NHS Scotland are advertising a job for a ’specialty doctor in homeopathy’, which pays up to £68,638. They are also letting go of hundreds of other staff who have actual jobs. Obviously this is fucking stupid, and so several bloggers have applied for it already, and obviously so have I. You can read their supporting [...]

Having recently been fired from Ofquack, the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC). I found I was missing the constant dribble of double-speak, Then, as luck would have it, a friend emailed me to draw my attention to a lucrative job at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee.  On August 11th I put out a tweet, just in [...]

Suggested twitter tag: #buckgate

Number 19 Buckingham Street, London WC2N 6EF.is to be the home of the proposed "College of Medicine" that has arisen from the ashes of the late unlamented Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health (their last accounts can be seen at Quackometer).
Naturally one must ask if the "College [...]

In which Dr Aust sets a small – though not quite homeopathically small –  test.
I had meant to post something for World Homeopathy Awareness Week (WHAW), which was last week.
However, I got a bit distracted by other things, like the dropping of the BCA’s lawsuit against Simon Singh (including whether the BCA had been reading [...]

This post recounts a complicated story that started in January 2009, but has recently come to what looks like a happy ending.  The story involves over a year’s writing of letters and meetings, but for those not interested in the details, I’ll start with a synopsis.
Synopsis of the synopsis
In January 2009, a course in "integrated [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Investigation of the mechanism of decay reactions with single bond breaking and calculation of their velocity constants on the basis of quantum chemical and statistical methods - that’s quite a complex topic to write about, isn’t it? Well, someone wanted to write her doctoral dissertation about it, in the field of chemical physics, in 1986. Who? A certain Angela Merkel, whom some of you might also know as the current Chancellor of Germany [1].
<!–break–>
It’s fairly technical stuff and a good understanding of how science works and treats evidence is a prerequisite for reading it - and was, of course, needed for writing it, too. But how did this knowledge master the transition from science to politics? How is evidence treated in German politics today, by those who should know, the scientists-turned-politicians, the MDs-by-profession? And where, in the still fairly new German cabinet do we find these?

A quick list of the German ministers and their profession:
(ordered: name - party-affiliation - ministry - education/degree - topic of degree’s thesis)
Guido Westerwelle - Free Democrats (FDP)- Minister of Foreign Affairs - Dr. jur. - Party law and political youth organisations [2]
Thomas de Maizière - Christian Democrats (CDU) - Minister of the Interior - Dr. jur. - Informal practices in the German cartel office [3]
Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger - Free Democrats (FDP) - Minister of Justice - Second Staatsexamen in law - n/a [4]
Wolfgang Schäuble - Christian Democrats (CDU) - Minister of Finance - Dr. jur. - Certified public accountants in employment law [5]
Rainer Brüderle - Free Democrats (FDP) - Minister of Economics and Technology - Diplom in Economics - n/a [6]
Franz Josef Jung - Christian Democrats (CDU) - Minister of Labour and Social Affairs - Dr. jur. - Regional Planning in Hesse [7]
Ilse Aigner - Christian Social Union (CSU) [8] - Minister of Food, Agriculture. and Consumer Protection - Electrical engineer [9] - n/a
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg - Christian Social Union (CSU) - Minister of Defence - Dr. jur. (summa cum laude) - Comparison of US and European constitutional evolution [10]
Ursula von der Leyen - Christian Democrats (CDU) - Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth - Dr. med. - CRP in the diagnostics of amniotic infection syndrome [11]
Philipp Rösler - Free Democrats (FDP) - Minister of Health - Dr. med. - Prophylaxis against pre-operative Atrial fibrillation within the scope of coronary bypass operations [12]
Peter Ramsauer - Christian Social Union (CSU) - Minister of Transport, Building, and Urban Affairs - Dr. oec. publ. - Economic aims and effects of local government reform in Bavaria [13]
Norbert Röttgen - Christian Democrats (CDU) - Minister of Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety - Dr. jur. - Argumentation of the European Court of Justice [14]
Annette Schavan - Christian Democrats (CDU) - Minister of Education and Research - Dr. phil. - A review of studies on the development of the conscience [15]
Dirk Niebel - Free Democrats (FDP) - Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development - Diplom-Verwaltungswirt (FH) [16] - n/a [17]
Ronald Pofalla - Christian Democrats (CDU) - Chief of the Chancellery - Diplom-Social Pedagogue (FH) [18] and Second Staatsexamen in law - n/a

So there are only a handful of university degrees that actually required some research, data-collection, analysis, and everything. So, after a quick overview on (not) evidence-based voting by means of one certain issue (heroin prescription), let’s take a closer look at how those politicians who sport such a “research” degree (Angela Merkel, Philipp Rösler, and Ursula von der Leyen) have fared so far regarding evidence-based politics.

Heroin-therapy

All but three of the current ministers (Rösler, von der Leyen and de Maizière) were MPs during the last legislative period. In July of this year, the German Parliament Bundestag voted on the introduction of a heroin distribution programme for the hard core of addicted, long-term users, that have failed previous attempts at detoxification. This programme had a precursor in some half-dozen model programmes in different German cities, that were adequately covered by corollary studies [19]. The patients would receive synthetic heroin (diacetylmorphine), be supervised while giving themselves the injections, and be looked after by social workers. The model programmes were huge successes, but it took over 20 years to introduce the final bill to the Bundestag. Unsurprisingly, after stalling for so many years, the CDU/CSU-fraction was unrelenting and the law passed with only 11 votes from their side, while 196 CDU/CSU MPs voted against it. So how did the new ministers vote then?

pro: Niebel (FDP)

contra: Jung (CDU), Schavan (CDU), Aigner (CSU), Ramsauer(CSU), Pofalla (CDU), Röttgen (CDU)

did not vote ( abstention!): Brüderle (FDP), Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger (FDP), Westerwelle (FDP), zu Guttenberg (CSU), Merkel (CDU), Schäuble (CDU)

not MP: de Maizière, Rösler, von der Leyen

The non-votes from zu Guttenberg, Merkel and Schäuble can be explained by either being for the law, but not wanting to upset the rest of their respective parties, or, more likely, wanting to abstain from voting on this controversial topic while being part of the government (although Jung, Aigner and Schavan all were part of the last cabinet as well and voted against the law).
The non-votes from the FDP-MPs Brüderle, Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger and Westerwelle are more problematic, as roughly three quarters of all FDP-MPs voted for the law. So it seems that in these three cases, ideology trumped the evidence (and, it could be said, human decency and compassion for drug users who have no other perspective).
(Voting results taken from the German-language abgeordnetenwatch.de.)

Philipp Rösler

Philipp Rösler was, until recently, the Minister of Economics, Labour and Transport in the State of Lower Saxony. His pet project on the federal level is the reform of the health care system from the currentuniversal multi-payer system that is paid for in equal parts by employers and employees; Rösler’s plan apparently includes a freeze on the contributions from employers and a the introduction of a per capita premium, instead of the now-current percentage of income. So the new plan would ease the burden on those with higher incomes and the employers while lower income households will pay more of their income on health care; in certain cases (people below a certain minimum income), the state will need to subsidise the health plan. This has already drawn protests from the opposition, certain medical associations, and, last but not least, the coalition partner CSU. The latest development is the appointment of a panel to decide on reform of the German health care system; said panel will begin work in early 2010. The future will show, whether these experts will recommend evidence-based policies and whether or not Rösler will implement them.

Ursula von der Leyen

If you ask some of the German “digital natives” about his opinion on Ursula von der Leyen, chances are he will either run screaming into the woods or give a fairly derisive answer in which he calls her “Zensursula” (a portmanteau from the German word “Zensur”, meaning censorship, and her given name). Why is that? Because she was the minister responsible for pushing mandatory internet blockage legislation (read: internet censorship) against child pornography during the last election cycle.

Netizens, the still fairly fresh German Pirate Party, the information privacy ombudsmen on the federal and state level, and the then-opposition FDP protested heavily. I don’t really feel like recapping all their arguments, but they were all based on actual data (showing the feasibility of emailing the providers to effect the removal of child pornography) and technical knowledge (such as the fact that DNS-based censorship like the one proposed by von der Leyen can be circumvented fairly easily). von der Leyen’s reasoning was more like this:

Unsurprisingly, numerous discussions on this basis proved fruitless; especially notorious is the claim made by her that “Billions of Euros” were being made with child pornography on the internet, and child pornography being not illegal “in many nations, e.g. India and others” (which drew a rather harsh rebuttal from the Indian Foreign Office), without providing any studies to back this up.

Finally, there is a fairly widespread belief amongst the opposition (and especially netizens) that the whole affair was pretty much a publicity stunt to boast her ratings with the mostly older, non-technical, value voters that make up much of the CDU/CSU electorate. This belief is reinforced by the fact that the whole thing has pretty much blown over after the elections. To some degree the (alleged) publicity campaign seems to have worked, and von der Leyen is still in charge of the Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth in a new, Centre-Right Coalition.

Angela Merkel

As the German Chancellor, you have what is called Richtlinienkompetenz (guideline competence), that allows you to end controversies amongst your cabinet and push through your own decision as the final verdict. Even though some MPs (though not nearly all, or even the majority) of the then-coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD) argued against the von der Leyen-Agenda of web censorship (one MP, Jörg Tauss, even went so far as to leave the SPD and join the Pirate Party), Merkel never exercised her Richtlinienkompetenz on this topic (to be fair, she rarely gets involved in inter-coalition disputes unless a solution already emerged and has been criticised for this “policy of the steady hand”).

Back to the Future?

So, where does this leave us? The conclusion is twofold: Firstly, the absolute overkill of Juris Doctorae is fairly typical for German cabinets (and, I would say without having checked, most other countries). My guess is that the endless droning on fairly densely-written laws and prescriptions prepares you for writing similarly dense stuff. So this might mean that most politicians have lots of experience within the murky waters of politics and lawmaking, but only few are (or should be) properly equipped by way of their profession to navigate the - sometimes equally murky - waters of science. Secondly, some politicians that should know better how to accumulate and interpret data, how to look at evidence, and especially how to build a scientific consensus, simply don’t, if doing so is not convenient to their ideological agenda or not popular within their constituency.

We will see, how the evidence will fare in the future - I don’t have high hopes for it, though.

=====

Footnotes

[1] Angela Merkel: Untersuchung des Mechanismus von Zerfallsreaktionen mit einfachem Bindungsbruch und Berechnung ihrer Geschwindigkeitskonstanten auf der Grundlage quantenchemischer und statistischer Methoden, 1986 (German).
[2] Guido Westerwelle: Das Parteienrecht und die politischen Jugendorganisationen, 1994 (German).
[3] Thomas de Maizière: Die Praxis der informellen Verfahren beim Bundeskartellamt – Darstellung und rechtliche Würdigung eines verborgenen Vorgehens, 1986 (German).
[4] Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger went on to work for the German Patent Office, but I do not kow in which capacity. I suspect the legal department.
[5] Wolgang Schäuble: Die berufsrechtliche Stellung der Wirtschaftsprüfer in Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaften, 1971 (German).
[6] A Diplom usually requires a thesis; as these are not usually published outside the alma mater, I do not know the topic of Brüderle’s Diplom-thesis.
[7] Franz Josef Jung: Die Regionalplanung in Hessen, dargestellt am Beispiel der Regionalen Planungsgemeinschaft Rhein-Main-Taunus, 1978 (German).
[8] The CSU is sort of the Bavarian Part of the CDU. After WWII they signed a partnership-agreement and are usually regarded as “sister parties”. They do form a common fraction in the Bundestag, but sometimes have some intra-fraction rivalries/disputes.
[9] In Germany, this does not represent a university degree, but rather a kind of add-on to a previous apprenticeship.
[10] Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg: Verfassung und Verfassungsvertrag: konstitutionelle Entwicklungsstufen in den USA und der EU, 2007 (German).
[11] Ursula von der Leyen: C-reaktives Protein als diagnostischer Parameter zur Erfassung eines Amnioninfektionssyndroms bei vorzeitigem Blasensprung und therapeutischem Entspannungsbad in der Geburtsvorbereitung, 1991 (German).
[12] Philipp Rösler: Einfluss der prophylaktischen Sotalolapplikation auf die Inzidenz des postoperativen Vorhofflimmerns im Rahmen der aortokoronaren Bypassoperation, 2001 (German).
[13] Peter Ramsauer: Wirtschaftliche Ziele und Effekte der Gebietsreform in Bayern, 1985 (German).
[14] Norbert Röttgen: Die Argumentation des Europäischen Gerichtshofes - Typik, Methodik, Kritik, 2001 (German).
[15] Annette Schavan: Person und Gewissen - Studien zu Voraussetzungen, Notwendigkeit und Erfordernissen heutiger Gewissensbildung, 1980 (German).
[16] Roughly equivalent to a Master of Public Administration.
[17] As with Brüderle (see fottnote [6], usually a thesis is required, but it does not appear to be published.
[18] Again, some sort of thesis should be neccessary, but probably hasn’t been published.
[19] Christian Haasen et al.: Heroin-assisted treatment for opioid dependence: randomised controlled trial, in: The British Journal of Psychiatry. 191, 2007, pp. 55 – 62.

Further Reading:

N. Metrebian et al.: Patients receiving a prescription for diamorphine (heroin) in the United Kingdom, in: Drug and Alcohol Review. 25, No. 2, 2006, pp. 115 – 121.

For over 5 years Belle de Jour has been one of the most high-profile and successful anonymous bloggers. In her blog, Belle talked about her experiences as a high-class London call girl. A book followed, then a popular TV series.

Today, Belle revealed herself as Brooke Magnanti to The Times. And that’s Dr. Brooke Magnanti. She’s a scientist.
<!–break–>
My first thought was: what a fantastic coup for the image of women in science. Despite what people think, women in science, and scientists in general, can like fashion, enjoy looking beautiful, have hopes, fears and money troubles. Take away the label of “scientist”, and all that’s left is… a woman.

This is an important message to send when we try to promote careers in science to girls: you don’t have to be weird, or geeky, or a maths genius, or stop washing your hair, to be a scientist.

As a scientist, you can still be so glamorous that Billie Piper would want to play you on tv. (There was Billie, thinking she’d made break from her geeky Dr Who role, whereas in fact she was playing a developmental neurotoxicologist).

The image problem of science is not limited to women. Male scientists suffer from stereotyping just as much as female ones. Anyone else out there want to own up to their secret life as a quantum physicist?

My second reaction, however, was of dismay. Belle turned to prositution in the period between submitting her PhD thesis and taking her viva. Procedures for completing a PhD differ quite a bit between countries. In Britain, a “big book” style thesis is required, typically of around 200 pages or so, rather than a collection of research papers. Writing such a tome is a big job, and the research papers still have to be written as well in order to get a publication record.

The thesis is then sent to examiners, typically around 3 expert scientists from both inside and outside the candidate’s own institute, who review the book in detail. The PhD exam takes the form of a viva, literally an “oral exam”, between the committee and the cadidate, lasting a few hours. Finally, the examiners recommend that the candidate passes, immediately (rare), following minor (most common) or major changes (less common) to the thesis, or not at all (very rare).

This whole process can take many months, during which the student’s employment status is often sketchy at best. With PhD funding in Britain typically shorter than elsewhere, although efforts are being made to bring it in line with the US and Europe, these final stages often spill over the end of the funded period. And with competition for academic jobs as fierce as it is, employers prefer to hire candidates whose PhD’s are a certainty, rather than a pending proposition.

