Apathy Sketchpad

I’ve had an idea in my head for a short time now. I thought it’d be good if there was a website that stored all your usernames and passwords for things so that if you were using a different computer (say, in a hotel or a cybercafé or something) then you could just go there, put in one set of login details, and then it’d log you into all the others. So I wrote it, and put it up at logmein.apathysketchpad.com. You give it a URL, by edit-box or bookmarklet, and it extracts all the forms and shows you them. Then you fill in the login one and it remembers what you typed. Next time you come back to logmein it will show you a login button, with no input fields, for each site you’ve added. You can then loginto each one without typing anything. It stores and transmits your passwords unencrypted, pretty well by necessity, but there you go.

Only problem is, it doesn’t work. Not properly, anyway. Works a bit. There were a few problems. First, the URL the login is submitted to. It’s usually given relative to the page, and parsing the source URL to find out what the submission URL will be can be a pain. But that’s a problem I solved. Turns out, though, that some websites fill the login form with all sorts of weird stuff: expiring session IDs, gibberish I couldn’t figure out… I just replicated all hidden fields, and it usually seems to work, although some sites need their gibberish up-to-date and fail. But other websites, like vBulletin forums (like RealVG’s), didn’t accept POST requests from external websites — specifically blocking this kind of site from working. How annoying. (Particularly annoying that it probably does work it you’re running a crappy firewall.)

Feel free to play with it, or even use it, though. Some sites won’t; other sites won’t. I promise I won’t look at the password database. (Really, I ought to encrypt the database a bit — I’d still be able to decrypt it but I’d not see things by accident if I had to do maintenance. But since it doesn’t work, I didn’t bother.) If people think it works well enough I might make it look nice. But as it is I’m happy enough to chalk it up to just a good idea that didn’t work.

Ho hum.

This month, the Religious Crackpot Of The Month award (I love how these nutters just roll around, regular as clockwork, at least once a month) goes to General Sir Richard Dannatt, who is something called the Chief of General Staff, seen here in fancy dress as a magpie’s nest. He wins the award primarily for making this comment:

In my business, asking people to risk their lives is part of the job, but doing so without giving them the chance to understand that there is a life after death is something of a betrayal, and I think there is very much an obligation on …a Christian leader to include a spiritual dimension into his people’s preparations for operations, and the general conduct of their lives. Qualities and core values are fine as a universally acceptable moral baseline for leadership, but the unique life, death, resurrection and promises of Christ provide that spiritual opportunity that I believe takes the privilege of leadership to another level.

I think that’s all that I need to say to convince you he’s totally mad, but just for good measure I’ll ramble on a little further. My main problem with this is not that there isn’t a life after death (although there isn’t), but that if I were killed without knowing there was a life after death and there was, I’d be pleased, which is not really the same as feeling betrayed, whereas if some crackpot general had convinced me there was and there wasn’t, then I (or more realistically, those who survived me) would feel very betrayed, and that this would be quite justified because they had literally been betrayed.

Even if it could be proven beyond reasonable doubt that there was life after death, he’d still be wrong. Given that it hasn’t, he’s not only wrong, but his position is diametrically opposed to the truth. If you replace the word “without” with the word “after” and delete after the word “betrayal” then you arrive at the truth.

This blog is equally at fault, and is linked by Libby Purves, who has written an opinion piece without expressing one, which would appear to be an act both of spineless sham diplomacy and of sloppy journalism (which is ironic considering she calls her section a “guide to religion and thought” — non-overlapping magisteria if ever there were any). The Times also choose to back this report up with a piece by Ruth Gledhill, their “religious correspondent”, although judging by her output, “religious correspondent” is a description rather than a job title. This is what she said:

I understand the Ministry of Defence was not too impressed by Sir Richard’s unabashed evangelical take on the eschatological aspect of the job he does. … And yet, after all, someone’s got to be head of the Army. Surely, given the close daily contact with death and destruction that Army service entails as Iraq is all to sad a witness to, it’s better that the person responsible for all this is someone with strong religious beliefs.

