National Health Service

"What Doctors Don't Tell You" about homeopathy?

oracknows — Wed, 17 Aug 2016 01:46:12 +0000

"What Doctors Don't Tell You" about homeopathy?

We in the US certainly have our share of pure quackery; there’s no denying it. After all, we have to take “credit” for inflicting the likes of Joe Mercola, the ever-libeling conspiracy crank and hilariously off=base scientist wannabe Mike Adams, Gary Null, Robert O. Young, and many others on the world. Unfortunately, we sometimes export our quacks elsewhere. Such was the case with expat Lynn McTaggart, who with her husband Bryan Hubbard moved to London to inflict their woo on our friends the Brits.

I first heard of her when I encountered her mystical magical belief that our thoughts can heal the world (and even has a website saying as much complete with advertisements urging readers to “learn about their psychic abilities,” although it’s been “down for maintenance” a long time), basically a variant of that incredible New Age nonsense known as The Secret. I later heard about her through her most visible and apparently successful project, What Doctors Don’t Tell You (WDDTY). As Guy Chapman describes and Josephine Jones catalogues, it is a publication that touts every form of quackery and medical pseudoscience known to human beings. Not surprisingly, McTaggart is antivaccine to the core. Also not surprisingly, she loves to threaten her critics with spurious libel suits.

The reason I mention WDDTY and its creator is because a reader of my not-so-super-secret other blog sent me an article from that fabled repository of nonsense claiming to make The Doctors’ case for homeopathy. The reader asked us to treat the claims seriously and fairly, and I tried. I really, really did. However, the article represents (to use one of my favorite metaphors) a steaming, stinking load of fetid dingos’ kidneys from a scientific and medical standpoint, so much so that I couldn’t restrain myself from unleashing at least some not-so-Respectful Insolence at it. Also, since the source is a British publication, even if one owned by an American expat, letting a character as quintessentially British as Orac have at it seems appropriate, particularly given that it is Orac as channeled through an American with the temerity to take the ‘nym of a character from an obscure 35-year-old British SF series.

What appears to have “inspired” this article, whose author is not identified as far as I can tell, is the pressure being put on the UK government to ban homeopathic remedies within the National Health Service, something that certainly sounds like a good idea to me. After all, it’s not for nothing that I like to refer to homeopathy as The One Quackery To Rule Them All given that it is arguably the form of alternative medicine based on the silliest and most easily demonstrably ridiculous concepts. The first is the “Law of Similars,” which postulates that to treat a symptom you must use something that causes that symptom in healthy people. The second is even more ridiculous, namely the “Law of Infinitesimals,” which states that diluting a homeopathic remedy makes it stronger. Specifically, homeopathy claims that serially diluting a remedy with vigorous shaking between each step (succussation) to the point where it is incredibly unlikely that a single molecule of that remedy remains will produce ever more potent remedies. That doesn’t even get into the methodology of “provings,” which is how homeopaths claim to be able to figure out which remedies should be used for what symptoms and have produced things as outright dumb as homeopathic plutonium and homeopathic antimatter.

So what does WDDTY have to say about homeopathy? Let’s take a look:

Ever since the birth of the National Health Service in 1948, homeopathy has been an integral part of the medical care offered by GPs and hospital doctors. Costing a tiny fraction of the NHS’s overall drug bill—£4 million out of £113 billion last year—homeopathic remedies have offered any NHS doctor who cared to do extra training a clinical alternative to the monoculture of pharmaceutical drugs. Some 400 doctors who took the training now offer homeopathy in addition to standard medical care.

But this option is now under threat, largely as a result of a decade-long propaganda campaign mounted by a small band of British ‘sceptics’ who have lobbied the UK government to ‘blacklist’ homeopathic remedies.

Gee, you say that as though it were a bad thing. I know that if I were a Brit I wouldn’t want my tax dollars going to support such incredibly silly pseudoscience. Eight years ago, I visited London and, while I was there, made it a point to have my picture taken in front of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital as a joke. Unfortunately, the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital was no joke. Almost a year ago, I visited London again to give a scientific talk and extend that to a vacation. Although the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital is no more, magically renamed to the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine but offering the same nonsense, homeopathy in the NHS is still not a joke. Let’s just put it this way. Homeopathy is such utter pseudoscience that £4 million is far too much to be paying for it, even if it is a tiny fraction of the entire NHS budget. In fact, spending even £1 on homeopathy is £1 too much.

At this point, though, I do have to admit to some envy of my British skeptic friends. Over the years, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen British quacks complaining about how a “small band of British ‘sceptics’” causes them them so much problem and, apparently, has an outsized influence on the British government, to the point of endangering what little funding there is left for homeopathy. It’s a narrative that I’d love to believe as true. You never hear this in the US, where quacks aren’t complaining about a “small band of American ‘skeptics’” eliminating homeopathy in the US. The best we’ve come up with is the FDA re-examining how it regulates homeopathy. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad. After all, we have our biggest cranks, like Mike Adams, complaining that a small band of skeptics utterly controls Wikipedia, all led by an American, Susan Gerbic.

Not surprisingly, WDDTY paints the whole kerfuffle as two things: The aforementioned campaign by British skeptics to “suppress” homeopathy and, of course, a “turf war” on the part of MPs who are physicians to “suppress” homeopathy. Again, the complaint is made as though suppressing homeopathy were a bad thing. I certainly don’t consider eliminating such obvious quackery to be undesirable—quite the opposite, in fact.

Now here’s the funny thing. WDDTY openly admits that many homeopathic remedies don’t contain a single molecule of the starting remedy, quoting Professor Colin Blakemore, head of Britain’s Medical Research Council, who sounds just like me in saying, ““If we were to accept the principles of homeopathy, we would have to overturn the whole of physics and chemistry.” As I like to put it, it is simply incredibly implausible that so many well-supported principles of physics and chemistry are not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong, but that’s what would have to be true for homeopathy to work. Apparently WDDTY is so very, very offended that there are scientists telling it like it is about homeopathy and that some of them are actually a bit intemperate in their characterization, which is funny, given how often WDDTY paints conventional medicine as being hopelessly in the thrall of big pharma in equally intemperate terms. Particularly unhappy is a GP named Noel Thomas:

This kind of invective means it’s a dialogue of the deaf, says Noel Thomas, a GP in South Wales. “Opponents make much of the ‘consistent failure to demonstrate effect beyond placebo’ when trials of homeopathy are studied; this is untrue. It is depressing to see the interests of patients being threatened by a small posse of poorly informed and discourteous critics, who mix a little science with denigration and abuse,” he says.

“Only a very few critics confine themselves to what they regard as scientific principles—people who believe that science knows everything about everything, and nothing remains to be explained—scientific ‘fundamentalists’, perhaps.”

Ah, yes. You knew that was coming: The charge of “scientific fundamentalism.” As long as I’ve been in the skeptic biz blogging about pseudoscience like homeopathy, I’ve come to recognize that whenever an advocate of quackery like homeopathy starts whining about “scientific fundamentalism” or “scientism,” it’s because he doesn’t have any science to back up his own position. Indeed, the use of the word “fundamentalism” is very much a case of projection, and inevitably what follows is predictable:

Dr Thomas has put his finger on the nub of the issue. The war is not about evidence, but scientific ideology. Because homeopathic medicines often contain not a single molecule of an active ingredient, opponents mock them as an affront to rationality—and indeed, a threat to the whole of science. Hence the hostility from lobbying organizations such as the self-styled Sense About Science and The Good Thinking Society (a name eerily close to Orwell’s dystopian “Ministry of Truth”), whose attacks echo those of the medieval Vatican against Galileo: it cannot be true, so it’s not.

No, we don’t mock homeopathic “medicines” a threat to the whole of science (although, to be fair, we do mock them as an affront to rationality, because they are). WDDTY also invokes what I like to call the “Galileo gambit,” something I first wrote about over 11 years ago. As I like to say whenever I hear a quack invoking Galileo, for every Galileo, Ignaz Semmelweis, Nicolaus Copernicus, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, etc., whose scientific ideas were either ignored, rejected, or vigorously attacked by the scientific community of his time and then later accepted, there are always untold numbers of others whose ideas were either ignored or rejected initially and then were never accepted—and never will be accepted because they were wrong. The reason the ideas of Galileo, Semmelweis, Copernicus, Darwin, Pasteur, et al, were ultimately accepted as correct by the scientific community is because they turned out to be correct! Their observations and ideas stood up to repeated observation and scientific experimentation by many scientists in many places over many years. The weight of data supporting their ideas was so overwhelming that eventually even the biggest skeptics could no longer stand. That's the way science works.

None of this stops quacks from invoking Galileo’s name a way of characterizing scientists who criticize their pseudoscience as doing so based on the equivalent of religious beliefs. Of course, the critics of homeopathy have science on their side. What does WDDTY have? Why, anecdotes, of course! Several of them, in fact. There’s a patient who had a peritonsillar abscess, supposedly resolved with homeopathic belladonna. Of course, homeopathic belladonna preparations tend to be less “strong”—i.e., less dilute to the point of having actual remedy in them—with potentially enough left to have anticholinergic effects, such as decreasing the saliva production that the patient was having trouble swallowing. One also notes that abscesses can spontaneously drain, commonly after manipulation. What’s more plausible, that homeopathic belladonna cured a peritonsillar abscess within minutes or that it drained spontaneously? Then, of course, there were a whole lot of anecdotes about patients with chronic pain treated with homeopathy who did much better. Never mind the usual confounding effects like placebo effects, regression to the mean, and the like.

Particularly amusing is WDDTY’s attempt to argue that nonhuman uses of homeopathy rule out “placebo effects” as the cause. How does he know it helped? Proponents of alternative medicine will claim that quackery like acupuncture “works” in animals because it couldn’t possibly be due to placebo effects, but they are only sort of correct. The reason is that the only way we can know what animals are feeling is through the observations of humans, who interpret those observations as the animal either being in pain or getting better. Thus, placebo-like effects can occur in animals, but in reality they are a result of a change in perception of the animal’s condition by the owners, who expect results and, after treatment, look for results. If they believe acupuncture will work, often they report results. It’s difficult enough to quantify pain reliably in humans; in animals, it’s even harder. Add to that the tendency of most conditions to regress to the mean or to slowly improve, and, if the acupuncture or chiropractic adjustment is performed as improvement is beginning or around the time when the symptoms are at their worst (which is often the time when treatment will be sought), then it can appear that the treatment “worked.” There appears to be a phenomenon in veterinary medicine known as caregiver placebo effects, which appears to be a real phenomenon. Indeed, frequently, there is little or no correlation between owner-reported observations of animal pain and objective measures.

Then there are attempts to make turn the plural of anecdotes into valid data when it’s not:

In 2006, Tom Robinson, a Dorset GP who offers both conventional medicine and homeopathy, published a 12-month audit of his homeopathic treatments.2 His records showed that he used them for roughly one in 10 patients, the top conditions treated being ear, nose and throat problems, mental health issues, skin disorders and “miscellaneous, such as ‘tired all the time’, bruising, motion sickness, leg cramp, chilblains—all situations,” he says, “where conventional medicine has nothing to offer.

“An analysis of the responses to the homeopathic medicines revealed that 78 per cent of my patients noted an improvement following treatment, even when prescribed in a standard 10-minute GP consultation.”

The paper cited was published in Homeopathy and completely useless, a case series with no control group that boiled down to basically a patient satisfaction survey.

Not surprisingly, WDDTY also invokes flaws in conventional medicine:

A year ago, Lancet Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton reported on a closed-door Wellcome Trust conference in which medical science was pilloried for “questionable research practices”, “many a statistical fairy tale”
and “a research culture that occasionally veers close
to misconduct”.

As a result, says Horton, “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue”.5

Of course, the fact that pharmaceutical medicine has a poor evidence base doesn’t necessarily make a stronger case for homeopathy.

Imagine my relief that WDDTY admitted that problems with conventional medicine don’t mean that homeopathy works. It’s disingenuous as hell, of course. If WDDTY didn’t mean to imply that problems with conventional medicine mean that homeopathy works, why were these problems mentioned? As Ben Goldacre says:

Quacks citing problems in pharma make me laugh. FLAWS IN AIRCRAFT DESIGN DO NOT PROVE THE EXISTENCE OF MAGIC CARPETS.

— ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) January 31, 2013

Yet that is exactly what WDDTY is arguing, while denying that that’s what it is arguing.