In this situation, it is not uncommon for PhD students to find themselves forced to take a job to avoid financial hardship, and end up sidetracked from science and unable to finish their PhDs.

This was precisely Belle’s predicament, and faced with eviction from her home, she decided to become an escort to supplement her income. This would leave her enough time to write, work and prepare for her viva while earning enough money to support herself.

While Belle says she “didn’t object to the concept” of getting paid for sex, and certainly deserves not to be judged for it, I’m sure whe would rather have avoided having to resort to it in the first place. This would not be an outrageous suggestion. Having just finished a PhD, she had just become one of the most highly-educated people in the country. Isn’t education supposed to shield you from this kind of hardship?

Scientists are being told that their work is crucial for driving our knowledge-based economies, but are paid so little that they have to run up hefty debts, wait tables or turn tricks to make ends meet. Isn’t it time young scientists received respect in a more tangible form, like jobs and money?

This is the only way we can ensure that the best scientists stay in science, and not just those for whose circumstances allowed them to continue.

A final note on the media coverage of this case. I sincerely hope for Belle and her loved ones that she receives a fairer treatment than several other bloggers (like Girl with a One Track Mind or Night Jack) who wrote under the veil of anonymity and were outed and subsequently hounded by the press.

While so far the coverage is mild and generally complimentary of Belle, and having decided to out herself has the advantage of holding the strings for now. I hope she hangs on to them.

Presumably if you’re reading this you’ve heard that Alan Johnson demanded David Nutt resign as head of something called the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for comments he made in a speech reproduced as a pamphlet you can download. I have read his speech. It’s quite interesting. It discusses of the intentions of the drug [...]

I’ve been dying to chime in amongst the raucous of commentary surrounding Dennis Overbye’s NYT article “The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate.” The bloggosphere has chewed this one up and spit it out a few times, and today, the article came up in a phone conversation between me and a physicist friend.

Is this for real?

…I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one….

It sounds like a farce. Then, on the second reading, i realized what the article was really about: the wonky-craziness of theoretical physics and how genius often involves going way out on a limb in your thinking. (At least i hope this was what it was about–the theme was a bit buried. So buried that, in my opinion, the article seemed to give too much credibility to the bizarre, unpopular, and certainly untested theory.)

Fairly, my physicist phone-buddy wanted to go over the facts of Neilsen’s theory to judge if this was, in fact, nonsense or whether it was simply a creative interpretation of a plausible concept.

There is conflicting commentary all over the web…

from phsyicscentral

…”The Collider, the Particle, and a Theory About Fate” goes out on a limb—a really long limb—and discusses a fringe idea…

Physicist Sean Carrol, quoted in the article, from Cosmic Variance.

The theory is undeniably crazy — but not crackpot, which is a distinction worth drawing. And an occasional fun essay about speculative science in the Times is not going to send us back to the Dark Ages, or even rank among the top ten thousand dangers along those lines.

Comment below the Times article, MM from Chicago

What I find most most amazing reading these comments is the scientific illiteracy of people who otherwise are probably well educated. Examples: (1) comments that entropy is a fundamental law (its not fundamental), (2) comments that the universe is deterministic in nature (physics stopped believing that over fifty years ago), (3) comments that traveling backwards in time is impossible (not at the quantum level).

People, there has been a revolution in physics. Its came out of quantum mechanics and from the theory of relativity. The old science you learned in high school was not entirely accurate. Pick up a good book on modern physics. You will be awed.

In theoretical physics, it’s often difficult to draw the line between what is creative and what is just plain crazy. Everyone has their own definition.

The word ’spirituality’ is very much in fashion but is used in such a nebulous way to mean so many things that it has become virtually emptied of meaning. It has also become something of a sacred cow, not to be questioned.

A Pew Survey in 2008 and a Newsweek survey in 2009 both found that Americans are increasingly identifying as spiritual rather than religious. Newsweek states that, of the people surveyed: Nearly half (48 percent) described themselves as both ‘religious and spiritual’ while another 30 per cent said they were ’spiritual but not religious’. A Mori poll in the UK in 2003 found that 24% of people considered themselves spiritual but did not belong to a religion.

There seem to be four main flavours of spirituality:

The first is used by religious people almost interchangeably with ‘religion’ and ‘belief’.

The second covers people who have a faith but a more personal relationship with their deity, away from hierarchical, structured religion, formal worship and dogma. Some people’s faith, whether they use the word ’spiritual’ or not, is so loosely defined that it would barely be recognised as faith at all by the orthodox. One such believer writes in the Guardian that ‘what I believe is that God is the ultimate aesthetic object, ultimate beauty, glory and power, and that the vision of God embodies the quintessence of every aesthetic experience and every sensual pleasure’. Hers is a very rarified conception and it’s not clear why anyone would put themselves in a category and then go to great lengths to explain how different they are from everyone else in that category. Safety in numbers, perhaps.

The third is a secular, mostly New Age flavour that is personalized, pluralistic, mystical. This can take a particular form - for example, Native American spirituality - or it can be just be a sense of connection with the universe, that there is ’something out there’, a belief in the supernatural in the broadest sense. Words like ‘energy’, ‘quantum’ and ‘natural’ crop up a lot. For example, the all-embracing pick and mix nature of this spirituality is illustrated by the Spiritual Forums, which welcome discussion on the Spiritual, Paranormal, Metaphysical, Philosophical, Supernatural, Complementary Therapies and Esoteric subjects from Astral Projection to Zen, Angels and Yoga.

Although this alternative spirituality is New Agey, it is not new. Followers of Swedenborg and his brand of spirituality have been around since the 18th century and, although less fashionable now, they still exist. Madame Blavatsky was another precursor of New Age spirituality.

Finally, there is spirituality-lite, a kind of life-style accessory involving scented candles, pictures of sunsets, having once read a book by Deepak Chopra and the buying of alternative medicine by people who probably went to India at some point or would like to.

What they all have in common is that they focus on something other than the purely physical. They often take a critical view of materialism although the last two flavours involve buying a lot of accessories.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs identifies five layers of human requirement. The first is the most basic, satisfying physical survival needs for food, water, sex, sleep and so on. The second is for safety, the third for relationships. The top two needs, once these basics have been achieved, are for esteem/self-esteem and self-actualisation. Spirituality seems to fall into these two categories, particularly the last (although deeply religious people might possibly put it into the relationship category). Anyone struggling to survive is not going to be pondering the meaning of life and their connection with the universe or admiring a dream catcher they picked up in the local garden centre while listening to whale music.

Is spirituality just an indulgence, a modern fad, or does it have benefits?

The Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) have a leaflet called Spirituality and Mental Health which looks at the potential benefits. It states that: In healthcare, spirituality is identified with experiencing a deep-seated sense of meaning and purpose in life, together with a sense of belonging. It is about acceptance, integration and wholeness. It also says that Evidence for the benefits for mental health of belonging to a faith community, holding religious or spiritual beliefs, and engaging in associated practices, is now substantial. The Spirituality and Psychiatry Special Interest Group (SIG) has over 2000 members.

The leaflet has a long list of spiritual practices, including belonging to a faith tradition, acts of compassion, reading scripture, yoga, meditation, appreciation of the arts and engaging in creative activities, including artistic pursuits, cookery, gardening etc, group or team sports.

Spiritual practices, they say, include being self-reflective and honest, developing greater empathy for others, achieving a peaceful state of mind, wisdom, equanimity, patience and joy.

While a lot of the things on the lists are desirable both in life and in therapy, many of them are not what most people would consider spiritual. Is sport a spiritual activity? It appears that the RCP are using this catch-all term to cover pretty much anything that improves quality of life.

Their claim that there is substantial evidence for the benefits of faith and belonging to a faith community is undoubtedly true for some people. But faith can also bring a whole lot of unwanted baggage such as guilt, prejudice, pressure to conform and conflict, especially for people whose lifestyle or identity is not mainstream. Faith communities can be supportive, a vital social safety net but some communities are very focussed on ritual, dogma, formal worship and other distinctly non-spiritual elements. So it seems that this leaflet is being over-general and optimistic, the word ’spiritual’ bland to the point of uselessness.

The NHS has also recognised the need for using spirituality as part of ‘holistic’ and ‘humane’ treatment. Its guidelines for staff state that Recognising a person’s spiritual dimension is one of the most vital aspects of care and recovery in mental health. While treating the whole person rather than regarding them as a set of symptoms is laudable, the guidelines are over-stating the case for spirituality and potentially putting a burden onto already over-loaded and under-funded medical staff.

The guide defines spirituality as (among other things), a life-force, what makes us unique, a sense of connectedness with other people, nature, animals, sport, our life-pilgrimage and quest, what gives our life meaning. Again, the vague, hippyish, touchy-feely catch-all. And, again, sport features on the list.

Although the guide gives an unsurprisingly prominent place to religion as an aspect of spirituality, its aim is to include everyone. However, there is no recognition that some people may not want to use that term to define the part of their lives concerned with relationships, enjoying nature, art and so on, perhaps because it has religious or New Age connotations or perhaps because it is just inappropriate. Human spirituality is, for the NHS, a given. The Scottish version of the NHS guide begins with the quotation: we are not human beings seeking spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings seeking what it means to be human.

The promotion of spirituality either by people who claim to have it or by organisations that think everyone should want it, is not entirely benign.

It is sometimes a way for an individual to make themselves feel a bit ’special’, a self-aggrandizing term that they cannot define or explain but which must not be challenged or even questioned. There is potential for misunderstanding between the different interpretations of the word and, although the ‘right’ to spirituality is assumed, different groups could well see their version as superior. A deeply religious person is unlikely to value Native American spirituality even if they pay lip service to tolerance. It is potentially yet another way of creating the Us and Them divide so well exploited by religions. My spirituality is more spiritual than yours.

Moreover, on the basis of the NHS and BPS definitions, if you are not spiritual at all, you are lacking. Anyone rejecting the need for this vapid labelling could be seen as somehow less than fully human, lacking in ‘wholeness’ - and this is the worrying element (that and the fact that tax-payers’ money is being spent).

One survey contradicts the findings that spirituality is essential for wholeness and a healthy emotional or mental life. Profiles of the Godless questioned nearly 6000 individuals and looks in depth at atheists, agnostics and spiritual people, comparing them with believers. The distinctive element of this research is that it breaks down the category that many surveys use to lump all non-religious people together.<

It found that more women than men described themselves as spiritual (which touches on something I blogged about here). Interestingly, it also found that ’spirituals’ (as the survey describes them) reported lower satisfaction with their lives than those with other belief labels. It reports: Those non-believers most confident in their non-belief tended to be the most emotionally healthy, relative to the ‘fence sitters’ (…) Therefore, having uncertainty regarding one’s religious views appears to be associated with relatively greater emotional instability.

One conclusion of the survey was that being sure about what you think and believe, whether that manifests as being actively religious or atheist, is better for your mental health than being agnostic or spiritual.

While it would be satisfying to have a term to apply to that part of our lives in which we enjoy things other than meeting survival needs or satisfying material desires, spirituality is not a good candidate. A word that means too many things means nothing and, in trying to be inclusive becomes exclusive.

Why choose a term that has religious overtones and then stress that religion is not the only form of spirituality? The word also has the taint of dualism, separating body and spirit. This is an old view of the Self with wholly religious roots. There is also the marketing triad of Mind-Body-Spirit used in bookshops and places that sell spirituality accessories, which further splits the Self.

There is a difference between being a materialist (not believing in unseen powers or a separate spirit or life-force) and being materialistic (placing too much value in, or reliance on, material things). I am a materialist but not materialistic and I reject the use of spirituality, in any of its meanings, to apply to my life. Does that mean there is something a bit wrong with me? I have a hole where my spirituality should be.

There are lies and damned lies, and then there are stories produced by tabloid health editors. Yesterday one of their favourite topics, Patrick Swayze, star of Ghost, Dirty Dancing and various other films I’ve been forced to watch by girlfriends, tragically died of pancreatic cancer at just 57 years old. His death followed a two-year battle with the disease, and two years in which his every appearance fuelled a sort of sick and morbid game among tabloid hacks to predict his demise. Here’s a little run through of the Daily Mail’s various predictions over the last 18 months.

The story broke in the first week of March 2008, and the papers gave less chance of seeing the summer than Frosty the Snowman.

7th March, 2008: Hollywood rallies around Patrick Swayze as he vows to continue work during his cancer battle - “An American magazine claimed the star was facing as little as five weeks to live in a report revealing he was battling the disease.”

14th March, 2008: Patrick Swayze still smoking despite being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer - “…if, as reports suggest, Patrick Swayze has only a few weeks to live…”

Within the first few months a pattern emerged. There were two possible Patrick Swayze stories; i) Patrick Swayze is about to die and ii) Patrick Swayze’s doing great. Now cancer patients will often have good times and bad times, but what’s remarkable is the way that newspapers reached these conclusions on the basis of a photo or an off-hand remark. If Swayze looks a bit glum, he’s facing the end. If he’s got a bit of a tan he’s making a miraculous recovery.

9th April, 2008: Patrick Swayze having ‘excellent response to cancer treatment’ - “A month ago, it was reported that Swayze had been “close to death”. The actor was said to have as little as five weeks to live.”

4th May, 2008: Patrick Swayze looks grey and gaunt as battle against cancer takes its toll - “But reports suggest he is preparing for the end…”

9th June, 2008: Brave cancer sufferer Swayze goes back to work in new TV series - “The Dirty Dancing star, 55, is said to have been responding well to treatment”

So Patrick gets better worse better, and things calm down few a few months until the papers decide in the run up to Christmas to accuse him of dying - the accusation here being that he may have dared to start dying without telling them first.

3rd December, 2008: I’m still fighting: Angry Patrick Swayze hits back at reports that he’s dying from cancer - “Last week, a U.S. supermarket tabloid claimed the Dirty Dancing actor was beginning ‘the countdown to the end’ after being told the cancer had spread to his liver.”

The reports prompted Swayze to take some time out from his life-threatening battle with a fatal disease in order to fight another battle with the gutter press; a battle he had even less chance of winning.

“It’s upsetting that the shoddy and reckless reporting from these publications cast a negative shadow on the positive and good fight I’m fighting. For me, my family, and those close to me, it amounts to downright emotional cruelty.”

Quite. The papers backed off for a while, after he appeased their morbid fascination by doing a television interview.

16th January, 2009: Cancer stricken Patrick Swayze is ‘doing well’ as he is treated in hospital for pneumonia - “In an interview last week he spoke of time running out, with the words: ‘I’d say five years is wishful thinking. Two years seems likely if you’re going to believe the statistics.’”

But it didn’t last long. By the end of January, they were spreading wild rumours that he’d stopped treatment.

28th January, 2009: Cancer-stricken Patrick Swayze ’stops treatment after doctors say there is little they can do’ - “A family friend told the Enquirer: ‘There’s nothing more doctors can do for him. We are down to the wire and the goal now is to keep Patrick comfortable.’”

Once again Swayze was forced to step in, patiently explaining to ‘journalists’ that their story about him stopping treatment was accurate apart from the big about him stopping treatment. Connoisseurs of tabloid double-think will appreciate the weasel-worded addition of “reportedly” to a quote otherwise taken verbatim from the previous story. Classy.

