On February 6, 2011, 350 people in Manchester simultaneously took a massive drug overdose. Nobody died, nobody was remotely harmed. How did they manage it? The drugs they took were homeopathic – the huge dilutions which comprise homeopathic preparation meant the pills contained no active ingredients and therefore had no effect on their bodies.
And yet, according to the Society of Homeopaths, NHS spending every year on homeopathic drugs is £4million annually, a figure which does not appear to include running of the three dedicated NHS homeopathic hospitals, including the one in Cotham, Bristol.
Just to re-emphasise, that’s £4m to specially administer pills which contain not a single molecule of active ingredient. This is despite advice from the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology who recommended cutting all NHS funding to homeopathy, presented here and discussed here.
Tim Minchin summarised it well in his beat-poem called Storm: “By definition…, alternative medicine… has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call alternative medicine which has proved to work? Medicine!”
The argument for the scientific basis of the workings of homeopathic treatments is shaky, yet people still swear it works and seek medical advice and treatment from NHS and independent homeopaths. This is because effectiveness due to the placebo effect is not the same of efficacy. Efficacy is the tangible mechanism of a drug working on the body, but effectiveness relates to how the patient subjectively feels after treatment compared to before.
The placebo effect should not be underestimated – it is a fantastic, bizarre and unfortunately unreliable phenomenon, as this infographic video demonstrates. But when a potentially helpful (if morally questionable) deception becomes an industry of its own, problems arise.
It seems strange to me that people can really buy into this, when even pro-homeopathy websites admit that their drugs are “not acting chemically” in the body. Sadly, chronic and sustained pain may lead some people to try anything.
By posing as a new mother seeking immunisation advice for her child via email, an undercover survey of homeopaths found that only 2 out of 77 homeopaths were pro-vaccination (see here for another article of mine about why childhood immunisation should not be refused), and 10 out of 10 homeopaths recommended their homeopathic treatments against malaria over scientifically developed conventional treatments.
I believe people who give advice like this should not be allowed to call themselves healers of any sort, and make homeopathy a dangerous practice.
Bristol is a major city in the UK for homeopathy, so I think it’s something to get talking about. Is choice more important than evidence, justifying £4m annual NHS money for peddling the placebo effect, or would the money be better spent researching and treating diseases in a tangible way? Furthermore, do independent homeopaths have the right to claim their treatments can cure minor and major diseases if people are willing to pay for them?
Emily Coyte is a recent graduate of Biochemistry at the University of Bristol
Sorry, no intellectual argument here. But, after suffering migraine for many years and trying several conventional prevention medicines given by my doctor, I gave a homeopathalic pill a chance and, touch wood, it seems to have had an immediate effect. Beauty is as beauty does!
How do you know it wasn't the touching wood that made your headache better? The chances are the same.
So having no intellectual argument makes me stupid does it skepticat, but you did make me laugh, and I'm sure that must cure something or another.
Paul BemmyDown
Is that the level of your 'intellectual argument'? Skepticat asked you a perfectly straightforward and pertinent question and instead of providing an answer, you try to make yourself look like you're on the receiving end of some kind of personal attack?
Is that the best you can do?
Also, I find it amusing that you say "Pseudoscience bloggers [like Emily] just can't be taken seriously." when you take the pseudoscience that is Homeopathy so seriously you decide that insulting someone who argues against it becomes a logical next step.
Oh, and lauriej1, when you say "The author is merely parroting nonsense from other pseudoskeptical blogs and websites." are you talking about pseudoskeptical bodies like the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology?
Finally, in response to you saying "drug studies are often fudged, and government health technology assessments repeatedly show that most treatments are of dubious or unknown effectiveness." I would like to know if you can point to some scientific evidence produced by a genuine scientific source to prove any of that. Good luck!
Just read the health technology reports of the U.S. and U.K. governments. Do your own homework, would you?
