Science vs. Homeopathy

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."

All UK ciizens should be angry about this!

[Winckle]

Your tax money goes to fund an NHS homeopathy hospital in London, whilst other local health trusts are desperate for cash.

James Randi!

[Mukunda_NZ]

James Randi has often spoke brilliantly on the topic of homeopathy, in this authors@google video he speaks on it, among other things. http://youtube.com/watch?v=MTPj9VlNzQ0

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.

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Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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"

"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.

[BESTouff]

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.

How lucky you are. Right there in France, we have a big lab called "Boiron" that's leader in homeopathy, makes regular mess in the media and have a *lot* of the population believe in its lies.

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Mr2001]

Even for homeopathy, I'd say that percentage is quite low.

Maybe, but they're pretty visible. Go to Amazon's Askville [amazon.com] and see how many of the health questions are looking for "natural or homeopathic remedies".

Re:How do homeopaths wash dishes?

[abhi_beckert]

Does placebo work on animals? I have seen homeopathy (Ledum 200 for anyone who's interested) save the lives of hundreds of dogs from paralysis ticks (http://www.petalia.com.au/templates/storytemplate_process.cfm?specie=Dogs&story_no=56), which are usually deadly for dogs/cats and can kill horses, cows and sometimes even humans. My mother is a homeopath, and there are many, many farmers in this region who swear by homeopathy for saving their animals lives, they've seen first hand how many of their animals died before they learned of using homeopathy, instead of taking their pets to the vet for the antiserum, which is expensive, has a lower success-rate (especially if the dog is already paralyzed when taken to the vet), and can only be used once a year on an animal (if your animal has another tick in the same season, the vet won't even bother attempting to give it another shot, as it never saves them). It's not scientific at all, but when you see hundreds of dogs over several years come back from symptoms that usually mean certain death, there has to be something there.

Re:WTF?

[Carnildo]

Because if the arstechnica objections are right, and homeopathy is only a matter of placebo effect, you'd still have to prove that this placebo effect is inferior to normal cures in terms of percentage of people cured.

That's what every Phase II drug trial ever done has tested: "Is this medicine more effective than a placebo?"

Re:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac

[Volanin]

People may claim over and over about it being a fraud,
but we must not forget the study of Madeleine Ennis [wikipedia.org],
who initially wanted to disprove homeopathy, but ended up
reaching the conclusion that solutions, dilluted to the
point of not containing even a single molecule,
produced reactions just like the controls did.

I know her experiment was later "disproved", but then again,
they used a method that didn't match her own, with many
questionable practices.

I am not ruling out it being a total fraud, but I guess it
would be more accurate to say it's a fraud if compared
to our usual western medicine.

Re:Water Memory?

[Misanthrope]

Read the wiki page? When the double blind test was conducted without experimenter bias, there was no effect.

Re:Umm, what?

[Goaway]

"largely settled matters"... in 1404, a flat Earth was a "largely settled matter"

Yes, it was largely a settled matter that the Earth was not flat, but round. This was known since antiquity.

Not the flat Earth myth again

[benhocking]

... in 1404, a flat Earth was a "largely settled matter"

No, it [wikipedia.org] wasn't [wikipedia.org].

Re:James Randi!

[Copid]

There might well be some good arguments against homeopathy, but those of James Randi does not count among them.

Hmmmm... I don't know about that. I quit enjoyed Randi's talk about homeopathy and think that it did a great job of outlining the actual problems with it (e.g. zero active ingredient, no known basis for water to "remember" the ingredient, counterintuitive results if it were true, etc.). Can you mention some arguments that are good that he didn't cover, or are some of his arguments wrong? Or do you just dislike James Randi?

Re:Homeopathy and the power of the mind...

[Elivs]

I'm a doctor

Same.

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.

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:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac

[SQL Error]

Ennis's work appears to be identical to that of Jacques Benveniste. Benveniste also showed positive results for ultra-dilute solutions - until James Randi adjusted the experimental protocol to exclude confirmation bias, whereupon the results disappeared.

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.

Re:Water Memory?

[SQL Error]

The answer is, as others have said, right there on the Wikipedia page:

The team traveled to Benveniste's lab and the experiments were re-run. In the first series the original experimental procedure was carried out as it had been when the paper was first submitted for publication. The experiments were successful, matching the published data quite closely. However, Maddox noted that during the procedure the experimenters were aware of which test tubes originally contained the antibodies and which did not. A second experimental series was started with Maddox and his team in charge of the double-blinding; notebooks were photographed, the lab videotaped, and vials juggled and secretly coded. Randi went so far as to wrap the labels in tinfoil, seal them in an envelope, and then stick them on the ceiling so Benveniste and his colleagues could not read them. Although everyone was confident that the outcome would be the same, reportedly including the Maddox-led team, the effect immediately disappeared.