Then there’s the “let’s count the randomized controlled trials” gambit:

Much of the data have come from places like Brazil and India, where homeopathy is welcomed as a valuable part of their national healthcare systems. In India, homeopathy is taught in universities and medical schools, sending thousands of qualified doctors every year out into hospitals and the community, and carrying out clinical trials on a range of chronic conditions, including cancer.

By the end of 2014, homeopathy had been tested in 104 RCTs for 61 different medical conditions: 41 per cent were positive; 5 per cent were negative; and 54 per cent were inconclusive.6

One notes that the source of this number is the Faculty of Homeopathy, who published its results on a webpage without peer review. I noticed that at least a few of these studies are ones I’ve blogged about before, describing their poor methodological quality and why they don’t show what homeopaths think they show. Personally, I’ll stick with Sense About Science’s interpretation that “over 150 clinical trials have failed to show that homeopathy works. Some small-scale studies have yielded positive results, but this is due to poor methodologies or random effects.”

Hilariously, near the end, WDDTY tries to argue that homeopathy is “more than just water,” resurrecting some of the silliest pseudoscientific claims about how homeopathy might “work.” One such claim is that there is “electromagnetic communication between in cells” that is affected by homeopathy. This claim is based on work by Jacques Benveniste’s thoroughly debunked experiments from the 1980s and from more recent work of Nobel laureate Professor Luc Montagnier, whose work I deconstructed in detail five years ago. The other “mechanism” by which homeopathy “works” is, according to WDDTY, the ever-popular nanoparticles. Nope. Sorry. That explanation doesn’t fly.

Homeopathy is pseudoscience. In fact, it’s such obvious pseudoscience and it’s so easy to explain why it is pseudoscience that I frequently use it as an example when teaching basic skeptical principles—as do many skeptics. There is no scientific basis for homeopathy, which is rooted in prescientific vitalism and whose precepts were dreamt up before basic chemical principles like Avogadro’s number had been worked out. Even as early as 1842, Oliver Wendell Holmes could explain why homeopathy was a delusion, penning the immortal Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions. Unfortunately, 174 years later and 173 years after the death of homeopathy’s creator Samuel Hahnemann, there exist publications like WDDTY that actively promote the quackery that is homeopathy. Of course, cupping is thousands of years old and still practiced by elite athletes despite its being equally quackery. Truly, the battle against irrationality in human beings is akin to the task faced by Sisyphus.

Yet we must continue to push that boulder up that hill.

oracknows Tue, 08/16/2016 - 21:46

Categories

Physical Sciences

First I must confess to being part of the conspiracy of sceptics who did manage to persuade various retailers to stop stocking WDDTY...

McTaggart is very fond of crying "free speech" (odd as we don't have the same legal concept here as in Merkinania), but then applies the banhammer on the WDDTY Farceberk pages whenever anyone suggests anything critical of them or their stance. F'rinstance I'm banned for having the temerity to point out the lack of medical qualifications or credibility of their editorial board. I'm pretty sure Guy is banned, as are a couple of other occasional UK-ian posters on here (many of us with connections to Bad Science).

WDDTY is really a pernicious rag with no content that stands up to critical scrutiny (check out What Doctors Don't Tell You Don't Tell You).

McTaggart is also fond of the "Big Pharma Shill" line, while taking money hand over fist from supplements companies, folk selling dodgy "tests" and all the usual wooerama in the form of advertising money, which is obviously different to any other form of money...

Perhaps, the homeopathic practitioners would volunteer for a study on greenstick femoral fractures.
The controls will be the populace, both with femoral fractures and conventionally treated vs the practitioner, who shall receive homeopathic analgesics PRN, as much as is desired.
Circulatory overload, of course, shall also be treated via homeopathic medications, administering as much medication as is necessary until circulatory overload has been remedied.
Then, transport to A&E can be initiated.

In an effort to be of assistance, I can provide hammers in the weight of one stone and two stone. Homeopathic heroin (UK only) or morphine (US or UK) to be provided by the homeopathic practitioner, who shall also be the patient.

Additional equipment, heavy lorry, two dozen pallbearers.
Water *is* heavy.

@murmur

McTaggart is also quick to ban the least scent of potential doubt and questioning from her personal blog. This promptly led several of us to play the screenshot game. Even the politest of inquiries was vanished from history.

And now a request: may we reblog this 'with full attribution of course) to WWDDTYDTY?

I got banned from McTaggart's FaceBook pages too. And I read The Field with the aim of writing a debunking review but its so devoid of any actual substance that I couldn't be bothered. I still cover any copies of her atrocious rag that I come across. Sad to say that there were copies in the shop on MacDill AFB in Tampa.

McTaggart is, I suspect, beyond help. She simultaneously attacks science while taking on its clothes to add a veneer of respectability to her nonsense.

On homeopathy, is there a point at which the supposed miracle powers of the "preparation" lose their power or do they become even more effective once they have been through the sewage system and the effluent diluted in reservoirs and lakes? If the power is retained then we can all get the effect for free (although blue green algae might nullify it somewhat).

Of course.

On homeopathy, is there a point at which the supposed miracle powers of the “preparation” lose their power or do they become even more effective once they have been through the sewage system and the effluent diluted in reservoirs and lakes?

As succussion is essential for the remedies to work, it is obvious that flushing will completely eliminate their activity.

the medieval Vatican against Galileo

Medieval... High Renaissance... it's all the same, innit?

"...the top conditions treated being ear, nose and throat problems, mental health issues, skin disorders and “miscellaneous, such as ‘tired all the time’, bruising, motion sickness, leg cramp, chilblains—all situations,” he says, “where conventional medicine has nothing to offer."

But aren't you guys always telling us that Allopathic Physicians just douse everyone coming through the door with drugs?

Now I'm confused. :(

“…the top conditions treated being ear, nose and throat problems, mental health issues, skin disorders and “miscellaneous, such as ‘tired all the time’, bruising, motion sickness, leg cramp, chilblains—all situations,” he says, ...

...that are most susceptible to a placebo effect.

Of course, the reason why conventional medicine "has nothing to offer" for these is because it requires treatments to work better than placebo. If you want to give placebos, though, they will work for these things.

The only mildly plausible explanation for homeopathy is that is structures the water in an orderly fashion, but this would only work for certain mineral ions. A homeopathic preparation of morphine would just be dilute laudanum with little structuring.

It just seems like a scam invented by some old powdered-wig type.

The creator of the Homeopathic scam has a monument erected in his honor, In D.C. no less: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Hahnemann_Monument

Would it be a crime to toiletpaper this monument?

Article: ...dreamt up before basic chemical principles like Avogadro’s number had been worked out.

I don't want the reader to be left with the impression that Avogadro's number is anything more than an arbitrary constant. The passage above almost implies that it is as important as the natural logorithm or pi, nothing could be further from the truth.

There is nothing fundamentally important about this number. Avogadro's Number is just an arbitrary convention.

But there is something fundamentally very important in the concept behind the number; i.e., the knowledge of how many molecules/particles are in any given mass of a pure substance. Avogadro's number might be arbitrary, but the science behind that number (that there are a certain number of particles/molecules per given mass of matter) tells us that 30C homeopathic dilutions don't have a single molecule of starting substance left.

"I don’t want the reader to be left with the impression that Avogadro’s number is anything more than an arbitrary constant."

Odd, I see a formula for Avogadro's constant, from the ratio of the molar mass of the electron to the rest mass of the electron.
That doesn't sound very arbitrary.

My toes curl in horror just thinking of "treating" chilblains with homeopathy. Thank goodness my conventional medicine doctor sensibly prescribed thicker socks instead of magic water.

My toes curl in horror just thinking of “treating” chilblains with homeopathy.

Eesh. I'll stick with Raynaud's.

@12: It is not a fundamental constant per se, but it does give a good idea of the scaling between numbers of particles and aggregate features like grams. It's not far off to say there are about that many particles in an amount of material that humans conventionally deal with - say a gram or so.

Avogadro’s Number is just an arbitrary convention.

Funny, I had a similar conversation about the arbitrariness of mathematics with colleagues a few days ago.
They, too, were mixing up the name we give to a thing with the thing itself.

Defining one kilogram as the weight of one liter of pure water is just an arbitrary convention, too. You can use different units (pounds, stones...) , or go for a different "arbitrary" value and give it a name of your choosing.

But if you accidentally drop on your feet 5 kilograms worth of heavy material, using whichever unit you like won't change the fact that your feet are on the receiving end of 5 kg of crushing matter.

Speaking of Avogadro's number, look for the 17th scientific joke here.
(and all the ones before and after)

And yet, holy water still burns vampires... The 'holy' these days being fairly diluted.

With respect to pressures on the National Health to cover crackpot remedies, I am sad to report that Massachusetts is moving in the wrong direction on this issue.

So called "medical marijuana" has been muscled into place via referendum, a neat little end run around evidence based procedures to ensure safety and effectiveness. The mental health practitioners I know are howling with despair, as patients show up too stoned for any sort of therapy, while the "weed cures cancer" nutters are free to walk among us.

The Lege is no better, having over ridden the veto of a bill requiring health insurance to cover crackpot treatments for "Chronic Lyme" with no provisos for proving first that any such condition really exists.

The big fight today on this front is the corresponding bill to force coverage of acupuncture as if it were a legitimate therapy.

So called “medical marijuana” has been muscled into place via referendum, a neat little end run around evidence based procedures to ensure safety and effectiveness.

Annnd, that would be what we call 'no studies to show' --It is hard to show efficacy while the herb remains schedule I where no researcher has access to any but the govmnt supplied dirt weed out of Mississippi.

I preferre passiflower incarnata for much good that cannabis can be a stand-in for; Though, Tigger please.

That list of problems that genuine medical practitioners supposedly have no treatment for includes some that I have or have had. Medication has helped me greatly. Somehow I don't think that having somebody credulous enough to believe in it can help me by sticking pins in my ass (There are some properly educated people who might want to do that to me anyway, but that's to treat a different sort of issue.).

Any case, the combination of the British Nasty Health Service, as an acquaintance calls it, with homeopathy always brings this to mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0

I started What "What Doctors Don't Tell You" Don't Tell you (wwddtydty.com) - it proved too much of a challenge keeping up with the firehose of crap and it's not had much activity this year. McTaggart launched a number of deranged paranoid personal attacks on friends and me, but they were done so ineptly as to cause no harm.

Ah, perhaps a real, accurate version of "What Doctors Don't Tell You".
Such as, "Your specialist ordered the appropriate treatment, now it has to go before the insurance company board. Shan't take much longer than the next global glaciation".
Or:
"I'm not mentioning it, but that medication that's your primary specialist ordered treatment, which took since the last mass extinction for the insurance board to approve may well have to be replaced with a similar, but mandatory boarded medication, which will likely be approved as the sun becomes a red giant".
Or, the every popular:
"You know that medication that is keeping you alive and preventing disability and disfigurement isn't covered by insurance and won't be until the sun goes white dwarf. However, this medication is and will only cause projectile vomiting, soiled undergarments and between three and six hospitalizations per year".

All, quite close to actual patient level experiences this year.
People can't quite grasp why I have such a homicidal view toward insurance company boards and executives...

Your specialist ordered the appropriate treatment, now it has to go before the insurance company board.

I'm delighted to report it doesn't work that way in the UK. Vive la NHS and down with Big Insurance! waves flag, goes on rampage, etc.

There's definitely room for an anonymous, confessional site for medical students, called "What doctors really won't tell you or their parents".

@Wzrd1 #25

The popular (for a rather low value of popularity) around here for the asthmatic kids is the roulette wheel of which brand of controller medication and rescue inhaler the insurance company will kinda cover some of the cost for this year. It isn't the same brand as last year, and who cares if that last year's actually works for you!

Whoever decided that changing the propellant means you get a whole new full set of years of patent protection for the same medication should have to breath through one of those really thin straws for the rest of their life. And even in the face of no generic alternatives they penalize you for using the name brand.

What kills me is the apparent idea that it is much cheaper to just let all the kids end up in the ER or urgent care and on prednisone for a few weeks to prevent an immediate return ER visit than pay for the inhalers,. Because they act like preventing asthma attacks or DIY rescue treatments has to be the most expensive treatment possible given they don't seem to want to pay for the medications that will keep you out of the ER.

/soapbox

Inhaler, my butt. The civilized world, where medicine is advanced, uses nebulizers for home use.
Oh wait, in the US, those are durable medical equipment and hence, optional.
Third world care for first world prices and rationing aplenty.
/soapbox

I thought when used with a spacer inhalers were as effective. They are more portable, at least what I've seen around here.