30th January 2009: Patrick Swayze denies reports he has stopped having cancer treatment - “A family friend reportedly told the Enquirer: ‘There’s nothing more doctors can do for him.’”

This worked for about another fortnight, at which point reports about his treatment degenerated into a bizarre fictional reality, in which Patrick Swayze entered a sort of quantum state in which he responded well to the treatment that he had rejected.

14th February, 2009: Gaunt Patrick Swayze defiantly chain-smokes as he battles cancer - “Reports from the US suggest that he has stopped treatment for the cancer…”

14th March, 2009: Brave Patrick Swayze looks frail on shopping trip as he continues cancer battle - The actor is said to be responding well to chemotherapy after suffering a setback in January when he was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia.

The double-think doesn’t just apply to current events, but to history. Talking without a trace of irony about his 2008 series “The Beast” on April 15th, the virtually omnipresent Daily Mail Reporter remarks that:

“The series arrived on a wave of publicity mainly driven by the grim prognosis and exaggerated accounts that he was near death.”

Quite. But no matter, because Patrick was about to be saved!

25th July, 2009: How new advances may help Patrick Swayze beat cancer - “…his recovery is due to recent advances in radiotherapy-surgery and chemotherapy that give patients a better chance of surviving longer, and some even a hope of being cured.”

6th August, 2009: Patrick Swayze proves he’s beating the odds in his cancer battle…

Less than six weeks later, Patrick Swayze died. Rest in peace. Peace from cancer, and peace from insensitive tabloid rumour-mongering.

In July 2008 I wrote an editorial in the New Zealand Medical Journal (NZMJ), at the request of its editor.
The title was  Dr Who? deception by chiropractors.  It was not very flattering and it resulted in a letter from lawyers representing the New Zealand Chiropractic Association.  Luckily the editor of the NZMJ, Frank [...]

It’s good to see the BMJ joining the campaign for free speech (only a month or two behind the blogs). The suing of Simon Singh for defamation by the British Chiropractic Association has stirred up a hornet’s nest that could (one hopes) change the law of the land, and destroy chiropractic altogether. [...]

Here is a short break from the astonishing festival of chiropractic that has followed the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) v Simon Singh defamation case, and the absurd NICE guidance on low back pain.

Singh’s statement already has over 10000 signatories, many very distinguished, Sign it now if you haven’t already. And getting on for 600 [...]

… which aren’t actually there at all

[BPSDB] It’s Homeopathy Awareness Week, and I can think of no better way of stopping people wasting time and money on homeopathy than by making them aware of exactly what homeopathy thinks it is. To this end, we have jdc325, Zeno, APGaylard, AndyD, Zygoma, The Quackometer, David Colquhoun, Orac, and Steven Novella (Homeopathy Awareness Week,
Homeopathy Awareness Week,
Homeopathy Awareness Week,
Homeopathy Awareness Week,
Homeopathy Awareness Week,
Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week) helping to spread awareness of what a great big pile of nonsense homeopathy is. It’s not “herbal,” it’s not “natural,” it doesn’t “work” by “stimulating your immune system” and it’s not a viable alternative to the Western Big Pharma hegemony. This is because homeopathic preparations contain nothing of the ingredient(s) listed on the label (although other stuff may be in there), what with it/them having been diluted out of existence in a strange procedure invented about 200 years ago in Germany (while many modern pharmaceuticals are based on plant extracts, more tightly controlled in terms of dose and purity than herbal medicines themselves); if there’s no active ingredient then obviously it can’t be anything more than placebo, a result repeatedly found in trials of homeopathy, so there’s no reason to try to invent increasingly far-fetched explanations of how homeopathy “works”.

Following Lionel R. Milgrom’s¹ editorial, which had very little to do with what Otto Weingärtner² wrote, it’s the turn of Alex Hankey.³

“As a theoretical physicist, Weingärtner seems an unlikely candidate to have made several useful contributions to understanding homeopathy,^4,5 but “seeing is believing,” and he belongs to the ranks of those like myself, for whom seeing particular medical conditions improve by applying homeopathy convince that genuine phenomena await scientific explanation. Characteristic reactions to prescribed remedies result in the most spectacular cases, differing completely from improvements seen in placebo cases, where pathology improves without a “healing crisis.” In my opinion, conducting trials on cases for which such extreme reactions may be expected would be the best way to demonstrate that potentized remedies do indeed have systematic, observable physiologic effects. If a “healing reaction” is induced by taking a homeopathic remedy, as often occurs on the path to cure, only the remedy could have produced it. What better proof could be given of actual physiologic effects of taking a potentized remedy?”

Hankey is right in his implication that a theoretical physicist ought to know better; however, a scientist is well within his job description to try to find out what science is going on behind an apparent observation. The obvious answers are nearly always the right ones, though, and if medical conditions really seem to improve after the patient has taken some water (usually with ethanol or salt in it) from which all traces of an irrelevant substance have been removed, or some sugar pills onto which a drop of this water has been allowed to fall, or some pills which were once in contact with the pills in the previous subclause, then you really need to ask yourself if the patient wouldn’t have got better anyway. The workings of the human immune system give a far more satisfy explanation. Bear in mind that patients with minor acute conditions are often going to get better anyway, and that patients with fluctuating chronic conditions often seek help when they are feeling particularly bad, and then it’s obvious how something called “regression toward the mean” can make people think that whatever they tried last did the trick. But the “healing crisis” is something particularly insidious which homeopaths have invented in order to explain the other possibility - that the patient is going to keep getting worse since the treatment is doing nothing. Once you’re in the mindset that whatever happens to the patient is because of homeopathy, you are lost, rationalizing desperately as random stuff happens. All those boring times when the remedies do nothing at all are filtered out of your memory (“… even Kent said that sometimes with the best intention and the best homeopathic prescribing, the remedy doesn’t work - so what is going on? Entanglement is a much more subtle thing than just intention. I don’t quite know what it means yet.”).

“But some scientists seem prepared to assert that, if a phenomenon does not yet possess a shadow of a scientific theory, then no scientific theory is possible, and the phenomena concerned must lie beyond the domain of science.”

No, we’re prepared to assert that, when presented with a phenomenon whose purported explanation goes against a couple of centuries’ worth of extremely successful science, that we’re going to need pretty good proof that this phenomenon is actually happening. That proof does not exist,⁶ so there is no reason to make up new science and instead there is perfectly good other science (psychology instead of physics) to explain why people believe things which are not true.^7,8 It is the quacks who keep telling us that our science is inadequate to explain their results, but they can’t resist appropriating sciency-sounding language to make their nonsense more impressive⁹ just like they are always willing to flag up a double-blind randomized, controlled trial of a non-individualized remedy when they think it gives them the result they want^{10,11,12,13,14,15} but then claim that RCTs don’t work and that remedies need to be individualized when,¹⁶ as in the majority of cases,¹⁷ it doesn’t. Knowing how something works comes long after we decide whether it works or not at all.

“Weingärtner’s present contribution is to formulate a means of analyzing a series of experiments that contain conflicting
results.”

His insight is that you should take an average of lots of measurements. It really is as simple as that. The more times you measure something, the closer the average should get to the true value. That’s why big trials are better than small ones.¹⁷

“Many medical disciplines present similar challenges to science.”

Do they? There’s no citation for this. Does he mean that physics can’t be used to gain insight into psychology or does he not realize that biology is also a science? Of course we don’t have all the answers yet as science continues to grow and progress on all fronts.

“The idea that we now possess all the theories we shall ever need to treat either day-to-day or laboratory phenomena is a gross exaggeration of our scientific expertise.”

There would be no reason to be in the laboratory if we had all the theories we shall ever need, and I for one am happy that there is still a job for me to do.

“Many disciplines of science are slowly undergoing revolutions. New forms of fundamental physics are proposed annually.”

Are they? Like the superstring theory review¹⁸ Hankey cites (wrongly) from 1986?

“Scientific studies of out-of-body experiences, hypnotic regression, past lives, and the afterlife, are revolutionizing our understanding of the world in which we live, and bringing hope to millions.”

It’s particularly heinous to tack this sentence about paranormal phenomena onto the end of a paragraph about advances in science, since the science here is in the psychology, not the paranormal.

“These minor scientific revolutions prove that the metaphysics of classical physics and Bohr-Heisenberg quantum physics is simply too limiting. Such “materialist” metaphysics bears no relation to the wider world of human experience, only to the narrow world in which the scientific community’s leaders allocate funds for experiment.”

Now that’s just nonsense. Quantum physics bears no relation to “the wider world of human experience” only in the sense that it’s not feasible to derive psychological principles directly from quantum electrodynamics (which isn’t exactly “Bohr-Heisenberg”),^19,20,21 even if chemistry is built on physics and biology is built on chemistry.²² I don’t know quite what to say about manner in which “the scientific community’s leaders allocate funds for experiment”. I wonder who these “leaders” are and if I can submit a proposal? We’re currently having to ask the CARIPLO foundation or the European Commission.

“So how does this affect CAM?”

I don’t know, Alex, why don’t you tell me?

“The idea that CAM disciplines can be theoretically understood by extending known laws of biophysics is slowly gaining currency.”

No, not according to people who understand biology or physics it isn’t.

“Many CAM disciplines have excellent phenomenologies.”

… but most have rubbish ones.

“This makes it much easier to frame theoretical hypotheses for how they may work.”

… if they work (which they don’t).

“Ayurveda is a case in point. Clinical observations over several millennia have developed a coherent phenomenology that can be tested and verified by theoretical models and predictive experiment.”

Well, my online access to the journals doesn’t go back that far.

“Ayurveda basic concepts are proving highly susceptible to theoretical study.”

No they aren’t: if there’s no citation it isn’t true.

“When this has been achieved for homeopathy,”

… it won’t be, because homeopathy doesn’t work.

“… and associated aspects of energy medicine and vibrational medicine,”

“Associated” according to you, but every quack seems to have their own strange mental map of how different made up things relate to each other.

“… it will become possible to design better experiments. Until that time, Weingärtner’s new approach should rule the roost.”

You already know what counts as a better experiment,¹⁷ and why there’s nothing to design.⁶ You just choose to ignore the evidence rather than admit you might be wrong. You are not doing science.

1.  L. R. Milgrom, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 15, 205 (2009).
2.  O. Weingärtner, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 15, 287 (2009).
3.  A. Hankey, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 15, 203 (2009).
4.  O. Weingärtner, Homeopathy 92, 145 (2003).
5.  H. Walach, W. B. Jonas, J. Ives, R. Van Wijk, and O. Weingärtner, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 11, 813 (2005).
6.  J. Maddox, J. Randi, and W. W. Stewart, Nature 334, 287 (1988).
7.  J. Kruger, and D. Dunning, J. Personality and Social Psychology 77, 1121 (1999).
8.  P. Bloom, and D. S. Weisberg, Science 316, 996 (2007).
9.  A. Sokal, and J. Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (Economist Books, 2003).
10.  Orac, Homeopathy in the - cringe - ICU (2007).
11.  P. B. Hill, J. Hoare, P. Lau-Gillard, J. Rybnicek, and R. T. Mathie, Vet. Record 164, 364 (2009).
12.  S. J. Baker, and G. J. Baker, Vet. Record 164, 634 (2009).
13.  G. W. Tribe, Vet. Record 164, 634 (2009).
14.  M. G. Kerr, C. A. Hebbern, P. Wilson, and J. J. Magrath, Vet. Record 164, 635 (2009).
15.  P. B. Hill, J. Hoare, and R. T. Mathie, Vet. Record 164, 635 (2009).
16.  L. R. Milgrom, Evid.-Based Compl. Alt. 4, 7 (2007).
17.  A. Shang, K. Huwiler-Müntener, L. Nartey, P. Jüni, S. Dörig, et al., The Lancet 366, 726 (2005).
18.  J. Ellis, Nature 323, 595 (1986).
19.  R. P. Feynman, Phys. Rev. 76, 749 (1949).
20.  R. P. Feynman, Phys. Rev. 76, 769 (1949).
21.  R. P. Feynman, Phys. Rev. 80, 440 (1950).
22.  H. M. Wiseman, and J. Eisert, arXiv.org e-Print archive physics, arXiv:0705.1232v2 (2007).

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by
H^EV^EA.

The Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Integrated Health (FiH) is a propaganda organisation that aims to persuade people, and politicians, that the Prince’s somewhat bizarre views about alternative medicine should form the basis of government health policy.
His attempts are often successful, but they are regarded by many people as being clearly unconstitutional.

The FiH’s [...]

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday August 9 2008
Silly season is in full swing. At the Telegraph, their correspondent has gone for a bioenergetic health audit. “The resident homoeopath, Katie Jermine, quizzed me about my diet, stress levels and lifestyle. She then strapped on a wristband and plugged me into an electronic device called the Quantum QXCI, [...]

There’s an excerpt Rowena Ronson’s book, Looking Back Moving Forward [1] featuring an interview with Lionel Milgrom, at Galahomeopathy:

“I think that essentially what goes on between the patient and practitioner with a remedy is a form of entanglement. You can consider that entanglement mathematically because mathematics is a language; a very sophisticated language, but it is a way of talking about something. What I have found is that the discourse of quantum theory, when you really get down to the nuts and bolts, is very similar to the discourse in homeopathy and that has been a real eye-opener for me in the last couple of years. If there is that similarity of discourses then we would be able to use the same sort of concepts as the quantum physicists. A lot of them get rather cheesed off by this because they think that we are robbing their territory.”

No, Lionel, that’s not it. We just want to tell you that you’re wrong about almost everything. We laugh when we read your articles which purport to use quantum mechanics to describe homeopathy but we cringe when we discover how quantum terminology is abused throughout CAM. When they then claim that we’re the “scientific conservatives” who are stuck in an old non-quantum mechanical paradigm, and we get personally attacked because we disagree with them then we start to get cheesed off. I don’t suppose any of the “highly competent quantum physicists (including a Nobel Laureate)” passed [sic.] whom he “continually run[s] [his] ideas” [2] would have anything to add, by the way?

“The remedy is part of the entanglement. So what does it mean to prescribe a remedy? Is it the pills or is it the process? Or is it some combination of both? And what, after all, is the remedy? Is it the pills, or the process, or some combination of both? And are we mistaken if we think the process and the pills are indeed separate? Maybe it is the whole shebang - process, prescription, the giving and the taking of the remedy… try plugging that little lot into a double-blind randomised controlled trial!”

Or, try explaining how Boiron (who make about about € 20 million a year in profits having spent € 47 million on marketing (and only € 2.5 million on research)) can sell over-the-counter homeopathic remedies. Or try explaining why Dana Ullman kept trying to push that terrible [3] paper by Frass et al. [4] onto the potassium dichromate wiki page. It’s obvious that homeopaths like double-blind randomized controlled trials when they are done badly enough [5] that the results happen to go the way the homeopaths want [6-10] (and try to cherry-pick positive results [11] out of trials which don’t [12]).

“… before anything, there are just two people sitting in front of each other but when it clicks then its like being on a trail. You can sense the remedy and I suppose I start to ask questions around my understanding of the remedy picture.”

