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Homeopathy for ADHD, asthma, and dementia. Where’s the evidence?

I don’t know about you, but I’m bored stiff with homeopathy. There are a lot more important things. Nevertheless, it remains a gross insult to reason, and there has been such enormous success in combating it over the last five years so, this is not the moment to stop.

Hats off to the Merseyside Skeptics Society. [...]

[BPSDB] Sceptics stage homeopathy ‘overdose’: ‘The society [of Homeopaths]‘ chief executive, Paula Ross, said: “This is an ill advised publicity stunt in very poor taste, which does nothing to advance the scientific debate about how homeopathy actually works.”’

It. Doesn’t. Work.

There’s no ‘scientific debate’ to be had about how something works if it doesn’t work and it the quality of your science is represented by nonsense like this.

Tomorrow, I plan to travel to the centre of London where I will take a huge overdose – in public – consuming an entire bottle of pills.

I will not be alone. I’ll be joined by several hundred others in London and around the world who will also be overdosing. No harm will come to us because the pills will be homeopathic, and therefore contain no active ingredient – just sugar.

Continue reading at The Guardian!

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AT 10.23 am on 30 January, more than 300 activists in the UK, Canada, Australia and the US will take part in a mass homeopathic “overdose”. Sceptics will publicly swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic pills to demonstrate to the public that homeopathic remedies, the product of a scientifically unfounded 18th-century ritual, are simply sugar pills.

Read on at New Scientist!

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This Saturday, a lot of people are going to publicly overdose on homeopathic medicine, to prove that the pills are totally inert. This is part of the ‘10:23′ campaign. Personally, I love homeopathy. Its practices read like a scathing satire of alternative medicine. Literally every part of it is wrong. Just as you think it’s [...]

In which Dr Aust suggests that while sending money for disaster relief may not feel like enough, it it better than sending nothing. Even magic nothing.
Earlier this week Dr Aust wrote out a cheque to the Disasters Emergency Committee.
At times of disasters with tragic costs in human lives, people are naturally moved to think about [...]

The other day, Martin wrote about the MHRA’s label test for Arnica 30C. I think that perhaps he was a touch unfair. This was only a label test, and not intended to be anything else. The purpose is to ensure that the label is clear to consumers (you can’t have patients when the ‘medicine’ is just magic water) and that it accurately conveys what is supposed to be in the bottle.

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Dr Kendall’s Patent Home Cures are proud to announce the launch of their new Homeopathic Remedies Range. The first product in this new range, which is planned to expand alongside our other best-selling Home Cures, is Dr Kendall’s Homeopathic Contraception.

Non gravida 30C is made from extract of guaranteed 100% pure organic Brazilian rainforest babies.

For the uninitiated, homeopathy works on the principal of like curing like or of like preventing like, as eminent homeologist Crispian Jago explains. A remedy containing babies therefore prevents pregnancy.

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The Science and Technology Select Committee have published two new documents submitted by the MHRA as part of their homeopathy ‘evidence check’; a public consultation from 2005 which the MHRA used to argue that there was “widespread support for the introduction of national rules for the authorisation of homeopathic medicinal products”; and a document describing how labels for the homeopathic remedy ‘Arnica 30C’ was tested.

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In which Dr Aust hails the work of the polymath Dr DeeTee
Dr Aust often wishes he could do several things at once. Sadly, experience has shown that he can only manage this by doing everything in an incompetently amateur-ish fashion.
Some other folk, however, manage to do several things with amazing competence, despite one wondering where [...]

The purpose of this post is to reveal a few samples of things that are taught on a homeopathy ‘degree’ course. The course in question was the "BSc Hons homeopathy course at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN). Entry to this course was closed in 2008 and, after an internal review, UCLAN closed almost all [...]

Sense About Science have published their annual roundup of the worst science howlers emanating from the pages of Hello! magazine, and it’s a bumper crop. From horse placenta to homeopathy, celebrities love their bogus science. Among the more LOL-worthy comments featured:

Having dodged poison daggers and golden guns, Roger Moore reveals an even more nefarious tool for assassinating the world’s elite: namely that fois gras causes cancer.

Beatle-baiter and professional wingnut Heather Mills insists meat hides inside your body for 40 years while it “gives you the illness you die of. And that is a fact”

Breakfast TV leftover Denise Van Outen whipped out that old chestnut, claiming Bionsen deodorant was “chemical free“.