The Committee report you speak of was prepared by 3 of 17 supposed members and spent its time mostly ignoring the evidence. It was rejected by the government, or did you miss that part? Homeopathy is still covered under the NHS, or did you miss that part too?
Read the recent Swiss health technology report.
Medicine is not "science" by the way, it's health technology.
Only pseudoskeptics confuse philosophy about medicine with science.
lauriej1 said:
"The Committee report you speak of was prepared by 3 of 17 supposed members and spent its time mostly ignoring the evidence. "
What evidence did they ignore?
technology is the application of science.
Yeah, Pseudoscience bloggers with degrees in Biochemistry from one of the best universities in the country. :-/
Emily, and indeed actual science (Like Biochemistry and unlike Homeopathy), is coming up against a stubbornly unmovable object. It's ironic that people like you lauriej1 ignore science, and proven facts and call people like Emily "Pseudoscience Bloggers" when you are in fact promoting pseudoscience. Never fails to be entertaining.
Also, Dana Ullman your statement:
"It is so embarrassing when people who are so young and inexperienced are so arrogant, especially about a subject for which they know little or nothing. The irony here is that Emily is trying to "defend science" when it is clear that she maintains an embarrassingly poor scientific attitude. Sorry, there is no drug for ignorance, homeopathic or allopathic."
is one of the single most arrogant posts I have seen in a long time.
The best source of information on Homeopathy is http://www.extraordinarymedicine.org
This blog is just another lame Homeopathy-bashing attempt. The author is merely parroting nonsense from other pseudoskeptical blogs and websites.
Hundreds of thousands of people end up in the emergency dept. at the hospital each year as the result of taking properly prescribed prescription drugs. A good proportion end up with permanent damage or dead. Whitney Houston is a good example of a recent fatality.
Conventional medical treatment never carries any form of guarantee, drug studies are often fudged, and government health technology assessments repeatedly show that most treatments are of dubious or unknown effectiveness.
The latest health technology assessment from the Swiss government has concluded that Homeopathy is not only safe and effective, it is cost-effective.
Pseudoscience bloggers like Emily just can't be taken seriously.
It is so embarrassing when homeopaths are so arrogant, especially about a subject on which they claim to be experts. The irony here is that Dana Ullman is trying to "defend homeopathy" when it is clear that he is trying to divert attention away from the nonsense that it is by being gratuitously abusive. Sorry, there is no drug for ignorance, homeopathic or real.
Excellent article, Emily, I agree with every word
I recommend the brilliant vid, how Boiron Scammed Me, and How You Can Fight Back:
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/16…
Dana Ullman has a Master’s degree in Public Health and has authored numerous well-researched books and articles on the effectiveness of Homeopathy.
You seem to think that You-tube videos by cranks and retired stage magicians like Randi are “proof” that Homeopathy is an ineffective form of medicine?
Maybe you can get Peewee Herman to post his opinion about Quantum Mechanics on a pseudoscience blog and we can all reference that as an authoritative source too…
"Dana Ullman…has authored numerous well-researched books and articles on the effectiveness of Homeopathy"
I've read the articles: you overstate their quality by a sizeable amount. He gets paid to promote homeopathy. As for quantum, you don't need Peewee Herman: it's one of the homeopaths' favourite words. Not that bthey understand it. They will waffle on, using half-digested physics terms, mixed in with a "humours" theory of illness, trying to claim that there is an active ingredient. Yet when it comes to actually showing any effect beyond placebo, in over 200 years there hasn't been a single, reliable study in its favour. This is exactly what science predicts.
You're entitled to your opinion, however you need to acknowledge that that's all it is. You obviously have little knowledge about Homeopathy or its current practise and your claims regarding existing studies is just simply nonsense.
Find another hobby besides Homeopathy-bashing. You're really not getting anywhere.
This is the best explanation of how homeopathy works:
http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/
What you are looking for in a homeopathic remedy is a provocation of you own bodys self-healing powers. So it is not the remedy that cures – it is yourself.
