Secular Psychedelic: Pseudoscience: Homeopathy

"...for the purposes of popular discourse, it is not necessary for homeopaths to prove their case. It is merely necessary for them to create walls of obfuscation, and superficially plausible technical documents that support their case, in order to keep the dream alive in the imaginations of both the media and their defenders." - Ben Goldacre

"If homeopathy works, then obviously the less you use it, the stronger it gets. So the best way to apply homeopathy is to not use it at all." - Phil Plait

Origins of Classical Homeopathy:

The German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) is generally acknowledged to be the founder and developer of homeopathy, although some of his concepts appear very early in medical history.1 Dissatisfied with the state of medicine at the time, which included bleeding, purging, cupping and excessive doses of mercury, he ceased his medical practice in 1782 and began translating medical and chemical texts. It was during this time that he apparently began to seriously question the proposed mechanisms of drug activity of his contemporaries.

Hahnemann followed a tradition that viewed disease as a matter of the vital force or spirit. The concept of the vital spirit appears to be one of the earliest speculations in recorded medical history and similar forces form the proposed basis for any number of metaphysical health practices. It is an alleged nonmaterial "force" that sustains life and for which there is no objective evidence. According to Hahnemann:

"The causes of our maladies cannot be material, since the least foreign material substance, however mild it may appear to us, if introduced into our blood-vessels, is promptly ejected by the vital force, as though it were a poison....no disease, in a word, is caused by any material substance, but that every one is only and always a peculiar, virtual, dynamic derangement of the health."

Hahnemann and his followers went on to test the effects of almost 100 substances on themselves, a process known as "proving." The typical procedure was for a healthy person to ingest a small amount of a particular substance and then attempt to carefully note any reaction or symptom (including emotional or mental reactions) that occurred. By this method, Hahnemann and his followers "proved" that the substance was an effective remedy for a particular symptom. That such a method of determining the effectiveness of a treatment is implausible and at least open to the power of suggestion should be inarguable. In fact, in one controlled study, healthy subjects reported similar symptoms whether given a homeopathic dilution of belladonna or a placebo.

Nevertheless, the collected experiences of such incidents became the basis for a compendium called the Materia Medica. Because some of the substances tested were toxic (such as poison ivy, strychnine and various snake venoms), during a proving it made sense to ingest minuscule doses. This may be the source or the homeopathic principle of "infinitesimal dilutions" in which the most dilute solutions are alleged to be the most potent.

Hahnemann came upon his “Law of Similars” (like cures like) in 1790 while translating William Cullen's Materia Medica into German (Loudon 1997: 94). He began experimenting on himself with various substances, starting with cinchona.

Daily for several days, he wrote, he had been taking four drams of the drug. Each time he had repeated the dose, his feet and finger tips had become cold, and other symptoms had followed which were typical of malaria. Each time he had stopped taking the cinchona, he had returned rapidly to a state of good health. (Williams 1981: 184)

Hahnemann put forth his ideas of disease and treatment in The Organon of Homeopathic Medicine (1810) and Theory of Chronic Diseases (1821). The term 'homeopathy' is derived from two Greek words: homeo (similar) and pathos (suffering).

Hahnemann meant to contrast his method with the convention of his day of trying to balance "humors" by treating a disorder with its opposite (allos). He referred to conventional practice as allopathy. Even though modern scientific medicine bears no resemblance to the theory of balancing humors or treating disease with its opposite, modern homeopaths and other advocates of "alternative" medicine misleadingly refer to today's science-trained physicians as allopaths (Jarvis 1994).

Classical homeopathy is generally defined as a system of medical treatment based on the use of minute quantities of remedies that in larger doses produce effects similar to those of the disease being treated. Hahnemann believed that very small doses of a medication could have very powerful healing effects because their potency could be affected by vigorous and methodical shaking (succussion). Hahnemann referred to this alleged increase in potency by vigorous shaking as dynamization. Hahnemann thought succussion could release "immaterial and spiritual powers," thereby making substances more active. "Tapping on a leather pad or the heel of the hand was alleged to double the dilution" (ibid.).