A short excerpt of the transcript of the Horizon homeopathy episode was posted at JREF to give an example of how this works:

NARRATOR: Scientists believe the mere act of taking a homeopathic remedy can make people feel better and homeopathy has other ways of reducing stress.

LIONEL MILGROM: And is there any particular time of day that you will, you’ll, you’ll have that feeling?

PATIENT: No.

NARRATOR: A crucial part of homeopathic care is the consultation.

LIONEL MILGROM: The stress that you have at work, is that, are those around issues that make you feel quite emotional?

PATIENT: No.

LIONEL MILGROM: The main thing about a homeopathic interview is that we do spend a lot of time talking and listening to the patient. We would ask questions of how they eat, how they sleep, how much worry and tension there is in their lives, hopefully give them some advice about how to actually ease problems of stress.

PATIENT: I just feel I want to have something more natural.

LIONEL MILGROM: Yeah…

Feel the entanglement!

“… even Kent said that sometimes with the best intention and the best homeopathic prescribing, the remedy doesn’t work - so what is going on? Entanglement is a much more subtle thing than just intention. I don’t quite know what it means yet.”

I know what it means.

There’s no excuse for Milgrom not understanding entanglement (in its actual quantum mechanical sense, when two or more systems share some conserved quantity between them) or quantum mechanics generally if he’s seeking to explain these concepts to homeopaths, let alone apply them to homeopathy itself. (And there’s no real excuse for hiding in post-modernism, not least because he doesn’t seem to understand that either [13,14].)

I’m still waiting for Milgrom to learn enough about quantum mechanics that he could perhaps cast his ideas in terms of, for example, the remedy as a ladder operator on the patient’s wavefunction, or dis-ease [sic.] as a first-order perturbation on the Vital Force’s Hamiltonian, because I realized some time ago that none of his models metaphors actually had any time-dependence in. In other words, there was never any mechanism in there which meant that something could change.

In Milgrom’s model, homeopathy can’t actually do anything.

At least he’s right about that bit.

1.  http://youtube.com/watch?v=CeFFP5fyBCc.
2.  L. R. Milgrom, Evid.-Based Compl. Alt. 4, 7 (2007).
3.  Orac, Homeopathy in the - cringe - ICU (2007).
4.  M. Frass, C. Dielacher, M. Linkesch, C. Endler, I. Muchitsch, E. Schuster, et al., Chest 127, 936 (2005).
5.  A. Shang, K. Huwiler-Müntener, L. Nartey, P. Jüni, S. Dörig, et al., The Lancet 366, 726 (2005).
6.  P. Belon, A. Banerjee, S. R. Karmakar, S. J. Biswas, S. C. Choudhury, et al., Sci. Total Environ. 384, 141 (2007).
7.  M. A. Taylor, D. Reilly, R. H. Llewellyn-Jones, C. McSharry, and T. C. Aitchison, Brit. Med. J. 321, 471 (2000).
8.  M. Frass, M. Linkesch, S. Banyai, G. Resch, C. Dielacher, T. Löbl, et al., Homeopathy 94, 75 (2005).
9.  A. Robertson, R. Suryanarayanan, and A. Banerjee, Homeopathy 96, 17 (2007).
10.  E. Weatherley-Jones, J. P. Nicholl, K. J. Thomas, G. J. Parry, M. W. et al., J. Psycosom. Res. 56, 189 (2004).
11.  P. Fisher, Evid.-Based Compl. Alt. 3, 145 (2006).
12.  A. White, P. Slade, C. Hunt, A. Hart, and E. Ernst, Thorax 58, 317 (2003).
13.  A. P. Gaylard, Homeopathy 97, 47 (2008).
14.  L. R. Milgrom, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 14, 589 (2008).

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by
H^EV^EA.

.. I Leick it (aha, aha)

Philippe Leick [1,2] wrote a letter [3] (as did many others) to Homeopathy to comment on papers by Lionel Milgrom [4] and Otto Weingärtner [5]. Milgrom responded [6], as did Harald Walach [7] (a coauthor of the Weak Quantum Theory paper [8], previously criticised by Leick [1]) and Leick dealt with this in a JREF thread.

These are the key points from Milgrom (another point is addressed elsewhere on JREF) which Leick deals with, to which I’ll add my own comments:

1. [Leick and his fellow skeptics] ignore research that demonstrates (a) homeopathy’s clinical efficacy over placebo, and (b) differences between solutions potentised beyond Avogadro’s limit and pure water.

Regarding point (a), there is of course a certain irony. Milgrom is well aware that homeopathic remedies work no better than placebo in well designed trials [9] (even if he still clings to some misconceptions about that particular analysis) otherwise he wouldn’t have spent all this time trying to “explain” this effect [10] with weak quantum-mechanical Patient-Practioner-Remedy entanglement [11-21].

It is interesting to note that the idea of Patient-Practitioner-Remedy entanglement really has nothing at all to do with the specifics of homeopathy, namely the alternating dilution of the active ingredient and the banging of the phial on a book or something, and apparently everything to do with the practitioner having the time to listen to the life story of the patient:

“A patient enters the practitioner’s ‘space’ and for a time, becomes during the consultation ‘isolated’ from the surrounding environment. This produces a kind of ‘quantum superposition’ or ‘coherence’ between patient, practitioner, and therapy (in the case of homeopathy, this would be the remedy). When this state interacts with the outside world after the consultation, it gradually undergoes ‘decoherence’ (i.e., collapse of the quantum superposition), possibly to a state of cure.”

It ought to be obvious just from this that the nature of the “therapy” itself is irrelevant.

Regarding point (b), the work by led by Rustum Roy [22] was anything but ignored: it was exposed for the worthless mess it was [23]. Rao and Roy, who claimed to measure changes in water ethanol which was supposed to have had something homeopathically present in it, were last seen trying to measure changes in water that some people had been thinking about.

2. [Leick and his fellow skeptics] exhibit a fundamentalist adherence to (a) the DBRCT as the only way to demonstrate the efficacy of any therapeutic modality; and (b) one, positivist, interpretation of quantum theory.

There’s nothing magic about the double-blind randomized controlled trial, as I’ve previously said: it’s just the best way to work out if there’s something really going on by systematically cancelling out confounding factors. If this Patient-Practioner-Remedy entanglement gave rise to real effects then there would also be a way to test it (we could design a trial with homeopathy versus pharmaceuticals, for example). Regarding quantum theory, there is no room for interpretation when it comes to quantum theory itself and it’s obvious that even within the framework of weak quantum theory [8] Milgrom makes errors, such as not knowing the difference between an operator and a wavefunction, not realizing that states exist whether or not anything occupies those states, and not realizing that “0” is an impossible state. Milgrom has not responded to these criticisms, but instead responds to Philippe saying that I have compiled a list of errors and inaccuracies on my blog, “some of which may be trivial, some of which would shame a second year physics student (such as the claim that quantum mechanics is non-deterministic or giving the units of Planck’s constant as [J/s] in Ref. [20])” with “there is nothing wrong with saying quantum mechanics is non-deterministic” based on Popescu [24,25]. Philippe replies,

“Now, this is a at best a gross simplification. The finer point being missed here is that, while quantum mechanics may not be completely deterministic, this does not automatically mean that Milgrom’s statement is true. Whether the measurement process is deterministic or not depends on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the Copenhagen interpretation, it isn’t. In the Many Worlds interpretation, it is. In any case, the evolution of the wave function according to Schrödinger’s equation is fully deterministic.”

There’s room for interpretation when it comes to asking what quantum theory actually means about the fundamental nature of the Universe; however, whenever some element of someone’s interpretation [26] wanders into the realm of things which can be tested, such tests are designed [27] and eventually done [28,29] (by physicists of course, not homeopaths). John Gribbin [30], who prefers the sum over histories and the transactional interpretation, writes that “the one thing you must not do is believe that any quantum interpretation is The Truth. They are all simply crutches for our limited human imaginations, ways for us to come to grips with the weirdness of the quantum world, which never goes away and is outside the scope of everyday experience.” Milgrom’s talk of “collapsing wavefunctions” seems to place him within the slightly outdated [30] Copenhagen interpretation; so much for the physicists being the conservative ones.

The experimental work of Gröblacher et al. leads to the conclusion that a broad class of non-local (i.e. allowing faster-than-light communication) hidden-variable theories must be excluded as possible interpretations of quantum mechanics and the authors go on to speculate on what this might mean: [29]

“We believe that the experimental exclusion of this particular class indicates that any non-local extension of quantum theory has to be highly counterintuitive. For example, the concept of ensembles of particles carrying definite polarization could fail. Furthermore, one could consider the breakdown of other assumptions that are implicit in our reasoning leading to the inequality. These include Aristotelian logic, counterfactual definiteness, absence of actions into the past or a world that is not completely deterministic [31]. We believe that our results lend strong support to the view that any future extension of quantum theory that is in agreement with experiments must abandon certain features of realistic descriptions.”

The implications of Gröblacher et al. may have us finding that reality is even more strange and counter-intuitive [32] than we thought, but it does seems that whatever there is, quantum mechanics describes it. (There’s a good discussion of quantum mechanical determinism in Gross and Levitt’s book [33], but this is based on the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics [34,35] which is probably not the right one.)

3. [Leick and his fellow skeptics] attempt to dismiss opposing arguments by disparaging the scientific views, competence and credibility of their proponents.

Look, if you’re unable to do basic quantum mechanics, and then build a whole theory on top of this inability, there isn’t really a nice way to say “this theory is meaningless because you fundamentally don’t know what you’re doing.” Just because Milgrom doesn’t understand quantum mechanics, that doesn’t make him as clever as Feynman [36]. There’s no room for differing interpretations or philosophies when it comes to Milgrom’s basic errors. If he wants to actually use (rather than just borrow a few technical-sounding terms from) quantum mechanics to explain something then he needs to play by its rules. Even weak quantum theory has rules. (In any case, the time when Milgrom pulled Feynman’s authority over Simon Gates was not at all an attempt to disparage Gates’s competence or credibility.)

Regarding epistemology versus ontology, Milgrom still doesn’t get it: the double slit experiment stops working as soon as it becomes possible to know which slit the particle went through whether or not anyone actually knows it [37]. In a DBRCT, the person in charge always has the key regarding who got verum and who got placebo. From the point of view of the patient and practitioner the key might be like a set of “hidden variables” and entanglement should not occur anyway [27,29]. (I’m indebted to this comment for pointing this out.) You can’t get all post-modern about knowledge when experiments [28,29,37] make it this clear.

But Milgrom has indeed “adopted implicitly a post-modern stance. This acknowledges there is no such thing as an objective reality that has only to be unveiled, and exists whether we observe it or not, and irrespective of the method in which it is approached.” There’s an obvious reply to this, but the less obvious one is that objective reality still exists and it is a strange counter-intuitive quantum objective reality. There’s nothing subjective about the result of an entanglement experiment; nothing subjective about the way in which an operator acts on a wavefunction; nothing subjective about whether homeopathy works or doesn’t.

And finally, Milgrom cites this comment thread as an example of “the cynicism and disparagement that is the lingua franca of some sceptical blog-sites.” I can only assume that this is due to Adrian Gaylard’s quoting of an Italian journalist reviewing a book in which Del Giudice et al. are described (without being named) as “fornicating priests” for their part in perpetuating the cold fusion lie. Where have I insulted any homeopaths? It’s not necessary. The facts speak for themselves. Objectively.

1.  P. Leick, Skeptiker 3/2006, 92 (2006).
2.  P. Leick, Skeptiker 8/2008, 86 (2008).
3.  P. Leick, Homeopathy 97, 50 (2008).
4.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 96, 209 (2007).
5.  O. Weingärtner, Homeopathy 96, 220 (2007).
6.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 97, 96 (2008).
7.  H. Walach, Homeopathy 97, 100 (2008).
8.  H. Atmanspacher, H. Römer, and H. Walach, Found. Phys. 32, 379 (2002).
9.  A. Shang, K. Huwiler-Müntener, L. Nartey, P. Jüni, S. Dörig, et al., The Lancet 366, 726 (2005).
10.  D. E. Moerman, and A. Harrington, Semin. Pain Med. 3, 2 (2005).
11.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 91, 239 (2002).
12.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 92, 35 (2003).
13.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 92, 152 (2003).
14.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 93, 34 (2004).
15.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 93, 94 (2004).
16.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 93, 154 (2004).
17.  L. R. Milgrom, Forsch. Komplementmed. 11, 212 (2004).
18.  L. R. Milgrom, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 11, 831 (2005).
19.  L. R. Milgrom, Forsch. Komplementmed. 12, 206 (2005).
20.  L. R. Milgrom, Evid.-Based Compl. Alt. 4, 7 (2007).
21.  L. R. Milgrom, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 14, 329 (2008).
22.  M. L. Rao, R. Roy, I. R. Bell, and R. Hoover, Homeopathy 96, 175 (2007).
23.  M. Kerr, J. Magrath, P. Wilson, and C. Hebbern, Homeopathy 97, 44 (2008).
24.  S. Popescu, Nature Physics 2, 507 (2006).
25.  Compare googling on “quantum+mechanics+non-determinism”.
26.  A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, Rev. Mod. Phys. 47, 777 (1935).
27.  J. S. Bell, Rev. Mod. Phys. 38, 447 (1966).
28.  A. Aspect, P. Grangier, and G. Roger, Phys. Rev. Lett. 49, 91 (1982).
29.  S. Gröblacher, T. Paterek, R. Kaltenbaek, C. Brukner, M.  et al., Nature 446, 871 (2007).
30.  J. Gribbin, Q is for Quantum (Weidenfeld and Nicholson history, 2002).
31.  J. S. Bell, Dialectica 39, 103 (1985).
32.  P. Bloom, and D. S. Weisberg, Science 316, 996 (2007).
33.  P. R. Gross, and N. Levitt, Higher Superstition (John Hopkins, 1997).
34.  D. Dürr, S. Goldstein, and N. Zanghí, J. Stat. Phys. 67, 843 (1992).
35.  D. Dürr, S. Goldstein, and N. Zanghí, Phys. Lett. A 172, 6 (1992).
36.  Your Feynman chaser is at 5:42–6:01 of aParallel Worlds, Parallel Lives 2/6 (other parts of which also feature Max Tegmark [38]).
37.  M. O. Scully, B.-G. Englert, and H. Walther, Nature 351, 111 (1991).
38.  M. Tegmark, Phys. Rev. E 61, 4194 (2000).

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by
H^EV^EA.

Comment on “Macroscopic Quantum Coherence in Patient-Practitioner-Remedy Entanglement: The Quantized Fluctuation Field Perspective” [eCAM Advance Access published online on May 14, 2008].

Submitted 8^th July 2008

Alex Hankey (1) has written to support and defend Lionel Milgrom (2,3), but does so in his own terms of “quantum fluctuation fields” in biological systems (4) rather than Milgrom’s model (often referred to as a metaphor (5)) of patient-practitioner-remedy entanglement (6) via “weak” quantum theory (7). Quantum fluctuation fields are supposed to demonstrate quantum coherence on a macroscopic scale, but the reasoning behind this is flawed; in any case, a link between these two models is not to be taken for granted (8,9).

