Archive for category 10:23
Sci-Tech Report Slams Homeopathy… But Did It Stop Short?
Posted by Marsh in 10:23, Homeopathy on February 23rd, 2010
This week, the Science and Technology Select Committee’s report on Homeopathy came out. Homeopathy did not do well. Think of the report as a fishmonger and homeopathy as a fish, and you’ll get a good idea of the kind of evisceration we witnessed on Monday morning.
I could talk at length about how great the report was, how well it communicated its points, the extent to which it backed every one of our issues with the 200-year-old-quack-therapy, the way it dismissed like cures like as nonsense, waved aside the law of infinitesimals as if it were meaningless (it is, after all), laid the smackdown on the MHRA for failure to regulate properly, proposed labeling regulations so strict that only the partially-sighted would fail to spot that these tablets are nothing more than sugar, outright accused the homeopaths of cherry-picking evidence to suit their cause, utterly demolished said cherry-picked evidence and generally all-round gave Hahnemann’s magic a good kicking – but I won’t. Partly because that sentence was long enough as it is, and partly because a full and thorough dissection of the report has been done far more competently and comprehensively elsewhere than I could muster.
Instead, I’m going to ask the awkward question – the one nobody dares to ask. I’m the kind of brave, rebellious, devil-may-care health-rangery-type of non-conformist who’d go ahead and do that. By which I mean this:
Did the report go far enough?
Yeah, that’s right, I’m asking the question we’re all thinking. Because while the recommendations in the report pretty much destroy every shred of credibility homeopathy has had, and leaves almost no stone unturned in its aims to take away the rocks that homeopathy’s been hiding under, I think there are some key suggestions it failed to put forward. Namely:
- Anyone who uses animals to prove homeopathy works to be henceforward treated exclusively by vets
- Anyone who genuinely believes that the process of diluting liquids makes them stronger to be banned from working in cocktail bars
- Subscribers to the notion of ‘like cures like’ to be forbidden from becoming firefighters
- Tate and Lyle to be forced to carry warnings on their packets stating ‘Granulated sugar containing no homeopathic vibrations’
We can only hope such vital measures are put in place in the coming months.
10:23 – A View From The Centre
Posted by Andy in 10:23, Activism, Homeopathy, Skepticism on February 4th, 2010
I can make this blog post as it’s still the weekend at the time of writing. Yesterday I tweeted how we all deserved to feel smug for at least 24 hrs. And I meant it. But tomorrow is Monday. Back to real life in many ways because the last 3 months, and the last couple of weeks in particular have been one of the most rewarding periods of my life. Not because I did something amazing. But because lots of people worked together to do something amazing. I know this is a feeling shared by many people this weekend.
The reason this protest was so successful was because of the backstory, the unheard voice of the British skeptical community, the private outrage expressed through blogs and web sites and individual efforts feeling completely unheard by the general population.
The idea belongs to the community. Inspired by the likes of Randi and his famous serial overdosing, egged on by the success of the Belgian skeptics and their overdose a couple of years ago. The Belgians were about 25 in number. And they achieved big headlines.
MSS decided some while back that it would be more than a talking shop. Like so many scousers before us we wanted action and we wanted it now. We also knew that the traditional skeptical battles were already continually being fought out in the blog trenches. Any slight bit of mainstream media coverage for one of the traditional skeptical targets such as psychics or bad medicine or even the dowsing rods being sold to the Iraqis for £40k each showed that the skeptical community had plenty of fight and ability in it. We all felt that focussing this energy was what would bring the best results. Homeopathy was a good target for our effort and we resolved to make this the focus for MSS in the medium term and started thinking about what we might do. Read the rest of this entry »
Homeopathic Mass ‘Overdose’ – The 10:23 Campaign
Posted by Marsh in 10:23, Activism, Homeopathy, Skepticism on February 3rd, 2010
The 10:23 Campaign
Cross-posted from the JREF Swift blog.
Generally speaking, when homeopathy hits the headlines here in the UK skeptics have cause to wince – whether it’s B-list celebrities advocating homeopathic malaria prevention, newspaper lifestyle columns promoting the benefits of the long-discredited pseudomedical practice or simply major pharmacies out to make an easy profit, there are very seldom many good days for succussion-skeptics.
Saturday, 30th January 2010, however, was different. At precisely 10:23am that morning, over 400 protesters took to the streets of cities around the UK as part of the 10:23 campaign – aiming to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of homeopathic pills. Gathering in a dozen town centres the length and breadth of the land, activists bravely took their lives into their hands by ‘overdosing’ on entire bottles homeopathic remedies.