Dynamization was for Hahnemann a process of releasing an energy that he regarded as essentially immaterial and spiritual. As time went on he became more and more impressed with the power of the technique he had discovered and he issued dire warnings about the perils of dynamizing medicines too much. This might have serious or even fatal consequences, and he advised homeopaths not to carry medicines about in their waistcoat pockets lest they inadvertently make them too powerful. Eventually he even claimed that there was no need for patients to swallow the medicines at all; it was enough if they merely smelt them. (Anthony Campbell)

Two potency scales are in common use: the decimal, which proceeds by 1:10 steps, and the centesimal (1:100). Starting from the original "mother tincture" (in the case of a plant this is an alcoholic extract) a 1:10 or 1:100 dilution is made. This is succussed and the resulting solution is known as the first potency. This now serves as the starting point for the next step in dilution and succussion, which results in the second potency, and so on. The 1:10 potencies are usually indicated by x and the 1:100 by c; thus Pulsatilla 6c means the 6th centesimal potency of Pulsatilla, which has received six succussions and has a concentration of one part in a thousand billion. (Anthony Campbell)

Like most of his contemporaries, Hahnemann believed that health was a matter of balance and harmony, but for him it was the vital force, the spirit in the body, that did the balancing and harmonizing, that is, the healing.

Hahnemann claimed that most chronic diseases were caused by miasms and the worst of these miasms were the 'psora.' The evidence for the miasm theory, however, is completely absent and seems to have been the result of some sort of divine revelation. The word "miasm" derives from the Greek and means something like "taint" or "contamination". Hahnemann supposed that chronic disease results from invasion of the body by one of the miasms through the skin. The first sign of disease is thus always a skin disorder of some kind. (Campbell)

His method of treatment might seem very modern: Find the right drug for the illness. However, his medicines were not designed to help the body fight off infection or rebuild tissue, but to help the vital spirit work its magic. In fact, Hahnemann believed it is "inherently impossible to know the inner nature of disease processes and it was therefore fruitless to speculate about them or to base treatment on theories." His remedies were determined by the patient's symptoms, not by the supposed disease causing those symptoms. (Campbell)

Working on the principle of similarities, Hahnemann created remedies for various disorders that had symptoms similar to those of the substances his provers had taken. However, "....methods of proving are highly personalised and of individual relevance to the homoeopath or experimenter." In other words, one hundred homeopaths preparing a remedy for one patient might well come up with one hundred different remedies.

Where did this bizarre belief originate? For that we back-track to our good friend Mr. Hahnemann and chinchona bark extract. Chinchona bark extract was a known treatment for malaria. Hahnemann was messing around with a few drugs and narcotics, supposedly for test purposes. Upon Hahnemann’s taking of the substance he gained the symptoms of malaria, in his eyes proving that the “law of similars” works. However, later studies (after homeopathy had truly taken off) showed that Hahnemann was allergic to chinchona, and this caused the effects of malaria. Okay, so the basic premise of homeopathy is based around someone being allergic to a medicine? Don’t you think that evidence seems just the slightest bit weak? So people are ingesting poisons, possibly on their death-bed, believing these poisons will cure them just because some German doctor was allergic to a medicine.

However, ingesting poison is not a problem: the second rule of Homeopathy is the theory of infinitesimals or potentisation. The process begins with one drop of the chosen poison being put in 100 drops of water; this is called a 1C solution. Yes, that’s right, one in one hundred dilution of the active ingredient. But of course, there is the vigorous shaking and the tapping ten times, ten being the magic number of homeopathy, transferring the “spiritual essence” of the substance. With harmful substances, however, 1 in 100 is still too strong. What to do, what to do? Ah! Dilute it again. In fact, the most common dilution is 30C! That’s a ratio of 1 over 1 followed by sixty zeros!

A Glorified Placebo:

There have been several reviews of various studies of the effectiveness of homeopathic treatments and not one of these reviews concludes that there is good evidence for any homeopathic remedy (HR) being more effective than a placebo. Homeopaths have had over 200 years to demonstrate their wares and have failed to do so. Sure, there are single studies that have found statistically significant differences between groups treated with an HR and control groups, but none of these have been replicated or they have been marred by methodological faults. Two hundred years and we're still waiting for proof! Having an open mind is one thing; waiting forever for evidence is more akin to wishful thinking.

