There is no shortage of villains in the world. Psychopaths – domestic and national – whalers, toxic waste dumpers, global eavesdroppers, billionaire tax avoiders and their army of accountants – all well worth campaigning against with the aim of getting them banged up or forced to cough up.
There is also an infinite supply of people who are mildly irritating who misplace apostrophes, wear Croc shoes, do crochet, litter their sentences with “you know” and text using their middle finger.
However most of us can tell the difference. In fact mixing the two categories up is a pretty reliable indicator of a serious level of battiness . Picketing shops that sell Crocs or campaigning to forbid the sale of mobiles to clumsy texters puts you firmly in the mild-to-fairly-irritating and definitely-a-bit -potty class.
Step forward the Nightingale Collaboration, earnest and self-styled defender of rationalism, whose seriously potty members have got these categories mixed up. They have picked on something that might, to some, be mildly irritating – homeopathy – and pumped up their dislike into a cause, complete with demonstrations, calls for bans and a vindictive campaign – CAMpain? – directed against homeopaths’ livelihood.
Personally I am agnostic about homeopathy, I fully appreciate the apparent absurdity of the mechanism but I know plenty of perfectly rational people who swear it has helped them. Maybe it has a strong placebo element but so do anti-depressant SSRIs. The data on effectiveness may be mixed – both sides can cite sheaves of negative and positive studies. But unlike regular drugs, these trials are not all run by those selling the remedies nor do they have vast marketing budgets to accentuate the positive and conceal the negative.
Irritating and should be banned
I bring all this up because this week Nightingale was supposed to be protesting outside the Advertising Standards Authority (because they haven’t been diligent in chasing homeopaths for making unsupported claims on web sites) and lobbying Parliament (because “something has to be done”). I don’t know if any of this actually happened – I couldn’t find any news coverage –but I’m writing about them because they are irritating and batty and should be banned (ironic joke).
Homeopathy and the other CAM activities that grinds the Nightingale’s gears don’t exist is a vacuum. They are part of the health and healing options open to all of us. In other words you can’t make a judgement about them without considering what may be involved in taking drugs to deal with your ailments. In other words, as drug regulators are fond of saying: it is a matter of balancing risk and benefit.
I don’t plan to rehash all the evidence for pharma’s sometimes fraudulent practices and unreliability – Ben Goldacre’s latest book has done that very comprehensively – but it does seem useful and revealing to highlight the stories about the risks involved in taking drugs that were reported in a single issue of the BMJ – June 22 – the same week that the Nightingale felt that the best way to protect patients was to lay into homoeopathy.
Significant rise in brain haemorrhage
No worries for them about a drug widely prescribed on the NHS for the treatment of acute stroke and recommended by NICE called Alteplase. An investigation has just found that only two of a dozen randomised trials of Alteplase showed benefit while five had had to be stopped early because of: ‘lack of benefit, higher mortality and significant rise in brain haemorrhage’.
How could such a mismatch between evidence and recommendations have occurred? The investigation also found that the clinical guidelines for Alterplase – what doctors rely on to guide them in the use of a drug – had been written by experts who nearly all had links with companies making or marketing the drug. This is a long-running problem and possibly a little more dangerous than homoeopathy.
Another issue that is all too familiar is the dubious drugging of young children. A German study had just found that the use of antipsychotic drugs – powerful tranquilisers with a nasty range of side-effects – on children aged ten and over had gone up in the last four years by 41per cent “for no medical reason.” There is good reason for thinking the situation is very similar in the UK. What do these drugs do to a developing brain? We’ve no idea. Is this worrying and probably not in the children’s best interests? I think so.
A central charge against homoeopathy is that there is no evidence it works. OK but what about the missing evidence about the effectiveness or otherwise of Tamifu. For at least three years researchers have been asking to see the full evidence that this flu drug, on which the NHS has spent 500 million pounds, cuts infection risk or shortens time you are sick.
Not being told the entire truth
The BMJ reported that the journal’s editor had told a Commons committee that only half of the Tamiflu trials had ever been published and that a positive trial was twice as likely to be published as an unsuccessful one.
These are all long running examples of why it is perfectly rational to suspect you may not be told the entire truth about both the safety and the effectiveness of standard treatments. But now there is a new one. This issue of the BMJ also followed up on an alarming story the journal had broken a couple of weeks about a new class of diabetes drug that was being linked with a raised risk of pancreatic inflammation and cancer, which the companies involved had been slow to investigate. See my story here.
Known as incretins, the drugs come in two types GLP1 and DPP-4 that both boost insulin production. The companies and their critics, which now includes the American Diabetic Association, are settling in for a long battle. The journal makes a strong case for believing the warning signs had been there since the drugs were first licenced and there had been little enthusiasm for investigating them.
Nightingale usually advances these arguments for why homeopaths must be hounded: that any reported benefit is due to the placebo effect; that treatment claims therefore lack evidence and are fraudulent; that homoeopathy distracts patients from getting a real treatment that works.
But all of these can be applied with equal force to one or more of the drug examples covered in the BMJ. Ultimately what Nightingale is attacking is the intelligence and judgement of people who are trying to find an effective way to heal themselves. If homeopathy, which even its most virulent critics cannot claim is remotely likely to be harmful, works for you, then someone needs to combine serious arrogance with real battiness to believe they have the right to stand in the way.
Body of Evidence 
Dear Jerome – Many thanks for your article. People should be concerned that one by one homeopaths will disappear, homeopathic clinics will lose funding, homeopathic remedies will be removed from access, and homeopathic hospital will be closed.*
For those people who have experienced positive results with homeopathy, this will be a great loss.
The detractors of this 200+ year old healing method stand by their fixed notion that “homeopathy does not work”. They claim it is just water with nothing in it. They give credit to the compassionate case-taking methods and the placebo effect. Thus, they do find some benefit, when they attribute the real live voices of people who tell their healing stories. However, they will not change their minds about calling in nonsense. I guess they are not willing to investigate why it works for some people, if not for them. Now they take this position and post remarks on as many websites as possible telling people they are stupid or even idiotic to try these remedies. They go to the extreme and say homeopathy kills people.
These types of statements intend to push their agenda of removing homeopathy from access and closing down the clinics, offices and hospitals. In essence to remove access. All this means taking away the ability of an individual to choose this form of medicine. I do call it medicine, because physicians all around the world, including surgeons**, psychiatrists, dentists, etc. utilize homeopathic remedies and do so for their effectiveness.
Therefore, by removing access to homeopathic remedies, we would be limiting the tools in the physicians toolbox to heal trauma victims, emotional and physical injury, or helping people recover from surgery and work through painful events. On mass, Cuba and Brazil have found homeopathic remedies even prevent contagious disease.
For these reasons and many more, people should care about protecting their freedom to choose homeopathy and wonder what motivates attackers. If anything, governments should be funding MORE research to understand why so many people claim it has healed their arthritis, cancer, auto-immune diseases, high blood pressure, hair loss, hormonal dysfunction, depression, poor eyesight, bleeding gums, abscess, cuts, angina, diabetes and so many other diseases that cost individuals and governments trillions of dollars. Use of homeopathy could be a cost-cutting investment.
Please use this list or resources as a reference to the points above:
http://www.nationalcenterforhomeopathy.org/articles-research
**Evaluation of homeopathic Arnica montana for ecchymosis after upper blepharoplasty: a placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind study. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20683279
Just a few examples where the consequence of detractors have made an impact to reduce access and thus freedom of choice for medical care from people who have relied on homeopathy for hundreds of years.
On the 7th of January 2013, the Cotham Hill site of the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital will close and the staff will move to a new NHS development, the South Bristol Community Hospital.
*http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/health/health-board-plans-to-axe-funding-for-homeopathy-treatment.21443524
NHS homeopathic clinic in Cullompton to close
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-20780271
Homeopathic hospital funds campaign gains momentum
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/homeopathic-hospital-funds-campaign-gains-momentum.21037822
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde: Save the Glasgow Homoeopathic Hospital
http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/nhs-greater-glasgow-and-clyde-save-the-glasgow-homoeopathic-hospital,
The Deputy Chairman of the junior doctors committee of the British Medical Association (BMA) has called homeopathy “witchcraft” and “nonsense on stilts”, whilst the BMA conference declared in 2010 that homeopathy has “no place in the modern health service”.
http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/nhs-greater-glasgow-and-clyde-withdraw-funding-for-glasgow-homeopathic-hospital
Thus, we might call these actions unfounded witch hunt against a well established form of medicine.
Interesting! The article that you quote, “Evaluation of homeopathic Arnica montana for ecchymosis after upper blepharoplasty: a placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind study”, states explicitly:
“CONCLUSIONS: The authors find no evidence that homeopathic A. montana, as used in this study, is beneficial in the reduction or the resolution of ecchymosis after upper eyelid blepharoplasty”.
Had you actually read it?
I read a lot of studies, and one of the most fascinating things I’ve found is that many draw conclusions that the results simply do not support. This is particularly common in studies with results that run counter to the current beliefs of that field, so the conclusion will state that the study found no evidence for the hypothesis, in spite of the results clearly demonstrating that the hypothesis was correct. Quoting nothing but the conclusions proves absolutely nothing.
If someone wants to use homeopathy then I don’t have a problem with that, though I might let them know that the evidence is against it working. Similarly, if someone wanted to cure their warts by rubbing a snail on them then I won’t stop them, though I would also let them know that there was poor evidence in favour of this treatment.
Where I draw the line is that if someone advertises a cure for warts based on snail rubbing then I would expect that they can substantiate this claim. Likewise if someone makes claims for the efficacy of homeopathy then I would expect they could substantiate this claim. And this shouldn’t be based on anecdote. That wouldn’t be sufficient for pharmaceuticals so why should it be sufficient for homeopathy.
And let’s be clear. The ASA does not prohibit the advertising of homeopathy or snail rubbing. It is the advertising of unsubstantiated claims of efficacy that is the problem. Once homeopaths (and snail rubbers) can do that then they make these claims till their hearts content. Homeopaths don’t accept that though. They seem to believe that there is one code for them and another for snail rubbers and the rest. There isn’t. There is a level playing field and it is about time homeopaths learned the rules of the game.
Reblogged this on Homeopathy4health and commented:
“Ultimately what Nightingale is attacking is the intelligence and judgement of people who are trying to find an effective way to heal themselves. If homeopathy, which even its most virulent critics cannot claim is remotely likely to be harmful, works for you, then someone needs to combine serious arrogance with real battiness to believe they have the right to stand in the way.”
I must commend this blogger for his honesty. He has filed the blog under “Lack of Evidence” and “Evidence Ignored”, two goals he has achieved with remarkable alacrity.
Comments were made about vaccinations which implied it is a safe process.
Far from it! Just think for a moment. Every single vaccine that comes out is either said to be ‘safe’ – indicating that safety of vaccines has always been an issue – or that it is said to be ‘safer than the previous version’ which obviously means that the previous version had SAFETY problems.
It has taken the FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT to get the details on MMR vaccine.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) was fully aware of MMR vaccine dangers as early as 1989, but covered them up! That is pre Dr Wakefield’s warnings.
Freedom of Information Act has revealed what probably most people do not know and that is the fact that we have been LIED to for a long time and that this lie is being repeated daily through the media to hide the truth and cover up data to encourage vaccine compliance.
The JCVI made continuous efforts to withhold critical data on severe adverse reactions and contraindications to vaccinations to both parents and health practitioners in order to reach overall vaccination rates which they deemed were necessary for ‘herd immunity,’ a concept which … does not rest on solid scientific evidence,” explains Dr. Tomljenovic in the introduction to
her paper.
Learn more:
http://www.naturalnews.com/038598_vaccines_medical_hoax_government_documents.html#ixzz2QorMSgG4
So much having been said about how good conventional medicine is! From today’s BBC report:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-23109314
People with heart problems have been advised to stop using one of the most commonly prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs in the UK.
The medicines regulator said painkiller diclofenac could significantly increase the risk of a heart attack or stroke for some patients.
The advice has been updated after a European review of the risks.
Millions of people take diclofenac for a range of conditions including headaches, back pain and arthritis.
