Adverse Reactions : homeopathy

A nice little Ernst-er

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:08:00 GMT

You are Edzard Ernst, esteemed professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, and I claim my £10,000. Please wire my payment to: Bryan Hubbard@Dunworkin.

As you may have heard, Edzard has done a Randi, and has announced a £10,000 prize to anyone who can produce evidence that homeopathy works.

Magician James Randi is another gallant quack-buster, who has offered a $1 million for proof that the paranormal exists. Randi has never coughed up, of course, and he never will, despite the many cases he has seen that should see him parted from his loot.

I fear the same with Edzard. For him, it’s a publicity stunt to stimulate the flagging sales of his latest book, which is a full frontal assault on alternative medicine, which seems strange from Britain’s only professor of, er, alternative medicine.

But let’s give the man the benefit of the doubt, and take him at his word. So, Edzard, here’s a study that has been double-blinded and placebo controlled, and that demonstrates homeopathy is just as good as, if not better than, drugs for the treatment of eczema. The study’s reference is: Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 2008; 16: 15-21.

Take a look, and pass the money along soonest. No disrespect, but I’d prefer notes (£20s and £50s are fine) to a cheque.

The miracle of water

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:23:00 GMT

As it’s a celebration of God made incarnate, Christmas is a better time than most to think about the miraculous. The philosopher David Hume famously pointed out that a miracle is a violation of nature, and therefore impossible. And if it were to happen all the time, it would cease to be a miracle and would become a part of nature.

Today, rationalists use a different language. Nature has been replaced by science, and miracles by quackery. And quackery ceases to be quackery if it is finally proven by science in the same way that a miracle ceases to be one when it can be explained by science.

To explore the argument, let’s take the controversial subject of homeopathy, the therapy that makes scientists and doctors apoplectic, simply because, for them, it can’t possibly be anything other than placebo.

For the doctor, homeopathy is the last word in quackery because it violates every known law, and common sense, too, for good measure. At its heart is a completely implausible premise, says the scientist. The idea that you can dilute a substance one million times and still have something of the original is impossible, or, as Hume would put it, a violation of nature.

But scientists who have spent a lifetime studying the quality of water and other aqueous substances say that it does, indeed, have ‘a memory’ that persists despite even a million dilutions.

Prof Eugene Stanley from Boston University, who is considered one of the leading experts on the physics of water, has catalogued 64 anomalous property changes to pure water. As Rustum Roy, a materials scientist at Arizona State University, explains, the first law of materials science dictates that there must be the same number of different structures in liquid water – which suggests we really don’t know the first thing about water, after all.

Meanwhile, Prof Martin Chaplin from London’s South Bank University is currently exploring just how it could be that water has a memory. As he says: “Too often the final argument used against the memory of water concept is simply ‘I just don’t believe it’. . .Such unscientific rhetoric is heard from the otherwise sensible scientists, with a narrow view of the subject and without any examination or appreciation of the full body of evidence, and reflects badly on them.”

So if science could explain homeopathy, does this mean that this ridiculed therapy is about to lose its quackery status? Miracles do happen, it seems.

Have a wonderful Christmas, everyone!

The trouble with everything

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:24:00 GMT

Homeopathy comes in for yet another pasting this week. It’s the turn of Ben Goldacre, that scourge of all things alternative, who writes in The Lancet and The Guardian about the un-science of homeopathy.

His attack is three-pronged, and while we’ve all heard the arguments before, they are worth pondering anew.

The placebo effect: This, for Ben, is the main reason why homeopathy ‘works’. It explains why we “just feel better” after being given a homeopathic pill. (For the record, I’ve never felt any better having been given a homeopathic remedy, so, according to Ben’s measure, my negative experience proves it works!) Medicine understands the placebo effect, and discounts it when analysing the results of a double-blind placebo trial. Homeopaths also claim there are plenty of trials that demonstrate an effect far greater than placebo, but this brings Ben to his second challenge.

Publication bias. Homeopaths just publish the good stuff, and they hide the bad results in their filing cabinets. If they published every trial, good and bad, the greater-than-placebo effect would disappear. This doesn’t happen in medicine, says Ben, because of the ‘clinical trials database’. Everyone can see all the trials and their results. Sadly, this is not true. In the 50 years since 1948, there were around 1 million medical trials undertaken, yet only half of these were ever published. The rest were put into, er, filing cabinets (I wonder if they are the same ones the homeopaths use?) The EU clinical trials database is not available to the public because drug companies “need to protect commercially sensitive information about drug developments”, Thomas Porstner, spokesman for the German Pharmaceutical Industry Association, has said.

Regression to the mean. This is a scientific way of stating that disease is cyclical. Some days you feel better, some days worse. It’s quite possible, says Ben, that you take the homeopathic pill when you’re at your worst. Then you feel better, but not because of the pill, but because of the natural cycle of the disease. This argument can just as easily be laid at the door of conventional medicine.

For Ben, all of this un-science is dangerous stuff. Homeopathy could be killing people, he argues, which is a bit strange because a minute ago he was telling us it was utterly ineffective. Anyway, that’s the province of the pharmaceutical industry, and they won’t give that one up without a fight.

It’s true that medicine is more ‘scientific’ than homeopathy and other alternative therapies, and for a very good reason. With the rise of mass production, the nascent pharmaceutical industry needed to establish its products were solutions to mass health problems. It shoehorned the art of medicine into a science, but the shoe fits poorly.

In truth, even the best medical trials establish only that a drug works for some people some of the time (usually in the first 6 months of starting treatment). The real question is: will it work for you? Well, you won’t know until you take it and, when you do, you may well “just feel better”. But isn’t that what the homeopathic patient said, too?