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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

Assuming you don’t know: a journal club is usually a group meeting in a lab where a paper is discussed. In our lab they vary from “I read this paper and it’s given me an idea for an experiment” to “look at the major critical flaw in this study, let’s avoid it and make sure we do better.”

Some academic journals accept journal club style mini-reviews of recent papers; the Journal of Neuroscience and Nature are two that I know of.

Basically a journal club is a commentary, and you don’t have to worry about the copyright of the work you’re discussing. As long as you don’t post it in its entirety of course!

What I find a little bit worrying about all this is that Homeopathy looks like a proper journal: it is peer-reviewed, it is indexed by the Web of Science, it has that journal-like page layout. Perhaps it even has an impact factor (for what that’s worth, ie not much). If you don’t read the papers critically, this is going to seem like a perfect valid source of useful scientific information.

Quite so, wilsontown. The same is also true of other CAM journals like eCAM, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Therapy, etc etc ad nauseam.

They look like science journals. But they’re not.

They all boast about being peer-reviewed: see e.g.

www.jnlcompmed.com.au/

www.alternative-therapies.com/

- and are, I suspect, listed on medline in part precisely because of this.

But if the reviewers are all part of the same “circle of suspension of scepticism”, what price the peer review?

We discussed this on a previous thread, if anyone can find the right one.

-everythingis presented in the wrong format, with no clear methods, results and discussion sections (minor points, I guess, but it would make everything so much clearer to understand).
- None of the papers give details of the numbers of replicates they had for each experiement, nor give any indication of the scatter in the data (no error bars, no standard deviations).
- No statistics are shown to demonstrate that anything significant is found in any of the data. Instead, we are always referred to poorly presented graphs with exhortations such as these: “It may be noted from Figure 3 that the absorption spectra for unsuccussed ethanol is significantly different from: (a) the succussed ethanol and (b) succussed homeopathic remedies, Nat mur and Nux vom.” (Rao et al). Note that “significatntly different” doesn’t appear to mean significant in any recognised statistical sense. Or we are told “The results for a given configuration
of the measurement system have good reproducibility.” (Vybiral and Voracek).

So for none of the papers is it possible to see if the data show anything at all. They may do; if the authors went back and analysed their data, we could find out.

How does this stuff get published?

and can I go home now?

Similarly, the Rey paper looks interesting, but I can’t tell if the results given were reproducible. There is a statement that the results have been reproduced by another group, but the reference is to the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It doesn’t seem as though the author has tried to replicate the results himself.

What I find a little bit worrying about all this is that Homeopathy looks like a proper journal: it is peer-reviewed, it is indexed by the Web of Science, it has that journal-like page layout. Perhaps it even has an impact factor (for what that’s worth, ie not much). If you don’t read the papers critically, this is going to seem like a perfect valid source of useful scientific information.

Where do I start? I have no understanding of the physics and molecular dynamics they describe, but I do know how data should be presented.

-The methods section does not describe the methods, nor cite a reference for where I could find the methods described.
-The results section is non-existant, but results are given in the methods section, and in a bizzare section labelled “Ageing effects”.
- The discussion is mixed in anywhere (I might be being fussy, but clear sections make it easy to read an evaluate).
- Everywhere, they state that there are differences between what I assume are the controls and the homeopathic solutions, but don’t present any P values for this, or detail any statistical test. Significantly (pardon the pun), they don’t even state that they have statistically significant difference for any of their data. Nor is it possible to see what the separation of the data is like, as there are no error bars, no details of numbers of replicates are given. I hope they have done replicates…..
-I’m confused by the sentance “…from the studies
so far conducted, we cannot derive reproducible
information concerning the influence of the different
degrees of homeopathic dilution or the nature of
the active principle (solute) on the measured physicochemical
parameters”. Does this mean that all of their experiments gave non-reproducible results? In which case, you can’t publish this as a result.

Overall, it is rubbish. Until they analyse and present their data properly, there is no way of knowing if they have found anything out. Personally, I don’t think they have.