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."

Umm, what?

[Penguinisto]

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

Honestly, as long as it doesn't interfere with other scientific endeavors, I see no problems with such things as homeopathy. They may even stumble across something that is heretofore unknown, actually contributing to science in the process. Even in this case, competent MDs certainly don't discount human willpower and mindset, especially in matters such as healing times and recovery from sickness or injury.

Sneer all you like folks, but even the fundamentalist creationist types have a chance (small as it may be) at accidentally discovering something along the way that "real science" may have ignored or discounted, or in asking a question (or posing a challenge) whose answer might lead to something useful in science itself -- if a scientist here or there takes the time to tackle them.

It's kind of how we've gotten as far as we have.

/P

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Vellmont]

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.

The truth about doing nothing

[netsavior]

Diluting something to the point that it is nothing and admistering it as medicine is not a great testament to Homeopathy in my mind. It is a testament against "western medicine". I think it is very true that often doing nothing is better than doing whatever western medicine says. Example: US has one of the most medicalized Birth process of any country, and one of the worst infant mortality rates of any modern world country [cnn.com]. The US also feeds babies medicine(infant "formula") instead of food (breastmilk), cuts off functional parts of the male anatomy at birth out of tradition and ignorance.

All this unnecessary medicalization happens in the first few seconds of life a large percentage of US born babies. Setting that precident, imagine all the rediculious medicalization the "western world" faces and it is not hard to see why backing the *eff* off and using some kind of placebo voodoo water (assuming homeopathy is false) would be popular and even relieving to the bodies of people who have been abused by their own thirst for "medicine".

I am not saying western medicine gives us nothing, or that homeopathy gives us something, but I am saying that psychological response is perhaps more important than chemicals and surgery, and maybe a psudo science of placebo is a nice way to wean lemmings off of "just gimme an antibiotic so I can feel better".

Re:Umm, what?

[Vellmont]

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.

Mod parent up

[hedwards]

Seeing as this is /. I'm in no way surprised that this was modded troll. Moderators hear seem to lack the funny gene. Still pretty damn funny though.

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.

The root issue

[Tlosk]

Something few people seem to recognize is there are two separable elements to most of homeopathy. The first is the treatment itself, and the second is the explanation for how it works. For whatever reason people aren't satisfied to know that something works, they also need to know why it works. And unfortunately if there isn't a self-evident explanation one will be invented. And it doesn't end there, the invented rationale is then usually extended to develop other treatments (which don't work of course because what they are based on isn't true).

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.

Re:Umm, what?

[FreelanceWizard]

The problem is not so much that people are doing research in this field -- people still do research into parapsychology and memetics, for example. The problem is asserting that your theoretical framework is true and correct in the face of serious competition and disconfirmatory evidence. Homeopathy's principle claims are not supported by evidence. As a theoretical framework, it doesn't buy us anything in terms of explanatory power over its primary competitor, the placebo effect. The placebo effect is even more predictive, because it can explain results such as "red and purple liquids, colored by a biologically non-reactive dye, have greater treatment effects than clear ones." How does homeopathy address that? Even clinically, homeopathy fails; its results are on par with what you'd predict from placebo.

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.

Re:The truth about doing nothing

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

The problem is that the things you are complaining about have little to do with modern medicine.

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.

They should take a look in the mirror.

[NEOtaku17]

I find it somewhat funny that they make fun of non-western style medicine because it is expensive and unnecessary. In my experience most of the treatments THEY prescribe are also expensive and unnecessary. The majority of ailments people suffer in the U.S. could easily be cured by getting the proper amount of sleep, using good hygiene, exercising daily, and eating whole foods in moderation. Instead they give their patients all kinds of drugs that cause just as many problems as they eliminate and at prices that bankrupt families and put a huge strain on the overall economy. Somewhat hypocritical don't you think?

Re:Umm, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you feel about three-card Monty?

There's a difference between people doing research, and outright fraud based on "homeopathic cures".