She is a crap religious correspondent if she understands the issues that poorly. After that is an acknowledgement that other people may disagree, but unfortunately it isn’t a sentence so I can’t infer any views from it:

Or maybe there are some who think not, Islam, Christianity and the state of the world in general.

What the hell does that mean?

And perhaps more to the point, where is the secular reaction to this? Why is that exactly nowhere to be found anywhere on The Times’ website? Why do they have a special Irrational Correspondent and no rational reaction?

I don’t know why I ask such questions. I know already that there exists no answer that will satisfy me.

I work in image analysis. The major advantage of this is that when I criticise shows like 24 and Spooks for their utterly preposterous image enhancement software I can do so with a vague air of authority. But it’s not usually very exciting; not the kind of science that they can make a CSI style show about (although I thought that about maths, and they went ahead and made Numb3rs anyway*). So I was glad to see a forensic image analysis story in the Times today. It is the story of a very stupid paedophile who photographed himself sexually abusing young boys and put the photos on the internet. To prevent his arrest, he fired up some art package or other and distorted his face until you couldn’t tell who it was.

He used a fairly standard distortion that most packages call “twirl” or “whirlpool”. This was not smart. Had he used “blur”, he’d still be loose. Had he used “pixellate”, he’d be on the streets. Those effects destroy image information. But he used “twirl”. The thing about “twirl” is that it’s technically a transform: it doesn’t remove any information from the picture, and that means you can reconstruct the original, with a little patience and preferably a copy of MATLAB. Unfortunately, my laptop with MATLAB installed is currently not working, so I can’t fire it up and show you how to do this, but I can explain it. First, here’s the image he released and the image the police reconstructed from it:

Image source: AFP

The effect is pretty simple, and you’ve probably already figured out how it’s done, but to make it explicit, here it is in mathematical terms. Working in polar coordinates, you shift the image in θ, where the shift (which we should call φ) depends on R. (If you’re not familiar with the notation, R is the distance from the centre of the swirl and θ is the angle that distance is at.) For full nerd points, here’s the equation:

θ_f = θ_i + Sφ(R)

More generally it should be θ_f = θ_i + φ(S, R), but the art package designers probably didn’t set out to make this difficult. They probably didn’t expect it would be used in this way.

I’ve used S as the strength of the effect that you get to choose. The simplest way to undo this effect is to simply apply the same distortion in the other direction: subtract Sφ(R) and you get θ_i back. First we need to know where the centre of the swirl is, but that’s relatively simple. The patterning behind him shows us the edge of the circle, so finding the centre isn’t too hard, and that’s led to people (such as what is at the moment the only commenter on the Times article above) saying that this should have been an easy fire-up-PhotoShop-and-press-twirl fix. Problem is that all paint programmes use a slightly different φ(R). So really you’re just left playing around with something like MATLAB to find a φ(R) that works. That’s why the reconstructed image above still looks a bit like he’s hypnotising you with his Scary Eye.

My preferred approach would be to knock up a MATLAB interface that let me draw a φ(R) on a pair of axes and then showed me the image it resulted in. I reckon I could detwirl that image to a recognisable whole in an afternoon. And yet…

The hunt began three years ago when German police discovered about 200 photos on the internet of a man sexually abusing young Asian boys. But the man’s face had been digitally scrambled and it was only 11 days ago that German police were finally able to reconstruct an identifiable image of the man who had eluded them for so long.

I can’t imagine how you could spend three years on that. If you can’t do it to a good approximation in a week then it’s probably impossible, and if you can then I don’t see how there could be three years of work in it.

There are 200 images, of course, but it’s safe to assume he’s used the same software to do each one. There aren’t many distorts that don’t destroy the image information, so probably many of those images were useless. The rest, you can reconstruct in the same way. They’ll use the same φ(R).

It’s not as simple as it looks at first glance, but… I just can’t see three years’ work in that. Doing it in a couple of months would have got him caught much sooner. Also now, of course, they have to computer-graphically age the image three years.