A review of the reviews of homeopathic studies has been done by Terence Hines (2003: 360-362). He reviewed Taylor et al. (2000), Wagner (1997), Sampson and London (1995), Kleijen, Knipschild, and ter Riet (1991), and Hill and Doyon (1990). More than 100 studies have failed to come to any definitive positive conclusions about homeopathic potions. Ramey (2000) notes that:

"Homeopathy has been the subject of at least 12 scientific reviews, including meta-analytic studies, published since the mid-1980s... [And] the findings are remarkably consistent: homeopathic "remedies" are not effective."

Yet, despite the fact that of the hundreds of studies that have been done on homeopathic remedies the vast majority have found no value in the remedies, some defenders of homeopathy insist not only that homeopathic remedies work but they claim they know how they work. It seems, however, that scientists like Jacques Benveniste, who claim to know how homeopathy works, have put the cart before the horse. Benveniste claims to have proven that homeopathic remedies work by altering the structure of water, thereby allowing the water to retain a "memory" of the structure of the homeopathic substance that has been diluted out of existence (Nature Vol. 333, No. 6176, pp. 816-818, 30th June, 1988).* The work in Benveniste's lab was thoroughly discredited by a team of investigators who evaluated an attempted replication of the study published in Nature. Neither Benveniste nor any other advocate of the memory-of-water speculation have explained how water is so selective in its memory that it has forgotten all the other billions of substances its molecules have been in contact with over the millennia. One wonders in vain how water remembers only the molecules the homeopath has introduced at some point in the water's history and forgets all those trips down the toilet bowel, etc. (Benveniste even claims that a homeopathic solution's biological activity can be digitally recorded, stored on a hard drive, sent over the Internet, and transferred to water at the receiving end. He was a successful biologist working in a state-run lab until he started making such claims, which have cost him his status and reputation as a reputable scientist. He is now considered by his critics (such as James Randi) to be another Blondlot.) Since homeopathic remedies don't work any better than placebos or doing nothing, there is no need for an elaborate explanation as to how they work. What there is need of is an explanation for why so many people are satisfied with their homeopath despite all the evidence that homeopathic remedies are inert and no more effective than a placebo or just letting an illness run its natural course. [SkepDic]

Nevertheless, homeopathy will always have its advocates, despite the lack of proof that its remedies are more effective than a placebo. Why? One reason is the prevalence of a misunderstanding of the causes of disease and how the human body deals with disease. Hahnemann was able to attract followers because he appeared to be a healer compared to those who were cutting veins or using poisonous purgatives to balance humors. More of his patients may have survived and recovered not because he healed them but because he didn't infect them or kill them by draining out needed blood or weaken them with strong poisons. Hahnemann's medicines were essentially nothing more than common liquids and were unlikely to cause harm in themselves. He didn't have to have too many patients survive and get better to look impressive compared to his competitors. If there is any positive effect on health it is not due to the homeopathic remedy, which is inert, but to the body's own natural curative mechanisms or to the belief of the patient (the placebo effect) or to the effect the manner of the homeopath has on the patient.

Stress can enhance and even cause illness. If a practitioner has a calming effect on the patient, that alone might result in a significant change in the feeling of well-being of the patient. And that feeling might well translate into beneficial physiological effects. The homeopathic method involves spending a lot of time with each patient to get a complete list of symptoms. It's possible this has a significant calming effect on some patients. This effect could enhance the body's own healing mechanisms in some cases.

Homeopath and historian of homeopathy Anthony Campbell writes, “A homeopathic consultation affords the patient an opportunity to talk at length about her or his problems to an attentive and sympathetic listener in a structured environment, and this in itself is therapeutic.” In other words, homeopathy is a form of psychotherapy.

This is true whether or not the homeopath recognizes that she is using psychotherapy. Many homeopaths would agree that there is an element of psychotherapy in the consultation, but they would not accept that that is the main part of it. However, homeopaths generally pride themselves, often with justification, on being people with good powers of intuition and empathy; indeed, unless they have these abilities they will not succeed in their profession. This also means that they are good psychotherapists. (Campbell)

We know that the sum of all the scientific evidence shows clearly that homeopathic remedies are no more effective than placebos. This does not mean that patients don't feel better or actually get better after seeing a homeopath. That is quite another matter and is clearly the reason for the satisfied customers. (Here the reader might research the placebo effect, the post hoc fallacy and the regressive fallacy.)

Water as Medicine:

There are not two kinds of science, conventional and non-conventional. There is just science. You are either doing it or not. True, some are doing science well and some are not...