Eating a whole bottle in one go in stead of just one pill doesn't matter so much as all the pills in the bottle has the same potency. You don't get a stronger light from a lightbulb by switching it on and off 100 times.
Saying there is no active ingredients in a homeopathic remedy is also incorrect. Remedies comes in many potencies from the lowest X (1 to 10) to the highest C (1 to 100).
The correct interpretation of how Homeopathy works is that it assists the body to return to homeostasis.
Taking a whole bottle of a remedy could cause adverse effects, but since it would be too embarrassing to admit the stunt backfired, I wouldn't expect the unlucky/stupid individual to fess up.
A better test would be to take repeated doses of a remedy daily for a week or two in a double blinded documented experiment. Since pseudoskeptics seem to think they comprehend the scientific method it shouldn't be too difficult to do this with unbiased double blinded supervision to make sure everyone's playing by the rules. Then let's see what the results are…
Put your money where your mouth is.
This is exactly the type of challenge George Vithoulkas posed to James Randi who predictably finked out after months of fudging "reasons" for a delay.
It is so embarrassing when people who are so young and inexperienced are so arrogant, especially about a subject for which they know little or nothing. The irony here is that Emily is trying to "defend science" when it is clear that she maintains an embarrassingly poor scientific attitude. Sorry, there is no drug for ignorance, homeopathic or allopathic.
Dana, it's even more embarrassing when older people act smug and patronising over younger people who clearly have a far better grasp of reality than them.
That YOU should be criticising someone's "defence of science" is comparable to to a blind man criticising an artist's choice of colours.
What is worse, Dana–being inexperienced and arrogant or being experienced and deluded?
Her youth, Dana? Really?
I've seen some poor attempts to discredit your critics but this must be among your weakest (and it's up against some pretty stiff competition.)
What else would you like to mock Emily Coyte for? Her shoe-size perhaps?
Hey intoscience,
"On the positive side, none of these people died, which would not have been the case had they had overdosed on a bunch of pharmaceuticals. "
Oh dear. You are indeed correct, that's because pharmaceuticals have a therapeutic window within which they are safe and effective. Exceed it and, like many things in life that actually have an action on the body, you will see overdose effects. There is however one thing which has a *huge* safe window for ingestion before negative effects are seen, and that is.. water. Thankfully this is what the people in Manchester drank
"How do I know this ? Because I have witnessed this happening,in my life and in that of others, over and over again, for the last 32 years".
Sorry but your little anecdotes mean NOTHING in a wider context. Would you agree that rather than just one person's subjective accounts of things they've tried throughout their life, it would be much more effective to do this on a wider scale? Like, for example, if you have use homeopathy on X amount of people with a certain ailment over the course of a year, perhaps taking 100X people with the same ailment (in a randomised fashion), splitting them into two groups and giving one the homeopathy and one a placebo vial of water (I physically laughed out loud writing that, oh the irony) and seeing what happens? Oh wait, this has been done.. and well I fucking never, it yields a result that unfortunately you don't want to hear, because it means A) Your "field" will always be prefixed with the word "alternative", B) You're not and never will be a medical practitioner in any sense of the word, and C) People with an ounce of common sense will continue to laugh at your expense.
You see for everyone one idiot like you bleating how you've "seen" this shit work first hand, what you forget is there are another 99 people who have tried what you do in controlled studies and been honest and objective about what they've found.. which was nothing. This one time I wished to find a ten pound note in the street and did exactly that the next day. Should I then conclude that anyone can wish to find a tenner and they will? I can cite my lame little anecdote as "evidence", or I can be an intelligent, thinking human being and realise that for everyone 1 person who wishes for something to happen and gets it, there are another million who do the same and get sweet FA. Good day.
Yes, I do use homeopathic medicine and find it immensely effective. In fact, it is my treatment of choice.
