Looking Out To Sea

If I may characterise Ben Goldacre’s excellent article in the Guardian as Homeopathy doesn’t work because of A, B and C, then we can safely say that Denis MacEoin’s response consists of Yeah but what about B or C, you didn’t think about that, did you?

It really is the saddest thing, to see grown and (you would hope) intelligent people willing to skip merrily from premise to conclusion without a thought for everything they have to accept on the way:

• Like cures like. Why would something that causes fevers be effective at curing the flu? This doesn’t just require magical thinking — we need to throw out all of our understanding of human biology and how we fight infection before we can even entertain the idea. In fact, it also requires we throw out the entire notion of infection. This stuff does not jive with germ theory. Even creationists don’t deny the existence of disease-causing bacteria, but these people will happily sell you water to banish malaria or HIV.
• Dilution is amplification. This is the one that everyone laughs at, because it’s just so fundamentally silly. And they really do take it to extremes. Only a homeopathist would consider that dilution past the point of Avogadro’s limit is no obstacle to the principle. Just keep diluting, it’ll get more potent! (Did you know that it helps if you slap a leather-bound book against your homeopathic treatment? True story.)
• Holistic treatment only treats symptoms. The weird thing is that, while homeopathy is no more effective than reiki or chiropractic, it pretends to be “holistic” while blatantly ignoring the real causes of many diseases. The treatments, after all, are allocated depending on your symptoms, not their causes. Dizziness? Well, it could be last night on the G&Ts, or it could be West Nile virus, or that nasty bump you received when you walked into the kitchen cupboard. The treatments are all based on the symptom, so all these will seem alike.

Even if you swallow the “water has memory” stuff, there’s still have a massive load of nonsense to internalise. None of this can be explained by, or explains, what we know about biology or medicine or physics or… anything, really. There’s no evidence for any of it. It ignores hundreds of years of scientific discovery.

But even if we assume that it is all possible, we will never discover these purported benefits if we do as Denis MacEoin asks. We cannot have an unimpeachable priesthood, whose qualifications we have to match in order to say “no, that’s just water”. (At which point, I don’t doubt, you would be accused of heresy.) I don’t need qualifications of any kind to look at evidence, and yet at the moment all I can see is holes where that evidence should be. Homeopathy is a religion and those gaps must be filled with faith. For the rest of us, who live in the “reality-based community”, we might prefer those gaps filled with more than wishful thinking.

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