There are good reasons science uses controlled studies. The dangers of self-deception should be apparent. The vulnerability to post hoc fallacies like the regressive fallacy should be obvious. How could we ever separate out placebo and false placebo effects, from unique remedy effect if we did not do controlled studies? Homeopaths are asking that they be given a free pass to draw conclusions about their treatments based on their subjective impressions and self-serving testing methods. Their special pleading is absurd on its face.

Even though most homeopathic remedies in the U.S. and the UK are little more than water or alcohol, there are a number of products on the market that are labeled homeopathic that have active ingredients in them (see complex homeopathy, isopathy, and nosodes). However, if I did find that my remedy was one of those that had been diluted so many times that there weren't any molecules remaining of the original active substance, I would rather believe that my pain had suddenly gone away than that the homeopathic remedy had cured me of my pain. Why? Because the known laws of physics and chemistry would have to be completely revamped if a tonic from which nearly every molecule of the active ingredient were removed could be shown to be effective.

By successively diluting the initial substance, extremely dilute solutions can be made rather quickly. The dilution limit is reached when the volume of the solute is unlikely to contain a single molecule of the solvent. The limit recognizes that there is a large but finite and specific number of atoms or molecules in a mole of substance (a mole is the molecular weight of a substance, expressed in grams). That number of atoms or molecules is 6.022 X 1023, also known as Avogadro's number.

Homeopathic remedies are diluted by either a factor of 10 or 100. "D" dilutions are prepared by serial dilutions of 1:10; "C" dilutions are prepared by serial dilutions of 1:100. Thus, a remedy marked C30 would imply a 1:100 dilution performed 30 times. By simple mathematics, it can be calculated that at dilutions of C12 or D24 or greater, it is not likely that the remedies contain even a single molecule of the original substance.

Since the original substance is not present in extremely dilute homeopathic remedies, explanations for a mechanism of action of homeopathic medications have moved towards speculation. Such proposals include the formation of stable ice crystals, magnetic properties of water or the formation of protein shells in the water mixture. Water molecules are highly polarized, a fact that already accounts for much of the special role of water in biology. However, the likelihood that water can maintain a complex ice-like structure under the vigorous shaking that usually accompanies homeopathic preparation has not been demonstrated. Neither has any physical mechanism by which such hypothetical structures can produce the implied biological effects.

The fact that there is no known mechanism by which extremely dilute homeopathic medications should be able to exert a biological effect is indeed a source or concern to proponents of homeopathy. In fact, if proposed mechanisms can be shown to be insupportable, the Director of the Office of Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health has written that, "highly speculative and imaginary [sic] explanations may be necessary."

As a Nobel Prize winning physicist noted, "The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment." From a mechanistic point of view, however, homeopathy neither makes sense nor agrees with any experiment. Accordingly, most discussions of the possible effects of homeopathy prefer to focus on discussions of results of studies. [Vic Stinger]

A 1996 review of homeopathy, concluded that:

"No one should ignore the role of non-specific factors in therapeutic efficacy, such as the natural history of a given disease and the placebo effect. Indeed, these factors can be used to therapeutic advantage."
"As homeopathic treatments are generally used in conditions with variable outcome or showing spontaneous recovery (hence their placebo responsiveness), these treatments are widely considered to have an effect in some patients."
"However, despite the large number of comparative trials carried out to date there is no evidence that homeopathy is any more effective than placebo therapy given in identical conditions."
"We believe that homeopathic preparations should not be used to treat serious diseases when other drugs are known to be both effective and safe."
"Pending further evidence, homeopathy remains a form of placebo therapy." [Aulas, J. Homeopathy update. Préscrire International 1996; 15(155): 674-684.]

A 1997 meta-analysis concluded, "The results of our meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homeopathy are completely due to placebo. However, we found insufficient evidence from these studies that homeopathy is clearly efficacious for any single clinical condition." Furthermore, "Our study has no major implications for clinical practice because we found little evidence of effectiveness of any single homeopathic approach on any single clinical condition." The authors concluded by calling for more research, "providing it is rigorous and systematic." [Linde, K., et al. Are the clinical effects of homeopathy placebo effects? A meta-analysis of placebo-controled trials. The Lancet 1997; 350: 834-843.]

