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."

Comments

Marriage is between a MAN and WOMAN!

[Keith Curtis]

Homeopathy is when you don't care either way about the gays

Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Just Some Guy]

Ars chose a relatively uncontroversial pseudo-science to examine

Homeopathy is controversial, in that some people actually believe it and loudly proclaim its wonders. That's like saying that evolution vs. intelligent design is settled just because science overwhelmingly supports the former, ignoring that many people still believe the latter.

All UK ciizens should be angry about this!

[Winckle]

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

Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this!

[taoman1]

Not surprising since the royal family are believers in this nonsense.

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.

[Just Some Guy]

Homeopathy is controversial, in that some people actually believe it and loudly proclaim its wonders.

Which reminds me, that "Head On" junk advertised on TV is homeopathic. My advice is to use bottled water instead:

"Evian: apply it directly to the gullible"

So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspiracy..

[David Hume]

and the suppression of homeopathy.

James Randi!

[Mukunda_NZ]

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

Homeopathy is a terrible scam and I know too many people that have been sucked in to it due to lack of education, and the ability for critical thought.

Re:James Randi!

[Copid]

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

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

How do homeopaths wash dishes?

[Scrameustache]

The more you rinse them, the stronger the soap becomes!

Enjoy your placebo effect, people.

Re:How do homeopaths wash dishes?

[mugnyte]

  They don't use soap - they apply "like cures like" and wash dirty dishes in half-done compost.

Rx: Placebo

[ringm000]

A friend of my cousin works in a homeopathic pharmacy (in Russia). She told a story that once in a while a client appears in the pharmacy with a prescription which literally says: "Placebo" (yes, an average Ivan is probably even less likely to be able to read a prescription than an average Joe, as Latin is not Cyrillic). The client gets the prescribed drug and pays a hefty sum for it. Supposedly, the more they pay, the more likely it is to work.

Re:Rx: Placebo

[feepness]

The client gets the prescribed drug and pays a hefty sum for it. Supposedly, the more they pay, the more likely it is to work. I've been on Placebo for years and it does wonders. I've been trying to find the manufacturer so I can buy their stock but apparently they are very small.

Also, funnily enough, they look at taste like M&Ms.

Re:Rx: Placebo

[Pathwalker]

Walgreens has a pretty good price on Cebocap #3 - $46.29 for 100, and everyone knows the orange ones are the strongest!

Re:Rx: Placebo

[John Miles]

I've been reading Philip Ball's (excellent) biography of Paracelsus, The Devil's Doctor, and he describes this phenomenon to a 'T'. Apparently, it was common for medieval physicians to work hand-in-hand with apothecaries, prescribing drugs whose principal healing attribute (besides being poisonous as hell, most likely) was how expensive they were. The more the patient had to pay, the more likely the drug would help him.

Homeopathy is interesting from a historical standpoint, because it's really the only semi-mainstream form of quackery to have survived the fall of the alchemical age.

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:Umm, what?

[jcr]

Honestly, as long as it doesn't interfere with other scientific endeavors, I see no problems with such things as homeopathy.

How do you feel about three-card Monty?

They may even stumble across something that is heretofore unknown, actually contributing to science in the process.

Nope. Not a chance.

Sneer all you like folks, but even the fundamentalist creationist types have a chance

Even less of a chance, since they do no work at all in any field of scientific inquiry. They just write up ever more long-winded versions of "nu-uh" to science.

-jcr

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.

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: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:Umm, what?

[Goaway]

"largely settled matters"... in 1404, a flat Earth was a "largely settled matter" Yes, it was largely a settled matter that the Earth was not flat, but round. This was known since antiquity.

Re:Umm, what?

[ChrisMaple]

There's value to the argument that someone who tries homeopathy will eventually have to enter the conventional healthcare system in worse condition than if he had not tried homeopathy, thereby increasing everyone's costs through the mechanism of insurance. However, humans usually defeat most diseases without any special care, and in these cases if homeopathy delays a trip to the doctor so long that the disease ends and the trip never happens, everyone's costs are cut. Furthermore, homeopathic "remedies" are often self-inflicted, so no expensive "professional" services are ever used.

The number of people who would try to use homeopathy for crisis medicine (heart attack, stroke, car crash) is vanishingly small, so it's probably not a valid concern in such cases.

Most homeopathic substances aren't very expensive because there isn't much but water or sugar being sold.