In their document, each celebrity claim is answered by a specialist in the particular field. Sense About Science hopes that the playful ribbing will stimulate clebrities to take a more informed view in their science proclamations. All the bad science (and a few notable examples of good sense) are available for download.

Read the comments on this post…

Can’t resist another bit of straight plagiarism. In this week’s Times Higher Education, the inimitable Laurie Taylor wrote this.

Rock around the clock
Professor Georgina Kunzite, the Head of our Department of Crystal Healing, has reacted strongly to the recent High Court ruling that the University of Central Lancashire must hand over teaching materials from its [...]

We critically thinking, rational types are well aware that the reason why homeopathy doesn’t work beyond the placebo effect is because, in all probability, there are bugger all active ingredients in any remedy above 15C. In fact, the scientifically unproven technique of like curing like means that even the remedies below 15C, that might just contain the odd molecule of the original ingredient, are hardly any more likely to work either.

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We critically thinking, rational types are well aware that the reason why homeopathy doesn’t work beyond the placebo effect is because, in all probability, there are bugger all active ingredients in any remedy above 15C. In fact, the scientifically unproven technique of like curing like means that even the remedies below 15C, that might just contain the odd molecule of the original ingredient, are hardly any more likely to work either.

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The Yuletide edition of the BMJ carries a lovely article by Jeffrey Aronson, Patent medicines and secret remedies. (BMJ 2009;339:b5415).
I was delighted to be asked to write an editorial about it, In fact it proved quite hard work, because the BMJ thought it improper to be too rude about the royal family, or [...]

A momentous decision was promulgated (as lawyers say) by the Information Tribunal on December 8th 2009.  It marks a step forward in Freedom of Information about how universities spend your money. It has taken 3.5 years to get to this point. Perhaps now there will be an end to the attempts of every single [...]

The latest in an occasional series looks at homeopathy.

What is homeopathy?
It is a system of medicine based on the principle that ‘like cures like’. The German physician Samuel Hahnemann founded homeopathy in the 18th century after hearing claims that cinchona could cure malaria. Hahnemann took cinchona bark and decided that the symptoms he noted in [...]

Earlier today, Minister for Health Services Mike O’Brien, the Department of Health’s Chief Scientist David Harper, and Kent Woods, Chief Executive of the MHRA were questioned by MPs as part of the Science and Technology Select Committee’s “Evidence Check” on homeopathy.

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Last week, we saw the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Select Committee question ‘expert’ witnesses in a review of the evidence for homeopathy. In the aftermath of what was a fairly dismal performance by homeopathy advocates, the BHA have issued the following, dire press release:

Robert Mathie, the BHA’s Research Development Adviser, told the committee that there is evidence that homeopathy has an effect greater than placebo. You can read the BHA’s written submission to the committee here.

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We have listed many reasons hear why you should never trust Boots.  Here are the previous ones.
Can you trust Boots?
Don’t Trust Boots
Boots reaches new level of dishonesty with CoQ10 promotion
This post is about a "functional food".  That is about something a bit more serious than homeopathy, though I’ll return to that standing joke in [...]

Recently, claims have surfaced surrounding a Belgian coma patient - Rom Houben - who spent 23 years ‘locked in’, conscious but paralysed. It was only recently discovered that he had been conscious, and efforts were made to enable him to communicate using a controversial technique called ‘Facilitated Communication’. As The Times report; “Mr Houben is now seemingly able to express himself in remarkably lucid messages while [his 'facilitator'] Mrs [Linda] Wouters guides his hand over a computer screen.” This sounds all very good, until you watch the following video, and in particular the section around 1m 17s:

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The facilitator is moving the finger at an incredible rate of knots, but Houben is not even looking at the screen, or the keypad - his eyes are firmly shut. Now, yes, I can touch-type, but try touch-typing with your eyes closed, and directing somebody else’s finger. It’s a bloody big ask.

It sounds even more unlikely when you look at the scientific evidence for facilitated communication - or rather, the lack of evidence, since - as James Randi has pointed out in a gloriously annoyed blog - the technique has about as much support as Nick Griffin at an ACLU meeting. Wikipedia note that:

The majority of peer reviewed scientific studies conclude that the typed language output attributed to the clients is directed or systematically determined by the therapists who provide facilitated assistance.