Yes. There's also a difference between people doing scientific research and people doing homeopathic research. I know this is slashdot, but read the article: it's quite enlightening. Example: one homeopathic researcher simply discarded "long runs" of negative results, presuming that the measurement apparatus was defective. If you throw out the negatives, all you're left with are positives, but that doesn't mean you've tested your hypothesis. Example: one investigator found that certain individuals were able to 'sense' the remedy, where other individuals were not. Rather than admit that this might mean there is nothing in the remedy to be detected, the investigator decides that certain people are sensitive to the remedy and other are refractory to it. You might as well suggest that certain people are good at flipping heads on a coin.

The homeopathic researchers may not be committing intentional fraud, but they don't appear to be committing research, either.

Re:Good and bad

[mad.frog]

Eight years without a cold or flu isn't a placebo.

I've been eight years without a cold or flu, and haven't taken a single so-called preventative -- placebo or not.

In other words -- have you considered the possibility that you are just lucky?

Where is your gumption?

[rumblin'rabbit]

I am amazed at how tolerant doctors are of alternative medicines. Years ago I had a letter published in the local newspaper where I protested their gullible coverage of an obviously bogus medical claim. I was surprized that my letter was the only one that appeared. This was in a big city - where were the letters from the medical doctors?

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.

Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this!

[AnonymousCactus]

Why? It's probably a lot cheaper than the other hospitals. Not to mention that at the very least it gives people a placebo effect and probably teaches them some reasonable lessons about respecting their body and respecting nature, which are valuable lessons.

I'd be more concerned about the excessive amounts of drugs advocated by the traditional hospitals, which have their place, but also serve to mask symptoms And they, along with overly expensive and often unnecessary operations, are part of the reason hospitals are underfunded.

Nothing is as clear as you think.

Here's VERY simple proof it's a fraud

[A nonymous Coward]

The claim is that if you dilute a substance X to the ratio of one part X to 10***120 parts pure water, you will then have no X left in the pure water, only the memory of X, and this will now cure whatever illness X caused in the first place.

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?

Re:Water Memory?

[Mukunda_NZ]

There is first of all, no proof of water memory, which is what you'd be looking for. A positive indication, not trying to disprove something like this which flies in the face of all our scientific understanding. Why does water not remember all the other things that had been part of it, like urine, dirt, sand... Filtering wouldn't remove the memory of those things, as filters works of the basis of removing particles, not memory.

Re:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac

[Anti_Climax]

Did it produce "reactions" at a higher rate than those expected for a pure placebo?
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

Re:They should take a look in the mirror.

[Idarubicin]

Do you actually have specific examples, or are you offering a baseless rant?

Yes, many conditions could be improved - even cured - through lifestyle changes. The incidence of diabetes, many cancers, assorted psychological problems, headaches, tooth decay, and many other ailments could be sharply reduced if people ate right, got enough sleep, brushed their teeth, stopped smoking, and drank in moderation.

And yet, these people have real diseases, and real problems with their health. Were the problems avoidable? Yep. Can your doctor force you to eat better and get more exercise? Nope. Do they still need to be treated? Yep.

So, are drugs costly? Some of them, absolutely. Nevertheless, drugs are required to be tested for efficacy. The doctors who prescribe them are familiar with the effects and side effects, and are generally competent to help a patient make an informed decision about the tradeoffs involved in a particular therapy. Are drug companies evil? Mostly--at least, in any way that makes them a buck. Do they fudge data to suppress information about side effects? Sometimes--but it usually costs them a bundle in the end, and most drugs do actually work as advertised, and have accurately reported side effects.

I have difficulty seeing why it's the fault of western medicine that some people are lazy and have bad habits. And at least 'western' drugs are tested for efficacy, and have some oversight.

Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this!

[Anonymous Coward]

First, and most importantly, providing a placebo effect is not something taxpayer funds should be spent on, let alone enough to support an entire hospital. You say "... at the very least ..." a placebo effect as well. I'll save you the trouble and correct an obvious typo: "... at the very _most_ ..." There exists more than sufficient evidence indicating that the only likely medical change as a result of homeopathic treatment is the potential for harm by avoiding proven medical treatments.

