So, you've got a migrane. Or backache. Or arthritis. What would you say if you went to your doctor and they prescribed you water? You'd probably flip.
Yet, the self same people who complain are the ones who would probably also be taken in by homeopathy.
Homeopathy was created by Samuel Hahnemann, a German doctor. He proposed two laws. First of all: the law of similars. Most people understand this one. The law of similars states that if you find out what the symptoms of your problem are, prescribe something that causes those symptoms. Like cures like. This is fairly easy to believe. We've all taken vaccines, right? Vaccines are just very small doses of a disease, right? Wrong. Vaccines are modified versions of the antibody that cause the body's immune system to react and build it's own stock of immune responses. When you take a vaccine, you aren't getting pure undiluted tuberculosis or measles - you are getting an antibody that fools the immune system in to thinking that you have a disease. That causes the immune system to build a suitable response to that disease so that if you get the disease again, your body is prepared for it.
Homeopathy does no such thing. Because of the second law that Hahnemann proposed. The law of infiniteismals. This law is equally simple: the more you dilute a substance, the more powerful it gets. Unlike creationism (see my previous article), at least this can be falsified: get a bottle of orange juice, pour yourself a neat glass of it, drink four fifths of it. Now fill the rest up with water. Continue doing this a few times. You'll realise fairly quickly that the orange juice is not more powerful. The flavour disappears and it tastes more and more like water and less and less like orange.
But if you take a homeopathic remedy (like belladonna, arnica, evening primrose etc.) and mix it up, magically it gets more powerful.
And we're talking big dilutions too. One drop of the substance mixed in with nine drops of water/alcohol gives you 1X. One drop of the substance mixed in with ninety-nine drops of water/alcohol gives you 1C. Most homeopathic preparations are served at 6C, 12C or 30C. By the time it reaches 12C, it has been mixed to a dilution that could be said to be equivalent to one drop in all the oceans on the planet Earth.
Of course, the homeopaths insist on the fact that you have to 'succuse' each remedy. That basically means that once you've added the drop to the test tube, you take the test tube and you shake it. Hahnemann suggests that you knock it ten times against a leather-bound Bible. Others either do it by hand - knocking it against a hard surface - or use a machine to shake the remedy.
By the time it's reached 30C, it's more likely that you'll get the jackpot on three lottery draws than it is that you'll get even one molecule of the remedy.
This has been wonderfully parodied. I saw a cartoon a while back where a woman goes to her homeopath. He says something along the lines of "When you run out, just fill it up from the tap".
How can it work? Well, it can't. The only theory that explains how it can work is that of Jacques Benveniste, a French scientist, who claimed that homeopathy is explained using the 'memory of water' hypothesis. Water contains a memory of what it has been in contact with. He published the research in Nature. But when Sir John Maddox sent in James Randi and Walter W. Stewart (a professional conjurer and a scientist respectively) to investigate, Benveniste's experiment failed. Later Madeline Ennis, an Irish pharmacologist, repeated the experiment and found it positive. The BBC then repeated her experiment under the same watchful eye of James Randi and found no evidence for the memory of water hypothesis. Logically, the water of memory hypothesis makes no sense because of what you get out of your tap. If water has a memory, why am I not being affected by all the rubbish that my water goes through? Pipes, the pumping plant, filters and the soap that washed the glass. These should all give water a memory. But none of them do.
Is it effective then?
No. The vast majority of clinical trials have proven it ineffective at solving any disease or problem. Even finding it some kind of therapeutic effect (such as pain relief, stress management or mental health care) would be amazing. But it's plainly refused to happen.
Instead, homeopaths will put forward hundreds of testimonials. One must first remember that a homeopath gives a long consultation. While your GP might give you five minutes, a homeopathic consultation usually takes the best part of one hour. In that time, the questions you recieve are based not on your symptoms but around a large number of variables. Everything from the sleep pattern to diet will be analysed. Of course, this is very valuable for the patient. Most people love having someone to talk to who will "understand". They will leave feeling better, psychologically speaking, because they have just had someone talk to them very nicely and politely.
