Apathy Sketchpad

A few days ago I corrected a Telegraph article about homeopathy, as part of Homeopathy Awareness Week. (That is of course not the official ‘week’ website but it is better.) Today, as the week ends (after eight days for some reason), I will apply much the same corrections to another homeopathy article, this time courtesy of Cancer Research UK, whose Cancer Help website carries a page of what I will generously term “information” about homeopathy. It is split into the following sections:

• What homeopathy is
• Why people with cancer use homeopathy

Strangely, the word “ignorant” does not appear in this section. It does say “Some people choose homeopathy because it offers a completely different type of treatment compared to conventional medicine.” Which is true, but it’s a bit like saying “some people choose spaghetti because it offers a completely different type of support compared to a conventional bungee cord”.

• Evidence on using homeopathy in cancer treatment
• What homeopathy involves
• Side effects
• Who shouldn’t use homeopathy

Ooh, I know! Is it “anyone who wants to get better or has a finite supply of money”?

• What homeopathy costs
• Finding a homeopath
• Homeopathic hospitals in the UK
• Homeopathy organisations

For context, this page sits in their “complementary and alternative therapies” section, (surely by definition all therapies are either complementary or an alternative?) which lists a huge number of options including the harmless, the spiritual and the quackerific. They’re all split into the same sections as the homeopathy page. They’re mostly good stuff:

• There is no evidence to suggest that acupuncture helps in any way with treating, preventing or curing cancer. Both the World Health Organisation and the Cochrane Library have published reviews on chemotherapy related sickness, concluding that acupuncture can help.
• There is no scientific evidence to prove that Aloe vera can help treat, prevent or cure cancer in people in any way.
• There is no scientific evidence to prove that aromatherapy can cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer.
• Many people say these therapies help them to cope better with cancer and its treatment. But there are treatments which are part of ayurvedic medicine such as special diets and herbal remedies that we don’t know enough about to support their use. These treatments could be harmful to your health or interfere with your conventional treatment.
• Some people have claimed that black cohosh may reduce your risk of getting breast cancer or prostate cancer. There is not enough evidence for this at the moment.

And so on, all the way down to

• There is no scientific evidence to prove that yoga can cure or prevent any type of cancer. But there are some studies to suggest that it might help people with cancer sleep better and cope with anxiety.

Yeah, it’s tiring is yoga.

I also like that they discuss the evidence in an adult way, rather than simply saying “this works; this doesn’t work”. The point is, though, that I can’t help think that the following text lends far too much weight to the insane fringe view that there is even the slightest possibility that homeopathic ‘medicine’ could cure cancer:

There are over 100 published clinical trials looking at how well homeopathy works in treating various illnesses and symptoms. None of these trials provide us with any scientific evidence to prove that homeopathy can cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer. Many individuals say that homeopathy has helped their symptoms. And some small trials have shown that homeopathy can have a positive effect. Two studies suggest that homeopathy may help women with breast cancer to cope with menopause symptoms. But these are small clinical trials and they don’t provide enough evidence to show if homeopathy really works, or how.

Remind me again why I should give you money, Cancer Research UK? This is sort of implying you’ll waste it.

We don’t really know whether the effects of homeopathy truly come from the homeopathic medicine or if they are simply a placebo effect.

…

Using homeopathic medicine is generally safe. Some homeopaths warn people that their symptoms could get slightly worse, before they settle down and improve.

Sort of like illnesses do on their own, then..?

But this does not happen very often. A Swiss meta-analysis of homeopathy trials in 2006 found homeopathy applied appropriately by a trained homeopath to be safe and with few side effects.

Yes, because it’s totally inert!

If you are having treatment for cancer it is important that you let your specialist doctors know if you are planning to use homeopathic medicine.

It’s a difficult thing to do, of course, because it’s important to say “look, here is the evidence, do you still think water is magic medicine?” rather than “it just doesn’t work, okay?” because it’s the only way any real progress will be made against the nonsense we’re all surrounded by. But equally, there really is no good evidence at all on the homeopaths’ side, so representing the evidence in a truly balanced way looks a lot like saying “it just doesn’t work”.

Ultimately, though, it’s the links sections at the bottom that annoy me. They link, for example, to the CORH, saying “look on their website for a list of the organisations who are members,” but the CORH are happy to link uncritically to the almost totally mental Society of Homeopaths, whose record on such things is pretty dismal (and it’s hard to over-state their satisfaction), and to the Faculty of Homeopathy, whose president I recently caught on television endorsing the Faculty while claiming to be an ordinary member. She said:

If people have a serious medical condition I would strongly advise them to approach [the Faculty of Homeopathy].

Homeopaths have a record of giving bad advice, mostly by recommending people avoid real medicine (or as above failing to recommend they seek it out), and I don’t think it’s appropriate for a cancer charity, or indeed anyone else, to endorse their organisations in this way without a large disclaimer saying “warning: many homeopaths are a bit mental and think their water is magical. If they tell you they can cure cancer or AIDS or that they can basically do anything at all apart perhaps from making you feel vaguely better, leave and report them to their governing body and Trading Standards”.