Although some people don't like carrying around the spacer. Word from the youth sports is the more asthma away coaches will craft a spacer out of one of the many empty water bottles they have around as it at least seems they work better with the spacer, especially with the newer propellants.

The portable inhalers have *always* worked better with the spacer tube (aerochamber). That's been known for well over 30 years, few insurers want to pay the loose change for one.
But, a full size nebulizer can deliver the same performance (why not? That's what's used in the ED) and one can tailor the dosage rate and amount. A little less portability for superior treatment.
But, one has to carry sterile water and medication with the unit. At a minimum, far superior for home treatment.

I still think a good test for Homeopathy would be curing toe fungus. Not too many ethical concerns and there are other treatments to compare it to.

Wzrd1: I have both a nebulizer and rescue inhalers. My insurer paid for both; I am fortunate to have good employer-provided insurance. I think that given the choice, though, I'd rather rescue inhalers be given. That little difference in portability is significant, because it means they can keep one in their pocket or purse while traipsing around a carnival or hiking in the backcountry or even just shopping. And for people with severe asthma, that little difference in portability can be lifesaving.

Now, for the controller meds, a neb makes sense. But for the rescue meds, it should be as portable as humanly possible, IMHO.

Got to agree: a less than perfectly effective rescue inhaler in your pocket is a lot better than a fabulous nebuliser that's back at your house somewhere :-)

Wzrd1: I also have both a nebulizer and rescue inhalers in addition to two other inhalers used daily. My Medicare Advantage coverage paid for all but a small copay.

OTOH, I have a friend who has ended up in the ER 4 times in the last 6 months, where they give her nebulizer treatments, but they sent her home with an Albuterol inhaler. Medical coverage in this country is confusing.

I can not respect the argument, that political muscle is an acceptable excuse for over riding the evidence based FDA approval mechanisms in those cases where I personally enjoy using the substances in question on for recreational purposes.

I simply can not.

@Robert L Bell #36, so you're against opioid analgesics? Some use them for enjoyment (called abuse), so there is incessant pressure to outlaw them, despite major strong arming by those of the public that rely upon them to avoid writhing on the floor in agony.
Meanwhile, some receive respite from pain from using marijuana and there is some evidence to support their claims of pain relief, but research has been forbidden in this nation, all over political pressure against "reefer madness", nonsense that goes back to the Randolph Hearst days.

My wife has run into "we're no longer stocking the test strips for your glucose meter so you'll have to get a different model" a couple times.

The little supermarket where I shopped this morning didn't have the usual rags griping about Hillary health, but in between competing books for Hindu art therapy (Zen) and Islamic art therapy(mandalas) was an issue of WDDTY telling how to completely eliminate pain. I understand death has that effect, but I prefer to forgo the treatment.

Published 2009-01-16 (Rev. 2014-02-05) -- The World Health Organization estimates that 65 - 80 percent of the population use holistic naturopathic medicine as a primary form of health care.
Author: Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, PhD.
She goes on to quote:
"If everyone knew they could prevent any disease with plant extracts, medicinal herbs, natural vitamins, minerals, and supplements, as well as having peace of mind, the pharmaceutical and medical industry would collapse overnight."

I have been involved in the medical world since 1955 - in both allopathic as well as other medical sciences which do not rely on long confusing Latinised names to show patients just how smart their doctors are. How good is a system that is so expensive that only the privileged few can afford it - and then - only at the whim of their Insurance company who is surely far more qualified to decide what should or should not be prescribed.
It would be a courtesy - as well as s show of humility, tolerance and understanding if the shrill voices of the 'naysayers', most of whom have little knowledge of which they speak - and often do nothing more than parrot what someone else has said - would stop for a moment and listen to just how ridiculous they sound.
What happened to "Primum Non Nocere?" Just look at the list of dangerous possibilities and side-effects that accompany most drugs. Just look at the fact that avoidable medical error accounts for nearly 300,000 deaths a year in the US alone. Just look at the abysmal outcomes with sleep disorders - despite the billions of dollars being wasted on night-time intervention, where the problem is largely of daytime origin. And then - take a long and hard look at one of the facile comments made earlier on about 'placebo" treatment. If what I do for a patient relieves them of their symptoms and they feel better - who has the right to tell me I'm wrong? Just remember what Voltaire wrote - way way back in 1770 - "The Art of Medicine lies in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease". What we perpetrate, condone and, worse still, perpetuate, is that odd combination of Idiopathic and Iatrogenic science which - when translated means nothing other than "I don't have a clue what's wrong or how to fix it" and "Gee - I'm so sorry - It was the treatment I prescribed that caused the problems you now have.". If you do not have respect for others - how can you possibly have respect for yourselves. It might be a great idea if those hysterical, tambourine banging, RCT-DB-Meta-data, Cochrane Collaboration fundamentalists took a long and hard look at the very large percentage of the world that uses Chinese, Ayurvedic, Kanpo, Aboriginal and other time-honored and successful remedies, and realised that the hotbed of cancers, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and the host of other chronic and crippling (physical as well as financial) diseases reside right slap-dab in the heart of the Western Disease Management Business that is so blindly followed. Universities teach Dysfunctional Medicine. It is all about what is wrong, how to diagnose it and how to try to fix it. Functional Medicine looks at the causes and prevention. I know what my choice is. Oh - and by the way - I have the deepest respect and regard for those amazing doctors, nurses and other health professionals who so passionately and professionally address, heal and repair the horrendous effects of accidents, injury and other physical defects. They are truly heroes in my eyes.

Ah, the good old "nature cures everything", save for a greenstick femoral fracture. That needs accupuncture and hypnotherapy.
Or something.

I do ponder though, whyinhell Voltaire is so germane to modern medicine? Are we now to also regress back to the humours of the body, evil winds and miasma theory of disease - despite seeing the microorganisms that cause infectious disease with a microscope and the ability to culture most of them?
What precious little weed will treat my wife's insulin dependent diabetes, which was never treatable until insulin was discovered, purified and used to treat the disease?
Well, before, a shovel was used to bury the one who died of complications of diabetes.
I'd just as soon not bury my wife, thank you, all woo peddlers. Indeed, offer such to her, be at risk of finding one of my fighting knives that I keep readily available at all times being used as an acupuncture treatment for your disease.*

*Excuse my foul mood. I saw my ortho today, thankfully, no separation of the shoulder, just the ligaments are stretched by the old sprain. The poking, prodding and manipulation would've been bad enough, but I also received an injection into the afflicted area and I'm feeling a lot sore and that means, adrenaline gets released and I get extremely irritable. Irritable enough to hit someone over the head with a Buick. ;)
OK, maybe not irritable enough to violate the laws of physics.
But, for once, something hurts more than my back does!
Doctor and I are agreed, a course of treatment with a physical terrorist should do the trick for the shoulder.
Note the lack of noxious nostrums to treat the problem.

That should tide me over until my home GCU can swing back, grow me a new body and transplant me into it. ;)

@Roger Price: Your comment might make some sense if it weren't for the fact that the US is extremely unusual in having a system where large numbers of people can't afford healthcare, and if the fields of genetic medicine, immunology, preventive medicine and epidemiology did not exist.

At least, unlike most quackery shills, you at least acknowledge the existence of trauma medicine. Your straw man is still made of straw.

DOROTHY M. NEDDERMEYER, PH.D.:
Dr. Dorothy, Hypnotherapist, is an internationally recognized authority on bridging Science, Spirit, and Human Potential with over 30+ years experience.

Wzrd1
On the legalisation of marijuana, I used to be somewhere on the spectrum between "sympathetic" and "indifferent". But the last few years we keep hearing of stronger forms of the stuff (or marijuana derived products) which can be, or are, significantly dangerous :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/33047282/synthetic-cannabis-more-…
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36988891

Will it be possible to distinguish between the milder and dangerous forms in a legal framework?

@Peter Dugdale, obviously yes. The law can distinguish between street heroin and morphine. Designer drugs can be outlawed in the same way, with the term "synthetic compounds related to" or similar terms.
Just as we still have whipping cream nitrous oxide used to still whip cream, but medical nitrous still remains regulated.

Indeed, if marijuana were legalized for medical usage, it doesn't uncouple it from regulation at all, any more than my wife's morphine sulfate is unregulated, despite a demand by abusers of the drug.
But, the question becomes, if we regulated marijuana like we regulate alcohol and tobacco products, how much demand would there by for the illicit, heaven knows what's in it "spice" crap? Users find a product when their desired drug isn't available. When it is available, they go for their usual source.
The funny thing is, neither my wife or I could use marijuana, we're both extremely allergic to it. A mere whiff of the smoke and we're having difficulty breathing.

But then, a *lot* of money is being made in support and prosecution of our war on drugs, with a fair amount being distributed just prosecuting marijuana possession. It's unlikely that that source of income would be given up easily by agencies so addicted to such easy money and forfeiture laws.

The US has far more people in prison per capita than even dictatorships, a hell of a lot over drug possession and far too many due to possession of reefer madness nonsense, while chronic pain patients cannot lawfully benefit from a potential relief from pain or even have analgesic qualities legally evaluated.
To the point where one cannabinoid is illegal to even study for treatment of glaucoma in the US, but in the rest of the world study was allowed. Zero THC, no other intoxicant, promising effects against glaucoma, but the US prohibited even that specific compound from being studied in the US.
That isn't sensible law!
Hell, it's illegal to grow hemp of any sort, even hemp with a THC content that one would have to smoke an entire field of it to acquire the same THC content of a "joint"! So, the US imports processed hemp from Canada, to hell with "Grown in the USA" for that plant product.

Apparently, the US has entirely failed to learn a lesson that should have been learned between 1920 and 1933, prohibition only strengthens organized crime.

The World Health Organization estimates that 65 – 80 percent of the population use holistic naturopathic medicine as a primary form of health care.

I am saddened but not enormously shocked to learn that the majority of humankind cannot afford access to medicine that works.

I sincerely doubt that they use "holistic naturopathic medicine" (i.e. Western anti-science quackery) as a *primary* health care route. This is probabbly the usual bait-and-switch: adding everybody who ever bought a vitamin pill and everybody who lives in a country with poor health infrastructure, and counting them all as devotees of the cult of BecauseNatural.

Chinese, Ayurvedic, Kanpo, Aboriginal and other time-honored and successful remedies

Tell us more of these successful Aboriginal remedies, and of the health and life expectancies they have successfully delivered to Aboriginal populations.

@Herr Doktor Bimler (#47)
If you get an answer to that, try asking the dingleberry why he felt he had to pad his list of "time-honored and successful remedies" by mentioning Chinese medicine twice. "Kanpo" is just the Japanese word for "traditional Chinese medicine," after all.

I have been involved in the medical world since 1955 – in both allopathic as well as other medical sciences which do not rely on long confusing Latinised names to show patients just how smart their doctors are.

Wait – the only non-"allopathic" medical "science" is the one that uses comically alchemical Latin names.

The *real* irony here is that allopathy - the practice of bloodletting purging and so on in order to rebalance the humours - is extinct other than in the offices of naturopaths and like quacks.

Oh I know they *mostly* don't do bloodletting any more, but the talk of vital forces and the reliance on ancient wisdom as opposed to empirically validated fact, is precisely what characterised allopathic medicine. It lived for nearly two and a half thousand years, and only died out in the 19th Century. And of course the science that got rid of allopathy is the same science the quacks reject because it does not suit their beliefs.

Funny old world.

Nicely done, Narad. I'm afraid however that this one suffers from an extremely insensitive irony meter.

"If what I do for a patient relieves them of their symptoms and they feel better – who has the right to tell me I’m wrong?"

I suspect it would be the county attorney or state attorney general, if you're practicing medicine without a license.

"I have the deepest respect and regard for those amazing doctors, nurses and other health professionals who so passionately and professionally address, heal and repair the horrendous effects of accidents, injury and other physical defects."

As do I. I also have great respect and sympathy for those who address, and attempt to heal and repair the damage caused by woo-promoters and quacks who steer patients away from effective care, and and cause grievous harm and preventable deaths.

"I have been involved in the medical world since 1955.."

How old is Dorothy? Does she have a picture in her playroom?

Ellie, I think it's Roger Price who is claiming to have been involved for 55 years, not the hypnotist.

Check out the hypnotist's website if you want to see some nonsense. She does "past live regression" in addition to smoking cessation.

Sorry, make that "involved since 1955", not 55 years.

"She does “past live regression” in addition to smoking cessation."