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said the drug should not be used by people with serious underlying heart conditions.
People who have suffered heart failure, heart disease or a stroke should stop using it completely.
Smokers and people with high blood pressure, raised cholesterol and diabetes have been advised to use the drug only after consulting their GP or pharmacist.
The MHRA said diclofenac would continue to provide safe and effective pain relief, apart from patients in certain “at risk” groups.
Dr Sarah Branch, deputy director of the MHRA’s vigilance and risk management of medicines division, said: “Whilst this is a known risk and warnings have been included in patient and healthcare information for some time, this advice is now being updated.”
Six million prescriptions were written for diclofenac last year and the drug is also available over the counter.
=====
So why are people silent?
Why is there not demonstrations about big pharma?
Diclofenac is a useful drug – I need to use it occasionally for attacks of gout. It’s effective. But indeed, there’s a risk of heart problems with long-term use and larger quantities. Like all effective drugs, diclofenac has a benefit/risk ratio that needs to be monitored and managed.
It’s certainly true that homeopathy has low risk – small quantities of water and sugar aren’t risky. But it has no proven benefit either. So the benefit / risk ratio is easy to determine.
And incidentally – this risk with diclofenac came out of detailed long-term follow-up studies. If homeopaths are claiming that their products have high benefit / low risk, and can be used by large population groups, don’t they need to have similar long-term tracking studies in place?
@BobTurner who says “don’t they need to have similar long-term tracking studies in place”
Homeopathic medicine already has “long term tracking studies in place” actually 200+ years worth of provings for some remedies by patients who have had follow-up blood tests, scans, x-rays and other testing modalities which show an improvement. Patients can and do undergo roentenograms, MRIs, ultrasounds and CT scans, urinalyses and hematological studies which are taken to their homeopath. My own homeopath has depended on these modalities with patients before and after treatment. And, surprise, homeopaths can actually ORDER and understand the test results. It is also common knowledge that many patients consult a homeopath because they already have a diagnosis and have already had the necessary “testing” by their mainstream doctor who smiles and says something like “sorry, there is nothing more we can do”. Many homeopaths were first MDs. The title “homeopath” does not mean that they are unqualified to treat disease. . .
The “you gotta show me proof” it mantra is old, and frankly gibberish. Time to change the talking points.
Homeopathy could most definitely cure your gout so you no longer have attacks because it would treat the cause which creates the body conditions which create the symptom called gout which is the way the body responds when it is trying to create balance. And it would do so at little cost and with no side-effects and no potential for harm. But to each their own. If you are happy using drugs then that is your choice and your right.
You do reveal your prejudice and ignorance however, referring to Homeopathy as sugar and water. Here’s a test – why don’t you give Homeopathy a try for your gout. There is nothing to lose and after all, if it is sugar and water it will do no harm. You don’t have to believe in it – you can disbelieve – just find a professional Homeopath and put it to the test.
OK, that’s an interesting thought. Will it work preventively? Can I take a course of homeopathic product and then expect my uric acid level to go down? I can indeed get that measured, and if it doesn’t go down I’ll know the homeopathic product hasn’t worked.
(Clearly I can’t do a proper test with an acute attack, as I’d need to take painkillers, and that would confuse the experiment).
You said: OK, that’s an interesting thought. Will it work preventively?
Homeopathic does not work to prevent, as in stop, which is the way Allopathic treatments work, but it works to re-balance and to heal. Remedies which kick-start a healing process don’t so much prevent attacks as remove the need for that physiological expression by the body.
You said: Can I take a course of homeopathic product and then expect my uric acid level to go down? I can indeed get that measured, and if it doesn’t go down I’ll know the homeopathic product hasn’t worked.
Homeopathy doesn’t work like that although if the remedy is effective your uric acid levels may well go down but uric acid levels per se: are not the cause of gout, otherwise everyone with high uric acid levels would experience attacks of gout and they do not. Just as everyone who is bitten by a malarial mosquito does not get malaria, so a factor in one human being which triggers as physiological symptom, does not do the same in another.
Homeopathy treats the human being as a whole and your gout would be one symptom of your state but only one and not necessarily, even the most important. But it is a good place to start. However, you would need, if you consulted a professional homeopath to be aware that he or she would not be putting focus on removing the gout attacks per se: but in helping your body to heal so that they are no longer triggered. But, as many people have found, the ‘presenting problem or symptom’ is not the only thing to disappear with homeopathic healing – chronic conditions will also be healed when the remedy is found. Let’s just say it is worth a try if your gout is that painful. You have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain. If you give it a try, keep an open mind. You don’t have to believe in it for it to work but if you actively disbelieve then it might take longer to find the right remedy. That is all.
Homeopathy is not placebo – it works perfectly well on animals and babies whom you cannot fool with the placebo effect – especially with cows that do not see it added to their drinking trough. Please see Horizon’s prog on Homeopathy c. 1991.
Conventional medicine supporters make many claims for its efficacy – please could some one give an example of a ‘cure’ by conventional medicine where all the symptoms were removed, no new symptoms were produced and no other organ was damaged in the process. Just one example would do please.
What a strange comment! Placebos don’t work on the disease itself, they work on the perceptions of the person who’s using them. And in this case that person is the farmer. Unless you know any cows that write up their own treatment reports?
Having seen a remedy effective in a child where the parent most definitely does not believe in Homeopathy, in fact disbelieves, and yet, where Allopathy has failed, is prepared to give it a try but expects nothing, I am sure that there is more than one farmer who has turned around days or weeks later, shaking his or her head in amazement, at the healing they have witnessed.
I have been using homeopathy for over 15 years, and have found the results to be nothing short of miraculous, on occasion. Several people I know have been told my their specialists, “yes, we know there are side effects, but there s nothing more we can do, you ll just have to take the drugs for the rest of your life”….And then, after receiving professional homeopathic treatment, their symptoms improve and even disappear! Conventional medicine has little to offer in cases of depression, auto-immune disease, thyroid problems, inflammatory bowel issues, skin problems, etc, yet I myself and people I know have been helped hugely by homeopathy for these very illnesses…. Bottom line, if you think that homeopathy is quackery, then dont bother to try it, but why denigrate it so ardently, when others are successfully using and benefitting from it. Live and let live! In years to come, the science behind homeopathy will be proven; not by conventional scientific methods, but by Quantum Physics, and i guarantee you, the Pharmaceutical Companies will be falling over themselves to purchase the licences for it. And then a humble bottle of Arnica, which now costs 5 euros, will probably cost 20 euros and will only be available on prescription….. ah yes, progress!!
If you want to spend your money on homeopathy, that’s your good right. However it becomes a problem when one of the following happens:
1) People want to use homeopathy within a state-funded system. Why should others in society be obliged to pay for a treatment with no proven effect? Clearly homeopathy has a placebo effect, which can indeed be powerful, but is it ethical to ask state-funded doctors to hand out placebos?
2) Certain homeopaths start saying that homeopathy can be used to replace vaccination programmes for serious diseases such as measles. If homeopaths want to risk their own health that’s their good right, but undermining vaccination programmes introduces risks for the rest of society.
3) Certain homeopaths start saying that homeopathy can treat majoor diseases. And when these reach a critical state, the rest of society needs to mop up the consequences.
Bob Turner says:
If you want to spend your money on homeopathy, that’s your good right. However it becomes a problem when one of the following happens:
1) People want to use homeopathy within a state-funded system. Why should others in society be obliged to pay for a treatment with no proven effect? Clearly homeopathy has a placebo effect, which can indeed be powerful, but is it ethical to ask state-funded doctors to hand out placebos?
2) Certain homeopaths start saying that homeopathy can be used to replace vaccination programmes for serious diseases such as measles. If homeopaths want to risk their own health that’s their good right, but undermining vaccination programmes introduces risks for the rest of society.
3) Certain homeopaths start saying that homeopathy can treat majoor diseases. And when these reach a critical state, the rest of society needs to mop up the consequences.
My reply…if one proposes the opposite argument, what then? Many, myself included, think that if people want to use con med within a state-funded system instead of homeopathy, why should the “others” have to pay for it? The supporters of homeopathy know that Con med drugs are toxic, can also act as a placebo effect on many occasions, have not and cannot cure anything. There are millions Worldwide who see the vendetta against homeopathy as backed by BigPharma and carried out by batty folks who never seem to be able to comment from a true position of credulity; i.e., they never mention that they are physicians, pharmaceutical chemists, homeopaths or involved in any of the health care sciences. Oh, and none of them has ever been treated by a classical homeopathy. Isn’t that simply amazing!. .
So, based on your comment can I ask why should the people who oppose con med have to pay for it? Eh, that’s a crush.
Firstly, not everybody uses every treatment available on the NHS. Therefore, we all pay for treatments we do not use.
Secondly, the treatment which should be used in any individual case is the treatment which benefits that person. Abstract arguments about the legitimacy of that treatment are irrelevant.
Thirdly, according to the latest British Medical Journal Clinical Evidence report 50% of the 3,000 most commonly used treatments in the NHS have no evidence of benefit.[1] Where is the campaign to remove these from the NHS?
Fourthly, The only case I know of where vaccination has successfully stopped a disease which has become endemic with seriously rising infection rates was the the homeopathic vaccination scheme in Cuba against leptospirosis. All conventional vaccines have been brought in some time after the epidemic has peaked.
Fifthly, measles is only a serious disease in malnourished populations and individuals. Vaccination is not 100% effective, and it has serious consequences for the babies of vaccinated mothers, since it reduces the quality of the immunity conferred on those babies by the mother. This means that those babies are at greater and more serious risk from measles, and so need to be vaccinated because their natural protection has been removed by parental vaccination. In addition, vaccines are not tested on this age group, which completely contradicts the demand for only treatments tested by RCT to be used. Similar problems are starting to occur with other vaccinations which are leaving young men (mumps) and women (rubella) vulnerable at exactly the time they most need protection.
Lastly, the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital study [2] showed that, within the NHS at least, the majority of referrals were of people who had had conventional treatments without success for some time before getting better with homeopathy. In fact some patients had seen up to ten specialists without success before seeing a homeopath. This is quite the reverse of Turner’s claim. Other studies have shown that the benefits can last at least eight years.[3]
Taken all together, it is clear that all these alleged problems are illusory when you actually look at the facts.
Notes
1. http://clinicalevidence.bmj.com/x/set/static/cms/efficacy-categorisations.html
2. D.S. Spence, E.A. Thompson, S.J. Barron, ‘Homeopathic Treatment for Chronic Disease: A 6-Year, University-Hospital Outpatient Observational Study’, JACM, 2005, 11:793-798.
3. Claudia M. Witt, Rainer Lüdtke, Nils Mengler and Stefan N. Willich, ‘How healthy are chronically ill patients after eight years of homeopathic treatment? – Results from a long term observational study’, BMC Public Health, 8 (2008), 413.
William
Can you evidence this statement?
“Thirdly, according to the latest British Medical Journal Clinical Evidence report 50% of the 3,000 most commonly used treatments in the NHS have no evidence of benefit.[1] Where is the campaign to remove these from the NHS?”
Because this is precisely not what the BMJ Clinical Evidence site says.
And William
The Cuban leptospirosis trial had no control group. You absolutely cannot come to the conclusion that the homeopathy stopped the infections.
Indeed, the infection curve looks no different from a normal leptospirosis outbreak that was coming to an end.
William,
If you read the reference you cite for the BMJ clinical evidence site, you will see that it does not substantiate your claim that these are 3000 “most commonly used treatments in the NHS”. In fact the reference says , “This does not indicate how often these treatments are used in clinical healthcare”.
In the context of the article, which argues that Homeopaths are “mildly irritating” and “…even its most virulent critics cannot claim is remotely likely to be harmful” William’s post is rather good evidence that Jerome’s view of Homeopaths is incorrect.
The denigration of proven beneficial interventions such as vaccinations and claims that Homeopathy is effective against serious infectious disease (it isn’t) provide an insight into the real belief of Homeopaths: not that it is something people can turn to in addition to conventional medicine, but that it is a complete system of medicine on its own.