Neumann et al. (10) have recently reported that they have achieved entanglement between two ¹³C nuclei in a diamond lattice (controlled via their coupling to an electron in a nitrogen-vacancy defect) and that the quantum correlated state persists for 3–5 milliseconds at room temperature, similar to the spin-spin relaxation time of the electron spins (6 ms). A quantum correlated state involving three spins (the two ¹³C nuclei plus an electron) persisted for less than 2 μs, because interaction with other spin impurities shortens the relaxation times of the electron’s spin (11). This represents the reality of quantum correlations in solid matter at room temperature - persistence of an entangled state of two of three particles for milli- or microsecond timescales (respectively) represents a breakthrough. It is a long way from the kind of “macroscopic quantum coherence” which Hankey writes about (1). Hankey insists that coherence can be maintained over macroscopic distances in quantum systems at high temperature:

“All quantum field theories in solid state physics provide examples where this kind of assumption is made at a primal level, since the low energy forms of their various quanta are assumed to extend over the whole lattice being considered. Theoretically that is infinite in thermodynamic systems, and, practically, over a whole crystal, or whatever kind of domain is appropriate to the exciton under consideration, be it phonon, electron, magnon or other.”

Solid state physicists use Bloch waves to describe electrons in a crystal - they are made up of normal plane waves multiplied by a function with the periodicity of the crystal. Plane waves are eigenstates of momentum and are of course infinite in extent but no actual particles really have such well-defined momentum. In a thin semiconducting layer at low temperature (of the order of 1 K) it may be possible to see weak localization (12,13), which causes a slight increase in resistance when the charge-carrying particles (electrons or holes) become trapped in quantum-coherent loops. This coherence persists on a timescale called the dephasing time, which at 1 K (-272°C) in a good-quality sample may be of the order of a few picoseconds (14) and coherence may be maintained over length scales of around a micrometre. The dephasing time decreases as temperature increases. At 1 K the momentum relaxation time (the time it takes the particle to change direction significantly) is also just a few picoseconds, and due to the uncertainty principle this sets a limit on how well-defined the momentum can be. Far from extending “over the whole lattice being considered” the wavepacket of the charge-carrying particle in this example extends for about 1 μm at 1 K and only gets smaller as the temperature increases. Recently, Billy et al. (15) have observed a localization length of almost 0.6 mm in a one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium-87.

Incidentally, an exciton is a bound electron-hole pair, not a general term for phonons, electrons, magnons or whatever (although the electron-like quasiparticles which pass for electrons in a crystal may be considered as excitations of the Fermi sea, for example).

The Mössbauer effect (16,17) is the emission of a gamma ray by an atom in a solid, in which the crystal as a whole recoils a tiny amount (instead of the emitting atom recoiling alone by a relatively large amount, thus reducing the energy of the emitted gamma ray). It relies only on the fact that there is a significant probability (for gamma rays of relatively low energy) that the recoil, which involves just the atom which emitted the gamma ray, will not excite even the lowest-energy vibrational modes (phonons) of the solid (18). It happens because the tiny momentum kick from the emission of the gamma ray involves just one atom, and the low-energy phonons which can take that sort of momentum have very long wavelength so involve lots of atoms. I struggle to understand how this means that the system undergoes “a quantum interaction as a coherent whole”. It is actually the failure to interact which means the momentum kick is not lost to phonons and is therefore taken up by the entire crystal.

Regarding David Chalmers (19) it seems that Chalmers’ dismissal of Penrose’s “nonalgorithmic processing” actually invalidates Hankey’s “putting together” (20) of Penrose and Chalmers (21). Chalmers has already considered Penrose’s ideas on conciousness and quantum gravity (22), and even if they were right (which is somewhat controversial, to say the least (23,24,25)) they are not what Chalmers was looking for in his “innocent version of dualism”. He is not particularly interested in general quantum mechanics either, which seems to further negate what Hankey is trying to suggest (and probably what Milgrom is trying to suggest, or at least what Hankey is trying to suggest about what Milgrom is trying to suggest). Chalmers also dismisses vitalism and therefore the “life force” which would be “equated with quantized instability fluctuations” (4). In any case, the non-trivial quantum effects (23) which Hagan et al. discuss (22) would take place in microtubules of diameter 25 nm and coherence might last for 0.01–0.1 milliseconds, although Tegmark calculated times of less than 0.1 ps (24). We are still a long way from macroscopic time- and length-scales.

Regarding phase transitions and the critical point (26), Hankey writes

“As the temperature T approaches the critical temperature T_c from above, the increase in specific heat means that extra heat energy is lost; implying that systems of critical fluctuations have anomalously low energy/heat content. This translates into low entropy content, since, by dq = TdS, heat change dq is directly related to entropy change dS.”

The third law of thermodynamics states that minimum entropy S of a system is to be found at the absolute zero of temperature. The entropy only increases as the internal energy q and therefore the temperature T is increased, by dq = CdT (where C is the heat capacity and is almost always positive). The high value of the specific heat at the critical temperature T_c
means that to increase the T through T_c requires an anomalously large input of heat energy. This translates via dq = TdS to a large increase in entropy. Hankey seems to imply that a low-entropy state exists at T_c, but since entropy is a state function this cannot be true, and systems of critical fluctuations do not have anomalously low energy/heat content. It is just that a system at a temperature just below T_c has quite a low energy/heat and entropy content compared to a system just above T_c.

This would already seem to render most of Hankey’s further reasoning untenable. The correlation length does become very large at the critical point, but this is not related to low entropy and it certainly has nothing to do with macroscopic quantum coherence. This is because the correlation length in a statistical mechanical sense is not directly related to the phase correlation length in a quantum mechanical sense. Spins, for example (26), correlate because they line up in each other’s magnetic fields, not because there is some quantum phase interaction. (If the long-range correlation were quantum mechanical in nature then we would only be able to understand it by creating a wavefunction which contained all the particles’ spin states combined in a non-trivial way; this is not usually necessary, unless T→ 0 (27).)

In conclusion, the link between coherence of some property near the critical point and coherence of the quantum phase is spurious and nothing to do with low entropy; Hankey’s “quantized fluctuation fields” (4) do not seem to have anything to do with Milgrom’s hypothesis of patient-practitioner-remedy entanglement (2,6) based on “weak” quantum theory (7) to explain what is only the placebo effect (28), apart from the vague appeal to quantum theory. Milgrom’s work is not physics and neither for that matter is Hankey’s.

References

1.  Hankey A. Macroscopic Quantum Coherence in Patient-Practitioner-Remedy Entanglement: The Quantized Fluctuation Field Perspective. eCAM Advance Access published online on May 14, 2008.
2.  Milgrom LR. Journeys in the country of the blind: Entanglement theory and the effects of blinding on trials of homeopathy and homeopathic provings. eCAM 2007; 4:7-16.
3.  See
   http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2008/07/new-fundamentalism-why-lionel-milgrom.html for an examination of some of the criticisms made by
   Milgrom on those who maintain a skeptical attitudes towards his work;
   http://apgaylard.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/shangs-secret-the-hydra-of-homoeomythology/ notes a misconception from Milgrom, which seems to
   be common amongst homeopaths, regarding Shang et al. (29); see
   also
   http://shpalman.livejournal.com/tag/lionel+milgrom.
4.  Hankey A. CAM Modalities Can Stimulate Advances in Theoretical Biology. eCAM 2005; 2:5-12.
5.  Milgrom LR. Conspicuous by its absence: the Memory of Water, macro-entanglement, and the possibility of homeopathy. Homeopathy 2007; 96:209-219.
6.  Milgrom LR. Towards a New Model of the Homeopathic Process Based on Quantum Field Theory. Forsch Komplementmed 2006; 13:174-183.
7.  Atmanspacher H, Römer H, Walach H. Weak Quantum Theory: Complementarity and Entanglement in Physics and Beyond. Found Phys 2002; 32:379-406.
8.  Hankey A. Weak Quantum Theory: Satisfied By Quantized Critical Point Fluctuations. J Alt Comp Med 2006; 12:105-106.
9.  Eq. (1) of Ref. (8) appears to be in error, since
   it seems to represent the commutation relation of a wavefunction &#X3C8; with
   its Hermitian adjoint
   &#X3C8;^† (or possibly the
   complex conjugate
   &#X3C8;^* is intended as in Eq. (4)) rather than the
   commutator of two complementary observables as in Eq. (1) of
   Ref. (7). We also note that Eq. (5) of
   Ref. (8) does in any case contain Planck’s constant; see
   also
   http://shpalman.livejournal.com/10685.html.
10.  Neumann P, Mizuochi N, Rempp F, Hemmer P, Watanabe H, Yamasaki S, Jacques V, Gaebel T, Jelezko F, Wrachtrup J. Multipartite Entanglement Among Single Spins in Diamond. Science 2008; 320:1326-1329.
11.  Gaebel T, Domhan M, Popa I, Wittman C, Neumann P, Jelezko F, Rabeau JR, Stavrias N, Greentree AD, Prawer S, Meijer J, Twamley J, Hemmer PR, Wrachtrup J. Room-temperature coherent coupling of single spins in diamond. Nature Physics 2006; 2:408-413.
12.  Lee PA, Ramakrishnan TV. Disordered electronic systems. Rev Mod Phys 1985; 57:287-337.
13.  Chakravarty S, Schmid A. Weak Localization: The Quasi-Classical Theory of Electrons in a Random Potential. Phys Rep 1986; 140:193-236.
14.  Berkutov IB, Komnik YF, Andrievskii VV, Mironov OA, Myronov M, Leadley DR. Weak localization and charge-carrier interaction effects in a two-dimensional hole gas in a germanium quantum well in a SiGe/Ge/SiGe heterostructure. Low Temp Phys 2006; 32:683-688.
15.  Billy J, Josse V, Zuo Z, Bernard A, Hambrecht B, Lugan P, Clément D, Sanchez-Palencia L, Bouyer P, Aspect A. Direct observation of Anderson localization of matter waves in a controlled disorder. Nature 2008; 453:891-894.
16.  Mössbauer RL. Kernresonanzabsorption von Gammastrahlung in Ir¹⁹¹. Naturwissenschaften 1958; 45:538-539.
17.  Mössbauer RL. Kernresonanzfluoreszenz von Gammastrahlung in Ir¹⁹¹. Z Physik 1958; 151:124-143.
18.  Eyges L. Physics of the Mössbauer Effect. Am J Phys 1965; 33:790-802.
19.  Chalmers DJ. Facing up to the problem of conciousness. J Conciousness Studies 1995; 2:200-219.
20.  Hankey A. Self-Consistent Theories of Health and Healing. J Alt Comp Med 2008; 14:221-223.
21.  See
    http://shpalman.livejournal.com/9807.html and
    http://shpalman.livejournal.com/10038.html.
22.  Hagan S, Hameroff SR, Tuszynski JA. Quantum computation in brain microtubules: Decoherence and biological feasibility. Phys Rev E 2002; 65:061901.
23.  Wiseman HM, Eisert J. Nontrivial quantum effects in biology: A skeptical physicists’ view. arXiv [physics.gen-ph] 2007; arXiv:0705.1232v2.
24.  Tegmark M. Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes. Phys Rev E 2000; 61:4194-4206.
25.  Rosa LP, Faber J. Quantum models of the mind: Are they compatible with environment decoherence? Phys Rev E 2004; 70:031902.
26.  Onsager L. Crystal Statistics. I. A Two-Dimensional Model with an Order-Disorder Transition. Phys Rev 1955; 65:117-149.
27.  Latorre JI, Orús R, Vidal J. Entanglement entropy in the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model. Phys Rev A 2005; 71:064101.
28.  Moerman DE, Harrington A. Making space for the placebo effect in pain medicine. Semin Pain Med 2005; 3:2-6.
29.  Shang A, Huwiler-Müntener K, Nartey L, Jüni P, Dörig S, Sterne JAC, Pewsner D, Egger M. Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects? Comparative study of placebo-controlled trials of homoeopathy and allopathy. The Lancet 2005; 366:726-732.

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by
H^EV^EA.

… do not in fact have anything to do with each other

While writing my eLetter regarding Alex Hankey’s (1) support and defence of Lionel Milgrom (2), I took a look at a short letter written by Hankey entitled “Weak Quantum Theory: Satisfied by Quantized Critical Point Fluctuations” (3). Only the first page is freely available, but I’m assuming his reference to Walach is Ref. (4) and the reference to weak quantum theory is Atmanspacher et al. (5).

Atmanspacher et al. (5) give the following as their Eq. (1),

in which ℏ = h/2π (and h is Planck’s constant). This is the commutator for two complementary observables P and Q. An example of two such observables would be the position in the x-direction, x, and the momentum in the same direction, p_x:

The momentum operator p_x actually has the form

and is intended to operate on a wavefunction ψ like this:

in which ∂ψ/∂x just means “the rate of change of the wavefunction in the x direction”.

The position operator x is in fact just x, so we can expand Eq. 2 like this:

The second term now contains “the rate of change of ‘x times the wavefunction’ in the x direction” and the general rule for dealing with this is

where f and g are any general functions of x, so

in which the first two terms cancel out and ∂x/∂x = 1 so we are left with

so that

However, Hankey actually writes that

“In weak quantum theory, observables or weak quantum fields are postulated not to obey the usual quantum commutation relations, characteristic of ordinary quantum fields:

[ψ,ψ†]=ψ×ψ† − ψ†×ψ = ih

…”

Firstly, we note that this equation appears to be referring to wavefunctions rather than observables, and that the distinction seems to be lost on Hankey. (Operators are functions which operate on wavefunctions to produce other wavefunctions, they are not in themselves wavefunctions.) Secondly, he has h on the right hand side instead of ℏ so he is out by a factor of 2π. Thirdly, he is taking the commutator of a wavefunction ψ and its Hermitian adjoint ψ^† (or possibly the complex conjugate ψ^* is intended as in Eq. (4)) rather than the commutator of two complementary observables.

Now ψ^* ψ = |ψ|² and for a normalized wavefunction,

For concreteness let us consider the particle in a 1-dimensional box (length L) which has wavefunctions of the form

where n is a positive integer. In this case, ψ_n^* = ψ_n so it is easy to see that [ψ_n , ψ_n^*]=0 and Hankey’s Eq. (1) is invalidated. For completeness, using

(i.e. changing the sign of the imaginary part of p_x which is all of it) we find

since i and ℏ are constants (i.e. they do not change with x). An operator A is actually “self-adjoint” if A^† = A. Operators corresponding to observable quantities always have this property, and would always give [A,A^†]=0. Ladder operators, which raise or lower the eigenvalues of other operators, are not self-adjoint. In fact, if X is a lowering operator for N then X^† is a raising operator for N (and vice-versa). But in this case it should be generally the case that X and X^† commute. Assuming [N,X]=cX (c is real and positive) and N|n〉=n|n〉,

so if N operates on the state |n〉 to give the eigenvalue n, then X acts on |n〉 to give a state X|n〉 on which N operates to give n+c, where c is the commutator of N and X. X^† acts to lower the eigenvalue by c, so [N,X^†]=−cX^†:

We find that the eigenvalue of the N operator on a state |n〉 which has been raised and then lowered,

is n, as it was originally. We can also lower and then raise the state (as long as we are not starting in the lowest possible state),

and again we obtain n, meaning that it does not matter what order we apply the raising and lowering operators, which means that they commute: [X,X^†]=XX^†−X^†X=0. So, we have disproved Hankey’s Eq. (1) for particular cases of self-adjoint and non-self-adjoint operators. The commutator, Eq. (1), only applies to pairs of complementary operators such as position and momentum. It does not apply to an operator and its adjoint, or to a wavefunction and its complex conjugate, at least in the cases I’ve just examined.

