A Nature commentary blasts homeopathic medicine taught in some British universities as little better than the placebo effect. The commentator may be missing the point.
Medical science is once again pounding on alternative medicine--that is, treatments and cures that science cannot or has not validated. But the fact remains that many people who chew on tree bark and quaff bitter-tasting concoctions swear that they work, and industries that are virtually unregulated happily supply the remedies and the lore and testimonials about how the latest potions are miracle cures for everything from cancer to acne.
Some of these treatments date back centuries to when shamans and healers discovered plants that seemed to alleviate disease. For instance, in old Europe, to relieve pain and reduce fever, physicians including Hippocrates gave patients a bitter powder ground down from the bark of willow trees--a substance that led to the development of aspirin.
Homeopathy is not so ancient. Launched in the late 17th century by the German physician Samuel Hahnmann, homeopathic medicine contends that the natural chemicals that cause symptoms in healthy people will, when given to patients in minute amounts, cause those symptoms to go away. Hahnmann surmised that the tiny amounts triggered the body's defenses to fend off the symptoms. Homeopathy is also associated with a holistic approach to treating people: practitioners spending time comforting and talking to patients and tending to their spiritual life as part of the healing.
Homeopathy remains popular in Europe and is taught in many medical schools. Yet only a few universities actually award Bachelor of Science (BS) degrees in homeopathy, including six universities in the United Kingdom.
Modern science, however, has found no evidence that homeopathy works. In a commentary in this week's Nature, pharmacologist David Calquhoun of the University College in London derides the BS degree programs in the United Kingdom for teaching "anti-science." A report in the same issue compares the teaching of homeopathy to students pursuing a BS degree in the United Kingdom with attempts to teach creationism as scientific fact in U.S. schools. The suggestion is that both are in the realm of pseudoscience.
Yet legions of patients are convinced that homeopathy and other alternative medicines work, leading scientists to surmise that these remedies have a placebo effect.
This comes as many drugs developed by scientists in drug companies fail in human trials because the active ingredient that researchers so painstakingly identified and tested turns out to work no better than a placebo. Drugs derived from natural products have a particularly high placebo effect--meaning that when patients think they might be getting a drug derived from a plant, they want it to work so badly that in many cases it does.
In a 2000 article about the placebo effect published in the New York Times Magazine, the writer Margaret Talbot offered,
"The truth is that the placebo effect is huge -- anywhere between 35 and 75 percent of patients benefit from taking a dummy pill in studies of new drugs -- so huge, in fact, that it should probably be put to conscious use in clinical practice, even if we do not entirely understand how it works. For centuries, Western medicine consisted of almost nothing but the placebo effect. The patient who got better after a bleeding -- or a dose of fox lung, wood lice, tartar emetic or any of the other charming staples of the 19th-century pharmacopoeia -- got better either in spite of them or because of their symbolic value. Such patients believed in the cure and in the authority of the bewigged gentlemen administering it, and the belief gave them hope and the hope helped make them well."
Rather than deriding such practices as homeopathic medicine as quackery, modern science should endeavor to better understand why they seem to work--or at least why so many people believe that their health improves when they consume, say, a potion containing tiny amounts of aloe to treat their hemorrhoids. A growing body of science also suggests that patients get better more quickly when physicians and other healers treat them more holistically--a problem for medical doctors in the United States today who are forced by insurers to spend only a few minutes on each patient.
People getting well after erroneously believing that they have had surgery or after taking a sugar pill--this is powerful medicine, but why? Learning the answer seems like an interesting project for science, and it might shed some light on why those shamans dancing around fires--not to mention the degree candidates in British universities learning about extracts of lavender--might know something that today's scientists do not.
Report: Giles, Jim, "Degrees in homeopathy slated as unscientific" Nature 446, 352-353 (22 March 2007) | doi:10.1038/446352a;
Commentary: Colquhoun, David, "Science degrees without the science", Nature 446, 373-374 (22 March 2007) | doi:10.1038/446373a;
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
The interesting thing to notice is that it was herbal doctors who called the chemical peddlers quacks. Nowadays, it is the chemical doctors who call herbalists quacks.
How the world changes!
TomTom
03/30/2007
Posts:29
Sadly it is a stock response of quacks to make that accusation. I guess it is a good way to change the subject.
David Colquh...
04/09/2007
Posts:1
What I don't appreciate about holistic medicine is when a "doctor" prescribes a ton (10,000mg) of vitamin C for things like cancer. Firstly, vitamin C is good for the body in a normal dose, which is usually obtained from normal foods without the need for vitamin pills, but not much research has been done on the overdosing effect of vitamin C. Now some people may say that C is water soluble, so your body evacuates it before it does damage, but there are notes about the potential damaging effects of it despite this claim (http://www.webmd.com/drugs/drug-499-Vitamin+C+Oral.aspx?drugid=499&drugname=Vitamin+C+Oral).
