Homeopathy simply explained: What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is an effective system of healing which assists the natural tendency of the body to heal itself. It recognises that symptoms of ill health are expressions of disharmony within the whole person and that it is the patient who needs treatment not the disease.

In 1796, a German doctor, Samuel Hahnemann, discovered a different approach to the cure of the sick which he called homeopathy (from the Greek words meaning ’similar suffering’). Like Hippocrates two thousand years earlier, he realised there were two ways of treating ill health: the way of opposites, most commonly used by conventional medicine and the way of similars.

Hahnemann discovered that diluting and succussing (shaking) remedies, which homeopaths call potentisation, not only produced fewer side effects but also produced better results. Homeopathic remedies are drawn from the natural world and prescribed on the principle of treating “like with like” or the way of similars.

How does it work?

Scientists cannot yet explain the precise mechanism of action for homeopathy but there is published evidence of its efficacy. It is believed that homeopathic remedies work by stimulating the body’s own healing abilities and that this stimulus assists your own system to clear itself of any expressions of imbalance. For more details on research evidence, please see the Society’s website at www.homeopathy-soh.org.

That’s not too bad. I’ve crossed out very little by homeopathic dilution standards.

I’m going to skip over the argument for choice within the NHS, as I think that’s more to do with entitlement issues and the persecution complex fringe groups always adopt when their absurd privileges are taken away — hence every ‘attack on Christianity’ news report you’ve ever read or the endless ‘put the football on the BBC’ petitions on the 10 Downing Street website. The problem with ‘choice’ as an argument for providing alternative remedies is that their practitioners are intent on taking away any choice you may have.

A particularly gutsy Deal Or No Deal contestant may find themselves offered the swap with only the 1p and £250,000 boxes in play. Their dilemma, essentially, is between the prize in box 4 and the prize in box 17. One of them is life-changing money, the other won’t cover their bus fare if they live down the road. If they call it wrong, we wouldn’t incredulously ask them why anyone would want 1p instead of £250,000. They were never given a meaningful choice.

Both extremes of the ‘choice’ argument can agree on one thing: homeopathy and evidence-based medicine do not both work. One of them cures diseases, and the other is a waste of time and money. A patient given a choice between homeopathy and real medicine is in the same position as the Deal Or No Deal contestant above: they want the medicine that will cure their disease, but they don’t know which box it’s in. The patient has no meaningful choice until they’re told which medicine works (at which point they still have no meaningful choice since one option just seems silly).

An uninformed choice is no choice at all, so the people pushing for consumer choice are the skeptics who work to disseminate evidence of efficacy or lack thereof, to expose quacks and to debunk media scare stories. They are giving people the information which enables them to make a choice. Homeopaths are effectively arguing that we are ‘anti-choice’ because we want to give people information that will make the choice so easy it will cease to exist. I think they are anti-choice because they deprive people of information that makes the choice meaningful — and often give out misinformation that makes the answer to their dilemma both obvious and wrong. When they die of a treatable condition, will the homeopath stand up in court and say ‘this is what he chose’?

Nobody is arguing that consumers should have a choice between conventional business deals and Nigerian princes who e-mail them opportunities.

The way homeopathy works — I say ‘works’. The way homeopathy is thought to work — I say ‘thought’. The way homeopathy is believed to work is by a principle called ‘like cures like’. So you cure a disease using something that causes the same symptoms (even though they tell you that homeopathy treats diseases, not symptoms unlike, they say, something which they call ‘allopathy’ and which everyone else calls ‘medicine’). So, for example, say you have fractured limbs. As any player of Theme Hospital will tell you, Fractured Limbs is caused by falling from high places onto concrete, so you might get some concrete, put it in a glass of water and call it medicine. That’s a rather facetious example, but you can genuinely buy homeopathic remedies made with dolphin song or the light of Venus. The light of Venus? What disease does that cause? I think if you’re exposed to significant amounts of Venus-light then the terrible heat and the atmosphere of sulphuric acid will be what does for you. Homeopaths work out what diseases to flog these esoteric tinctures for by giving them to healthy people and writing down what it does to them. In case nothing happens, they omit such extravagances as a control group or any statistical tests, so they get the same guaranteed results as the N = 1 science of Braniac. They call these experiments ‘provings’, which is a bit like me writing ‘working’ on my timesheet when I was actually doodling: it is what I would like people to believe I was doing.

Anyway. You take your medicine, which you’ve carefully selected to be the worst possible thing you could give the patient, and dilute it. This, homeopaths conveniently assert, reduces its harmful effects while amplifying its presumed healing properties. You take a drop of the water with your medicine in, and put it in 10ml of fresh water, which is assumed to be about a 1:100 dilution, which they call “1C”. Then you shake it, or hit it with a book. (That obviously achieves nothing, so it can be fun to leave it out, thereby making homeopaths say amusingly daft things like ‘well of course it’s going to sound silly if you don’t mention the succussion’, which is the word they invented for hitting things with books.) Then you repeat the dilution, and succussion, so you have a 1:10,000 dilution, which they call “2C” and then again so you have a 1:1,000,000, or “3C” dilution. They call it a ‘potency’ instead of a ‘dilution’ because that sounds more like it might work, but chemists may recognise this as the technique used to remove all trace of a chemical from titration pipettes (except they’re delicate so you don’t hit them with books). Homeopathic remedies are routinely sold at a potency of “100C”, which means…