One critic of the study cautioned that when the best trials were examined, the odds of a positive effect of the therapy were distinctly lower than in the overall study. [Langman, MJS. Homeopathy trial: reason for good ones but are they warranted? The Lancet 1997; 350: 825.] Another critic suggested further caution in interpreting the results of this study by noting that negative trials may have been less likely to be published, which may have skewed the analysis. [Vandenbroucke, J.P. Homeopathy trials: going nowhere. The Lancet 1997; 350: 824.]

Were homeopathy to prove an effective therapy, it would be irrational for any legitimate medical practitioner to ignore or fail to employ it. Given the apparent lack of adverse effects from high dilution homeopathic remedies, such a therapy should be readily embraced if it were effective. Indeed, open-mindedness is one of the hallmarks of science and the rapid assimilation of new therapies and technologies has been a consistent characteristic of scientific medicine. In fact, studies have shown that practitioners of mainstream medicine are less dogmatic than those of its alternatives. [Berkowitz, C. Homeopathy: keeping an open mind. The Lancet 1994; 344: 701-702; Berwin, TH. What's wrong with complementary medicine? The Sceptic 1995; 8: 6-9.]

"...at the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World : Science As a Candle in the Dark. Random House, 1996, 304.

There is nothing wrong with the hypothesis that homeopathic remedies, no matter how implausible, are effective. However, such a hypothesis is amenable to scientific testing. Proper trials of homeopathic remedies should be easy to conduct. However, whether they are evaluated by review, by meta-analysis or by postulated physical mechanism, there is no good evidence to date that homeopathic remedies are effective treatments for any condition in human or in veterinary medicine. Nor is there evidence that they are superior to already established therapies.

Every practitioner of medicine requires faith in his or her methods in order to be confident. However, faith is not a legitimate foundation on which to build a practice of scientific medicine. Furthermore, in order for people to change their minds, they must have a good reason to do so; mere faith is not such a reason. Advocates of ethical medicine and veterinary science demand reliable evidence of both efficacy and safety before employing therapies to treat their patients. Thus, the question remains; if homeopathic remedies are safe and effective, why have its practitioners and proponents been unwilling or unable to conduct the proper trials and research required to prove it? [Homeopathy and Science: A Closer Look - David W. Ramey, DVM, Mahlon Wagner, PhD, and Robert H. Imrie, DVM. Published in The Technical Journal of the Franklin Institute]

A recent Huffington Post blog by Dana Ullman, a notorious homeopathy apologist, claims that the clinical and basic science research supports homeopathy. We know from the work of John Ioannidis that most published studies, in retrospect, are wrong. This is because there is a large amount of preliminary and poorly controlled research leading up to the large definitive trials that finally answer questions. Preliminary research is unreliable and biased – most of it is wrong. But we can still get to reliable answers in the end. Meanwhile, there is also researcher bias, publication bias, and the various placebo effects that conspire to make medical research look positive, even when there is no effect. [Homeopathy Pseudoscience at the HuffPo]

One homeopathic researcher is Jacques Benveniste, another supposed doctor. In 1988 he claimed that water has the power to remember the properties of a substance when diluted down to homeopathic treatments, and supposedly had “evidence” to prove it. Naturally, the scientific community met this theory with much scepticism, but the British Medical Journal agreed to publish Benveniste on one condition: he must open his laboratory to a team of independent referees to evaluate his work. At this point, the wonderful James Randi stepped in to investigate. Unsurprisingly, Randi and the referees came back with unquestionable evidence showing that Benveniste’s work was – wait for it – wrong! It’s interesting and telling that a study homeopaths continually quote is one that has been disproven. There is absolutely no credible evidence proving dilute treatments, such as homeopathic medicines, have any affects on the human immune system. [DPSkeptic]

It was a re-analysis of the Shang study that showed that homeopathic treatments are placebos, and the analysis concluded that “The conclusions on the effectiveness of homeopathy highly depend on the set of analyzed trials.” Well, of course they do. That’s why systematic reviews are better than meta-analysis. What do the systematic reviews of homeopathy show? Edzard Ernst did a systematic review of systematic reviews of homeopathy – that’s about as thorough as you can get. He found:

"The findings of currently available Cochrane reviews of studies of homeopathy do not show that homeopathic medicines have effects beyond placebo."

Skeptics don’t say there is “no research” – what we say is that there is “no good research” – meaning large, blinded, placebo controlled trials that show a replicably positive effect. What we do see is the positively-biased noise of placebo vs placebo research. The better controlled the study, the smaller the effect and greater the chance of no effect.