Well. Perhaps if my laptop is mended I shall have a go and see how hard it actually is, and then I’ll be able to say properly. But probably by the time my laptop gets fixed I shall be too distracted by the flying pigs and so forth.

Still, it could happen.

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*I’m given to understand that the maths in Numb3rs was mostly pretty good, although they did approximate e to three.

I’ve been playing with Pandora, an excellent service that is supposed to learn your taste in music and play more stuff like that. It works by identifying qualities that you like, such as subtle vocal harmonies, major rock tonalities, piano melodies, and so forth, and qualities you don’t like, such as James Blunt, and playing you only songs that seem to pass these tests. (It’s not meant to work outside America, so tell nobody I showed you this.) So I put in “The Divine Comedy”, and it played my a track I’d never heard before, and I liked it. Then it had a couple of bad guesses, and then it started improving. And then it played me a song I really liked, Songs That We Sing, by a French girl I’d never heard of, called Charlotte Gainsbourg. I’m going to try something potentially disastrous now and embed a YouTube video in my blog. (Oh, God, I feel dirty just typing that. I shall console myself with the idea that YouTube is really just Google Video in a cheap, consumerist disguise…) Anyhow, here’s the song in question:

I felt quite pleased with myself. I usually don’t stray far outside my little musical comfort zone, full of piano melodies I could never hope to reproduce, complex percussive things I wouldn’t know how to reproduce, and dulcet baritones I’ve been asked not to reproduce. There are very few songs with female lead vocals in my collection, other than commercialist pop I’ve inherited from somewhere and an Alanis Morrisette album. Oh, and Air. I thought I’d discovered something different here.

So I ran the name through Google, and learned that this was an album written by Air, with lyrics by Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon. So well done, Pandora. Music Genome project, indeed. An RSS feed could have managed that!

Pandora, why is this song playing? Based on the music you’ve told us you liked, we played this song because it contains being-written-by-the-same-guy, along with many other qualities identified by the Music Genome Project.

Pah.

I went out last night with some friends for a Chinese meal. I’m aware that Chinese tastes differ from western ones, but there were eight of us there and we all go there regularly. We like Chinese food. But apparently the Chinese aren’t very good at desserts. The last few times we’ve been there, there’s been mounting curiosity from the group about a desert called “Donkey Rolled In Mud”. I’d tasted the thing before, and I made a point of telling everyone how bad the thing was, but they ordered it anyway, probably because I couldn’t actually remember what the hell it was like, other than that all five people there last time had hated it.

The moment it arrived, the whole memory came flooding back, of course, which is good because it saved my trying the thing again. And to be honest, I’m not sure I could have usefully described it even if I had remembered it sooner: it’s unlike everything. I could no more describe it succinctly than I could describe the colour green to a blind man. (I mean a man blind from birth — the blind, not being insane, don’t insist on a capitalisation to distinguish congenital and acquired disability.)

I’m told it’s made with red beans. These, I surmise, are the brown gooey filling — presumably the eponymous mud. I can only guess that this is smeared onto the squishy grey gel that forms what I assume is the “donkey”. This stuff tastes of nothing very much, and it looks like a grey gel. The closest substance in the realm of normal human experience (if you exclude the Chinese, and how many of them can there possibly be?) is probably snot, the main difference being that some people eat snot. A more similar, but less well-known, substance is the stuff they put on cheap action figures to allow them to flip down walls — sticky enough to cling but not enough to bear its own weight for long.

This whole thing starts to resemble something that was squeezed out of a spot on one of the noses on Mount Rushmore, and so to stop it looking quite so gross it’s sprinkled with something brown and vaguely unpleasant, which clings to the tacky white mush in little clumps. The best word to describe it is “encrusted”, and not in the “diamonds” way.

