22 Jan Homeopathic overdose – rebuttal
Contrarian would not have thought it possible for a defense of quackery to set me chuckling and nodding my head, but my old pal Warren Reed has done it. [Previous installments here and here.] Knowing that the best defense is a good offense, Reed began by catching me in the act of scientific error:
Amedeo Avogadro
One of the few things I remember from Nat. Sci. 3 is Avogadro’s Number — 6.023 x 10**23. So it isn’t roughly 10**23 as you state — it’s actually 6 times that. Six is called The Republican Constant – any Republican can stretch the truth by a factor of six without raising an eyebrow on Fox News. Journalists often get the same exemption.
But we don’t read Contrarian just for the science. More puzzling is the notion that a group of pub-crawling Brits is claiming to know what constitutes “proper medical assistance.” Of the reasons for healing—the passage of time, the placebo effect, natural defenses—”proper medical assistance” is on the list, but is an evanescent concept at best. It depends on many of the same principles for success as Homeopathy. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.
More after the jump.
In Canada and Britain, where “proper medical assistance” is essentially free, people flock to chiropractors and pay their compliments to complementary medicine by paying cash at Lawton’s. Why? Because they are programmed by doctors to think that illness requires intervention, doctors are way too busy, and because the passage of time, the placebo effect and natural defenses work. Actually, it’s in the doctors’ interest to have Boots selling this Homeopathic stuff, as it takes the pressure off their schedules and acts as triage to separate transitory from more serious problems.
These 10**23 folks say “We don’t expect to find products on the shelf at our local pharmacy which do not work”, yet if you bother to keep track of mainstream medical retractions and misjudgments you’ll find tons of things which worked yesterday but don’t work today – calcium is the latest medical boondoggle – you can eat the White Cliffs of Dover and it won’t make your bones stronger. So should Boots withdraw calcium from its shelves? Why is tincture of arsenic more offensive than Calcium as a little bit of medical malfeasance? People should be allowed to decide for themselves. Or should we ban Christian Scientists?
Some of the ideas behind Homeopathy aren’t so far fetched anyway – inducing similar symptoms with dilutions sounds a lot like vaccination. It works with Quinine and Colchicine. I’m out of my depth, but I wish the 10**23 people would just have another Guiness. Come to think of it, a pint of Guiness can cure many cases of deranged stress by causing a little harmless derangement. Homeopathy at work!
Speaking of weakly diluted English substances that should be banned, isn’t this a tempest in a teapot?
Warren is right to point out that “the passage of time, the placebo effect, and natural defenses” are the usual route to recovery from most illness. The simple fact is that most people get better from most things that happen to them. And if they happen to have swallowed sugar water in the belief (fostered by lies on the package) that it actually contained something curative, they may be reinforced in the delusion that homeopathy fixed them.
And, yes, the same post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning can equally reinforce us in the belief that conventional medicine cured some malady we may well have recovered from on our own.
To sort out what actually works from what merely appears to work, we have double-blind trials, and these consistently show that homeopathy holds no curative power beyond the placebo.
Warren advances an even more inventive syllogism: because some medical treatments eventually prove ineffective and must be discarded, therefore we should encourage a pseudoscience whose nostrums cannot be effective, and are never discarded.
Warren’s claim that homeopathy “sounds a lot like vaccination” is a talking point homeopaths often use to buttress the credibility of their nostrums by linking them to convetional medical techniques they purport to despise. Homeopathy might sound like vaccination, superficially, but decisive differences divide the two.
- Vaccines are used to prevent illness, not to treat it;
- Vaccines consist of small but measurable quantities of their stated ingredients, not sugar water.
- Vaccines produce measurable antibodies in the bloodstream.