Best Homeopathy Analogies and Facts

[athon]

Folks, this Sunday I have a presentation I can given on a topic of my choice for the Australian Science Festival. It should have a fairly substantial audience and is moderately light hearted, although the focus of the session will be four panelists (of which I am one) ranting about something in science that makes them angry.

I've decided to do CAM, and will start with homeopathy. I'm moderately well versed in the history and concepts behind it but was looking for some entertaining analogies and some interesting facts on the global homeopathic industry.

Web sites that you find helpful would also be appreciated.

Athon

[Blue Wode]

You might like to consider the following:


Homeopathic Products Used for Mass "Suicide"

Scientists, doctors, and other rational thinkers in Belgium were dismayed last year when the country’s major health insurance companies announced that they would begin covering part of the costs of homeopathy, a widely-used but medically invalid and worthless form of quackery. Responding to the protests, the companies justified their action by claiming that “people like it.”

Critics were incredulous. SKEPP, the Belgian skeptical organization, promptly suggested that costs of Bordeaux wine also be reimbursed. Why? Because, unlike the situation with homeopathy, there is substantial evidence that red wine, taken in moderation, is good for your health. When this argument failed to prevail, according to a report in the Skeptical Inquirer by public health professor Luc Bonneaux, the skeptics decided to make their point by staging what they called a mass “suicide.”

In front of reporters from Belgium’s major newspapers and television stations, 23 volunteers—respected medical professors, a well-known TV producer, a top publicist, and several ordinary citizens—gulped down large quantities of over-the-counter homeopathic solutions based on deadly poisons. These included snake venom, deadly nightshade, arsenic and, just for the hell of it, dog milk. Dog milk was included because a homeopathic reference book (materia medica) actually says that undiluted dog milk can cause such disturbances as vomiting, bloody pus discharges, sciatica (right side) and “dreams of snakes.”

Read on…

http://www.homeowatch.org/articles/jaroff.html





Homeopathy: Holmes, Hogwarts, and the Prince of Wales

Do you think I don’t understand the hydrostatic paradox of controversy? If you had a bent tube, one arm of which was the size of a pipe-stem and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Thus discussion equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, and the fools know it. O. W. Holmes. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1)

THE HYDROSTATIC PARADOX has never been so well illustrated as by current discussions of alternative medicine and its poster child, homeopathy.

-snip-

Now for the Principle of Minimum Dose—it turns out that most homeopathic solutions contain nothing at all. Sad to say, the last remaining privately owned drug store in my neighborhood features dilutions of Oscillococcinum® a "200C" product. That’s a dilution number, cunningly calculated to guarantee that the original ingredient has been diluted several million times, and has surely exceeded Avrogado’s number. The magic numbers have been calculated by Dr. Stephen Barret as follows: "Dilutions of 1 to 10 are designated by the Roman numeral X (1X=1/10, 2X=1/100, 3X=1/1,000, 6X=1/1,000,000). Similarly, dilutions of 1 to 100 are designated by the Roman numeral C (1C=1/100, 2C=1/10,000, 3C=1/1,000,000, and so on). Most remedies today range from 6X to 30C, but some carry designations as high as 200C. Oscillococcinum, that 200C product "for the relief of colds and flu-like symptoms," involves dilutions that are even more far-fetched. Its "active ingredient" is prepared by incubating small amounts of a freshly killed duck’s liver and heart for 40 days (18).

Were a single molecule of the duck’s heart or liver to survive the dilution, its concentration would be 100200. This huge number, which has 400 zeroes, is vastly greater than the estimated number of molecules in the universe (about one googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes). Quackwatch—a website well named for a duck authority—quotes the February 17, 1997, issue of U.S. News & World Report as reporting that only one duck per year is needed to manufacture the product, which had total sales of $20 million in 1996. The magazine dubbed that unlucky bird "the $20-million duck."

-snip-

It’s been said that "if homeopathy has a leader in the United States it is Dana Ullman MPH!" (20) Mr. Ullman has written six major texts, and Penguin, his publishers, boast that he serves on the Advisory Council of the Alternative Medicine Center at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and is a consultant to Harvard Medical School’s Center to Assess Alternative Therapy for Chronic Illness (21).

Penguin does not report that in the course of the anthrax outbreak in October of 2001, Mr. Ullman advised use of the homeopathic medicine Anthracinum for the prevention and treament of anthrax. This agent, gathered from infected swine, is called a nosode and its producers reassure the public that they are "diluted to a point where no molecules of the disease product remain." (22) Well, nosodes and Anthracinum, miasmas and the like, which dot the Hogwarts curriculum of Mr. Ullman’s site, are matched by those on the web-sites of the University Centers he has advised. Columbia’s Rosenthal Center offers "integrative medicine" for children with cancer offered by a staff experienced in Shiatsu, reflexology, aromatherapy, Reiki, Flow Alignment and Connection, So Tai, and Tui Na (23).