For all I know practitioners of the other alternative therapies are no better, but I’m aware of a lot more evil done in the name of homeopathy than in the name of acupuncture or yoga. Generally, homeopathy and ‘herbalism’ are the pseudosciences most likely, in my experience, to have delusions of efficacy beyond palliative care, and that makes them dangerous.

Just because the pill is harmless doesn’t change that.

It is Homeopathy Awareness Week. Has been since Saturday. That’s right, the week starts on a Saturday if you’re a homeopath. I am, as ever, happy to do my bit for this kind of cause, so here are a couple of articles I saw this week with misconceptions about homeopathy I’d like to clear up. The first is from the Telegraph, which contains this fantastic but only tangentially relevant passage:

A Government report yesterday called for “urgent” controls on herbalists, acupuncturists and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, amid fears over patient safety. Its recommendations, to be considered by ministers, include a proposal that new practitioners would have to study for a degree in their field before they could practise.

Yes, that will help a lot. Can’t have people doing acupuncture wrong, can we? (Answer to rhetorical question: yes.)

These are the homeopathy mistakes:

A £40 million industry in the UK, homoeopathic remedies claim to be able to prevent yellow fever, typhoid, polio and even leukaemia, as well as cure symptoms ranging from toothache to hearing loss. But there are growing concerns over whether the homoeopathic remedies have any effect.

No, there aren’t. There is a total consensus that homeopathic remedies are nothing more than placebo. (Obviously I’m aware that there are people who dispute this consensus, but those people are cranks, or ignorant, and in any case too few in number to count — remember, there are those who dispute the holocaust.)

Homoeopathists differ from herbalists, who use a variety of plants to combat diseases, because their treatments are heavily diluted. There can often be as little as one millionth of the original ingredient in a homoeopathic remedy.

Setting aside that this last sentence doesn’t actually mean anything, the fact is that most homeopathic remedies do not contain even one molecule of the original ingredient. None at all. That’s not the same as “heavily diluted” or “one millionth”. That’s the same as a nice glass of water.

Then the Telegraph invite readers to “Have Your Say: Do you believe in homeopathy?” Because what we need to settle this one isn’t evidence, my word no. It’s the ill-informed rants of internet cranks such as Mike Abrahams, who says (all links and emphasis in these are mine; I’m sure you’d have worked that out soon enough):

At the moment, “properly applied/prescribed” medical intervention “accidentally” kills over 250,000 people a year in the USA alone (Journal of American Medical Association)…

I didn’t know it was possible to commit libel using only punctuation marks.

…So let’s get a perspective on this. Just how many people are killed by homoeopathy - last year? - in the last 50 years? …

(Answer to rhetorical question: lots, and here are 8 that even Dave Hitt can’t argue with.)

…Even if Homoeopathy used just the placebo effect it is much safer than orthodox drug treatment.

…because it doesn’t do anything. Or Graham, who says:

i think that you can apply the one rule for all principle here, that is when doctors have their medicines and procedures, in all combinations tested with randomised control trials and they are proven to be safe, then perhaps other CAM therapies would do the same. … i thought the idea was to heal people, this homeopathy does with out a doubt, or it would have died out years ago. i gave my son a remedy for a croup attack when he was about 14 months old. within 30seconds he was calm and breathing normally, from being blue and gasping for breath. i don’t really give a flying fig how it worked, i just know that it did, its called imperical evidence its what doctors use when they give new mixes of medicines that have not been tested together. the difference is i saved a life doctors are often just trying to clear up their own drug induced side effects…

Or “Cured!”, who says:

Perhaps the medical profession is sceptical of hoemopathic remedies because they are not patented, can’t be licensed and can’t be used to derive monopoly profits.

No, but these would be the same homeopathic remedies that are made out of pure water and sell as a “£40 million industry in the UK” according to the article Cured! just commented on, yes? Yes. Yes, they would.

Lucy Puglia says:

MY DOG HAD SKIN CANCER ON HER PAW,IT WAS MALIGNANT,AFTER IT WAS REMOVED ,WE CHOSE TO GIVE HER VITAMINS AND HOMOEOPHATIC REMEDIES,SHE LIVED A FULL LIFE ,RUNNING AND HAPPY, … .HAD WE CHOSEN ANOTHER TREATMENT ,SHE WOULD HAVE SUFFERED SIDE EFFECTS.WE HAVE SEEN A HOMOEOPHATIC DOCTOR FOR OVER 20 YEARS,AND IT WORKS FOR MY FAMILY,INDIVIDUALS SHOULD HAVE A CHOICE,ON THE TREATMENT THEY WISH TO HAVE ,AFTER ALL DOCTORS ARE NOT ”GODS”,PEOPLE ARE DYING IN HOSPITAL FROM ALLERGIC REACTION TO DRUGS EVERYDAY,I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW MANY ARE DYING FROM ”HOMOEOPHATIC REMEDIES SIDE EFFECTS”.I AM ALLERGIC TO GRASS POLLEN,THERE IS NO MEDICATION THAT HELPS,IN 32 YEARS OF SUFFERING ,THE ONLY MEDICATION THAT HELP ME ,IS HOMEOPATIC,THE NOSESPRAY,EYEDROPS,DROPS TO KEEP MY NOSE CLEAR,PILLULE .I TOOK ANTIHISTAMIN TABLETS FOR YEARS,AND HAD 2 CAR ACCIDENTS ,BECOUSE OF THE SIDE EFFECTS,AND NEARLY FELL OFF THE BUS,MISSED THE STEP.WE SHOULD HAVE MORE HOMEOPHATIC HOSPITALS ,AND CHOICE,INSTEAD ,THE HOSPITALS ARE BEING CLOSED BY THE TRUSTS,LIVING PATIENTS WITH NO CHOICE…AFTER ALL THIS IS A DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY…LUCY,ISLINGTON..

