Homeopathy

The following site simply has to be seen to be believed. It is called "Fair Deal Homoeopathy". Here is a typical extract; and here is the main link.
I'm still not sure if this is for real or just some kind of elaborate joke. Whichever, it's certainly very funny.Edited by Granny Magda, : typo

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Mutate and Survive

Hi Linda,
You say;

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Logically you can write them all off as being delusional, mistaken, victims of the placebo effect. Maybe this applies to some but I think it's insulting to humanity in general to lump them all in this category and tell them that they are wrong, every last person.

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But is it not just as condescending, more so even, to dismiss the large numbers of clinical trials that basically prove homoeopathy to be bunk? There are quite a lot.

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But science first has to accept that something exists to investigate

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This is simply not true. Just look at the current effort by physicists to detect the Higgs Boson. It has never been observed, so physicists are searching for it, despite the fact that they cannot know for certain that it really exists for them to find. So I hope you will agree that the above statement is false.

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and some people seem to think that anything which does not fit the materialistic reductionist paradigm is delusional and therefore unfit for study.

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There are studies on homoeopathy which are negative.

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I hope you realise that these two statements are contradictory.

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There are studies on vitamins which are negative.

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Negative for what exactly? Providing essential nutrition or curing cancer?

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Anyone with a closed mind, anyone from a pharmaceutical company who wants to eliminate some competition, etc etc can produce a negative study. What about all the people who attest that these things exist?

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Ah, I see, it's a conspiracy by evil big pharma. Seriously, here is an example of how reliable the people who say that this exists really are. The folowing is from an analysis published in the British Medical Journal in 2001. The whole thing can be found here. {Emphasis mine}
That is pretty damning stuff. Homoeopathic journals are printing flawed, self-congratulatory trials without proper scrutiny. Rhain has already provided us with some examples of what happens when homoeopathy is tested by non-enthusiasts, but (no disrespect Rrhain) they were just three studies right? Maybe they were wrong or biased.
Maybe.
So lets take a look at a rather more rigorous way of examining data, the meta-analysis. Just for clarity, this is where a large number of studies are analysed, their statistical differences are ironed out, so that like can be properly compared with like, and the end result is taken from all of this data. These are very powerful tools. If homoeopathy were more than just a placebo effect, they would detect it. So let's take a look; Both of these reports can be found on Pubmed, here and here, respectively.
That isn't very convincing. The second one looks a bit better, but given the claims made by CAM practitioners, I'm still not impressed. The lack of effectiveness demonstrated by such analyses, combined with the fact that there is no conceivable mechanism for homoeopathy to work (beyond guff like "energy medicine", where "energy" is a synonym for "magic") can only lead one to believe that homoeopathy just doesn't work.
It's no use just saying "But I know it works." because your experiences are subject to all kinds of bias. One might use the same logic to prove the healing power of prayer.
I agree that all that really matters is whether or not it works, not how it works. But the truth is that it simply doesn't work.
PS - Didn't Dr Emoto fight the Fantastic Four in issue #16?

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Mutate and Survive

LindaLou,
Starting with your response to Subbie, about clinical trials, I have to say that there are an awful lot of studies that debunk homoeopathy. Just look on Pubmed. All the information you request is obtainable. It's not like this stuff is being kept secret. I recommend the report that Rrhain cited, by Paris, Gonnet, Chaussard, et al. It seems like a straightforward study. It comes out against homoeopathy. Perhaps you would like to tell us where it goes wrong.
I'm going to leave the stuff about quantum physics aside, since it has been pointed out that this example is only going to lead us off course. Suffice to say that there have been several papers on homoeopathy cited on this thread. They demonstrate that your claim that scientists are unwilling to engage with homoeopathy, is false.

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This can be seen in the claim that in order to have an effect, a homeopathic remedy must retain some of the original diluted substance. The idea of energy or memory somehow being transmitted in the water is dismissed out of hand.

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Scientific consensus is that the "remedy" must contain some of the original substances because such represents the best explanation currently available. If you have a better model, feel free to explain it, but you'll have to do better than vague talk of "energy" (by which you appear to mean magic). As for the ludicrous claim that the "memory of water" theory was dismissed out of hand, I am astonished that you could talk such nonsense. The theory saw publication in Nature and the experiment was subsequently repeated. It failed. The results have not been replicated. The report debunking the finds was published in the very next issue of Nature after the initial paper was published. It is still available on-line. The whole thing was televised. I would be very surprised to hear that you had not heard of all this. Homoeopathy is only being subjected to the same scrutiny as other theories. If an experiment is not repeatable, it is assumed to have been in error. That is very different from an "out of hand" dismissal.

