I know that numerous chiropractors swear by homeopathy. I even know of a couple MD’s who push homeopathic “remedies.” It makes me shake my head because A) homeopathic theory (e.g., “the law of infinitesimals” and “the law of similars”) makes no sense and 2) homeopathic remedies and double-blind studies don’t mix.
Homeopathy is a painfully well-known placebo that millions of well-educated people just can’t bear to give up. They know that it can’t really work according to the theory of its promoters, but they just can’t part from that juicy hit of placebo.
I recently ran across a science website with good energy, lots of engaging stories and commentors chomping at the bit. It’s called Bad Science. The post that most recently caught my interest is on homeopathy, more specifically a highly suspicious article in the “British Journal of Homeopathy” that claims that water “has a memory.” Check out the comments for a rousing tour of the many failings of homeopathy. One fellow apologizes for peeing in the ocean when he was young, because he didn’t realize the effect that it was going to have on everyone in the future.
For more information on the bad science of homeopathy, including a stab at one of my favorite psuedo scientists, Deepak Chopra, consider this article from the Skeptical Inquirer. Here’s an excerpt:
Quite apart from the matter of how the water/alcohol mixture remembers, there are obvious questions that cry out to be asked: 1) Why does the water/alcohol mixture remember the healing powers of an active substance, but forget the side effects? 2) What happens when the drop of solution evaporates, as it must, from the lactose tablet? Is the memory transferred to the lactose? 3) Does the water remember other substances as well? Depending on its history, the water might have been in contact with a staggering number of different substances.
Homeopathy is only one of many forms of medical quackery being hawked to a scientifically naive public by researchers and public spokespeople who refuse to allow facts get in the way of their favorite version of snake oil:
The public is spending billions of dollars annually on sugar pills to cure their sniffles, hand waving to speed recovery from operations, and good thoughts to ward off illness, all with assurances that it’s based on science. Society has been set up for this fleecing in part by the media’s sensationalized coverage of modern science. Popular discussions of relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos often leave people with the impression that common sense cannot be relied on — anything is possible. Scientists themselves often feed the public’s appetite for the “weirdness” of modern science in an effort to stimulate interest — or simply because scientists, too, can be beguiled by the mysterious.
I wish there were more of a placebo effect associated with the reading of science done carefully. Maybe then we wouldn’t waste so much money and energy on all of those other placebo-effect inducers, including homeopathy.
Instead of deferring to a site like "Badscience" (where bias against any form of natural medicine prevails, this includes denial of any scientific research that supports homeopathy) you should grasp the nettle and come along to a professional homeopathic case conference. It might change your entrenched view that homeopathy is all about the placebo effect. Here you will find many video cases (before and after treatment) of serious pathology such as autism being helped significantly by homeopathy. If you are unable to make it to a conference in person go to http://www.impossiblecure.com where you will find details of a book that tells how the authors autistic son was cured by homeopathy. For details of positive scientific studies on homeopathy go to http://www.trusthomeopathy.org. There is a lot more to homeopathic medicine than the negative bias from sites like the one you mentioned.
Why is so much critical energy spent on homeopathy as oppose to other more dangerous alternatives? If a physician was contemplating the administration of a placebo or nothing at all and she knows that a placebo may help resolve the patient's anxieties, then why not homeopathy? Is it not, after all, only water?
Richard Dawkins examines homeopathy in this 2007 video called "The Enemies of Reason, Part II." He points out that the dilution rate of many homeopathic "medicines" equals one drop of active ingredient into all of the atoms in the entire solar system. Most bottles of homeopathic "medicine" are pure water, not a single molecule of active ingredient.
The discussion starts at 23:00 here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=600492701…
Ann asks why criticize homeopathy? How about this: It is a phenomenally popular scam and it is not free. I'm not claiming that the practitioners are all intentionally trying to scam the patients. The sin of the practitioners is that they intellectually negligent. They need to connect the dots through the application of a bit of skepticism.
For me, the bottom line is why pretend that a treatment works when there isn't a shred of evidence that these magic bottles of water do anything at all? As Dawkins argues, the cure is in the kind, patient and gentle way in which the practitioners administer the magic bottles of water. I.e., when homeopathic works, the thing doing the curing is the placebo effect. Practitioners should ditch the magic bottles of water and, instead, tell their patients to go out and take a brisk daily walk, absolutly free of charge.