Homeopathy has absolutely nothing to do with respecting one's body or nature, so nuts to that claim as well. Unless you mean respecting the power of enough water and filtering to sufficiently remove, oh, well, just about anything, which is a pretty nifty trait I'll agree. But as I suspect that wasn't your intended point, nuts indeed.

I won't argue that there exist overpriced medication and unnecessary operations, but acknowledging those things does not by extension imply any sort of merit to a regularly debunked quackery.

Many things may not be as clear as I think, but in this context, one of them certainly is: folks in the UK have a good reason to be irked, what with a portion of their taxes being essentially pissed into the wind.

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Just Some Guy]

Debunks all the health scams from homeopathy to ear candling to colloidal silver to chiropracty, all on one convinient page.

Well, I have to say that I've had good luck with a chiropractor [slashdot.org] for back pain, but I agree with you on their general theory of disease being cause by misalignment. Chiropractor as physical therapist? I'll buy that. Chiropractor for digestive ailments? No thanks.

Re:There should never be a settled issue in scienc

[aichpvee]

Tell that to all the people on /. who keep saying that Global Warming is a settled question and that no more research on anything except profiting from the melting of the polar ice caps needs to be done.

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[The One and Only]

"Uncontroversial" is vague and scope-bound. Do you mean uncontroversial among scientists? Uncontroversial among the educated public? Uncontroversial among the greater public at large? I think homeopathy is uncontroversial within at least two of these scopes.

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Nursie]

It's a shame that in most people's minds homeopathy has become mixed up with "natural remedies", some of which do contain useful compounds.

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.

The public understands science all too well.

[tjstork]

If science was a car, people would never buy it. The basic fact of science is that, even though we learn a bunch of new things, and have ten thousand new ideas a day to better humanity, probably only one in a million of those new ideas actually WILL, so, as a risk management thing goes, you genuinely are better off ignoring most scientific breakthroughs - even if there is overwhelming evidence that the breakthrough is beneficial. Cell phones and plastic bottles suddenly come to mind.

But its more than that. Science as a brand is in trouble and on a many levels.

The public exposure to science is, in these days, filled with a bunch of bad news. It used to be that science would make peoples lives better, and now, the more we know, the worse our lives promise to get. Every time a scientist gets up on TV, its to say that we're screwing up the planet, we have to have less, use less, in essence, roll back a pretty good chunk of our wealth really, just to "share" with the emergent third world, and that sucks.

Every time a scientist gets on TV, you hear about wonder drugs that kill some small amount of people, so your grandmother can't get them, how you can't smoke, can't drink, can't even eat peanuts on the plane anymore. It's like, science used to be about human promise, and it's really, any more, just nickel and diming us into a life of total misery. Then, to top it all off, some scientist comes out with a supposed cure for cancer, but you can't afford it anyway, because, the truth is, the gov't and the insurance companies know that the country can't afford to spend 1 million bucks per citizen and medical costs and have a solvent nation.

Accompanying all of that doom and gloom is a remarkable lack of constitency and clarity. You get scientists that say claiming that there will be more hurricanes than ever for a year, and none show up. You have the government taking recommendations of scientists saying that people should eat cheese and peanut better one year and then the next year, eat celery and whole grains. Now, scientists claim to have your kids interests at heart, and all of a sudden we have the absurd primary school educational disasters of the 1980s, becuase, oops, we didn't learn until last year that boys brains really ARE wired differently from little girls brains, sorry, folks, that an entire generation of men got screwed despite the best intentions of the scientists in that field.

Now, compare all of that to a preacher, who reads out from the bible. He's not hawking a perfect system, but it is a system that has been field proven, and, at least in the context of christianity, coupled with some technology, that actually elevated europeans from the dark ages into world domination. You'd have big families, spread out, dominate. That's good stuff, and at the end of the day, you've got the promise of a woopass god that will smite your enemies when you die and shower you with goodies. That's cool.