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Regarding the two studies you have linked. The first is from the Lancet, and its abstract begins like this: "Homoeopathy is widely used, but specific effects of homoeopathic remedies seem implausible." Just a tad biased from the start then?

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To be honest Linda, that is about as polite as it is possible to be with regards to Homoeopathy. Homoeopathy is implausible, in that it is in opposition to all known physics and it consistently fails at clinical trial. If I had written that paper, it would have started "It is of course well known that homoeopathy is bollocks...". Now that's bias!

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Just to let you know, I've had this alt med/scientific method discussion a hundred times over with people here. We're butting heads really.

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Yeah, I know. I'm pretty unlikely to change my mind as well, but, as CK says, it's all about the lurkers (and the pleasure of debate of course).
AbE; Oh. I notice that since I started writing this LindaLou has rendered herself inactive, as has Buz. That's a shame. I guess it's just me and the lurkers then...Edited by Granny Magda, : No reason given.

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Mutate and Survive

Buzsaw has been plugging homoeopathy in another thread, so I have decided to reply here, where it is on topic. It is safe because there is nothing in it but water on a sugar pill. Homoeopathy is a placebo, that's all. The average homoeopathic remedy is diluted so many times that the remedies you buy have an amount of potentially active ingredient in them equivalent to one drop in all the worlds oceans. Think about that for a minute. Some remedies are actually more diluted, but it makes little difference, because by this point there is none of the original ingredient left in the bottle; it is just water. No wonder it is safe.Of course what isn't safe is relying on homoeopathic snake oil in the face of serious illness. Those who recommend homoeopathy instead of anti-malarials, for instance, are dicing with peoples lives. As Rahvin has already pointed out Buz, you have no idea whether your improvement regarding hay fever is actually down to the pills. Perhaps it is related to outside forces, such as a change in local agriculture (I get hay fever some years and not others) or maybe your body has simply managed to fight it off independently. Your testimony, taken alone, is anecdotal and thus valueless as scientific evidence because you cannot rule out other causes.The only way to determine with any kind of accuracy whether a treatment works or not is by means of a standardised, randomised, double blind, peer reviewed clinical trial, the gold standard of evidence based medicine. Anything else is just a waste of time. It most certainly does not make logical sense. Remember the bit about dilution? What is logical about a treatment with no active ingredient, indeed, no ingredient other than water, having an effect on a pathogen? As for the bit about mimicking the disease, that sounds to me like your interpretation of the homoeopathic "like cures like"principle, a concept that has more i common with medieval witch craft than modern science. If, on the other hand, your "mimic" explanation is true, we should be able to test for it quite simply, by giving a homoeopathic treatment to someone who is not ill and doing a blood test on them before and after. If the homoeopathy works as you say it does, we should see antigens for the appropriate pathogen appearing in the patient's blood. Simple. Care to point me to such an experiment? You do realise that you made the same point twice don't you? Sugar pills are not the point. Many nasty tasting medicines are given in sugary pills. That is not the reason why doctors dismiss homoeopathy. Doctors dismiss homoeopathy because it has consistently failed to perform statistically significantly better than placebo in clinical trial. That means it doesn't work. Doctors are not so feeble minded as to dismiss a valuable cure because it comes in a sugary pill, when they themselves dispense hundreds of sugary pills every day. This point is the biggest crock of shit in your whole post. Homoeopaths are the ones charging a fortune for sugar pills, whereas in the UK, I can get my medication for nothing. Doctors don't benefit from the profit margins of pharmaceutical companies, at least not in my neck of the woods. They get paid the same whether they prescribe drug a, drug b or no drugs at all. Homoeopaths on the other hand, rely on sales of their snake oil to make a living. So who is more deserving of those dollar signs? Ah yes, "holistic" the new-age quacks favourite mantra. Holistic means bugger all. Either a treatment works or it does not. The only way to study this is by clinical trial. Homoeopathy fails at clinical trail, so it's apologists must come up with some means of hand waving this away. Claiming that homoeopathy is holistic is one way in which homoeopaths attempt to dodge this failure. How holistic exactly is a treatment that cannot even treat the single ailment that it was intended to treat, let alone anything else?By contrast, when a little lump appeared on my neck recently (don't panic, it's benign) it led to a series of blood tests that measured pretty much everything that it is possible to test blood for, from sugar levels to lymphatics and in the process picked up on a few things that otherwise might have gone unnoticed. That sounds pretty holistic to me, but doctors do not feel the need to shout about this; it is simply common practise. Your faith in Mr Savage is touching, but neither he nor anyone else has ever provided a fully fledged clinical trial that backs up homoeopathy's claims. Unless he or you can do that, you're wasting your time. Proper clinical trials are the gold standard of medicine, indeed the only standard. Homoeopathy fails at clinical trial. Thus, we conclude that homoeopathy is bunk. End of story.