It appears people write articles against Homoeopathy without actually having tried it. Had they tried it their opinion would change. It is interesting to know that many great names in the Homoeopathic literature were all one time staunch critics – but they had an objective mind and had a thirst for experience based knowledge.
Some of the present pseudo scientists have made it profeession to criticise all the systems that are not produced by MNC pharma companies. While they are free to follow their agenda those who believe in Homoeopathy will continue to care less for their tantrums.
I wasn't trying to throw a "tantrum." I was trying to warn people that they shouldn't waste their money on tiny expensive bottles of water that serve only as an excuse to allow (sometimes) earnest and (sometimes) naive practitioners to evoke the placebo effect.
I've tried homeopathy. My G.P. M.D. for the last decade was originally trained in, and still practices, homeopathy. I consider it a science of applied placebos.
No double-blind study has ever shown a benefit of homeopathic remedies. Discrediting studies of homeopathy go back over 200 years, before germ theory, before nutritional theory, and even before most of the chemical elements were known.
Most of the bottles of remedies contain a statistical chance of a single molecule of the active ingredient. Very dilute, indeed. (a 30x pill contains one part of the ingredient to 10<sup>30</sup> parts filler. Avogadro's number (the number of molecules in a mole, where a mole is the weight in grams of the sum of atomic weights of the molecule) is about 6 x 10<sup>23</sup>, or 1,600,000 times more concentrated than 30x. For example, sodium-chloride remedy at 58g/mole: You need to take 93,000,000 grams (about 102 U.S. tons) of 30x pills to encounter a single molecule of the active ingredient.
As with most cases, you inhale more of the active ingredient with every breath.
Homeopathy may well have been superior to cupping, bloodletting, exorcism and other practices of the time it was invented. But we've come a long way since then in our understanding of disease.
P. Wagle: You insist that I shouldn't criticize homeopathy without trying it. But I HAVE tried drinking water before. It's good stuff. But water isn't medicine.
Have you bothered to look up the sites I linked to ?
Or have you bothered to look at the research you denigrate as "highly suspicious" ? Bear in mind that "Homeopathy" is a peer reviewed medical journal and the research and writing contained therein is by conventional scientists / medical doctors.
Your comments go some way to proving that a sceptics view of homeopathy is based purely on a belief system and not on science if you are not willing to look at the scientific research on the subject. It's like saying that any research is fine as long as it does not show a measurable effect for homeopathy.
It is now thought that homeopathic preparations have more to do with electro-magnetic activity than molecules. This is the most plausible explanation as homeopathic remedies can exert a measurable effect when in excess of avogadro's constant. Detractors of homeopathy with molecular obsession will never get past that point. Google Prof. Madeliine Ennis' research published in "Inflammation research" another peer reviewed medical journal. This study shows a measurable effect of homeopathically prepared histamine on basophils. This research was replicated in 3 other labs across Europe.
Lastly, somebody forgot to tell these mice that homeopathy was all about the placebo effect : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3208528.stm
What is MNC pharma? If you mean the big pharma companies, Ben Goldacre, the writer of Badscience, is not a fan of them and some of their moneymaking strategies either. And nobody is against natural medicine per se just because he criticizes homeopathy.
Come on, Clive. Look at this argument of the "British Homeopathy Association (one of the highly biased organizations for which you provided a link): "With an acknowledged 500 million people worldwide using homeopathy, can they all be wrong and Dawkins right?" http://www.trusthomeopathy.org/csArticles/article… Is THIS an valid argument? Truth by vote?
Sounds like you're getting rather irritated at me. Maybe it's time for you to get some relief by taking another dose of that expensive medicine that probably doesn't contain even one molecule of its allegedly active ingredient.
After that pure water takes effect, take a calm look at the numerous damning evaluations of homeopathy mentioned here, under the heading "Medical organizations' attitudes towards homeopathy": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy.
If you want me to buy into your worldview regarding homeopathic, then show me strong, repeated, findings based on double-blind tests. You know, the gold standard. Gad. You won't convince me when homeopathic can't even keep up with the pathetic double-blind "success" obtained by that wretched drug Vioxx.