There are two ways homeopathy might harm patients – one by the treatment given and I think even the sternest critics wouldn’t claim that the number of people being killed and/or hospitalised as a result of homeopathic treatments is a vanishingly small fraction of those who suffer this as a result of prescription drugs. The second way.implied here,is that its practitioners might stop people having beneficial mainstream treatments. That is possible of course, but since the great majority of people coming to homeopathy have already tried the conventional approach – because it is free, because most people trust doctors, because modern medicine is very good at some things – and found it not to work for them, it seems unlikely.
Bob Turner says:
If you want to spend your money on homeopathy, that’s your good right. However it becomes a problem when one of the following happens:
1) People want to use homeopathy within a state-funded system. Why should others in society be obliged to pay for a treatment with no proven effect? Clearly homeopathy has a placebo effect, which can indeed be powerful, but is it ethical to ask state-funded doctors to hand out placebos?
I don’t think we can ascribe any kind of moral highground to doctors regarding the prescription of placebos, as 97% of doctors say they have knowingly used placebo http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/the-placebo-effect-doctors-admit-prescribing-unproven-treatments-unnecessary-tests-and-pills-with-no-active-ingredient-8542666.html
Doctors clearly aren’t being asked to hand out placebos (quite the opposite, ethically). Yet at times they feel the need in order to do their best to help their patients. I wonder what an estimate of the cost of this practice may look like? Could it run into the millions of pounds with the number of doctors doing it? It seems to me that the societal cost of ‘placebo prescribing’ by doctors right now is a much more significant issue than a possible future issue regarding potential state-funding of homeopathic prescribing (leaving aside the thorny issue of whether homeopathic remedies are just placebo). Am quite enjoying the irony of this. Personally I’m not opposed to doctors occasionally knowingly using placebo in the way that they do, and these costs being born by the NHS.
It is the vaccine industry which undermines itself. Forty years ago most children got four vaccines and today they are pushed, in the US forced, to have up to forty!
Along with this dramatic increase in vaccination in the developed world has come massive increases in autism along with behavioural and learning difficulties. Don’t take my word for it, talk to child psychologists, teachers and parents.
In addition, recent data is showing troubling and substantial increases in autism, previously incredibly rare, in places like Kenya where vaccination programmes have been instituted and increased in recent years.
Jerome,
It is an assumption that the “great majority of people coming to homeopathy have already tried the conventional approach”.
As homeopaths here have testified, they would seek homeopathic treatment before real treatment for serious conditions such as cancer. As such, they pose a clear threat to their own wellbeing and of those they come into contact with.
Those sorts of beliefs are well worth challenging.
Agree that unsurprisingly homeopaths would favour homeopathy. Whether they would consider it appropriate for everything is, like much else here, a guess. Some might while others might feel homeopathy would be best to try first and then go on the reverse journey if it didn’t work. Who knows? And if they pose a clear threat to their own well being so do base jumpers and cave divers. A threat to those they come into contact with? Hmm, because they will force them to use homeopathy too? Not sure what beliefs you are referring to that need challenging. At this point I feel it should refer to your apparent belief that homeopathy are dangerous beasts who prevent people accessing life-saving medicine. Should we take everyone whose beliefs posed a clear threat to their well being to the ASA? Please don’t answer this is getting silly (ed).
Andy Lewis states that “Because this is precisely not what the BMJ Clinical Evidence site says.”
You are right. For many years the BMJ Clinical Evidence team selected the 2,500 most commonly used treatments for its summary. Now it chooses an arbitrary 3,000. Given that the selection is arbitrary, one wonders why the percentage of those treatments with “unknown effectiveness” is around 50% in this model as well as in the previous model. Could it be that around 50% of ALL treatments examined under EBM are inconclusive? That would be even more serious than the original evidence about the most commonly used treatments.
Coincidentally, this figure of around 50% is very similar to that for the inconclusive results of RCTs of both conventional and homeopathic treatment. In short it appears that the alleged ‘gold standard’ provides conclusive results on average at the same rate as tossing a penny produces ‘heads’.
Andy Lewis says: “The Cuban leptospirosis trial had no control group.”
This is not true. The control group included 8.8.million people, and in their case the rate of infection ROSE as predicted and varied with typhoons, as is usual. The change in the incidence among the 2.3 million treated was unprecedented as measured by four different parameters.
The argument that the infection was coming to end anyway is unsustainable in the face of the vastly different trends in two groups on the same island, where the only difference between them was that one group received a homeopathic treatment and the other not.
On behalf of the Nightingale Collaboration, allow me to correct a number of misapprehensions appearing in both the blog and the comments beneath it.
We challenge misleading claims made in the promotion of healthcare therapies to the public by reporting them to the appropriate regulatory authorities, such as the ASA and the MHRA. Our website is full of helpful information to enable other members of the public to do likewise. We do not distinguish between ads for ‘CAM’ and ads for mainstream OTC medicines; it’s just that advertising for the latter tends to stick to the regulations. We do not make these regulations; they already exist for the purpose of protecting us, the consumers.
If people want to subscribe to some cult therapy, they are free to do so. What they may not do, is advertise it for gain, claiming that it can prevent swine flu, treat heart disease, cancer or any other of the dozens of conditions that our supporters found on homeopaths’ websites and leaflets. Those who criticise us for challenging the false claims made by so-called healthcare practitioners of one sort or another, are effectively claiming the right of such practitioners to be held to a lower standard of evidence than advertisers of other goods and services. Given that an unknown number of horrific and entirely needless tragedies* have resulted because people have believed the false claims made by homeopaths and other quacks, I must say I am surprised at the callous disregard for the potential consequences of misleading advertising in healthcare, shown by our critics here.
*See for example here: http://discoverhomeopathy.co.uk/?page_id=116 (“Mildy irritating”?)
Our complaining about adverts may be perceived as an “attack” by those whose living depends on being able to make unsupportable claims about their products and services to the public; similarly, a mugger who is witnessed and reported to the police may also perceive it as an attack on his living. The bottom line is that it is they – not us – who are breaking rules.
Finally, some of our critics – here and elsewhere – suggest that, instead of doing what we do, we should be doing something unspecified about pharmaceutical drugs instead. However, it’s never clear what they expect us to do. As ordinary consumers we have no power to influence the research, development, marketing or prescribing of pharmaceutical drugs – but we can challenge misleading claims made in healthcare advertising. Considering that a great many potentially dangerous misleading claims are made in healthcare advertising – well, at least in advertising by CAM practitioners – I am satisfied that campaigning for truthful advertising in healthcare is a worthy cause, however “seriously potty” or a “waste of valuable resources” it seems to anyone else.
Brilliant post, thanks.
You’re so right. Nightingale is attacking those who sell homeopathy. Hurrah! All power to their elbows. Brave little Nightingale, Standing up single-handed against the dangerous purveyors of soi-disant cures.
But hold on a minute. Are they blinkered? All we see is the attacking of one ‘wrong’ ie; homeopathy – over and over and over again. BORING! SHORT SIGHTED! DIM! Why don’t Sense About Science also attack conventional medicine in such a concerted and sustained way? Because it does even more damage than homeopathy is supposed to. Not enough hard evidence? I don’t think so. Because it’s very simple – when you place the number of deaths from homeopathy against the number of deaths from conventional drugs….well! There’s no contest. Conventional drugs win hands down. Hospitals are overflowing with people who have ended up there uniquely because they had taken a prescribed TESTED, conventional drug. And – guess what. A lot of those people won’t make it home again.
So- is Nightingale being fair, balanced, scientific? No – of course not. They have an axe to grind – and they will continue to grind it, unscientific though it may be. Who are the charlatans then?
Certainly agree about the balance of damage
I do love how supporters of alt med never let facts stand in the way of their views.
Sense about Science have spent much of the last year on attacking Big Pharma’s approach to evidence and not a word on homeopathy.
http://www.alltrials.net/
Can we have the apologies now please?
@Liz Brynin
Bravo in high potency for that comment!
“Brave little Nightingale”? What nonsense! It takes no more bravery to make a complaint to the ASA than to make an anonymous denunciation. It takes so little bravery that the Nightingale Collaboration even automated part of the process. The foolishness of this organisation is shown by its failure to realise that the ASA would rapidly get fed up with the large volume of unnecessary complaints.
On the other hand, it takes tenacity and determination to force the ASA to recognise that it is breaking its own rules and to fight for justice in the face of the ASA’s TOTAL control over the process, and acknowledged lack of any expertise in science or medicine.
For those who are unaware of the process, the ASA appoints an Investigation Executive to oversee an investigation against a marketer (the person whose advert is being complained about). The Investigation Executive decides on the specific complaints and puts the case against the marketer. The Investigation Executive also decides what defence information will be included, and how it is expressed. The Investigation Executive also recommends the judgement for each complaint. The decision is then made by the ASA Council, but only on the basis of the information supplied by the Investigation Executive.
If you take the parallel of a court, it would mean that one person controls the defence case and is able to censor and distort it. The same person controls the prosecution case and is able to adjust it to counter the defence case. Again, the very same person is the judge. The jury only gets to see the case as presented by this person. This is a travesty of justice, and it takes real bravery to fight for the truth in such a distorted forum.
At one point we forced the ASA to investigate itself, we got a bland statement from Guy Parker, the Chief Executive, stating that nothing was wrong. Four days later he had to retract that statement and make changes which we had been demanding for months. Even then, the ASA Council backed us up on further issues, again on grounds we had presented months before. In our opinion, the ASA’s behaviour in this case has been a shambles from start to finish, and we look forward to making the details publicly available.
Ii looks like you got the wrong end of the stick, you should try adding some investigating to your journalism
Great piece once again Jerome! The ASA’s position is questionable in that they are effectively allowing themselves to be dictated to by Nightingale.
If only the folks at Nightingale would speak up about the dire deeds of Big Pharma that you outline above – its a shame that they are wasting their valuable resources on attacking CAMs. I have to say that I am not rabidly anti-pharmaceutical medicine – when it works, it does so brilliantly. However, CAM treatments are growing in popularity for a reason – because patients benefit and spread the word, not because there is a massive marketing budget promoting it – unlike Big Pharma’s product range. Additionally the incidence of patient harm from CAM use is minuscule when compared to the damage (and deaths) caused by Big Pharma’s products.
Selling treatments with no prior plausibility and that do not work above placebo is what is “batty and arrogant”.
Is it wrong also to challenge (no, not “hound”) homeopaths who give so called vaccinations against life threatening diseases to vulnerable people?
Doctors and medicine can be wrong of course, as you point out – but how does this legitimise nonsense like homeopathy? And we have to point out that at least there are checks and balances in real medicine. When do we hear of checks into alt med or admissions that they can be wrong?
Most importantly who has ever been cured of anything other than a self limiting disease by homeopathy?
There are many much better informed people than me who would strongly dispute your bald assertion that homeopathy does not work. The vaccination issue is also not as simple as you imply – reports from Cuba about the effectiveness of homeopathic vaccination millions are impressive. Not an RCT but a carefully done observational study with huge numbers that would seem to deserve more open-minded attention.
Regular medical errors, distortions and fraud do not of course of themselves legitimise homeopathy but they do change the context in which people have to make decisions about what form of treatment to follow. I obviously didn’t make that point clearly enough in the blog.
There are checks and balances in medicine but there are numerous examples of where they fail or are ignored. For instance, years of prescribing antipsychotic medication to elderly dementia patients by GPs even though those drugs were not licenced for that use and that several large RCTs had found that used on this population they did not improve behaviour and raised the risk of cardiovascular disorders that killed an estimated 1800 people a year.(reference available)
Quite right. There is also growing evidence of the efficacy of Homeopathy in treating children damaged by vaccination. There is nothing the human body cannot heal, nothing, but it can need help in the process of re-balancing which is required. We are all energy beings – a few atoms spinning around in a lot of empty space. We are vibratory organisms, both wave and particle, manifesting and disappearing in space constantly – call it energy. Homeopathy, like acupuncture, works at this vibratory or energy level and a body in balance, or rather, a body in tune because we are, each of us, more like a ‘song’ than anything else, cannot succumb to dis-ease and will be restored from dis-ease. However, all that matters is that it works and that, at the end of the day is all anyone cares about.