The experience of eating one is very strange. It doesn’t actively taste bad, but then, it tastes so decidedly unlike anything you’ve ever eaten that it takes you several bites to realise that it’s gross, and all through that time you have to put up with the texture, which is how I imagine eating wet blu-tack must feel. When you bite through it, sometimes the bean goo moves around, and the layers of gel touch. When this happens, the layers merge. It seems you cannot have two blocks of gel touching any more than you can have two holes touching: you have one big one.

I assume the ridiculous name is there to get people curious about it. I suspect the Chinese characters next to it say “this is not a dessert — it is just a trick to see what the locals will eat”. What I’m trying to say is: if you’re ever curious, don’t indulge that curiosity. The curiosity is more enjoyable than the equivalent dessert.

I’ve seen twelve people try Donkey Rolled In Mud. Based on that experience, you have a one in twelve chance of liking it.

Recently, the Government released a document called Faith In The System, which was a good title because it simultaneously describes the problem, the proposed solution, and what I lost whilst reading it. I’ve done a previous entry, more immediately after the document was published, which covered faith schools more generally. I suspect most of it will be covered here, but there’s the link if you want it. This entry is more concerned with a very wordy correspondence on the subject, which is so lengthy that it belongs firmly after what I understand is called “the fold” in blogger jargon. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the country’s newspapers (indeed, most of the world’s, judging by a Google News search) have recently published a story about acupuncture, and most of them got the facts wrong. I should declare now that my University of Manchester Athens login doesn’t provide me with access rights to read the full article, but I can read the abstract online, and so can you.

But first, let’s look at what the papers say about it. The Independent has this to say:

Acupuncture is best way to treat back pain, study finds
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 25 September 2007

The ancient Chinese practice of acupuncture works better than anything modern medicine has devised for the treatment of back pain, scientists have concluded.

In trials among 1,100 patients with chronic lower back pain which had lasted for an average of eight years, almost half (47 per cent) of those who received acupuncture showed significant improvement – compared with barely a quarter (27 per cent) of those given conventional treatment.

…

The results showed that 44 per cent of volunteers suffering from back pain showed a significant improvement with sham acupuncture.

The Telegraph said this:

Acupuncture ‘best therapy for back pain’
By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:39am BST 26/09/2007

Acupuncture can provide significantly more relief from lower back pain than conventional therapies, scientists say.

The Chinese needle treatment was 74 per cent more likely to lead to a sustained reduction in pain or improved ability to function normally than physiotherapy, medication and advice on exercise, according to German researchers.

…

However, the study also found “sham acupuncture” — in which needles are applied away from points usually used in traditional Chinese medicine — to be almost as effective.

The Daily Mail went with this:

Acupuncture ‘provides twice the pain relief of standard medicine’
By SIMON CABLE
Last updated at 09:38am on 25th September 2007

Acupuncture is twice as effective at reducing lower back pain than conventional medicines, according to researchers.

But pretend acupuncture, where the needles are inserted less deeply, has also been found to have a similar effect, suggesting that the pain relief could be psychological.

…

It had previously been believed that the process whereby needles are inserted into the skin, was only effective if the needles were inserted at precisely the right points on the body.

But the study suggests that there are in fact no physical effects at all, and that the healing of pain stems from the patients psychological conviction that they are getting better.

Here’s the BBC’s coverage:

Needles ‘are best for back pain’
No author credited.
Last Updated: Tuesday, 25 September 2007, 07:44 GMT 08:44 UK

Acupuncture – real or sham – is more effective at treating back pain than conventional therapies, research suggests.

A German team found almost half the patients treated with acupuncture felt pain relief.

But the Archives of Internal Medicine study also suggests sham acupuncture works nearly as well as the real thing.

And Channel 4’s (who have been congratulating themselves for their news coverage on More4 lately):

Acupuncture ‘better for back pain’
Last Modified: 25 Sep 2007
Source: PA News

Acupuncture and even sham acupuncture are more effective treatments of lower back pain than conventional therapy, a new study has suggested.

…

After six months, almost half of the verum acupuncture group (47.6%) and only slightly fewer (44.2%) of the sham acupuncture group had met this criteria.