The problem with a 100C dilution is that it’s beyond analogy or satire. A 60C dilution would have to literally fill the entire universe before it had even a remotely realistic chance of containing a single molecule. When homeopathy was first imagined, we didn’t know about Avogadro’s Number, but now we know that beyond 12C there are generally no molecules left of the original medicine. It’s just a glass of water. So modern homeopaths have invented a thing called the ‘memory of water’. Some of them write long pieces of gibberish about quantum theory which read like a shooting script for one of the sillier episodes of Star Trek Voyager, but mostly they pin their meagre hopes on some kind of unspecified crystalline microstructures which they say form around molecules in water, and which heal your body somehow and don’t get damaged by being repeatedly hit with a book. Of course nobody has ever shown the memory of water effect in a laboratory or that homeopathic remedies have any therapeutic effect, but they write a lot more entertaining but merit-free quantum bullshit to explain that away. This empty water can optionally be soaked into a sugar pill if liquid medicine isn’t your thing, so my advice would be not to give hyperactive children homeopathic sleeping pills.

The problem with the ‘memory of water’ hypothesis (aside from the fact that it isn’t true) is that beyond a 24C dilution there is none of the 12C solution left either, so water would not only have to remember what it contained, but communicate this information to some future water. A 100C dilution would have had to do this at least four times. This aqueous Chinese-whispers obviously has no active ingredient, and homeopaths therefore believe that the real power of homeopathy is that it activates the body’s own healing powers, which sounds very natural and healthy but raises two rather important questions, the first of which is ‘why doesn’t the body just use those powers in the first place?’, and the second of which is ‘what environment did mankind evolve in where this was the best system?’. Developing an immune system that needs kick-starting by some water which used to have poison in it seems to me like an evolutionary mis-step.

No, the immune system evolved to try its level best to fix anything that might go wrong in the body, but it’s a bit of an ad-hoc job and doesn’t always get it right. Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it fails, and sometimes epically backfires and kills its owner. Modern medicine works by giving a group of intelligent people a deep understanding and knowledge of anatomy, asking them to interfere with the natural progression of a disease, and banking on their expertise to make a better fist of it than the body’s in-built system, which by the way is the same system that reckons if you don’t wash your face enough you need a load of spots that hurt to clean. It’s a slightly messy process, obviously, because there’s a finite number of options available, so we do massive amounts of research to discover every effect that every chemical and surgical procedure we can think of has on the body. Doctors look through that research to find one which will do what they need it to, and anything else it happens to do is called a ’side effect’ and the patient has to put up with them or take their chances with the disease.

Homeopaths, on the other hand, insist their medicine has no side effects. Much like the Daily Mail, they see the world as divided into ‘healing’ and ‘disease-causing’ things, and like the Daily Mail put everything on both lists. It’s just a pathetic piece of magical thinking which belies a complete lack of understanding of how the world works. It’s not divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things; things are right or wrong for a particular purpose. It’s this kind of thinking that leads to people putting deisel in a petrol engine, assuming they haven’t ruined it already by using 100C unleaded.

Homeopathic medicines in Boots, labelled with poncey Latin names to appear more credible. Hence the alternative spelling ‘homœopathy’.
photo credit: Gwyn Richards

And obviously people are perfectly free to think this way and to spend many a happy afternoon pointlessly diluting glasses of water and hitting them with books. Probably the ritual will make them feel better. But if people rely on this voodoo nonsense instead of real medicine, they die. And when they promote it over real medicine, they kill. Boots the Chemist have admitted in Parliament that there is no evidence that homeopathic medicines work, but they sell them anyway, alongside the real medicine, because “[their] customers think they work”. Campaigns like 10:23 are important to minimise the harm these things do.

Homeopaths will tell you that 10:23 does nothing to disprove homeopathy. The stunt is for loads of people to each chug an entire box of pills all at once to demonstrate that nothing happens. Such homeopathic overdose stunts have been done before, and homeopaths have got their excuse down pat by now: they say that any non-zero number of pills, if swallowed all at once, is the same as one pill. (I agree, apart from the ‘non-zero’ part.) They can say this, and indeed anything they like, because once you’ve effectively invoked magic, all bets are off. But the point isn’t to convince homeopaths — they’re far too invested to quit now — but to show everyone else how silly it is. If you have a bit of a cold and someone suggests you try homeopathy, and you do and you get better because it was only a cold, that can be quite convincing. But if we can goad the homeopathic community into publicly saying something as patently absurd as “one hundred pills is the same dose as one pill” then that’s a valuable victory. Anyone who’s seen that will think twice before entrusting their health to a homeopath. It also raises questions about why the packaging of these pills says to take a dose of two. That’s the business plan of a dodgy plumber.

That’s the point: we don’t need to disprove homeopathy. Aside from the fact that it is the homeopaths’ responsibility to prove their theory, all you need to do to homeopathy is hand it enough rope. A public awareness campaign is exactly the last thing homeopaths need.

Ann Widdecombe, who can always be relied upon to jump into the wrong side of any issue put before her, offered this dismal attempt at an explanation:

Look, you read your newspapers every day. Scientific advice changes almost as often as the wind.

You can hear this on iPlayer now; I heard about it from @krypto. And she’s right, of course, because the sum total of everything we know about the universe changes when we learn new things. Your choices are to go with what we know now, understanding that it could change in the future, or to make shit up and run with that. If you want to make shit up then fine (it’s called religion), but don’t foist your made up shit on me, and don’t employ a scientific advisor to make it look credible or else exactly this is bound to happen.