Hankey’s Eq. (3) looks a bit like the standard deviation (ΔX = √〈X²〉−〈X〉² for some operator X, where 〈X〉=〈ψ|Xψ〉) and as he correctly points out all the quantities in his Eq. (3) are numbers and so “commute with everything”. They are all actually real numbers, equal to their complex conjugates, so it therefore makes no sense whatsoever for him to try to construct the commutator in Eq. (4) or to substitute in from Eq. (3). In fact he seems to have lost the distinction between wavefunctions and operators again.

This was all an attempt to find an object which obeys a “more general commutation relation” which does not involve Planck’s constant (but presumably a much larger number) but Hankey’s Eq. (5) contains h anyway (6), so it’s not as if he’s completely escaped from the constraints applied by Planck’s constant, despite have escaped from the constraints of reality.

References

1.  A. Hankey, Evid. Based Comp. Alt. Med. (eCAM) Advance Access published online on May 14, 2008.
2.  L. R. Milgrom, Evid. Based Comp. Alt. Med. (eCAM) 4, 7 (2007).
3.  A. Hankey, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 12, 105 (2006).
4.  H. Walach, Forsch. Komplementmed. 10, 192 (2003).
5.  H. Atmanspacher, H. Römer, and H. Walach, Found. Phys. 32, 379 (2002).
6. Also note that the commutation relation for the x and y
   components of
   angular momentum is [L_x,L_y]=iℏ L_z, i.e. not exactly
   iℏ, but nobody is suggesting that this is therefore “weak” quantum
   theory.

---

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by
H^EV^EA.

Lionel Milgrom’s latest paper, “A New Geometrical Description of Entanglement and the Curative Homeopathic Process” [1], as introduced by Alex Hankey (“Self-Consistent Theories of Health and Healing” [2]) quotes Hahnemann saying that

“The unprejudiced observer is well aware of the futility of transcendental speculations which can receive no confirmation from experience.”

Milgrom’s futile transcendental speculations have been going on for six years. This latest paper is light on equations but heavy on pictures and mysticism and further from science (and indeed reality) than ever. But it’s still possible to find some things which are meaningful enough to be wrong.First we find complaints and special pleading to be allowed to overturn evidence-based medicine (EBM) and the double-blind randomized-controlled trial (DBRCT):

“EBM and the DBRCT, like much of biomedical science, are rooted in the reductionist philosophy of logical positivism combined with local realism. The latter states that: (a), the universe is real and it exists whether we observe it or not; (b), legitimate conclusions and predictions can be drawn from consistent experimental outcomes and observations; and (c), no signal can travel faster than light [3,4,5]. In questioning (a) and (c) above, quantum theory transcends local realism [4] and the reductionism of biomedicine [5]. Attempts at explaining homeopathy’s efficacy have made use of concepts generalized from the discourses of semiotics [6,7] and quantum theory [8,9,10].”

EBM just means that someone’s checked that it actually works - if it could be demonstrated that homeopathy worked at actually curing diseases then it would be part of EBM. In fact anything in CAM would quickly become part of EBM if it worked. What we actually get is subjective reports of improvements in self-limiting or cyclic conditions, while journals publish flawed, biased articles on effects at the fringes of statistical significance [11,12,13,14,15].

There’s nothing magical about DBRCTs either, they are just the most rigorous way of trying to sort out if there is actually any weak effect there. If homeopathy really worked as well as its proponents seem to suggest then the results should be blatantly obvious and there would be no need to dig so hard to find them. Let’s pedantically consider each letter.

T for Trial

You have to test something to make sure that you aren’t just remembering the positive anecdotes and forgetting the negative ones.

C for Control

You compare your treatment group with a group receiving no treatment, to make sure that it’s really the treatment having an effect. It’s usual to give the control group a placebo.

R for Randomized

To make sure that the patients in the treatment and control group are similar, so that similar disease progressions would be expected in each group if the treatment were ineffective. Otherwise you could deliberately or subconciously put the healthier people into the treatment group and then of course they likely to be healthier at the end of the trial. It’s good to have large groups.

B for Blind

The patient shouldn’t know whether they are getting the treatment or the control because this could bias their self-reported symptoms and also their expectations.

D for Double

The doctor shouldn’t know whether a patient is in the treatment or control group either, or else he or she can deliberately or subconciously influence the patient.

A DBRCT is just the best way of minimizing all the possible biasing factors in the case that the effect of the treatment is less than blatantly obvious. So it’s not surprising that good quality DBRCTs tend to come out negative for homeopathy while less well-controlled trials show positive effects - that shows exactly that the positive effects of homeopathy are nothing to do with the remedies themselves [16,17,18,19].

And then, on with the entanglement, as if I haven’t already explained how the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger [20] system actually works, or why most of what he says about entanglement isn’t correct.

“Entanglement is said to occur in a quantum system when its seemingly separate parts are so holistically matched or correlated, measurement of one part of the system instantaneously (i.e., not limited by the speed of light and without classical signal transmission) provides information about all its other parts, regardless of their separation in space and time, or their size [21].”

Italics are his. I’ve tried to explain entanglement in other posts, and I’ve tried to clarify that “size” doesn’t mean “number of interacting particles” since even maintaining seven nuclear spins in a state of coherent quantum phase is quite hard [22]; macroscopic coherent states do not persist for very long at all [23,24]. Superconductors and superfluids work because of ways in which the particles in question are prevented from interacting [25,26]. Apparently,

“the Memory of Water [27] also relies on macro-entangled coherence, albeit between large numbers of water molecules [28].”

which isn’t true at all, and not just because there is no such thing [29]. The Memory of Water is supposed to be a physical effect whereby the structure of a sample water depends on what used to be in solution in it: it’s nothing to do with coherence of the quantum phase. (Del Giudice et al. [28] seem to be talking about coherence of dipoles in an electric field, not coherence of the quantum phase.) Milgrom then goes on to explain:

‘Nonlocal correlation is not the only prerequisite for entanglement. A quantum system’s processes must also be describable in terms of a “non-commuting algebra of complementary observables.” [4]’

All this means is that it matters what order you do certain pairs of measurements in, since eigenstates of one operator are not eigenstates of another. I just found the quote marks interesting, as if he’s pasted that in without knowing how to explain it. To be fair, I can’t be bothered to explain it either. But this complementarity means, according to Milgrom, that

“To fully explain quantum phenomena, therefore, it is necessary to have two different but complementary concepts. The answer one obtains performing two different sets of observations depends entirely on the order in which they are performed; yet both are necessary in order to acquire a complete picture of the system.”

A “complete picture of the system” is not actually possible in these terms. It is impossible to have a system in two complementary states at the same time. A “complete picture” in terms of macroscopic variables (such as position and momentum) therefore does not exist. We just have the idea that there’s a wavefunction which exists but is not directly observable, on which we can operate in various ways in order to obtain observable results.

Having misunderstood and misrepresented quantum theory, Milgrom now goes on to do the same for weak quantum theory (WQT) [30]. Leick has already pointed out [31] that

‘Milgrom writes “Complementarity and indeterminacy are epistemological in origin not ontological”, [5] which is a serious misquote of the original paper, where it says that “[...] there is no way to argue that complementarity and indeterminacy in weak quantum theory are of ontic rather than epistemic nature.[...] one would expect them to be of rather innocent epistemic origin in many cases.” [30] The difference between the two versions cannot be emphasized enough, as quantum effects such as entanglement are due to the ontic nature (ie not simply to our incomplete knowledge) of complementarity and indeterminacy!’

But what does it mean that WQT “relaxes several of its nanoscopically limiting axioms, including dependence on Planck’s constant.”? Planck’s constant h is what connects quantum theory with reality - it turns out that light comes in photons and the energy of each photon is proportional to the frequency of the light, with the constant of proportionality being h. This is how Planck was able to solve the problem of black-body radiation. If “complementarity and entanglement are not restricted by a constant like Planck’s constant” then what do we have in its place, to connect WQT with reality? The simple answer is that there is no connection to reality so it’s not even a sensible question. The more involved answer is that “WQT has no interpretation in terms of probabilities” which amounts to more or less the same thing. How can Milgrom then write that “the product 〈Ψ_PPR|Ψ_PPR〉=|Ψ_PPR|² presumably represents the probability of cure”? (If Ψ_PPR is properly normalized then 〈Ψ_PPR|Ψ_PPR〉=1 and it says nothing about the “probability of cure” or anything - to find that he’d have to define an “cure” operator and calculate its expectation value.) By the way, it’s often more convenient to work with ℏ = h/2π so you’ll see that in some equations later on.

I have already wondered what use WQT would be in answering objective questions like “does homeopathy work?” if it doesn’t seem to have any interpretation in terms of observables. Medical effects are quantifiable. Anyway, Milgrom then goes on to introduce Walach’s use of semiotics [7] and there’s a box-out which contains the unintentionally ironic Hahnemann quote. Semiotics is more linguistics than science, it’s got no place here. The way we interpret signs and produce meaning has got nothing to do with the molecular biology of how actual pharmaceuticals work.

The rest of the quote in the box-out explains that the observer

“can take note of nothing in every individual disease, except the changes in the health of the body and of the mind (morbid phenomena, accidents, symptoms) which can be perceived externally by means of the senses… All these signs represent the disease in its whole extent, that is, together they form the true and only conceivable portrait of the disease.”

The first part of that may have been true a couple of hundred years ago but it isn’t true now. The second part was never true: we now know about
germs, viruses, genes, DNA and molecular biology. Symptoms are part of the body’s reaction to an underlying pathology. They are not the pathology itself. The same pathology can present in different ways in different people, and many symptoms are shared between different diseases.

A few kets finally turn up now, as Milgrom once again formulates his patient, practitioner and remedy wavefunctions. He then decides to attach one of Walach’s semiotic sign-object-meaning triangles (each corner of which seems to represent an operator or possibly the expectation value of it) to each of the three corners of the patient-practitioner-remedy triangle. It’s meaningless, but where it becomes actually wrong is in the invocation of complex numbers and a strange sort of quantum origami. Already in part C of his Fig. 2 the bra-ket notation seems to have broken down - and how he manages to fold the “corners of the large triangle to create a pyramid with a hexagonal base” is beyond me, since a pyramid with a hexagonal base needs six sides and a triangle only has three corners. This folding appears to have turned the states into their complex conjugates, but then Milgrom reflects the whole thing so that it’s upside down and then unfolds it and it turns out to be twisted through 60°. How is that supposed to happen? It’s nonsense mathematically (not to mention scientifically) and I don’t even think it makes geometrical sense. Which directions are real and which are imaginary doesn’t seem to be made clear for fairly obvious reasons - taking the complex conjugate means mirroring in the Real line but each of the three corners is flipped over a different line in the 2-d plane, and then the whole “pyramid” is mirrored in the whole 2-d plane which apparently represents the “homeopathic operator, Πr”. This is all I suppose taking place in the

‘“therapeutic state space” [32] (an analogue of the complex mathematical Hilbert space more familiar from orthodox quantum theory) [4].’

In the nicest possible way, how many readers of J. Alt. Complement. Med. are familiar with Hilbert spaces? He seems to think that in an equation such as 〈Ψ_PPR|Πr|Ψ_PPR〉=⟨&#X394; S x⟩ that it’s the operator which is making the complex conjugate 〈Ψ_PPR| out of |Ψ_PPR〉, which just isn’t the way it works at all. (Anyway, if you fold over the corners of an equilateral triangle so that you are left with a regular hexagon, the triangles will meet in the middle when they are flat against the hexagon - the pyramid they define has zero height. And each wavefunction exist in its own Hilbert space so I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean to put them all in each others’ spaces.) It’s hardly worth looking at his Fig. 3 where he does it all again only with tetrahedra. The lack of any explicit conceptual difference between Figs. 2 and 3 demonstrates how arbitrary and meaningless it is, since he can apparently produce two completely different pictures to represent what is supposed to be the same things, and this makes it useless trying to work out on which level to take it seriously - there isn’t a level on which it makes any sense. (There are probably lots more versions of this quantum homeopathic origamy nonsense coming soon to “peer reviewed” journals with low editorial standards near you.)

Meanwhile, there’s a second box-out on the Kochen-Specker theorem [33]. This is a theorem which says that it’s not possible to find a direct correspondence between quantum mechanical observables and classical quantities. The first half of the box seems to be ok, up until the part where he he claims that

‘signs and symptoms of disease are considered observable manifestations of an “invisible” disturbed vital force, Vf.’

This is apparently because Auyang [4] said

“Eigenvalues are analogous to symptoms of a disease, which are disturbances of the body that show up and indicate something that does not show up. Just as a cold persists though its symptoms are suppressed, so a quantum system’s wave function has a definite amplitude, even though it has no eigenvalue…”

and Milgrom has taken this analogy far too seriously. Common cold viruses are not invisible. (I’m not sure what “no eigenvalue” means in this context either: is it that the eigenvalue is zero or that the state is not an eigenstate? Measurement is supposed to collapse a mixed state into an eigenstate.) There’s a mention of self-adjoint operators, which are those operators which operate on states to give physical observables. (There are, for example, ladder operators which operate on states to give new states.) It’s not exactly true that “they consist only of real numbers” because for example the momentum operator for the x direction is −i ℏ ∂/∂x - rather, it means that the operator is a Hermitian matrix which is equal to its own conjugate transpose and it has real eigenvalues (but see also the spectral theorem).

The Kochen-Specker theorem [33] knackers hidden variable theories, in which the quantum mechanical correlations leading to entanglement are explained by theorizing that the system somehow already “knows” which state it’s going to turn out to be in when you measure, even if this information is not available from the wavefunction. It turns out that you can’t have definite values of all the hidden variables corresponding to quantum mechanical observables all the time which are independent of the way in which they might be measured. This is because for classical quantities it shouldn’t matter in what order you measure certain properties, but for certain complementary pairs of quantum mechanical observables it does indeed matter in what order you measure. This is actually only a problem if the Hilbert space has three or more dimensions [34], and Milgrom decides that since his homeopathy Πr mirror is a 2d plane, so the “therapeutic state space” is this 2d plane on which the Kochen-Specker theorem need not apply. In fact he’s drawn his mirror as a 2d plane embedded in a 3d space, and if he wants a pyramid which goes upside-down then he needs at least a 3d Hilbert space to do it in. It’s clear that in the real world there are wavefunctions which really do “exist” in Hilbert spaces with three or more dimensions out of which observable quantities can be extracted with the appropriate measurement operators: the theorem just says that these very observables were not some how “in there” before we did the extraction. What comes out actually depends on the interaction between the measuring operation and the wavefunction, so the intrinsic properties of the wavefunction (and I maintain that it does have them) are not those which correspond exactly to things we are intuitively familiar with, such as position or momentum. So I don’t think that the Kochen-Specker theorem is particularly relevant to what Milgrom is trying to do, and he wouldn’t be able to get around it anyway because he’s working in 3d not 2d. (What he’s drawn isn’t a Hilbert space anyway: states exist as rays in a Hilbert space, not polygons.)