What's science giving us instead, a life that sucks, a death that's permanent, and a universe that will wink out of existence in 100 billion years, or some other grizly fate. Even the existence of man is utterly pointless in the long run.

So yeah, while it may be factual and consitent and the religious types live in a fantasy land, it is a fantasy that gets your more goodies if you can win it, and finally,

Y o u d o n ' t n e e d t o b e l i e v e i n e v o l u t i o n t o
u s e a c e l l p h o n e...

When the dust all settles, its really no surprise. Science offers a shitty deal, and religion offers a good one, so only an idiot would really choose science, and so more and more people don't!

Re:WTF?

[marcello_dl]

You aren't anal enough, which was the point.
You say it's tested against a placebo (double blind test, I presume), but I said "THIS placebo" for a reason: this appeals to somebody's faith in alternative medicine. The double blind placebo doesn't. Whether it makes a difference is another matter.

Re:Too bad this isn't a controversy

[SQL Error]

Something you might not have noticed: Water is a liquid.

Re:Medicine is an empirical science

[Anonymous Coward]

> Homeopathy had a lot of empirical studies showing it's better than placebo.

Name one. Funny thing, the homeopathic institutes claim that homeopathy "can't be tested with double-blind techniques".

They are frauds, and not even sophisticated ones. They just keep making the same claim over and over, and that seems to be good enough for most people

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

[Hebbinator]

Placebo effect is very important, especially in things like depression, anxiety, and agitation (its a real clinical status, look it up!) where behavioral therapy may improve symptoms. I'll let it slide that homeopathy for these things is hard to justify, what with the "like cures like" and all (can we get a 100000x dilution of sad juice?), and stick to the placebo effect which I think is your main point.

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. ..So, if you wake up and feel tired (who does that??), you are experiencing possible drug-related fatigue..

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.

Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this!

[Valdrax]

Why? It's probably a lot cheaper than the other hospitals. Not to mention that at the very least it gives people a placebo effect and probably teaches them some reasonable lessons about respecting their body and respecting nature, which are valuable lessons.

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?

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Babbster]

And if there's something to acupuncture, you're welcome to prove it. It's failed every rigorous test before it, but hey, keep on trucking. Granted it's pretty hard to do double-blind studies with people you're jabbing with needles, but I guess you could deliberately miss the "meridians" or target the wrong qi flow or whatever.

That is indeed about the closest you can get to "double blind": There just has to be a mechanism in place to tell the acufakers when to target the "proper" area and when to stick the "wrong" area.

If people want to believe in bullshit, they're welcome to it. The problem arrives when these poor, ignorant people have real medical crises and are going to their local homeoquack, chiroputz or acufaker instead of getting therapy that has undergone (or is undergoing, in the case of experimental treatments) scientific testing. If one of my family members looks to be falling into that trap, I'll be dragging them to medical doctors and force-feeding them real meds if I have to.

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[rossifer]

It's always nice to hear a positive story from a chiropractic patient on a forum such as this.

Chiropractors provide many things. Human touch. Warmth. Massage. Stretching. Advice on posture.

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.

Colloidal Silver? Probably not a good idea.

Dangerous quackery.

Magnetic Healing? Probably something to it.

Probably something that can be sold for a profit. Fraudulent but harmless quackery.

Acupuncture? Definitely does something, but I don't think we know exactly what.

It pokes holes in you and irritates tissues normally protected by your skin. Other than that, lots of nearly untestable placebo effect.

Homeopathy? I've never been to a practitioner, but I'm honestly not too confident in the concepts.

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.

Homeopathy though? I continue to doubt.

That's a great start. Keep it up. Skepticism can be tiring, but is incredibly rewarding.

Regards,
Ross

Re:Here's VERY simple proof it's a fraud

[Hal_Porter]

That sounds good, except that you can't tell if a medical treatment will work or not by logical argument since we don't know all the rules. Maybe there is some weird reason why homeopathy works that no one understands yet.

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.

Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this!