The Daily Mail’s A N Wilson also defended Johnson, who presumably wishes he wouldn’t, saying

The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth. He allowed scientists freedoms which a civilised government would have checked.

This was accompanied by an inset photo of Hitler until The Jan Moir Police made them take it down.

While obviously Wilson’s biggest crime against reason in that quote is kidnapping the word ‘only’ and dumping it, lost and confused, in front of an idea well outside its comfort zone, he’s also quaintly ignorant. Hitler was a big fan of science in principle, but corrupted it with quackery and racist ideology, and all but banned theoretical work as ‘Jewish science’ (except secretly where it might help his war effort). Anyone caught doing science that didn’t fit the racist message was fired. One mathematician even attempted to prove quantum mechanics and Nazism were the same thing. All of this is covered in John Grant’s Corrupted Science which I presume the Daily Mail’s A N Wilson hasn’t read, because it is a book.

Melanie Phillips, also of the Mail, implied pretty strongly that Nutt’s claims were simply wrong, which would at least be a legitimate defence of his sacking, were it true.

The reason they are casting the Home Secretary as the villain of this episode is that the chattering classes have bought into the idea that soft drugs are indeed less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. They therefore think Nutt is the voice of scientific reason.

But he is not.

She does, at least, appear to have read his speech, as she criticises it piece by context-free piece, which is perhaps as strong an endorsement as a scientific claim can get. Melanie Phillips’ views on science are almost uniformly opposed to reality. Take, for example her butchering of the Cochrane report on MMR or her support for ‘intelligent design’. Incidentally, Nutt’s speech cites the MMR fiasco as an example of harm done by ignoring evidence. Phillips doesn’t mention this. (For a better cricism of Nutt’s ideas, see the Transform blog post about the original paper.)

On what I will generously refer to as ‘the left’, Alan Johnson himself defended his actions by saying

Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with … He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy. This principle is well understood and long established.

Widdecombe also made this case. And it’s true, although irrelevant. This was a lecture about scientific work, not a campaign. In any case, I think it’s equally well understood and established that you can’t ignore science and expect your science adviser to sit there and let you get on with it. Even if Nutt had crossed the line into campaigning, I think he would have been justified in doing so. As it is, Nutt did little more than present an alternative idea for consideration and present arguments in its favour (i.e., science). Gordon Brown believes Nutt should be fired for this, “because we cannot send mixed messages”, an argument pre-emptively demolished by Nutt himself on page 12 of the PDF transcript.

Martin at LayScience.net points out [with my annotation in square brackets] that

nobody hearing Professor Nutt speaking about the government is going to confuse him with a Labour minister [and it was made clear Nutt was speaking only as a scientist], so the problem that Gordon Brown is referring to is the problem of a senior scientist publishing and publicising research that contradicts the government line. In Gordon Brown’s world of control freakery, such dissent is not to be tolerated.

which sounds familiar but I shan’t comment on why because I’m not sure what happens if both sides of an argument are compared to Hitler.

Don’t listen to these people, and don’t listen to me. Read Nutt’s speech for yourself. If you’re a scientist, you’ll find its structure and tone familiar and start to wonder what all the fuss was about. If not, just read it and then ask yourself if you’d consider it ‘campaigning against government policy’ or ‘a man telling a class what he does at work’.

From the b3ta newsletter, it’s OK Cupid’s analysis of what words and phrases are more successful than others at eliciting a response to a first-contact message. Essentially, it’s a formula for the perfect on-line chat-up line, and it basically reads ’spell right, don’t be a creep, and mention specific interests’. It’s just a blog post, so it’s still not really Proper, Peer-Reviewed Science, but there are enough mentions of N and f and statistical significance — all used quite correctly — as well as a note about anonymisation, that my instinct says they probably did it right. And the results are a nice mix of the obvious (read the other person’s profile), the counter-intuitive (confidence is bad) and the interesting (mentioning a religion is good but mentioning atheism is better).

In any case, it does what the original ‘perfect formulae’ story tried to do (or at least what its creator claims he tried to do and I see no reason to disbelieve him), which is to combine clever PR with an actual attempt to show how science can be relevant. And it worked, because here it is in the Telegraph, alongside a photo of attractive young people kissing each other, for purely illustrative reasons, naturally. Wouldn’t it be nice if companies realised they could get the PR without the sneers of intellectuals if they just did these things right?

Also I’m inclined to like it because it seems to say that self-effacing male atheist physicists are sexy. And I think we can all agree that that’s basically indisputable.

Seriously? You want me to believe that half the population of London actually think that see-through dead people float through the city rattling people’s drawers? I’m sorry, but that simply isn’t plausible to me. I know people are easily led and a bit gullible. I accept that. But I thought Theos said that 34% of people believe in Jesus and 33% say they’re not sure. You can’t simultaneously accept Christianity and believe in ghosts, and that only leaves 32%. Okay, so there are error margins on this but I don’t for a second accept that all atheists believe in ghosts — because I’m one and I don’t. Someone would have taken a photograph by now. I don’t think there’s anything that exists that hasn’t been photographed, aside perhaps from the Higgs Boson.

The director of Theos, Paul Wooley, said

The extent of belief will probably surprise people, but the finding is consistent with other research we have undertaken.