That almost makes some kind of sense. You need only be regressed to a past life that occurred before smoking was invented. But don't go too far back or you'll turn into a fish.

@rs #55, so *that* explains my advanced skills of a sturgeon, hanging about the bottom for a disconcerting amount of time. I regressed back to being a fish!
Or something. ;)

Yeah, I'm the joker that actually does hang out at the bottom of the pool long enough to worry people.
Not bad, as I'm a smoker.

@ Woo Fighter Thanks. I misread it. I wouldn't have even asked, except I found her picture and she didn't look as though she had been in "practice" for 60+ years. I don't know about Roger Price.

The World Health Organization estimates that 65 – 80 percent of the population use holistic naturopathic [sic] medicine as a primary form of health care.

I am saddened but not enormously shocked to learn that the majority of humankind cannot afford simply don't have access to medicine that works.

FTFY. Oh, and the percentage range qualified by "the population" is predictably an utter crock (see Table 69.1). The attempted deception of "a primary form of health care," I take it, is obvious. The same could be said of bandages.

Chinese, Ayurvedic, Kanpo, Aboriginal and other time-honored and successful remedies

The Ayurveda grift is passe. All the hipsters will be moving on to Unani Healing Practices soon.

ERANU!

OK, that's a bit British.

This website, after reading through most of it's articles, would appear to be objective to the uninformed... HOwever, this site supports modern day medical quackery, yes, medical science is the new quackery and attacks natural, holistic medicine, that actually works. This site is rubbish and should be taken with a quacks grain of rock salt.

My, how positively Orwellian!
Evidence based medicine is quackery, but evidence free "medicine" is real medicine.

Sorry, but I'll stick with evidence based medicine, based upon science and experimentation, not woo and BS claims.
As a case in point, how would "natural, holistic medicine" treat hyperthyroidism? Modern medicine treats it with drugs that block the production of thyroid hormone.
What's "natural, holistic medicine" treat hyperthyroidism with, other than a shovel for a premature grave?

@Peter: How long did it take you to read most of the articles, and how did you manage, during that no doubt protracted exercise, to escape learning anything?

"after reading through most of it’s articles"

Since this is Orac we're talking about I am convinced you're a liar.

@rs #63, that came out not as a response to Peter.
I'll stand by my assessment of Orwellian doublethink on his part, where evidence based medicine is quackery and "natural, holistic medicine" is considered genuine medicine, despite its fact free existence.
So, I'd not call him a liar, I'd call him willfully delusional. A delusion is bad enough when it's involuntarily experienced, when it's willfully experienced in place of reality, it's simply very, very sad.

would appear to be objective to the uninformed

Those uninformed of the meaning of "insolence", which hardly aims to be objective. :)

@Jay #66, while Orac prefers insolence, I prefer insolent hyperbole to ludicrous proportions.
Following, of course, "the next logical step" (read, 100 large steps onward toward massive fail land), in a humorously over the top exaggeration.

Hence, on some sites, where the far right brain trust blames Obama for things he wasn't even born for, let along been in office for, I refer to it as "The Time Machine Gambit", elaborating on full the delights of the Obama Time Machine and Obama's superpowers. Alas, he lacks a sonic screwdriver and never carries the day. ;)
Although, his time machine isn't a TARDIS, it's a TURDIS (after a specific brand of London portapot unit). ;)
In that specific scenario hyperbole, there are also weeping angels, alas, weeping over lousy puns and beyond absurd comparisons to starkly outline the epic failures in comprehending causality on the part of the one drawing my ire. :)
Alas, in those stories, reality and the storyline share one common true reality. I lack a TARDIS or TURDIS, however, I have a RETARDIS, which slows time agonizingly. :P:p:P:p

"This website, after reading through most of it’s articles, would appear to be objective to the uninformed…"

Well, the uninformed deserves praise if it has actually read as many as 1/100 of the articles appearing on this site over the years.

Sadly it is still uninformed. :(

@DB #68, would that dinner were presented on the countertop and with robotics.
IN our world, you're worthless, we concede.

@Wzrd1

I am a fan of that approach, nothing better to make them realise the ridiculousness of their argument.

Myself, my metier is to adopt a pose of cheerful bonhomie* and counter all arguments using the principles of Suzette Haden Elgin's "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-defence".

This can drive trolls wild and I've had some great results, meaning that minds were changed and people deleted comments.

Anybody interested, apparently the basics may be found here: http://elfwreck.homecircle.org/stuph/VSD_Basics.pdf

*Two French words in one sentence, what a coup :)

Of course, two words in French does not necessarily serve one's cause well in an "always" sense.
After all, there's...
C'est merde. ;)

Jay...and a third in the ultimate sentence.

Oh, for the record, that's the essence of my fluency in French. :/

@ Shay - Indeed ;)

@Wzrd1 - Fair enough, you are an ocean away after all.

For those who want to follow the ongoing campaign to get the NHS to stop wasting money on homeopathy, a lot of the hard work is being done by the Good Thinking Society (which is run and advised by such skeptical luminaries as Simon Singh, Chris French and Richard Wiseman): http://goodthinkingsociety.org/projects/nhs-homeopathy-legal-challenge/

The Long Dark Tea-Time of Homeopathy

oracknows — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 02:00:00 +0000

The Long Dark Tea-Time of Homeopathy

Sometimes politicians actually get it right.

I know, I know, it makes me choke on my words to admit it, but sometimes politicians can actually get science right. I'm referring to something that happened in the U.K., yesterday, when the Science and Technology Select Committee delivered its verdict on homeopathy. Indeed, the Committee has gone so far as to call for the complete withdrawal of NHS funding and official licensing for homeopathy. The report is called Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, and I'll cut to the chase. This is what the report concluded:

By providing homeopathy on the NHS and allowing MHRA licensing of products which subsequently appear on pharmacy shelves, the Government runs the risk of endorsing homeopathy as an efficacious system of medicine. To maintain patient trust, choice and safety, the Government should not endorse the use of placebo treatments, including homeopathy. Homeopathy should not be funded on the NHS and the MHRA should stop licensing homeopathic products.

It's about time.

I realize that homeopathy is a frequent topic of supporters of science-based medicine, but that's just because it's about as pure a form of quackery as there is. After all, homeopathy is, more than almost any other "complementary and alternative" medicine modality, pure placebo given that homeopathic remedies above 12C (10²⁴-fold dilution) are unlikely to have a single molecule of the original remedy left over. By the time homeopaths reach a 30C dilution (10⁶⁰-fold), it's incredibly unlikely that even a single molecule of active compound is left in the mixure, given that Avagadro's number is on the order of 6.02 x 10²³, 10³⁷-fold lower than the dilution factor. These remedies are either left as water or packed into sugar pills and sold. It is the very fact that real homeopathy (not herbal remedies labeled as "homeopathic" when they are not) uses nothing more than water or alcohol diluents that makes it a perfect example to study how an inert "cure" can seem so compelling to so many people.

Moreover, the very principles of homeopathy are so ridiculous a their core from a scientific standpoint that it makes an excellent test case to examine how quackery can flourish. Stripped to its core, homeopathy is nothing more than a tarted up version of sympathetic magic, in which Frazier's Law of Similarity ("like cures like") is combined with the Law of Contagion (a.k.a. the "memory of water," in which water somehow magically remembers only the good "homeopathic" bits that it's been in contact with and somehow never remembers all the pollution, poison, and poo). Add to that the magical ritual in which it is supposedly the "succussion" between each dilution step that imbues the homeopathic remedy with its magical powers, and belief in homeopathy is nothing more than a belief in pure magic. Make no mistake, many are the times I've had homeopaths like Dana Ullman and others piously and condescendingly inform me that homeopathic remedies are more than just diluted substances but that it is the succussion that imbues them with their potency.

Unfortunately, the report can't describe homeopathy in these terms, but there are certainly some excellent and very insightful observations, first, for example, about the plausibility of "like cures like":

We conclude that the principle of like-cures-like is theoretically weak. It fails to provide a credible physiological mode of action for homeopathic products. We note that this is the settled view of medical science. (Paragraph 54)

We consider the notion that ultra-dilutions can maintain an imprint of substances previously dissolved in them to be scientifically implausible. (Paragraph 61)

That's nothing more than a polite way of saying that "like cures like" is complete bollocks. (This is a British report, after all; so I think I should use the lingo.) Ditto the conclusion that water has "memory" that can maintain an imprint of substances previously dissolved on them. Of course, I would have put it another way, but then I don't write reports for political bodies. I would also have been a lot less polite and a lot more--shall we say?--insolent than Martin Robbins was about this quote from Dr Peter Fisher, Director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital:

Dr Fisher stated that the process of "shaking is important" but was unable to say how much shaking was required. He said "that has not been fully investigated" but did tell us that "You have to shake it vigorously [...] if you just stir it gently, it does not work"

I've always wondered about this. As many may recall, Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, recommended smacking the vial containing the remedy being diluted against a leather-bound Bible as a way of shaking it. Martin may find it rather curious that homeopaths have never figured out how much shaking is needed between dilutions or how shaking supposedly "potentizes" the homeopathic remedy. Unfortunately, our National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine appears to have stepped in to fund a study of just that question, as I pointed out two years ago. Yes, that's right. NCCAM has paid for what can only be described as pseudoscience. Would that our own government would have the clarity of vision to conclude, as Science and Technology Select Committee did, that homeopathy is not only not worth studying anymore but that doing so in clinical trials is unethical:

There has been enough testing of homeopathy and plenty of evidence showing that it is not efficacious. Competition for research funding is fierce and we cannot see how further research on the efficacy of homeopathy is justified in the face of competing priorities.

It is also unethical to enter patients into trials to answer questions that have been settled already. Given the different position on this important question between the Minister and his Chief Scientist, we recommend that the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor John Beddington, investigate whether ministers are receiving effective advice and publish his own advice on this question.

Finally, I've discussed the ethics of trials of homeopathy, particularly in Third World countries. To understand the reason why clinical trials of homeopathy are unethical comes down to a question of informed consent. One of the overarching principles of clinical trials is that subjects must enter into them only after truly informed consent. That means that the patient must understand what the therapy being tested is, what its odds of helping are (as best as can be estimated by what is known about it at the time of the trial), and what the potential side effects are. Does anyone think that homoepaths actually describe what homeopathic remedies are to potential research subjects or patients. If they did, they'd have to explain that homeopathic remedies are water, that they have been diluted to the point where not a single of active molecule is likel to remain in them, and that science says that this is impossible. Indeed, to be truthful, a homeopath would have to explain that, for homeopathy to work, huge swaths of what we know about multiple areas of science, including physics, chemistry, and biochemistry would have to be not just wrong but totally, completely, and spectacularly wrong. I'm not talking about cutting edge science needing to be wrong, either. Cutting edge science is often later found to be incorrect or not supported by subsequent data. No, I'm talking about well-established science, such as the law of mass action or the chemistry and physics that say that the "memory of water" is so improbable form a scientific standpoint that it is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from impossible.

Of course, no homeopath would ever tell a patient or potential research subject anything like that. It would be the truth, but homeopaths believe in their woo, as do, unfortunately, many of the physicians suckered in to doing studies on these "remedies." Even physicians not entirely sold on homeopathy tend to be so open-minded that their brains fall out when it comes to the possibility of the "memory of water."

Even so, the MPs actually got it:

For patient choice to be real choice, patients must be adequately informed to understand the implications of treatments. For homeopathy this would certainly require an explanation that homeopathy is a placebo. When this is not done, patient choice is meaningless. When it is done, the effectiveness of the placebo--that is, homeopathy--may be diminished. We argue that the provision of homeopathy on the NHS, in effect, diminishes, not increases, informed patient choice.

This single brief paragraph is shockingly insightful, so much so that I find it hard to believe that it was written by a panel made up of politicians.

Perhaps the single most important conclusion of this report is the acknowledgment that when the government funds a treatment, it puts it imprimatur on that treatment. For all intents and purposes, by funding homeopathy, the British government is endorsing it as being evidence-based and effective, and this report recognized this fact. Indeed, it is because of this that the report explicitly recommends that the NHS stop funding homeopathy and other woo not based in science and evidence. This recommendation is also, in essence, a recommendation that the most famous bastion of homeopathic quackery in the world, the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (visited three years ago by yours truly), be defunded and closed. The MPs also recommended that homeopathic medicines be delicensed:

It is unacceptable for the MHRA to license placebo products--in this case sugar pills--conferring upon them some of the status of medicines. Even if medical claims on labels are prohibited, the MHRA's licensing itself lends direct credibility to a product. Licensing paves the way for retail in pharmacies and consequently the patient's view of the credibility of homeopathy may be further enhanced. We conclude that it is time to break this chain and, as the licensing regimes operated by the MHRA fail the Evidence Check, the MHRA should withdraw its discrete licensing schemes for homeopathic products.