In other words, as Randi points out, FC is most likely a case of the “Clever Hans Effect“, a psychological quirk in which “a person’s or an animal’s behaviour can be influenced by subtle and unintentional cueing on the part of a questioner,” notorious for its destructive influence on poorly controlled trials of this kind. The facilitator may not be doing it consciously, but it seems far more likely that the words are coming from her mind.

The Times, one of the few papers to question the findings, notes:

The novel method of communication has not convinced all medical experts, however. “It’s Ouija board stuff. It’s been discredited time and again when people look at it. It’s usually the person who is doing the pointing who is doing the messages,” Arthur Caplan, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said after watching a video of the pair.

In a comment to Wired, Caplan has drawn attention to the unlikely language being expressed by Houben via his facilitator:

“You’re going to lie for 23 years in a hospital bed with almost no stimuli, and then sound completely coherent and cogent?” he said. “Something is wrong with that picture. The messages are almost poetic. It sounds too lucid, like someone prepared these things to say. I’m not saying it’s all a fraud, but I want to hear a lot more.”

Caplan’s disdain for Facilitated Communication (FC) is well justified. Mark Mostert published a systematic review of the literature in 2001 [1] [pdf], painting a bleak picture for proponents. Of 29 studies reviewed, 19 had one or more control procedures and refuted FC claims, 6 had one or more control procedures and supported FC claims but were often riddled with methodological problems, while 4 had no controls and supported FC claims.

Mostert concluded with a statement that should sound all too familiar to anyone who has ever read meta-studies of treatments like homeopathy or chiropractic:

The results of the review support and confirm the conclusions reached by previous reviewers of the empirical FC literature. The divide between the results of studies incorporating control procedures find very little to no support for the efficacy of FC, studies employing fewer control procedures produce mixed results, and studies ignoring control procedures almost universally find FC to be effective. In the cases of the few, tentative positive results emerging from studies reporting some form of control procedures, as in the cases of Cardinal et al. [2] and Weiss et al. [3], these results are much more likely the artifact of methodological problems than an accurate representation of persuasive evidence.

Professor Laureys, the patient’s neurologist claims to have performed a simple test to establish the truth, as The Times report:

The spectacle is so incredible that even Steven Laureys, the neurologist who discovered Mr Houben’s potential, had doubts about its authenticity. He decided to put it to the test.

“I showed him objects when I was alone with him in the room and then, later, with his aide, he was able to give the right answers,” Professor Laureys said. “It is true.”

The problem is that these claims are extraordinary, and therefore require extraordinary evidence to back up. Laureys cannot be considered an unbiased observer, given his emotional investment in the case. That isn’t an accusation of fraud or wrong-doing - it is incredibly easy to deceive yourself in such situations.

Given what we know then, Professor Laureys and other medical staff working with Houben need to back up their extraordinary claims with much more solid evidence than the anecdata presented so far. After all, if it turns out that in fact the results produced by FC aren’t real, they could be causing their patient even more stress than he has experienced so far.

And there’s a further reward on offer. The James Randi Foundation have offered a one million dollar prize to anyone who can provide a valid demonstration of facilitated communication, and Randi has told Wired that the offer “is still there.”

The gauntlet has been thrown. Will Professor Laureys be willing to put his claims to the test?

[1] Mostert MP (2001). Facilitated communication since 1995: a review of published studies. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 31 (3), 287-313 PMID: 11518483

[2] Cardinal DN, Hanson D, & Wakeham J (1996). Investigation of authorship in facilitated communication. Mental retardation, 34 (4), 231-42 PMID: 8828342

[3] Weiss MJ, Wagner SH, & Bauman ML (1996). A validated case study of facilitated communication. Mental retardation, 34 (4), 220-30 PMID: 8828341

The House of Commons Science and Techology Committee are holding an inquiry into the evidence base for homeopathy and government policy.  The deadline for written submissions was earlier this month and many individuals and organisations, from all sides of the homeopathy debate, will have submitted evidence.  Including among this are H:MC21, organisation dedicated to informing [...]

It seems very reasonable to suggest that taxpayers have an interest in knowing what is taught in universities.  The recent Pittilo report suggested that degrees should be mandatory in Acupuncture, Herbal Medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine. So it seems natural to ask to see what is actually taught in these degrees, so one can judge whether [...]