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Mutate and Survive

Thanks for the reply Buz, I'll answer the second part first if that's all right with you. You appear to have misunderstood what I mean when I say "many times". I do not mean that "many times" as a synonym for "very often". I meant that homoeopathic remedies are diluted and diluted again and diluted again and again and again, so that by the time they get to the shops, they have been diluted "many times". This is not a departure from the norm, it is an essential part of how homoeopathy is supposed to work. I'll explain below. Princess Asgara has asked if you know what a "c-solution" is. From staements like the above, it seems pretty obvious to me that you do not. That's fair enough. Until a few years ago I had no idea either. I just assumed that homoeopathy was some sort of herbalism. Then I learned better.There are three key principles of homoeopathy;Like Cures Like; Oatmeal looks like flaky skin, so oatmeal must be good for eczema. Nettles cause pain and swelling, so nettles must be good at curing pain and swelling. This is the bit that resembles medieval superstition, specifically in its similarity to the principle of sympathetic magic.Potentiation; Homoeopathic remedies must be vigorously shaken or struck against a surface (succussed in homoeo-jargon) to release their effects and "counter toxins" (some homoeopathic ingredients are indeed toxic, but that doesn't matter, for reasons that should become clear...). This is done hand-in-hand with the next step.Dilution; Less is more! In homoeopathy it is supposed that the more you dilute something, the more effective it will become. All homoeopathic remedies are diluted. First a tincture of some herbal or animal compound is prepared. This can be anything from lettuce to the heart and liver of a duck (seriously!). The homoeopath takes one drop of this "mother tincture" and mixes it with 99 drops of water to make a 1/100 dilution. Then they shake it. Then they take the solution (not the original tincture) and mix a drop of that with another 99 drops of pure water. This would be called "2C" because it has been diluted two times. This dilution/shaking routine will be repeated many times, with the dilution getting weaker as we go on. 10C or 20C is fairly standard for homoeopathic practitioners, but dilutions of 200C are not unusual. Don't take my word for it though. This is from the Society of Homoeopaths website;

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How are the remedies made?
There are five regulated homeopathic pharmacies in the UK (see Find a Pharmacy). The raw extracts (from plants or animals) or triturations (from minerals and salts) are made into a ”tincture’ with alcohol which forms the basis of the dilution procedure. Dilutions are made up to either 1 part tincture to 10 parts water (1x) or 1 part tincture to 100 parts water (1c). Repeated dilution results in the familiar 6x, 6c or 30c potencies that can be bought over the counter: the 30c represents an infinitessimal part of the original substance.

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This should be enough to tip us off that something is very wrong about all this, and indeed, it is in the area of dilution that the biggest objection to homoeopathy lies.Avagadro's Number; This has already been explained by Molbiogirl, Rrhain and no doubt others, but I'll give it a go as well, just for good measure. After all, this is medicine we're talking about here. It's important to get things right.The Avagadro's number is the number of molecules of a substance required to make the weight of that substance in grams equal to its molecular weight. This physical constant is the basis for the unit of measure, the mole.Avagadro's number is about 6.02214x10²³, that is 6.02214 x 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.So just to be clear, the molecular weight of carbon is 12. The yellow diamond on the front of the Pahlavi Crown weighs 12 grams. Thus, the diamond contains 1 mole of carbon, a fact that I just shamelessly stole from Wikipedia. This is important because it places a limit on the number of molecules that can be present in a given quantity of water (or whatever else). The repeated dilutions described above push the dilution so far that it exceeds this limit, i.e. there cannot be even one molecule of the original ingredient left.This happens quite early in the dilution process, at abut 12C, or 1 part in 10²⁴. In other words, for there to be a single molecule of our original substance in one mole of solution, we would need that mole of solution to contain 10²⁴ molecules and that can't be true. There cannot be a single molecule of original ingredient in a 12C solution. It's physically impossible.But don't take my word for it. Listen to the homoeopaths themselves. Here's Felicity Lee, former chair of the Society of Homoeopaths;