How great is she!? Peter Walton says:

Homeopathy does work, which is exactly what the major pharmaceutical companies are fearful about. They put their money into supporting those who outwardly conduct research supposedly disproving the efficacy of homeopathy. Most of this research is based upon double blind tests which may have some value, were it not for the fact that homeopathic treatment, unlike allopathic, uses individualised remedies. …

(Double-blind trials can account for this. Many do. Homeopathy still doesn’t work.)

…The �researchers� carrying out double blind testing on homeopathic remedies of course must know this, and therefore one may conclude that they have alternative agendas.

One other point; arguments are put forward that there is no scientific evidence for homeopathy. May I suggest that science will one day be able to provide that evidence, it is for ever amending its theories to explain the observed, unlike homeopathy which has essentially remained unchanged for 200 years. There is no need to change that which is correct!

Let’s not mention the inconvenient advent of Avogadro and germ theory during those 200 years, though, eh? Or the countless other wrong ideas science has failed to eventually prove. Or…

G Payne says:

Just because, like all remedies, it is not and does not clainm to be a panacea, is not a reason for the attacks upon it by allopathic doctors and chemists - except for their inbuilt self interest. The point is, that the proof lies in the fact that, in so many instances - called “anecdotal” homoeopathy does work.

Steve Scrutton (which is a name I recognise from other homeopathy rants) says this:

It is remarkable that spokesmen for conventional medicinem, and ConMed drugs, like Ernst, can still believe that seeing a doctor, and taking ConMed drugs, is safer than seeing a homeopath. What they consistently deny is that ConMed is killing more people year on year, and that the more drugs we take, year on year, the greater the rise of disease epidemics (Alzheimer’s, Autism, et el) -

Can you have an epidemic of a non-infectious disease? I suspect you can’t.

- many of them diseases that were unknown prior to drug taking becoming ‘free’ on the NHS…

The prevalence of a disease which predominately affects the elderly rose sharply when medical care became free? Clearly medical care causes Alzheimer’s. There’s no other explanation!

…He also ignores another undeniable fact - that tens of thousands of people have been treated successfully by homeopath, many after failing to get better with ConMed. When they hear Ernst, and others telling them that homeopathy is ineffective, they yawn, wonder why he should consistently come out with such nonsence, ponder who is speaking for, and tell their friends.

The drug companies are under pressure as more of their drugs are being withdrawn, and they face an increasing number of law suits in the USA.

Keep your campaign going, Professor Ernst - perhaps one day you will actually be able to convince us that ConMed is safe too!

Jayney says:

I think these attacks on homeopathy are just providing a smoke screen to take the emphasis off the 40,000+ deaths that occur each year due to totally avoidable medical blunders (quoted in the BMJ.) Close to 1 million people are injured by conventional medicine too - every year. Agsin this is a matter of public record . There is only one record of a homeopath being linked to a person dying - this was a doctor who told her patient that she should stop takng her heart medication. This doctor is now being investigated by the GMC.

Shathejas says:

in my shortlife i saw various patients who got remedy by homoeo,while modern medicine said goodbye in such cases. many many examples can be given. but iam not a homoeopathistic.

No. No, you are not. And lastly, a homeopath speaks. Francis Treuherz says:

How do I prove that my work as a homeopath is successful? I suggest just as hard with my wrong remedy as my right one in almost 25 years of practice my patients know when they receive the right remedy…

Well, yes, because you define “the right remedy” as “whichever one you’re doling out when the patient happens to get better on their own”.

…The way we decide what makes a remedy is known as a proving. We test potential medicines on healthy humans and the symptoms and signs which appear are then used to inform treatment. I suggest that Professor Ernst, or any one else who does not think that homeopathy works, undertakes a proving of Aesculus hippocastanum and observes the effects. This is a remedy used in painful haemorrhoids.

This is a common brain-failure experienced by homeopaths: they refer to something as “a proving” and assume that therefore it proves something.

This was rather longer than I expected, because I hadn’t planned to do the comments, so I shall post the second article I want to criticise some other time. If I remember. Hopefully, I’ll get it out within the Awareness Week.

