Skeptic persecution via Ben Goldacre BadScience Forum leads to patient suicide and medic perpetrator prosecution. GMC fails to act.

Patient Committed Suicide After His Doctor Was Hounded By Dr Ben Goldacre’s Badscience Forum Internet Bullies – Perpetrator’s Mild Two Year Cautionary Sentence Only Just Ended December 2013

Perpetrator: Stuart Jones

“Causing a patient to commit suicide by vicious bullying of the patient’s treating doctor specifically to “increase anxiety levels” in the victim doctor’s patients is apparently not a sufficiently serious crime to warrant more than a 2 year “caution” for the Health and Care Professions Council.

Although no charges were brought against the patient’s doctor by the GMC and the doctor was never called before the GMC, aborted investigations in 2006/07 cost the GMC £136,692.12 in solicitors’ fees and disbursements and a possible further £500,000 on internal costs – according to a report on a website set up to support the patient’s doctor by patients and wellwishers.

The GMC is funded by a levy paid by all medical doctors registered in the UK.

It appears also no action has been taken by the GMC regarding Dr Goldacre’s BadScience Forum activities.

The GMC is meant to act on patient complaints.  To complain to the GMC you can contact them on:

Email: gmc@gmc-uk.org.”

Why hounding homeopaths is both batty and arrogant.

“Ultimately what Nightingale is attacking is the intelligence and judgement of people who are trying to find an effective way to heal themselves. If homeopathy, which even its most virulent critics cannot claim is remotely likely to be harmful, works for you, then someone needs to combine serious arrogance with real battiness to believe they have the right to stand in the way.”

 Body of Evidence

There is no shortage of villains in the world. Psychopaths – domestic and national – whalers, toxic waste dumpers, global eavesdroppers, billionaire tax avoiders and their army of accountants –  all well worth campaigning against with the aim of getting them banged up or forced to cough up.

There is also an infinite supply of people who are mildly irritating who misplace apostrophes, wear Croc shoes, do crochet, litter their sentences with “you know” and text using their middle finger.

However most of us can tell the difference. In fact mixing the two categories up is a pretty reliable indicator of a serious level of battiness . Picketing shops that sell Crocs or campaigning to forbid the sale of mobiles to clumsy texters puts you firmly in the mild-to-fairly-irritating and definitely-a-bit -potty class.

Step forward the Nightingale Collaboration, earnest and self-styled defender of rationalism, whose seriously potty members have got…

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Edzard Ernst’s uncritical endorsement of EBM is ’empirical quackery’

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick’s review of the book ‘Trick or Treatment’ by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst at  spiked-online (they say: “an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms”) makes the following observations and criticisms of interest:

“Despairing of their capacity to engage with serious adversaries or big issues, former left-wingers are inclined to re-fight the battles of the past and to seek out soft targets for their invective: current favourites include neo-fascists, creationists and conservative religionists. Though any small success of these forces is trumpeted as a menace to civilisation, in reality they are as marginal as they have ever been. Exaggerating these threats enables liberals to imagine a return to their glory days, and allows them to evade the real problems of the present.”

“Alternative medicine, the focus of a new critique titled Trick or Treatment? by the science writer Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, ‘the world’s first professor of complementary medicine’, has become another target of the radical backlash. Following the spectacular success of a series of works promoting militant secularism, a spate of books and blogs now signals a new crusade against alternative medicine.”

“it is light on references”

“My reservations about Trick or Treatment? concern its uncritical endorsement of what the health policy expert Rudolph Klein has characterised as the ‘new scientism’ of ‘evidence-based medicine’ (1), its incoherent advice to doctors on telling the truth and its curiously paternalistic approach towards patients.

According to Singh and Ernst, ‘evidence-based medicine’, a term coined by the epidemiologist David Sackett in 1992, has ‘revolutionised medical practice’. They acknowledge that ‘prior to the development of evidence-based medicine, doctors were spectacularly ineffective’. However, ‘once the medical establishment had adopted such simple ideas as the clinical trial, then progress became swift’. As a result, ‘today’, less than two decades later, according to this remarkable telescoping of the familiar narrative of progress from darkness to enlightenment, ‘the clinical trial is routine in the development of new treatments and medical experts agree that evidence-based medicine is the key to effective health care’.

