h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is there actually any scientific basis *at all* for homeopathy (y'know the 'dilute something 100 times and it'll make you better' thing). I myself am sceptical about it but I keep hearing conflicting reports about the subject.

Vaccination works by giving a small amount of the disease to the person, so that their immune system can learn how to cope with it. In some cases, a dead version of the disease is used, in others it is a slightly different version. All this works by training the body's immune system.

Homeopathy, on the other hand, uses such extreme dilution that the "medicines" do not contain any of the original substance at all. It is hard to see how such a medicine could have any effect, and scientific studies have never shown any effects which couldn't be explained by chance anyway.

Some homeopathic medicines are dangerous, because they are not prepared to the exacting standards of hygiene that normal medicines have to undergo. Tests on some homeopathic eyedrops showed they contained viruses that could cause blindness.

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Too... much... irony... head... exploding...

>> and scientific studies have never shown any effects which couldn't be explained by chance anyway.
<<

How far above placebo does the effect have to be in order to be not chance?


>>Some homeopathic medicines are dangerous, because they are not prepared to the exacting standards of hygiene that normal medicines have to undergo. Tests on some homeopathic eyedrops showed they contained viruses that could cause blindness.<<

Some references please. Not that I don't think it's not possible, but I'm sure there are instances of contaminated pharmaceutical medicines that were otherwise considered harmless. Which is to say we wouldn't condemn pharmaceutical medicine for that would we, so let's be careful about how we condemn homeopathy.


>>Is there actually any scientific basis *at all* for homeopathy (y'know the 'dilute something 100 times and it'll make you better' thing). I myself am sceptical about it but I keep hearing conflicting reports about the subject.<<

Do you mean is there adequate scientific theory to explain how homeopathy works? Or do you mean have there been adequate scientific studies that show that it does work? Those are two different things.

I always find the James Randi forums to have a good source of trial data.

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=1870619770

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=1870530496&

I would say that as a complimentary medicine it may well helping relieving discomfort and pain but not as a cure. If the placebo effect that makes you believe it works helps a person through an illness then fine - just don't ignore proved medical procedures.

The dilution effect I think is nonsense and the 'memory of water' is just stupid(the belief that water 'remembers' the effects of the homeopathic medicine when the medicine has been diluted down to a infintesimal degree.) It doesn't water is water one oxygen two hydrogens and thats that.

When looking at any 'scientific' trials you have to ensure they have been correctly designed with blinds, placebos, controls etc. If you design your trials badly enough you can prove anything.

I mean adequate studies to show that it *does* work... I'm familiar with the theory behind it and think it's a load of foetid dingo's kidneys... but if I can get some decent evidence that it's the real deal then I may reconsider my stance.

>>Some references please.

I'm afraid I can't supply any references. It was in New Scientist many years ago. I wasn't suggesting you avoid all homeopathy because of one case of unhygienic preparation. I was just saying that it isn't necessarily safe just because it is designed to contain nothing.

OK, Mr Dreadful. I don't have time at the moment to look at the trials in the links provided above but I can comment based on research I have read in the past.

The most pertinent thing to understand is that homeopathic remedies aren't drugs. You can't examine their efficacy with the same kind of trials that you do pharmaceuticals. This is because homeopathics are prescribed for the _person_ not the illness, and each person is so individual that you simply can't replicate that in big enough numbers to do the kind of trials that have established the efficacy of drugs.

A typical homeopathic consultation takes an hour which includes extenisive gathering of the ' symtom picture' of that person - these are going to be the variables and there can be hundreds of them. It's unique. That's what gets prescribed for.

Compare that to penicillin which is prescribed for specific types of bacterial illness. It's a very blunt instrument and it's pretty easy to gather large numbers of people (or bacteria) to test it on because the variables are relatively finite (say half a dozen: age, gender, bacteria type, site of infection etc).

Personally I think that homeopathy would be much better researched by case studies, but I'm sure that there are other research methods that could be developped.


