Homöopathie: Es gibt nichts in ihm

It’s admittedly and regretfully rather rare that we at the Merseyside Skeptics Society cover stories of a non-English language nature. That’s entirely mea culpa, malheureusement my non-English language abilities are limited at ‘meilleur’. Still, it would be ridiculous of us not to mention the Wünderbar developments coming out of Germany, where top magazine Der Spiegel ran with the cover story:

Homoöpathie: Die groβe Illusion (‘Homeopathy: The grand illusion’) – Source: Der Spiegel

This, of course, is HUGE. Not least because Germany is oft-cited as a prime example of a healthcare system in which homeopathy is given the ‘respect’ it deserves (I’d argue 10:23 actually gave the respect homeopathy REALLY deserves), but also because Germany is the home of homoeopathy and Hahnemann – all of which making the prospect of the magic water getting ‘Das Boot’ from the German equivalent of the NHS an incredibly sweet pill to swallow.

Far be it from me to wallow in all of the delicious, delicious developments too much, but here’s a glimpse at the online version of the Der Spiegel article, for any of our Deutsch companions out there. What’s that at the bottom? Why, that would be the 10:23 Campaign, cited as an influence! Needless to say (although I will anyway), our collective bosoms swell with pride here at 10:23 HQ. My aforementioned linguistic limitations prevent me from doing it justice in the original German, and the Google translate is admirable if patchy (“Many patients believe the cash to pay only that which helps also detectable. Ennoble why the health insurance with their approach to homeopathy.” – I swear Google hires Master Yoda to do their translating…). With that in mind, allow me to quote from the English version of Deutsche World:

The 200-year-old dubious medical treatment may soon be dropped from German medical insurance providers as a cost-saving measure. The the United Kingdom may also do the same.

Too right we might.

In recent days, the over-two-centuries-old practice of homeopathy has come under fire in Germany.

Dr. Karl Lauterbach, the chair of the parliamentary health committee, recently called for public health insurers to stop funding the practice, which typically involves solutions of small amounts of herbs or other medicines heavily diluted with water and then shaken or stirred to “add energy” to the solution.

According to its proponents, homeopathy can heal patients as well – if not better – than conventional medicine, while its detractors, including nearly all medical doctors and scientists, say that it is no more powerful than a placebo.

What’s more:

“If everybody pays for his beer, then he can pay for his homeopathy,” said Dr. Kay Brune, a professor in the Department of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuernberg, in southern Germany.

Brune added that there is no scientific evidence to suggest that homeopathy actually causes any meaningful and healing bio-chemical reactions in patients, but that doesn’t stop people from believing in a practice that has been so deeply ingrained into the German psyche.

“Homeopathy has a very long tradition in Germany,” he added in an interview with Deutsche Welle. “The founder, Hahnemann was a brilliant physician. But at that time doing nothing was helpful to the patient. In 200 years, the pseudo-science has not taken any steps forward.”

Now, of course, we aren’t arrogant enough for one second to think that we had a huge part to play in this – but if the actions of the 10:23 Campaign and our amazing support (not least the hundreds of national and international ‘overdoses’ who joined in back in January) had even a small effect on this development, I safely speak for everyone at 10:23 and the MSS in saying how immensely proud we are to have been involved.

What’s been staggering over the last 6 months, and in fact back to October when we started letting the 10:23 cat a little out of the bag, is the phenomenal response we’ve had from ordinary people – not just doctors and working scientists. We’ve been blown away by the level of involvement support, coverage and interest 10:23 has had so far, and as we’re starting to see the homeopathic dominoes tumbling here in the UK – and in Germany too, now – the level of interest continues to amaze me. On our side we have the science, we have the support, and we have the momentum.

Homeopathy: There’s nothing in it / Es gibt nichts in ihm

In the light of this proposal, we urge the the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain to follow suit and issue similar guidelines for its members.

We maintain the belief that ineffective treatments should not be offered for sale in pharmacies, nor should patients be burdened with the responsibility of checking the medical literature for data supporting the claims of efficacy made for products found on pharmacy shelves. Until pharmacies realise that they must prioritise patient care over profit by providing only scientifically proven treatments, it is up to individual pharmacists to ensure that patients are given the information they need about homeopathy at the point of sale.

We feel this stance from the Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland, in addition to the publication of Science and Technology Select Committee Evidence Check on homeopathy in February of this year, fully supports our campaign to have these ineffective treatments removed from the shelves of legitimate pharmacies across the UK, as well as having taxpayer funding for these unproven treatments on the NHS revoked.

The new guidelines published by the Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland will help ensure that patients in Northern Ireland are not misled about the effectiveness of homeopathic treatments.

We call upon the responsible pharmacists of the rest of the UK, as well as the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, to follow suit – it’s time for this ineffective and wasteful treatment to be put to bed.