While it is true that evidence-based medicine (EBM) has made some useful contributions to contemporary medical practice, notably in the systematic use of randomised controlled trials in the study of therapeutic interventions, it is nonsense to claim that it has played a major role in the successes of modern medicine (such as vaccines, antibiotics, steroids, anaesthetics, surgical techniques) which arose from developments in the basic medical sciences.”

“To some of its critics, in its disparagement of theory and its crude number-crunching, EBM marks a return to ‘empiricist quackery’ in medical practice.”

“Why are so many GPs tolerating, promoting or even using bogus treatments?’ is the provocative question posed by Singh and Ernst to my colleagues in primary health care. They consider various possibilities (though they do not seem to apply their commitment to an evidence-based approach to their speculations in this area). Could it be that GPs are simply ignorant of the facts that alternative medicine is useless? They raise the possibility that some GPs may be true believers in alternative therapies, but – understandably – find this too terrifying a subject to investigate further. They believe that many GPs are so inconsiderate towards their patients that this drives them into the sympathetic, empathetic arms of alternative therapists. But for them the most likely explanation is that GPs are simply lazy and respond to their patients’ relentless minor complaints by ‘fobbing them off with placebos’, in the form of ‘bogus remedies’ and referrals to alternative therapists.”

“Singh and Ernst criticise GPs for ‘encouraging patients’ to seek out alternative therapists. In a bizarre parallel with the world of drug addiction, they argue that ‘introducing patients to alternative therapists in relation to a minor condition could act as a gateway to a longer-term reliance’. One taste of a (tasteless) homeopathic pill or twist of an acupuncture needle could lead to a serious habit, and they may end up refusing vaccinations and stopping prescription drugs.

This is getting silly.”

I have received the following further comments from Ralf Jeutter PhD RSHom:

“The quotes from the book presented by Fitzpatrick show how superficial Singh and Ernst’s critique is. It is primarily based on the assumption that EBM is a reliable tool with which to judge treatments, totally ignoring that EBM is far from accepted as that.  Fitzpatrick calls it ‘incoherent advice to doctors’; the ‘founder’ of EBM, Sackett, wrote: ‘EBM … never replaces clinical skills, clinical judgment and clinical experience’, thus refuting in one single sentence everything Ernst claims: that EBM is the most reliable and generally accepted standard for assessing clinical effectiveness.

Ernst is a dramatiser who has lost perspective of real academic/scientific issues when he writes that ‘prior to the development of evidence-based medicine, doctors were spectacularly ineffective.’ If he really means this it is clear that he has an utterly uncritical enthusiasm for what is only the latest fashion in medicine, one that is neither established nor universally accepted. The one appeal it has is its mind numbing simplicity, which totally ignores clinical realities.

The review also highlights how desperate Ernst is to find ANYTHING to discredit CAM: apparently it is habit forming on a par with, well, seriously habit forming things. Rightly Fitzpatrick says: ‘This is silly’.

Ernst loses academic credibility by refusing to acknowledge the real complexity of research into CAM. Moreover he refuses to acknowledge that most conventional treatments and interventions are not evidence based. He has found a way of making headlines by propagating very crude science indeed. His academic status is further undermined by acting much more like a quackbuster of recent years than as somebody who should be encouraging more research (including research methodologies into CAM) to benefit the profession and patients.

It really does not become a Professor of CAM to dismiss such a longstanding and successful practice like homeopathy as ‘bogus’ and ‘nonsense’. As an academic he has had to make a determined effort to ignore the plethora of research which has grown around homeopathy over the last 200 years: pre-clinical fundamental research; fundamental research into physics and chemistry as far as it has a bearing on homeopathy; experiments on plants with ultra-high dilutions; experiments on animals and animal tissue with ultra-high dilutions; in-vitro studies; clinical studies, be they observational or comparative studies; controlled studies of nosological clinical homeopathy to randomised clinical isopathic and epidemiological studies. He has also ignored the dedicated hard work of many researchers into CAM and associated fields: dismissing all of this as useless activity which has yielded nothing and will never yield anything. I think it would suit Prof. Ernst to show more respect to his colleagues and a modicum of modesty.

Ernst has come to the conclusion that homeopathy doesn’t work by cherry-picking what he considers to be state-of-the-art research methodologies, which conflict in many instances with clinical realities.

It appears that it is Ernst’s desire to call a premature end to homeopathy which informs his understanding of ‘science’. Homeopathy has survived many fads, fashions and detractors, and will no doubt survive this latest attempt at discrediting it. In my own modest predicition, Ernst, in all likelihood, will become a footnote in the history of homeopathy, like so many before him.  He is an academic who mistakes scientific models with reality.”

