What is the placebo effect? If thinking you are helping your body heal has that big of an effect in itself, does having even more conviction about an elaborately descriptive and appealing theory about why it works help it be more effective? How many lives does it save per year? If you look at homeopathy as an amplifier of the placebo effect there’s every reason to take it very seriously.

http://philipball.blogspot.com/2007/08/bad-memory-i-have-just-read-all-papers.html

It contains some notable responses from Dana Ullman and Peter Fisher.

Interestingly, one of the main threads in the special issue seems to be that critics of homeopathy are wrong when they say homeopathic remedies contain nothing but water. After all, the remedies contain all kinds of impurities too! How this makes them significantly different from, say, tap water is not explained…

On the subject of contamination. If you do the following:

1) degas and filter some DI water (100ml or so) (use an 0.1 um filter)
2) Measure the particulates at 2um or greater. You should get one or two per hundred ml.
3) Put this water into a clean beaker and move the beaker from one side of a typical lab to the other (this is just expose the water for a short period of time to the environment)
4) The particluates (at > 2um) will now be a few hundred per ml.

These particulates are pollen, dead skin, dust etc. Just the the stuff used to “potentise” the homepathic “cure”.

Unless you do all the preparation and handling under clean environments (no particles in the air) any remedy will be contaminated with allsorts as soon as it comes in contact with the air.

The question then must be asked what happens to water’s memory once it comes in contact with the organic broth that is the human body.

Why should the water remember only that what was intended by a person even though the same person adds (unknowingly) many other species to his potion.

Either the homeopath can will some physical change in matter or it’s bollocks.

If Nature can be taken as any sort of barometer, the scientific community regards homeopathy as… magic, superstition, nonsense, take whichever word you prefer.

Not a great surprise. The surprise is that the “healthcare” sector journals take it so seriously. And that’s the mainstream ones, we’re not even talking about the Alt health journals.

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070806/full/070806-6.html

“Gimpy said,
24. I did something worse at the beach when I was four……………”

W C Fields refused to drink water on the grounds that: ‘fish fuck in it.’

I may join him.

http://hawk-handsaw.blogspot.com/2007/08/cracking-example-of-pseudojournal.html

So, no evidence for water memory, then?

This is how the page ends for me (Opera 9.21):

Oxford, UK, 01 August 2007 – A special issue of the journal Homeopathyones such as antibiotics, vitamins, etc..

New headline – Homeopathic Remedies Implicated in the Rise of Drug Resistant Pathogens.

Or – Healthfood Supplement Manufacturers Support Homeopathic Remedies to Reduce Effectiveness of Vitamins and Increase Sales
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Or that the human body is able to select between the multitude of memories that each drop must contain to be affected only by the intended memory and to be unaffected by all the other memories of the substances that the molecules in that drop of water have been in contact with (do I detect placebo?).

In this case taking one homeopathic remedy would confer protection against those contacted substances, including beneficial ones such as antibiotics, vitamins, etc..

New headline – Homeopathic Remedies Implicated in the Rise of Drug Resistant Pathogens.

Or – Healthfood Supplement Manufacturers Support Homeopathic Remedies to Reduce Effectiveness of Vitamins and Increase Sales

I know you don’t do ad hom, Ben, but this:

http://tinyurl.com/2g8uex

On Sue Young’s site is really very amusing indeed. You are Lord Voldemort, apparently

Hmm. Sue’s persecution mania is showing, methinks. Perhaps she had been partaking too freely of the kind of herbal preparations that some studies claim raise the odds of delusions.

Anyway, she’s wrong on the Voldemort thing, purely on an anagram basis.

As any Potter reader with too much time can work out, if you start with “Ben Michael Goldacre”, you cannot anagramatically end up with “I am Lord Voldemort”.

The best I have been able to do so far is:

“I am Lord Beechglance”

- which has a pleasantly herbal feel, I think. Can anyone else do better?

One of the rationales for having a journal club would be to “solidify” a place for reasoned on-the-science critiques of Junk Science like the one you wrote about QuantuMilgrom.

At present, if the journal does what eCAM did with you and declines to put the critical comments on their “response thread” (and that’s if they have one at all), there is no formal place to put the rejoinders. Which leaves the parallel reality of the Journals of Nonscience unpunctured, at least to a casual observer.

http://tinyurl.com/2g8uex

On Sue Young’s site is really very amusing indeed. You are Lord Voldemort, apparently…