We'd be better off if people didn't believe in frauds, but homeopathy does less damage than many other forms of medical stupidity.

Re:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac

[jcr]

Yeah, many slashdotters are opposed to Homeopathy, Scientology, and many other varieties of fraud.

-jcr

Homeopathy and the power of the mind...

[neapolitan]

I'm a doctor -- I could write an entire book on the relation of "scientific" or "evidence-based" medicine in relation to homeopathy.

In general, homeopathy is essentially tolerated, and as the article humorously points out, it tends to not do much harm because things are dilute. From the Wikipedia article, which nicely summarizes it:
> any positive effects of homeopathic treatment are simply a placebo effect.

That has pretty much been my experience -- and it is difficult for an individual (even a doctor) to tell somebody to NOT do something that is not harmful, and (very, very unlikely) may be beneficial. Physicians joke about "homeopathic" doses of drugs when we think a drug is significantly under-dosed (usually when beginning somebody on a new medicine to see how they react to it.)

It is really funny the ritual surrounding this -- you wouldn't believe the people that adhere to homeopathic remedies and spend hundreds of dollars on these cure-alls, yet still "struggle" to afford the copay on the drugs that are actually keeping them alive. However, something that reinforces positive thought (which indeed can have an effect on your health) is good, and the placebo effect is undeniable.

Despite their benign nature, the aggressive marketing of these substances to vulnerable groups (the sick) disagrees with me. I mean, look at this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=homeopathic+remedy&btnG=Google+Search and some of the wild claims they make for cure. I can't make these outlandish claims for most of the drugs I prescribe, so how can an honest doc compete? :)

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

[Elivs]

I'm a doctor

Same.

it is difficult for an individual (even a doctor) to tell somebody to NOT do something that is not harmful, and (very, very unlikely) may be beneficial.

Unfortunately I disagree with this statement. While most homeopathists generally don't do harm I have seen plenty who have. Things that I've personally seen:

1) Patients who are struggling with money spending more than they can afford on bogus treatments. Depriving them on money they could have spent on other things.

2) Patients refusing or delaying treatment to see try homeopathy. While people have the right to chose their own treatment, a faith heeler and homeopathest misled people by saying that their treatment works. One case springs to mind of a patient in their mid 30 with Duke's A bowel cancer. This should have had a good chance for cure, but after 12 months of "trying the homeopathy first" the cancer had disseminated (liver/retro-peritoneum etc).

3) I've also seen direct harm based on dangerous advice. When I was a house surgeon we had a patient come in with seizures due to a low serum sodium. It turned out that her homeopathists had advise her to drink about 5-7L of water per day. The little old lady did this and essentially diluted herself with excess water until she almost died. (BTW drinking so much water that you do this is REALLY HARD. It requires a lot of will power to drink much beyond your thirst.)

So, while its nice to say homeopathists etc do no harm, its simply not true. I suggest reading this article on quack watch.

elivs

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

[neapolitan]

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

> 1) Patients who are struggling with money spending more than they can afford on bogus treatments. Depriving them on money they could have spent on other things.

From my OP:
>you wouldn't believe the people that adhere to homeopathic remedies and spend hundreds of dollars on these cure-alls, yet still "struggle" to afford the copay on the drugs that are actually keeping them alive.

Appreciate you bringing up the second and third dangerous anecdotes -- however, from my original post, I said it is difficult to tell somebody to do something that is NOT harmful, and clearly instilling polydipsia (excessive drinking) to the point of seizures from hyponatremia (low sodium) IS harmful. I stay involved with my patients that desire homeopathic remedies, and ask them what they have been doing in this regard. They *know* how I feel about the practice, (waste of time and money, largely,) but I don't beat them over the head with it. Clearly if they told me that they were spending large amounts of money or drinking themselves to death, I would step in with appropriate force.

Think of an analogy to religion. The vast majority of medical doctors tolerate if not support religion, with similar benefits that I eluded to earlier. Would you then disagree with this and come out with the counterarguments:

"I've seen somebody who prayed to their god instead of seeking a doctor!!! They died of infection instead of just coming in."

Clearly homeopaths can do harm. This is quite a different statement than what I was saying though.

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[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.

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Which reminds me, that "Head On" junk advertised on TV is homeopathic. My advice is to use bottled water instead:
>
> "Evian: apply it directly to the gullible"

"Evian: apply directly to the naive."