Homeopathy for animals under threat

From www.homeopathyworkedforme.org

Homeopathy for animals under threat – 22 March 2008

If you treat your animals with homeopathy then you need to know that the British Veterinary Surgeons Act is currently under review by a Parliamentary Committee and they are inviting information and comment. The homoeopathic vets are facing the same sort of attacks from others in their profession as homeopaths are, and it is vital that owners write to their MPs in defence of the right to treat their animals.

Letters to MPs and to DEFRA (especially those asking a question and therefore needing a reply) are actually noted and that it is surprising how few are needed to have an effect. Letters sent to the Committee should state that:
 
the owner has used homoeopathy;
the owner has found it to help the problem;
the owner would like to have the freedom to choose the type of treatment for their own animals;
the veterinary profession is not able to offer this service;
homoeopathy should be specifically included within the remit of the Act;
lay professionals should be able to treat animals.

You can get information about contacting your MP at: http://www.parliament.uk/directories/directories.cfm. 

At present, by strict interpretation, homoeopathy given to animals by anyone other than a vet or an owner is illegal, no matter how well qualified the practitioner, and only about 250 vets are qualified in homoeopathy. Apparently a survey in a vetinary magazine two years ago reported that 65% of owners want homoeopathic or other alternative.

Further information is available at: http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/VideoPlayer.aspx?meetingId=1246
http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/environment__food_and_rural_affairs/efra_veterinarysurgeons.cfm

Wholesale scorn on complementary medicine is unscientific.

Madeleine Bunting (at my least favourite newspaper ‘The Guardian’ since ‘I’m a cuddly junior doctor/you’re-making-it-up-psychiatrist’ Ben Goldacre’s devoid of any twisted homeopathic facts propaganda piece) makes some pertinent points about the state of Sceptic-Woo wars in complementary medicine.  I disagree that homeopathy is ‘just placebo’ as the benefits of homeopathic treatment can be much more profound than just ‘feeling better’ or ‘removal of symptoms’ but otherwise I agree with her thinking:

“Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All; Snake Oil Science; and next month sees another, Trick or Treatment: what these new books have in common is varying degrees of frustration at the seemingly inexorable rise of complementary medicine. It seems the aim of some of these authors is to finish off a burgeoning health industry that they believe is based on charlatans and quacks preying on the gullible and desperate.

The books reflect the growing exasperation in some quarters that public opinion is not as amenable to persuasion and scientific evidence as they would hope. The language gets lurid; the mood music to pronouncements on complementary medicine is increasingly alarmist – we are living in dangerous times, an unEnlightenment looms as tides of irrationality threaten to overwhelm the palisades erected by science. “Reason is a precious but fragile thing,” declared Richard Dawkins in his series, The Enemies of Reason, last autumn. “Reason has liberated us from superstition and given us centuries of progress. We abandon it at our peril.”

What so troubles these science warriors is that it is estimated a third of people in the UK now use complementary medicine, at a cost of £1.5bn a year. In the US, the figures are substantially higher; it has been calculated that more visits are made to healing therapists than to doctors. There is an extraordinary paradox here: a half-century of astonishing conventional medical advances has not succeeded in eliminating complementary medicine. Quite the reverse: the breakthroughs in conventional medicine have been accompanied by the proliferation of other forms of healing – many of which have little or no evidence base to prove their efficacy. Indeed, it only takes a short surf on the web to discover that the wilder shores of this burgeoning industry are, well, pretty wild.

To the science warriors, this bizarre state of affairs can only be explained by irrationality. They bemoan the state of science education and lament how, contrary to expectation, literacy and access to information have failed to eradicate superstition. Meanwhile, in this increasingly sharply polarised debate, complementary medicine practitioners are equally exasperated by what they see as blinkered scientific reductionism.

So it takes a brave scientist to launch into this territory and risk getting attacked from both camps by daring to ask a simple question: is there anything science can learn from complementary medicine? That is precisely what Kathy Sykes is doing in her current television series, Alternative Therapies (the second programme is on BBC2 tonight). As Bristol University’s professor of public engagement in science and the director of the Cheltenham Festival of Science, no one can challenge her credentials as a scientist, yet her scrutiny of particular therapies throws up serious challenges to conventional medicine.