Despite having been shown that his results were entirely due to experimenter bias allowed by his own poor experimental design, Benveniste believed in water memory to the day he died. This is not untypical.

Re:Homeopathy works - here's why

[PCM2]

Yes, but that's not what homeopathy means. No doctor claims that natural, so-called alternative medicines don't work. Modern medicine acknowledges that aspirin came from willow bark, for example. The term "homeopathy" implies more than just herbal cures; read the rest of the thread for info.

Re:Umm, what? (Death by Medicine)

[Anonymous Coward]

See "Death by Medicine"
LE Magazine August 2006 (Life Extension Magazine)
Death by Medicine
By Gary Null, PhD; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; and Dorothy Smith, PhD

Go to www.lef.org and search their magazine for "medical deaths" and read the article.

Something like 780K deaths/year caused by "real" medical care.

(There's no signon needed at their web site, but it's a bit klunky so no direct URL).

There's little consensus on the latter.

[Valdrax]

The consensus is that breastfeeding is good, and circumcision isn't beneficial.

Actually, there's no consensus on the latter. First, circumcision is actually beneficial in helping to prevent HIV by removing tissue that acts as an easy point of entry. [bmj.com] Second, a small (40 person) study was performed that showed that strongly suggests that sensitivity is not significantly impaired in circumcised men [arstechnica.com] despite commonly held beliefs to the contrary.

Re:Homeopathy and the power of the mind...

[neapolitan]

You set up a clear straw man argument. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man [wikipedia.org] We don't disagree at all.

> 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.

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[FooAtWFU]

You, sir, are an excellent example of why being an expert on one thing (chiropracty... or whatever the noun form is) does not make one an expert on another.

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".

Quackbusters busted.

[Fantastic Lad]

Quackwatch has a good section on how pseudoscience does not make progress, unlike real science.

Quackwatch is a fraudulent organization cobbled together by the drug industry in an attempt to undermine alternative medicine.

The leading speakers of Quackwatch, Stephen Barrett in particular, are liars [google.com.sb] and losers [bolenreport.net] who are almost certainly psychopathic with regard to their total lack of shame when their lies are exposed. [kospublishing.com] Luckily, the legal system is smarter than the average internet reader. Stephen Barrett does a good job of losing the court cases [educate-yourself.org] he brings to court against alternative practitioners.

The Quackbuster representatives were its founder Stephen Barrett and Ronald Gots, the founder of the Quackbuster branch, Environmental Sensitivities Research Institute. Both men are also directors of the American Council on Science and Health, another branch of Quackbusters. Their presentations were later published in the prestigious International Journal of Toxicology (vol. 18, no.6, 1999). The debate focused on whether chemical sensitivity is a psychological or a biological condition. In front of an audience of several hundred people, and aware that the entire debate was being video- and audio-taped, Gots stated that prestigious university-affiliated authors of a (named) main-stream peer-reviewed journal had recently provided incontrovertible proof, on the basis of rigorous scientific study and experiment, that chemical sensitivity was a psychological condition.

Gots [of Quackwatch] was followed by Johns Hopkins' speaker Albert Donnay who informed the audience that this prestigious study was fictitious. The authors were fictitious, too. Even the journal was fiction. A gasp went through the audience. Amazingly, Gots made no attempt to answer. Even more astounding was the body language of both Gots and Barrett. While the audience was audibly shocked and murmurs were going through the crowd, those two Quackbusters leaned back in their chairs, fiddled with their pens in the bored and relaxed manner of total self-assurance awaiting the next item on the agenda.

Stephen Barrett, although claiming to be a retired Psychiatrist, was never able to become "Board Certified." He failed his test. Also, Barrett gave up his MD license in 1993. His employment record shows he NEVER was able to hold a full-time job - and his claim to "Psychiatric fame" was his part-time (4 to 8 hours a week) employment at a Pennsylvania Mental Hospital - from 1978 through 1993. From 1976 through 1978 he could not get a paying job. He also claims to be a legal expert, though he has never had any legal training.

Bobbie Baratz, the current president of the NCAHF, was terminated from his former position at a Boston area medical center after a physical altercation with a 72 year old woman. He now operates a hair removal business. He also operates the NCAHF out of that same hair removal location.

-FL

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[dabraun]

So what did I learn out of this: Only when she switched to natural birth control (taking temperature combined with some other factors), which I believed to be a fraud because "science" always told us so, did the problem go away and oh boy did it go away... Oh and she's without a baby and she's actually in her eighth month with the NFP method.

