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08/26/2005: "Postmodern snake oil"
The most remarkable aspect of the much publicised research by Shang, et al, in today's issue of The Lancet is not that it adds to the great crashing tide of evidence against homeopathy, but that prestigious medical journals still see validity in giving column inches to this tosh.
I'm afraid I can't link to the article, as it's for subscibers only, but the upshot of their meta-analysis was that
when analyses were restricted to large trials of higher quality there was no convincing evidence that homoeopathy was superior to placebo, whereas for conventional medicine an important effect remained. Our results thus provide support for the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homoeopathy, but not those of conventional medicine, are unspecific placebo or context effects.
The authors specifically acknowledge that, it being impossible to prove a negative, it is impossible also to definitively prove that homeopathic 'remedies' are ineffective. Instead, they merely apply Occam's Razor, and point out that exactly the same outcomes could be accounted for by the placebo effect. And given what the alternative explanation involves, they are inclined to go with the placebo explanation.
Homeopathy, for the uninitiated, involves turning established chemistry & physics on their head - as Prof. Robert Park eloquently explains in the excellent Voodoo Science:
The dilution limit is reached when a single molecule of the medicine remains. Beyond that point, there is nothing left to dilute. In over-the-counter homeopathic remedies, for example, a dilution of 30X is fairly standard. The notation 30X means the substance was diluted one part in ten and shaken, and then this was repeated sequentially thirty times. The final dilution would be one part medicine to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 parts of water. That would be far beyond the dilution limit. To be precise, at a dilution of 30X you would have to drink 7,874 gallons of the solution to expect to get just one molecule of the medicine.
It gets worse... For
Oscillococcinum, the standard homeopathic remedy for flu ... the standard dilution is an astonding 200C. The C means that the extract is diluted one part per hundred and shaken, repeated sequentially tow hundred times. That would result in a dilution of one molecule of the extract to every 10400 molecules of water - that is, 1 followed by 400 zeros [sic]. But there are only about 1080 (1 followed by 80 zeroes) atoms in the entire universe. A dilution of 200C would go far, far beyond the dilution limit of the entire visible universe!
This presents little difficulty for homeopathists, who would have us believe that the water someone retains an imprint or memory of the substance. Of course, no experiment has been conducted, or even imagined, that could prove this theory. But then, expecting anything so conventional as proof is just testimony to my cultural brainwashing. Just as it no doubt makes me a cynic to point out that a 'medicinal' substance that is literally impossible to distinguish from ordinary water is manna from heaven for these present day Elmer Gantries, who plunder the coffers of the desperate & credulous. (As Park points out, trying to ascertain that a vial of water is 'homeopathic' would be like trying to prove purported holy water had indeed been blessed.)
Where previous generations had snake-oil salesmen, their successors try to sell us the mere memory of snake oil. How bloody postmodern is that?
The homeopathic industry tends to respond to these threats with all guns blazing, but I think the Italian libel case backfired so badly that they'll think carefully before they try that tactic again.
Maybe they'll resort to more desperate measures, but somehow, the prospect of their attempting to poison my drinking water with, erm, drinking water isn't especially terrifying...