Then the medicine itself is served. Can anybody say "placebo"? Of course they can. The vast majority of diseases clear up without you having to do anything at all. Got a cold? Give yourself a few days, and you'll clear up. Headache? It'll probably sort itself out in a few hours. Most problems are solved by the body itself, without the need for any medicine. But if you take some medicine before the disease has cleared up and the disease subsequently does clear up, you'll thank whatever you were taking. I took medicine x, then I got better, therefore medicine x caused me to get better. This we call a post hoc fallacy. A then B, therefore A caused B. It's a ridiculous assertion, especially if you substitute A for something else. I was suffering terrible constipation. Then I watched a game show. My constipation eased. Therefore, watching the game show eased my constipation.
In addition to that, taking something will often prompt someone to believe that they are going to get better. Taking something will give people confidence that they are 'fighting back'. We are still very unsure how the placebo effect works. It's a very complicated psychological effect. But we do know it happens. The aim of medicine is to find a cure that is more effective than placebo or non-treatment. Of course, to find if something is more effective than placebo, we let one person the placebo and we give someone very similar the medicine that we are testing. If the person with the medicine is healed quicker, better of more efficiently than the person with the placebo, the medicine is effective.
We do those tests in a double-blind environment. We make the placebos look like the medicine being tested. We ensure that neither the doctors giving the drugs out nor the patients taking the drugs know which one they are taking. Generally this is done by using some kind of code or cipher, getting a third party to encode the pairs using the cipher and then hiding the information required to decode the codes. Often a computer is used to code these. After the test has finished, you decode the pair and work out which was more effective.
Instead of clinical trials, like all the other 'alternative' medicines, homeopathy relies heavily on the testimonial. "L. P. from London" says "It worked absolutely splendidly!" or "T. Y. from Northumbria" says "Superb! My doctor is rubbish in comparison!"
The obvious problem? The literature put out my the practitioner will only contain testimonials from those happy with the service. And testimonials aren't scientific. They list the experience of a person, but a person may be deluded. The scientific process is designed to filter out delusions through peer review, checking and reproducability/falsifiability. You can't falsify "splendid" or "superb". You can falsify evidence. You can reproduce experiments.
Homeopathic advocates would now interrupt and say "but what about animals? Surely, they can't be fobbed off with the placebo effect, and so make a perfect target."
Again, no. Animals may not get the placebo effect (of course, we don't know), but most of the testimonials homeopaths or their satisfied clients will give you of homeopathy's vetinerary uses are equal delusions. Unlike a scientific trial, the treatment used will not be compared with placebo and are generally done by an amateur working only in a single-blind environment. The animal may not know they are being treated, but the person treating them will. Animals aren't delusional. Pet owners are.
Ignore testimonial evidence and look only for the facts, and you'll see a huge disparity in the proposed effects and the observed effects.
"Although homeopathy will, at some future time, be classed with historical delusions." - Jacob Bigelow, M.D., 1858.
"As homeopathic treatments are generally used in conditions with variable outcome or showing spontaneous recovery (hence their placebo-responsiveness), these treatments are widely considered to have an effect in some patients. However, despite the large number of comparative trials carried out to date there is no evidence that homeopathy is any more effective than placebo therapy given in identical conditions." - Prescrire International (a French journal on pharmaceutical products), 1995.
"We found insufficient evidence . . . that homeopathy is clearly efficacious for any single clinical condition." - The Lancet, 1997.
"The chemical content of homeopathic products is often undefined, and some are so diluted that they are unlikely to contain any of the original material. These products have not been proven effective for any clinical condition. There is no good reason to use them." - The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics, 1999.
I could go on and on. I've got many more references of studies which have shown homeopathy to be ineffective.
But I will finish by saying this. Don't, whatever you do, bother with this riduclous delusion. Doctors and scientists work hard so that you, the British public, have access to medicine that works. The NHS is free at the point of use and will help you when you have a problem. Homeopathy is an industry run by charlatans who have not proven scientifically that their medicine is succesful or useful.
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