The other point to bear in mind is that most so called alternative medicine works from entirely different premises and rationales than science. Although they are different they are still valid. Until those differing ways of understanding are bridged science will not be able to apply itself to things like homeopathy.

At the moment it's using the wrong tools because it simply doesn't understand how alternative medicine differs from medical science. It's likely that alot of scientists don't even recognise that there is a valid difference to understand.

On the otherhand alternative practitioners with a science base or background do understand ie they speak both languages. They probably don't very often work in research labs or on boards giving out research grants though.

Another thing to consider is that other forms of healing like acupuncture have also faced this kind of scorn in the past and are now considered reliable enough to have a level of credibility _despite_ there still being no adequate scientific theory about how acupuncture works. I always thought a basic premise of science was open minded enquiry about things we don't understand.

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The odd thing (which I read about on my lunch break) is that some 'serious' medicines often have no proper theory about how they work (paracetamol, for example, is only recently being understood properly) yet they aren't treated with this kind of scepticism... is there a lot of snobbery in the scientific community about whether something was discovered by a scientist or some random bloke in a mud hut?

>>I was just saying that it isn't necessarily safe just because it is designed to contain nothing.<<

This is interesting also because classical homeopaths say that high potency homeopathics (i.e. more strongly diluted) are potentially dangerous if the wrong remedy is given to the wrong person (in that they may create side effects or worsen the illness).

So if you don't believe that homeopathics work then you can't take the cautions seriously. Bit of a catch 22 if a trial was being designed.

Homeopathy is disliked by scientists because it seems to be a contradiction:

"You're suffering from an excess of x, so we're going to cure you by giving you tiny amounts of x. In fact, we're going to give you such tiny amounts that we're not going to give you x after all, but it'll still cure you."

>>The odd thing (which I read about on my lunch break) is that some 'serious' medicines often have no proper theory about how they work (paracetamol, for example, is only recently being understood properly) yet they aren't treated with this kind of scepticism... <<

Good one Mr D

Psychiatric meds are another example of this - they often don't know how they work, and they often don't work in the 'scientific' way we are lead to believe (as in having consistent effect on the same illness on any person).


>>is there a lot of snobbery in the scientific community about whether something was discovered by a scientist or some random bloke in a mud hut?<<

Snobbery is a polite word for it

Traditional Chinese Medicine has been developping and in use for thousands of years. Meaning they were doing their science successfully while our ancestors were still in mud huts

>>"You're suffering from an excess of x, so we're going to cure you by giving you tiny amounts of x. In fact, we're going to give you such tiny amounts that we're not going to give you x after all, but it'll still cure you."
<<

That's not the basis of homeopathy - at least the first bit isn't. It has nothing to do with an excess of anything.

Also the term 'cure' means different things in medical science than alternative medicine.

And how do you know there is no x in the remedy? Because you can't detect it? Does that mean there were no bacteria before microscopes were invented?

How can you have an opinion about the validity of something when you don't understand it? Sorry Gnomon I don't mean to have a go at you personally. It's just that this is a common conversation to me, and it surprises me that it happens so often in h2g2 especially in a forum like this. Most people who are agin homeopathy have about the same understanding of it that creationists do of evolution ie their belief systems get in the way.

It is true that there is very little regulation for alternative medicines. Some herbal remedies contain hundreds of different chemicals, many of them potentially harmful, and very few of them have had their effects on patients adequately studied. I believe they are subject to foodstuff regulations rather than as medicines (but should not contain dangerous viruses!) Pharmaceuticals contain a small number of known ingredients and all of them must be thoroughly tested. I would imagine homeopathic medicines, being entirely water, are probably pretty safe in the main.

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What I don't understand is, if there is no real scientific evidence and if the whole scientific process is not even applicable in this area, on what basis are the remedies tailored to the individual?

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Statistics. It gets diluted so much that it is very unlikely that the bottle contains even a single molecule.

>>How can you have an opinion about the validity of something when you don't understand it?

