this three-bong-load abuse of physics by Lionel Milgrom, a contributor to this very special journal edition, who proposes a theory (I shit you not) of quantum entanglement of humans:
Mr. Milgrom, you and I share the same perspective on the universe. Unfortunately for you, it's called religion, not science, and your attempts to dress it up as science for the purposes of promoting our generation's version of patent medicine are the worst sort of shameful mockery.
Also, "instantaneously?" How can any two things be made instantaneous by a force that "transcends time?" You're as shitty a philosopher as you are a physicist, Mr. Milgrom.
Re:Too bad this isn't a controversy (Score:4, Insightful)
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The root issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Take acupuncture. Twirling small needles in the top layer of the skin has a variety of benefits. But why? Traditions tell the story that it balances the energy flows, etc etc. A recent study examined three groups, one with no acupuncture, one with acupuncture in the traditionally prescribed locations, and one with acupuncture in random locations. Both of the latter two groups were better than the first (no treatment), but interestingly they weren't different from each other.
So yes acupuncture has some effect, but the traditional explanation has nothing to do with why it works.
So two of the big problems with homeopathy are first that most people get hung up on the far out explanations for why the treatments supposedly work and miss out on stuff that could actually help them. And second that lots of homeopathic treatments are developed that don't do anything to help because they are logical extensions of faulty premises.
Alternative medicine also suffers from the fact that once a treatment becomes well accepted and is supported by empirical research it magically leaves the realm of alternative medicine. So by definition alternative treatments will always be those that haven't yet been supported by scientific research, even though many of them do in fact work.
I've talked to a number of homeopaths and in my limited experience they seem to take it like an all or nothing religion, where you have to accept it all or none of it, and you have to accept the wacky explanations to the letter. It would be nice if they didn't feel so burned by the modern medical machine that they reject as a matter of principle empirically based testing.
My take on homeopathy... (Score:4, Interesting)
But there is one exception - and amazingly it works great. Arnica Montana is amazing stuff. All it does is stop compression-type injuries from swelling.
Re:Umm, what? (Score:4, Informative)
How do you feel about three-card Monty?
They may even stumble across something that is heretofore unknown, actually contributing to science in the process.
Nope. Not a chance.
Sneer all you like folks, but even the fundamentalist creationist types have a chance
Even less of a chance, since they do no work at all in any field of scientific inquiry. They just write up ever more long-winded versions of "nu-uh" to science.
-jcr
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Re:Umm, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
The homeopathic researchers may not be committing intentional fraud, but they don't appear to be committing research, either.
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Re:Umm, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I see no problems with such things as homeopathy.
The problem is really people are wasting a lot of money, and potentially harming themselves from not seeking treatments that actually work. You might say "who cares?", but eventually those people are likely to wind up in the normal health care system when the snake-oil treatments fail to do anything, and in worse shape than they would have if they had sought "conventional" treatments. That winds up increasing premiums for everyone else.
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Re:Umm, what? (Score:4, Interesting)
The number of people who would try to use homeopathy for crisis medicine (heart attack, stroke, car crash) is vanishingly small, so it's probably not a valid concern in such cases.
Most homeopathic substances aren't very expensive because there isn't much but water or sugar being sold.
We'd be better off if people didn't believe in frauds, but homeopathy does less damage than many other forms of medical stupidity.
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Re:Umm, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't mind if people spend time looking for results they may never find. It's true that they might stumble upon something, though the evidence so far suggests that they most likely won't. Given the results thus far, we should definitely consider research into homeopathy very risky, and be mindful of spending money on it. That's an issue of efficient resource allocation, however.
My major problems with researchers into homeopathy is that they often violate the epistemological underpinnings and conventions of science (no special pleading, peer review of results, full disclosure of methods, falsifiable theories and hypotheses, etc.), and that they often make assertions that go far beyond, or run completely counter to, the results of their studies. Those two problems cut to the core of why it's a pseudoscience: it claims to be a science, and sometimes even puts on the airs and trappings of scientific pursuits, but it doesn't follow the same epistemological rules and therefore is *not* science.
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Re:Umm, what? (Score:4, Informative)
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Not the flat Earth myth again (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:The truth about doing nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
The consensus is that breastfeeding is good, and circumcision isn't beneficial.
Medicine screws up, sometimes, but you're damn glad it's there when you need it.
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Re:The truth about doing nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
This argument completely goes both ways.
Example: I have an embarrassing confession to make. I once contracted a disease called scabies. Scabies, long story short, is bugs living in your skin. Your skin becomes inflamed and it itches. I have no idea how I got it, but it is fairly contagious, particularly if you have prolonged close contact with somebody who has it (e.g. you share a bed). My doctor diagnosed it, prescribed a treatment for me which I used to the letter, and I was cured. End of that story. Except...
Go online and do a search for scabies and you will find all sorts of interesting stuff. There are whole forum threads devoted to it. The cure, which for me was really very simple, does not seem to be simple at all for a lot of people.
It will probably help if I explain something else about it. Like I said, scabies is bugs, and you get welts and they itch. But these are not bug bites, per se. What is happening is that your body has initiated a systemic allergic reaction to the presence of the insects. You're basically breaking out in hives. Often you will break out in areas where no bugs have ever been. And the problem with this is that the cure for scabies is to kill them. Killing them, however, doesn't get them out of your skin -- it just interrupts their lifecycle. Eventually your skin will shed and they will all be gone. But in the meantime they are dead but still there ... which means that even after you are cured of scabies, you keep having symptoms ... sometimes for several weeks after the successful treatment. So you can maybe see how this freaks people out.
Back to the Web. Go online and search for "scabies cure" and you will find all kinds of people who are very frustrated about their symptoms, which has led them to try all sorts of things:
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Re:WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
That's what every Phase II drug trial ever done has tested: "Is this medicine more effective than a placebo?"
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Re:Homeopathy works - here's why (Score:4, Informative)
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