Homeopathy – Quackery?

Homeopathy is an absurd pseudoscience, which survives today as ‘alternative’ medicine, despite there being no reliable scientific evidence that it works. Ben Goldacre is one of many skeptics of this ‘spiritual medicine’, and tears it to shreds in his book Bad Science. He is a spokesman against general pharma-bullsh*t and his arguments are sound and entertaining so I have shared some of them with you in this blog.

Homeopathic remedies are made by taking an ingredient such as arsenic, and diluting it down so far that there is not a single molecule left in the dose that you get. The ingredients are selected on the basis of ‘like cures like’, so that a substance like quinine that causes malaria-like symptoms, for example, would be used to treat malaria. The typical dilution is called ’30C’: this means that the original substance has been diluted by 1 drop in 100, 30 times. This is a dilution of 1 molecule in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000. At a homeopathic dilution of 100C, which they sell routinely, and which homeopaths claim is even more powerful than 30C, the treating substance is diluted by more than the total number of atoms in the universe.

How can an almost infinitely dilute solution cure anything? Most homeopaths claim that water has a ‘memory’. Well, if this is true, why does it not make you ill from its memory of water-borne diseases? Does it have no memory of once being in Ryan Gosling’s eyes or Captain Hook’s arse? The homeopaths answer to this is that they use ‘succession’. Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, had a saddle-maker construct a special wooden striking board covered in leather on one side and stuffed with horsehair. The diluted substance is then ‘struck ten times’ against this board, to ‘activate’ the medicinal substance. Right.

Nonetheless, there is clear evidence that people ‘feel better’ after taking homeopathy. You could say to such people that they are experiencing the placebo effect, which is in itself, an incredibly powerful phenomenon that I would like to write about more fully another time. The placebo effect has been studied extensively. We know that four sugar pills are more effective than two at clearing up ulcers. Salt-water injections, which also do nothing, are more effective than sugar pills at treating pain, as the dramatic procedure seems more potent.  Green sugar pills are better than red ones for treating anxiety due to the associations many people make with colours. Or simply ‘regression to the mean’ could be to blame for apparently miraculous effects of a homeopathic treatment. If you take an ineffective sugar pill when your illness is at its worse, odds are on that you are going to get better. If you hang goats’ entrails around your neck when your illness is at its worse, odds are on that you are still going to get better. These will be the actions you resort back to should you get ill again, as they ‘worked’ once, despite that taking no action at all would have had the same result.

The evidence homeopaths use when they say that there are trials that prove homeopathy acts better than a placebo tends to be dubious. Firstly, there are a lot of trials that are simply not ‘fair tests’, for example, patients were not blinded properly and knew whether they were getting the homeopathic treatment or the placebo. Or there was inadequate randomisation, or reporting of data. The meta-analysis homeopaths use to prove the effectiveness of their treatment includes all the poorly conducted trials. There is a positive correlation between the stringency of the trial and the number of trials that conclude that homeopathy is no more effective than placebo.

Aside from just being annoying, the unjustifiable claims of homeopaths can cause concrete harm. It is routine marketing practice for homeopaths to denigrate mainstream medicine, for commercial reasons. A student was sent to visit 10 homeopaths to discuss what actions he should take against malaria before visiting Africa. 9 out of 10 advised against taking conventional treatment. Further, more than half the homeopaths approached concerning MMR advised against providing children with the MMR vaccine. This is both irresponsible and dangerous, endangering lives

Homeopathy could have value as placebo, but there are ethical and commercial considerations that need to be addressed. Ultimately, homeopaths need to stop undermining the public’s understanding of medicine and science.