Apparently, Dorothy Patterson you have not done your homework. Many people have been helped and saved by homeopathy. That is why it is one the rise. All doctors (MD) as well as Surgeons in India are homeopaths as well as practice conventional medicine. Smart people and very healthy. Maybe moving to India would be smart–at least they do their homework before speaking or writing.
@maryann
Wonder why the average age of death in India is 138th in the world, at 65yrs. This has increased due to modern medicine and vaccination from 30 yrs in 1940. http://economics.mit.edu/files/2130. I doubt much to do with homeopathy.
Also I also doubt all doctors in India practise homeopathy as well as real medicine. But am willing to accept they all do if you provide the evidence.
@dorothy,
The average death in India is about many things and would be far higher if not for Homeopathy. Indians use both Allopathy and Homeopathy but the economy and effectiveness of the latter has had the medical system and government turn increasingly toward Homeopathy.
Doctors in India with a tradition of Ayurvedic medicine, like doctors in Europe with a tradition of herbal medicine and Homeopathy are more open to traditional medicine and less inclined to believe that Allopathy knows it all or has all the answers.
There are significantly greater numbers of Indian doctors who practice Allopathy along with Homeopathy – the use of the word ‘real’ signifies your prejudice – but then 100 years ago all Homeopaths were doctors, until the materialistic mindset of the industry and its profit driven approach brought about a movement to discredit Homeopathy. This was most effective in the US although even there the tide has turned and more and more people are turning to Homeopathy and more and more Allopathically trained doctors are now training in it.
If the Nightingale Collaboration are “batty and arrogant” for demonstrating against homeopaths and it then transpires that the demonstration is actually by homeopaths demonstrating against the ASA and the Nightingale Collaboration, what does that make the “investigative journalist” who misreported the whole thing? “loopy and incompetent”? “incompetent and arrogant”? Methinks at least a correction is in order. I think this is what is done ijournalism.
I apologise – see above
#yawn# Bob Turner is correct. If you’d done your homework, you could have saved yourself the bother of repeating the same flawed arguments, which were all addressed two years ago here:
http://www.skepticat.org/2011/05/first-we-went-for-the-homeopaths/
Awesome article, I will be sharing it aggressively. Lovely to find your site!
Their time would be better spent attacking the users of western drugs, sold at hugely inflated prices , making billions for the pharmaceutical companies, with often little to no proof of efficacy and plenty of proof of damaging side affects (acknowledged by the very manufacturers of the product). I don’t know how many times we are going to have to repeat homeopathic remedies are not just sugar and water, homeopaths don’t claim they cure serious disease – they see homeopathy curing all manner of illness. Homeopathy does not replace vaccination, but in my experience of my own children, homeopathy means they just don’t need the vaccinations. My three unvaccinated kids are healthier than any vaccinated kids I know (never suffering chest or ear infections, stomach bugs, asthma, or any of the other weird and wonderful ailments so many kids now suffer). Try opening your eyes to the reality rather than believing the people who make a fortune by convincing you drugs work and homeopathy doesn’t
What, like Ben Goldacre, you mean? Who has been leading the AllTrials campaign, to have all clinical trial data made public?
The seeds of this are in Bad Science. Which also, of course, contains a comprehensive demolition of homeopathy and the anti-medicine nonsense promoted by many quacks.
Ben Goldacre’s book was a very good account the ways pharmaceutical companies distorted or hid unfavourable results and made a strong case for transparency. He was far from the first person to do that – I had set out a much less detailed account in Food is better Medicine than Drugs in 2006 which in which followed in the steps of far more knowledgeable critiques such those by psychiatrist Dr David Healy and one-time NEJM editor Marcia Angell.
In my view the limitation of Godlacre’s position and of the critics of homeopathy writing here is that randomised controlled trials should be regarded as the only authoritative source of the benefits and risks of a treatment. They are obviously valuable but they are not very useful, for instance, for testing multiple interventions nor for providing reliable side-effect data about drugs whose side-effects mimic the symptoms of the disease. Lots more to be said on that but not here
F Brown, you wrote: “homeopaths don’t claim they cure serious disease”
That is quite simply not true. There are instances of homeopaths claiming to cure things like rabies and bowel cancer, both of which are very serious diseases. They also, equally dangerously, claim to be able to prevent serious disease (e.g. malaria). Would you like to issue a retraction now?
Jerome Burne, re RCTs: It is a truism that properly conducted RCTs can only be used to test for the things they are testing for, but that is a bit of a red herring. One of the things they are very good at doing is testing whether there is evidence for a specific outcome from a specific intervention. If something does not have an effect claimed for it, RCTs are invariably a pretty good way of establishing this by comparing the intervention with placebo. And this, of course, is where it is superb for establishing the lack of evidence for efficacy of pseudomedicines like homeopathy.
Thank you F. Brown for the breath of fresh air in this irritating discussion. Everyone can take their various medications daily (one counteracting the others side effects) all the while suppressing the disease and the body to help heal itself–pitiful, just pitiful, Homeopathy is a 200 year old blessing.
I wonder if Jerone can produce any evidence whatsoever that The Nightingale Collaboration
a) has or is planning a demonstration outside the ASA
b) is planning or has lobbied parliament
c) has ever called for homeopathy to be banned?
Just wondering.
Firstly, if you think Homeopaths are ‘mildly irritating’ you really need to read around the subject a lot more before writing such uninformed nonsense.
If you do this basic research you may come across the name Penelope Dingle, or discover the UK homeopaths malaria prophylaxis sting, or see useless vaccine alternatives promoted in the UK. You may discover that Homeopaths are pushing sugar pills as a miracle aids cure in countries too poor to offer anything else.
You would also of course know that homeopaths operate under relatively impotent professional organisations who neither respond to external criticism, nor use their own codes of conduct to protect the public. You would know that the remedies are marketed without needing to show efficacy and that many lay homeopaths have been operating outside the law for a very long time.
That’s before we even get to the misleading advertising!
I don’t know how its possible to get so many errors into a few paragraphs, I presume this characterisation of the Nightingale collaboration is how you would like them to be, because frankly its impossible to reconcile it with any semblance of reality.
The Nightingale Collaboration have not undertaken any demonstrations, not were they supposed to be holding one this week. That was H:MC21.
The Nightingale Collaboration are not attempting to ban anything, they challenge misleading claims.
The Nightingale Collaboration have undertaken a number of focused complaints not restricted to Homeopathy. There is nothing vindictive about co-ordinating complaints to challenge misleading healthcare claims using established channels like the ASA. The ASA are there to determine what advertising is fair, legal and honest. If Homeopaths are having so many problems, perhaps this is indicative of the claims they make and how they promote their livelihood?
I can’t even face dissecting the remainder of the nonsense, it does deserve the time.
This kind of shoddy piece may be acceptable in the Daily Mail Jerome, but really….get a grip!
> If homeopathy, which even its most virulent critics cannot claim is remotely likely to be harmful
Nonsense. When people are persuaded to take homeopathic ‘remedies’ and eschew real treatment for a condition or illness, harm is most definitely a result.
Zee: Nonsense. When people are persuaded to take homeopathic ‘remedies’ and eschew real treatment for a condition or illness, harm is most definitely a result.
It is all too common for cancer patients, for example, to turn to homeopathy when surgery, chemotherapy and radiation have been unsuccessful. When an oncologist tells a 35 year old mother of four children “there is nothing more we can do” , why would you chastise her for seeking homeopathic help? She wants to live and see her children grow up. False hope? Maybe. Placebo effect that gives her six more months? Maybe. However, I know personal stories of patients cured by a homeopath here in the US who, after an invitation, lectured about homeopathy in the UK some years ago.
I agree with the author of this article that the attacks on the internet by people that are a part of the Nightingale collaboration are potty mouths, who I suspect are supported in some way by Big Pharma. None of the people who oppose homeopathy has ever commented from a position of authority. None have noted that they were a physician, a homeopath, a pharmaceutical chemist, a practicing member trained and involved in any of the health sciences, or been a homeopathic patient treated by a licensed classical homeopath! Therefore, like schoolyard children they spew ridicule and cyber bullying because they cannot comment otherwise. Shameful.
” people that are a part of the the Nightingale collaboration are potty mouths, who I suspect are supported in some way by Big Pharma.”
Do you have anything remotely like evidence for that “suspicion”, or is it just a case of “throw enough mud and some of it will stick”?
“None of the people who oppose homeopathy has ever commented from a position of authority.”
Quite right.
No-one is making appeals to authority. Just asking homeopaths, who are making serious claims, to be able to substantiate them with evidence.
Sandra: You said what I wanted to say. “I suspect (the critics) are supported in some way by Big Pharma.” Big Pharma is dealing with generics and not making as much money. Big Pharma kills thousands of people. You take one drug and the side affects makes you have to have two and three and then you find yourself on 8. Homeopathy is a wonderful CHOICE. From my experience it is not a placebo. If you don’t believe in it, don’t use it. I see it as being more of a preventive form of medicine. Homeopathy keeps you out of the doctor’s office and away from the side effects of the many medicines that are being “advertised” on TV for you to go and demand them from your doctor. A doctor will change your medication if Big Pharma offers him an incentive to use their drug. If you want something to point a finger at, go there, leave homeopathy alone. It is a choice.
The ‘debate’ between Homeopathy and Skeptics has mainly been between the two sides, and this blog puts an interesting and independent slant on it. As a Homeopath I have always seen their attacks as part of the campaign to keep the Conventional Medical monopoly intact, especially at a time when most of their ‘wonder’ drugs have failed, or are failing, and as Jerome says, there is much within conventional medicine that needs challenging and investigating. So seeing the activities of the Nightingale Conspiracy described as ‘batty’ and ‘arrogant’ is refreshing.
As an individual, and as a Homeopath, I have seen patients who have had conventional medicine for years without any improvement in their condition, and who have improved with Homeopathy. If nothing else, this experience (it has been going on for over 200 years, and throughout the world) should attract some interest and attention. Especially by people who think there approach is ‘scientific’. Instead, Sense about Science (funded in the main by the Big Pharma drug companies), and the Nightingale Conspiracy (funded by one of the main people in Sense about Science) attack us, and seek to limit what we are able to say about the work we do.
Science (real science, not cheque-book science that supports most conventional drugs and vaccines) is as yet unable to explain the ‘working mechanism’. That is a problem for science (and real scientists like Luc Montagnier and others, are investigating this). But then to say “homeopathy cannot be explained, therefore it does not, or cannot work” is one of the most unscientific responses I have ever heard. It denies the experience of many millions of people through the ages.
But the lack of explanation is not a problem for Homeopaths, or indeed for their patients. We work along very clear principles, and the outcomes we get from doing this are not only demonstrably effective, they are also entirely safe.
It is time that medical therapies and treatments were judged according to the outcomes they achieve in treating sick people. This is all that Homeopaths ask.
The key issues H:MC21 was raising with its protest outside the ASA were very serious – especially for those using conventional medicine. The ASA is gagging homeopaths, but it is threatening the lives of those who use conventional drugs.
In 2010 H:MC21 produced an advert which promoted an increase of funding for existing homeopathic treatment in the NHS. In order to attack the legitimate statements about evidence made by H:MC21, the ASA endorsed a view of medical evidence which is without any scientific validity, but which is popular with those attacking homeopathy and other CAM therapies.
Essentially, the ASA is stating that the only valid evidence is that of RCTs, and that evidence from patients and from clinical practice is not valid. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) – the government regulator – operates a ‘yellow card scheme’ precisely because RCTs are not reliable, and it gathers information from patients (as well as from carers and medical practitioners) because the MHRA recognises that patients have first-hand knowledge of the effects of treatments. In other words, the ASA is undermining an important regulatory process and threatening the safety measures in place to protect patients against the hazards of conventional drugs.
At the same time, the ASA has presented evidence in its case against H:MC21 without allowing any challenge to this evidence to be considered. In particular their view is based on “a substantial review of over 100 placebo controlled trials showed no convincing evidence that homeopathy was superior to placebo”. They do not even provide a citation for this statement. On this basis the ASA has argued that H:MC21’s evidence in support of homeopathy was misleading.