This compared to only 27.4% of the conventional therapy group.

Each of the above extracts states explicitly that the study shows conventional treatments are less effective than acupuncture, and all of them except The Daily Mail and The Times’ opinion piece state or imply that “real” (or verum) acupuncture is better than sham acupuncture. Neither of these conclusions are supported by the study. (For bonus points, the BBC incorrectly attributed the study to the Archives of Internal Medicine whose involvement was just to publish it, and the Independent mis-spells the name of the university whose employees conducted the study.)

The study’s abstract states that “response rate was 47.6% in the verum acupuncture group, 44.2% in the sham acupuncture group, and 27.4% in the conventional therapy group”. It’s easy to see why the journalists thought that the study showed verum acupuncture was better than sham acupuncture, but the abstract then states:

Differences among groups were as follows:

• verum vs sham, 3.4% (95% confidence interval, –3.7% to 10.3%; P = .39)
• verum vs conventional therapy, 20.2% (95% confidence interval, 13.4% to 26.7%; P < .001)
• sham vs conventional therapy, 16.8% (95% confidence interval, 10.1% to 23.4%; P < .001)

A p-value is the odds of getting a result this compelling if you assume there’s no difference between the groups. A p-value of less than 0.05 is considered significant, and a p-value of less than 0.001 is preferred. In this case, we see that the results of any kind of acupuncture compared to the control group are very unlikely if the acupuncture has no effect, but there was a 39% chance of getting a result this compelling by chance alone between the verum and sham acupuncture groups. That’s hardly unlikely.

All scientific results have margins of errors in them. We can’t be sure what the absolute value of results are, but we can say there’s a 50% chance it’s within x range, and a 60% chance it’s within y range, and so on. A “95% confidence interval” is the range that we’re 95% sure the answer lies in. Generally, if the range includes zero we shouldn’t draw conclusions. Again, by this test the sham-vs-verum is the only pair of groups that show no difference at all.

This study does nothing to suggest that verum acupuncture is better than sham. Quoting the 47%, 42%, 27% statistics without also mentioning that the difference between the first two is statistically insignificant is misleading.

As for the other conclusion, that acupuncture is better than conventional treatment, that’s not supported either, because the study simply didn’t address that. All the subjects were, according to the abstract, ones “with a history of chronic low back pain for a mean of 8 years”, so they’re obviously pre-selecting people whose back pains don’t respond well to conventional treatment. The 27% who responded to such treatment in the study are therefore likely to be mostly examples of a form of the Placebo Effect and of the Hawthorne Effect, where people who know they’re in a trial respond to treatment better than they otherwise would, even when the treatment is the same. If you selected people whose back pain had just started then you would address the question of how effective acupuncture is compared to conventional treatment. Of course, you’d have a job getting it past an ethics committee.

Slightly more worryingly, the National Review Of Medicine’s article is little better than the Daily Mail’s, opening with a false conclusion, and Nursing In Practice’s was much the same. The Times’ Dr Copperfield observed that it was strange that the conventional treatment was as much worse than acupuncture but didn’t realise why — probably because he’d read the press release but not the original research paper.

Personally, I’m happy to attribute a lot of this nonsense to said press release. It comes from the journal’s parent organisation, JAMA, and says:

Got a backache? Get acupuncture
Sep 24, 2007

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Acupuncture could prove more effective then conventional treatment in curing back pain, according to a new study released Monday.

…

After six months, 47.6 percent of those receiving Chinese acupuncture had noticed an improvement in their condition, along with 44.2 percent in the sham group.

Only 27.4 percent of the group receiving conventional therapy however, reported any improvement, noted the study in the journal which is part of the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) group.

“The superiority of both forms of acupuncture suggests a common underlying mechanism that may act on pain generation, transmission of pain signals or processing of pain signals by the central nervous system and that is stronger than the action mechanism of conventional therapy,” the authors said.