Fixed it for ya. I always wondered if having your product be "Naive" spelled backwards was an inside joke on the part of some marketroid.

With that out of the way, my go-to site for debunking quack medicine is Quackwatch. Debunks all the health scams from homeopathy to ear candling to colloidal silver to chiropracty, all on one convinient page.

Too bad this isn't a controversy

[Sunburnt]

The writers picked the topic because of a relative lack of controversy. This is unsurprising to me, but not for a good reason. My experience - I would love to see some research, hopefully proving me wrong - has led me to believe that a majority of people accept the spurious claims of homeopathy advocates. I'm disheartened about this by the number of otherwise perfectly reasonable people who have insisted that I should pay money for a homeopathic dilution of zinc to fight a cold virus.

"My last cold only lasted three days, must have been the Zicam," is so wrong on multiple levels, and it's a sad commentary on the state of education that such thinking is so widespread, although it's only fair to note that such has always been the case with regards to medicine.

My favorite part of the article is this three-bong-load abuse of physics by Lionel Milgrom, a contributor to this very special journal edition, who proposes a theory (I shit you not) of quantum entanglement of humans:

"It is as if at a deep level, everything in the universe is instantaneously linked together in a vast holistic matter-energy network of interacting fields which transcends ordinary concepts of space and time," Milgrom says. "And we, composed of trillions of particles are an inseparable part of it: far from what reason seems to tell us."

Mr. Milgrom, you and I share the same perspective on the universe. Unfortunately for you, it's called religion, not science, and your attempts to dress it up as science for the purposes of promoting our generation's version of patent medicine are the worst sort of shameful mockery.

Also, "instantaneously?" How can any two things be made instantaneous by a force that "transcends time?" You're as shitty a philosopher as you are a physicist, Mr. Milgrom.

Re:Too bad this isn't a controversy

[SQL Error]

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

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. 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: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.

Re:The truth about doing nothing

[PCM2]

They don't know enough and truly are practicing--on their patients. If it doesn't work out, it's "oh well, we did all we could." This would be acceptable, if it wasn't for the unbearable arrogance of many in the medical profession, and their looking condescending attitude towards anyone who tries anything that has not been blessed by the high temple that is the American Medical Association.

This argument completely goes both ways.

Example: I have an embarrassing confession to make. I once contracted a disease called scabies. Scabies, long story short, is bugs living in your skin. Your skin becomes inflamed and it itches. I have no idea how I got it, but it is fairly contagious, particularly if you have prolonged close contact with somebody who has it (e.g. you share a bed). My doctor diagnosed it, prescribed a treatment for me which I used to the letter, and I was cured. End of that story. Except...

Go online and do a search for scabies and you will find all sorts of interesting stuff. There are whole forum threads devoted to it. The cure, which for me was really very simple, does not seem to be simple at all for a lot of people.

It will probably help if I explain something else about it. Like I said, scabies is bugs, and you get welts and they itch. But these are not bug bites, per se. What is happening is that your body has initiated a systemic allergic reaction to the presence of the insects. You're basically breaking out in hives. Often you will break out in areas where no bugs have ever been. And the problem with this is that the cure for scabies is to kill them. Killing them, however, doesn't get them out of your skin -- it just interrupts their lifecycle. Eventually your skin will shed and they will all be gone. But in the meantime they are dead but still there ... which means that even after you are cured of scabies, you keep having symptoms ... sometimes for several weeks after the successful treatment. So you can maybe see how this freaks people out.

Back to the Web. Go online and search for "scabies cure" and you will find all kinds of people who are very frustrated about their symptoms, which has led them to try all sorts of things:

• You're only supposed to use the medicine once, maybe twice. That will be enough to cure you. But some people apply the medicine again and again and never see any improvement. This is not really surprising; the medicine is a common commercial insecticide, which is highly inflammatory to the skin. In other words, they're wrecking their own skin and that's why the itch seems to be getting worse.
• Often, the people who claim to have the worst, least curable cases are the people who started off trying home remedies instead of just going to the doctor. "I've tried everything," they cry -- everything, that is, except the treatment that is proven to work. Other people read their accounts and assume they are in the same straits.
• You hear a lot of people claiming their entire house is infested with scabies and that's why they keep getting re-infected. This is highly unlikely. Scientists have shown that scabies mites can't live more than an absolute maximum of 48 hours when they're not on a person, and it's probably more like 12 hours. But because these people keep itching, they keep trying to self-medicate and so the symptoms never seem to go away.
• After suffering for a while, some people develop theories about their infection. Some will tell you that their fingernails are the worst trouble spot, and that they have to dig thousands of the bugs out from under their fingernails. This, again, is highly unlikely -- a scabies-infected person with a healthy immune system will probably have no more than 10-15 mites on their entire bodies.
• So as the condition progresses, out of frustration they try more and more elaborate home remedies. By "home remedies," I mean scrubbing their skin with Comet. I mean

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:WTF?