An independent review found:

Some positive results were described with homeopathy in good-quality trials in rhinitis, but a number of negative studies were also found. Therefore it is not possible to provide evidence-based recommendations for homeopathy in the treatment of allergic rhinitis, and further trials are needed.

Most studies are unblinded, which in this context means they are worthless. One blinded study for homeopathy in ADHD – was a small study with barely significant results. Again – I prefer systematic reviews, like this one, which concludes:

There is currently little evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy for the treatment of ADHD. Development of optimal treatment protocols is recommended prior to further randomised controlled trials being undertaken.

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=2775
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17943868

Finding science and medicine experts to defend homeopathy isn't easy. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine offers a primer complete with an explanation of homeopathy regulation, the status of research and more.

The first two "key points" are especially notable, the first for the explanation, the second for the context.

"The principle of similars [or 'like cures like'] is a central homeopathic principle. The principle states that a disease can be cured by a substance that produces similar symptoms in healthy people. Most analyses have concluded that there is little evidence to support homeopathy as an effective treatment for any specific condition; although, some studies have reported positive findings."

Respected skeptic Steven Barrett is more blunt. He says this about homeopathy: "Homeopathic 'remedies' enjoy a unique status in the health marketplace: They are the only category of quack products legally marketable as drugs." That's just the beginning of his essay. Read the full post on Barrett's site, Quackwatch. [LA Times, 2/7/2011]

In online videos, James Randi consumes an overdose of homeopathic sleeping pills to demonstrate that they have no effect, and skeptics elsewhere consumed large overdoses of other homeopathic drugs in similar demonstrations. Randi also offered $1 million of his own money to any manufacturer of a homeopathic product who could prove that the product actually worked as claimed, and challenged major retailers like CVS, Rite-Aid and Walgreens to remove the products from their shelves. [LA Times, 2/5/2011]

"Consumers have the right to know what they are buying," he said. "No one should walk out of a drugstore with a homeopathic product without knowing these basic facts: There is no credible evidence that the product does what it says. There is not one bit -- not a single atom -- of the claimed 'active ingredient' in the package, and no U.S. health agency has tested or approved the product." [LA Times, 2/5/2011]

There is a corrective: good news. British skeptics have been working hard to fight homeopathy, UK doctors have called for a ban on homeopathic 'medicines', and the doctors have voted to make homeopathy unsupported by the national health service! Reason triumphs for once! At least, it triumphs on the other side of the Atlantic. The University of Minnesota still supports homeopathy.

Recently an exhaustive review of the evidence for homeopathy led the UK Science and Technology Committee to conclude that homeopathy should not work, it does not work, and all public support for homeopathy and homeopathy research should be halted. [Science-Based-Medicine]

If you don't understand why rational people oppose homeopathy, maybe you need to read a cartoon about it. Darryl Cunningham has made a clever and revealing comic:
http://darryl-cunningham.blogspot.com/2010/06/homeopathy.html

The Canadian program, Marketplace, did an excellent piece on homeopathy. (You view it on YouTube in two parts) Usually such mainstream media attention to homeopathy and similar topics falls into the trap of false balance – telling both sides and letting the audience decide. This is a reasonable journalistic default for political and social topics, but not for science. In science there is a level of objectivity and the logic and evidence is not always balanced on two sides of an issue. We don’t need to “balance” the opinions of an astronomer with the illogical ravings of an astrologer. (http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2011/cureorcon/)

CBC Marketplace - Homeopathy: Cure or Con?
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFKojcTknbU
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIr3Lo9zlLs

Homeopathy is on the ropes in the UK. Earlier in the year The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (STC) released a report, Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, essentially saying that homeopathy is bunk and should no longer be supported. Recently representatives of the British Medical Association (BMA) condemned homeopathy as “witchcraft.” [Telegraph, 5/15/2010]

Now the BMA is going one step further – calling for a ban on homeopathy in the UK. They do not want homeopathy to be illegal, but they want a ban on any National Health Service (NHS) support for homeopathy. The NHS currently spends about 20 million pounds a year on homeopathic remedies (about 0.01% of the NHS budget) and maintains four homeopathic hospitals. This is a small amount overall – but anything spent on homeopathy is a waste. More importantly, as the BMA notes, homeopathy has “no place in the modern health service." [Telegraph, 6/27/2010]

The BMA specifically recommends that the NHS stop paying for homeopathic treatments, and that doctors in training can no longer receive any of that training at any of the four homeopathic hospitals, as they are not compatible with modern “evidence-based” medicine. They also suggest that homeopathic remedies should not be sold in pharmacies unless they are clearly labeled as placebos, rather than medicine.

