Doctors are wrong and someone lives, brilliant.

BBC is caught giving out impartial advice about the benefits of homeopathy and someone dies, manslaughter.

“Whaling worsens carbon release, scientists warn” – headline news item on the Science section of the BBC website.

“A century of whaling may have released more than 100 million tonnes – or a large forest’s worth – of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists say.”

However, further down the article: “Dr Pershing stressed that this was still a relatively tiny amount when compared to the billions of tonnes produced by human activity every year.” Er, so it’s *not* actually a “news item”. No more so than would be an article, say, on the carbon released by my sigh on reading this hyper-inflated non-story.

So, should we be surprised by the reporting of “cured” homeopath?

Brilliant. Although i’m a bit disappointed they didn’t reply to me.

The BBC just got round to replying to my complaint. It was the usual,’we need to present impartially both sides of the argument’ until I asked him if they would give holocaust deniers equal impartiality, at first he said know then he realised that it ruined his argument and so he said he would.

I asked if they’d checked with the womans specialist but he avoided answering the question.

I suggested that where people make claims that they have evidence that the BBC should ask them to produce it and provide links to it. Apparently the BBC already do this and he directed me toward a number of articles which had a link to the homepage of the society of homeopaths on it. I explained that it wasn’t quite the same thing but it was well over his head.

“I accidently cut off the end of my finger while working a lathe. I was bleeding all over our brand new carpet. What’s better? Stitches or a sugar pill?”

I recommend one of two actions: Either move the lathe out of the living room and into your workshop, or move your brand new carpet out of the workshop and into your living room.

I suspect that most of the doctors on here are not saying that everything is OK in medicine and that everything is evidence based. Simply that Western medicine does respond (sometimes slowly) to new evidence and there is a growing trend for things to be evidence based. So lots of work to be done, but not a job that homeopathy or other placebo/quack/alternative therapies will ever undertake.

You have, with some justification, (even if with, in some of our views some overstatement) raised concerns over the scientific rationale behind certain areas of therapeutics, so I would like to know how vigorous your rationale is for making assessments in your own field.

@Guy
Mental health is my field and I often have to clear up consequences of SSRI prescriptions: addiction, side-effects mistaken for symptoms of anxiety & depression, not to mention the people who’ve given up. I’d still be interested in what % share of the $600bn drugs market is actually proven to work better than placebo.

Loved Rhodri’s comment by the way. I was particularly amused at the fact that, when challenged about the massive evidence deficit that hangs over homeopathy like its imminent death, she attempts to defend her profession by saying “There’s plenty of scientif… of evidence!”. I am pleased to see though that even she’s aware there’s not a femtogram of science to back this stuff up.

www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/2010/02/24/did-homeopathy-cure-womans-cancer/

What was the date of the original broadcast, and BBC channel? I want to make a complaint.

All that I think can really be said with confidence is that “method x of testing for water-memory has been proven false.” This does not rule out the possibility that someone will not come along tomorrow with method y of testing which may or may not show different results. So I am still not confident in being able to falsify the entire edifice in this way. I am only talking about this specific situation here, I am sure that there are other situations where your methodology would hold true.

Hadn’t read much of the discussion you reference – probably precisely because a certain name tends to encourage me to go and do something else! Probably a good thing too, I’ve had to restrain myself from answering half of the comments two months too late – Andanotherthing…!

My uncertainty re this is exactly what I was trying to waffle abour – perhaps badly – in post #33 on Ben’s previous article www.badscience.net/2010/02/parliamentary-sci-tech-committee-on-homeopathy/

with no great conclusions. SkyeSteve felt, with plenty of justification, that using placebos is paternalism (he also said that he thought that it was an approach regarded as unethical by the BMA and the GMC, though some of us might regard that as actually an argument in favour of the approach!)

The scientist in me wants to be scientific, the therapist in me wants to find what helps my patients to feel better, as long as it is safe, and to boot knows that I do not have well-validated remedies for many of the problems my patients consult with. OK, many of these conditions may be self-limiting, but not necessarily quickly so, and there can be considerable mortality in the intervening period. Add in the fact that the other title for my chosen career is “family medicine”, and I also see the knock-on effects on others. This all makes me reluctant to dismiss paternalism out-of-hand if it can still make a difference. This is my day-to-day dilemma, not a comfortable computer-chair academic debate.

So, I don’t have any answer I can comfortably accept as “correct”, but if I went quiet, it was only because I thought that people might be getting tired of my repeated ramblings on the subject!

Good example. You may have noticed that I posted on this a couple of topics before this one, about the lack of evidence for SSRI’s and how they are largely placebo effect. Interestingly the doctors on here went rather quiet when I questioned the place of placebo when used by qualified doctors who know what they’re treating, rather than homeopathy which is nothing but placebo and people kidding themselves!

I hope this demonstrates that though you don’t know me from Adam, I am willing to recognise where medicine is letting patients down!

As to my point I wasn’t saying you can falsify one specific phenomenological prediction by another. My point is that often a research scientist will not simply be interested in testing specific phenomena and cataloging them “pulling lever x causes y”. instead we are testing a theory which says F=ma and this has many predictions, including “pulling lever x causes y” and falsifying one of the predictions falsifies the theory as a whole.

I don’t really care about the specifics regarding homeopathy, but I was concerned that your general statemnent was because you often heard scientists talk about demonstrationg a theory was false, and misunderstood becauase you assosiate the name we give to the theory with a specific phenomena instead. For example you might think Newton’s theory of gravity is that the planets orbit the sun and not that the force grows with inverse square of the distance. You would then not understand how scientists could discuss falsifying it by testing other phenomena, like lab experiments with pendulums.

With regards to homeopathy, one can test theory that the effects of substances are transmitted to a host by serial dillution and succussion due to the “memory retention” of water. You can falsify this either by demonstating there is no effect transmitted or by by showing that water does not retain a “memory” of the substance. Randi might have meant this “theory” when he referred to homeopathy. If you read the section ‘The memory of water’ in the link you provided you can see it uses quites similar langauge so it seems plausible, but obv i haven’t seen the documentary. and tbh i don’t care either way on that specific statement, I just want to make sure you are not generally misunderstanding the statements made by scientists in this way.