Also, look out for another bit of Homeopathy Awareness Week fun that I’ll show you when it’s finished.

The whole ‘bad-science blogs’ thing has given rise to an amusing retaliation movement of ‘bad science-blogs’ run by homeopaths. There’s a little network of them and they all link to each other and post approvingly about each other’s updates. I was put onto them by Blogging The Organon, wherein Gimpy posts sections of Hahnemann’s Organon (upon which homeopathy is largely based) one at a time and then people discuss them for a bit, then it descends into farce and the next chunk of Organon goes up. But of course, they’re clearly not as good, because they haven’t got a central aggregator website.

They all have names like “good science”, “suppressed science” and “remedy reality”, and they all update every few days about homeopathy. This is somewhat pointless, because homeopathy hasn’t changed since it was invented in the nineteenth century, except for the addition of a few extra remedies and the decision to start making their magic water using preposterous machines instead of dilution and succussion (which is fair enough since neither works anyway so you might as well do it the quick way). One of my favourites is Homeopathy4Health. I think it’s always a good sign when a website carries a disclaimer like this:

Disclaimer: I am not the owner of any website named homeopathy4health.

I think you have to question the mental state of someone who would say that at homeopathy4health.wordpress.com, under the name homeopathy4health. Many of the posts do at least allow public comments, although I’m given to understand there’s some censorship there. But some posts have no comments on them. An example is “Medicine: blind and in the dark?”, which is essentially a long attack on evidence based medicine for blinding studies. The anonymous author’s thesis seems to be that looking at more than one subject is bad because it means using “statistics which are incomprehesible to the lay person and which are subject to statistical interpretation bias” instead of just looking at one patient and trusting yourself not to indulge in any confirmation bias. That, and

The foundations of the scientific approach are suspicion and doubt: both are deeply negative mental processes.  I am told that a good scientist should doubt his results as his first reaction; I would say that this is an unhealthy reaction in most normal situations: someone who doubts his reactions has poor intuition. Someone who is doubtful isolates themselves from experience. Suspicion causes peers to doubt each others results and slows progress.

…

Sceptics believe that the scientific method is the answer to medical problems, I am unconvinced.

That sounds like Biblical thinking to me. The whole idea of “negative mental processes” leading to negative outcomes sounds like something Master Splinter would say. But just as I was thinking he was crazy, I saw a link in his blogroll that put that into perspective. The “Freedom of Science” blog is proper crazy. Honestly, I’m not totally convinced it’s not an elaborate joke, although the archive goes back over a year and that’s dedication if it is. It’s inextricably linked with “Alphysics”, which I think is a joke, but is a rather stupid one written by a crank in the style of Facts For Life in an attempt to discredit physics by equating it — I think; it’s not clear — with alchemy.

It’s very telling: there’s always the chance that the author of Homeopathy4health genuinely has had the astonishing good fortune claimed, and that the range of symptoms described on the “about” page genuinely did vanish just after taking homeopathic remedies. I could see something like that being very convincing, and once you’re there it follows logically that anyone who dismisses it is being overly suspicious of it. But no amount of coincidental remissions could justify listening to the cranks at Freedom of Science (which really should be called Freedom From Science). It is a website devoted to “removing Newtonism from the education process”. It says, with no apparent trace of shame,

Physics is Newtonian religion. Physicists are priests who believe in Newton’s laws as their immutable faith. Physicists are the enforcers of Newton’s occult laws in the name of God.

Now I am a physicist and I’d be the first to tell you Newton’s laws are wrong. They’re wrong because they break down when you look at very small objects. They’re wrong because they’re an approximation to the truth; an expectation value. They’re wrong because they don’t account for relativity. But they’re not wrong because

Occult does not exist therefore Cavendish did not measure the Newtonian force. 

“Occult” is the author’s favourite word to describe force:

Occult does not exist outside physics. Occult may be the official faith of physics and every physicist must believe in it as part of their professional faith but occult does not exist in nature.

This is especially vexing, since he says on the same page:

If we look at the Newtonian force closer we see that force is not really occult.

He is of the opinion that what he calls “physics” is actually a religion devoted to pushing Newton’s politics and never questioning his Laws:

In order to understand what force is a scientist must question it. A scientist, unlike physicists, is not bound by Newton’s authority. For a scientist there is nothing sacred about Newton’s arbitrary definitions. To understand force a scientist must take it apart and then put it back together. Since this is forbidden and illegal in physics a scientific investigator must look at the Newtonian force from outside of physics.

It’s brilliant. The lengths some people will go to be wrong has never failed to astound me. I suppose it starts with one unshakable belief in something — homeopathy, Jesus, racism, whatever — or a fundamental and equally unshakable disbelief in something — relativity, vaccination, science, maths, the holocaust, whatever — and from there you quickly hit a contradiction. Clearly either your pet theory is wrong, or else something very sinister and slightly stupid is going on, and clearly the pet theory can’t be wrong, so you end up justifying it in increasingly moronic ways…

[Force] is a placeholder because it cancels. We cannot cancel radius R and Period T from R3 = T2. But if we write it as Newton did as

Force = R/T^2 = 1/R^2 = Force

we can cancel the superfluous terms of force. We can also write

Newton’s soul = R/T^2 = 1/R^2 = Newton’s soul.