You attack me as though I'm the one making fringe claims. I'm just not in favor of marketing water to desperate people as though it were medicine. I make no apology for my position.
By the way, I also have grave concerns about many of the treatments and tactics of big pharma and mainstream medicine. Here's the problem: there are many hideous medical conditions that have no known cure. It's just a damned fact. Wishing isn't curing.
I'm an equal-opportunity critic. I'm not in the pocket of any medical care provider (I'm trying to anticipate your next personal attack). Nor am I against all alternative treatments, as an across-the-board rule.
I do agree to keep enough of an open mind to read future human double-blind studies that claim significant "biological mechanisms of action." If I see anything noteworthy, I'll report on it.
Here's a meta-analysis of 110 studies from the Lancet which concluded that homeopathy is statistically indistinguishable from a placebo.
That's hardly surprising, really. As Erich has pointed out, homeopathy works by systematically diluting the treatment until no active ingredient is left. A homeopathic remedy is water, nothing more. Clive's gibberish about "electromagnetic activity" is just one example of the increasingly nonsensical explanations homeopaths have come up with to explain how this treatment is supposed to work, now that we know what a molecule is.
Something else for homeopaths to ponder: How does the water know to amplify the effect of just the one specific remedy the homeopath deliberately added to it, as opposed to the other impurities that will inevitably be present in any ordinary amount of water?
Erich, I think you are getting a little sensitive here. Either you want a debate or you don't. My comments were never meant to be about you, just your views on homeopathy.
You call homeopaths "purveyors of snake oil" and you insinuate that people that choose to use homeopathy are less than intelligent. I'm certainly not going to lose any sleep over your comments even though I am both a homeopath and have homeopathic treatment.
The site I linked to was the British Homeopatic Association where you will find high quality research that supports homeopathy. Just click on the "Research" tab. Accept it or don't accept it, but please acknowledge that it exists. You have called the BHA a biased organisation. This seems like a very strange comment. Just who do you think should promote homeopathy then, the general medical council or the AMA ?
As far as the "gold standard" DBPC trial is concerned, it is a well known fact that is difficult to evaluate "Classical homeopathy" with this method. This type of homeopathy deals with choosing a specific remedy based on the persons individual symptom picture. This is why 5 people with influenza or autism for instance will get 5 different remedies. It's all about treating the person with the disease rather than the " one size fits all" oriented pharma model. Double blind trials are now being modified to take this individualised treatment into account.
This has happened with a Swiss study on the homeopathic treatment of ADHD.
It was published in the peer reviewed "European journal of Paediatrics" 2 years ago and found homeopathy to be effective for the condition. For an abstract go to http://www.springerlink.com and type "ADHD homeopathy" in the search field.
If you would like to know more about the science behind homeopathy I can recommend "The emerging science of homeopathy, complexity, biodynamics and nanopharmacology" by Bellavite and Signorini. Here you will find many studies that are double blind and placebo controlled that show homeopathy to be effective above and beyond placebo. If you can be bothered to delve a little deeper, then good luck to you.
Ebonmuse "Here’s a meta-analysis of 110 studies from the Lancet which concluded that homeopathy is statistically indistinguishable from a placebo"
I'm afraid you'll have to do a bit better than that. The meta analysis you quote has been completely discredited as a biased and flawed piece of research. The authors cherry picked 8, yes 8 out of 110 studies that had nothing to do with how homeopathy is normally practised. After the study went public, the authors refused all requests from other scientists to unveil the 8 studies that were used in the final analysis. This carried on for some months until demand became too great. By then all the newspapers had their soundbites.
http://homeopatia.edu.pl/pdf/critique%20Lancet%20….
"Clive’s gibberish about “electromagnetic activity” is just one example of the increasingly nonsensical explanations homeopaths have come up with to explain how this treatment is supposed to work, now that we know what a molecule is".