Nowhere does it mention that the difference between sham and verum acupuncture is not significant. (The final paragraph was reproduced by all the newspapers, but it’s really just speculation by the authors of the study. It isn’t supported by the study, which by design does nothing to suggest that the effect is anything other than placebo.)

The newspapers all faithfully reproduced this press release without apparent reference to the original paper. Possibly this is because the press release didn’t contain a link to the original paper, or even the abstract. But frankly I demand more of journalists than this. It took me less than a minute to get from the Independent’s article, via Google, to the original paper. Surely it’s not asking too much for journalists to expend the same amount of effort for their national newspapers as I do for this blog, and do one minute’s research in order to produce a story that isn’t wrong?

Why do we even have journalists if they can’t be trusted to report accurately? What possible use are they, given that?

And exactly how far into the End Times must we be when The Daily Mail have the most accurate report of a scientific study? I think it’s time to repent.

The site is now readable and non-hideous with Internet Explorer. That’s all you’re getting until you download a real browser.

I’ve just uploaded a zip file containing five applications I’ve written which you cannot live without. I say this confidently because there are 18 applications in there and I use at least two of them most days at work. Here they are, divided into broad categories. The first category is probably the most useful for non-geeks, the second is indispensable for geeks, and the third is mostly no good to anyone.

The “The Screen Is An Art Package” Applications

These are designed to go in a quicklaunch bar, or in an Aquadock, or something. They all allow you to run simple image manipulation on the entire screen. Some are useful only for people who do a lot of work with images (and don’t want to fire up The GIMP every time they get an email), others are just really, really useful. They are:

• Brightness And Contrast* — make faint images visible without having to copy-paste into an art package.
• Channel Splitter* — toggle display of red, green, blue, hue, saturation, and value of the screen.
• Colour Picker* — find out the RGB code of any pixel. Also shows HTML colour codes which you can copy to the clipboard.
• Copy* — drag a box on the screen and it will copy that area to the clipboard.
• Filters* — apply blur, sharpen, edge detection or any custom filter to the entire screen
• Freeze — prevent an area of screen from updating. You can also use the programme to quickly grab an area of screen, and move it around. It is very useful for comparing graphs, keeping headers in scrolling tables, and making quick notes from a document you’re reading.
• Histogram* — see a histogram of the area of screen you select.
• Morphology* — erode and dilate the screen. Useful really only for imaging types.
• Paintbrush — this allows you to draw on the screen, and then continue to work with the painted lines still visible. This is useful for all kinds of different things, as well as being basically awesome.
• Save* — drag an area of screen, and save it to a file. Nothing you can’t ordinarily do, but it’s so much faster…
• Thresholder** — threshold the screen image.

Regular Expressions Applications

Regular Expressions is a massively useful standard for doing very advanced find-and-replace operations. I’ve built two little programmes around it:

• RegExp — a command line utility that takes standard inputs, applies a regular expressions search to them, then gives the results as standard outputs. It can be used by anyone who understands the Windows console properly to run regexp find-and-replace on any text file or to create a batch file based on a directory structure. To be honest it should have been built into Windows to begin with. Put it in a folder on your PATH environment variable, or else add its folder to PATH (using contol panel > system > advanced > environment variables).
• RegExp File Renamer* — takes a regular expression pattern and a folder of files, and applies the find-and-replace rule to all filenames therein. It’s ridiculously useful. It has a preview feature so you can test the expression before applying it to your precious data, and it can copy, delete, move and rename on demand.

Everything Else

• AnyOverlay — drag a picture onto this window (or load one with the right-click menu) and you can keep it always-on-top, resized, semitransparent, and/or masked to a colour. Useful for aligning things and comparing images. Also pretty handy just for previewing images.
• Coverer And Measurer — tiny application which can be always-on-top (to hide things from people) and displays its dimensions, so you can use it to measure screen distances.
• Folder Viewer* –not the easiest to use application, but it’s designed to help you flick through a lot of folders each with the same images in. I can’t imagine this will be as useful to you as it is to me.
• Text File Combiner — it allows you to combine text files in unusual ways, sticking the new file to the top, bottom, left or right of the old. It’s not great but I’ve used it before and it helped.
• Video Calibration Tool* — calibrate webcams, USB cameras, TV cards, and the like. It shows you the live feed and the histogram, so you can make sure you’re getting the most from it. Probably only of interest to people who need such cameras for something more important than Skype.

