This week saw the news that the UK government is considering shutting off NHS benefits for homeopathic treatment. Their argument is simple: there is no evidence that homeopathy works, so why should we be using taxpayers’ money to pay for people to use it?
The notion that homeopathy is bunk may come as a surprise to many people. If, like me, you grew up thinking homeopathy was a more “natural” form of medical treatment, using “natural” substances and herbs to cure disease where modern medicine (called “allopathy” by the homeopaths) uses nasty chemicals and invasive procedures. My personal experience of homeopaths is that they are kindly, caring sorts who spend hours taking careful medical histories and asking sometimes bizarre personal questions in an attempt to treat you “holistically”.
As it turns out, most of that last paragraph is not true. Homeopathy is in fact a study of masterful marketing, positioning itself as the natural alternative, the treatment of choice for hippies, tree-huggers and people who care about their own bodies (and those of their kids).
Homeopathy was invented by Samuel Hahnemann in the early 1800s. He proposed a “Law of Similars” in which a highly diluted solution of a poison or toxin is given to a patient enabling the body to “balance its own humours”. This may sound, superficially, like a similar idea to modern-day vaccines, except that homeopathic dilutions are so extreme as to effectively render the resulting solution absent of the original substance.
Put more simply: when you take homeopathic medicine you are taking nothing, no active ingredient whatsoever.
Don’t believe it? Consider how homeopathy measures its dilutions (this from an episode of “Skeptoid”, www.skeptoid.com):
“A 6X dilution means one part in 106, or one in one million. A 30X dilution means one part in 1030, or one followed by 30 zeros. A few products are even marketed using the C scale, roman numeral 100. 30C is 10030. That’s a staggering number; it’s 1 followed by 60 zeros, about the number of atoms in our galaxy.”
These numbers are so ludicrous that it’s hard to believe anyone who knows what they mean could believe this could be a treatment of any kind, for any thing.
Hahnemann ultimately argued that the water (or the sugar pills soaked in it) has a “spiritual imprint” of the substance and that means it can work even with the substance missing. Huh? Run that by me again?
So let’s review: homeopathic medicine is a combination of taking plain water with an “imprint” of a substance to cure a disease.
Is it any wonder that the British government wants to stop paying for this crap?
Now, whenever you have this conversation with people who are homeopathy advocates you get a couple of familiar arguments: “I have used homeopathy for years, and it’s worked for me” or “I have seen homeopathy perform almost miraculous cures after trying all kinds of modern medicine” or “Just because you don’t understand homeopathic cures doesn’t mean they don’t work”.
These arguments are actually a wonderful study of logical fallacies. Suffice to say here that just because you *think* something worked on you, or on your friend, doesn’t mean it *does* work, or that it works for the reasons you claim. The placebo effect is not a tool used by cynics like me to win every argument. It’s a powerful, documented psychological reality that can make you feel better and even make you better. That’s almost more amazing than the claims homeopathy makes — and in fact was an effect Hahnemann was well aware of.
Add to this a string of other familiar faces in the line-up of pseudo-scientific argument like observer bias and appeal to ignorance, and you find that there is as little substance to homeopathy as there is in homeopathic medicines. There is not a single scientific study that has ever shown any effects better than chance with the use of homeopathy. And there has never been a credible, reasonable explanation offered as to why it would work. Common sense alone is enough to rubbish the whole idea. To even spend money researching it seems wasteful.
I believe that people in general, to say nothing of doctors, hospitals and medical aids, are victims of a 200-year-old wives’ tale cut from the same cloth as Mormonism and Scientology. But it’s worse than these last because your medical aid contributions are cross-subsidising this drivel — so instead of paying for your cosmetic surgery, which at least has a concrete result — your monthly payments are going toward funding the selling of little bottles of water and sachets of sugar pills to people who either do or don’t need proper medical care.
I object to that. If people want to spend their time and money on expensive placebos that’s their business, but like the UK government, we should leave that up to the individual and certainly for their account. Medical-aid schemes don’t pay for people to have bones read or for reiki practitioners to wave their hands around them. They don’t even pay for a lot of things that have proven scientific or health benefits.
After 200 years of bunkery, it’s time to send homeopathy the way of blood-letting and prayer — to the part of the bookstore called “New Age and Religion” and far, far away from the part called “Medicine”.
The best article I have read in four years. I agree completely. My husband and I have been duped by an acupuncturist of late but we stayed away from a very dubious homeopath- thanks to a warning by a friend.
“All great truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
Just because Jarred is not a doctor or a homeopath it doesn’t make what he says not true. The only way a government can allow themselves to pay for medicine (through the taxpayers) is if it has been proved in double blind peer reviewed clinical trials to work. As far as I know there have been no homeopathic remedies subject to such inspection. Ben Goldacre (www.badscience.net) rules.
Thanks Jared. Time this brigade of village quacks pack their little black bags and skulk off to the shadows where they belong. Its amazing that when this discussion erupts over dinner, the table is full of people who had sniffels that cleared up, sinus issues that resolved, pimples that went away and other such muck that basically resolves itself or is seasonal anyway. To date I am yet to hear of a homeopathic remedy to cure anything serious. Gangrene? Homeopathic pill or an commercial antibiotic? Aids? Sugar pill or ARV? Broken bone? Happy the Holistic Homeopath or that evil conventional doc, the Orthopod? Need an operation? Little homeopathic pain pills or anaesthetic? You bunch of herbal remedy hypocrits would make the conventional choice every time and then cure your sinus with sugar water tictacs.
When it really counts, conventional medicine from proper scientific research is the best solution we have. If you wish to dabble with dilution mumbo jumbo and imprint of the pathogen pseudoscience, make sure you do it when you are suffering from something that time and your body can heal anyway. That way you too can join the herd of homeopathy disciples and spread your word to the other mutts out there that don’t stop to think:
if such a minute amount of active ingredient actually does affect you, what on earth must the effect be of ingesting random substances floating in the air and on surfaces and on food in much greater concentrations?
Think people, think.
These descriptions of ‘scientific’ evaluations of homeopathy are a bit like flat-earth beliefs. It seems extraordinary that any well-informed, scientific thinker could imagine that because science doesn’t have the tools to adequately measure the efficacy of the dilutions, they are said to be diluted out of existence. It is is not the fault of homeopathy that science has not yet developed these tools. Homeopathy is an affordable and accessible treatment and one benefit is that people can self-administer without fear of damaging side-effects.
Twenty years ago I mentioned using arnica to my conservative GP. He now prescribes it. I know of many GPs who are also practicing homeopaths. A balanced view would realize that there is a place for both treatments. If they are just sugar-coated placebo’s, why are they also effective on animals and children?
And if you’re going to make a noise about the greedy industry behind these remedies, why aren’t you hoarse from yelling about Big Pharma?
@grant “wally” walliser
Why are you so vitriolic in your condemnation of ordinary people making a personal decision at their own cost to invest in a treatment to be applied only to themselves? What the hell do you care?
You presumably support the regime which requires, by force of law, that
1. only doctors certified by “your” system may perform a vast range of procedures
2. only medicines approved by “your” system may be prescribed for a vast range of problems
As a result of this legal patronage, “your” system of medicine and drugs has become the biggest industry on earth, surpassing the oil industry a year or so ago. And yet a recent US survey shows that more than 50% of Americans (surrounded by all the benefits of “your” system) have used an alternative therapy for a serious health condition.
What you can’t accomplish by force of law, you attempt to achieve by ridicule?
Think, Wally. Think.