Or

Newton’s wig powder = R/T^2 = 1/R^2 = Newton’s wig powder.

So planets may be powered equivalently by Newton’s force, Newton’s soul or Newton’s wig powder. The last two are as good as force.

Well done for proving we can give a quantity a different name, although the idea that if something cancels it must therefore be antique powdered starch is a rather strange one. Freedom of Science thinks that Newton’s Laws are just made up, and that the actual fundamental law at work here is Kepler’s Third Law, which he calls “Kepler’s Rule”. This is, you may remember, much the same idea that Mark McCutcheon utterly failed to defend when I emailed him.

The site is also hooked into a “wiki” (which is not a wiki at all — it uses Wikimedia but it’s not a wiki because, like with Homeopathy4health’s more preposterous claims, I can’t edit or comment on it) with similarly strange ideas:

We know that Newton started from Kepler’s rule and wrote it as

where R is the radius and T is the period of the orbit. Newton then multiplied both sides by a label he invented, mass, then labeled each side by another label he invented, force, and labeled each side Newton’s laws

This guy thinks that mass is made up. Indeed, he thinks this of all quantities which cancel out even if there are other equations from which they do not cancel. Mass cancels in discussion of gravitation because the gravitational force is proportional to mass and therefore acceleration, and therefore speed and position, aren’t affected by it. Force is a slightly redundant concept when discussing gravity, although it’d be hard to discuss electrostatics without it. Presumably, therefore, he would be happy to play my game: he drops a 4g mass on my head from a height of one metre. Then, I drop a 2-tonne mass on his head from the same height. Then, assuming he survives, I give him £50. See how strong his faith in a massless universe is.

Essentially, he’s angry with Newton because he’s replaced k² with GM (when I learned this at school I never for a second imagined I’d hear even one person take umbrage with it, and here’s at least the second) and arbitrarily defined another quantity as “force”. He seems to consider this a pointless (and indeed politically motivated, although what the politic in question might be is unclear) obfuscation of Kepler’s elegant theory, which indeed it is, as long as you never want to discuss anything but planetary motion. The moment you want to discuss apples, Kepler’s Laws, brilliant as they are, just don’t apply. One of Newton’s greatest achievments was thinking in terms of general theories, rather than having one theory for planets and a separate Theory of Apples. Furthermore, introducing the concept of “force” (which we could always simply call “rate of change of momentum” which is a physically manifest quantity — although so is force if you want to talk quantum) means that we can then add three other forces and describe the whole of the universe, or at least what Richard Dawkins calls “Middle World”, in a few short equations. That has to be better than knowing how fast planets go, doesn’t it?

Well, you would think. But apparently there is what I shall generously term “some debate” about it.

You may recall, some time ago, a blog called Quackometer had to remove a page about the Society of Homeopaths because the Society of Homeopaths* threatened his hosting company with legal action. Well, he’s in trouble again. Just the other day, his godawful web hosts, Netcetera (you may have noticed some more Google- than user-oriented keyword selection going on here), received a letter from a lawyer representing a quack called Joseph Chikelue Obi. In case that page also gets taken down, here is a cache of it on Furl.net. Here are Furls of the offending two posts: Right Royal College of Pompous Quackery - Dublin; Ethical Quackery, the Monarchy and Kate Moss.

The problem is that Joseph Chikelue Obi says that the posts are “defamatory”:

Our clients hereby give you formal notice that they are determined to sue you directly for the highly defamatory contents contained on the website should you fail to immediately shut down the website and delete all of the defamatory material relating to the Royal College of Alternative Medicine, Professor Dr Obi and our clients` lawfully registered Trademarks.

Nowhere is it stated exactly what parts of the pages are defamatory or what the complaint is, because that would give Andy Lewis (who runs the site) chance to remove only that part. Also, of course, because the Quackometer pages are backed up with published reports in newspapers which Joseph Chikelue Obi has chosen not to sue, although he’s not really planning to sue Lewis or Netcetera either: he just saw the reports about the time the Society of Homeopaths threatened to and (having not read them very carefully at all) thought “maybe I can get the annoying pages taken down”. I mean, look at this ridiculous letter:

In case the defamation continues beyond 12 noon on Monday the 21st of January 2008, we are instructed to hold you fully liable to the tune of £1 Million (One Million Pounds) per day, together with additional punitive damages relating to the many months during which the defamatory material had and has been globally accessible via your server.

One Million Pounds? That’s ridiculous. That’s just a made-up number. It’s designed to sound Big And Scary, so Netcetera bow to his will, and it worked, because Netcetera are cowards. They clearly don’t care about anything but getting as much money as they can and keeping out of trouble at any cost, and I really don’t expect any more from them. I don’t expect any more from Joseph Chikelue Obi either: his college is imaginary, he’s been suspended for misconduct, he takes people’s money promising them everything and gives them nothing, newspapers advice people to avoid him, charges £250 to hear recorded phone messages, refused to turn up to his own GMC hearing, and his qualifications are highly suspect.

