Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine that is taken seriously by some, and mocked by many - especially those in the reality-based community. There is good reason for the mockery. Homeopathy is based on the medieval philosophy of "similia similibus curentur" (like cures like), and relies on "treatments" that involve administering a substance that causes symptoms similar to those of the disease it is intended to "treat". In order to avoid having the treatment cause more harm, the substance is normally diluted to such an enormous extent that it is present at levels that may be literally undetectable. This is believed to work because it is presumed that the process of dilution releases and concentrates the healing essence of the substance while removing the impure physical presence.
In short, then homeopathy is a classic example of a pseudoscientific enterprise lacking any basis in reality whatsoever. Despite this, it is a very popular form of "alternative medicine", and has many practitioners. There have also been serious scientific studies that have examined the effectiveness of various homeopathic remedies. In the latest issue of the medical journal The Lancet, a group of authors have published a detailed statistical comparison between 110 published, placebo-controlled studies of homeopathic remedies and an equal number of studies of conventional drug trials. Their analysis showed that the effects of the homeopathic remedies in the published trials are so slight that they are best explained as placebo effects. This comes as no surprise to the scientific community.
What I find interesting about this is the way that this contrasts with the Intelligent Design movement. In homeopathy, we see a "medical" treatment philosophy that runs counter to everything that we understand about the way that our bodies function. From a scientific perspective, homeopathy is utter garbage. However, it turns out to be testable garbage. Homeopathy makes predictive statements ("if you take this, it will make you better") that can be tested against what really happens. In this instance, they were tested and massively failed.
Intelligent Design lacks even that virtue. Intelligent Design makes no positive predictions of its own, and therefore cannot be directly tested against reality. The closest that ID comes to anything testable is when they claim that some given trait cannot be explained by evolution, but the jump from that to "ID is therefore right" is totally untestable - it would be like a homeopathic practitioner claiming that, "the cure proposed by conventional medicine does not work, therefore my cure must." Put in those terms it is clear that ID's "logic" is nonsensical. Yet for some reason, people seem to find it a perfectly acceptable argument in that context.
2 comments:
See, this is why I really appreciate blogs like yours and The Loom by Carl Zimmer http://www.corante.com/loom/. I'm interested in the debates between creationists and science, no doubt. But just LEARNING from you people is what makes it really worthwhile. I THOUGHT I knew what homeopathic medicine was, but apparently I was wrong. I thought it was just natural medicines (like echinacea for the immune system).
Here's an interesting anomaly noted recently by New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524911.600
13 things that do not make sense
19 March 2005
Michael Brooks
...
4 Belfast homeopathy results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
(Flamers pls note: I'm not defending homeopathic theory or practice, nor even playing devil's advocate - just pointing out a relevant oddity from a reliable source.)
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