“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it would be such as oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
Leo Tolstoy
My, but there’s some neat skills being displayed in handling the media relations for today’s announcement of the latest meta-analysis of trials into homeopathy’s effectiveness! (The Lancet Vol 366, 27 August 2005: ‘Are the clinical effects of homeopathy placebo effects? Comparative study of placebo controlled trials of homeopathy and allopathy’.) In the UK at least, it’s being delivered as a kind of “final word” on the subject, as if we can now forget about it and consign it to the dustbins of history. Nice try boys and girls!
Funnily enough, that sort of thing was tried once before. Nearly 100 years ago. And homeopathy’s still with us. I wonder why. As Sir John Weir (1879-1971), Royal Homœopathic Physician serving George V, Edward VIII, George VI and Elizabeth II, once said:
“I suppose not one of us has approached homeopathy otherwise than with doubt and mistrust; but facts have been too much for us.”
The facts that Weir is talking about are not, of course, randomised controlled trials, but the vast number of individual cases and cures recorded throughout homeopathy’s 200-year history. These include many cases that seem rather unlikely candidates for the placebo effect – babies; animals; cures where several remedies were tried before finding the one that worked. In the 1854 London cholera epidemic, the results from homeopathic treatment were so positive that they were deliberately withheld from parliament. The House of Lords asked for an explanation and it was admitted that if the homeopathic figures were to be included in the report, it would “skew the results.” The suppressed report revealed that mortality under homeopathic care was just 9%. Under conventional care it was over 59%. Real results; real lives saved; and a matter of public record, rather than trials and convoluted statistical analyses available only to paying subscribers. You can’t help but wonder why that was never considered the last word on the subject …
It’s fascinating to see what lengths people will go to to try and discredit something which doesn’t fit the “map” we have of the world. It’d be interesting to know who funded this latest report in the Lancet.
(For a much fuller exploration of the subject, see the essay Unscientific Attachment.)
“Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality.”
G K Chesterton
Tags: placebo, Shang et al, The Lancet