Unsurprisingly, no skeptics were harmed in the making of this protest – for, as we know, there’s nothing in homeopathy. Zip. Zilch. Nil. What’s more, the event didn’t go unnoticed – with prominent press coverage from the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph and even the Huffington Post, amongst many, many other sources. Radio stations had phone-ins on the the story. It made the TV news. All in all, this wasn’t a day for skeptics to wince. Read the rest of this entry »
Quantum of Senseless
Posted by Allan in 10:23, Homeopathy, Pseudomedicine, Pseudoscience on January 26th, 2010
Returning to the MSS Blog, resident linguist Allan takes a look at Quantum Homeopathy…
Particles everywhere. Quarks strangely up the continuum, where they can be postulated without arbitrary precision to flow among the hadronic mesons and baryons; Leptons down the scale of posited particulates, where electrons roll neutrally, defiled among the 105.7 MeV/c2 of muons and the apathetically gyrating tauons of a great (and probabilistically determined) Quanta. Sleptons in the supersymmetric marshes, Higgsinos on the hypothetical heights. Quarks creeping into the collider-beams; Gluons lying out on the fields, and hovering in the rigging of the august atom; Higgs bosons drooping on the W, Z bosons and the massless photons. Higgs field like molasses in the eyes and throats of ancient university professors, wheezing lyrical over their lecterns at their wards; Protons and plumbons in the spoon and bowl of the afternoon muesli of the wrathful scientist, leucous in their locked labs; Uncertainty principles cruelly pinching the lobes and hippocampus of their equivocating little ‘search babe in the back. Chance people on the galleyways peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of particles, with particles all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.*
Oooh… Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? If you’d believe anything, and I don’t, didn’t know anything, and I don’t, then you’d swear I knew of what I was on about, and I don’t. Still, it is rather lovely, isn’t it? Me and Dickens… aside from 150 years and light years of ability in the sphere of stylistics, we’re like this: *crosses fingers*
So what is that? That, my great and only friends, is a cacophony of sumptuous, semiotic manifestations that garners much to appearances, and less to substance. In other words, it’s word soup. Bullshit. Beautiful bullshit, perhaps a load that the bull in question felt a sudden, artistic need to shape and sculpt into transcendent forms, but, still, finally, when all is silkily said and finally done, and aside from the rose delicately balanced in its crescendo, it is still a steaming pile of moderately meaningless gibberish.
Beautiful, big words alone or juxtaposed do not a great point make. Read the rest of this entry »
Homeopathy and the 10:23 Campaign
Posted by Marsh in 10:23, Homeopathy, Skepticism on January 20th, 2010
The 10:23 Campaign
On January 30th, 2010, at exactly 10:23am, large groups of skeptics will gather in the town centres of around a dozen cities in the UK and consume a full bottle of homeopathic pills, in order to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of homeopathy. Marsh explains why…
Homeopathy in the UK is alarmingly pervasive – setting aside the fact that the industry is worth an estimated £40million per year, the National Health Service actually plows £4million per year of taxpayers’ money into providing sugar pills as a Complementary Alternative Medicine – much of which goes into the upkeep of the four government-run homeopathic hospitals. That figure doesn’t even take into account the £20 million spent on the redevelopment of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. According to the British Homeopathy Association, more than 400 GPs regularly refer patients to homeopaths. Homeopathy is everywhere. And then we have the UK’s leading pharmacy, Boots…
Boots are as much a British national institution as the Royal family, the BBC and the sense of quiet superiority over our former colonies. Yet this well-respected and trusted organisation lends its well-earned reputation to quackery in the sale of homeopathic remedies (including it’s own-brand range) alongside real medicine. What’s more, their decision to stock these sugar pills is compounded by the fact that they have no real belief in their effectiveness, as became clear in the laugh-a-minute evidence check session, where Boots’ Professional Stand-up Com… sorry, Professional Standards Director Paul Bennett admitted the company’s policy of selling homeopathic remedies was based not on a belief that they work, but in a belief that they sell, and sell well. And that’s before we even take a look inside the Pandora’s box that is the Boots Learning Store – Alternative Medicine module (sample statement: ‘Foxglove (Digitalis) extract is used in the treatment of heart failure’). Read the rest of this entry »
Episode #013
Posted by Mike in 10:23, Podcast, Skeptics with a K on January 14th, 2010
Welcome to 2010. Mike, Marsh and Colin return to talk about Project Pterosaur, EFT, Ear Candling and the Man in the Iron Mask. Also, the latest news from the 10:23 Campaign.
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