Sykes is too good a scientist to give complementary medicine an easy run. Tonight she examines reflexology, and gives it pretty short shrift. There are 30,000 reflexologists working on a million British feet a year. They base their work on a theory that parts of the sole of the foot correlate to organs in the body. The only problem is that Sykes could find no one, reflexologist or scientist, who could explain how these correlations might work. Furthermore, it turned out that this “ancient” healing system seems to have originated with an imaginative American woman in the 1930s. But patients swear by it. One reflexologist points Sykes to her annual garden party full of babies and children as evidence of the success she has had with infertility problems. This is the point where most scientists snort with derision at the use of personal anecdote as evidence, but Sykes presses on and it takes her into two areas of scientific research. First, she digs up new research on the importance of touch, which can have a profound impact on the brain. Even the hand of a stranger reduces anxiety and that of someone with whom one has a close relationship is even more significant. In fact, Sykes finds some scientific underpinning which goes beyond placebo in many of the therapies she looks at. But it is placebo which emerges as a recurrent and crucially important thread in her quest, and it leads her to the work of several American scientists who are trying to identify what placebo is, who it works for, and why it works.

This is one of the most common charges made against complementary medicine – that most of it is no better than placebo. But there is a way of turning that accusation around: perhaps complementary medicine is an effective way to harness placebo as one of the most powerful – and cheapest – of healing processes. Rather than being derogatory about the phenomenon as “just” placebo, perhaps we should see it as one of the most remarkable and little understood aspects of the human body.

That line of inquiry has taken Sykes to the US several times over the course of the two series she has made. There placebo has become a new frontier in medicine. In a range of studies with startling results – even sham knee surgery can be as effective as the real thing – many factors contribute to placebo: the confidence of the doctor; the social, cultural expectations around the procedure; the empathy and warmth of the patient-doctor relationship; the patient’s degree of faith. Get all these right, and the outcome can be remarkable. Harvard professor Ted Kaptchuk is publishing a study this week which shows that placebo is as good as any conventional treatment available for irritable bowel syndrome. Given that the eight most industrialised nations spend $40bn a year on medication for this condition, that’s revolutionary stuff.

This kind of research into placebo gives some insight into why complementary medicine has boomed and why there are so many people who cite their own experience to passionately defend it. The average consultation with a GP is 4.6 minutes, while the complementary therapist can devote an hour to taking detailed personal histories. That time and relationship provide a context and an opportunity for the ritual and recasting of personal experience which Kaptchuk believes are the crucial elements of placebo.

Complementary medicine is most popular where conventional medicine fails, such as with musculoskeletal conditions and mental health – stress, depression, anxiety (the recent revelations about the inefficacy of Prozac were another reminder of how shaky the science is in a large area of conventional medicine). Several complementary therapies are particularly effective at pain relief – you had to see Sykes’s footage of hypnotism helping a woman to have teeth extracted without anaesthetic to believe it. Kaptchuk argues that pain is not a static given but can be experienced dramatically differently.

Conventional medicine prolongs life but is less successful in prolonging good health – we can expect to spend more years of our life in poor health, as a government report showed last week – and in producing wellbeing. So people are voting with their feet, trying to find other ways to fill the gaps left by conventional medicine. We need scientists to help to identify what they are looking for and why, rather than pouring scorn indiscriminately on the whole field and on the relations between belief, mind and body, of which science still has such a fragmentary understanding.”

Witnessing the worldly struggle of parallel and opposing teams: Haliaeetus Leucocephalus (American bald Eagle)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/-jon-/136679496/ 

Today I came across the proving by Jeremy Sherr of the blood of the American bald Eagle.  Some of what the proving says has relevance today in the apparently opposing world views of homeopaths and skeptics:

 ‘The tranquillity of Eagle leads to a unique characteristic.  This is a state of witnessing, a pure objectivity that will not take sides in the worldly struggle of parallel and opposing teams that can never share a common point of view. 

From this highly objective position eagle approaches the state of a truly unprejudiced observer.

Haliaeetus…. focuses not on the lines but on the eternal split between them.’  One prover felt: “It’s like a deep, deep crack and it is getting deeper, like a crack in my soul.  The crack has an endless quality to it, like a crack in my soul or the universe.”

‘The Kabala teaches that the Tree of Life is constructed of three parallel columns.  On the left side is the pole of Judgement and discrimination and on the right side is the pole of Sympathy and benevolence.  Haliaeetus separates these polarities to an extreme degree.  But in opposition to the deep and evil crack mentioned earlier, it also has the power to unite both columns in the central column of Mercy, which represents divine presence.