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By the time homoeopathic remedies have been diluted and succussed or shaken to the potency of 12C (I don't whether I can assume you all know about that, so Ill quickly say that's a one in hundred solution carried out on twelve different occasions, so we're well below Avagadro's number just at that point), there's nothing there materially.

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Taken from the audio file of a debate on homoeopathy found here.There's also this, from the Society of Homoeopaths website I cited above;

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"Homeopathic remedies are a unique, potentised energy medicine, drawn from the plant, mineral and animal worlds. They are diluted to such a degree that not one molecule of the original substance can be detected (after the 12c potency).

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So there are no molecules of original ingredient in homoeopathic "medicines". No molecules, no active ingredient, no medicine. That's why homoeopathic potions can be made from poisonous ingredients; by the time you take them there is no poison left, just water!So how does homoeopathy work? Well the short answer is that it doesn't, at least not beyond its power as a placebo. After all, it gets trashed in clinical trials, where it consistently fails to perform better than placebo. The homoeopaths answer? Taken from the Society of Homoeopaths website again;

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It is thought that this process {dilution/succussion} imprints the healing energy of the medicinal substance throughout the body of water (the diluent) as if a message is passed on. The message contains the healing energy.

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What rubbish, I mean, "healing energy" indeed! They don't even have the honesty to admit that their explanation is "Oh, I don't know how it works, it's just magic water, okay!".Of course this is not something that most homoeopaths tend to shout about, after all, if people knew that they were forking over their hard earned cash for little sugar pills with nothing added but a drop of water, they might just get a bit pissed off. So I don't blame you for taking homoeopathy more seriously than it deserves. But now you know better eh?

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Mutate and Survive

It's my pleasure. As you may have gathered, I feel quite strongly about this. I regard homoeopathy as an attack on real medicine and that really gets my goat. I'll explain why in a bit. OK, from the cited article; That sounds about right. Remember, anything over 12c is just water. So what? Is this suggesting that hormones are responsible for homoeopathic effects? It certainly doesn't apply at or above 12c. Even below this it is misleading. It states that the hormone exists in the blood at 1 part in 10,000. A 6c homoeopathic solution, like the ones in your hay fever potion, has one part in 10¹², which is a hundred times weaker! Of course, if hormones are the mechanism, then the homoeopath's credo of "more dilute=stronger" would be complete rubbish (which it is). What's more, it's not a fair comparison in the first place. Human hormones are specially adapted (or designed if you prefer ) for their jobs. They are always going to be more efficient than some plant-derived chemical which is meant for some other purpose in some other organism. This is why things like side effects creep in, even the most sophisticated chemicals are actually fairly blunt tools in terms of the human body. The fact that homoeopathic potions have no side effects should give us the hint that they simply don't do anything. That's a cheap shot and complete piffle. Vaccinations and allergy treatments work because the agents being used bear a genuine similarity to the pathogens or allergens, indeed, they usually are those very same pathogens or allergens, in a weakened or diluted form. This allows antibodies to develop that have developed the ability to recognise the pathogen/allergen.The "like cures like" similarities invoked by homoeopaths are simply not the same. They are aesthetic similarities, usually based on the similarities between the symptoms of an illness and the effects of the ingredient (nettles cause pain and swelling, so they must be good for treating pain and swelling) or visual similarities between the symptoms of an illness and a plant or other ingredient (snake bites cause wounds that look a bit like a ruptured skin lesion, so they must be good for treating lesions). Take this example, from a homoeopathic treatment guide, found here;

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The patient of Piper Nigrum {black pepper} remains by nature sad and depressed. The patient cannot concentrate on anything. His thoughts become
scattered. The patient is startled by the slightest sound.