It’s consistent in that they all report implausibly high belief in ridiculous ideas, yes. Then he said

The results indicate that people have a very diverse and unorthodox set of beliefs.

…which I thought very charitable to the respondents.

I think what Theos are increasingly discovering is that surveys can’t be trusted. They are repeatedly finding that a sizable fraction of the population will say yes to anything you care to ask them. I’m quite prepared to believe that London is an unusually credulous city, but given that the 2001 survey tells me that 1.4% of its population is Jedi, I’m tempted to think it might also be a city that doesn’t poll well.

And astrology? Really? Surely by now everyone in the world knows that astrology columns are just written by whoever happens to be passing at the time, with no thought or reference to any source of knowledge, just like the science reporting. I don’t believe that 22% of the population think that the stars and planets control their lives. I don’t accept that a fifth of the people I see in the street really believe that the arbitrary shapes drawn in the sky by convention dictate their fortune.

Are they counting ‘I suppose there might be something in it’ as a yes? Are they excluding ‘I don’t know’ responses from the results? Did they phone round houses in the middle of the day? We don’t know, because Theos’ press release doesn’t say. But any of those seems more likely than 4 million Londoners believing in ghosts. Nobody believes in ghosts. It’s a lunatic fringe belief, like crop circles or fairies.

Andrew,

I have implied nothing. You just don’t seem to be able to read.

Nice. That’s class, right there, isn’t it? That was the response when I accused Vizzini of “[implying] that swine flu is a media-invented scare story like wifi or MMR or whatever”. Now obviously there are two sides to every story, and where one person reads clear implication another might read baseless inference, so I shall paste in the opening of Vizzini’s blogpost and let you be the judge:

Hi folks,

I am sick….sick of the swine flu. I have never seen so much hype over something so stupid.

Now I’d have said that that fairly clearly implies that swine flu is ’stupid’. A stupid thing to worry about. A silly little disease that poses no threat. Obviously I’m reading between the lines somewhat here, and you can’t really get all that from those two and a half sentences, so here’s a bit more:

The excuses have already begun. “Even if the swine virus doesn’t prove as potent as authorities first feared, that doesn’t mean the U.S. and World Health Organization overreacted in racing to prevent a pandemic, or worldwide spread, of a virus never before seen.”

Uh….yes it does. All these ‘experts’ are going to have egg on their face and now they are trying to justify scaring the crap out of your for no good reason.

photo credit: â–  Guerry

You see? His point, so he claims, is that people who wear facemasks because they’re scared of swine flu are stupid. I’ll come to that in a minute, but those people are not the same people as work for the WHO or the CDC. He’s veered off onto a tangent here and is mocking the epidemiology experts who have been working to prevent a H1N1 pandemic. That, to me, is not the action of a man who believes there is a risk of widespread infection. That is the action of a man who thinks we should let it run its course and see how many people die. He’s clearly betting on ‘not many’, and deriding people who disagree. That is an attempt to entirely debunk swine flu as a potential pandemic, and it’s simply too early to do that. Ben Goldacre refused to debunk it three times in the time it took him to write an article about how often he’s been asked to debunk it.

He may or may not have meant to imply it, but I think that he did. And given that Vizzini’s post and comments are riddled with non-standard punctuation and typos (to the point where he misspells ‘IQ’), and give the general impression that they were rushed off just as fast as he can type, it seems likely that I’ve read it more carefully than he wrote it and therefore probably the failure is on his end. Certainly he doesn’t use language in the most nuanced way I’ve ever seen. Here, for example, is a selection of his ripostes to my criticism (my emphasis):

You mean someone was so stupid that the nest [sic] they could do was make fun of a typo? Bet they were wearing a mask! … You just don’t seem to be able to read. … Run around terrified if you want to. … A mask is a very visible IQ test at this point. To me it is very much the same as people who pick a typo out of an article and use it to invalidate the article. Andrew….you failed that test. When you have to use a typo to make a point then you have run out of anything intelligent to offer. … Frankly Andrew you suck at debate. If points such as spelling are not relevant then don’t mention them. It makes you appear desperate and ill informed. … Just another example of your tendency to not be able to focus on the topic. I always find it funny that someone like you tosses out insults but then is so fragile when they get tossed back at you. Your mentioning a typo was arrogant and….stupid. If you can’t handle it then learn how to have civil disagreements without acting like a twit. … Stupid people tend not to be able to think for themselves. You have said nothing to contradict that assertion.

That’s right, he acts as if I’m wearing a mask. He literally cannot distinguish ‘I consider there is a chance of a pandemic in the future’ from ‘OH GOD OH GOD I’M GOING TO DIE WHERE IS MY FACEMASK?’. I have, for the record, never insulted him. I have criticised his arguments, and he seems incapable of distinguishing that from mindlessly abusing him, which, if I’m generous, explains his argument style. (Okay, maybe now I’ve insulted him.) For the record, here is my first comment:

That guy’s massively missed the point. Sure, wearing masks now is dumb, but the fact that 1000 people are sick is a worry because the disease might BECOME pandemic. He conflates the media whipping up a profitable panic with the WHO giving out expert advice, then has a go at them for taking measures to prevent a pandemic because they might work and then he can say ‘look, see, there was nothing to worry about’.

Also, he misspelt ‘IQ’.

You can see how I clearly relied on that one typo to invalidate his argument. Clearly there’s no way that could be a throwaway comment, a joke if you will, finding humour in an unfortunately placed transposition error.