[Babbster]

Yeah, all that "live healthy" stuff is great up until the point where they tell you that with such-and-such 1:100,000,000,000-concentration solution you can cure an illness. And that's what makes them a homeopath. You may be confusing homeopathy with naturopathy - they're two very different things in that a naturopath will at least recommend doses of something that comes in a potentially effective concentration, which a homeopath will never do, and if they do then they're no longer a homeopath.

Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this!

[the_fat_kid]

All "homeopaths" are:
1. crazy
2. stupid
3. liars
or
4. all of the above.

the ones that know better are liars.
the ones that don't know better are stupid.
the ones that think that it's a real science are crazy.

just like phrenology, holocaust denial, and scientology.

well so much for my karma...

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Mr2001]

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.

Agreed, but looking for something "natural" as an end in itself is foolish. If you want a natural headache cure, you can use salicylic acid from willow bark, but the side effects will be a lot milder if you process it into aspirin first. The people who go looking for "natural remedies" usually just suffer from the superstition that synthetic chemicals are automatically more dangerous than ground-up leaves.

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".

What's amusing to me

[Sycraft-fu]

Is that everyone I know who believes in homeopathy also believes that the climate is getting warmer and humans are the cause of that. When asked why they believe in global warming the answer is, invariably, "Because science has proven it." More questioning leads to the point that the consensus of scientists is that global warming is real, and human caused. Fair enough, they lack the education and/or will to investigate it themselves, so they rely on the prevailing expert opinion.

However you then confront them that the prevailing expert opinion is that homeopathy is junk and they start twisting things, calling up studies of dissenters, distrusting scientists, and so on.

In other words, they like the "scientific consensus" explanation when it supports their views, but don't when it doesn't. Unfortunately, I think this is extremely common with most people. They just buy whatever explains their world view, they don't apply the rigor they sometimes like to pretend.

Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this!

[bjorniac]

The inbred social misfits that make up the royal family don't decide how our health care is funded. They don't control how taxes are spent, although they do receive a disgraceful amount of it (though anything >0 is disgraceful IMO).

Re:No

[bjorniac]

"Some things are just provably wrong and don't need experimentation." and that, in a nutshell, is why SCIENCE should be taught in schools. You DO need double-blind tests to try these things (except math which is in a different type of 'proof'). If you have a theory and want to see whether it's right or wrong, it's the best way to go if you can. In all the cases you mention it's a pretty good way of establishing the facts (again, except math).

Re:The public understands science all too well.

[Kelson]

Y o u d o n ' t n e e d t o b e l i e v e i n e v o l u t i o n t o u s e a c e l l p h o n e...

...but you do need to understand electromagnetism to design one.

Re:Umm, what?

[porpnorber]

The thing I find interesting about homeopathy is this: on the one hand, it is an extreme long shot that water could hold long-term imprints of the sort claimed. It's not actually quite theoretically impossible; there are minerals that seem to be capable of propagating macrostructures - but of course, water is a liquid. Then again, it's an inordinately interesting liquid, and it does form nontrivial macrostructures - but of course, as far as we know, only for very short periods of time. In short: it's hard to exclude the notion on principle, even if Occam doesn't have to strop his razor very much for it to seem pretty damned far fetched.

But. Suppose for a moment (and yes, this is a metatheoretical thought experiment and not a scientific argument!) that these water memories indeed have some physical reality, any physical reality at all. Would homeopathy then work? Would the human organism have evolved to be sensitive to it? You bet it would! If there were any pathway made available to the selective process whereby a contaminated water supply could trigger the immune system before the pathogen itself arrived in enough quantity to do harm (and for some pathogens a single molecule might suffice!), it would be a massive win. Evolution is death-based learning, and death avoidance is the most powerful incentive there is. Life would be all over such an early-warning system, in (geologically speaking) a flash.

So: I do not consider this memorious water likely. Remotely possible; still worth doing further real scientific studies on, I think; but one hell of a long shot. But if studies on the claimed physical properties of water should ever prove positive, the conceptual landscape changes completely.