The main argument here is that people who are taught that these holistic medicines are better than normal drugs will sometimes never get better or they may die before ever getting a cure. Vitamin C doesn't cure cancer, it may prevent it, but it takes Chemo or other hard drugs to kill cancer.
Another "treatment" that was advertised some time ago was kombucha tea, which has very powerful anti-oxidants in it. The claim was that this tea helped with most diseases, boosting the immune system, energy, and everything else in the body. The books and writing even noted a significant difference in Diabetes, keep in mind that there are 2-3 completely different types (most people know about 2 types, but there's a hybrid type that's not mentioned a lot). The claim about Kombucha was that it could "cure" diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is easily managed by losing weight and watching what a person eats, so if a person switched their diet to a more vitamin rich diet then they probably reduced their weight and took care of the problem without the tea. Type 1 diabetes occurs due to the immune system being too strong and mistaking the islet cells in the pancreas as a diseased cell. The immune system is a main cause of Type 1 diabetes. If someone were to take this holistic tea for type 1 then they would find no benefit and may have high blood sugars because of the tea.
These treatments need to be studied more closely and holistic doctors need to be aware of the realistic - studied - benefits and not tout the perceived benefits. Don't get the hopes up of a person with an illness unless you can really treat their problem, it just makes them more depressed otherwise.
Buckwheat469
03/30/2007
Posts:33
And melatonin has been used to cure many cancers, but Big Pharma can't make money it. "Various cancer types have been shown to be responsive to oral melatonin (10-50 mg daily),
including breast cancer, non-small-cell lung cancer, metastatic renal cell carcinoma, hepatocellular carcinoma, and
brain metastases from solid tumors."
http://www.thorne.com/altmedrev/.fulltext/10/4/326.pdf
It also cures prostate cancer and melanoma as well as many others. There are more than 1000 medical journal articles about it on PubMed.
You can do your own search at this address:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?DB=pubmed
TomTom
03/30/2007
Posts:29
Why media wants to keep spreading these lies - and encouraging the undermining of science - is bizarre.
I expect more from a publication like the Technology Review.
Louis
03/30/2007
Posts:1
We should ask ourselves what is it that allows fake medicine to flourish? If traditional medicine was delivering the goods there would be no niche left for quacks, would be?
The truth is that there is a lot of quackery going on in traditional medicine as well. There are a good number of drugs on the market with very questionable effect. One famous example is Aricept, an Alzheimer drug. It is completely ineffectual, although Pfizer vehemently denies this. We might as well give Alzheimer's patients aspirin, and have the same effect as Aricept.
http://www.medicineonline.com/conditions/article.html?articleID=470&catID=12
http://www.worstpills.org/
The whole point is that if the traditional medical establishment has such eroded standards, then what do you really expect from the 'holistic' bunch?
gabrielg01
04/01/2007
Posts:363
Rather than encouraging homeopathy and other quackery because some people are deluded into espousing it, why not push for evidence-based medicine, both for "alternative" and mainstream treatments?
Loquitur
04/03/2007
Posts:1
Study alternative mediccal practitioners and you will find that the successful ones have optomistic and very powerful personalities that impose a very real presence of leadership upon the patient. In short they are extremely good salespeople. They are very charismatic leaders.
They believe in what they are doing one hundred and ten percent and have the ability to communicate not only that belief but also their personal optimism upon their patients.
The practitioner is god-like to his or her staff and this god status quickly rubs off on the successful patients. The successful patients, in short, become optimistic in their attitude toward their illness and treatment. They also come to believe not only in a particular cure but the person who provides that cure to them.
In their optimism they become desirous of signs of being cured while ignoring their chronic persisting symptoms. They want to please the person who is providing the cure to them and will report only good news to him or her.
In time the successful patient will talk himself out of his own illness simply by virtue of his own optimism and due in no small part to preassure from his practioner whom he sees as his leader in his cure.
In time the unsuccessful patients who are truly physically ill will become embittered by their doctor's optimistic outlook. They will simply stop seeing their doctor and fall by the wayside unhelped by the charismatic charlatan.
Does this seem to resemble a religious experience? I think that for the successfully treated patients, it resembles religion very much.
Whereas the patients who have had no success in their treatment with alternative medicine are typically embittered with their experience and have a very pessimistic outlook the successfully treated patients by the same alternative medical practioner are typically quite the opposite in all respects.