Always good to have a reference or two to back up your gibberish don't you think :
In 1990, Dr. Emilio Del Giudice, an Italian physicist, theorized that water molecules form structures that can store minute electromagnetic signals. This theory is bolstered by the findings of German biophysicist Dr. Wolfgang Ludwig, who has conducted preliminary research showing that homeopathic substances give off electromagnetic signals, indicating specific dominant frequencies in each homeopathic substance, according to physicist Dr. Beverly Rubik of Temple University in 1991. Using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging, a 1968 study demonstrated subatomic activity in twenty-three different homeopathic remedies, while such activity was not found in placebos. Similar NMR findings have been confirmed by Dr. J. L. Demangeat and colleagues in a series of 1992 studies.
Here are more articles and studies for those interested in making up their own minds. There are lots of comments and links to be found in these articles, pro and con, though the articles themselves are ones that I found more credible than the ubiquitous pro-homeopathy sites:
"Homeopathy"
"As a fourth study says it's no better than a placebo, is this the end for homeopathy?"
"Homeopathy is bunkum"
and consider this analysis:
HOMEOPATHY AND SCIENCE: A CLOSER LOOK
Homeopathy is safe in that it does not harm, however reliance on it alone can lead to great harm.
The human body can often heal itself when not impeded with an overload of side-effect from unnecessary medication. For example, high blood sugar can sometimes be controlled if the person looses weight. He will still be a diabetic. But for the most part, serious illnesses need serious medicines. IN these cases the placebo effect doesn't work. It can prevent a person from getting the treatment that could prevent much suffering and death.
Clive, the material you've cited is gibberish and will remain so, even if it's spoken by someone with letters after his name. It has the shape of science, but that's all. "Specific dominant frequencies"? "Subatomic activity"? Every word of that is meaningless babble. And the idea that "like cures like" is nothing but the ancient notion of sympathetic magic, dressed up in some modern sciencey jargon.
I repeat, and will continue to repeat: there is absolutely no basis for homeopathy in any field of science, no mechanism known or suspected by which it could possibly work. Well-designed studies have repeatedly found and will continue to find that it is indistinguishable from a placebo (here's another example, a study carried out by the BBC). Studies that find otherwise are inevitably shown to suffer serious methodological defects. (For example, some homeopathic studies that supposedly found benefit to animals were not double-blinded. Animals don't experience placebo effects, but human researchers do, when they know which animals are supposed to be getting the cure.)
Firstly, Erich, I agree that it is important to supply the public with the facts so they can make up their own minds. The links I have given are for scientific studies that have been published in peer reviewed journals. However, the links that you have given are from the "skeptics" website, a discredited lancet meta analysis (see earlier post) and a newspaper article from a deeply biased journalist.
Ebonmuse : You are more than entitled to your opinion and after all that's what it is, just an opinion. I haven't seen you back up your opinion with very much though. There are highly intelligent people in the world of science who would take a very different standpoint. Nobel prize winner Prof. Brian Josephson for instance. http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/
You say there are no Double blind trials that find homeopathy to be effective for animals.
It took me approx. 30 seconds to find this :
In a blinded study where rats were treated for urinary infections results showed that rats treated with
homeopathic remedies had clear reduction of bacterial colonies. Results were at least as clear as for
treatment with antibiotics. Untreated rats had no changes in bacteria colonies, compared to a reduction
to 33 % of original bacteria levels in rats treated with antibiotics, and 22 % and 39 % in rats treated
with homeopathic remedies (Phosphorus and self-nosode).
Gonçalves et al. O uso da homeopatia no tratamento da infecção urinária em ratas. Anais do VIII
SINAPIH; 20-22 May, 2004: p.25-26.
In a study of homeopathically potentised remedies the incidence of haematomas was reduced by 30 %
in turkeys during transportation. The study was randomised, placebo controlled and double blinded.
Filliat C. Particularité de lutilisation de lhoméopathie en production avicole. Annals of the
“Entretiens Internationaux de Monaco 2002”, 5-6 October 2002.
The only link that you do give is for the BBC horizon experiment with "magician" and sceptic James Randi that found homeopathy to be similar to placebo. This experiment was an attempt at replicating Prof Madeline Ennis' groundbreaking pan european study that found homeopathic preparations of histamine to be capable of exerting a biological effect.(published in peer reviewed "Inflammation Research") Strangely the horizon experiment's chemist introduced an ammonium chloride step that would have killed the basophils. http://www.homeopathic.com/articles/view,55. Randi stood to lose $1,000,000 if the experiment showed homeopathy to be effective.