And here's an interesting thing: you notice that the entire industry of cryptography (to take one example) is based on this structure: if it is true that factoring certain objects is substantially harder then forming their product, then I have this groovy cryptosystem for you. And we do go ahead and use these results. Can we honestly assess the truth of this precondition, either?

The fact is that I am inclined to trust contemporary cryptographic theory, and I am inclined to dismiss homeopathy. But I thought it worth commenting on the structural parallel: it sure as hell makes me go 'hm.'

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

[Lane.exe]

Acupuncture is stress-relieving because it stimulates the release of endorphins, which is a quaint way of saying it gets you high. Less stress is, incidentally, better for your health. But it's nothing special about acupuncture. It's something special about stress-relieving activity. You could spend an hour sitting in a peaceful place reading a good book and get the same benefit.

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

[cp.tar]

How exactly does behavioral therapy or physiological analysis "resolve" a problem? If your wife left you, will therapy bring her back? No, only the way you feel can be addressed. The fundamental problem will never be resolved. I would be thoughtful before taking a drug like Prozac, but I'm not swayed by the unscientific protestant-ethic-based theory that solving a problem should be hard or time-consuming.

If your wife left you, that is no longer a problem.
The way you feel about it is the problem. The way you act because of that is the problem.

Whatever problems you had before she left you are gone.
Well, you're probably still broke, or even more broke because she also took all your money when she left, and have probably lost a friend or a gardener as well, but I digress.

Anyway, therapy (which I consider only a substitute for friends who'll talk to you - and, more importantly, listen to you; I've had both and friends are both better and cheaper) resolves a problem by first showing you it is not the immediate problem at all.
"Fundamental" problems tend to occupy your attention, so you don't see the real, immediate problems. Problem is (I'm using that word way too much now), if suddenly your fundamental problem was resolved, i.e. your wife came back, your immediate problems would seem to have disappeared altogether. However, whatever led to her leaving in the first place remains unresolved, and your new feelings for her would never be the same anyway.
Basically, save for foing back in time and preventing certain things to happen, there is no solving those fundamental problems.
There's just dealing with the consequences.

Problems are only solved in maths. In life, they are dealt with.

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Anonymous Coward]

evolution vs. intelligent design is settled just because science overwhelmingly supports the former

Science neither confirms nor denies the latter. It can merely provide strong evidence in support of the former. This means that evolution is an empirically sound theory with theoretical basis - i.e. it is good science - whereas intelligent design is outside the realms of science entirely, and no scientist can use his abilities to confirm or deny it. Couple of reasons:

1. "It's elephants all the way down." Science is based on observing some feature of the universe and approximating it with a model. It has never attempted to ask, let alone succeeded in answering, the question "and why's that true?" of every one of its laws, and then same of the more fundamental law, and so on - because that would be an infinite process.
    
2. Even assuming that divine intervention occurred after the creation of the universe, while there is sufficient scientific evidence to make it plausible that natural selection produced the current crop of species, it is impossible to refute the assertion "ah, but God just made it look random". I can select for you a series of numbers sufficiently carefully that just about any statistical test you apply makes it appear as though they were taken from the throws of an unbiased die, even while announcing that I've preselected the third number to be a 5.
   

Because ID proponents are making untestable statements, a scientist - while wearing his scientist hat - can only reject the proponent's claims as untestable, not as wrong and stupid. Otherwise he is entirely misunderstanding his own discipline. ID proponents assert their claim to be scientific, while scientists claim that science refutes ID; these mistakes makes the whole battle so prolonged.

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[geckofiend]

I'm sure you can find any number of normally healthy people who had a stroke and died unexpectedly. It happens every day. Far more people visit a chiropractor receive and adjustment and get on with their lives. Ever heard "correlation is not causation"?

For years I lived with neck and shoulder pain that doctors could do nothing about, short of surgery to fuse two vertebrae. Eventually I also developed a numbness that reached down into my arm. After I finally broke down and visited a chiropractor, at the suggestion of my doctor, I was on the road to a pain free life. Now I visit one every now and then when the pain starts returning.

