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NHS Should Stop Funding Homeopathy, Says Parliamentary Committee
An anonymous reader writes "Homeopathic remedies work no better than placebos, and so should no longer be paid for by the UK National Health Service, a committee of British members of parliament has concluded. In preparing its report, the committee, which scrutinizes the evidence behind government policies, took evidence from scientists and homeopaths, and reviewed numerous reports and scientific investigations into homeopathy. It found no evidence that such treatments work beyond providing a placebo effect." Updated 201025 19:40 GMT by timothy: This recommendation has some people up in arms.
Heomeopathy = Placebo so no surprise there . . .
Ben Goldacre for stopping this lunacy. His weekly Bad Science column and website have been invaluable in combating woo.
It's worth pointing out, for those who don't know much about the British parliamentary system, that the title of this post isn't true. One of the Parliamentary Select Committees has recommended that the NHS should stop funding homoeopathy. This is not a decision and will not automatically result in the money being withdrawn. This should be seen as the starting of a conversation on the issue in Parliament. In reality, the government has effective control over public spending and unless and until the Department of Health decides to change the way its money is spent then there will be no change in practice.
Except that
1. it took some actual evidence-medicine to separate the few that work from the thousands that don't work. There's a name for traditional medicine that actually worked: medicine. The whole alternative gang is the ones that don't.
2. That's irrelevant anyway, because that's not what homeopathy means. Homeopathy can be summarized like this:
A) You notice what herb or substance produces what symptoms. E.g., caffeine produces insomnia.
B) Like cures like. When someone comes to you complaining about insomnia, you give them something that causes insomnia. E.g., caffeine.
No, it's sadly not a joke. The ingredient in most real homeopathic sleeping pills is caffeine.
C) Except you don't really. You dillute it to the point where there's hardly even a mollecule of the original substance left. The dilutions used in homeopathy are all powers of 10. It goes like this:
1X = 1 part active substance in 10 parts water. But this is too concentrated. You don't give them this one.
2X = 1 part 1X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 1% active substance. Ditto.
3X = 1 part 2X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.1% active substance. Ditto.
4X = 1 part 3X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.01% active substance. Waay to concentrated still, you only use this one to make...
5X = 1 part 4X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.001% active substance. Still too concentrated.
Actual homeopathic remedies start can be anywhere between 10X and 100X. But there's the small problem of Avogadro's number. A 100X solution, you'd have to drink whole swimming pools of it, before an actual mollecule of caffeine actually entered your system to cure your insomnia.
D) But that's supposedly OK, because water somehow has "memory" and cures every symptom like a substance it ever encountered. (So I guess since a lot of water is more or less recycled, and so many people wank in the shower, tap water should be a bulletproof contraceptive.)
The whole thing is stupid on several levels. Not just the "like cures like" or "water memory" stupidity, but starting on the very fact that it focuses on "what causes the same _symptoms_?" instead of the actual pathogen or mechanism involved. If you went to a homeopath with a pain in the throat, he/she wouldn't look at whether you have a pharingitis or a thyroid cancer, but simply at what else causes a pain in the throat. And give you a dilluted version of that. But curing RL illnesses doesn't work that way. Imitating the symptoms doesn't cure a cancer, nor kill MRSA. It's what you get from a brand of "medicine" which appeared before microscopes and is based on little more than ignorance and wild guesses, and inability to distinguish between symptoms and cause of a disease.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Here you are unabashedly wrong. As someone who designs drug trials for a major pharmaceutical company, I can tell you we very often prefer to test our new drugs versus placebo, and we absolutely will report those results. Part of this is because you obviously have a much better chance of demonstrating effectiveness if your competitor is 'nothing,' whereas using an active comparator (product X) runs the risk of making you look no better than product X. This doesn't mean all products tested against placebo are "shit;" it simply means the company is minimizing the risk of a failed trial.
Of course, how well your new drug works compared to existing therapies is exactly what many healthcare providers and payers want to know, which is why regulators increasingly demand active comparator trials. In some countries reimbursement is explicitly linked to how well you fare against whatever the current standard of care is.
*sighs*
That's not what he's being sued for.
He's being sued for suggesting that the chiropractors were willfully giving people treatments they knew to be be useless. Personally, I don't see think that's what he meant in his article and that's his argument, too, but the one thing he's *not* being sued for is saying chiropractic remedies are little more than horseshit - there's be no lawsuit if that was all he'd said.
There always seems to be a remarkable amount of bitching about the British libel system, but really all it boils down to is that if you publicly smear someone, you'd better be able to damn well prove it. Where exactly is the problem in that? From what I've seen of American media and politics, it'd be a hell of a lot better if there were some requirement for people to be able to back up their accusations...
-Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience-
Ummm, I believe they go to 10 nines and beyond. Hence they ARE placebos.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I wish I could mod you up, but I only have infinitely diluted mod points left. .Sign and/or donate if you support their cause!
Anyway, there's also a petition going for libel reform. Check it out at http://www.libelreform.org/
That's because Britain's libel laws are generally weighted in favor of the plaintiff. In Britain, the plaintiff need not demonstrate that the statements are false; the statements are presumed false and the defendant must prove them true. The plaintiff need not demonstrate direct harm either. The U.S. (and much of the rest of the Western world) has much more stringent rules; in the U.S., the plaintiff must prove the statements false and demonstrate harm. If they are a "public figure", they also need to prove it was not only false, but that it was malicious and exhibited a reckless disregard for the truth. The "public figure" category that has been expanded over time by court decisions; originally it referred to politicians, but now it refers to celebrities, athletes, and basically anyone else with a sufficiently visible public profile.
Basically, the problem isn't that Britain is pro-pseudoscience, it's that it's anti-free-speech and pro-tort.
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99% of homeopathy is simply people using random herbs that are ineffective
99.999% of homeopathy is either water or sugar.
I suspect you have been as stingy with your trailing decimal points as most homeopathy is with actual non-inert ingredients.
According to the report: "Homeopathic medicines are diluted so much that it is extremely unlikely that any active component can possibly be left in the solution. The committee failed to identify any plausible explanation for how such remedies might work."
The dilution factors are utterly astounding in many cases. The most common Dilution advocated for most purposes would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient
The Homeopathy Wiki article is even more dismissive than TFA, which by itself is rather astounding.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I was under the impression the most common dilution "30C", was something like 1/3000... But no, on further reading I discover it's 99.999999999999999999999999999999% water, as you say. i.e. even in a mass spectrometer we're not going to see any molecules of the original solution.
Deleted
A "100C" dilution is divided by more than the number of atoms in the universe. Quite literally.
1x10^60 the dilution factor for a "30C" remedy. That's ten to the sixty.