The MHRA is the Medicines and Health Care products Regulatory Agency. Basically, it appears to be the U.K. equivalent to our very own Food and Drug Administration. Being an American, I had not previously been aware that the MHRA licensed homeopathic remedies. And I thought the DSHEA of 1994 was bad! At least the FDA doesn't license homeopathic remedies! In any case, it's good to see the MPs tell it like it is and point out that it is not appropriate for a government body charged with regulating drugs and medical products to license placebos and confer upon them the status of real medicine.

Is this report likely to lead to action? Who knows? I'm not British and am therefore not familiar with British politics; perhaps some of my British readers could comment on the likelihood that these recommendations will become law and policy. Even as a Yank, though, I do know that Prince Charles is a huge booster of homeopathy and other varieties of quackery, and I can't help but wonder what sort of influence he will bring to bear on the threat to his beloved homeopathic hospitals and remedies. On the other hand, this is a pretty resounding, damning report. Moreover, health care money is tight in the U.K., just as it is pretty much everywhere else in the wake of the global recession. Add this report to the budgetary pressures that will demand more efficiency and more evidence that what the NHS spends its limited resources on, and one can't help but hope that this hard, cold reality, coupled with the political cover of this report, will lead to decreasing support and funding for homeopathy in the U.K.

A guy can dream, can't he?

oracknows Mon, 02/22/2010 - 21:00

Categories

Physical Sciences

Both myself and my wife work for the NHS and have been annoyed with the funding provided for CAM since we first heard about it.

While it is very refreshing to see politicians coming down on the side of reason I find it doubtful that anything will change quickly. CAM is popular with middle class twits that are to cool ( or in touch with their spiritual side ) to actually educate themselves, and this is the section of the population that poltical parties like to woo. Also as Orac said Prince Charles will no doubt stick his oar in.

Homeopathy on NHS is a political decision because of the pressure of reducing fiscal deficit as elections are looming late this year.

The repercussions of this are already starting to be felt;
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/23/2827835.htm?
This article "Homeopathy Not For Children" quotes a pharmacy consultant from Melbourne, Australia.
Hopefully, once the beast of pseudo-science is shown to not be the juggernaut a lot of people thought it was, more unbiased analysis and testing will make its way into the public arena.

a.k.a. the "memory of water," in which water somehow magically remembers only the good "homeopathic" bits that it's been in contact with and somehow never remembers all the pollution, poison, and poo).

I don't at all believe in homeopathy, but: according to homeopaths, that's because normal water doesn't go through "succussion" (shaking the water by forcefully striking the container the water is in). I've no clue as to if they have any explanation as to why things like rain drops striking the ground and river water going through extreme turbulence doesn't count.

I have not had a chance to read this yet but I will when I wake up (03:35 right now, not a reasonable hour to read something like this) but I am happy to see the Douglas Adams reference used in the title of this post.

This single brief paragraph is shockingly insightful, so much so that I find it hard to believe that it was written by a panel made up of politicians.

Well one of the Panel, Evan Harris, is a medical doctor with a track record of criticising quackery. In fact he's a special hate figure of the homeopaths.
It's also interesting to note that a member of that committee did try and water down the report after being lobbied hard by homeopaths.

As for the question of whether this report will make a difference?

Yes.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) were robustly criticised in the report for failing to regulate pharmacies properly with respect to homeopathy. They clearly recognised this concern some time back and were able to pre-empt this criticism with revision of their guidance documents on homeopathy.

The MHRA will also find themselves under considerable pressure to change their practice with respect to homeopathy.

However, I imagine the debate on NHS funding for homeopathy may be more protracted. Unlike the RPSGB or MHRA there are votes to be won or lost when it comes to politicians and the NHS. I think we can look forward to dirty tricks campaigns, the unconstitutional intervention of our Queens feckless son, Charles the future King, who has form on this, as well as debates on 'patient choice', as supported by the mainstream parties, being subverted to include non-efficacious treatments. Ultimately though this report will serve as an excellent counter argument to the above.

The only problem with this is the UK media.

You may have heard of the Daily Mail - the paper with a mission to separate the entire physical world into object that either cause or cure cancer - which is quite partial to woo of all forms. Expect lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth from them.

There is the Telegraph as well. Not exactly reality-based media either.

The thing is, in theory we have NICE, which scientifically evaluates treatments based on expense and outcomes; this tends to infuriate both Big Pharma, who get annoyed that expensive-and-of-marginal-use treatments don't get funded, and the Alt-Med brigade, who don't like the nasty insistence on only funding things that work.

And it only took a decade or two for them to figure out that homeopathy is not better than a placebo. I wonder if having all those skeptics "attempt suicide" by "overdosing" on homeopathic sleeping pills had any effect ?
I hope so.

Homeopathy is dying in England now if the polititions are debating it. The final nail in the coffin will come soon. Probably when the Daily Mail decides that homeopathy causes cancer.

Orac, if you're going to use British lingo, you could at least refer to Homeopaths as 'Muppets'.

A lot of this is thanks to one fantastic MP, Dr Evan Harris (MP for Oxford) who is a champion of science and evidence based medicine. If we had a few more like him then parliament would spend most of its time doing useful things.

Hi Orac- a couple of clarifications for you.
1) the MHRA doesn't license sugar pills in the same way that it does 'proper' medicine. there is a rather woolly law that was passed in response to an EU statute that requires member states to allow alternative medicine to be marketed as long as it is shown to be a 'folk' remedy. The committee's decision doesn't answer the question of how this will be done if the MHRA don't do this.
2) the government have no legal duty to carry out the recommended actions from the committee, and given their track history with the external advisory panel on drug abuse
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8344895.stm
there is probably little that will be done.
3) as has already been mentioned a lot of the key electorate (middle class 'earth mothers etc' are into homeopathy, and with an election looming I doubt either side will do much, even the third party here (lib dem) whose members were key people on this committee, are being very quiet about this.

TV and radio coverage of this report has been very annoying. To be fair, the journalists themselves have basically got it right; but their insistence on balance means that, as well as having a scientist explaining the committee's findings, you get a doctor sympathetic to homoeopathy chanting 'in my experience in works'.

"You have to shake it vigorously...", just before you prepare your homeopathic concoction. Slap the leather, so to speak. That's homeopathy!

Even so, the MPs actually got it:

At least one of the members of the select committee is a doctor as well as a politician (Evan Harris) which may help.

The select committee actually has a fairly decent recent track record. They have also previously supported research using hybrid embryos.

The likelihood of anything happening soon is pretty slim: first homeopathy on the NHS is funded on a hospital level so the government will have to pass policy through the house of commons stopping hospitals from funding woo. There is also apparently a lot of support for an early day motion (basically 'lets talk about this') supporting homeopathy that will have to be combated.

I think the best we can hope for is to use this report as a rallying point to push the UK gov to remove woo from the NHS but I wouldn't expect results any time soon. It should supply good support for debating homeopaths

I agree with you on them getting it right, I've blogged what I consider the highlights myself. You mention the polite rebuttals of the claims of homeopathy. There's a slightly more direct one in the report where they choose to slap the faces of (some of) the homeopathy supporters who wrote to the committee:

âWe regret that advocates of homeopathy, including in their submissions to our inquiry, choose to rely on, and promulgate, selective approaches to the treatment of the evidence base as this risks confusing or misleading the public, the media and policy-makers."

Have to love them including "including in their submissions to our inquiry".

They also recommended that the government disclose how much money was spent on homeopathy or supporting homeopathic hospitals.

I'm not that happy with the reasoning for their not banning homeopathy from pharmacies (the arguments offered seem poor logic to me), but what they have chosen to do seems a solid move in the right direction.

RETRACTION: I've just had a search and it appears that there isn't an Early Day Motion in support of Homeopathy

This is really scientific fundamentalism, not science. Such science is trying to sell the idea that homeopathy cannot work because science does not seem to understand how it could possibly work. Experiments are then arranged that test homeopathic medicine the same way as pharmaceuticals, although this is completely different to the way homeopathic doctors prescribe. Unsurprisingly, the results are not impressive. This is the Dark Ages, not scientific argument.

As a regular user of homeopathic medicine, having seen it work successfully on myself, friends and family members, it is really mind blowing to see such closed minded orthodoxy being sold as "science". What is needed is more serious research, not political condemnation.

I am aware than science does not understand the process. I am also quite unimpressed by the pseudo-scientific explanations given by homeopaths. At the same time, it is quite evident to anyone who has taken some time to investigate, that some of these remedies evidently function. I would very much like to know why and how ... not to listen to Scientific Ayatollah telling me that it cannot work because it is outside their systems of thinking. Science is investigation, not pontification.

A big part of the problem with the public's perception of homeopathy - in the UK at least - is that it is so often confused with herbalism and folk remedies. On the forums I'm on, there have been several posters writing about their good experiences with things like herbal cough medicines, witchazel ointment and so on, and panicking that the government is about to ban these.
I must have written about three separate forum posts just yesterday, explaining that homeopathy is no more than magic water, contains no active ingredients, and that the arnica cream that they put on their bruises isn't homeopathic.
Of course, the homeopaths don't do a lot to lift these misconceptions - they're delighted to have their products confused for stuff that actually has some effect.

"1) the MHRA doesn't license sugar pills in the same way that it does 'proper' medicine. there is a rather woolly law that was passed in response to an EU statute that requires member states to allow alternative medicine to be marketed as long as it is shown to be a 'folk' remedy. The committee's decision doesn't answer the question of how this will be done if the MHRA don't do this."

I have a simple solution. We need to implement a separate body to clear these "folk" remedies. Something like a "British Organisation for Genuine but Untested Science". Any "medication" cleared by this body would obviously need to be marked in such a way that it was obvious that it wasn't a real medication, and one could do this by requiring that they have an acronym-based logo for this alternative clearing body prominently shown on their labelling.

Sanker, this isn't about pontification. It's not a case of science being unable to determine how homeopathy works, more a case of the basic premise being so improbable as to be practically physically impossible. If homeopathy works as claimed then we need to revisit much of what we understand about physics. This would be as drastic as finding that rabbit dreams are the source of gravitation forces in our universe, or to use an example from biology, it'd be akin to discovering that heart is the source of human compassion.

Homeopathy has already been studied in great depth, like many other forms of medical woo, and found wanting. I've no problem with people buying homeopathic products, but they should not be considered to be medicines any more than prayer should be bottled and sold as a cure for depression.

Your use of the term "scientific ayatollahs" is indicative of self projection. Religious people regularly accuse atheists of having "faith", or atheism itself being a religion, but this is an equivocation fallacy. Belief in the efficacy of homeopathy is a matter of faith, but the dismissal of homeopathy is only faith when there's no evidence provided to support that position.

You may find that homeopathy works, but you, like everyone else, are subject to personal bias. Science compensates for these biases. Testimonials carry little weight.

Personally I'm overjoyed to see homeopathy being seriously scrutinised. Homeopaths are no better than then the self-proclaimed psychics who take money under false pretenses and enabling denial of reality.

Edzard Ernst has an article in today's Guardian about this report. One of the comments is priceless:

There are some meta studies of tests of homeopathic treatments which show that as the tests become more scientifically strngent the effects of homeopathy disappear.

There are experiments, one on 720 sprague dawley rats will show up here pretty soon, that show that homeopathy DOES work in a single blind test but not in a double blind test.

That leaves what?
Simple really homeopathy DOES work and a strict scientific test will impede its mechanism thereby rendering the test invalid.

(Ummmmmm.....No, me neither...)

Experiments are then arranged that test homeopathic medicine the same way as pharmaceuticals, although this is completely different to the way homeopathic doctors prescribe.

If you're talking about the experiments not being individualized for each patient, homeopaths could volunteer to perform a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled where the non-placebos are individualized.

Sanker, if homeopathy worked as claimed, there would be no need for testing to show that it works. That fact would be self-evident.
People would be going to homeopaths instead of GPs, they would be having their diseases cured in the local homeopathic hospital, every pharmaceutical company would be selling homeopathic medicines by the ton. And Orac would be aiming his insolence at the deluded fools who claim that allopathic medicine works.
But he isn't. Because homeopathy has never cured a real disease. If you think otherwise, please how us the evidence.