This is all good. It seems to be a result of attention being paid to homeopathy recently – both systematic reviews of evidence showing that it is non-scientific and does not work, as well as public ridicule – such as the 10^23 campaign and their recent mass suicide with homeopathic “remedies.” (http://www.1023.org.uk/)

There are now similar efforts to ban homeopathy in other countries, like India, which claims to have the largest homeopathic infrastructure in the world.
http://banhomeopathy.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.html

“Stupidity” is like “intelligence” – it is a multi-faceted thing. More to the point – the inability to tell if a treatment is working, because of the various placebo effects that create the illusion of a treatment effect even where none exists, is not about intelligence or stupidity. It’s like saying that people who are fooled by clever magician tricks are stupid. No, they are just people. Everyone can be fooled. Everyone can be fooled by anecdotes and placebo effects.

This is an established historical fact – millions of people thought they were cured by Abram’s Oscilloclast, which was nothing but a black box filled with useless machine parts. Radioactive tonics were popular around the turn of the 20th century. And blood letting was popular in many cultures for thousands of years... Further, homeopathy is only about 200 years old, developed at the end of the 18th century by Hahnemann.

Conclusion:

Homeopathy was invented in 1796 by German physician Samuel Hahnemann, apparently solely out of his imagination. He reasoned, without any physical proof, that if a chemical compound such as arsenic caused symptoms such as poisoning in high doses, then low doses of the same compound could reverse those symptoms, curing the problem. The therapy was achieved by diluting the chemical to such high dilutions, however, that none of the active ingredient actually remained in the drug. Advocates claim that the water retains some mystical "memory" of the chemical that has curative power, but no clinical trial has ever shown a homeopathic remedy to be effective - and there have been lots of them. [LA Times, 2/5/2011]

Ultimately, there has been extensive clinical studies of homeopathy, most of it useless, but the well-controlled trials show that homeopathy does not work – for anything. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20402610)

The simple fact is that homeopathic remedies are not remedies at all. They are nothing but water, with (in most cases) any active ingredients diluted to such a degree that nothing but water remains. Further, clinical studies, when viewed in total and not cherry picked, show that homeopathy (not surprisingly) does not work. The underlying principles of homeopathy, such as like cures like, is nothing but magical superstition.

Some may think homeopathy is just “natural” or plant-based remedies, when in fact it is witchcraft based upon pre-scientific superstitions.

Most homeopathic solutions are diluted far past the point where there is likely to be a single molecule of active ingredient left – and therefore claims for the homeopathic “law of infinitesimals” violates the law of mass action and the laws of thermodynamics.

Homeopathy is based upon the “law of similars” – which is nothing more than the ancient superstition of sympathetic magic.

Homepathy = H2O + Magical Thinking

Homeopaths are so self-deluded they think homeopathic treatments actually work. I accept that. But even when presented with evidence, they believe without question that homeopathy still works. We’ve looked at the research. You’ve heard the evidence. You now know how much of a placebo homeopathy is. Don’t ever fall into the trap of believing it works. That would be a danger and a disgrace to the many people who have died from homeopathic treatments. (http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html)

_________________________________________

Sources:

Homeopathy And Science: A Closer Look by Vic Stenger
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Medicine/Homeop.html

Homeopathy in Perspective by Anthony Campbell
http://books.google.com/books?id=raC4sP0Q8OYC&

Hippocratic Corpus
http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/artifacts/antiqua/humoral.cfm

Homeopathy's Law of Similars by Dr. Stephen Barrett
http://www.homeowatch.org/basic/similars.html

NCAHF Position Paper on Homeopathy
http://www.ncahf.org/pp/homeop.html

What does the best evidence tell us?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20402610

James Randi
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/jref-news/1208-feb5video.html

LA Times, 2/05/2011
http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-skeptics-homeopathy-01052011,0,2326137.story

LA Times, 2/07/2011
http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-james-randi-homeopathy-20110207,0,1260180.story

Neurologica
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=2775