The review is known as Shang et al., and it was published in the Lancet in 2005. Its conclusion was actually based on only eight trials, and other researchers have shown that there is no good explanation for the selection of these eight trials. In fact, almost every other selection of ‘best quality’ trials would have supported claims for homeopathy.[1] The failure to explain the selection process breached the Lancet’s guidelines for such studies. The ASA has been repeatedly made aware of these facts, but has chosen to disregard them.
The ASA has also employed an expert (at last). This expert provided no evidence of any qualification, training or even experience of homeopathy, despite the ASA’s requirement that experts have proper expertise (CAP Code 12.2). He did have extensive experience in conventional pharmacology, with a specific interest in the development of drugs from plants, a discipline ideologically and commercially opposed to homeopathy. H:MC21 explicitly informed the ASA of various important issues which this expert had not taken into account, but these were ignored.
As it stands, the ASA is effectively claiming that to be an expert in pharmacology is to be an expert in homeopathy. Those pharmacologists who have trained to be homeopaths (including one of H:MC21’s trustees) can confirm that this is ridiculous.
H:MC21 is demanding that the ASA abide by its own rules and assess adverts on the basis of “the available science” (CAP Code 12.1) and not on the basis of ideological nonsense. As such this is an issue we should all be concerned about.
Notes
1. R. Lüdtke and A.L.B. Rutten, ‘The conclusions on the effectiveness of homeopathy highly depend on the set of analyzed trials’, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, (2008). Other criticisms were also made. (See Klaus Linde, Wayne B Jonas, ‘Meta-analysis of homoeopathy trials’ (letter to the editor), Lancet, 9503 (2005); Peter Fisher, Brian Berman, Jonathan Davidson, David Reilly, Trevor Thompson and 29 others, ‘Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects?’ (letter to the editor), Lancet, 9503 (2005); Flávio Dantas, ‘Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects?’ (letter to the editor), Lancet, 9503 (2005); A.L.B. Rutten and C.F. Stolper, ‘The 2005 meta-analysis of homeopathy: the importance of post-publication data’, Homeopathy, 97 (2008), 169–177.
William
Since the ASA do not allow testimonials and anecdotes to substantiate claims made in adverts for any sector, why should homeopaths be given an exemption?
This is irrelevant. It is not an issue we have discussed with the ASA, and it has no bearing on the serious issues we have been discussing with the ASA.
It the light of his claim, however, another interesting point is worth raising.
What Andy Lewis should have noticed is that the ASA’s arguments have placed opinion over factual evidence on occasions. In the original ruling the ASA stated of one issue that H:MC21 had expressed an opinion without identifying it as an opinion. H:MC21 claimed that it had stated a fact and had provided evidence to support this claim. The ASA refused point blank to read H:MC21’s evidence supporting the claim. If a regulator refuses to allow you to defend the truth of your statements, then something is seriously wrong. The ASA has now read this detailed factual evidence, but it appears that it is rejecting it as inferior to an alleged “consensus”.
It seems to me that the ASA is liable to accept opinion all too readily when it supports its own views, whilst being extremely strict about others doing the same.
Perhaps someone could prompt Alderson to answer this as I think this is the central quesiton he refuses to engage with,
The ‘debate’ between Homeopathy and Skeptics has mainly been between the two sides, and this blog puts an interesting and independent slant on it. As a Homeopath I have always seen their attacks as part of the campaign to keep the Conventional Medical monopoly intact, especially at a time when most of their ‘wonder’ drugs have failed, or are failing, and as Jerome says, there is much within conventional medicine that needs challenging and investigating. So seeing the activities of the Nightingale Conspiracy described as ‘batty’ and ‘arrogant’ is refreshing.
As an individual, and as a Homeopath, I have seen patients who have had conventional medicine for years without any improvement in their condition, and who have improved with Homeopathy. If nothing else, this experience (it has been going on for over 200 years, and throughout the world) should attract some interest and attention. Especially by people who think there approach is ‘scientific’. Instead, Sense about Science (funded in the main by the Big Pharma drug companies), and the Nightingale Conspiracy (funded by one of the main people in Sense about Science) attack us, and seek to limit what we are able to say about the work we do.
Science (real science, not cheque-book science that supports most conventional drugs and vaccines) is as yet unable to explain the ‘working mechanism’. That is a problem for science (and real scientists like Luc Montagnier and others, are investigating this). But then to say “homeopathy cannot be explained, therefore it does not, or cannot work” is one of the most unscientific responses I have ever heard. It denies the experience of many millions of people through the ages.
But the lack of explanation is not a problem for Homeopaths, or indeed for their patients. We work along very clear principles, and the outcomes we get from doing this are not only demonstrably effective, they are also entirely safe.
It is time that medical therapies and treatments were judged according to the outcomes they achieve in treating sick people. This is all that Homeopaths ask.
@opposeandresist
Love, love love your “cheque-book science” comment. You nailed it!
If I may add to the discussion…. “Real science” cannot explain on the cellular level (vital force) how a sperm knows where and how to connect with an egg which then produces an anecdotal human being.
Homeopaths know the symptoms a remedy produces in a healthy person and then ameliorates in the ill person who has these very symptoms, or “like treats like.” From the many clinical provings conducted by homeopaths (which “real science” calls evidence based trials) a homeopath can see concrete evidence of the effectiveness of a remedy when a person with osteoarthritis can walk without a limp or the use of a cane or a homeopathic remedy shrinks the size of a breast tumor when no other method of treatment was employed. I cringe when I see the “just because I say so it’s fact” arguments (it’s water, it’s bogus, they’re sugar pills, it’s unreproducible, it’s a religion, it’s 12th or 17th century and all the other nonsense claims. Then, there are the straw man and straw man comments that continue to fail. They will continue to fail miserably unless the opposition can gather up enough of their “believers” to burn books, shut down presses, the internet and imprison those who speak for choice in health care to their friends and family.. The opposition needs to bite the bullet this time around.
And for the naysayers, who in the main seem to have little or no understanding or experience of Homeopathy, let along relevant information, if you read one book – The Impossible Cure, by Amy Lansky, you could very quickly get a more balanced picture of Homeopathy and at least be able to reject it, should you so choose, from a position of some knowledge at least.
“A central charge against homoeopathy is that there is no evidence it works. OK but…”
There’s not “but”. If it doesn’t work then it doesn’t work! “OK so unicorns don’t exist but then rhinos make terrible pets…” would be equally as irrelevant.
You want to write an article on dishonest practices of Big Pharma? Absolutely fine. But don’t bring it in as the Straw Man fallacy.
Homeopathy: mainly medically untrained, scientifically illiterate folk playing at doctors with sugar pills and water, pretending they can diagnose and treat diseases that they can’t. A tad more dangerous than those who wear crocs methinks.
The responses here show that opponents of homeopathy start from the position that it is a done-deal that homeopathy doesn’t work. The response of those who have benefited from it or who have some time looking at the literature is that it’s a view that doesn’t accurately reflect the state of the literature. The -it-doesn’t work – position also seems to depend on ignoring the fact that a large proportion of people come to it precisely because mainstream medicine hasn’t worked for them. Further that many of those patients report relief, benefit etc.
This then raises the question of how useful are patient’s reports in assessing the benefits/harms of a treatment. The RCT model dismisses them as anecdotes – in the case of side-effect reports – until supported by an RCT. However psychiatrist David Healy has developed a telling critique of this position.
He suggests that asking a few more questions of the patient, such as: does the problem get better when you lower the dose or stop the drug? Does the problem reappear when you re-start the drug? Positive answers to these, especially when 10 of 20 give similar responses about the same drug, is much stronger evidence of a genuine side-effect than an anecdote, even though it is is not an RCT. See his Rxisk site for details.
The application of the same approach to patient’s positive experiences of homeopathy might well yield results that would move the debate on.
Isn’t the starting point for any serious investigation the null hypothesis? I.e. it doesn’t work.
In the case of homeopathy where the remedies often have no active ingredients and no effect is likely this seems quite a sensible approach.
The lack of prior plausibility also means that the burden of proof lies squarely with those making claims to provide high quality evidence of efficacy.
Jerome,
I have a back back that gets bad occasionally. When symptoms are bad I go to a chiropractor and within a week or two my back gets better.
No doubt Healy would see this as good evidence for effectiveness of chiropractic.
Except I do not go to a chiropractor. This is the natural life cycle of bad backs. But is allows chiropractors to claim credit for their back cracking.
Healy’s ideas fall foul to all sorts of confirmation biases and errors. That is why trials need to be controlled – to compare with an inert intervetion, blinded – so that are preconceptions do not influence our reporting, and randomised – so that we can compare like with like.
There is no getting away from this. No appeals to the magical insight of self-administered unblinded, uncontrolled tests. That is the road to delusion and error. Something homeopaths are quite happy about by the look of things.
Homeopaths easily fall for similar errors.
If symptoms get better then they claim their remedy works,
If symptoms get worse, then the body is having a healing crisis and the remedy is working.
If symptoms stay the same then be patient – homeopathy takes time.
All homeopaths do is fit a narrative to whatever happens – a narrative that can never challenge their belief in what happens.
Am away today and can’t reply to this or any other points – annoyingly – will do so this evening. I’ve hugely impressed by the level of debate and thanks to all for being so civil.
It is certainly true that many diseases/conditions are self-limiting but I’m not clear why you claim there is a difference between a person whose back pain improves after a visit to a chiropractor and someone whose depression improves after taking an antidepressant. Both are self limiting. Actually one difference is that the pills have a considerable potential for addiction and have also been firmly linked with suicide. If patients tell their doc they feel better within a month or so, is it the pill or the course of the disease that is responsible?
You claim the chiropractor has no effect, can you be sure about the pills? You are not on very secure ground relying on RCT’s because as a major study by Kirsch showed when you include all the studies and not just the ones that come out favourably, SSRIs turn out to be virtually no better than a placebo.
Healy is a sophisticate and experienced researcher and to suggest he is unaware of confirmation bias is just rude. He has devoted years campaigning for a truthful account of drug side effect, especially those from psychiatric drugs, and against a culture of denial and concealment. Look up what happened with Seroxat – I saw data about risks he was sending to the regulator in 1998 which was ignored until an investigation, prompted largely as it happens by the sheer weight of patient reports lead to the discovery in 2003 of concealed data and the admission of both the addiction (described as a problem with withdrawal) and suicide were acknowledged.
There is a clear parallel between the way patient experiences are denied any validity when reporting drug side-effects and when reporting benefit, as from homeopathy. Taking patient reports of side-effects seriously is not, as you seem to suggest, a simple-minded process of accepting every report as evidence of an effect of the drug.
Instead Healy sets out a clear and sensible series of steps, to be undertaken with the patient’s doctor to establish if it is likely that the drug caused the effects, such as lowering the dose, checking to see if that has an effect, if it does then stopping the drug to see if the effects disappear and then starting it again to see if the problems reappear. In just one case that is pretty convincing, if you collect ten cases then there is a perfectly legitimate case for saying a connection is likely.
This has nothing to do with magic and again it is simply gratuitously rude to suggest it. This sort of interrogation of patient experiences, I was suggesting, might well provide a useful way of assessing evidence of benefit from patients, such as might be applied to homoeopathy. In fact I am told that homeopaths do something similar as part of regular practice.
It does seem significant that you appear content when discussing how to evaluate treatments to remove patients’ own reports – surely what the whole process is about – from the process entirely.
Exactly. I feel the same way about the so-called skeptics and their dismissal of “magic stones” otherwise known as “stone soup” or “button-bone borscht”.
Just because their is no actual way to explain how a stone could make a soup taste nicer (yet!!!!) these potty skeptics ignore the many millions of people who eat soup cooked with a stone in and say it tastes nicer than normal soup.
We can all agree that these skeptics are all in the pocket of “Big Soup” and, as long as these well-funded groups like the Nightingale Collaboration are able to silence the truth, we “magic stone”eopathists will always be getting a raw deal.