On to Fig. 3 anyway. As I mentioned, for some reason this time he folds up the big triangle into a tetrahedron. Does this represent a mathematical transformation of some kind? (No.) There are no brakets arounds the Ψs this time, perhaps that’s the difference. The practitioner has a wavefunction Ψ_Pr and therefore a triangle, but then apparently “sits at the center of tetrahedron” too. There’s clearly no special reason for this apart from Milgrom wanted it that way and thereby made it up (and in the text it’s “the patient notionally at the tetrahedral epicenters”.). And then of course the practitioner also has an operator Πr which is supposed to be a mirror which somehow also twists the tetrahedron in a way which doesn’t make a huge amount of sense (and I don’t think this is a self-adjoint operator if it flips between these two states). Then there’s another box-out regarding chirality and there’s nothing wrong with it, apart from that it’s almost totally irrelevant, only serving to remind us that Milgrom used to be a chemist.

The final step is to combine the original tetrahedron and the twisted one into the shape called the stella octangula which Hankey got so excited about. (But he also folds up the big triangle into a small flat triangle which apparently introduces a 60° twist. I don’t think he runs with this; he was just getting carried away. I don’t know why the Ψs have now moved to the corners where previously we had operators.) The twisting is supposed to be the practitioner showing the cure to the patient or some nonsense like that. It’s not a real-space twist: it doesn’t matter which way the patient is “looking” or “going”. States evolve through Hilbert space according to the time-dependent Schrödinger equation:

where the left side has the Hamiltonian operating on Ψ (which classically involves the kinetic and potential energies, where the former involves taking derivatives with respect to space - stationary states are energy eigenstates) and the right side involves taking the derivative with respect to time. (This equation is completely deterministic, by the way.) How should we describe pointing “the patient in the direction of cure” now exactly?

The problem I always have with Milgrom is that I try to read it as if it were science. I assume that there’s sense and meaning in there but the concepts are difficult and require work to get to. The problem is that there’s no sense or meaning, and I end up doing a lot of work trying to get the right level into focus when there is no right level. It’s meaningless. I don’t think it’s even correct geometrically. It’s nearly finished though so that’s good.

We only have to deal with the stella octangula’s role in quantum teleportation first [35,36,37,38]. I’m not interested in the stuff about the Platonic solids or the “classical four elements”, or the Merkabah. (Read Finding Moonshine if you want a more sensible discussion about symmetry and that.) It’s the link back to quantum mechanics which is more troubling, since some might see that and think Milgrom’s on to something. Let me assure you he isn’t. The picture which Aravind [38] draws is a representation of operations described by Bennett et al. [36] when dealing with a entangled state of two spin-1/2 particles - it gives a way of understanding which combinations of spin states are more entangled than others, or something. The corners of a tetrahedron A, B, C and D represent four Bell states while the centre E represents a totally unpolarized state. Aravind explains:

“The twirl operation can also be visualized readily on the Horodecki diagram. The effect of a twirl on an arbitrary Bell diagonal mixture is to project it orthogonally onto the line AE containing the Werner states. For a non-separable state in the A-sector of the tetrahedron, this reduction is achieved without any loss in entanglement but for states in the B, C and D sectors there is a complete loss of entanglement. The proper way to reduce the latter states is to either subject them to a modified twirl [36] that projects them onto Werner-like states in their own sectors or else to transfer them into the A-sector (by a suitable unilateral rotation) and then apply the standard twirl.”

There’s an octagon embedded in the tetrahedron, formed by the intersection of the tetrahedron and its inverse, within which lie all the separable states. How does this compare to Migrom’s picture? Milgrom built up his intersecting tetrahedra from at least three “particles” so he would need a different shape (probably in more than three dimensions) to represent all their states; the centre, representing complete unpolarization and being the most unentangled state in Aravind’s picture, is the patient (probably) in Milgrom’s picture, but the patient is also a face; in Aravind’s picture the vertices of the tetrahedron represent maximally-entangled Bell states, while Milgrom seems to have expectation values or operators or something. So it’s clear that just because he has contrived to arrive at the same shape doesn’t mean that he’s somehow doing something connected to what these guys are doing. (It may not be a total coincidence either that Sandu Popescu [39] is acknowledged by Aravind [38] and cited by Milgrom [40] in his reply to Leick [31].)

To conclude, then: in order to avoid facing the fact that quantum mechanics is simply not relevant to the system of a homeopath and a patient [41], Milgrom concludes that the “state functions representing each of the Px, Pr, Rx, and the PPR entangled state are not related to quantifiable physical observables”, admitting how useless it all is for actually working anything out; but when he states that “it is clear that the nature of the therapeutic process requires its initial separation and ‘isolation’ from the usual external environment, as a necessary prerequisite for the coherence of entanglement to occur, and cure to begin,” he admits something I think we already knew: that it is necessary to be out of touch with reality to be a homeopath.

1.  L. R. Milgrom, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 14, 329 (2008).
2.  A. Hankey, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 14, 221 (2008).
3.  K. R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Hutchinson, 1959).
4.  S. Y. Auyang, How is Quantum Field Theory Possible? (Oxford University Press, 1995).
5.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 96, 209 (2007).
6.  H. Walach, Semiotica 83, 81 (1991).
7.  H. Walach, Brit. Homeopathy J. 89, 127 (2000).
8.  D. Gernert, Biosystems 54, 165 (2000).
9.  D. Gernert, Frontier Perspectives 14, 8 (2005).
10.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 91, 239 (2002).
11.  M. Frass, C. Dielacher, M. Linkesch, C. Endler, I. Muchitsch, E. Schuster, et al. Chest 127, 936 (2005).
12.  I. Chalmers, and R. Matthews, The Lancet 367, 449 (2006).
13.  A. Robertson, R. Suryanarayanan, and A. Banerjee, Homeopathy 96, 17 (2007).
14.  E. Ernst, Homeopathy 96, 285 (2007).
15.  A. Robertson, Homeopathy 96, 285 (2007).
16.  K. Linde, N. Clausius, G. Ramirez, D. Melchart, F. Eitel, L. V. Hedges, et al. The Lancet 350, 834 (1997).
17.  K. Linde, M. Scholz, G. Ramirez, N. Clausius, D. Melchart, and W. B. Jonas, J. Clin. Epidemiol. 52, 631 (1999).
18.  K. Linde, and W. Jonas, The Lancet 366, 2081 (2005).
19.  A. Shang, K. Huwiler-Müntener, L. Nartey, P. Jüni, S. Dörig, et al. The Lancet 366, 726 (2005).
20.  D. M. Greenberger, M. A. Horne, A. Shimony, and A. Zeilinger, Am. J. Phys. 58, 1131 (1990).
21.  L. J. Landau, Lett. Math. Phys. 14, 33 (1987).
22.  L. M. K. Vandersypen, M. Steffen, G. Breyta, C. S. Yannoni, and M. H. Sherwood, I. L. Chuang Nature 414, 883 (2001).
23.  M. Tegmark, Phys. Rev. E 61, 4194 (2000).
24.  S. Hagan, S. R. Hameroff, and J. A. Tuszynski, Phys. Rev. E 65, 061901 (2002).
25.  J. Bardeen, L. N. Cooper, and J. R. Schrieffer, Phys. Rev. 108, 1175 (1957).
26.  L. Landau, Phys. Rev. 60, 356 (1941).
27.  M. Schiff, The Memory of Water: Homoeopathy and the Battle of Ideas in the New Science (Thorsons, 1995).
28.  E. Del Giudice, G. Preparata, and G. Vitiello, Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 1085 (1988).
29.  J. Teixeira, Homeopathy 96, 158 (2007).
30.  H. Atmanspacher, H. Römer, and H. Walach, Found. Phys. 32, 379 (2002).
31.  P. Leick, Homeopathy 97, 50 (2008).
32.  L. R. Milgrom, Forsch. Komplementmed. 13, 174 (2006).
33.  S. Kochen, and E. Specker, Indiana Univ. Math. J. 17, 59 (1968).
34.  A. Peres, J. Phys. A 24, L175 (1991).
35.  R. Horodecki, and M. Horodecki, Phys. Rev. A 54, 1838 (1996).
36.  C. H. Bennett, D. P. DiVincenzo, J. A. Smolin, and W. K. Wootters, Phys. Rev. A 54, 3824 (1996).
37.  C. H. Bennett, G. Brassard, S. Popescu, B. Schumacher, J. A. Smolin, and W. K, Wootters Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 722 (1996).
38.  P. K. Aravind, Phys. Lett. A 233, 7 (1997).
39.  S. Popescu, Nature Physics 2, 507 (2006).
40.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 97, 96 (2008).
41.  H. M. Wiseman, and J. Eisert, arXiv.org e-Print archive physics, arXiv:0705.1232v2 (2007).

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by
H^EV^EA.

I’ve just read a post about “what prayer is” on Why Don’t You, which was inspired by a post about “prayer in schools” on GodBeGone. Heather sees prayer as “special pleading” to God, which seems pretty reasonable to me. Obviously it depends on what you hope to achieve by the prayer, but many people seem [...]

In his editorial introducing Lionel Milgrom’s latest paper, “A New Geometrical Description of Entanglement and the Curative Homeopathic Process” [1], Alex Hankey (“Self-Consistent Theories of Health and Healing” [2]) can’t even spell homeopathy: he cites Simon Baker’s letter to eCAM (in response to “Journeys in the country of the blind” [3]) as “Re: Homeoathy and hubris”. There’s also a citation to a letter written by someone called “Chrastana”. (This is after Lionel Milgrom got confused between Simon Gates and Simon Baker and ended up replying to Simon Bates.) There’s clearly little hope for any sort of scientific or technical accuracy when basic proof-reading is clearly beyond both Hankey and the staff of J. Alt. Complement. Med in which this is published.

It doesn’t take long for Hankey to have a dig at so-called “scientific conservatives” as if the ones who are desperately trying to dig a 200-year-old quasi-mystical idea out of the deep grave marked “contradictory to all of current modern physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine” are the innovators, not the scientists who have shown why we need to leave Hahnemann’s ideas behind. To summarize: the past couple of hundred years have seen the development of the germ theory of disease, the discovery of viruses, the development of genetics, the discovery of DNA and of its structure and the birth of molecular biology generally, the development of atomic theory and the arrangement of elements into the Periodic table, and the formulation of quantum mechanics and special and general relativity. All of these things are very well confirmed by experimental evidence and most of them contradict the principles of homeopathy. The germ theory of disease contradicts those who still believe in miasmas, molecular biology basically contradicts all that stuff about the Vital Force, and atomic theory explains that the kind of dilutions frequently used by homeopaths contain nothing of the supposedly active ingredient (as if containing a tiny amount of it would really make any difference anyway). But sadly, quantum mechanics, if understood poorly enough, seems to give the homeopaths hope that they haven’t actually been wasting their lives. In the final insult they then claim that it’s the rest of us who are stuck in an old paradigm. When Philippe Leick said that [4]

“the claim that dilutions beyond Avogadro’s limit can have any specific effect linked to the properties of the original substance… if
solved to the satisfaction of the adherents of homeopathy, probably will revolutionize physics.”

he was pointing out just how much we’d have to throw away if it were true (which it isn’t).

One thing which has come out of quantum theory of the solid-state is the transistor, and therefore the computer, without which none of this would be happening. David Chalmers and Roger Penrose are invoked by Hankey to explain what’s wrong with modern science, in that it apparently doesn’t have a theory of consciousness.

Now the only Penrose I’ve read is the The Road to Reality [5], so I’ve mainly bypassed all that quantum-gravity–consciousness [6] nonsense [7,8]. (In The Road to Reality Penrose complains that string theory [9] is useless because so far it’s only been able to create the graviton, and then tries to explain his twistor theory, which he’s been working on for 40 years, and which has so far only been able to create half a graviton. But he’s an extremely clever mathematical physicist even if I think he’s wrong about a couple of things. His insights into thermodynamics and entropy are interesting [10,11].)

But when it comes to the philosopher David Chalmers, Hankey cites “Facing up to the problem of consciousness” [12] which is a bit shorter than Penrose’s and is dealt with in another post, in which I try to argue that Chalmers’ dismissal of Penrose’s “nonalgorithmic processing” knackers Hankey’s “putting together” of Penrose and Chalmers. Chalmers has already considered Penrose’s ideas, and even if they were right (which I for one am not sure about) they aren’t what he was looking for. He isn’t particularly interested in general quantum mechanics either, which further knackers what Hankey is trying to suggest (and probably what Milgrom is trying to suggest, or at least what Hankey is trying to suggest about it). Chalmers also basically knackers all of homeopathy and frankly quite a lot of CAM by dismissing vitalism.

Hankey says that “creative thinkers… recognise such laws as necessary bases from which to depart…” and in doing so misses the point that you have to understand a rule completely in order to know its limitations (these guys only think they understand the rules based on some
popularizations) and the Dalai Lama quote about “The most important rule is to know how to break the rules” was probably about politics rather than science, in which the rules really can be broken because they are made up and imposed by humans rather than being discovered facts about the universe. Every research scientist, meanwhile, is trying to test, extend, and validate whatever laws have so far been discovered in whatever field he or she happens to be working in (and maybe even helping to discover new laws). It’s what we do all day.

It’s interesting how Hankey and those like him immediately react to criticism by complaining about the attitude of the complainants rather than by pointing to evidence for their positions: it’s becauese they lack the tools to deal with criticism, what without having any actual evidence. He just has philosophy and mysticism, understood at the same superficial level as he understands quantum physics.

In the end Hankey sees all of Milgrom’s work as having “striking confermation” because of the shape he makes up at the end is bit similar to another shape Hankey can think of. Analysis of Milgrom’s work will have to wait until another day - until then you can make do with “mere chemistry”.

References

1.  L. R. Milgrom, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 14, 329 (2008).
2.  A. Hankey, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 14, 221 (2008).
3.  L. R. Milgrom, Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 4, 7 (2007).
4.  P. Leick, Homeopathy 97,
   50 (2008).
5.  R. Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (Jonathan Cape, 2004).
6.  
   S. Hagan, S. R. Hameroff, and J. A. Tuszy&#X144;ski, Phys. Rev. E 65, 061901 (2002).
7.  
   M. Tegmark, Phys. Rev. E 61, 4194 (2000).
8.  H. M. Wiseman and J. Eisert, arXiv.org e-Print archive physics, arXiv:0705.1232v2 (2007).
9.  B. Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (Vintage, 2005).
10.  R. Penrose, J. Stat. Phys. 77, 217
    (1994).
11.  J. Bricmont, Physicalia Magazine 17, 159 (1995).
12.  D. J. Chalmers, J. Conciousness Studies 2, 200 (1995).

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by
H^EV^EA.

In his editorial introducing Lionel Milgrom’s latest paper, “A New Geometrical Description of Entanglement and the Curative Homeopathic Process” [1], Alex Hankey cites “Facing up to the problem of consciousness” [2] by philosopher David Chalmers, which merits a blog post of its own. Hankey’s editorial itself is dealt with in the post entitled Inconsistent with health and healing.

Consciousness… consciousness of other people… consciousness of beer… unconsciousness…

Chalmers distinguishes the ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems related to explanations of consciousness. The easy problems relate to the explanation of what he redefines as awareness;

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
• the integration of information by a cognitive system;
• the reportability of mental states;
• the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
• the focus of attention;
• the deliberate control of behavior;
• the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

whereas the hard problem is that of explaining experience:

“When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.”

