It has been a while since I last posted on homeopathy. Frankly speaking, having written about it quite a bit, I have grown kinda tired of the utterly unscientific, nonsensical nature of homeopathy, and foolishness of its relentless proponents. However, a few days ago on Twitter, my attention was brought to a whole new level of ridiculousness in this quackery modality, and I found it concerning anew because of what it implies for the hapless, gullible and vulnerable patients desperately seeking medical care. Today’s short post touches on this.
Tag: quackery (Page 1 of 2)
A recently published paper, with the outcomes of a collaborative European Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) undertaken in Germany and Ukraine, is making waves amongst jubilant homeopaths as yet another evidence supporting their long-held belief in the clinical effectiveness of homeopathy. Naturally, this 2016 paper in the Journal Global Pediatric Health by van Haselen et al. piqued my curiosity and I dove in to see what the hullabaloo was all about.
Classical homeopathy is scientifically implausible as a therapy, because there is no substance of any medicinal value left in the functionally-infinitely diluted nostrum. Naturally, there is no hard evidence supporting the therapeutic use of homeopathy, in terms of clinical benefit to the patient. Absent such support, homeopathy-peddlers generally push affordability and low cost as homeopathy’s unique selling point (USP). A large retrospective cost-analysis study, based on nearly 45000 individual German patients, gives lie to that myth.
Fear does strange things to people. The fear du jour currently permeating the US is, of course, the Ebola virus disease. Despite the august efforts to reassure and educate from CDC and the WHO, there has spread a modicum of panic (often with tragic results); we have seen Ebola response become a political issue, and as pointed out recently by that redoubtable scienceblogger, Orac, a ghastly profusion of conspiracy theories and quackery has crawled out of nooks and crannies, feeding into the overall noise that is smothering rational discourse on the topic. But even before Orac wrote on it, my attention was drawn on Twitter to the latest volley of insane quackery to emerge, a supposedly “Ayurvedic approach” to curing Ebola – the Ayurveda nowadays being a catch-all term to refer to everything pre-scientific mumbo-jumbo allegedly written in the ancient Hindu holy texts, the Vedas. Because culture.
While contemplating the scienciness of homeopathy research and the time, money and effort wasted by misguided homeopathy researchers, I recently came across a paper which represents one such effort; it was published in the Journal of Analytical Methods in Chemistry in 2012, written by two Indian authors, one from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, West Bengal, and the other from a medical college associated with a local district hospital. Intrigued by the title claim of “Medicinally Active Ingredient in Ultradiluted Digitalis purpurea”, I decided to delve in.
The “alternative medicine” modality called homeopathy is popular in some parts of the world, especially some European countries (including Germany, where it was invented in the late 18th century; France; the UK), and in India and its neighbors in the subcontinent. Many Indian homeopaths are well-known amongst the global homeopathy-aficionado community, and there were over 250,000 registered homeopaths in India in 2010 – which is not surprising, considering that homeopathy enjoys official government patronage in India and is recognized as a valid system of medicine in that nation.
Continued from Part 1… As I was saying, a study by Goldman et al. in the July 2010 issue of Nature Neuroscience, postulates that “Adenosine A1 receptors mediate local anti-nociceptive (i.e. pain reducing) effects of acupuncture.”
I stumbled a little right at the title. Anti-nociceptive effects of acupuncture? Where is the evidence that such an effect exists?
In the last post, I mentioned the conversation I had with my friend regarding homeopathic remedies. During this conversation was revealed the source of my friend’s strange and firm beliefs in this quackery. He presented several anecdotes about members of his family as living proofs of the benefits of homeopathy.
Very recently, I’ve had an occasion to cross swords with a close friend, a working molecular biologist, whose inexplicable belief in homeopathy flabbergasted me. I do know that we Indians have a culturally-conditioned, deep and abiding faith in many modalities of quackery, including homeopathy which is very popular in India. Nevertheless, I’d have expected someone like my friend, who has delved deep into the inner workings of cells, to naturally outgrow such infantile belief systems. Clearly, I was mistaken – but more about that later.
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