The next paragraph of the letter shocked me, though:

Kindly note that Google has already blocked the highly defamatory material from appearing on its search engines in the Republic of Ireland, and is currently in the process of extending the ban to other countries.

I honestly expect more from Google. Aside from the fact that I can’t for a second see how Google could possibly be labelled liable for libel when all they did was tell people that someone else has written a webpage pointing out that some newspapers published articles containing information that was probably true anyway, it doesn’t seem to fit with their general politic. I’ve written to Google, but not long enough ago that I could reasonably demand an answer yet. Here’s some (well, okay, most) of my email:

I understand you have recently removed some pages from your index after a legal threat: http://www.google.ie/search?q=quackometer+obi

…

I’d like to know how sites are checked, when this kind of threat is received, to see if they are genuinely defamatory. Having a policy of “not using an editorial viewpoint to determine the ranking of results” ( http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=4115&query=editorial&topic=&type=) and a policy of removing defamatory content at the request or threat of individuals concerned seems to be somewhat at odds with your stated “[strong belief] in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results” (http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39334&ctx=en:cuf2). The web’s democratic nature only works if you allow both sides of a story equal rights to your search results.

… If the world’s leading search engine happily indexes his own pages and third-party pages which sing his praises, but removes all pages which criticise him or highlight his past “misadventures” … then anyone searching on his name or ’services’ will be left with the false impression that he is a universally-praised and wholly uncontroversial man with no detractors, which is simply not the case.

This clearly leaves a situation where your search results are not only factually inaccurate, they are not even a true reflection of the content available on the web. It might be more helpful to simply return no results at all.

If nothing else, the “websites removed” notice should be placed in a more prominent position: A search for Obi (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Joseph+Chikelue+Obi&btnG=Search ) returns the “defamatory” page as the very first hit, whereas the notice about its removal on the same search at google.ie is right at the bottom of the page, where many users simply won’t see it.

Google has a reputation, and to some degree I think an obligation, for providing unbiased search results and that is not what you are doing in this case. At the moment I feel badly let down. Is there anything you can tell me to allay that?

It’s actually remarkably hard to email Google. Their website is awful by modern standards. You can’t easily contact them.

---

*It’s well worth using the phrase “the Society of Homeopaths” just to make “the Society of Homeopaths” a link to one of the blogs that reposted that blog about what the Society of Homeopaths did. It boosts its ranking in a Google search for “the Society of Homeopaths“.

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.)

The NHS in Kent have stopped funding the Tunbridge Wells Homeopathic Hospital, which leaves four NHS-funded homeopathic hospitals. This is, of course, a good thing: homeopathy is (and let’s be fair to it) total bollocks, and while there’s nothing particularly wrong with homeopathic hospitals existing*, giving them public funding is quite indefensible. Apparently, the decision was taken because “the NHS has to decide the best use of money on the evidence of clinical effectiveness”. This is also good — homeopathy has no clinical effectiveness and therefore should get no money. But I can’t help feeling that all of this is not so much a good thing as it is a very, very small step towards a good thing. The ideal situation is that public money isn’t spent on irrational things. It may come as a shock for many people, but I have checked, and we are not living inside a Jasper Fforde book, and here in Real Life there’s no reason to spend public money paying deluded people to put bad medicine into beakers and then repeatedly rinse them out, just like there’s no reason to spend public money brainwashing vulnerable children into believing in God.

Okay, so the NHS in Kent have decided that homeopathy is at least a little less deserving of funding than the other things they’re doing, but that’s not the same as the NHS stopping spending my money on stupidity. The NHS still seems pretty supportive of homeopathy. They know it’s nonsense, of course, everyone know that (or at least, everyone who counts), but they support it anyway. Why? Because a very tiny fraction of the public want them to. This is what the NHS has to say on its homeopathy information page:

Around 200 randomised controlled trials evaluating homeopathy have been conducted, and there are also several reviews of these trials. Despite the available research, it has proven difficult to produce clear clinical evidence that homeopathy works. Many studies suggest that any effectiveness that homeopathy may have is due to the placebo effect, where the act of receiving treatment is more effective than the treatment itself.

Medical doctors and scientists do not generally accept homeopathy because its claims have not been verified to the standards of modern medicine and scientific method. Scientists argue that homeopathy cannot work because the remedies used are so highly diluted that in many there can be none of the active substance remaining

That, to me, reads as a pretty damning condemnation of homeopathy**. It’s cagily worded, saying “it has proven difficult to produce … evidence” rather than flatly stating that there is no good evidence, but it’s pretty clear in its message: the people whose job it is to know if things like this work generally agree that it doesn’t. And yet this is on the website of the NHS, a body who spend a million pounds on homeopathy every couple of months. So why do they do that?