Chalmers maintains therefore that what is required to explain experience is something which does not fit into or arise out of cognitive science and neuroscience,

“These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say.”

and even some sort of quantum mechanical effect or Penrose’s “nonalgorithmic processing” can’t be the missing ingredient, because these are physical effects which should already be covered by the time that cognitive science and neuroscience have done their stuff. Chalmers still wants to know why any such purely physical process should give rise to experience - “Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical… When it comes to a problem over and above the explanation of structures and functions, [reductive] methods are impotent.” He then goes on to explain that he’s not being vitalist, but he admits that his position, in which he wants to “take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time,” qualifies as a variety of dualism. He maintains though that it is an “innocent version of dualism… nothing in the approach contradicts anything in physical theory.” Well he says that, but he can’t know that without knowing something that nobody else does about cognitive science and neuroscience, or making his idea so nebulous that its connection to reality can be wherever it’s easiest to hide. The fact that this idea’s “overall shape is like that of a physical theory” is useless if he’s already decided that there’s nothing physical about it. (Incidentally, he mentions Maxwell’s introduction of electromagnetics as “new fundamental components of a physical theory” in addition to the wholly mechanical processes that previous physical theories appealed to” but it’s important to remember that electromagnetics led to special relativity [3] (and from there to general relativity) which changed mechanics quite a lot, so it’s not necessarily safe to go adding new fundamental entities without expecting anything else in the rest of physics to have to change. Anyway, mass and charge are fundamental because they are conserved quantities (once we realize that energy has mass [4]) and conservation laws relate to symmetry; it’s hard to argue that “experience” is a conserved quantity.)

But finally we get to the three principles which Chalmers thinks might go into a theory of consciousness:

1. Structural coherence
2. Organizational invariance
3. The double-aspect theory of information

The first two of these are described by Chalmers as nonbasic principles but he considers the third and final one to be his “candidate for a basic principle that might form the cornerstone of a fundamental theory of consciousness.”

Structural coherence

“Any information that is consciously experienced will also be cognitively represented.” No argument there: put someone in an fMRI machine or PET scanner and watch the correlations between what they report and what’s going on in their brain. You have a cortical map of your body, and other parts of the cortex map visual or auditory fields.

Organizational invariance

“Any two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences.” The thought experiment here is to consider two conscious systems which have the same structure but are built from different components, and imagine that they might have different experiences, and then imagine progressing piece by piece from one to the other. The experience should surely need to change as we went from one system to another, but Chalmer decides this has to happen suddenly at one step in the progression rather than smoothly across the whole range; is there any real reason for that, or is it just that he is thinking in terms of mutually exclusive experiences of the same external phenomenon? One system might see red and have the experience of red, and another might see red and have the experience of blue, but is there one in the middle which would have the experience of grey or purple? This is the sort of question which reminds me why I have little patience for philosophy. It’s the sort of thing students discuss in pubs. Maybe we could sort it out in this case by examining the visual cortex, but then we’d probably be back to “awareness” rather than “experience”.

The double-aspect theory of information

Shannon [5] introduced the concept of information entropy to quantify the information content of a message. You can actually get an idea of the entropy of a Word document or something by seeing how much you can compress it with winzip (OpenOffice documents are already compressed). Documents which compress a lot contain a lot of repeated information^* and have a low entropy, whereas a truly random string of bits is incompressible and has high entropy. But information entropy doesn’t say anything about meaning: that seemingly random string of bits might turn out to be an OpenOffice document, once you’ve installed the software on your computer which allows it to make sense of it and translate it into text on the screen… and then it might turn out to be in a language which you don’t understand, until you learn that language and then you have the mental software to translate the text into mentalese [6]. It’s fine to represent information as if it lived in its own information space, because on a certain level that string of bits and the pattern of lights on the screen have the same information content even if they have completely different physical forms, but it doesn’t give the information space any physical reality. You always find that the information is encoded in some physical medium, whether it be magnetic domains on a hard disk, charges on the gates of transistors, the orientations of liquid crystal molecules, or firing patterns of neurons. In some sense it’s the same information, but it relies on either the computer or the human having the right software in order to get the meaning out. How that translation into mentalese [6] leads to “experience” of that information isn’t at all obvious. It still seems like “awareness” to me. What’s fundamental about information? It’s just an arrangement of something which isn’t quite as random as it could be.

(* - recently I had to make some posters in PowerPoint and I noticed that even simple edits caused the file size to increase significantly, but I discovered by accident that using “Save as” instead of “Save” cause the filesize to decrease back to its original value, even if you didn’t actually change the filename or anything.)

So what we are left with probably isn’t as exciting as Hankey seems to make out.

References

1.  L. R. Milgrom, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 14, 329 (2008).
2.  D. J. Chalmers, J. Conciousness Studies 2, 200 (1995).
3.  A. Einstein, Annalen der Physik 17, 891 (1905a).
4.  A. Einstein, Annalen der Physik 18, 639 (1905b).
5.  C. E. Shannon, Bell System Tech. J. 27, 379 (1948).
6.  S. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Windows into Human Nature (Allen Lane, 2007).

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by
H^EV^EA.

I confess to having quite a bit of fun by writing letters to medical and scientific journals. The web of course has opened up huge opportunities for this - indeed it was originally designed for scientists to exchange information. One online journal I rather like is MedScape, edited by George Lundberg who previously edited the [...]

Weak Quantum Theory isn’t that weak

Another comment on “Journeys in The Country of The Blind: Entanglement Theory and The Effects of Blinding on Trials of Homeopathy and Homeopathic Provings” [eCAM 4 (1) 7-16 (2007)].

Submitted 13^th January 2008

I certainly am entertained by Milgrom’s new notion of “the importance of isolation from the external environment (the consultation) in order for coherence and decoherence to bring about the possibility of cure.” It formalizes the position that homeopaths, and the people who feel a subjective benefit in going to them, have lost contact with reality. Indeed, my experience is that a lack of coherence is often seen in homeopaths with whom I try to interact. I am also pleased to note that Milgrom admits that “the wave functions of orthodox quantum theory represent quantifiably measurable observables of physical particles. This is not what the ‘wave-functions’ in PPR [patient-practitioner-remedy] entanglement or WQT [weak quantum theory] [1] represent… They represent more qualitative and subjective observables”. This makes it clear that WQT [2,3,4,5] is useless for answering objective questions such as “does homeopathy work?”

Quantum mechanics is irrelevant to homeopathy,[6] but in any case it seems that Milgrom cannot even follow the relaxed rules of WQT.[5] Greenberger et al. give the following as their Eq. (19) based on a gedanken experiment in which a particle at rest at the centre of the apparatus decays into three similar components each with the same energy [7]:

Milgrom [8] uses this for his Eq. (1) as a “maximally entangled state” between the patient (Px), practitioner (Pr) and remedy (Rx) each of which are considered to be in either a positive “up” state (respectively: well, helpful, curative) or a negative “down” state (respectively: unwell, unhelpful, non-curative):

However it is clear that Milgrom misunderstands the meaning of Eq. (1). In the gedanken experiment of Greenberger et al., the fact that the particle is at rest immediately prior to decay constrains the three decay products to have net zero momentum, and since they are considered to each have the same mass then they must be emitted 120^∘ apart. The source is surrounded by six apertures: a, b, and c at 120^∘ separation, and a′, b′, and c′ also at 120^∘ separation (but with the separation between a and a′ smaller than 120^∘). Most decays will lead to the three particles missing the apertures entirely, but a few will lead to the three particles passing through a, b, and c and a few will lead to them passing through a′, b′, and c′. The point is that states such as |a⟩|b′⟩|c′⟩, or even |a⟩|a′⟩|b⟩, are forbidden by the rules of conservation of momentum, and the entanglement exists because we know that if a particle has been emitted through a then the other two particles must have been emitted through b and c rather than b′ and c′. So of all the possible combinations of apertures only two are physically permitted, and they are represented as the two terms in Eq. (1). As soon as we know that any one particle has gone through a given slit, we immediately know whether the state is |a⟩₁|b⟩₂|c⟩₃ or |a′⟩₁|b′⟩₂|c′⟩₃ and in that sense, the superposition given in Eq. (1) has “collapsed” to one of the two equivalent possibilities. Milgrom is wrong in his first response: it is not the case that “the whole entangled state disappears” when the superposition of two entangled states collapses into one state or the other, but it seems he concedes this point in a later response (while maintaining that “the PPR entangled-state wave function does indeed for all intents and purposes disappear” which is still wrong, as will be shown below).

Equation (2) is meant to show entanglement between patient, practitioner and remedy. It would seem to indicate that only two states are allowed. The patient is well, the practioner is helpful and the remedy is curative; or the patient is unwell, the practitioner is unhelpful and the remedy is non-curative. The unphysical entanglement situation here means that if we know that the patient is unwell then the remedy and the practitioner must both be useless. There are no states included in which the remedy and the practitioner are beneficial to an unhealthy patient, who can then flip to the healthy state. There is no time-evolution in any of Milgrom’s equations. We are left with the trivial but useless tautology that a helpful practitioner and a beneficial remedy mean a healthy patient - if the remedy is curative then the patient must already be healthy. There is in any case no reason given for such an entanglement (created in Eq. (1) by conservation of momentum) to come about.

In his Eq. (4), Milgrom then goes on to consider PPR without the practitioner, such as might be the case with an over-the-counter homeopathic remedy. (Homeopaths seem to insist on an individualized remedy prescribed by a practitioner, except when it suits them [9,10].) He represents this by setting

and substituting this into Eq. (2) instead of |Pr↑⟩ and |Pr↓⟩. This is invalid, since “0” is not a state: the states of Pr continue to exist whether or not there is anything in them. It is unclear whether Milgrom would rather mean ⟨Pr|Pr⟩=0 (which makes Pr non-normalizable and therefore not a state) or |Pr⟩=|0⟩, but the second case seems slightly more likely. WQT [2] may have relaxed some of the “constraints” of “orthodox” quantum theory (which connect it to reality) but as long as WQT preserves the algebraic formulation of the latter [11] then these rules are as true for WQT as they are for “orthodox” quantum theory.

There is nothing particularly special about the state |0⟩ - it is conventionally the ground state - and if we assume it to be properly normalized, ⟨0|0⟩=1, Milgrom’s Eq. (4) becomes

such that

Since ⟨0|0⟩=1 by normalization this term can be removed, and when the remaining terms are multiplied out

Again, the states should be considered to be properly normalized such that ⟨Px↑|Px↑⟩=1, so that the first half of Eq. (8) is

and if we assume no overlap between up and down states for each of Px and Rx (for example, ⟨Px↑|Px↓⟩=0) the second half of Eq. (8) is

so that overall, ⟨&#X3C8;_PPR|&#X3C8;_PPR⟩=1 (meaning only that the &#X3C8;_PPR state was normalized). In fact it doesn’t matter what we use for |Pr⟩ as long as it is a normalized state. The &#X3C8;_PPR “PPR wavefunction” has not “collapsed to zero” due to the absence of the involvement of the practitioner. The lack of any sort of physical explanation of how the entanglement of Eq. (2) is supposed to be created means there is no way to work out how the case of PPR entanglement without the practitioner should be treated. But of course entanglement between two states is possible in general [12,13].

It is noted that Milgrom has sometimes [13,14] treated Px, Pr and Rx as non-commuting operators rather than states, with [Px, Pr]=iRx somewhat analogous to the commutation relation for angular momentum. Also, Milgrom has written [13] ⟨&#X3C8;_PPR|&#X3A0;r|&#X3C8;_PPR⟩=⟨Rx⟩ in which ⟨Rx⟩ is the ‘expectation value’ but not of the ‘remedy operator’ Rx (compare his Eq. [2]) but of &#X3A0;r. More recently, he has written [14] ⟨&#X3C8;_PPR|&#X3A0;r|&#X3C8;_PPR⟩=⟨(&#X394; Sx)⟩ where the expectation value of the &#X3A0;r operator is now ‘the overall change in symptoms’. Such shifting of concepts, meanings and rules ruins any connection to quantum theory, whether “weak” [2] or not, and whether “metaphorical” or not.

Another version of Eq. (1) is given as Milgrom’s Eq. (8):

Here there is actually some comment on the six missing combinations (forbidden by conservation of momentum in Eq. (1) and thus creating the entanglement) but again with no insight into what mechanism means that only these two states are allowed. If all eight states were allowed there would be no entanglement, since distinguishing between |a⟩ and |a′⟩ would not tell us anything about whether we had |b⟩ and |b′⟩, or |c⟩ or |c′⟩. This point is alluded to in earlier work [13] but without any suggestion of how maximum entanglement might arise. This is then developed into a kind of “welcher-Weg” [15] thought experiment. But Eq. (11) would not “collapse… so that &#X3C8;_ent=0”. As before, it would collapse to either |P_Rx↑⟩|P_Pl↑⟩|P_O↑⟩ or |P_Rx↓⟩|P_Pl↓⟩|P_O↓⟩ depending on the result of a measurement capable of resolving the up or down state of any of P_Rx, P_Pl, or P_O. Once again, there has been a redefinition of terms: |P_Rx↑⟩ (for example) is not the state of a remedy prover experiencing symptoms but now represents all provers on the remedy who show symptoms. Milgrom has again confused occupancy of a state with the state itself.

In summary, Milgrom seems to have copied out a few equations from articles, textbooks and popularizations of quantum physics, assigned arbitrary and shifting properties to the entities within them, and then claimed to have a model/analogy/metaphor for homeopathy. The more seriously the metaphor is taken, the less sense it makes. It would be simpler to set up something called “Weak Number Theory” in which 2+2 doesn’t have to be four, and he can pretend to prove whatever he likes with that.

The author acknowledges fruitful discussions with Philippe Leick.

1.  H. Walach, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 11, 549 (2005).
2.  H. Atmanspacher, H. Römer, and H. Walach, Found. Phys. 32, 379 (2002).
3.  H. Walach, Forsch. Komplementmed. 10, 192 (2003).
4.  P. Leick, Skeptiker 3/2006, 92 (2006).
5.  P. Leick, Homeopathy 97, 50 (2008).
6.  H. M. Wiseman, and J. Eisert, arXiv.org e-Print archive arXiv:075.1232 [physics.gen-ph] (2007).
7.  D. M. Greenberger, M. A. Horne, A. Shimony, and A. Zeilinger, Am. J. Phys. 58, 1131 (1990).
8.  L. R. Milgrom, Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 4, 7 (2007).
9.  M. Frass, C. Dielacher, M. Linkesch, C. Endler, I. Muchitsch, E. Schuster, et al. Chest 127, 936 (2005).
10.  Orac, Homeopathy in the - cringe - ICU, http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/07/homeopathy_in_thecringeicu_1.php (02.07.2007, accessed 12.01.2007).
11.  L. R. Milgrom, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 11, 831 (2005).
12.  A. Aspect, P. Grangier, and G. Roger, Phys. Rev. Lett. 49, 91 (1982).
13.  L. R. Milgrom, Homeopathy 92, 152 (2003).
14.  L. R. Milgrom, Forsch. Komplementmed. 12, 206 (2005).
15.  M. O. Scully, B.-G. Englert, and H. Walther, Nature 351, 111 (1991).