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This is magical logic. Pepper is fiery and stimulating, so it must be good for pepping you up a bit. Why? None of this follows, unless one employs the logic of sympathetic magic. Are there really? I think that Goldman is off in a fantasy world here. There is no such "difference in the electromagnetic fields", she's either deluded, or just making it up. If you doubt me on this, feel free to find some evidence for this extraordinary claim.This is actually pretty typical of the way CAM practitioners from different disciplines will support each others fields, even when they are completely unconnected. Homoeopathy and acupuncture have noting to do with one another except that both invoke ridiculous "healing energy" to hand wave away their lack of an explanatory framework. This is the kind of stuff that pisses me off. Is she not in the least bit curious about how homoeopathy works?! Putting results first is all very well, but if we understood the alleged causal mechanisms behind homoeopathy, we would surely be able to do so much more with them. One can't help but suspect that their lack of curiosity is related to their lurking suspicion that there is no underlying mechanism and that digging too deep might just upset the apple cart.Saying "It could be the limbic system" is useless. It could be tiny invisible magic badgers. How about some evidence? Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's right. Islam is very popular, but neither one of us thinks that that makes it more likely to be correct. As for miracles cures... There are two things that make homoeopathy appear to work (and this is true of other forms of alternative medicine and even to some extent of real medicine). They are the placebo effect and "regression to the mean".The placebo effect is well known and I'm sure you have heard of it. Placebos are powerful things, capable of affecting great change in subjective symptoms like pain or tiredness. They can even be manipulated; a big pill has a greater placebo effect than a little pill. The confidence of the doctor prescribing the placebo has a big effect as well. This is why clinical trials work so hard to eliminate the placebo effect by including a placebo group and making sure that the doctors do not know which group is getting the drug and which the placebo until the study is complete ("double blinding").You should approve of clinical trials. The first recorded instance is from the Bible no less (Daniel 1:1-16 of course!). In clinical trials, homoeopathy performs identically to placebo. That's because it is a placebo.The other important effect is regression to the mean. This is a mathematical term that basically states that an extremely unlikely event is likely to be followed by a less extreme event. I'll let Ben Goldacre of badscience.net explain that a little;

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This is an even more fascinating phenomenon: all things, as the new-agers like to say, have a natural cycle. Your back pain goes up and down over a week, or a month, or a year. Your mood rises and falls. That weird lump in your wrist comes and goes. You get a cold; it gets better.

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If you take an ineffective sugar pill, at your sickest, it’s odds on you’re going to get better, in exactly the same way that if you sacrifice a goat, after rolling a double six, your next roll is likely to be lower. That is regression to the mean.

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“Well, it could be that,” says the homeopathy fan. “But I just don’t think so. All I know is, I get better with homeopathy.”

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People do just get better. Even chronic illnesses do just clear up and go away. This may be for many reasons but it is impossible to say which exactly because none of this happens in isolation. We can't single out homoeopathy as a cause when it could be some other factor, especially since we know that homoeopathy is without any basis in theory or evidence. As we have established, the ingredients from the 12c bits of your pill are not even present, so it certainly wasn't them that triggered your immune system response. Even the less dilute 6c ingredients are there in such tiny amounts that they will be drowned out by the uncounted number of pollens in every single breath you take.Ultimately, I don't know what has cured your hay fever, but then neither do you. It certainly wasn't homoeopathy. No-one is trying to sell me pseudo-scientific snake oil based on quantum theory though. Oh wait, they are! http://www.qlink-online.co.uk/ This is exactly why I am so hostile to homoeopathy. When I was a kid, I had to take a lot of medicines. They had bad side effects. They made me gain weight. They made my appetite go through the roof, which made me gain weight. They made me lethargic and depressed. They made my hair fall out. They basically made the latter part of my childhood a fucking misery.But you know what? I'm still alive! Without those drugs I would have died an unpleasant death from nefrotic syndrome, aged ten. I owe the fact that I am able to sit here here now, writing this, is down to evidence based medicine, not homoeopathic woo. That's why I get pissed off when evidence based medicine comes under attack. It saves lives. that's worth suffering side effects for and it's worth a few $$$.If you want to continue to throw away dollar bills in exchange for little sugar pills with nothing in them them of course, you are free to do so. I just wouldn't recommend it.Edited by Granny Magda, : Suddenly realised that I'd missed out a quote that I responded to. Fixed.

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Mutate and Survive