Sankar,

Homeopathy is not rejected because 'science' doesn't understand it. (Whatever that may mean). Science is a method, not a series of authoritative statements.

Homeopathy is being rejected because whenever it is tested such that human foibles are ruled out of the equation, it shows no effect.

No effect.

The only effect shown is that of placebo.

There is no fundamentalism at play here. There is only what works, and what does not. Homeopathy does not work beyond placebo.

RatWiki has an article on Homeopathy which has been amplified following this report: http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Homeopathy

Sankar :

As a regular user of homeopathic medicine, having seen it work successfully on myself, friends and family members,

Actually What you may have seen is person A takes homeopathic remedy H and gets better.
Which is not proof that the percieved change in the health of person ( or pet ) A was CAUSED by remedy H.
I offer to furnish proof that everytime you or your friends got better when taking a homeopathic remedy my magic white cat farted. And that those magic cat farts are the true cause of your improvements. ( Well , my cat farted and you got better, so the farts MUST be the reason you got better. Q.E.D. )
My ethics forbid me to accept donations in lieu for my cat so I will not mention my account numbers here.
I know that my cats farts are magic healing because a unicorn I met on my last pub-crawl told me so. So there we have it on the best authority. Seriously, to show that any remedy ( including homeopathic and other alt.med ones ) actually works there has to be a difference between tratment and nontreatment.
We know that most people recover ( for example ) from the common cold without any treatment. So a remedy would have to show that users of a certain remedy show a significantly higher rate of getting well. Or that if the average convalescence time ( time to get well ) is shorter for them. Aka : If you stay warm , mostly in bed this will take a fortnight, however with this remedy you will be fine in a week. So far homeopathy has not furnished one bit of evidence going that way. Unlike at least SOME herbal remedies.
Just in case the swine-flue makes a reappearance I better get some more Z-Brand cat food ( it has that effect ;-) )

The Science & Technology Committeeâs report on whether the NHS should support homeopathy is akin to the Medieval Church insisting that the world is the centre of the universe. Newer scientific models show us a reality that will make the report irrelevant in the long term.

The homeopathic process of dilution and succussion creates energy medicine. Scientific experiments, by Popp and by Benveniste for example, demonstrate that it does have an effect even though none of the original material is left.

The committeeâs acceptance of scientific testing only by double blind trials is decades behind current scientific models and is irrelevant to homeopathy which recognises our uniqueness as individuals. However, this narrow frame of reference made the outcome of their report inevitable.

Just as inevitably, homeopathy will continue to gain in popularity because it works, and people now trust the truth of their own experience far more than âExpertsâ.

The extreme scientific rationalism that the select committee are clinging to is already history and the sheep will follow them in ignorance. For anyone willing to peep beyond their geocentric view, I recommend The Field by Lynne McTaggart and Energy Medicine, the Scientific Basis by James Oschman.

Here's a nice write up.

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/health/parliament-emitting-angry-pur…

"Their accounts will remember the money we used to give them."

Love it

@19 Sankar:

Here's the short and sweet: If you can prove the efficacy of homeopathic medicine in a simple, easy test, you can get $1 million for your trouble. Go here to find out more. The process is very simple: you apply for the $1 million challenge, negotiate a mutually agreeable protocol and conduct a preliminary and (if you pass the prelim) final test. The protocol is always designed so that there is no need for interpretation; the results are apparent to even a casual observer.

If you can't take this test and prove your claim (and walk away with a check for $1 million) then one of the following is true:
1) You are a coward, realizing that homeopathy is not provable. We refer to that as "NOT real."
2) You think homeopathy is valid, but not testable under ANY objective circumstances. ("Not testable" = bogus.)
3) You think the test is not worth your time. (You pay nothing for the application and testing, not even travel.)
4) You simply can't take the time from your busy schedule of homeo-awesomeness to trouble being tested. Yeah, right.

If you think you've got a winner here, apply for the Million Dollar Challenge. Otherwise homeopathy is bogus and you are a quack or you are promoting quackery.

Put up or shut up.

Adaminspace1, I look forward to seeing the authors you mentioned publishing their work in a mainstream journal, not just the rather esoteric journal of the ISSSEEM.

Double blind trials are irrelevant to homeopathy? That's rubbish. If homeopathy has any effects it should be testable just like any other medical treatment. By all means have your own beliefs, but you're not entitled to your own version of science and reality that just happens to favour the whacky notions of homeopathy.

Pseudoscientific cranks have long bemoaned scientific testing and found many excuses to explain why their fantastical claims crumble when properly tested. Could it be the cold sterile conditions of the lab that interfere with the mojo, or maybe it's the negative vibes of the scientists?

Anyone who could validate the claims of water memory and a subsequent pharmacological effect would be a strong candidate for a Nobel Prize. The fields of biology and physics would be turned on their heads. The medieval church preserved it's power through doctrine. Science is competitive, and any scientist who could present serious evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy (beyond a placebo effect) would be drowning in awards and research grants. Odd that no-one has managed this, in the same way that alchemists appear to be struggling to turn base metals in to gold.

TGAP Dad,

I endorse your comment. However, as I recall, James Randi did not even require that a homeopath demonstrate that their product works or is effective. He just required that they be able to distinguish between the homeopathic water and plain water.

No one has claimed the reward yet.

First a story:
My wife and I just had dinner and drinks out with 2 other couples. During dinner the subject of 'sensitivity' came up and when I understood that this was in support of things like ghosts, reading tarot cards and tea leaves, I opined that, as educated people, we can appreciate the tarot card art and the entertainment value of predicting the future but not really believe in that stuff. Oops. Four faces turned on me and stated unashamedly that they believed. Three with college degrees and all four smart enough to reason this out correctly. My wife & I spent most of the rest of the meal either reinforcing our position of non-belief or listening to anecdotal drivel about mediums and ghosts.

Point:
This inability to interpret and sort facts and fancies correctly is what supports homeopathy and all other pseudo science. They want to believe in spite of all the evidence against.

Amadan #23:

Read Jesus and Mo today on this subject.Â I guess they read Ernst too.

That's nothing more than a polite way of saying that "like cures like" is complete bollocks.

That's an insult to bollocks -- whose "physiological mode of action" has, after all, been solidly proven by medical science. (And yes, the effect is enhanced when you shake it with some vigor. It's hard to find a robust young nurse to shake them just right.)

And don't be surprised if they try to water down the report; that would, after all, make it more effective. Or at least more homeopathic.

Double blind trials are irrelevant to homeopathy? That's rubbish. If homeopathy has any effects it should be testable just like any other medical treatment.

It's likely (because of the "recognises our uniqueness as individuals" bit) that Adaminspace1 is making the same mistake that some (perhaps many) homeopaths have made, which is that it's impossible for a homeopath to individualize a prescription for the patient in a double blinded trial. This is false, since there are ways to do both at the same. For example, the homeopath could give the water (or sugar pill to which the water was was applied) to a third party, who would either pass it along unaltered or replace it with a placebo.

Such science is trying to sell the idea that homeopathy cannot work because science does not seem to understand how it could possibly work.

That's because: a) the homeopaths have been unable to explain satisfactorily how it's supposed to work; and b) it has not, in fact, been observed to work at all.

Experiments are then arranged that test homeopathic medicine the same way as pharmaceuticals, although this is completely different to the way homeopathic doctors prescribe.

If homeopathy works as consistently and as well as pharmaceuticals, then its effectiveness should be observable by the same means as that of pharmeceuticals.

Unsurprisingly, the results are not impressive. This is the Dark Ages, not scientific argument.

Do you have ANY CLUE what went on in those "Dark Ages" you're going on on about? Have you ANY CLUE how we got out of that darkness?

What is needed is more serious research, not political condemnation.

There's plenty of serious research, and it doesn't support any of your claims.

I am also quite unimpressed by the pseudo-scientific explanations given by homeopaths.

So why are you insisting we buy into any of it?

I would very much like to know why and how ... not to listen to Scientific Ayatollah telling me that it cannot work because it is outside their systems of thinking.

In other words, you want answers, but when you get them, you call us "ayatollahs."

Science is investigation, not pontification.

So why are you denying the science and offering nothing but pontification in its place?

The Long Dark Tea-Time of Homeopathy

How diluted was the tea?

adaminspace1:

The homeopathic process of dilution and succussion creates energy medicine. Scientific experiments, by Popp and by Benveniste for example, demonstrate that it does have an effect even though none of the original material is left.

You do realize, don't you, that Benveniste was found to have discarded data which did not support his conclusion? And that myriad efforts to replicate his trials (which, BTW, were neither clinical nor really validation of homeopathic principles -- I'll get to that in a moment) all failed to reproduce the claimed results?

Homeopathy is based on two principles: "like cures like" and serial dilutions. Benveniste tested only the latter, and in a way which actually contradicted the former. He wanted to know if a chemical, when diluted to absurdity, actually became stronger, when homeopathy actually predicts that the chemical will become progressively weaker, with its effect gradually diminishing to nothing, after which the *opposite* effect is seen and progressively strengthened.
e
This is not what Benveniste studied. So even if he trials weren't fraudulent, they would actually contradict the majority of homeopathic practice! Yet oddly, homeopathic supporters seldom address this. I believe this is not a conscious attempt to conceal an uncomfortable truth. I believe they simply haven't examined the evidence enough to have noticed this rather glaring problem.

@29, meet @31.

Energy medicine? I didn't realize energy could get ill.

I'd respond with more than mockery but I've read Hahnemann; his writings are classic anti-conventional-treatment woo. Homeopathy is 18th century science tarted up with 20th century marketing. It needs to be shown the door.

Science cannot answer many things, she cannot answer why the light sends out signals to different cells and her aura behaves differently. None of the studies considered by the UK parliament system looked at the right kind of studies and only looked at ones that were tighly controlled.

It is a shame that modern medicine will not listen to ancient wisdom of the ancients, like in the film "highlander" which I love very much because it has Sean Cannery it it and that French person, Jean Clade Van Doom, for if they did they would discover a world of healing opportunity.

Light has a gender?

Possibly some good news from *this* side of the pond: according to the Natural Solutions Foundation(Big Herba?)websites,HealthFreedom.org/GlobalHealthFreedom.org,John McCain is introducing legislation to amend DSHEA, giving the FDA additional powers over retailers and suppliers.If major league woo-meisters are all in a tizzy *and* Ron Paul has already spoken against it,there *must* be some value in the bill.

n EU statute that requires member states to allow alternative medicine to be marketed as long as it is shown to be a 'folk' remedy.

Shouldn't that require that the 'remedy' in question have a traditional lineage that predates the modern age? Homeopathy is a 19th century pseudoscience that has no roots in pre-scientific medical practice.

to ancient wisdom of the ancients, like in the film "highlander"

ROFLMAO..... not even my most historically ignorant students consider "Highlander" to prove anything!

Here in the Amadanian Academy of Homeopathetic Research we have postulated a scientific explanation of the many positive reports homepthic treatment.

Our hypothesis is that succussion of water produces a substance, tentatively named Macavitum felis. We suggest that this is the curative component behind the many positive reports homepthic treatment. Macavitum felis is phenominologically related to the aether identified by leading physicists [see Newton (1704), Dirac (1951)]. We hypthesize that its physical existentiality is inversely related to its curative efficacy. Accordingly, the absence of observable quantities of Macavitum felis in homeopathic medicines used in the many positive reports homepthic treatment is not a problem in need of a solution, rather, it is the solution in the solution to the problem.

You skeptics are sooooo negative

Ragesh said:

It is a shame that modern medicine will not listen to ancient wisdom of the ancients, like in the film "highlander" which I love very much because it has Sean Cannery it it and that French person, Jean Clade Van Doom, for if they did they would discover a world of healing opportunity.

Sean Cannery? Jean Clade Van Doom? Exactly how much have you been smoking and how potent was it?
(Highlander, by the way, starred Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery. But I don't blame you; you also believe in auras.)

Please tell me where 'woo' comes from - is it an acronym? I can just about make out what it means but not it's actual origin.

Amadan, here is a simple test to show how much you actually understand about physics. When homeopathy proponents bring up physics and energy properties of their remedy they often use the term "quantum." The word is based on counting (the similarity between quantum and quantity is not accidental).