Jermone,
I do not claim that “there is a difference between a person whose back pain improves after a visit to a chiropractor and someone whose depression improves after taking an antidepressant.” I am well aware of the poor evidence for antidepressants for low to moderate depression. More than that, it is RCT evidence that clearly shows there is not much of an effect in these cases – not patient testimonials. Your points on this subject are a straw man.
Secondly, I do not say Healy is unaware of various biases. Merely, his suggestions are not a good way of removing them. I give a clear example of how homeopaths fit post hoc narratives to their cases that preclude any sort of falsification using Healy’s methods.
Finally, I do not deny the usefulness of patient reports – far from it – is is just that RCTs are the best way we know of collecting patient reports and drawing conclusions from them free of many sorts of bias that could seriously mislead us otherwise.
I would actually challenge homeopaths that the denial of such reports is something homeopaths do. They reject the large amounts of goodwill that patients offer when entering RCTs and dismiss their collated accounts on the grounds of spurious reasons as to why RCTs are no good for their ‘paradigm’.
Interested you agree there is no difference between giving antidepressant or visiting a chiropractor in that both almost certainly rely on a combination of the placebo effect and the natural cause of the disease. But I am amazed that you conclude this is a straw man. What I and many other in this exchange have been claiming is that by concentrating your fire on homeopathy and other CAM treatments you are missing the real source of risk to patients and that your protestations of simply being led by the evidence don’t ring true.
I can now only assume that you agree and soon the Nightingale web spider will be crawling over pharmaceutical and regular medical sites winkling out suggestions that taking SSRIs as treatment for mild depression is a good idea and sending them off to the ASA, along with a number of other dodgy drugs that I have referred to at various points in this exchange
I’m not convinced that you actually know what Healy is proposing, my account was necessarily a very brief summary. I’m also far from convinced that your account of what homeopaths do is an accurate account. In fact my limited understanding is that homeopaths do actually do something rather similar – asking questions to see why something is not working or producing undesirable effects and then changing in response.
I absolutely disagree with you that RCT’s are the best way of gathering reports from patients.As I pointed out earlier SSRIs were marketed for years based on RCTs that showed them to be safe and effective and non addictive. It was partly the sheer weight of totally ignored patients reports gathered by Charles Medawar site on his called Social Audit that lead to a Panorama program and an investigation.
RCTs don’t capture the patient experience they capture statistics relating to the primary endpoint set by the researcher. The pharmaceutical literature is rife with examples of drugs that were characterised by RCTS in ways that bore no relationship to the patient’s experience – the billion dollar diabetes drug Avandia that caused an increase in heart attacks springs to mind.
As for allegations that homeopaths “reject the large amounts of goodwill that patients offer when entering RCTs” I just don’t know what you are on about.
Shame you have closed comments. Much in your last point that needs challenging.
Andy Lewis states: “Homeopaths easily fall for similar errors.
If symptoms get better then they claim their remedy works,
If symptoms get worse, then the body is having a healing crisis and the remedy is working.
If symptoms stay the same then be patient – homeopathy takes time.
All homeopaths do is fit a narrative to whatever happens – a narrative that can never challenge their belief in what happens.”
This is nonsense. The precise determination of what has happened after someone takes a homeopathic medicine is crucial and often highly complex, as it involves much more than the simplistic categorisation of “better”, “worse” or “no change”. Factors which need to be taken into account include:
What aspects of the condition change? Do more serious aspects improve or less serious ones?
How long does the change take, and how long does it last?
Do the changes relate to what is known about the history of the case?
Do the changes relate to what is known about the action of the medicine chosen?
Has anything happened which may have influenced or created changes?
If the medicine has not worked, then is there a problem with the medicine? Has it been kept in inappropriate circumstances? Has it be taken wrongly?
Has anything happened which may have prevented or aborted the action of the medicine?
And so on …
James Tyler Kent outlined 12 responses to a remedy, all of which are different and significant, and it is essential that a homeopath examines the facts about what is happening precisely because it is so easy to jump to conclusions.
It is this sort of failure to understand the complexity of homeopathy, and the desire to reduce it to platitudes and slogans which tends to indicate that the attacks on it are motivated by something other than scientific interest.
Here’s the link that you were looking for about the demo outside UK parliament: http://www.hmc21.org.
Homeopaths were demonstrating about the judgement against them by the Advertising Standards Authority. This was triggered by Nightingale; ASA agreed with Nightingale’s complaint.
You correctly mention problems with standard drugs. But I was taught that ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’. The fact that there are problems with standard drugs doesn’t justify selling (at inflated prices) water and sugar, and claiming these can be used to cure serious diseases or be used to replace measles injections.
And also – Nightingale isn’t attacking users of homeopathy. They’re attacking the companies and individuals who are making money from selling snake oil.
When you keep people from using what they wish for treatment, you most assuredly are attacking them. To suggest otherwise is absurd.
Your comparison of homeopathy’s “inflated prices” is also absurd, as its costs don’t come close to those of standard drugs, whether referring to how they’re priced or how many times greater the prices are over the manufacturing costs.
If the Nightingales and their ilk truly cared about whether people are harmed, they’d focus on what’s doing the most harm – and there is no doubt that it’s pharmaceutical drugs, not homeopathy.
“When you keep people from using what they wish for treatment, you most assuredly are attacking them. ”
Two points:
#1. That is disingenuous and misleading: Nobody is keeping anyone from using anything. What we want is for homeopaths and other “CAM” touts to advertise their wares honestly, not make claims that cannot be justified by robust evidence, and not to be able to mislead people. Why do you have a problem with that? (For heaven’s sake, they are doing everything possible to try to be accepted as real medicine (i.e. “medicine”), but don’t want to be regulated as medicine. Go figure!)
#2. The utterly selfish and amoral attitude of people “using what they wish for treatment” is partly responsible for several species (including the Amur tiger and the white rhinoceros) being on the endangered list. See: http://tete-enterre.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/freedom-of-choice-and-pseudomedicine.html for more detail.
Their time would be better spent attacking the users of western drugs, sold at hugely inflated prices , making billions for the pharmaceutical companies, with often little to no proof of efficacy and plenty of proof of damaging side affects (acknowledged by the very manufacturers of the product). I don’t know how many times we are going to have to repeat homeopathic remedies are not just sugar and water, homeopaths don’t claim they cure serious disease – they see homeopathy curing all manner of illness. Homeopathy does not replace vaccination, but in my experience of my own children, homeopathy means they just don’t need the vaccinations. My three unvaccinated kids are healthier than any vaccinated kids I know (never suffering chest or ear infections, stomach bugs, asthma, or any of the other weird and wonderful ailments so many kids now suffer). Try opening your eyes to the reality rather than believing the people who make a fortune by convincing you drugs work and homeopathy doesn’t.
I am a very satisfied homeopathic patient of many years. In fact, I call it the greatest blessing of my life. Con med could do nothing to help me recover from the disabling effects of an auto accident so I turned to homeopathy. Within a year I was back on my feet, enjoying my work and handling family responsibilities I couldn’t handle before. I also suffered from chronic insomnia for many years before finding homeopathy. All con med could offer was addictive pills. Homeopathy resolved the problem safely, gently, dynamically, permanently and inexpensively.
From my point of view, when Alan Henness and his band attack homeopathy and homeopaths they are also attacking me and my family and friends who have found it so curative. They are also attacking people who aren’t familiar with homeopathy, might consider trying it and could find it very curative, even life-saving.
There are hundreds of studies showing homeopathy works beyond placebo. They are published in 102 respected, peer-reviewed journals. There are studies showing homeopathy is safe, something we already know from 200 years of clinical use around the world. That clinical experience also tells us that homeopathy is effective just as scientific studies do. There are studies showing homeopathy is more effective than con med. This study of 782 patients with diseases of the major organs severe enough to hinder daily functioning in 78% of them, show that 52% of the homeopathic patients were able to discontinue one or more of their conventional drugs, thereby lowering the cost of their medical care. It showed that 89% found homeopathy improved their physical conditions and that 95% were fairly or very satisfied with their treatment. The study also showed that previous conventional medicine improved the conditions of 13%, made no difference in 32% and worsened conditions in 55% of patients.
Homeopathy is proven safe, effective and causes no iatrogenic diseases. It is also inexpensive. That is what I call “real” medicine.
The BMJ conducted an analysis of 3,000 common treatments offered on the NHS and found that only 11% were evidence-based, that, is proven to be beneficial. The NHS spends huge amounts of money on these treatments, and the bill is increased because of the necessity to treat the iatrogenic diseases these drugs create in the people who use them.
All of this brings up the question “why would anyone attack a system of medicine which has so much to offer to both individuals and governments?”.
You said: “There are hundreds of studies showing homeopathy works beyond placebo. They are published in 102 respected, peer-reviewed journals.”
No. There aren’t. You can’t just copy-paste text from an alt-med fan site and expect it not to be questioned.
Great response. But they are not interested in the truth. They are verbal bullies.
I concur with your assessment, RJ Herrmann, 100%, wholeheartedly, to my dying breath and into infinity!
Thank you for a great testimony! It continues to amaze me that these people so negative to homeopathy ignores the great body of evidence proving it’s efficacy. I presume it it easier to have the fanaticism supported by the pharmaceutical industry. What other interests does the industry have than making the most possible profit from each patient using their drugs? What incentives do they have to make a single cure of a chronic diseases? If it occurs a new and more serious condition appears as a consequence which in turn has to be even more aggressively treated.
Oyvind K. Nilsen
helseoslo.org
Well said! Critical thinking in this article seems to be as dilute as the Homeopathic remedies that the author appears to be defending.
It is very hard to talk with a group that knows very little about the substance that they are arguing against. Why would anyone compare apples to oranges? Homeopathy is not a drug or an herb. Why would anyone test it as if it were? Please read Dr. Dooley, MD from San Diego’s book “Homeopathy Beyond Flat Earth Medicine” (can be downloaded and read for free from his website) and educate yourself about homeopathy. It is not the dilution that makes it work, it is the successions between the dilutions that imprint the substance in the liquid. Physicists know of this and understand why the substance retains its original makeup by shaking the substance in a liquid and diluting it in between. Please educate yourselves people on both sides of the argument–it makes for a much more interesting debate.
“Homeopaths were demonstrating about the judgement against them by the Advertising Standards Authority. This was triggered by Nightingale; ASA agreed with Nightingale’s complaint.”
This is untrue. The Nightingale Collaboration was not formed until months after the complaints about the advert were made, unless they have invented time-travel.
To state this – “doesn’t justify selling (at inflated prices) water and sugar” – and to believe it is homeopathy means you really don’t have any real idea of what homeopathy is or even what the medicine is. The homeopathic medicine I use is not “water and sugar” (and I have twenty five years background/experince in using homeopathic medicines). Your notion of what you are criticising is so simplistically silly its almost funny. I say ‘almost funny’ if you weren’t attacking and degrading a medicinal method that is used by millions and millions across the planet and supports entire hospitals in some countries.
The fact that it was the homeopaths that were protesting outside the ASA and not the Nightingale collaboration ( see here http://www.hmc21.org/#/asa-protest-report/4577603662 ) renders this article somewhat irrelevant, does it not?
It means it was marked by a mistake but that has no effect on the central points
Ummm….you might want to check your facts. It wasn’t The Nightingale Collaboration who were protesting. It was a homeopathy group, H:MC2 – here is their report of the event.: http://www.hmc21.org/#/asa-protest-report/4577603662
Homeopathy has been proved to have no effect other than that of a placebo in test after test yet claims are made, in advertising, that it is beneficial for all sorts of things. The ASA is there to ensure that any such claims are truthful.
John, repeating inaccuracies over and over does not make them true. Neither does quoting Ernst.
Completely untrue but never let facts get in the way of propaganda.
The real issue at hand isn’t the dangers of using Homeopathy. The dangers lie in using Homeopathy instead of a treatment with proven efficacy. Which will seem tame for ailments which are mild, but for more severe or life threatening illnesses, this is not only problematic for the patient, but for the ever increasing problem of rising health care/Insurance costs. This goes for any treatment that has been proven to not have efficacy. Why Homeopathy needs to be “hounded” is because it helps promote overall magical thinking in terms of medicine, which might seem harmless and quaint for those treating a headache. But when those people get diagnosed with cancer and still hold onto that magical thinking, it becomes something far worse.