As is usually the case with these homeopathy – bashing articles. Emily Coyte knows nothing of which she speaks and she is trying to stir up problems where there are none.
This " remedy overdose" stunt is an exceedingly tiresome one, that keeps getting pulled out, over and over again. It proves nothing and moreover, sets a bad example for children, who might think that helping themselves to their parents pill bottles is a good thing. On the positive side, none of these people died, which would not have been the case had they had overdosed on a bunch of pharmaceuticals.
It really underlines the fact of the matter which is that homeopathy is not dangerous medicine. At worst, it does nothing. At best, it cures people of everything from minor acutes to serious chronic disease. How do I know this ? Because I have witnessed this happening,in my life and in that of others, over and over again, for the last 32 years.
Four million pounds is a drop in the bucket for the NHS and probably saves more money than it actually costs. People being treated effectively
means less public money being wasted on expensive pharmaceuticals, surgery, and diagnostic procedures and on the mopping – up after the dangerous " side effects" of drugs, surgery, and conventional medical treatments.
Well…saying "It proves nothing" to the remedy overdose stunt is quite blatantly wrong. The fact the no-one gets hurt proves that the treatments have no effect what-so-ever. So it proves that you might as well drink a glass of water instead of taking homeopathic medicine. How come it's illegal for companies to say that their product does something that it does not but it's not illegal to advertise homeopathic medicines – with no proof as to their effectiveness – as valid, effective treatments? I'd say that's pretty dangerous.
I for one would rather that the NHS spent the £4 Million on more staff, or proven treatments and not on expensive, useless homeopathic treatments.
"at worse it does nothing" is not quite true is it.
http://www.1023.org.uk/whats-the-harm-in-homeopat…
If you chose homeopathy instead of a known treatment (even if that treatment has unpleasant side effects) for many ailments you might suffer any number of unnecessary harm or death. This has already happened.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1216727/C…
Intoscience (obviously not really into science)
My anecdote trumps yours, for the last 50 years (that's 18 years more than you) I have witnessed the failures of homeopathic medicine in my life and in that of others over and over again. I've tried it myself for chronic ailments and seen absolutely no benefit. I have seen a close relative with Cystic Fibrosis try to rely solely on homeopathy, almost die twice only to be saved at the last moment by modern medicine. I've seen infections run rampant under homeopathic treatment and I've seen people suffer needless pain waiting for their homeopathic remedy to take effect when that could've been relieved by science based medicine . Now if you think your experience is more conclusive then mine, you should be prepared to prove it. Maybe you could get a larger sample size of sick individuals than those I've dealt with. You could treat some of them with your homeopathic remedies while others you could give just plain water to better prove that it's not a placebo effect and is actually the homeopathic remedy that is healing them. You could do this in an inconspicuous manner so that neither the patients nor those administering the remedy knew who was or was not getting the actual homeopathic remedy, like this you eliminate the possibility of someone who is biased against homeopathy denying that they actually feel better or have been cured. Once you have verified that Homeopathy worked for those that took it, then and only then, will your experience trump mine. Although I doubt it. Because this experiment has been carried out many times with far more people and in far more controlled environments than what you could arrange, and the results have always been the same. Homeopathy performs at best… as well as a placebo.
Oh come on, "intoscience" (there's a misappropriated nickname if ever I saw one), how can you claim homeopathy isn't dangerous when it's often (illegally) touted as a preventative for dangerous illnesses, or as an alternative to real medicine? At best it cures nothing, apart from having more money than sense.
Homeopathic remedies are sugar and water, based on moonshine (quite literally so, in the case of one remedy). £4 million for the NHS is a lot of money which could be spent on more nurses, more doctor and actually caring for people.
Here's a little FAQ on the subject http://blog.anarchic-teapot.net/2012/02/13/homeop…
Do you treat people using homeopathic medicine? Have you used homeopathic medicine and found it to be effective? Then let us know…