Can they cure disease? No, and a decent one will never make such claims. Are they providing a valuable needed treatment? YES.

The fact that you mentioned a lawyer without ever mentioning any sort of PROOF is telling. You know, my dad died of a heart attack after having used a scuba tank for years, maybe I should sue the makers of scuba tanks.

Re:Science? Hardly.

[miltonw]

I'm not going to defend homeopathy, but doesn't anyone else notice that this is not a scientific investigation?

It starts with the premise that homeopathy is a fraud and that it cannot work. and goes on from there.

All the "science" goes into proving that homeopathy can't work. It doesn't start with a clean, unbiased slate and investigate; It starts with a conclusion and simply works to only prove that conclusion. Their foundation allows them to automatically discount any evidence of workability as anecdotal, lies or placebo effect.

Maybe homeopathy works or maybe it doesn't (and I'm not claiming it does), but that whole investigation isn't science and doesn't use scientific method.

I not only find that disturbing, but the fact that no one noticed that is even more disturbing.

We accept bad "science" if it supports our opinions, and I think that's dangerous.

Re:Where's the evidence Ennis is incompetent?

[dubl-u]

But because of the circumstances, I doubt most scientists would risk their careers investigating "cold fusion" or homeopathy, or even be able to get funding to do so in the first place.

Plenty of people investigated cold fusion. Some people found something. Most people didn't. The people who found something couldn't reliably replicate their results. Research continues.

What's clear, though, is that some well-meaning people ended up doing bad science because they fell for the hype and let it influence their results. That is an entirely justified black eye for them, as guarding against that is pretty much the point of science.

I think we shouldn't dismiss her (or the entire field of homeopathy) just because of that experiment.

A homeless guy in my neighborhood is convinced that there is a sinister, far-reaching conspiracy against him, orchestrated by his estranged and abusive father. Now sure, it could be true. We probably shouldn't dismiss him or his theories just because he sounds like every other paranoid lunatic and has no proof. But let's just say I'm not rushing to investigate, either.

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

[Rich0]

Hmm - proof that anything can get modded up on /. :)

Uh, the whole point of the double-blind random clinical trial is that it is the only known way to distinguish between drug effects and placebo effects.

What other way would you propose? Tell people to try it and ask them how they feel? The plural of anecdote isn't data. They do precisely that in double-blind trials and guess what - quite a few people report feeling better when in fact they were given only sugar pills...

And the objection isn't to the concept that less dose administered = greater effect. The objection is to the concept that you can take a preparation that is unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but solvent and have it have any effect at all. If the does contains nothing but water, by what mechanism could it convey any effect at all?

If somebody wanted to rely on the prayers of a minister instead of taking a drug I'd not complain about the minister's actions. He would be completely up-front about the fact that he believes that what he is doing is completely supernatural and is not anything that can be relied on to have any particular outcome beyond whatever some deity intends to have happen.

The problem with homeopathy is that it masquerades as science by asserting that a particular concoction can with some degree of certainty promote a cure for a malady, and it asserts that the effect is somehow natural.

If an effect is natural then it is subject to the laws of nature. It must therefore be testable, and the fact that no effects have been found in suitable experiments forces us to conclude that it has no effect.

truthiness

[scorilo]

I tried to make a point without relying on numbers as I do not have any authoritative sources. Besides, the sharks smelling 1 molecule in 1 million molecules of water is mind boggling enough for me. Yet again and again, sharks detect that 1 "molecule" with precision. In my mind, the explanation offered by our current understanding of science is unconvincing. I think the only reason it is accepted is that it is empirically observed and to deny the obvious would make even the most fundamentalist scientist look silly.

Nonetheless, you seem to believe that our current understanding of science is sufficient to reject homeopathy; I don't.

