Peter Fisher and Elsevier have rather kindly given me permission to reproduce the experimental papers from the special issue of Homeopathy on the memory of water, so I’m posting them in full below. As you know I’m a strong believer in free access to academic journals, especially when they’ve been press-released and discussed in popular fora.
The memory of water is a REALITY
A special edition of “the journal previously known as the British Journal of Homeopathy” claims to have assembled a large body of data proving that water has a memory. By which they mean, of course, a memory of more than a few picoseconds, which can explain the effects of homeopathy sugar tablets (which have been shown in trials – let’s remember – to be no more effective than placebo sugar tablets). Read the rest of this entry »
A new ethics of bullshit
Ben Goldacre
Saturday June 23, 2007
The Guardian
I’m dispatching this column to you from the frontline of the healing fields at Glastonbury festival, where I can cheerfully offer aura reading, structural integrative massage, soul therapy in the pyramid healing space, happy footbaths, crystal magick, positive thinking yoga and angel therapy. In an angelically charged dome. Read the rest of this entry »
Homeopathy Science Degrees In British Universities
Just a brief note to say, if you want to read the original Nature news story and commentary that is driving today’s news story then Prof Colquhoun (the commentary author) is hosting a PDF copy of it here on his own entirely excellent blog:
www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/quack.html#nature1
He’s also got a cracking round up of the newspaper and radio stories, updated as they come out.
The Truth About Nutritionists…
…is the title of a stage show I’ve written with a friend. Amazingly it looks like it might Read the rest of this entry »
Lionel Milgrom – Quality Homeopathic Debate
Bit of a ramble, so feel free to bypass this post, but this is quite odd to me. When a chap receives a communique from one of the Directors of the Society of Homeopaths, that august representative body, it only seems fair to give it some thought and some space. This charming email from Lionel Milgrom Read the rest of this entry »
Homeopathy Debate Video Stream
The video for the homeopathy “debate” at the Natural History Museum two weeks ago is up, it’s me and Dr Peter Fisher, Clinical Director of the NHS Royal Intergalactic Homeopathic Hospital in Queen’s Square. It feels to me as if some of the discussion might be missing, looking at the timebar, but I haven’t had a chance to watch it all yet.
As I remember it, Peter’s talk involves rather a lot on how Dawkins said something a bit stupid about homeopathy once in an introduction to someone else’s book 7 years ago, and there was Read the rest of this entry »
Natural History Museum Homeopathy Debate – Booking Now
I'm talking at this Natural History Museum thing on Thursday 30th Nov at 7pm with Dr Peter Fisher, Clinical Director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, bookings on 020 7942 5555, seats going fast…
Should be good fun, at first it was to speak "against" somebody called Dr Marysia Kratimenos, but now they've got Dr Peter Fisher. He is obviously the biggest cheese in Uk homeopathy, a very nice man, a very clever man, a very well informed man, an extremely reasonable man, a man who takes Read the rest of this entry »
Dreary Pro-Homeopathy Piece and Letter
The usual tedious stuff in this 1000 word pro-CAM piece in the Guardian today: “CAM is good because medicine is bad”, “CAM is not researched because it doesn’t have big money” (in fact there are plenty of incompetent CAM trials, a bad trial costs as much to perform as a good one), “some authority figures say CAM is good”, and no attempt to address any criticisms except to complain that they are persecutory.
The whining and rhetoric I can cope with; an ignorance about evidence based medicine, so profound that she can’t even get the most basic terminology correct, is fine too (she refers to “random controlled trials” which means nothing, I presume she means “randomised controlled trials”); but she seems to allude to a trial that does not exist, and that is the thing, as usual, that Read the rest of this entry »
Homeopathy Packaging And Flu
With the changes to homeopathy regulations you can look forward to more products like this, for “influenza and influenza-like colds”:
Coldenza is a homeopathic remedy specifically designed to bring fast, effective relief for the symptoms of cold and flu. For best results take Read the rest of this entry »