Though the internal configuration of Haliaeetus is the unfocused separation of parallel lines, which leads to a dark, empty abyss, in our vast curved universe parallel lines may eventually meet high above the ground or deep within our interior.  once the eagle focuses on this central point of view, it can align with the only force in the universe that is beyond good and bad, present and future, judgement and sympathy – the all powerful force of God’s light.’

No comments allowed due to allegorical nature of this piece.

Rupert Sheldrake: we need to be skeptical of skeptics

Rupert Sheldrake,  one of the world’s most innovative biologists, is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory. He first worked in developmental biology at Cambridge University, and is currently Director of the Perrott-Warrick project. ”

The skepticism of believers 

I used to think of skepticism as a primary intellectual virtue, whose goal was truth. I have changed my mind. I now see it as a weapon.

Creationists opened my eyes. They use the techniques of critical thinking to expose weaknesses in the evidence for natural selection, gaps in the fossil record and problems with evolutionary theory. Is this because they are seeking truth? No. They believe they already know the truth. Skepticism is a weapon to defend their beliefs by attacking their opponents.

Skepticism is also an important weapon in the defence of commercial self-interest. According to David Michaels, who was assistant secretary for environment, safety and health in the US Department of Energy in the 1990s, the strategy used by the tobacco industry to create doubt about inconvenient evidence has now been adopted by corporations making toxic products such as lead, mercury, vinyl chloride, and benzene. When confronted with evidence that their activities are causing harm, the standard response is to hire researchers to muddy the waters, branding findings that go against the industry’s interests as “junk science.” As Michaels noted, “Their conclusions are almost always the same: the evidence is ambiguous, so regulatory action is unwarranted.” Climate change skeptics use similar techniques.

In a penetrating essay called “The Skepticism of Believers”, Sir Leslie Stephen, a pioneering agnostic (and the father of Virginia Woolf), argued that skepticism is inevitably partial. “In regard to the great bulk of ordinary beliefs, the so-called skeptics are just as much believers as their opponents.” Then as now, those who proclaim themselves skeptics had strong beliefs of their own. As Stephen put it in 1893, ” The thinkers generally charged with skepticism are equally charged with an excessive belief in the constancy and certainty of the so-called ‘laws of nature’. They assign a natural cause to certain phenomena as confidently as their opponents assign a supernatural cause.”

Skepticism has even deeper roots in religion than in science. The Old Testament prophets were withering in their scorn for the rival religions of the Holy Land. Psalm 115 mocks those who make idols of silver and gold: “They have mouths, and speak not: eyes have they, and see not.” At the Reformation, the Protestants deployed the full force of biblical scholarship and critical thinking against the veneration of relics, cults of saints and other “superstitions” of the Catholic Church. Atheists take religious skepticism to its ultimate limits; but they are defending another faith, a faith in science.

In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people’s errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief.”

Fact or FLACT?

Sceptics like to twist things around, notably Ben Goldacre (junior liaison psychiatrist, of the ‘it’s all in your head’ school of medicine), according to twisted logic.

It feels like this:

I might say ‘I like yellow’.

A sceptic might then claim ‘H4H doesn’t like white, red, blue, green, orange, purple, pink, black or brown.’  This would not be true as I also like blue and purple and I can tolerate all the other colours too.

I have a new term for such logic-derived ‘facts’: ‘FLACT’.

*4th February 2008.  Updated* to incorporate my justification of including Ben Goldacre from responses to Andy Lewis (aka le canard noir):

https://homeopathy4health.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/forced-vaccinations-because-conventional-medicine-is-not-effective-in-treating-infectious-disease/

The low cholera mortality rates under homeopathic treatment: When Cholera finally struck Europe in 1831 the mortality rate (under conventional treatment) was between 40% (Imperial Council of Russia) to 80% (Osler’s Practice of Medicine). Out of five people who contracted Cholera, two to four of them died under regular treatment. Dr. Quin, in London, reported the mortality in the ten homeopathic hospitals in 1831-32 as 9%; Dr. Roth, physician to the king of Bavaria, reported that under homeopathic care the mortality was 7%; Admiral Mordoinow of the Imperial Russian Council reported 10% mortality under homeopathy; and Dr. Wild, Allopathic editor of Dublin Quarterly Journal, reported in Austria, the Allopathic mortality was 66% and the homeopathic mortality was 33% “and on account of this extraordinary result, the law interdicting the practice of Homeopathy in Austria was repealed.’