Here's some further food for thought from that wikipedia article on homeopathy [wikipedia.org] (emphasis is mine):

• Hahnemann pioneered and always favored the centesimal or "C scale", diluting a substance 1 part in a 100 of diluent. Some homeopaths developed a decimal scale (D or X) diluting the substance 1 part in 10 of diluent. Hahnemann never used this scale but it was very popular throughout the 19th century and still is in Europe.
  
• It should be noted however that not all homeopaths advocated extremely high potencies. Many of the early homeopaths were originally doctors and generally tended to use lower potencies such as "3x" or "6x", rarely going beyond "12x". A good example of this approach is that of Dr. Richard Hughes, who dismissed the extremely high potencies as unnecessary. This was the dominant pattern in Europe throughout the 1820s to 1930s, but in America many practitioners developed and preferred the higher dilutions. This trend became especially exemplified by James Tyler Kent and dominated US homeopathy from the 1850s until its demise in the 1940s. The split between lower and higher dilutions also followed ideological lines with the former stressing pathology and a strong link to conventional medicine, while the latter emphasized vital force, miasms and a spiritual take on sickness.[34][35]
  
• Homeopathy has also been integrated into the national health care systems of numerous countries including India, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom. (...) Some homeopathic treatment is covered by the national insurance coverage of several European countries, including France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Luxembourg. (...) Homeopathy is currently integrated into the national health care system of Mexico and in 1985, a presidential decree established the first homeopathic school as well as regulations specifiying training requirements for homeopathic doctors.[102] (...) Homeopathy has been regulated in other South American countries, such as Columbia, since the beginning of the 20th century. In Brazil, Homeopathy is included in the national health system and since 1991, physicians who want to practice homeopathy must complete 2,300 hours of education prior to receiving the proper licenses.

Now whether you believe the "water memory" thesis or not, you have to admit that homeopathy is not synonymous with those high dillutions, and most practitioners use dillutions lower than what we give sharks credit for. Furthermore, America is where the highest dillutions were used and also where homeopathy has had the least success. (It's also the country where the [A]M[edical]A[ssociation] had the most success in eliminating competition to conventional medicine, but that's a different story.)

Last but not least, a very often overlooked reason why homeopathy is so successful where it is allowed to flourish and where crooks are weeded out is the correctly applied interview, which provides a full picture of a patient's health and seeks to resolve most negative symptoms. Contrast this with the crook who tends to either rush through or dispense with the interview altogether and prescribe a highly dilluted remedy for the most troublesome symptom.

Non-medicinal additives' side effects

[Scrameustache]

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.

Agreed, but looking for something "natural" as an end in itself is foolish. If you want a natural headache cure, you can use salicylic acid from willow bark, but the side effects will be a lot milder if you process it into aspirin first.

Here's a fun assignment, go to your local drug store, and try to find cough syrup without artificial sweeteners. The only ones I can find are natural products, evergreen extracts.

If your sensitivity to these toxins is low enough that you'll chock their side effects up to the disease you're fighting, you won't notice the difference, but if, like me, aspartame makes you fucking sick by itself, then the natural option is now the only option.

Re:What's amusing to me

[DavidTC]

What the hell are you talking about?

The greenhouse effect in general isn't the slightest questionable. Otherwise the damn planet would catch on fire, because it would just get hotter and hotter. (Because the planet loses almost no heat in any manner except radiation.)

There's no explanation of the temperature of the planet and atmosphere except via the greenhouse effect. The surface must be emitting infrared and the upper atmosphere must be intercepting some, but not all, of that. (In addition to incoming radiation.) Otherwise our temperature make no sense at all.

Hell, we can see the process when it fails, just look at Venus. The atmosphere got too reflective, which reduced radiation hitting the planet, but sadly also reduced radiation escaping, so it just sort of built up.

We know the temperature of the atmospheric system can't be explained solely by light hitting the earth with just heat moving outward from there. That wouldn't give us warm enough air at ground level, much less the temperature we see a mile up in the air.

You can argue there are specific parts we don't understand, like how much different parts of the atmosphere work, but saying that it's 'never been proven' is idiotic. It is the best atmospheric theory we have. Hell, it's the only one we have.