But enough of such frivolity. The main thrust of his argument, he tells me, is this:

If you own a business and someone shows up with a mask on….fire them. They are too dumb to work for you. They have no common sense. In a way this is an QI test [see?] for your company.

…

It is stupid. The people in masks are stupid. … The masks are a visible sign of how stupid they are. … If you own a business and one of your employees shows up in a mask…find a reason to get rid of them. They are too stupid for whatever job you hired them for.

You see how he doesn’t toss out insults or come across as arrogant at all. But still, is he right? Certainly with the number of cases of swine flu so much lower than the number of cases of regular seasonal flu, and given that facemasks don’t actually work all that well, wearing them is a bit stupid. (Well, unless you wore them before swine flu. That’s fair enough. The tube is gross.) But his claim is not ‘it is a stupid thing to do’. It is ‘the people who do it are stupid’. As I said to him,

The media, the tabloids particularly, love to scare people, because scared people buy tabloid newspapers — and they’ve got very good at it, largely by refusing to be hampered by inconvenient details such as facts. I know that. You know that. Not everyone knows that. I mean, I think it’s stupid to use Microsoft Word as an HTML editor, but I appreciate that some people don’t know better and that doesn’t make them stupid. I think it’s pretty stupid to imagine that God exists, but I certainly don’t think all religious people are stupid.

For the record, his response to this was the phrase ‘just another excuse for stupid people’ followed by the last six sentences of the torrent of abuse I quoted earlier. You see how I’m ‘[tossing] out insults’ there, using inflammatory phrases like ‘that doesn’t make them stupid’ and ‘I certainly don’t think [they're] stupid’.

I just think that if you say ‘people are stupid’ and leave it at that, it’s defeatist and misanthropic, condescending and unhelpful. If you engage with them you can change their minds. If you see the bigger picture you can see where the weaknesses are that we can fix and improve matters. If you just write off humanity as too thick to survive then you become a small part of the problem. His solution is to make them all unemployed. That’s what we need, a lot of uneducated people with no money. That will definitely solve both swine flu and the credit crunch. I want to think it’s meant in jest and he’s actually more progressive than that, but I’m really not convinced.

I’ll be interested to see if Vizzini replies to this.

First of all was the story of Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Archbishop of Recife’s decision to excommunicate a woman who helped her daughter get an abortion. The daughter was nine. She needed an abortion because her Catholic stepfather raped her. The rapist was not excommunicated. The Vatican supported all of this, so the only way these actions make any sense is if the Vatican considers abortion worse than raping a nine-year-old girl. And that nearly makes sense, except that the girl would probably have died in childbirth, so even if you consider her twin fÅ“tuses ‘people’ you still have to be pretty warped to expect her to die for the crime of being raped. (Warped, or Muslim.)

After that, the Vatican calmed down a little and celebrated International Women’s Day, by — I know, this has to be gold, doesn’t it? — by publishing an article asking the question “What in the 20th century did most to liberate Western women?” and reaching the rather brilliant conclusion that it was probably the invention of the washing machine. Not the right to work. Not women’s suffrage. Definitely a machine that makes cleaning clothes (which clearly is Women’s Work) easier. I mean, even if that’s pragmatically true (which it isn’t) don’t say so right after you’ve okayed raping small girls.

It’s lucky the Pope isn’t at all utterly terrifying.
photo credit: openDemocracy

After that piece of light-hearted batshit whimsy, the Pope decided to refocus his efforts on Catholicism’s core competency: ruining innocent people’s lives with arbitrary and idiotic dogma. This time, it’s Africa’s turn. Speaking about the AIDS epidemic there, the Pope himself, not a lackey this time, said “the distribution of condoms… aggravates the problems”. The Telegraph have found themselves a priest to defend him — and let’s mention now that I’m only inferring he’s a priest from his photo. Nowhere do they bother to actually mention that he works for the Pope, because that might be a bit too much like declaring one’s interests for the mainstream media. Their priest, George Pitcher, rehashes the same old argument I’ve heard over and over again: “that the Church’s historic teaching that chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it would prevent the spread of killer diseases such as Aids”. And this is true, but alas irrelevant, because nobody is criticising that teaching. (At least, I’m not. At the moment.) What we are criticising is the Pope’s claim that distributing condoms will make the AIDS epidemic worse. This claim is demonstrably false. It turns out that if you grow up and go with the facts instead of just making shit up, you can actually make a difference and save some lives.

The problem I have with the Pope’s speech is not that he advocated abstinence: it is that he specifically lied about something that we know works. Even if nobody acts on his advice, if they believe the epidemiological claims that he makes then they will make bad decisions and people will die.

Andrew’s comments are no longer allowed on this blog. This is because he has a tendency to write opinions based on logic and not from experience or facts. He is a programmer by profession.

Dammit, I do have a tendancy to write opinions based on logic. Oh, she really nailed me there. ‘Zing’, I should think, and probably even ‘oh, snap’. And so forth. Feel free to visualise Jon Stewart-style gesturing if it helps.

Goodbye, then, anonymous homeopath. Live long and prosper.

Suppose you got a massive bucket of bricks that weighed more than all but the fattest bastard. Clearly it is a bad thing to weigh more than it. Say then that every year you removed a brick, until it weighed the same as someone merely fairly chubby. It is clearly still bad to weigh more than the bucket of bricks. It is still true that those heavier than it die younger than those lighter. Only now, loads more people are heavier than it — primarily because it’s so much lighter than it used to be.