Not to be outdone, Harvard Medical School’s Osher Institute offers clinical fellowships, funded by NCCAM, to study remedies that meet Prince Charles’s criteria of being "rooted in ancient traditions"—acupuncture, herbal therapies, chiropractic, relaxation techniques, therapeutic massage, and other proto-scientific measures that sidestep the laws of chemistry and physics (24) . It is in this context that one can understand why, when Columbia’s Rosenthal Center kicked off its 10th anniversary celebration on November 20th at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, the awardees of honor were—you guessed it—Dr. Andrew Weil and Prince Charles (25) . Is Albus Dumbledore next?

More…

http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/full/20/11/1755





Homeopathic licensing alarms doctors

…the MHRA will license remedies based on "homeopathic provings", observations of the symptoms (such as watering eyes or headaches) a person gets when given a particular substance. Michael Baum, emeritus professor of surgery at University College London said: "This is like licensing a witches' brew as a medicine so long as the bat wings are sterile."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,1862554,00.html





Literally any outcome for the patient is used as confirmation of homeopathy's truth. Recovery obviously means the remedy worked. A lack of response merely dictates more prolonged treatment or a change of remedy. More bizarrely, a deterioration is called an "aggravation" and is specifically regarded as a sure sign the remedy is having the desired effect. Homeopathy is not a system of medicine, but a set of excuses. It does not provide successful treatment but a set of narrative tools to accompany the natural history of the disease".

Letter from Simon J Baker, Veterinary Surgeon, in the British Medical Journal
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/331/7520/795-a#119537




Good luck with your presentation.

[athon]

Good stuff. Thanks for the links.

Athon

[JJM]

Randi http://www.randi.org/jr/2007-08/081707hoagland.html#i17 has accepted a challenge to consume an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills without falling asleep. Sometimes he does this in front of an audience during a speaking engagement; but a believer thinks he fools everyone by subsituting blanks for the homeopathic pills.

[wilsontown]

Sometimes he does this in front of an audience during a speaking engagement; but a believer thinks he fools everyone by subsituting blanks for the homeopathic pills.

Heh. Or perhaps the dose is just too large to have an effect?

[Mojo]

...a believer thinks he fools everyone by subsituting blanks for the homeopathic pills.


Another excuse is that no matter how many pills are taken, if they're all taken at about the same time they only count as a single dose.

[Rolfe]

Oh, the standard get-out there is that the pills don't make you sleepy in the middle of the day, what they do is "treat" insomnia. If you have insomnia, they'll work. If you don't, nothing will happen.

Regarding Dana Ullman, we trashed him recently in this thread (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=82393). He obviously saw his own name in the thread title, and joined up as "James Gully". He posted historical stuff that took cherrypicking and quote-mining to new heights of dishonesty, then in true woo tradition of accusing your opponent of your own sins, called us "intellectually dishonest".

His new book is all about how all these historical figures like Darwin used homoeopathy and wouldn't have lived to make their great discoveries if they hadn't, and how O. W. Holmes was all wrong but refused to retract his famous essay. Of course Holmes wasn't wrong, and Darwin thought homoeopathy was bunk, and so on. Mojo pretty much handed Dana his backside on a plate. Dana eventually ran away, returning only once to make a hit-and-run post saying that Rustum Roy had proved us all wrong and when were we going to start consuming that humble pie?

Sorry Athon, that wasn't the question.

Hahnemann's Homoeopathy (http://www.angelfire.com/mb2/quinine/)

Homoeopathy and its Founder (http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsID.668/healthissue_detail.asp)

Good old Holmes, had it surrounded in 1842 (http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/holmes.html)

and of course Homeowatch (http://www.homeowatch.org/)

Good luck distilling all the information into a brief and entertaining presentation!

Rolfe.

[Eos of the Eons]

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/GiveMeABreak/story?id=124309&page=1
To understand the proportions, one drop of medicine in 99 drops of water is referred to as 1 C. Then often, homeopaths just keep diluting it. At 6 C the amount is like one drop of medicine in 50 swimming pools. Taken further, 12 C is like one drop in the entire Atlantic Ocean.

...Well there may not be any molecular dose, but somehow the water does change."

Homeopaths can't seem to get the molecular properties of water. They make things up, but don't even get that water has certain properties that debunks homeopathy itself. I've even heard them say homeopathy changes the shape of the water molecule. Even if it could change water from the described V-ish funky non-sperical molecule shape that does constantly exchange hydrogen with other water molecules, what would cause it to have any effect that they claim? Even if it somehow changed shape due to shaking and adding more water to water, it would still be just a water molecule that acts like water and nothing else.

http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/molecule.html

An equally warped response to their theory of water memory is to say the constant hydrogen exchange would erase any memory... if you want to get on their level of stupid. I'd like to see their response to that though.