If you feel some are being inconsistent by focusing primarily on one kind of ineffective treatment, I’m not sure the answer is to ask them to stop, but for you to focus on the ineffective treatment you want focused on. Be it an active ingredient free vile of homeopathic water, or a pill from Pfizer, being a consumer advocate doesn’t mean funneling money into scams or sugar pills, simply because the consumer doesn’t know any better.
Perhaps you have a slightly over-exaggerated idea of the effectiveness of drugs. Of course some are life saving – although I wouldn’t put my money on cancer drugs. They can prolong life after a cancer has spread, sometimes by months, occasionally by years but mostly by months. Welcome for many but far from a cure. Most drugs treat symptoms or keep a disease at bay and not for everyone by any means.
As a haematologist I can tell you that you are so wrong about “cancer drugs” as you call them that it’s very worrying. Chemotherapy cures a significant amount of haematological malignancies, sure, solid rumors are more resistant, but in that case that can bring years of life, not months as you say.
Please do read some information on say, gleevec, would you? And then we can talk.
Puzzled by the quotes around cancer drugs. What would you like them called? Chemotherapy is certainly beneficial in leukaemia,especially in children I agree. The results from adjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer are not so impressive. I’ve seen an Australian study recently suggesting it was around 3 or four percent. Results in colorectal cancer and prostate are considerably better; those for lung and pancreatic cancers not so good. Gleevec certainly had dramatic results in leukaemia some years ago; the number who respond to avastin and erbitux is not so impressive.
Chemotherapy is a very specific case. The science of cancer is really in its infancy, it has only been properly established for fifty years or so and the complexity of the disease – or more properly diseases – is immense.
There are a few cancers that can be cured, in some to many cases, by chemo. There are some where surgery and radiotherapy have now advanced to the point where chemo does not meaningfully improve survival.
The problem is that patients cling to life. Doctors generally know when something is forlorn and often opt to forego chemotherapy where it has little chance of a cure, choosing quality over quantity of life. More people should ask the doctor: “if it was you, what would you do?” Most of the oncologists I have met are a brutally honest bunch. They don’t lie to patients about survival rates, but patients filter it through some pretty strong emotional filters.
You are incorrect in implying that anyone with cancer who uses homeopathic treatment will somehow come out on the short end of the stick, will somehow loose out because of their choice of medicine. The reality is quite different. The Prasanta Banerji Homeopathic Research Foundation treats thousands upon thousands of cancer patients around the world. Their experience is that for 91 cases treated with their protocol alone the mean survival time is 92 months. For 11 cases in which the patient also uses conventional treatments the mean survival time is 20 months. PBHRF can take credit for two cures of brain tumors, six cures of lung cancer, two cures of osteosarcoma and a cure of cancer of the oesophogus through the use of their protocol alone. Homeopathic treatment does not damage other cells or impact the patient’s immune system. Added to that, the cost of being treated homeopathically is much less than the cost of conventional treatments.
Having used homeopathy for many years and having experienced first-hand what it can accomplish on every level, my first step, if I were diagnosed with cancer, would be to call my homeopath and PBHRF.
Being a consumer advocate means upholding the right to freedom of choice in health care irregardless of the beliefs or dis-beliefs others may hold about the choices. It means being able to use chemo and radiation if that is your choice and being able to use homeopathy, naturopathy or any other cancer treatment if that is the preferred choice.
Good luck to you.
You do realize that your anecdotes are not evidence of anything, don’t you? One cure, two cures, what is that? Not even anecdotes.
I would like to have freedom of choice. Radiation and drugs would not be my first choice, in fact., it would be my last choice as it “would cause harm to the patient”. I have been cured of bronchitis and many other illnesses that could have been fatal by my Primary care Physician, and MD who always chooses homeopathy before anything else. If I came down with cancer, homeopathy would be my first choice for my health as it is the least evasive, with no side effects. Most people judge homeopathy (they think it is an herb) but really don’t know very much about it. Read this very thin book by Dr. Dooley, MD of San Diego called; “Homeopathy Beyond Flat Earth Medicine”. If money is an issue, he has a soft copy on his website. Then I will listen to what you have to say and respect your opinion as someone who is knowledgeable about both sides of the coin.
Cecilia: These cases of homeopathic cures of cancer are not “anecdotes” as you intend the word to mean. They are documented case records. They include objective testing — CT scans, x-rays and histopathological reports — proving the successful outcome of treatment. Case records are integral parts of studies and are presented in medical journals. I’ve mentioned here only 11 cases. Worldwide there are many more such cases. Homeopathic treatment is sought after by people around the world, and Banerji Clinic treats people in 70 countries.
Well said. The irony is that Allopathy decries Homeopathy for its Like treats Like approach and yet that is exactly what Radiotherapy and Chemotherapy are about – each causes cancer and each is meant to cure cancer although the way the materials are used and in the dose-ages they are administered, particularly Chemotherapy, which is nuclear war against the body – kills more than it cures.
The other failing of Allopathy is that it sees disease as a battlefield and the body as an enemy which must be mistrusted, feared, at times hated and attacked. If we treated a human being like this we would not be surprised to see them wither and die.
Christine: The important point to remember is that as a therapy, homeopathy has the same outcome as kissing it better. They both work the same way. As long as everyone is completely clear about that, no harm is done. When people believe homeopathy has some curative effect, then harm undoubtedly is done. People die, in fact.
On Cancer and treatment using homeopathic methods, this quote is from the Banerji Protocol for cancer assistance (you can see more at – http://www.virtualtrials.com/ruta/ruta2007.cfm ); “Along with the Professor of Cell Biology and Genetics, at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, one paper has been published entitled “Ruta 6 selectively induces cell death in brain cancer cells but proliferation in normal peripheral blood lymphocytes: A novel treatment for human brain cancer” in the International Journal of Oncology in October 2003 where our method of treatment with Ruta and Calcarea Phosphorica was followed with excellent results.
In our observation for the last 30 years, these medicines have the definite power to reduce and cure Intracranial SOL. It may be interesting to note that our claims with regard to the action of these medicines have been successfully vindicated in vitro. These slides show Metaphases from control and Ruta 6-treated MGR-one human brain cancer cells showing mitotic catastrophe “. (to see more go to the site). Homeopathy has a definite role to play in assisting people with cancer.
Proven by the producers of their own product? How smart is that?
Did you really just say this in a thread over an article about anti-homeopathy activists ignoring the criminal malpractice of pharmaceutical companies? Doesn’t that cast reasonable suspicion on almost all drugs that are brought to market?
Everytime I see an article ‘critizing’ homeopathy, I ask the the blogger if they have actually done any research as to how homeopathy is supposed to work. Most of them say no. in which case their opinion is an uneducated one based on the whole water/sugar pill nonsense. Read a book on homeopathic philosophy and if after that you are still of the same opinion then fair enough, but at least your opinion will an informed one. Each to their own. If homeopathy works for you then fine. if you don’t believe in it nobody is forcing you to use it.
You’ve never asked me and my blog has many articles criticising homeopathy; one of them I helpfully linked to above. Do come over and have a chat. 🙂
I am amused that somebody said people should not consider homeopathy as a cure for cancer and instead seek out allopathic treatement – the current allopathic treatment for cancer works on a medeival “slash and burn” technique with impunity.. If the cancer or the horrendous damage chemo does still gets you and you die, there is no come back on the medical community….
Here, here Susan.
Every human being has a right to decide which healing methodologies they will use and every parent should have the right to do the same for their children. In the best of worlds, and there is a growing focus on Integrative Medicine which utilises all methodologies, including Homeopathy, all will be available through the medical system.
There are people who have been cured of cancer through the use of Allopathic treatments and there are those who have been cured through the use of Traditional healing methodologies – the choice should be theirs.
In terms of cancer cure in fact, Allopathy is singularly a failure on many if not most counts. Traditional medical approaches such as Homeopathy and TCM would say that is because Allopathy focuses on the removal of symptoms and does not address the original cause/s of the disease, which both Homeopathy and TCM do because they take a logical position of seeing disease as something emanating from dis-ease at emotional, psychological, physiological and in some cases, spiritual levels.
Modern or Allopathic medicine is sourced in materialistic science and takes a mechanistic approach which is why its areas of strength are those things which can be approached mechanically, like surgery – and in crisis or emergency situations, but where its limited and narrow approach means many other illnesses are never cured but maintained in a chronic state and where something like cancer, can be temporarily brought to a halt, only to re-appear even more strongly in months or years to come. That is not healing.
The body is not a machine and neither is it a ‘bag of chemicals’ as some aspects of science/medicine would also have it, because, if it were then Allopathy would be vastly more successful as a healing methodology than it is.
Medical approaches like Homeopathy and TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), and other traditional healing approaches, work on a basis of helping the body to create and maintain wellness by dealing with minor symptoms, which Allopathy would merely seek to suppress, so that major symptoms and major illness does not develop.
At the end of the day the body heals – no drug, operation, herb, remedy or practitioner does the healing – only the body does the healing and the task of the practitioner and his or her remedies is to assist and sometimes trigger, that healing capacity. That is not the approach of Allopathic Medicine and on that count, Allopathy, the youngest of all of the Traditional Medical approaches, stands alone. The drug and cut approach of modern medicine gives the illusion that it is effective because it is ‘doing something’ although even modern medicine knows about and sometimes utilises an approach called ‘benign neglect’ – but usually when there is no ‘doing’ to be done.
But given the massively increasing profits in medicine and pharmaceuticals, and the scientific industries associated and the massively increasing numbers of people needing medical help and the massively increasing size of hospitals, and the massively increasing cost of health care – it is difficult to argue that modern medicine has been successful at doing what it is meant to do – keeping people well and healing those who get sick.
You owe the Nightingale Collaboration an apology. They never set out to organise any kind of counter-protest, you seem to have drawn a mistaken inference fomr some banter among skeptics about turning up in duck suits with white coats, but as the photos show the H:MC21 protest was a bit of a non-event and no skeptics could spare the time (even the Society of Homeopaths was not in favour of it).
As for batty, well, I think sending someone into a malaria zone with no protection at all (again, that’s the Society of Homeopaths’ judgment not mine) is a bit beyond batty. I think “criminally irresponsible” is a bit closer to the mark. That’s the sort of thing homeopaths do, and that makes them fair game.
There’s a very strong scientific consensus that homeopathic preparations are inert, and no remotely plausible reason to think they could be otherwise. Until homeopaths amend their practices to stay within the bounds of what is defensible for an inert treatment, they will attract attention from skeptics. I think it might have been Steve Novella who defined skeptical activism as the intersection between science and consumer protection, and that’s exactly what’s going on with skeptical scrutiny of the claims of homeopaths.
I’d recommend Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” but I am told you might not like it.
Apology offered. Think most of your points have had a response elsewhere.
But I’m struck by the one about “skeptical activism” being the “intersection between science and consumer protection”
This is precisely the attitude that so infuriates anyone who isn’t determinedly opposed to homoeopathy and why I spent most of my post picking out just four of the problems with drugs that happened to come up that week.
So long as you see homeopathy as being the main example where “science and consumer action intersect” and that what we consumers need protection against is homeopathy while medicine has no need of sceptical eyes or actions – you are not going to look like impartial defenders but as partial pleaders.
I have never said that homeopathy is the main example of anything. Its primary relevance is that it is so easily demonstrated to be nonsense that it is a good example to walk people through the steps to examining claims made by quacks and repeated by the credulous.
There are much more important targets. The Burzynski clinic for example, which preys on cancer victims, and CANCERactive, which promotes quack cancer remedies with the ridiculous claim that its founder is “the UK’s Number 1 cancer researcher”.
And actually the biggest focus of skeptical activism for the last couple of years has been reform of the UK’s defamation law, in particular to grant an absolute protection for scientific speech. You may recall the case of Dr Peter Wilmshurst who was hounded by a company whose products he found did not stand up to the claims they made for them. The prime movers behind this – at least those fomr the skeptical community – have now moved on to found the AllTrials initiative, aiming to force full publication of all results in all clinical trials, something that will meaningfully improve transparency and make it much more likely that a weak or ineffective drug will be “rumbled” much sooner than at present.