I don't fully understand why the homeopaths think that giving you small amounts of certain things will cure you. Nor do I care.

But I do understand that homeopathic medicines do not contain any of the things they claim to contain, and that is what makes scientists so cross.

There's a number of problems here.
For a start, there really isn't much funding available for research into CAM, see the following:

http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/publicpetitioncam?OpenDocument&Highlight=2,homeopathy

And, as mentioned above, there is a lot of resistance in the established medical community.

Then there are the junk claims and the cowboys that inevitably prosper in the fuzzy world of CAM. There's also a lot of people have built businesses up and have a vested interest in CAM. Unfotunately, it tends to be those who are most likely to be dubious who are the loudest since they have the most to lose.

There's the claims that there is something special happening here, indeed as Kea! has claimed above, that they work in some special 'woowoo' way that science can't deal with.

Shoe makers.

If there is a product, or a process, which can cure someone of some complaint, then you have a case of cause and effect. You give someone something, and a little while later they get better. That can be, and should be, studied. If it works, reliably, then it can be measured and studied.

If it is a case of one remedy to one person, then that immediately junks all the prepared remedies. It also makes one wonder why the list of ingredients is finite. And, since remedies aren't totally individual, then there is some commonality. Therefore there is a common process. Whatever ingredient is used, it only has a finite set of chemicals in it.

I'm not saying it doesn't work as an actual cure or remedy (except with homeopathy where I agree with Gnomon). Because, quite obviously, it can do.

Claims, also, of respectibility due to age of the tradition is nonsense as well. Otherwise why aren't we all chewing willow twigs instead of popping aspirins? Or leaching? Or sacrificing goats?

Herbalism, acupuncture, that sort of thing, you are doing something to the body, and the body reacts. Just needs a bit of investigation into the actual chemicals involved.

Anaesthetics aren't understood fully either.
The difference here is that there have been many medical studies, the cause and effect and, as importantly, the side effects, have been noted and studied.

Oh, and for acupuncture, check out the BMAs summary :
http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/Acupuncture:+efficacy,+safety+and+practice+(m)~Acupuncture:+efficacy,+safety+and+practice+-+Summary+of+the+main+points+about+the+efficacy+of+acupuncture

"The report examined the results of clinical trials of acupuncture use for a number of medical conditions, concluding that the evidence suggests that acupuncture is more effective that control interventions for back pain, nausea and vomiting (most convincingly for post-operative symptoms in adults), migraine and dental pain. So far, results are inconclusive or uncertain for neck pain and osteoarthritis, recovery from stroke, tension headaches, temporomandibular joint dysfunction, smoking cessation and weight loss."

Incidentally looking at reasearch on accupuncture I largely find reports basically saying either:

We didn't find it did anything.

or

We found that sticking needles in people can have an effect on pain, but you don't actually have to put the needles in accupuncture points.

I think that medical science, having so greatly improved out quality of life, has a right to get a little arrogant.

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I assume you're referring to the practice of bleeding people to get rid of the bad humours... leeches are still used but for a different reason.

Indeed so Mr. Dreadful.

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Statistics. It gets diluted so much that it is very unlikely that the bottle contains even a single molecule. <<

Most homeopathic theorists will say that homoepathy works energetically not chemically. If we are going to have a discussion here about what 'energetically' means in a homeopathic context please don't make assumptions that it means the same thing as in science or popular culture.

>>>>How can you have an opinion about the validity of something when you don't understand it?
I don't fully understand why the homeopaths think that giving you small amounts of certain things will cure you. Nor do I care.
But I do understand that homeopathic medicines do not contain any of the things they claim to contain, and that is what makes scientists so cross.<<

Well maybe you should care because this is the second gross inaccuracy you have stated about homeopathy. Homeopaths don't claim that ,say, homeopathic arnica contains any arnica as we know it physically. That's why you don't see ingredients listed on bottles (you have the remedy name which is usually the substance the remedy was derived from).

See what I mean about belief systems? Both of you seem to assume that the world is solely physical.