[Carnildo]

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

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

Not the flat Earth myth again

[benhocking]

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

No, it wasn't.

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.

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

[Antony.Muss]

You put it next to a crystal, Duh.

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.

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 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: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: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.

Re:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac

[SQL Error]

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

As the Wikipedia article states, when Ennis's tests are repeated with a proper protocol in place, the results likewise disappear. The conclusion is straightforward: Ennis is a sloppy experimenter - probably honest, but incompetent.

My take on homeopathy...

[Panaflex]

It does not work. I'm tried quite a few of them, to be sure.

But there is one exception - and amazingly it works great. Arnica Montana is amazing stuff. All it does is stop compression-type injuries from swelling.

Re:Homeopathy works - here's why

[PCM2]

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

Re:%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:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Valdrax]

Which reminds me, that "Head On" junk advertised on TV is homeopathic.

Wait! You mean those irritating ads are for something that isn't even real medicine? That's it! I no longer have any reason not to burn down their company for those awful ads.

Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.

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:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[FooAtWFU]

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

Vibration. You assume the whole mass would oscillate/vibrate at some frequency. I'm extremely curious as to why you would believe that. Are you under the impression that typical molecules vibrate in funny patterns?

Physically, water molecules in the liquid form experience Brownian motion, true, random motion due to heat. It's chaotic, though, certainly not regular, doesn't really have a measurable frequency (an intensity, sure, in Temperature). Furthermore, supposing there was a regular vibration of some physical sort in water, and the energy of such vibration were somehow to remain in the water instead of dissipating like most vibrations do (try ringing a bell and then putting it down on a table, eh?) it would be readily disturbed and dwarfed when someone sloshed it around or drank it. It certainly could not be expected to persist in the body beyond the esophagus and, if it did somehow maintain this vibrational quality after that, it is sufficiently weakly-interacting that it oughtn't have any effect on the body. (There are plenty of little quantum states which one could maybe possibly call "vibration" if you were feeling poetic, but they're largely irrelevant at super-atomic scales, or else - like magnetism and electron spins - pretty trivial in effect compared to the effects of fields orders of magnitude more intense.)

If there's any sort of "vibration" left, it's a metaphysical pseudospiritual "vibration".

No

[A nonymous Coward]

You don't need double blind tests to know that 2 + 2 is not 5.

You don't need double blind tests to know that air breathing animals won't survive in a vacuum.

You don't need double blind tests to know that jumping off a tall bridge is going to hurt.

You don't need double blind tests to know that homeopathy has an internal inconsistency: pure water is required but by definition can't exist.

Some things are just provably wrong and don't need experimentation.

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:%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.

[jcr]

you science-nazis

Oh, this should be good..

Only once something can be clearly dismissed is it okay to see it as a fraud.

That's why we call Homeopathy a fraud. It never had any plausibility in the first place.

Also did you know that the pill can kill (yes, kill. Not lessen, fucking KILL) a womens sex drive? My wife had this problem.

Is that what she told you?

-jcr

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[rikkards]

Warning: I am extremely biased against Chiropractory and believe it should be shut down. Any arguing with me on it will be pointless. I am sure you are a nice person and so is your chiro but I look at it as snake oil. I am not going to try to convince you not to go but I will give you some facts. Maybe talk to your "doctor" about it but if you decide to continue seeing one, that is your choice and I hope it works out for you...

I can agree with the parent comment. My wife was given a neck adjustment on Dec 28 2003 and on the 2nd of 2004 had a mild (thankfully) stroke. It appears what happened was when the chiro torqued her neck one of her vertebrae moved. Of course a little while later the muscles pushed it back in place which they will do. At the same time a blood vessel was pinched off to her brain causing her left eye to not track quite as well as her right. She is fine but she still gets a bit of vertigo. Talked to a lawyer about it and they said unless we were willing to go through years of heartache and stress her time would be more worthwhile spent telling people her story. Her GP informed her that she has another patient who is middle age who's right arm is now useless due to a bad chiro adjustment.