You can download it here. All the applications in it require .NET, because they wouldn’t exist otherwise.

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*This was already available from this website but I put it in here anyway because I just don’t care — these mostly belong together, and storing extra data on this server is dirt cheap anyway, and I honestly can’t recall if these programmes have been updated since I last uploaded them. If your RegExp File Renamer is case sensitive then they have; the new one isn’t.**These are available as one combined app, before I split them because it wasn’t practical to add everything else to it.

This is a post from Quackometer, originally found here, posted Thursday, August 16, 2007. His hosts, Netcetera, decided got a complaint from the Society of Homeopaths and decided that they’d rather have him take the page down than risk any further action. This decision was wrong, and Netcetera are a bunch of weasels. My hosts, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net, I’m given to understand are not weasels and have no truck with such complaints. As far as I’m concerned that makes them better hosts.

In any case, if you want to complain to my hosts, then please do, there’s a link above. And guys, if anyone does complain then please pass it on — I could use a laugh. Not that it would matter, since the post is now everywhere. This is what happens when you try to silence the internet. I’m reproducing it here principally because I assume the Society of Homeopaths would like me not to.

The Society of Homeopaths (SoH) are a shambles and a bad joke. It is now over a year since Sense about Science, Simon Singh and the BBC Newsnight programme exposed how it is common practice for high street homeopaths to tell customers that their magic pills can prevent malaria. The Society of Homeopaths have done diddly-squat to stamp out this dangerous practice apart from issue a few ambiguously weasel-worded press statements.

The SoH has a code of practice, but my feeling is that this is just a smokescreen and is widely flouted and that the Society do not care about this. If this is true, then the code of practice is nothing more than a thin veneer used to give authority and credibility to its deluded members. It does nothing more than fool the public into thinking they are dealing with a regulated professional.

As a quick test, I picked a random homeopath with a web site from the SoH register to see if they flouted a couple of important rules:

48 • Advertising shall not contain claims of superiority.
• No advertising may be used which expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.

72 To avoid making claims (whether explicit or implied; orally or in writing) implying cure of any named disease.

The homeopath I picked on is called Julia Wilson and runs a practice from the Leicestershire town of Market Harborough. What I found rather shocked and angered me.

Straight away, we find that Julia M Wilson LCHE, RSHom specialises in asthma and works at a clinic that says,

Many illnesses and disease can be successfully treated using homeopathy, including arthritis, asthma, digestive disorders, emotional and behavioural difficulties, headaches, infertility, skin and sleep problems.

Well, there are a number of named diseases there to start off. She also gives a leaflet that advertises her asthma clinic. The advertising leaflet says,

Conventional medicine is at a loss when it comes to understanding the origin of allergies. … The best that medical research can do is try to keep the symptoms under control. Homeopathy is different, it seeks to address the triggers for asthma and eczema. It is a safe, drug free approach that helps alleviate the flaring of skin and tightening of lungs…

Now, despite the usual homeopathic contradiction of claiming to treat causes not symptoms and then in the next breath saying it can alleviate symptoms, the advert is clearly in breach of the above rule 47 on advertising as it implicitly claims superiority over real medicine and names a disease.

Asthma is estimated to be responsible for 1,500 deaths and 74,000 emergency hospital admissions in the UK each year. It is not a trivial illness that sugar pills ought to be anywhere near. The Cochrane Review says the following about the evidence for asthma and homeopathy,

The review of trials found that the type of homeopathy varied between the studies, that the study designs used in the trials were varied and that no strong evidence existed that usual forms of homeopathy for asthma are effective.