You now understand logic better than The Christian Institute:

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children. The report, compiled by researchers at the University of Essex, says that 44 per cent of babies are now born to unmarried parents. Cohabitees are estimated to make up three-quarters of those parents.

Well, technically, but hold on…

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children.

What? The study does no such thing. It says that co-habiting parents are more likely to split up than married ones (a fact which has many interesting causes, none of which involve Jesus), that children whose parents split up are worse off than those whose parents stay together, and that more children are being born out of wedlock.

Well yes, but unmarried couples are staying together longer than they used to: because the point at which the average couple marry — the number of bricks in the bucket — is changing. It’s not an illusory problem, and I’d hate to imply that it is, but the simplistic spin put on it by the Christian Institute (”The Christian Institute exists for the furtherance and promotion of the Christian religion in the United Kingdom”, so no agenda there) is just pathetic. To support that conclusion, you want a large cohort study, with a group of children of married parents and a matched group of unmarried ones — with similar incomes, social class, inteligence, location, and so forth, as any of those and other factors could affect odds of break-up and children’s welfare. That wasn’t even hinted at in any account of the report I can find. (I don’t think a RCT where the participants are unaware whether they’re legally wed would be particularly useful, but it would certainly be funny.)

And remember: the CI is a charity. Every time someone donates to them, the income tax paid on that is handed to the CI. So you funded this article. And so did I. And I’m cross about that, because it’s like everything I hate most rolled into one.

You may know already that I’m a fan of Ben Goldacre, but it’s not him. I found his style of agument quite conservative and traditional: people have been trying to win arguments by pointing out the gaping holes in their opponents’ ideas for centuries. Ancient people used evidence to draw conclusions. There’s nothing new there.

No, his opponent, Dr Sigman, is the genius here. I have, in retrospect, seen his argument elsewhere, too, but he has formalised it further than most. Here it is in a nutshell:

1. We disagree and are talking.
2. Therefore, There Is A Debate.
3. Therefore, the cautionary principle applies.
4. Therefore, whatever I dislike should be banned.

That’s just not on. Apart from the fact that creationism is anti-science enough without trying to trump psychology as well as biology, geology and astrophysics, this kind of thing is displacing real therapy that can actually prevent these deaths. But the hell with that — why bother preventing deaths if they can be used to promote an ideology?

An obvious question that may have entered your brain by now is “what on Earth does creationism have to do with suicide prevention?” and the answer is of course “nothing”, so a better question is “what does Chaplain Biscotti think creationism has to do with suicide prevention?”. Well. Apparently he has identified a Problem:

• In the last two years, completed suicides have escalated throughout the Air Force
• …
• The Air Force did not use spirituality as part of their suicide prevention briefing until 2005

It seems that he read that and thought that the solution was to add more spirituality. I cannot fathom how even the most religiously retarded mind could reach that conclusion from that evidence. So what’s his solution?

Dr. Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life,  provides a powerful model for Suicide Prevention, developing leaders, and making troops combat ready and effective.

No, it provides a pack of bullshit. (I haven’t read it, but I can easily surmise it’s a load of rubbish from the fact that Rick Warren wrote it.) After that are a series of laughably inept slides that are reproduced in the Kos article so I won’t bother here. Suffice to say that atheism (specifically, humanism) is equated with selfishness and then The Dreaded Communism, to the point where Darwin is inexplicably listed as one of the leaders of the USSR. It also uses the story of Pat Tillman, an atheist (as far as we know) who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, to push the idea of faith in general, including faith in oneself. That’s probably basically good advice, were it not displacing real therapy and attached to the rest of this pro-Christianity propaganda.

Chaplain Biscotti is not the Crackpot of the Month. That honour falls to those in secular roles above him, who allow and promote this, who push religion both as a way of reducing suicide and in general. I’m starting with Rod Bishop who seems to have compiled the presentation that contained Biscotti’s slides. Beyond that it seems to be so systemic as to make naming names as pointless as it is impossible.

Luckily the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is suing the US Military over this. How that lawsuit will go is unclear. I have no idea what the rules are on such things, not that that has anything to do with the result of any lawsuit with religion anywhere near it.

[BPSDB]

Neither is fun to read. Quacks do love to go on, possibly because simply saying a lot of things is an effective way to stop sceptics from being able to counter them all — it takes a second to say ‘miasmas exist’ without a reference but it takes a good five minutes to properly explain why they don’t. Throw in a stock ‘reference’ and a response might take an hour to craft. Of course, you can just say ‘prove it’ but that won’t convince anyone who doesn’t already have a healthy respect for science. It also doesn’t help that the English is somewhat broken. Possibly it is a second language. (In the quote below I have refrained from adding ‘[sic]‘ after errors, as it would be appended to every other sentence and just look like Vithoulkas had been at the sherry.)

Apparently, Randi fell ill and the challenge had to be postponed, by which time a change of management meant the centre would not be willing to participate. I can sympathise with this — the research unit I work for has this kind of problem all the time. Almost exactly this has happened at least once. That’s one of the problems, unfortunately, with doing proper science: everything has to be planned so meticulously that the slightest detail can throw it out and cause long delays. Vithoulkas claims that this was a trick to avoid ever having the experiment:

In 7.4.2006 Mr. Gindis wrote to Mr. Randi in order to signal to him that the homeopathic team was ready to start… But instead Randi suspended all activities of the experiment attributing it to his supposedly state of health!