Godfrey Bloom MEP - pro-homeopathy, anti-immigration, anti-climate change, anti-science, and rude to boot

One of our main aims with the 10:23 campaign was to get people involved. For a long time, people have railed against the sheer nonsense of homeopathy, but have done so in their own homes, the pub, their workplaces, the pub again, and then bed. Instead, we tried to get people to take that energy and passion and turn it to more productive action… which is why I was delighted to hear from an old friend (and long time MSS supporter) who, inspired by our campaign, has emailed MEPs in order to get their thoughts on EU Homeopathy Day – the entirely-self-elected-and-utterly-unofficial-Europe-wide-quackery-awareness-day. Marc (for that is his name, and you’ll see him comment on this blog from time to time) forwarded me his email, and I was happy to read it over and see some of the fruits of our campaigning.

I’d love to tell you our MEPs he contacted were scientifically-literate and met Marc’s concerns and appeals with a rational response. I’d even be OK with telling you that they were reluctant to get too involved, but were polite and diplomatic in their answers. However, as the below response from Godfrey Bloom of UKIP (I know, I know) will show, I can’t. FYI, Godfrey Bloom also has a blog outlining his opinions on climate change, as well as some very misogynistic views towards women:

“No self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age”.

That’s not poisoning the well by the way – that’s context. Anyway, Marc’s email read:

From: Marc Callinan
Sent: 23 March 2010 10:46

Dear Edward McMillan-Scott, Linda McAvan, Godfrey Bloom, Timothy Kirkhope, Andrew Brons and Diana Wallis,

I am writing to you all as my MEP’s with regards to the 3rd EU Homoeopathy Day. I sincerely hope that you all will reject its call for ”politicians and decision makers in Brussels to take action in favour of homeopathy for the benefit of European patients and citizens, as part of a more integrated and holistic approach to health care in Europe.” (Quote taken from the website: http://www.euhomeopathyday.eu/more)

Homoeopathy has been proven through research to work on the placebo effect. One of the key beliefs of homoeopathy is that water can remember a substance that has been diluted out of it. After 12C there is statistically not one single molecule of the original substance left in the dilution and homoeopathy happily sells solutions of 30C and even 200C. Funding and support should not be given to a treatment that has no benefit beyond a placebo, after all the placebo effect can be obtained much more cheaply by using sugar pills that have not been exposed to water that many dilutions ago was exposed to something that may or may not have any healing properties to begin with. The recent 1023 campaign did a wonderful job of raising awareness of what homoeopathy is and isn’t and showing that there literally is nothing in it.

Again I ask of you do not be taken in by misrepresented studies and cherry picked low quality trials as was presented to the commons select comity when it conducted the evidence check of homoeopathy. The evidence check was able to cut through the smoke and mirrors to see that homoeopathy should not be funded by the NHS in the UK let alone supported and given false credibility on a European scale.

Many thanks for your time

Yours sincerely,
Marc Callinan

As I’m sure you’ll agree, Marc was polite, to the point, and most of all accurate. So, imagine his surprise when the following response dropped through his metaphorical inbox door:

From: Godfrey Bloom <gbloom@ukip.org

Sent: Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 10:55 AM

Dear Mr Callinan

Thank you for your letter concerning homeopathy.

Unfortunately for your case, homeopathy works. You apply tests appropriate to pharmaceutical drugs in order to ‘prove’ that homeopathic remedies are no better than placebos. I feel sure that you would not wish to test pharmaceutical products on the reverse principal.

There are many good reasons for using homeopathy as the first resort, but the main one is that homeopathy can do no harm – one of the first aims of Hippocrates – as opposed to the long printed list of dangerous side effects accompanying most pharmaceutical products, and we believe that people should have a choice.

Incidentally, the Royal Family seem to survive pretty well on homeopathy.

Kind regards

Yours sincerely
Godfrey Bloom

*sigh*

For those of you counting fallacies, I make that 1 special pleading, 1 strawman, 2 appeals to authority, 1 Big Pharma/Western Medicine/Teh Pharmaceuticalz paranoia, 1 false dichotomy involving patient choice, and 2 outright factual untruth. It’s a fallacial buffet.

What’s more, the response is curt, smug and with an underlying sneer – note the casual ‘unfortunately for your case’ and the ‘incidental’ appeal to authority (were I Marc, I’d point out that it’s likely quite easy to survive pretty well when you’re born into one of the richest and most privileged families on the planet, not to mention the fact that the Royals also use real medicine – the very best, in fact). The whole email from Bloom strikes me as having the air of self-importance we often see of the science-illiterate when championing their ‘your science doesn’t know everything’ nonsense. For the record, taking his ‘points’ in order:

• Unfortunately for his smug sense of superiority, homeopathy doesn’t work
• A test is a test – there is no special science set aside by which homeopathy works. Tests are appropriate to pharmaceuticals because they’re appropriate to reality. Many pharmaceutical drugs fail these tests – presumably Bloom’s happy for those to be sold too, based on the idea that the tests weren’t appropriate to them?
• I’m not quite sure what reverse principal he wants drugs to be tested on, that makes them fail when compared to homeopathy. I’m not quite sure he’d be sure either, but I’d be delighted to have him write out a test criteria and we could go over it together.
• There are no good reasons to use homeopathy as a first resort – it doesn’t work. It’s not a first resort. It’s not even a resort.
• Homeopathy can do harm – see? See? OK, so the harm isn’t direct (there’s nothing in it!), but in the omission of a real first resort people can get very sick very quickly. