A darker breed of homeopath

Contrary to popular belief, I am not fundamentally anti-homeopathy. It’s a nice way of dealing with minor, self-limiting complaints such as backache or stress. Someone listens to you moan for an hour, hands you a placebo and sends you on your way. In fact, recent research into 240 patients with back pain found exactly that: physiotherapy and strong pain killers made no impact on recovery time - reassurance and paracetamol were just as effective. I don’t think the NHS should pay for homeopathy simply because I think this kind of “chin up” therapy doesn’t need a £100-an-hour counsellor and bags of pseudoscience.

The problem, as I see it, is that some homeopaths forget that their treatment is only really useful for minor quasi-ailments, and lurch dangerously into the belief that they are real doctors. So it is with this seriously deluded group of people: Homéopathes sans Frontières, who traipse the world’s disaster zones handing out useless sugar pills to the shell-shocked populace. On their site, in a somewhat brutal translation from French, they claim to have treated wounds, eczema, persistent headaches, diabetes. If what I can infer is correct, their medication is free, while the local hospital charges for their prescriptions. No surprise then, that they are inundated with patients, all of whom will receive a sympathetic ear and some sugar pills. Those with minor symptoms get better; those whose minor symptoms belie something more serious probably don’t. I imagine they had to see a proper doctor eventually, I hope they delay didn’t prove fatal.

They also claim that homeopathic remedies performed as effectively as chloroquine in a double blind study. Here is the study. It doesn’t appear on PubMed.

Here, for example, is a thread on an alternative health forum, with homeopaths discussing the Asian tsunami disaster and what best remedies to use for the treatment of cholera. For those of you who don’t know, cholera is a particularly nasty water-borne disease that often crops up in disaster zones. Wikipedia puts it succintly:

Cholera is one of the most rapidly fatal illnesses known—a healthy person may become hypotensive within an hour of the onset of symptoms and may die within 2-3 hours if no treatment is provided. More commonly, the disease progresses from the first liquid stool to shock in 4-12 hours, with death following in 18 hours to several days without rehydration treatment.

Cholera is not a minor, self-limiting illness. It is one of the most deadly diseases you can expect to catch these days, and sugar pills will do absolutely nothing to stop it.

Got a crisis? Maybe government stooges shot you while you were demonstrating for fair wages? No need to rush to the hospital, these people can prescribe you St John’s Wort for: “intolerable pain from lacerations, deep wounds, stab and gunshot wounds”. Though of course, at 200C, you’d need to drink enough remedy to fill the solar system to get a single molecule of active ingredient. I’d like to pretend homeopaths weren’t setting up shop in warzones, but that would be wishful thinking.

In any disaster zone, the chaos, language and cultural barriers will make it all but impossible for a resident to discriminate a trained health professional distributing effective medicines from a well-meaning yet highly delusional quack handing out placebos. These people look like doctors, act like doctors, and believe themselves to be doctors. They are not. And if the trend for humanitarian homeopathy continues, these people are likely to become as dangerous as the diseases they claim to cure.

11 comments November 11th, 2007