So what was it that ailed these successfully treated patients in the first place?
Could they simply have been looking for God? Could they have been looking for a religion and have needed it so badly that it made them feel ill? Can religion quiet our souls to such a degree that our bodies/minds respond in a positive way? Can religion give us peace and a sense of security? Is that what alternative medicine is to many of it's successful patients? Is it a form of religion?
Were the patients in question indeed truly physically ill? It is difficult to determine this from many of these so-called studies to be quite honest. Many of these studies become convoluted due to being meta-studies from europe on the placebo effect. Just how are we supposed to determine the study methods employed therein?
I put forth to you that it is natural to the human condition to need to be led by a strong personality. Most people need this to feel secure. This is exactly what the alternative medical practitioner provides. It is a godless, secularized form of religion for many who are chronically ill and who are misinformed as to the true rigors of observation and experimentation.
As for me I am unafraid of observation and experimentation in it's most unbiased form. And I prefer to follow Jesus the human who sacrificed his life. I much prefer Jesus to some greedy quack.
davidis1
04/04/2007
Posts:5
angry young ...
04/04/2007
Posts:1
Substances used to create Homeopathic Drugs are made up of Atoms and Molecules.
Avogadro's number, (602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or a little more than 6 followed by 23 zeroes, in scientific notation 6.02 x 10 ^23), is the number of Atoms or Molecules in a Mole. That is, if there are an Avogadro's number of molecules of a substance of molecular weight "X", one has "X" grams of that substance. The lightest molecule is Hydrogen gas, molecular weight 2. If we have an ounce of a molecular substance, or about 30 grams, we could not have more than 15 moles, or roughly 90 x 10^23, or 9 x 10^24. No matter what, fewer than 10^25 molecules (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) regardless of the molecular substance. (If the molecular weight were greater, as they all are, of course there would be fewer molecules per gram or ounce).
A dilution of X is a dilution by a factor of 10, a dilution of C is a dilution by a factor of 100. A 7X dilution is by a factor of 10^-7 (or 1/10,000,000), a 7C dilution is by a factor of 10^-14 (1/100,000,000,000,000). If we start with a pure substance and dilute it by a factor of 10, we have fewer than 10^24 molecules. If we dilute by 7C we have fewer than 10^25 x 10^-14, or 10^11 molecules.
If try to continue dilutions to 13C there are NO molecules left of the starting material. It is IMPOSSIBLE to dilute anything to 30C, because matter can not be further divided and retain its identity as a substance. For example, one ounce of a 12C dilution of an ounce of Hydrogen Gas would have roughly 9 molecules of Hydrogen Gas in it. Though one could dilute this solution by 100 (therefore 13C), producing 100 containers, the result would be, if perfect, 9 containers with one molecule, and 91 with none. Those 9 containers would be about as close as you could get to 13C (about 25X), but the other 91 containers would not have any Hydrogen Gas molecules. If one continued dilutions of the containers to 30C (10^-60) only one container out of every 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 10^35) would have a molecule of Hydrogen Gas - and therefore would be about a 25X (near 13C) dilution, and virtually every container would have none of the original substance. (If one had 10^35 vials and counted them at a rate of 10 trillion per second, it would take about 200 trillion years to count them, or more than 10,000 times the age of the Universe, and having counted them only one would have had a molecule of Hydrogen Gas). Dilutions this large are common in Homeopathy.
Therefore, in other words, what you believe by believing in Homeopathy is that a container that we know has nothing in it, will do something, and that you believe this because of your personal observations or multiple anecdotal reports of the phenomenon.
I can only conclude that the attribution of the observed response to the nothing that was administered is in fact an error in attribution, though perhaps well intentioned, unless there is evidence that there is more to nothing than its intrinsic nothingness. That evidence has not been presented. It is not closed minded to be unconvinced by testimonials that nothing can do something, that there is a way to distinguish nothing labeled as one something from nothing labeled as another something, and that nothing can do different somethings if labeled differently. It is not paternalistic to inform others of the logical inconsistency in believing that there will be a beneficial effect after taking a Homeopathic Drug, that if it was prepared as labeled has nothing in it, informing them that there is not yet any reasonable evidence to the contrary in spite of claims that are made, and informing them that those who profit from the sale of those preparations are not required to prove efficacy of what they sell.
I submit to you that Homeopathy is neither logical, nor appealing, and that it would take rather extraordinary evidence to convince a logical audience that a substance that is known not to be present can have a therapeutic effect.
bonedoc
04/06/2007
Posts:2
bonedoc
04/06/2007
Posts:2