Mr. Randi knew very well that this period was crucial for us to start the experiment and we had made this urgency explicit by sending several e-mails urging them that it was necessary to go ahead immediately. But Mr. Randi needed …six months “to recover” denying to assign a collaborator.

James Randi is 80 years old. Is it really that hard to believe he might be ill?

Vithoulkas and his team refused to accept this change to the schedule and have decided to do the experiment without Randi, which Randi.org quite accurately described as a withdrawal from the challenge. Randi points out that as his foundation is the one offering a million dollar prize, he gets to set the terms. Vithoulkas has decided that this is unfair and then, brilliantly, written Randi a retraction for him to post. He hasn’t. It seems to me that as a homeopath Vithoulkas is unfamiliar with the problems faced by real scientists doing actual clinical trials and is presumably used to ploughing on in an ad-hoc fashion and knocking the whole ’study’ out in a week.  I can see how in that case Doing It Right might look like stalling.

Still, whoever is right, I presume that since homeopathy4health is now in the business of chastising sceptics who she feels are shirking from a challenge, she will be immediately getting six bottled remedies and negotiating with Andy Lewis to find a trusted third party so she can participate in his far easier, lower-stakes challenge.

Otherwise frankly she’s fooling nobody but herself (and that’s only because herself is so very credulous).

I can’t personally vouch for this teaching: I had much of it drummed into me when I started my PhD (because it’s important), but it’s clearly expressed and illustrated with a range of examples somewhere between lavish and obsessive. The examples also show how universal the methods are: the chapter on Homeopathy also explains about good experimental methods, overuse of antibiotics, superstition, detox programmes, acupuncture, and meta-analysis and its role in assessing the effectiveness of steroids. It’s a structure I like a lot: interestingly varied without seeming like a collection of unconnented anecdotes, and with a strong theme to each chapter and a sense of progression through the book.

The book features chapters themed around the ideas used by Gillian McKeith and Patrick Holford, which discusses their own various publications. McKeith’s, he says,

have an air of ‘referenciness’, with nice little superscript numbers … but when you follow the numbers, and check the references, it’s shocking how often they aren’t what she claimed them to be in the main body of the text

and of Holford’s,

If Professor Patrick Holford is a man of science, and an academic, then we should treat him as one, with a scrupulously straight bat.

I heartily agree. I think that is, in part, why Goldacre’s book, as well as telling you things, shows you experiments and references you can use to check it all yourself (although the references are ferreted away in an appendix where they belong, rather than gaudily paraded in the body text, looking authoritative but basically just getting in the way). I think this is also because the book strongly agrues against the depiction of science as “didactic truth statements from… arbitrary, unelected authority figures”, and that would look pretty silly if presented with no evidence. (Although Goldacre makes a point of never claiming any authority: he doesn’t put “Dr” on the front cover — he doesn’t even have a capital ‘G’.) Transparency is the key to good science, a topic touched upon every time a quack mentioned in the book refuses to publish their research methods.

Holford’s book is also of interest, because Goldacre picks apart his reference list in great detail. Not out of malice or to make fun of him, but because as we know,

If Professor Patrick Holford is a man of science, and an academic, then we should treat him as one, with a scrupulously straight bat.

Okay. Let’s do that.

Goldacre’s book has fourteen pages of notes and references (at least the first edition does). I selected one from each page at random, and checked that it said what he says it said: 2 I couldn’t read, 1 was a note only, the other 11 checked out ane way or another, so that’s basically a 100% hit rate. I didn’t critique the referenced articles, mostly because I don’t have the time or inclination, but none of the research says anything very controversial anyway. Anyone who has read chapter 12 will realise that I am biased here, but that’s why I’m being transparent so you can check up on me too if you like: I’ve put the list of references I looked up, and a brief verdict on each, after the fold.

The other main theme of the book is the problems with ‘dumbing-down’ (a depressingly autological phrase) of the world of science and health: miracle cures, medicalised syndromes for everything, reports of conclusions rather than evidence, and so on. I think this was my favourite passage on that theme:

Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. I can barely understand most of the sports section. In the literature pull-out, there are five-page-long essays which I find completely impenetrable, where the more Russian novelists you can rope in the cleverer everybody thinks you are. I do not complain about this: I envy it.

I’d love to hear what someone with no scientific training thought of this book. But I expect they would learn a lot about the nature of evidence and the mental traps that make it so, acquire a lot of useless trivia about the proponents of pseudoscientific bullshit, learn to spot future nonsense, and have a good laugh along the way. I rate that as worth the price — not least because if you pay attention then the book will pay for itself the first time you don’t buy a pack of useless pills.

Since we’re talking transparency, the author declares that he received his copy of Bad Science free from the publishers and that, not being what you’d call a professional critic, the novelty of this kind of thing hasn’t worn off even a bit.