My wife was 30 at the time of the stroke, in perfect health as she was an avid runner even doing a half-marathon, doesn't drink, never smoked, so not even close to being someone classified as a normal risk for strokes.
My wife isn't bitter, I am I admit as I had to look her in the eyes when she was terrified as we didn't know what was happening and whether or not this was the beginning of something bigger. She thinks the big problem was that the chiro glossed over the risks, she doesn't even recall ever being told about them. She had been a semiregular patient for 5 years for lower back pain (which visits to a physical therapist fixed in a couple months after she stopped going to the chiro). I agree with the person up the thread that Chiros should stay away from the neck area and as well they should drop the whole "latent intelligence" BS that moving bones makes your organs work better.

An interesting read (albeit definitely not an unbiased view on the world of chiropractory is book called Spin Doctors, which you can order on Amazon or Chapters .

Re:Uncontroversial? Hardly.

[Just Some Guy]

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

My oldest son is 11 months to the day younger than my oldest daughter. "Breast feeding as birth control" advocates can kiss my counter-anecdotal butt.

For Homeopathy, Not Against.

[Whiteox]

A little knowledge is dangerous.
I used to be a Homeopathic Practitioner. Really I was. I was a Traditional Homeopathic Practitioner. There is a huge difference between 'modern' homeopathy and traditional. The split happened in the late 60s and both forms have diverged significantly since.
The modern approach is inclusive of as many therapies as you can shake a stick at, while the die-hard traditional won't adopt anything else.

So what is it?

- Homeopathy is based on the concept of "Like Cures Like" - So the best thing you can do for a hangover is to take a spoonful of brandy the next morning.
- Homeopathy works. Why do you take Quinine tablets for malaria? Because taking quinine causes similar symptoms to malaria.
Ever had eczema or skin issues? Ever taken coal byproducts for it? That's a Sulphur based product - Another homeopathic remedy.
Have a bruise? Want to get rid of it? Get some Arnica cream. Bitten by a mosquito? Try Urtica cream. Want an effective disinfectant? Try Calendula. All of these are proven homeopathic creams that work. No faith required. Sure, nowadays there's alternative remedies for general conditions like this, but there is no reason to discount alternative and older remedies.
- All of what we term 'immunization' is Homeopathy in its traditional form. You ingest a serum made from the very substance that causes the disease.
- Quackery was just that. Real doctors in the 1800's and beyond (especially in the US) used Homeopathic remedies whilst the quacks used opium, alcohol and wild herbs as a panacea.
- Homeopathy has a rating system. All remedies ending with an 'X' are dilutions eg 1 part per 10. All those ending in 'C' are 1 part per 100 and so on - following the roman numeric system.
- Homeopathy works from the general to the specific. Never the other way around. There is a huge difference in the efficacy of super-high dilutions 'M' for example and 'X'. A practitioner worth their salt would never give an 'M' first off. Very high dilutions are only used once a particular condition has been aggravated and only rarely.'X' and 'C' have measurable concentrations of whatever remedy is used. It is not water.
- Remedies are 'proven'. That means that a statistical sample of people are given 'X' doses of a remedy and observed closely as in all drug trials, looking for symptomatology. If the remedy gives consistent results then it is tested with patients who exhibit similar symptoms.
- Remedies come as creams, powders, solutions, pills, sprays, inhalations and injection (hypodermic).
- Homeopathy has a pharmacopoeia of thousands of proven remedies.
- Homeopathy ONLY WORKS if a condition is diagnosed properly. As proper diagnosis involves checking for a myriad of 'symptoms', it becomes a challenge to arrive at the right diagnosis. Get it wrong and the remedy doesn't work. There are a few pitfalls like that. I say that because if you've been given a remedy and it didn't work, then that's probably why.

Modern Homeopathy however has really gone astray. That's why I got out of it. Modern homeopathy considers that effective remedies can be made by shining a light through a slide that purportedly has the same 'vibrations' as the remedy is supposed to represent. And this is supposed to work? That sort of stuff goes against the grain of traditional practice and I would have to agree with many of the placebo comments made here.

I know I won't convince many, but when you see it working properly, all doubts fade.
Just keep an open mind. One day you may need it.