As to the other points having had “a response elsewhere”, I see the usual form of a debate around homeopathy: “It works!” from supporters, and “it works by placebo effects and cognitive errors, which is to say it doesn’t work, and can’t work” from the reality-based community. This normally goes on until another column is published and everyone rushes there (and the same debunked claims are normally recycled every time, such as the notorious “Swiss government report” that isn’t).
Your piece is not about the merit of homeopathy, so it is relevant here only in the context of a discussion of its relative importance as a subject for activism. That (unlike the claims of homeopaths, which are objectively false) is something on which reasonable people can disagree. I happen to think it is important, for the reasons stated, but I agree that it is not important enough to be the sole focus of anyone’s time. I have seen no real evidence that any skeptic does focus exclusively on homeopathy so that would appear to be a bit of a red herring in my view.
I see homeopathy as a litmus test. When it is eradicated from high street pharmacists, the NHS and any other venue other than those specialising in the beads-and-kaftan market, I will feel we have started to make important progress in addressing quackery and bogus health claims.I think “live blood analysis” may go first, but that is not so widespread or well-known, so it is not going to be a useful test.
Agree that Alltrials is a good idea and that the homeopathy debate seems to be conducted between entrenched positions but can’t agree that “eradicating” homeopathy would be a start in eradicating bogus health claims. Sceptics in this debate, it seems to me, may acknowledge there are problems with drugs and evidence – such as the need for Alltrials – and then go back to bashing homeopathy and others outside the mainstream such Burzynski.
I don’t carry the can for either but I’ve yet to see anyone from that side acknowledge the scale of problems with drugs – good life-saving of course in some cases – but still massively over prescribed, side effects under reported and a large death toll. This is not hysteria it is simply the way it is. And this affects the choices that people make.
What do you suggest people do once they have tried GPs and consultants for several years to deal with some chronic problem only to be be told that there is no physical cause and it is psychological? Sceptics seem to have far more faith in the efficacy of many drug treatments than those on the other side. If you take statins for primary prevention you are accepting odds – depending on which study you follow – of between 100 and 1000 to one that you personally will benefit.That doesn’t seem a reasonable deal even without taking into account the burgeoning number of side-effects that are showing up.
And if you want evidence-free prescribing just look at what is going on with polypharmacy – the dozen or more drugs routinely given to the elderly. No one has run trials on how all those combinations work in an individual and they never will. Yet that doesn’t even feature on your radar of unjustified and bogus health claims. Benzodiazepines for the elderly – stream of studies saying not a good idea yet their use is extensive.
The reason that people turn to other options is not because they are wilful idiots who don’t know what is good for them and are hell-bent on so-called “endarkenment” – rolling back the enlightenment – but because they are sick and frightened and often/sometimes (who can tell the precise success rate) find some sort of relief with one or other of the CAM options.
The RCT is useful but I don’t believe that elevating it as the only entrance to acceptance as a viable treatment has been in patients’ best interests. This is not special pleading to go easy on CAM but an acknowledgement that their approach can be hard to capture with the RCT model.It seems to me that the coming genetics revolution and increasing personalisation of medicine is going to throw RCT’s shortcomings into sharp relief – but that’s a topic for another blog.
Interestingly Mr Chapman does not define “Scientists”. I think that what is meant is -experts whose education is in pharmaceutical doctrine find it difficult to see therapeutic actions of homeopathy outside the material dose. Einstein quantum theories lay in isolation for many decades until it was understood how they could be used. In this century the energies of succussion and dilutions of homeopathy have been detected at nano frequency levels, now we have better machines to map them. I guess I am still flumoxed by how a fax can go across the World and come out of a machine in my house. I also think it is only the experts who can truely explain how they work not the lay person. So why do we listen to the uninformed (sceptics) who have no inclination to delve into the real understanding of homeopathy. Lets ask an expert Homeopathic scientist to advise us on how Homeopathy works.
Claire, “doctrine” is a belief not founded in empirically verifiable fact. That describes homeopathy, not any part of science. Medicine is a set of practices guided by science, medical science is a part of medicine but not the whole of it. Skeptics are as active in addressing issues with medicine as those with quackery.
Your claim that “the energies of succussion and dilutions of homeopathy have been detected at nano frequency levels” is, I am sorry to have to tell you, fantastical nonsense. Nobody other than believers has ever observed any effect akin to homeopathy, and we can by ow observe individual atoms directly. Hahnemann, of course, did not know that matter is made of atoms, he said it is infinitely divisible. This is just one of his many pre-scientific (read: wrong) ideas.
You said: Hahnemann, of course, did not know that matter is made of atoms, he said it is infinitely divisible. This is just one of his many pre-scientific (read: wrong) ideas.
What is wrong is your definition. Matter is not made of atoms in any absolute sense. Science has theories on what constitutes matter but it has no absolute proof of what it absolutely is. The Wave/Particle theory makes it impossible for matter to be the absolute entity that atom theory once would have had it be.
Science accepts that matter may be infinitely aggregative or infinitely divisible so Hahnemann may well have been right. What he was not, is definitely wrong as you suggest.
According to scientific plausible mechanism of action of ‘potentised high dilutions’, also known as super-Avogadro dilutions, they stimulate the biological activity and restore the homeostatic mechanism. All system of medicines are prepared and administered in doses whose ingredients can be quantified to be below Avogadro’s limit except for homeopathic medicine which is available both below (hormetic) as well as above [Beyond the Reciprocal of Avogadro Number (BRAN), also known as avogram) Avogadro’s limit.
“There’s a very strong scientific consensus that homeopathic preparations are inert”
No. There is an ALLEGED scientific consensus, but there has never been a study which defines who is included in this and why. Without such a study this is completely and unquestionably anecdotal evidence, both in scientific or judicial terms. A few “authorities” are quoted, but their competence is highly questionable.
Agreed. Touting falsehoods is the Nightengale way. They lay on the ridicule and negativity while they’re at it.
William,
I am not sure you understand what scientific consensus is and how it materializes.
Can you point to any study that shows the sort of evidence of consensus you seek for any well established result of science? You could choose quantum theory, general relativity, evolution, atomic theory. Anything.
Once we know what sort of “evidence of consensus” you desire, then perhaps we can move on.
William, as Andy says, you do not appear to understand what scientific consensus is, what it means, or how it is developed.
You might enjoy the book “Merchants of Doubt”, which covers this rather well I think.
There is also good evidence from in vitro studies that homeopathic medicines are NOT biologically inert. It is highly significant that the Science and Technology Committee report on homeopathy ditched all pretence at depending on evidence when it came to these studies, choosing instead to rely on theoretical claims that homeopathy cannot work. Such moving of the goalposts is typical of the attacks on homeopathy.
William,
Since showing a homeopathic medicine is biologically active in vitro would be a revolutionary result, that is, it would challenge fundamental and well established results of physics, chemistry and biology, I am sure there are well replicated experiments. performed unambiguously by many independent groups that you can point to to evidence your assertion that they exist.
Please show me where I can read the best review studies of these replications that challenge the fundamentals of science.
You ask for in vitro studies, Andy.
I suppose you will only accept something like pubmed papers.
Here are a few:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18066110
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16296918
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17101766
Will this do for a start?
William, when you say “good evidence” you must mean some other definition to that used by scientists. The kinds of things touted by homeopaths as good in vitro evidence include the claim that homeopathic remedies kill breast cancer cells, which turns out on closer analysis to be a demonstration that alcohol is cytotoxic, an entirely unsurprising result.
The simple truth is that every single result ever published by any homeopath (or at least every result that can be shown not o have been made up) is fully consistent with the null hypothesis.
I do not suggest this is evil, most homeopaths have no idea of the scientific method so probably do not actually understand what the null hypothesis is for any given experiment, certainly few if any experiments show any proper appreciation of the null hypothesis and the design of them is generally such that it cannot be eliminated.
You said: most homeopaths have no idea of the scientific method …..
That is patently untrue. Beyond the fact that Hahnemann was a scientist and the scientific system was in construction in his day, for the first 150-200 years all homeopaths were medically trained doctors, with an understanding of the scientific paradigm, a paradigm which has developed, but which has maintained its mindset to a large degree, and many homeopaths, particularly in Europe, are still also MD’s, Allopaths, therefore with a solid background in the scientific method. In France you cannot be a Homeopath unless you are an Allopathic doctor as well.
The other interesting ‘anomaly’ for the nay-sayers, and it is easy enough to verify if you do some research, is the fact that even today, many Homeopaths are trained physicians who have turned to Homeopathy and practise it in conjunction with Allopathy, or alone, and have done so for 20, 30 or 40 years or more.
Given their solid understanding of science and the scientific method in the modern age, not to mention their understanding of Allopathic medicine, is it not curious that they can accept and practice Homeopathy, finding it invaluable, when so many who have no training in either Allopathy or Homeopathy, or any real knowledge or understanding of either, would reject it?
picklet – No it will not do for a start. Note, I specifically asked for “the best review studies of these replications”. You do not present any reviews or any replications.
Any groundbreaking results will have undergone multiple independent replications. Spurious one off results never count for anything.I do know some such reviews exist for some homeopathy experiments and I know the results are not good.
Picklet, those are the same studies blown away by the ASA;
http://asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2013/7/Society-of-Homeopaths/SHP_ADJ_157043.aspx
Thank goodness we still have the right to CHOOSE how we decide to look after our health…and this is the Crux of the matter if you don’t like Homeopathy don’t see a Homeopath! But don’t think that entitles you to make that decision for others, and stop assuming that other people are less educated or lack in common sense.If I choose to see an Osteopath or have Accupuncture or Homeopathy then that is my RIGHT, just as you have your rights.
Shona – In this article, Burne has just asserted that Nightingale is trying to take away your ‘right’ to use homeopathy. Just as he was wrong about the demonstrations, he is wrong about this. Despite being asked to provide any example of where Nightingale are trying to ban homeopathy, he has been unable to do so. Mainly because it is not true.
What Nightingale do is to challenge the claims of homeopaths by asking them to comply with various regulations and standards and actually hold the evidence that is required to substantiate the claims. This is the same standard that applies to all advertisers, whether it be homeopaths, airlines or yogurt makers.
You still have the right to visit a homeopath – and good luck to you – just that the homeopath should not be able to claim in adverts things they cannot substantiate.
Why don’t you read Goldacre’s book on bad pharma? How drug companies misled doctors, which clearly points out that conmed doctors prescribe drugs about which they don’t know anything about. Sometimes I wonder that book is a medical thriller or crime fiction on evidence-based medicine.
You say: “this week Nightingale was supposed to be protesting outside the Advertising Standards Authority (because they haven’t been diligent in chasing homeopaths for making unsupported claims on web sites) and lobbying Parliament”
That’s the exact opposite of what happened. The Nightingale Collaboration conducted no such protest or lobby of Parliament. It was pro-homeopathy campaign group HMC21 who protested outside the Advertising Standards Authority because they had been diligent in chasing homeopaths for making unsupported claims on web sites, and lobbyed Parliament. You can see their report on the protest and lobby here: http://www.hmc21.org/#/asa-protest-report/4577603662
The Nightingale Collaboration has deliberately misused Florence Nightingale’s name. To make the facts straight, Florence Nightingale supported homeopathy in 1859 http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/nightingale/nursing/nursing.html
Surely yet another demonstration Nancy that the naysayers know nothing, not only about Homeopathy, but also clearly, about Florence Nightingale. In 1859 and for many decades beyond, all Homeopaths were MD’s.
Thank you, Dr. Malik. A very good point!
Nancy – just to correct you. Florence Nightingale was advocating that if nurses must meddle in the doctor’s business of prescribing, then they should prescribe the ‘folly’ of homeopathy because it cannot do any harm. Nightingale was far too clever to get suckered by homeopathy.
Homeopathy may not make sense, though the cancer activist Ian Gawler, an Australian vet, reports good results using Bach Flower remedies on animals.