I think the government lately has taken to trying to appeal exclusively to minorities. A small number of people want magic water on the NHS, so they get it. A small number want faith schools, so they get it. They held out on the smoking ban for as long as possible, presumably to please the small number of smokers in the public (although the quite bare-faced exemption of the House of Commons’ bar suggests another motive).

Of course, it doesn’t help that MPs are basically all rubbish at science. The above link is to a transcript of a debate in the House of Commons. Here’s a paragraph, spoken by David Tredinnick, whoever he might be:

Surveys have been done to see whether the treatments are effective. The Bristol homeopathic hospital did an outcomes study, not just of a percentage of its patients, but of the lot. It surveyed 6,544 consecutive follow-up patients, and the outcomes scores were as follows. They had all taken homeopathic medicine, and they were asked whether it worked. Seventy-one per cent.—three quarters—said that they had improved, half said that they were better or much better, and homeopathy was associated with positive health changes to a substantial proportion of a large number of patients with a wide range of chronic diseases. In other words, cutting out the jargon, the hospital was treating lots of different people for lots of different things—lots of serious problems.

He’s citing a survey as evidence. Which would perhaps be fair enough if there was any kind of a placebo control group — without knowing what kinds of conditions were being treated and how those conditions generally respond to placebo, without knowing what I’m supposed to understand from “71% … said they had improved, half said they were better”, without knowing what “a substantial proportion” might be, this is just a bunch of meaningless statements. I can see that at an idle glance at that paragraph. It worries me if the people running the country can’t. He mentions some numbers from other trials later, but to be honest I’ve already lost faith in his ability to understand scientific studies so his summary of them is of little value to me.

And of course, one might argue that they shouldn’t be expected to; that they’re politicians, not scientists, and that it’s unreasonable to demand they know how to critique a scientific study — they have advisors for that. And that would be true if they weren’t discussing NHS policy. NHS policy has to be decided by people who understand medicine; that’s just common sense. And anyone who thinks that a survey performed by a homeopathic hospital with no control group is in any way useful evidence does not understand medicine and shouldn’t be given a say, elected official or not.

Another thing which annoys me is that while I was trying to find out how much the NHS spends on homeopathy I found many references claiming that it costs 16p to treat a patient. Now I don’t know what that’s meant to mean, but it’s a lie. A glass of tapwater costs effectively nothing, and no molecules of medicine costs exactly nothing. But the whole placebo shebang costs a lot more — you have to pay someone to sit and talk to a patient for ages before they’re sufficiently bored that the ‘medicine’ will have any effect. They say it costs 16p. The BBC article I linked at the beginning says that the hospital in Tunbridge Wells costs £160,000 a year and treats 1000 patients with that money. That works out to £160 a year, which is a thousand times what is being claimed.

Apparently, the NHS has been funding homeopathy since it was founded, and it still is. You celebrate this one hopsital closing if you want, but I don’t call that progress.

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* I think it’s fair enough to provide a market for anything people believe, although if the homeopaths say that their medicine is more than just a placebo, as I’ve seen homeopaths do quite explicitly, then of course that’s fraud (even if it does make the placebo more effective — these morals are pretty clear cut when it’s not your money you’re spending, as in the case of the NHS spending money that the general public has worked to provide). And if a patient has nothing wrong with them then it’s just about acceptable for a GP to suggest they try alternative therapy, although obviously the NHS mustn’t fund that. If we’re happy for the NHS to lie to us in what it sees as our best interests, then how can we complain when ministers do it?

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** Here’s some example questions from the “what to ask” section of that same page (emphasis mine). I think there’s some pretty good advice here:

• How effective is this treatment?
• How will I know if the treatment is working?
• What will happen if I don’t have any treatment?
• Are there any other ways to treat my condition?
• Can you explain it again? I still don’t understand

A thread on the Bad Science forums has just directed me to this page, a parliamentary early day motion in favour of homeopathic hospitals, along with a list of the MPs who are stupid and/or ignorant enough to have signed it. Here’s the text of the motion:

That this House welcomes the positive contribution made to the health of the nation by the NHS homeopathic hospitals; notes that some six million people use complementary treatments each year; believes that complementary medicine has the potential to offer clinically-effective and cost-effective solutions to common health problems faced by NHS patients, including chronic difficult to treat conditions such as musculoskeletal and other chronic pain, eczema, depression, anxiety and insomnia, allergy, chronic fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome; expresses concern that NHS cuts are threatening the future of these hospitals; and calls on the Government actively to support these valuable national assets.

Almost every word of that is wrong. Homeopathic hospitals cost money and don’t work; that is a negative contribution. “Complementary treatments” is a misleading term and does not refer to homeopathy alone and so the number attached to it is irrelevant and misleading. Complementary medicine cannot offer “clinically-effective” (which should not be hyphenated) solutions to any health problems (except possibly for psychosomatic ones). Threats to these hospitals’ futures is not a cause for concern, the government should not support them, and they are not “national assets”. That’s pretty bad for a single sentence.