No doctor in their right mind would call the Rhythm Method (what you are referring to) a fraud. It just isn't nearly as effective as the pill, or virtually any other common method of contraception. All published statistics on birth control effectiveness refer to the liklihood of a woman getting pregnant over the course of a year - your anecdotal story doesn't even provide a single year - and it's a single data point - which is to say, it's completely worthless for the purposes of evaluation of effectiveness.

All hormonal birth control methods are outrageously more effective than all non-hormonal methods (leaving out abstinance for the purposes of this discussion). This includes the pill, implants, vaginal rings, shots, and some IUDs. They also have very real side effects (bad: blood clots, mood swings, good: prevents cervical cancer, prevents ovarian cysts), though different dosages, delivery mechanisms and drug combinations impact this. Do what works for you, but don't try to sell the rest of the world about how "the pill is unnecessary" or "natural birth control is just as good" because that's a load of crap.

Just a heads up: After you do have a child and are trying to prevent another immediately your wife (a hypochondriac perhaps?) will likely tell you about how breast feeding for a long duration (multiple years) can be an effective form of birth control. It is in fact documented to be 'effective' in the third world, and can be effective here.

There are also side effects to this, the regularity of feeding required to maintain the necessary hormone levels will impact her sex drive - and for many people is completely impractical in the first world (if, for example, she works for a living.) There's that and the fact that 'effective' in this case still means less effective than every 'normal' form of birth control available.

Now, on the general issue of 'natural medecine'. There are TONS of natural medicines that work REALLY well. We identify them, purify them, and they become drugs, at which point some people decide they are no longer 'natural'. (what, because we know why they work?). The rest of the commonly known herbal remedies you can buy today have not become drugs because they don't work.

Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price

[ZombieWomble]

I think homeopathy is just a Western equivalent; as long as the person giving it understands that it's bunk, and takes care to ensure that real medicine wouldn't be more effective, it doesn't seem too outrageous to use it.

It's a nice idea, but it just won't work - there is a non-trivial fraction of homeopaths who really, really believe in what they're doing (right up to the highest levels of their purported regulatory bodies). One recent example in the UK was a show which found that, out of a dozen or so registered homeopaths asked, none recommended malaria medication for travelling to at risk areas - all offering their delightful little sugar pills instead. This is despite their purported regulatory body explicitly stating that Homeopathy is unsuitable for treatment of ilnesses like malaria.

However, the Society of Homeopaths refused to sanction the people giving this dangerous advice, presumably out of solidarity with their colleagues or whatever. This is just evidence that, if you accept homeopathy, you are validating all the loons as well as anyone who may take part in the dubious placebo-peddling approach (something I pretty thoroughly disapprove of, but which is significantly less bad than the massive levels of delusion which lets people really, truly believe in these things.

Re:red and purple liquids?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of conventional medicine is placebo. It is quite nearly criminal to prescribe anti-biotics for the common cold, when the best medicine would be chicken soup or a nice, hot, cup of spicy apple cider. (Half a teaspoon of grated ginger root does quite a lot of good, and another half teaspoon of cinnamon makes it almost addictive, but anyway.) Oh, and rest, of course.

If a doctor you know prescribed antibiotics for a cold, you should seriously consider a lawsuit. Antibiotics do absolutely nothing for viral-caused illness.

That said, most of conventional medicine *IS NOT* placebo. Part of the drug approval process in the USA includes a rigorous double-blind with a placebo control group. In order to pass, the treatment in question must show that it can produce (statistically significant) better results than the control group. This double-blind is where homeopathy fails. (note that such a study would also conclude that antibiotics are no better than placebo for treating a *viral* illness. Antibiotics just don't affect virii. Antibiotics kill bacteria; they should only be prescribed for a bacterial infection-strep throat, for instance)

In all cases, however, it is important to weigh the benefits of the treatment against the known side-effects. Consuming and/or injecting a foreign substance into your body *will* have effects, be they beneficial or harmful. The main goal of pharmaceutical science is to maximize the benefits while minimizing the harmful side-effects. If you have a doctor that consistently prescribes medications with harmful side-effects for relatively harmless illnesses(like the common cold), it's time to find a new doctor.

Re:Medicine is an empirical science

[Via_Patrino]

Yes they do.

Homeopathy is much more individualized treatment than allopathy, you have much more factors (symptoms/probable causes) to consider, not just the pathology.

What those "scientists" do is ignore that basic homeopathy principle and apply the same treatment to a broad range of patients with different symptoms and probable causes. That shouldn't and won't work.

The kind of study that real simulates homeopathy is to deeply study each patient, prescribe a remedy to each one and later give each one the individually prescribed remedy or the placebo.

Another kind of study with good results is to choose a population not only with the same pathology, but also with the same symptoms and probably causes. And apply the same remedy (or the placebo) to the whole population.

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