Ben states:‘Homeopathic pills won’t do anything against cholera.’

So by his logic (and yours) most of the people treated with homeopathy just got better anyway: ‘the homeopaths’ treatments at least did nothing either way’

So logically: If people just got better anyway, by this evidence they should just have been left alone when they got cholera and the death rates would have been much lower. And his other part of Ben’s logic is that cholera death rates were so high because allopathic medicine made them much worse: ‘high allopathic mortality rate was due to dangerous practices’

So my point is why would the population worry so much about cholera then?

But they did:

http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2000_fall/1832_cholera_part1.html

‘New York was probably the most thoroughly scourged among the states. Each of the thriving towns along the Erie Canal suffered in its turn, despite quarantines and last minute attempts at ‘purifications.’ . . .Small villages, even isolated farms, were stricken. And here the disease was most terrifying; it had to be faced alone, often without friend, minister, or physician. The appearance of cholera in even the smallest hamlet was the signal for the general exodus of the inhabitants, who, in their headlong flight, spread the disease throughout the surrounding countryside.’

http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=3353

‘Asiatic cholera is a very violent intestinal disease, usually running a short course to dehydration and death, often in a matter of hours. Its very violence ensured that it would not be the type of disease which could be overlooked or treated with little concern’

‘The social and economic consequences of cholera were quite significant. Community life was completely disrupted whenever a new pandemic arrived. Usually panic gripped the populace and all persons who could leave the affected area promptly did so. The spectacular deadliness of the pandemic of 1826-37, which was the first to strike Europe and America, set up a psychological conditioning which assured that all subsequent invasions would induce panic. Normal economic and social life came to an end. Governmental activities were carried out with difficulty. Even medical and nursing services were impaired–sometimes to the extent that the sick were left untended and the dead unburied. Travellers and strangers often were treated badly. Gradually, as an epidemic waned, normal routines were resumed. Practically every community added boards of health and sanitation, which were supposed to take preventive measures against new outbreaks of cholera.’

Medicine: blind and in the dark?

The thing I like most about being a homeopathic practitioner is the observation process.  We all practise in slightly different ways according to our strengths, and whereas some of us are adept at reading body language my strength is in the language that people use when in the homeopathic conversation (reference Brian Kaplan’s book ‘The Homeopathic Conversation’) and out of it.  My aim is to empathise with the person’s situation, understand how they think and feel and how their body reflects these.

What puzzles me about scientific papers is that observation is taken out of the process and reduced to statistics which are incomprehesible to the lay person and which are subject to statistical interpretation bias.  Observation of effects is impossible and readers of scientific papers are literally ‘blind’ to their sense of the results.

The foundations of the scientific approach are suspicion and doubt: both are deeply negative mental processes.  I am told that a good scientist should doubt his results as his first reaction;  I would say that this is an unhealthy reaction in most normal situations:  someone who doubts his reactions has poor intuition.   Someone who is doubtful isolates themselves from experience.  Suspicion causes peers to doubt each others results and slows progress.

 Then there is the requirement to take an experiment into a laboratory both to control real world contamination and to simultaneously mimic real world conditions.  How can it do both?

Skeptics believe that the scientific method is the answer to medical problems, I am unconvinced.

Dr Natasha Campbell McBride says it better than I : http://www.thehealthbank.co.uk/nutrition_articles/blind_and_double_blind.html

Homeopathy – space medicine of the future?

Despite sceptics constrained by 19th century science claiming that homeopathy is a ‘quack’ 19th Century medicine, it is encouraging to hear that the 21st century space program is seriously considering using it: http://www.ebiologynews.com/2087.html. 

“The paper presented by Prasanta and Pratip Banerji was based on the fact that the moon has no magnetic field and hence problems of dispersion, solubility, absorption, availability at tissue level, metabolism and excretion of drugs, including recycling problems and disposal, do exist.

“Thus, in such a state, the use of conventional medicines has its limitations. An alternative to conventional medicines will be ultra-diluted medicines that may help solve the problems,” said Prasanta Banerji.

Ultra-diluted medicines have the capability to act through nerve terminals when placed on our tongue to execute beneficial roles in our body.

“Ultra-diluted medicines are also non-toxic, with extended shelf-life, non-addictive, with negligible weight and volume, low-cost, and easily administrable,” he added.”

Many things we now take for granted came out of the space program: http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html

Let’s hope homeopathy will be one of these in the future.  Happy Christmas.