This is not a surprise given that homeopathy is just a ritualised placebo. Hopefully, most parents attending this clinic will have the good sense to go to a real accident and emergency unit in the event of a severe attack and consult their GP about real management of the illness. I would hope that Julia does little harm here.

However, a little more research on her site reveals much more serious concerns. She says on her site that ’she worked in Kenya teaching homeopathy at a college in Nairobi and supporting graduates to set up their own clinics’. Now, we have seen what homeopaths do in Kenya before. It is not treating a little stress and the odd headache. Free from strong UK legislation, these missionary homeopaths make the boldest claims about the deadliest diseases.

A bit of web research shows where Julia was working (picture above). The Abha Light Foundation is a registered NGO in Kenya. It takes mobile homeopathy clinics through the slums of Nairobi and surrounding villages. Its stated aim is to,

introduce Homeopathy and natural medicines as a method of managing HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria in Kenya.

I must admit, I had to pause for breath after reading that. The clinic sells its own homeopathic remedies for ‘treating’ various lethal diseases. Its MalariaX potion,

is a homeopathic preparation for prevention of malaria and treatment of malaria. Suitable for children. For prevention. Only 1 pill each week before entering, during and after leaving malaria risk areas. For treatment. Take 1 pill every 1-3 hours during a malaria attack.

This is nothing short of being totally outrageous. It is a murderous delusion. David Colquhoun has been writing about this wicked scam recently and it is well worth following his blog on the issue.

Let’s remind ourselves what one of the most senior and respected homeopaths in the UK, Dr Peter Fisher of the London Homeopathic Hospital, has to say on this matter.

there is absolutely no reason to think that homeopathy works to prevent malaria and you won’t find that in any textbook or journal of homeopathy so people will get malaria, people may even die of malaria if they follow this advice.

Malaria is a huge killer in Kenya. It is the biggest killer of children under five. The problem is so huge that the reintroduction of DDT is considered as a proven way of reducing deaths. Magic sugar pills and water drops will do nothing. Many of the poorest in Kenya cannot afford real anti-malaria medicine, but offering them insane nonsense as a substitute will not help anyone.

Ironically, the WHO has issued a press release today on cheap ways of reducing child and adult mortality due to malaria. Their trials, conducted in Kenya, of using cheap mosquito nets soaked in insecticide have reduced child deaths by 44% over two years. It says that issuing these nets be the ‘immediate priority’ to governments with a malaria problem. No mention of homeopathy. These results were arrived at by careful trials and observation. Science. We now know that nets work. A lifesaving net costs $5. A bottle of useless homeopathic crap costs $4.50. Both are large amounts for a poor Kenyan, but is their life really worth the 50c saving?

I am sure we are going to hear the usual homeopath bleat that this is just a campaign by Big Pharma to discredit unpatentable homeopathic remedies. Are we to add to the conspiracy Big Net manufacturers too?

If I can just interject here — the above paragraph is quite incredibly ironic, and slightly prescient, given the development since. I particularly liked the bit about “Big Net manufacturers”… –Andrew

It amazes me that to add to all the list of ills and injustices that our rich nations impose on the poor of the world, we have to add the widespread export of our bourgeois and lethal healing fantasies. To make a strong point: if we can introduce laws that allow the arrest of sex tourists on their return to the UK, can we not charge people who travel to Africa to indulge their dangerous healing delusions?

At the very least, we could expect the Society of Homeopaths to try to stamp out this wicked practice? Could we?

A lot of people have complained about the Society of Homeopaths since this started. Personally, I’d like to depart from that model and complain about Netcetera. If you’re willing to take down a user’s page just because someone asks you to, you are not in any meaningful sense a web host. Put the page back, you great nancies, and stop running a mile the moment you’re served with a crayon-scrawled cease-and-desist. They’re mostly from big organisations bullying you for their own selfish ends, and if you capitulate then you’re pathetic.

(Update: I’ve edited the thread title slightly, and added a few links, after it became apparent that an inadvertent Googlebomb is happening. It’s perhaps less inadvertent now.)