The references I checked:

1. Schultz et al, p46: I can’t read the paper with my university login, but the abstract agrees with the book and even I recognise one of the author’s names — an impressive feat for a statistician.
2. Shang et al, (PDF) p56: This is a hugely well-known paper. It says what we all know it says. I especially like the funnel plots: like Goldacre’s book, they don’t make drug companies look all that great either.
3. Giona F, p70: This paper is still in press and I can’t find it. To be fair, the claim it supports is of sufficient irrelevance to be in brackets.
4. S Wolf, p78: This seems to support Goldacre’s precis (at least to the extent that I’m reading these, which is much less than I would were I doing real science here).
5. Buske-Kirschbaum et al, p80: This is a great paper, and one which doesn’t seem to have been misrepresented.
6. H Frankfurt, p89: This is a book which I have not read, but is quoted in the main body, so you can judge it for yourself.
7. Moynihan et al (open-access), p153: This is provided more as further reading: the title is enough to justify the ‘claim’, such as it is.
8. p164: This is a note and not a reference.
9. S Mayor, p183: This doesn’t require much reading to check. Yes.
10. Curfman, et al, p202: Again, pretty unequivocal. Yes.
11. Nathan et al, p203: This is also an unequivocal yes.
12. Manning et al, p262: This article describes what the book says it describes, albeit briefly.
13. B Deer, p280: I couldn’t find the relevant information on this page. I would have referenced this page on the same site instead.
14. Grilli et al, p307: This (guardedly — this is Cochrane) supports the claim.

(This post is mostly quotes, for which I make no apology because the easiest way to mock this kind of nut-job is simply to hand him sufficient rope.)

The ‘Kadir-Buxton Method’ is a treatment for mental-health problems which he invented “decades ago”:

The procedure stuns and resets the brain of the patient, so that the patient returns to a normal condition. The Kadir-Buxton Method is done by making a fist of both hands, and striking both ears of the patient atexactly the same time–

Do not do this. It is very dangerous.

–and pressure with the soft part of the inner hand which is where the thumb joins the hand. The arrow in Figure 1 shows this point for your ease of use.

…

At this point I would like to explain the difference between a stun and a punch. With the Kadir-Buxton Method, a patient standing on one leg whilst holding a rose would still be standing on one leg and holding a rose when they were cured. With a punch, the patient would be lying prone on the floor, and could well have dropped the rose. And just to add insult to injury, they would still be mentally ill. Try it for yourselves if you do not believe me.

Oh, yes, this guy’s proper crazy. Because you see, he doesn’t just cure mental health issues…

My method of unblocking fallopian tubes should be taken up by the NHS. It would increase the success rate of fertility treatment drastically, and also cut down on more expensive treatments.

He’s keen on NHS adoption. He’s even petitioning the Prime Minister to ear-box mental patients.

Many years ago I came up with the idea of feeding breast milk to old people who had suffered from immune system collapse. I got the idea when I found an obscure reference to Ayurvedic practitioners… My method was successful, the most famous person who was treated for it was the Queen Mother, then in her seventies, who went on to live for another twenty years or so.

Having cured mental illness, infertility and old age, all these people will need clean electricity:

Thus a 50% cut in Carbon emissions is achievable with the use of Buxton Geothermal Turbine Generators.

That’s not totally crazy, but this is:

The Kadir-Buxton Jump Start (formerly Buxton Jump Start) … is so called because when it is used on a [dead] patient the [now living] patient immediately sits up with a start.

After that it starts to get really strange:

Primary Menstrual Cramps can be a debilitating problem for some 10% of women. … Orgasm from masturbation has been found to relieve the painful symptoms of menstrual cramps. … In order to do this one simply has to clench and then relax the vagina repeatedly for five minutes. With this method no one need know of the discomfort being suffered, and the pain soon goes. … Do not try this whilst driving or operating heavy machinery.

No shit?

I had been instructing women in the Hands Free method of controlling Primary Menstrual Cramps since I was a school boy.

…Is that allowed?

The Buxton Handclap Method of delivering babies that minimises birth trauma to both mother and baby is used in various Third World countries, and according to one statistic quoted in ‘New Scientist’ would lead to an improvement in IQ of 15 points over natural child birth, and thus minimise intellectual impairment caused by difficult child birth.

Of course, if you don’t want to have children at all, he can help with that, too:

In the 1980s I fended off an unprovoked attack. … I gave the [now unconscious] person a bruising slap round the buttocks. When the attacker came to it was said that the experience was even better than sex. I knew at once I was on to another invention. Whilst paralysed… the sensation of pain is replaced by super enhanced pleasure. As Governments around the world have been looking for a safe alternative to sex this appears to be it.

Specifically, David Blunkett is looking for that. Although he does say “it is not an alternative to contraception as the sexual act is also far more fun”. I’m inclined to agree.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that he reads the Daily Express, on whose website he makes up yet more stuff he’s never defined:

The best way to redistribute wealth is to end mental illness. This would free up £100 billion a year in the UK alone. The Kadir-Buxton Method cures the mentally ill in just thirty seconds and a local practice nurse can do it. 

We then use the five Buxton Coefficients of Unemployment at a local level to create jobs for them, and suddenly we have ridden out the economic crisis and can look forward to another four years of Gordon Brown. Go for it Gordon.

I’m sure that you, like me, want to know how one man can achieve such pre-eminence in so many diverse fields. Well, Andy Kadir-Buxton is willing to share his amazing secret:

IQ can be increased slightly by the educational system. It is only slight because most education revolves around memorising facts, which increases eidetic memory rather than leaning logic which increases IQ. … An IQ of over 150 brings with it the bonus of being able to invent which can be economially useful.

I always tell people that the best way of learning logic is to study and analyse the character Mr Spock in ‘Star Trek.’

So now you know. All those hours of watching Star Trek were increasing your IQ all along. Who knew?

[BPSDB]