It also links to this page which tells you who your local MP is and how to contact them, so that if yours is on the list (mine isn’t) you can let them know that the NHS should probably not be spending millions of pounds of your money on hospitals whose stated goal is to prescribe a nice cool glass of water for every known illness.

I shall add this motion to my long list of reasons not to like Ann Widdecombe. The only other name on there I know anything much about it Lembit Opik, and frankly I expect more from him. If he wants me to believe his asteroid science he could start by showing he understands that water cannot cure allergies. If someone who understands science tells me there’s a danger then I’ll worry. If someone who thinks homeopathy is clinically effective tells me there’s a danger then I’ll laugh.

Lately I have been reading the internet differently. Usually I read a page and open all the interesting looking links in it in background tabs, then when I’ve finished I go through them one by one and read them. Today I didn’t do that. I started at one page, and hit an interesting link so I opened it on top and read that. Then another, and another, and at the end I went back and finished off the other pages. The end result was like reading a Billy Connolly routine.

But the deepest page in there was this video, because of course it had no links in it. The video is of a debate entitled “Does Homeopathy Work?”, and it features Doctors Ben Goldacre and Peter Fisher, a homeopath. And there were a few things that struck me, but the most striking thing was that while, in all, I think four people spoke at any length what I’d call ’strongly’ in favour of homeopathy, and all sounded very convincing, their arguments were all distinctly at odds with each other.

Once, Fisher was speaking out against the idea that homeopathists are against conventional medicine, but since he referred to it as “those nasty toxic drugs” I wouldn’t call it exactly ‘balanced’.

But my main problem with the arguments in the video is that they were largely contradictory. Fisher claimed there was “pretty incontrovertable” evidence that homeopathy did indeed work, but then another homeopathist, said the opposite (and utterly redefined homeopathy) by saying medicine was “one of the reasons why these kinds of trials that both parties tried to mention do not work, and it’s quite obvious, is … the homeopathic remedy is only homeopathic when it is used and has been shown to be effective”. No, that would be conventional medicine. You can’t say a clinical trial won’t work because your medicine can be shown to be effective. If that’s true then the clinical trial must work. Essentially, his argument was that (a) if the trial fails then by definition it wasn’t proper homeopathy anyway, and (b) a homeopathic medicine is specific to a patient; that rather than just saying “ah, you have condition X, you need remedy x“, you have to try things out until one works. “This,” he says, “is quite easily proved.” His proof is to ask homeopaths, and they will tell you that “they have had patients where they have prescribed remedies to them and they have not worked and they have reanalysed, reanalysed and perhaps again reanalysed the case, and eventually they’ve come up with the correct remedy, and that correct remedy has miraculously changed the patient.” This, to me, smells distincly of bad thinking: ill people either die or get better. That’s what happens to ill people. That’s how life works. So if you find ill people, and keep trying different ‘remedies’ on them, eventually most of them will get better. If you’re trying a different remedy every week then you’ll have to be trying one when they recover. Then you call that the “correct” remedy and announce your treatment a success. And if the patient dies? Well, they were proably going to die anyway and you obviously just didn’t find the right remedy in time. Can’t win ‘em all. But far more to the point, this goes directly against everything everyone else said, because he then said “so it isn’t the procedure of sitting in front of a homeopath for an hour and a half; it isn’t any other thing that you might think; it isn’t placebo; it is purely the correct substance being found which is homeopathic to the patient”. This got a round of applause, despite being directly opposite of what Dr Goldacre had said in his opening speech.

The video is a very good thing to watch for any scientists wondering if homepathy works. The homeopathists’ arguments convinced me they were all batshit insane.

Here’s a thought.

Homeopathy doesn’t work. That’s a given. (If you think it does work then you’re wrong, but you can simply pretend for the sake of this thought process that you accept that it’s bunk. Or you can substitute something you don’t believe in, such as evidence or integrity.) However, due to the placebo effect homeopathy can have some small positive effect, if you believe in it.

This means that homeopathy and similar quack therapies are ways to selectively cure the gullible and stupid. Look at that from an evolutionary point of view and it’s quite alarming. It would explain a few things, though.

People are essentially being bred to be gullible and stupid. Who thought that would be a good idea?

The way I see it, there are two ways to do this. The first is more scientific, but I’m less certian it would work.

My theory is that you could run experiments with some kind of toxin. Start off wth a concentrated solution, give it to someone, then measure how ill they get against a placebo control group. Then dilute the mixture to 75% and repeat. Dilute again a couple of times, say to 50% and 25% and repeat each time. Then plot the response against the dose.

My theory is that you’ll get a graph that looks, on some set of axes and units at least, like this:

This is because, as we all know, the body can deal with a small amount of toxin with no ill effects. Then we extrapolate, as shown:

It is now clear to see that using a dose of zero will cause a negative amount of illness — i.e., will make the patient better.

My second theory on how to prove homeopathy works is to run a study in a peer-reviewed journal. The trick is that homeopathists are not scientists; they are idiots. Therefore a truly peer-reviewed homeopathy journal would be reviewed by other idiots. And the paper would get through.