A darker breed of homeopath
November 11th, 2007
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.
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11 Comments Add your own
1. gimpy | November 11th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Frank if you want to prevent homeopathy’s pernicious perversion of medical practice you can’t justify its use as a placebo. If you accept the starting point that it is unacceptable to lie to patients (and homeopaths think this too) then you cannot have homeopathy as a valid placebo treatment. Either the homeopath knows it is bollocks and lies to the patient or else the homeopath believes in their bullshit and then you get the likes of Homéopathes sans Frontières. We have to destroy this corrosive meme at source. If education doesn’t work then legislation will.
As you well know Homéopathes sans Frontières are not the only homeopathic charity focusing in war torn and developmentally stunted parts of the world. There are numerous others, some of which I will blog on next week. The people behind these organisations are decent, honest and upstanding members of their community and include lawyers and chairs of NHS PCTs in their ranks. They also contribute to the sum total of human suffering through their ignorance.
2. Grant Gould | November 11th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
I’ll sy this in defense of the magic-water peddlers: At least with cholera they picked a disease whose accepted treatment actually is water!
3. Dougal | November 12th, 2007 at 12:17 am
I’ve always found it curious the way the back pain story is reported. Is it not the case that the trial subjects who were given conventional medicine had already been shown not to recover from it. In reality it was the placebo, since we already knew they wouldn’t get any better (modulo random effects).
4. Frank the SciencePunk | November 12th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Gimpy - in some respects I agree, but I think the best way to deal with all alternative therapies is tighter regulation. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never got on the back of faith healing - it doesn’t appropriate science and if it doesn’t guarantee efficacy then it’s fine by me.
If we could get homeopaths to admit that faith is the only power their placebos have, it could sit happily alongside astrology as indulgent nonsense.
5. jdc325 | November 12th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
HSF believe that water can help with “intolerable pain from lacerations, deep wounds, stab and gunshot wounds”. I can only speak for myself, but I think I’d prefer (a) something to stop the bleeding and (b) some serious painkilling drugs.
I always think that homeopathy must be a little bit like something from one of those role-playing-games (I was always more of a football fan myself). “If an incapacitated or debilitated character is healed using magic then they immediately stop being incapacitated or debilitated and can act normally.” http://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/rules/rules.asp?NavID=84
6. pv | November 12th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
I’m pretty much in agreement here with gimpy, but I do think that getting homeopathy out of the NHS would be a big step towards destroying what credibility it has among the legions of the credulous. Also I think a concerted effort at persuading Politicians that education rather than pandering to ignorance is morally the right way to go about things would pay off in the long run. Really, the Royal Society should be working their socks of towards this end.
Increasing the sum of human knowledge often seems like two steps forwards and one step back. Think of the current upsurge in fascination with woo and magical medicine as the latest step back. I’m sure it will right itself because we can’t “unknow” everything humanity has learnt. What the cost will be of the current step back in time to the middle ages, who knows? The only sure thing is today’s crop of magical morons won’t live for ever, just like us.
And perhaps schadenfreude might be a tad distasteful here, but it is well to consider that in matters of life and death believers in magic medicine are apt to hurt themselves - as evidenced by the recent death of a child whose homeopathist father decided he knew best. You can’t get more tragic or hurt than that.
7. Peter | November 12th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
great post - I thought April Fools Day had come early.
Getting homeopathy out of the NHS could be difficult initially - v unpopular to shut down a hospital.
I want to start off with getting government funding of homeopathy and acupuncture degrees stopped. This should be an easier target
8. gimpy | November 13th, 2007 at 10:41 am
pv,
I’m sure it will right itself because we can’t “unknow” everything humanity has learnt.
Well we did “unknow” the work of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans for a fair bit during the 7th-10th centuries. Perhaps we truly are entering an ‘age of endarkenment’.
9. HMDS | November 17th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Cindy Crawford on the Oprah Show: It is VERY pleased that Cindy Crawford chose to HIGHLIGHT the fact that she calls herself a “big fan of homeopathy” and that she uses it to
treat a wide variety of ailments of her children and her animals. This is fabulous…and it adds just one more person who is smart and successful and who could choose to use ANY form of healing…but SHE chooses HOMEOPATHY.. .with good reason. The bottomline is that she emphasized that she doesn’t leave home without her homeopathic medicines. Fab again.
10. Erik | December 13th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
I really liked the article on homeopathy for malaria…thanks for the link. Great site, too! Some very good information and opinions, plus funny as hell! Thanks!
11. Erik | December 14th, 2007 at 12:01 am
Ohh, I thought you’d like this picture, too:
SKEETER.JPG
Mosquito landed on a bottle of natural/homeopathic mosquito repellent :)
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