When quantum was termed what were the physicists counting?

you heard of the Caesarâs last breath calculation? you can do a similar calculation for Caesarâs last piss.

if you drink a homeopathic remedy, there are more water molecules from Caesarâs last urination than there are molecules of the active ingredient.

so, if you pay for a homeopathic remedy, you are pissing your money away.

oh, and WTF about medicine "not listen to ancient wisdom of the ancients, like in the film 'highlander'"

medicine is supposed to heed the shit in movies?

???

i guess i recommend all doctors adhere to the adversion therapy portrayed in "A Clockwork Orange."

don't forget to hide your big penis statues people!

Has anyone here heard of treatments involving homeopathic plutonium? And can anyone tell me whether it's homeopathic Pu-238 or homeopathic Pu-239?

woolly, try What is woo? and woo at the Skeptics Dictionary

Light has a gender?

If it does, that would seriously complicate a trip to the beach. How do I ensure that my scantily-clad body is bathed exclusively in female sunlight? 'Cause I'm NOT GAY, unnderstand? And I don't want any male light gettin' all over my girlfriend either!

Chris@49:

In your haste to oppress any opinion that doesn't bow to the dictates of your evidenciarist world-view, you have failed to following the link in my post. If you had, you would have seen that Macavitum Felis is a compound of elements 26, 53 and 6, or as we scientists describe it, iron-I-C.

why the light sends out signals to different cells and her aura behaves differently.

What? You seem to be leaving out a whole lot of context, because that doesn't make any sense on its own.

I am very pleased that a Select Committee chaired by my own MP, Phil Willis, has dealt a huge blow to the credibility of homeopathy.

All we need now is a separate investigation into chiropractors ...

Amadan, it is a simple one word answer.

Though now that I followed the link, I understand you are doing a Poe. It was a big joke (the link is to a TS Eliot cat poem).

You have to understand that you sound like most of the clueless homeopathy supporters, and they are often quite serious.

I wonder how this will affect Dana Ullman's latest rant over on HuffPost? He practically refers to ORAC by name. The scary thing is that the comments are mostly supportive of Dana. I did my best to "reply", but got weary of it in the end.

I heard about this on one of my Podcasts (from the Guardian's Science Weekly or BBC's Science In Action--not sure which).

What's really shocking to me is that the NHS has been funding an actual Homeopathic Hospital all this time! What kind of illnesses do people go there for? Do they augment standard treatment or just use homeopathy? It is just incredible. But then, we have several MD's and large hospitals here doing "integrative" medicine--which reminds me, Mark Hyman has a two-parter going on at HP about mercury-poisoning and a quick look at the positive comments will be enough to gag you very quickly.

This seems to sum up the current state of affairs perfectly:

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/health/parliament-emitting-angry-pur…

Anthro@59:

What's really shocking to me is that the NHS has been funding an actual Homeopathic Hospital all this time! What kind of illnesses do people go there for? Do they augment standard treatment or just use homeopathy? It is just incredible.

If you visit the hospital's website you'll see that they do all the usual medical stuff, and they use conventional medicine to so so. They use woo Magic Water for harmless or self-limiting stuff where it makes no difference.

It's funny how the 'Professional' association web sites all state that Magic Water isn't meant to be used for any serious illness that can be treated with Real Medicine. What does that say about homeopaths' belief in their own profession? When a patient comes back for a second consultation, do you tell them that the journals have just announced that everything you recommended last month is now wrong, and they should go to Dr Jones down the road?

Those disclaimers and warnings scream out that it's all just Mummy-Kiss-It-Better.

Amadan, you should have used 77 (Iridium), 8 (Oxygen), 7 (Nitrogen), 53 (Iodine), and 6 (Carbon). Then there would have been no need to spell out the first element. Also, putting in the rare earth element just increases its value. Oh, well.

ragesh preguptar @ 42:

It is a shame that modern medicine will not listen to ancient wisdom of the ancients, like in the film "highlander" which I love very much because it has Sean Cannery it it and that French person, Jean Clade Van Doom, for if they did they would discover a world of healing opportunity.

I'm a Highlander fan. Jean Claude Van Dam was not in any of the Highlander films, nor the TV series. In fact, no French person starred in any of them (though many French people did get guest appearances on the TV show, which was a French/Canadian coproduction partly filmed in Paris). The "French" fellow you may be thinking of is Christopher Lambert, who is actually a natural-born US citizen. (Born in New York City.) His parents were diplomats, and he ended up spending his formative years in Geneva, Switzerland, and was educated at a French boarding school. This is why he has such an unusual accent, even though his mother tongue is English.

Mind you, if you think homeopathy is anything at all like the Quickening -- goodness. Mixing up remedies must get awfully expensive, what with all of the property damage.

BTW, I think Orac wins a few internets for the title. Douglas Adams would approve. ;-) (Which makes it rather delightful that I'm responding to comment #42!)

RAGESH:

I can only sincerely hope you were posting with sarcasm and wit...
because citing successful movie and TV series as scientific references CRACKS ME RIGHT UP.
I also loved the Highlander movies... NOT for the 'science" so much as for the "fiction".. you know..transferred energy aura's/chi/whatever, immortality, etc. But I did like the morality play and the basic ethical thread of doing the right thing.... something our esteemed UK brothers and sisters may have moved towards with their antiHomeo-woo efforts.

If successful movie's are to be trusted as medical and scientific sources... perhaps we need to engage the HOGWARTS School of Medicine, Pharmacy, and Potions?

and for the British Parliament "only considering tightly controlled" studies.. that is often referred to as the scientific method. you know, control the variables, monitor the results, strive for consistent effects. that sort of crazy poopycock.

The Highlander was a documentary, and the events happened in real time.

Exactly, Master Shake. Just like The Matrix.

You know, if there was any evidence that homeopathic stuff actually did ANYTHING, science would absolutely be able to figure out why. And it won't be because of the law of similars or the memory of water or stupid crap like that. It would be explained by using real scientific principles.

The problem is, it doesn't do anything, so there really isn't any need to figure out how it works. Or doesn't work. All this crap about how it works is a mechanism in search of a result.

There are things that can happen that science doesn't understand, and then we go figure it out. In fact, this has been the most common route in science. Someone sees something odd, verifies that actually something odd is REALLY occurring, and then you figure out why. But something really has to happen first. It's like all the proposed mechanisms for how astrology works. Since it doesn't, the mechanisms are meaningless.

Well put, Pablo.

Sometimes it takes science a long time to figure out how or why something works. But we don't need to know why to observe and describe that something works. Newton didn't tell us why gravity works, but he described what happens. Aspirin worked for headaches before we had an idea of why, and both opiates and antibiotics work whether or not you the patient understand the mechanisms. If homeopathy were valid, the homeopaths could demonstrate that it works, in reasonable detail. (E.g., which conditions it is most effective for, and whether there are categories of patients who shouldn't use it--I'd expect discussions of the safety of homeopathy in pregnancy for example.) Instead, we have vague assertions that pink unicorns, no, maybe blue ones, maybe only the blue ones who have visited Paris, are why my tea mug can fly. And the mug just sits here on my desk.

Amadan, if you are serious (and the link to the cat poem was not a joke), then answer my simple question has to what "quantum" was counting when physicists coined the term.

Master Shake: The Highlander was a documentary, and the events happened in real time.

Including "Highlander II"?

*screams*

i think the Highlander reference to homeopathy is a good one!

"There can be only one."

--one molecule of the active ingrediant in a sphere of water a light year in diameter that is...

If you're talking about the experiments not being individualized for each patient, homeopaths could volunteer to perform a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled where the non-placebos are individualized.

But how would you address the objection that the placebos weren't randomized and blinded?

I think "Jean Claude Van Doom" would take offenses at being called French since he is Belgian. The bi-cultural Belgians suffer the dual ignominy of being the butt of ethnic jokes in both France and the Netherlands.

Homeopaths on the other hand ares the butt of jokes for rationalists the world over.

Rob,

I've "done the math" and found that a "20C" homeopathic HGH solution could be made by placing a single molecule of HGH in a sphere of water slightly larger than the orbit of Mercury.

This amount of water, however, would exceed the mass of the observable Universe by many orders of magnitude and would instantly create a super-massive black hole.

Whether the creation of such a large singularity would substitute for "succussion" is open to debate.

Prometheus

@72, please refer to post 37.

Chris@69:

You did read the poem, didn't you?, You know, the one about the criminal mastermind cat who must have done something because 'he wasn't there'?

You did read posts 55 and 62, didn't you?

Dissolve a bit of dihydrogen monoxide in hydroxyl acid and dilute to 30C. Rub a few drops on your temples, and you shall be enlightened.

D.C. Sessions @72 - it has been done - The homeopath does his consultation and prepares the remedy which is then given to a dispenser who then randomly chooses either the homeopathic remedy or the official placebo and gives it to the patient. The result was as expected - no difference between the magic placebo and the ordinary placebo. (Thinking about homeopathy studies makes my brain hurt.)

@33 squirrelelite:

You are correct in that aspect of Randi's test protocol of homeo-water. The reasons for this indicated that there was concern over withholding legitimate medicine from sick people just so that homeo-water could be tested. The alternative protocol of simply distinguishing homeo- from plain water was proffered but, IIRC, never accepted by the applicant.

To save money, I put homeopathic gasoline in my car. It should get AWESOME mileage. But, you know, it simply refuses to run. It's as if it doesn't WANT to run. I blame the car. Stupid car.

Prometheus:

I've "done the math" and found that a "20C" homeopathic HGH solution could be made by placing a single molecule of HGH in a sphere of water slightly larger than the orbit of Mercury.

This amount of water, however, would exceed the mass of the observable Universe by many orders of magnitude and would instantly create a super-massive black hole.

I'm not sure the latter is correct. Gravitational compression would doubtless heat the water considerably, until it dissociated into a hydrogen-oxygen plasma, then continue heating it until ultimately hydrogen fusion was initiated. I believe the outward pressure of energy produced by this fusion reaction would resist the gravitational collapse of the 20C homeopathic preparation. Until, that is, the hydrogen in the core was exhausted, and then we start to progress through the process of stellar evolution. I believe you are probably correct, however, that this object will be massive enough to progress to the "iron sun" stage -- the break-even point of nuclear fusion, where stellar fusion can no longer sustain itself and the star collapses into either degenerate material or a black hole.

But I don't know the numbers, because I'm just a computer science dweeb and not a physicist. :-P But I do think the homeopathic preparation would last a few eons before undergoing gravitational collapse, as it should contain sufficient hydrogen to support nuclear fusion.

Mind you, I wouldn't want to be that HGH molecule. :D

@45 - Nonsense, _Highlander_ clearly proved that there should have been only one.

Cash strapped NHS trusts have already been reducing funding for homeopathy. The head of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital was vocally unhappy about it.

Politically? The pro-homeopathy brigade is smaller than the number of people who want the NHS to pay for nurses and midwives and cancer treatment. Alas, the sums spent on homeopathy aren't enough to put a dent into any of those.

Amadan, I am allergic to cats. I get it, you are joking. Okay. And once a Poe is discovered it is silly to try to milk it for more.

I would note that the web site for the British Homeopathic Association appears to be down.

Dave Ruddell
Dare we to hope that with NHS subsidy they cannot afford the hosting costs?

Wooly @ 48: "Woo" comes from "Woo-Woo", a sarcastic term used to describe any sort of "magical" process.
It's a reference to American movies -- 50s "B" horror movies in which much of the sound effects were provided by a device known as the Theramin. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theramin )

Homeopathy fans: sorry, it just doesn't work.
I'm sure you'd like your magic water to work, but it just doesn't. If it did, we'd be rewriting the laws of physics and chemistry in order to revise our knowledge base.
People were debunking Homeopathy back when Hahneman was still alive.

@86 -- Is that where it comes from? I thought it was because most woo was as effective as a concotion of vodka, peach schnapps and cranberry juice.

How would a true homeopathic hospital run? How much would they dilute your IV fluid? Would the orthopedist make your cast from a teaspoonful of casting material in a fifty-five gallon drum of water? Do the prosthetic heart valves come from mice instead of calves?

Gregarious misanthrope complains:

"To save money, I put homeopathic gasoline in my car. It should get AWESOME mileage. But, you know, it simply refuses to run."

Have you tried taking some of your 20C gasoline (just a drop) and mixing it with pure ethanol? I believe that some homeopathic remedies are made with ethanol (in the last dilution), so this shouldn't compromise the "memory" of the solution.

Be sure to shake it vigorously (and work in a well-ventilated area with no open flames).

Prometheus

I found a 1A dilution of ethanol, stored for 12 years in an oak cask, makes an excellent anti-depressant. Interestingly, the geographic origin of the diluent is highly important, Scotland and Kentucky being the optimal sources.