[fishkr]

[QUOTE=Eos of the Eons;2905923]http://abcnews.go.com/2020/GiveMeABreak/story?id=124309&page=1

Homeopaths can't seem to get the molecular properties of water. QUOTE]

I've heard this structered water idea in general terms by homeopaths, but I never got that they were talking about changing the molecular structure. I thought they intended that the water molecules organized themselves into a certain pattern which was permanent. Brownian Motion was what came to mind.

But the molecules themselves? Have any of these people ever suggested an atom-scaled physical mechanism which might explain this? Even so, why would water remember just the non-existent hypothetically active material? What about the dilution tank? The glass vial? A dust mote? The myriad of organic and inorganic materials each molecule has come into contact with over the eons?

Do homepaths propose they can "erase" the water like a hard drive before the dilution process? How would you go about doing that? Without doing so, how could they control or predict which "memory" would prevail?

This stuff drives me crazy. Good luck Athon.

M

[Thing]

There's a pretty good summary here, you could print a stack out and leave them behind you.

http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/pdf/SenseAboutHomeopathy.pdf

[Thing]

Sorry, just read the OP and realised I'm too late. But it's a handy leaflet anyway.

[Ladewig]

Folks, this Sunday I have a presentation I can given on a topic of my choice for the Australian Science Festival.

SO how did it go?

[Eos of the Eons]

This water, which homeopaths call "potentized," is considered "structured water," because the water molecules have taken on a shape influenced by the original substance
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2000/03/33749

Yeah, I figured this meant that they claim it looks like some other molecular shape, of like arsenic (http://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2004/11/041116215318.jpg) or something, and no longer looking like a molecule of water.

[Pipirr]

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2000/03/33749



There was a line in that Wired story to the effect that the AMA was founded to "stamp out the scourge of homeopathy".

I had a look at the AMA website and the google, and can't substantiate that statement, but the following paragraphs from their 1847 charter of ethics (http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/upload/mm/369/1847code.pdf) show that homeopathy (and it's kindred delusions) did perhaps play a role in forming the AMA's philosophy:


To those who, like physicians, can best see the extent of the evil,
it is still more mortifying than in the instances already mentioned, to find
members of other professions, and especially ministers of the Gospel, so
prone to give their countenance, and, at times, direct patronage to medical
empirics, both by their use of nostrums, and by their certificates in favour
of the absurd pretensions of these impostors.

The credulous, on these occasions, place themselves in the dilemma
of bearing testimony either to a miracle or to an imposture: to a miracle, if
one particular agent, and it often of known inertness or slight power, can
cure all diseases, or even any one disease in all its stages; to an imposture,
if the alleged cures are not made, as experience shows that they are not.

But by no class are quack medicines and nostrums so largely sold
and distributed as by apothecaries, whose position towards physicians,
although it may not amount to actual affinity, is such that it ought, at
least, to prevent them from entering into an actual, if not formally
recognized, alliance with empirics of every grade and degree of
pretention.

Too frequently we meet with physicians who deem it a venial error,
in ethics, to permit, and even to recommend, the use of a quack medicine
or secret compound by their patients and friends. They forget that their
toleration implies sanction of a recourse by the people generally to
unknown, doubtful and conjectural fashions of medication; and that the
credulous in this way soon become the victims of an endless succession
of empirics. It must have been generally noticed, also, that they, whose
faith is strongest in the most absurd pretensions of quackery, entertain the
greatest skepticism towards regular and philosophic medicine.

Adverse alike to ethical propriety and to medical logic, are the
various popular delusions which, like so many epidemics, have, in
successive ages, excited the imagination with extravagant expectations of
the cure of all diseases and the prolongation of life beyond its customary
limits, by means of a single substance. Although it is not in the power of
physicians to prevent, or always to arrest, these delusions in their
progress, yet it is incumbent on them, from their superior knowledge and
better opportunities, as well as from their elevated vocation, steadily to
refuse to extend to them the slightest countenance, still less support.

These delusions are sometimes manifested in the guise of a new and
infallible system of medical practice, - the faith in which, among the
excited believers, is usually in the inverse ratio of the amount of common
sense evidence in its favour. Among the volunteer missionaries for its
dissemination, it is painful to see members of the sacred profession, who,
above all others, ought to keep aloof from vagaries of any description,
and especially of those medical ones which are allied to empirical
imposture.



Evidence-based medical practitioners of the world, past and present, I salute you.

[athon]

SO how did it go?

Brilliantly. The format was slightly different to what I originally thought, and I ended up ranting somewhat more generally about concepts of science within the community. I did mention the stupidity of homeopathy but didn't go into detail, deciding instead to keep my speech broad. It did become somewhat a focus of the event, though, which made me happy.

Hopefully they'll put it up as a podcast soon. I'll put a link up to it then.

Thanks for the links though, folks. I can almost guarentee I'll be doing more of this sort of thing in the future so this isn't a wasted resource for me.

Athon

[Eos of the Eons]

Thank you for the update, and a podcast to look forward to. Congrats again on the whole presentation!