Not to defend homeopathy, but the above discussion clearly paints it with too broad a brush. The fact is that some ancient cures have turned out to have medicinal value, but have been relegated to the pharmaceutical dustbin because drug companies can't profit from them. While this is a tiny minority compared to the vast number of worthless 'miracle cures' out there, it is a subset that should be recognized before the entire category of homeopathic medicines is dismissed.
As regards the placebo effect, I once heard it said that medicine is the art of entertaining the patient until the body heals itself. To the extent that homoepathic cures provide such entertainment, perhaps they are not all that bad. Indeed, even a casual reading of the medical literature on pain relief will show that a patient's subjective sensation of pain is often greatly influenced by his or her expectations. Change the expectations, and some patients will report significantly less pain. To the extent that this can be accomplished without real drugs, I would argue that this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Speaking of magic water . . . See here.
Here is a model trial for homeopathy. You take, say, 200 people, and divide them at random into two groups of 100. All of the patients visit their homeopath, they all get a homeopathic prescription at the end (because homeopaths love to prescribe pills even more than doctors) for whatever it is that the homeopath wants to prescribe, and all the patients take their prescription to the homeopathic pharmacy. Every patient can be prescribed something completely different, an "individualised" prescription – it doesn't matter.
Now here is the twist: one group gets the real homeopathy pills they were prescribed (whatever they were), and the patients in the other group are given fake sugar pills. Crucially, neither the patients, nor the people who meet them in the trial, know who is getting which treatment.
This trial has been done, time and time again, with homeopathy, and when you do a trial like this, you find, overall, that the people getting the placebo sugar pills do just as well as those getting the real, posh, expensive, technical, magical homeopathy pills.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/nov/16/sci…
Consider the total lack of real science applied to homeopathy by its believers. That is the subject of an article by Harriet Hall, M.D., called "Homeopathy–Still Crazy After All These Years. Here's an excerpt:
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/09-01-14.html#fea…
I've been reading this exchange with interest but my thoughts have been about the many links that are being posted as proof of this or that point.
We are always warned about how unreliable is the information available on the internet. I know that Wikipedia is not The Encyclopedia Britannica, but in general has the quality of information on the web gotten better or worse or just about the same?
Further, is the information in the tons and tons of printed books now gathering dust on library shelves around the world any more reliable? There seems to be plenty of misinformation to be found wherever you look.
Didn't mean to hijack this conversation. Erich, if you think this would be more appropriate as its own post let me know. This surely isn't the only thread that uses links to bolster an argument but it struck me that both sides seem to have "documented" evidence in the form of a web page of some kind which contradict each other. Logically, half of them have to be wrong.
Mike: Even if I were a scientist who could run my own study I couldn't convince the world because it would just be piled on top of all of those studies already done.
What strikes me about homeopathy is that it makes no sense, in theory, for the reasons stated in the post. Then, on top of that, their don't seem to be any convincing double-blind studies that give us any confidence in homeopathy (and those who advocate it don't seem to be motivated to run them).
The shaky studies allegedly showing that homeopathy works are done by those advocating homeopathy. When those not pushing homeopathy run double-blind studies, they repeatedly show nothing greater than the placebo effect.
I'd like to say that I choose to rely on credible experts, but then that invites the issue of how to choose an expert. It raises allegations that scientists who work with the scientific/medical establishment are incapable of keeping open minds. Among the lay people, it boils down to how to choose an expert we trust, in a world where SO many experts have sold out. Hence, there doesn't seem to be any way for either side to convince the other (even though, regarding homeopathy, I would prefer those with higher standing among the scientists who do this sort of work, as evidenced by substantial track records of peer reviewed work).
Yeah, for once a non-scientist can state that specfic researcher(s)can find what they are looking for and/or also not find what they don't suspect exists.
Might faith in what they believe be factors to be included in their reported results.
I will repeat this for those who might not want to hear it again, double blind studies are not done with radioactivity. A rock is not a rock unless it has the specifics about where it came from attached to it. How homeopathic is that?
Magician James Randi takes on homeopathy in this Youtube lecture. This 2001 lecture is terrific–succinct and informative. Randi pulls no punches. He essentially calls homeopaths crooks and swindlers.