Speaking as an evil socialist Brit, I would say the problem goes beyond mere effectiveness and ethics and touches on economic issues. We pay for nationalised health care and I agree with that. But if we're made to pay for something that doesn't work, we're getting screwed over and wasting money that could be better invested in any number of things. Homeopathy is vanity (non-)medicine. If people want to waste their own money on it that's fine.

TGAP Dad-78,

Thanks for the clarification. I don't think I had heard about that part, but it makes sense. Anyway, if homeopaths can't tell the difference between their product and plain water, how is your body supposed to tell the difference and get better? It doesn't give them much of a prima facie case.

DLC-86,

I suspect the origin of the term woo in this context is more obscure and confused than that, but you might be right. Perhaps orac or one of his friends can elucidate it for us.

The theramin is an interesting instrument. It at least gives you positive evidence that you can alter an electromagnetic field by waving your hands in it (which just about any freshman physics student could tell you anyway). Still, that is more evidence than the homeopaths and reiki practicioners have produced for the effectiveness of their methodologies.

And, it does give you "Good Vibrations"!

#77: Whoosh!

squirrelelite:

I suspect the origin of the term woo in this context is more obscure and confused than that, but you might be right. Perhaps orac or one of his friends can elucidate it for us.

See the links I posted in #53.

I've "done the math" and found that a "20C" homeopathic HGH solution could be made by placing a single molecule of HGH in a sphere of water slightly larger than the orbit of Mercury.

This amount of water, however, would exceed the mass of the observable Universe by many orders of magnitude and would instantly create a super-massive black hole.

Are you sure about that? I didn't try to account for gravitational effects, but just assuming water at standard temp & pressure, I calculated that that much water would be equal to maybe 35,000 solar masses and thus much less than even our galaxy.

it has been done - The homeopath does his consultation and prepares the remedy which is then given to a dispenser who then randomly chooses either the homeopathic remedy or the official placebo and gives it to the patient. The result was as expected - no difference between the magic placebo and the ordinary placebo. (Thinking about homeopathy studies makes my brain hurt.)

Huh, I hadn't realized those had been done. There's also the idea that homeopathy works via quantum entanglement, and that double-blinding collapses the wave function, destroying the entanglement and thus rendering the remedy ineffective. The pro-homeopathy people who have commented to this post might be talking about that.

MC, you're nearly right, it's just not quantum entanglement that gets broken but the positive thought. Succusion only works if done by a practitioner, you can't have the whole dilution-succusion sequence done by a machine. So the non-believer injected into the homoepath-pharmacist-patient chain during the blinding renders the water in the homeopathic preparation inactive, just like it were pure water.

quantum entanglements? positive thoughts? dear god. The more I learn about homeopathy the more I'm astounded that anyone falls for that stuff.

(my daughter is taking a class where they had to identify how to tell pseudoscience. I told her that, if it had the word "quantum" in it, unless it was high-level physics, it was probably woo.)

Dave,

I went back and checked my numbers and - my bad! - I messed up on a conversion.

For a 20C dilution, the volume of water would be only 3.674 X 10^14 cubic meters (3.674 X 10^14 tonnes) which would be a sphere of radius 44,430 meters - about the size of a modest asteroid.

A 40C solution of homeopathic HGH (which I happened to see in my local "organic food" shop) would require 3.674 X 10^34 tonnes of water per molecule of HGH. This would be a shade over 18 million solar masses. That is quite a lot of water, but even so is well under the mass of the galaxy (~6 X 10^11 solar masses), let alone the observable Universe.

My apologies.

Prometheus

#42, the wisdom of the ancients? Homeopathy is less than 225 years old!

Hint: #42 is a really good Poe, and most amusing to boot.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.

-Douglas Adams

Gimpy said:
"It's also interesting to note that a member of that committee did try and water down the report after being lobbied hard by homeopaths"

Surely watering down the report would make it more effective? It would naturally be most information-rich once the last word was expunged, provided the remaining paper was shaken vigorously.

I've really amused myself with that one.

@Wrysmile #30: LOL:

"Their accounts will remember the money we used to give them."

Top comment.

Sheri Nakken, R.N., MA, Hahnemannian Homeopath
Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Washington State, USA
Vaccines - http://vaccinationdangers.wordpress.com/ Homeopathy http://homeopathycures.wordpress.com
Vaccine Dangers, Childhood Disease Classes & Homeopathy Online/email courses - next classes start February 24 & 25

Ooh, random URL time! Can we play too?

www.whale.to/vaccine/nakken_h.html

So, Sheri, you are in Washington, where Bastyr U. is located (they have a very nice cafeteria, but the parking is really bad!).

About twenty years ago when they were located in the MacDonald School near Green Lake they announced to the local media with grand fanfare that they were going to do a definitive study on homeopathy. It was a commentator on KOMO Channel 4 that explained what homeopathy was (until then I thought it was some kind of herbal remedy).

Well, it has been two decades, do you know what happened to that study. I keep looking at their website and I find nothing about that study.

Do you know what happened to it? Do you think it was a victim of the file drawer effect?

Or did you just come here to advertise your worthless class and remedies?

Succusion only works if done by a practitioner, you can't have the whole dilution-succusion sequence done by a machine.

Wait, so Airborne has loving school teachers manually shaking vials?

a.k.a. the "memory of water," in which water somehow magically remembers only the good "homeopathic" bits that it's been in contact with and somehow never remembers all the pollution, poison, and poo...

But they don't just require the "memory of water" as a justification for many of their remedies - the magic water is dropped onto sugar pills and allowed to evaporate, so all they are left with is the hearsay of lactose.

@Andrew Dodds:

The only problem with this is the UK media. You may have heard of the Daily Mail - the paper with a mission to separate the entire physical world into object that either cause or cure cancer - which is quite partial to woo of all forms. Expect lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth from them.

Here's what the Daily Wail said about homoeopathy the other day:

Prince Charles last night stood accused of secretly lobbying ministers in support of using discredited homeopathic medicines on the NHS.

stuv.myopenid.com @ 108:

Wait, so Airborne has loving school teachers manually shaking vials?

Minor quibble: Airborne is not a homeopathic remedy. (If it were, they couldn't have been sued for false advertising when they made medical claims for it.) It's basically a hideously overpriced multivitamin. The dose of Vitamin A, far from being homeopathic, actually exceeds the maximum recommended daily allowance, and if used frequently, could lead to osteoporosis in women.

It's amazing how much variety there is in homeopathic claims. Some say you can't have a machine do it -- yet Zicam (an only technically homeopathic drug, which contains dangerous levels of zinc) and Head-on and others are mass produced. They must have a machine involved at some point.

Other homeopaths do not prescribe store-bought preparations, but make their own. This allows them to make even more convincing claims about how "personalized" the medicine is, since it gets mixed up *just for you*. (Wow.)

I also read about an enterprising Russian homeopath who devised a more efficient means of obtaining the desired dilutions. He even reported that his method was superior to Hahnemann's. The method? Create the initial solution. Dump it down the drain. Refill the test tube. Voila!

I expect that something along the lines of the Russian method are used by most homeopathic drug manufacturers, though they might make it even more efficient by skipping that time-consuming "create the initial solution" step.

And now more homeopathic woo - research crazy enough to suggest that even cancer could be helped by homeopathy. And published in that well known peer reviewed journal of woo
The International Journal of Oncology - this month by scientists at that crank institution - M.D Anderson. Oh well, since homeopathy can't work I guess there's no reason to even post the abstract ....but in the unlikely case there's still an open mind in this crowd...

Cytotoxic effects of ultra-diluted remedies on breast cancer cells

Authors: Moshe Frenkel, Bal Mukund Mishra, Subrata Sen, Peiying Yang, Alison Pawlus, Luis Vence, Aimee Leblanc, Lorenzo Cohen, Pratip Banerji, Prasanta Banerji

Affiliations: Integrative Medicine Program-Unit 145, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030-4009, USA. frenkelm@netvision.net.il

International Journal of Oncology February 2010 issue

Pages: 395-403

Abstract:
The use of ultra-diluted natural products in the management of disease and treatment of cancer has generated a lot of interest and controversy. We conducted an in vitro study to determine if products prescribed by a clinic in India have any effect on breast cancer cell lines. We studied four ultra-diluted remedies (Carcinosin, Phytolacca, Conium and Thuja) against two human breast adenocarcinoma cell lines (MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231) and a cell line derived from immortalized normal human mammary epithelial cells (HMLE). The remedies exerted preferential cytotoxic effects against the two breast cancer cell lines, causing cell cycle delay/arrest and apoptosis. These effects were accompanied by altered expression of the cell cycle regulatory proteins, including downregulation of phosphorylated Rb and upregulation of the CDK inhibitor p27, which were likely responsible for the cell cycle delay/arrest as well as induction of the apoptotic cascade that manifested in the activation of caspase 7 and cleavage of PARP in the treated cells. The findings demonstrate biological activity of these natural products when presented at ultra-diluted doses. Further in-depth studies with additional cell lines and animal models are warranted to explore the clinical applicability of these agents.

Wikipedia says that all of the world's oceans contain about 1,300,000,000 cubic kilometers of water, or about 1.3 x 10^9. Each cubic km is eaqual to 10^9 liters, and each liter is equal to 10^3 ml. So the oceans contain about 1.3 x 10^21 ml of water (1.3 x 10^(9 + 9 + 3)). Add one ml of any substance to the oceans, apply succussion (earthquake? or just draw out a liter and get a homeopath to do it right). Remove one drop, apply to a sugar pill, and you have a homeopathic remedy at (approximately) the 20C level. I suppose the reason that homeopaths wouldn't expect that to work is because at that level is because it is still too concentrated.

@Calli Arcale: The "Russian method" is actually one correct way to measure vermouth for a dry martini.

Some say you can't have a machine do it

This might be wrong, since I'm just repeating what I've read elsewhere (and I'm not expert on homeopathy), but I think that the legal definition of homeopathy doesn't say who can or can't make it, and practicing homeopaths might think that the legal definition is too broad. Also, the objection that many pro-homeopathy people make to things like Zicam is that it's not individualized to the exact symptoms of each patient; the legal definition of homeopathy also doesn't make any distinction based on whether or not the remedy is individualized for each patient.

There's a reason the International Journal of Oncology has an underwhelming impact factor...seriously oderb, did you read the paper (PMID: 20043074)? It's terribly disappointing. They don't even bother to do any statistics but readily claim that their findings "demonstrate biological activity"?! And what's the deal with their HPLC results? The solvent shows a single distinct peak, and the tested compounds show a number of small peaks and not the distinctive solvent peak? Sounds like they used messy compounds and an asininely inappropriate control.

Sorry, this open mind is going to need something far more substantial than yet another mind-numbingly flawed paper. Seriously, the authors should be embarrassed to have published that work, and you should be embarrassed to have cited it as support for the claim that "homeopathy works."

It's also interesting to note that a member of that committee did try and water down the report after being lobbied hard by homeopaths.

Ha bloody ha.

re # 105 and Sheri Nakken...

you embarass all RNs with your postings, lack of science, and actions that endanger small children.

IF you were licensed in a state other than California, I would entertain idea of reporting your unprofessional behavior. Being you are in California, it seems you have found safe haven.

a Vigorous allopathic Humbug upon you, charlatan!

Bluemaxx, actually Ms. Nakken claims to now be in Washington State. But she is very shy about indicating exactly where she is located. She seems relocate quite often.

CHRIS: (@#118)

well if she is indeed actually living/or and practicing in Washington State, and by practicing I mean identifying herself as a REGISTERED NURSE and providing (shamefully inaccurate) medical advice/information/guidance while using the title RN, I believe she must be registered and licensed to do so. As of Sunday 2/28/10 her name (Nakken, any first initial S) yields no valid licensure as RN within the Washington state license verification database.

check it yourself: https://fortress.wa.gov/doh/providercredentialsearch/SearchCriteria.aspx

interesting, and perhaps reportable?

Sam said: "I've just had a search and it appears that there isn't an Early Day Motion in support of Homeopathy"

Yes, there is. Sponsored by David "I need astrology software for work" Tredinnick, unsurprisingly.

As for whether the report will lead to a change in policy/law, I'd say it's a big maybe. Yes the NHS is under funding pressure, but homeopathy is most popular in the UK with the sort of people who are really influential with politicians - eg Worcester Woman, to use the pollsters' terms. I suspect you'll see some changes, but with enough loopholes that both sides can claim victory.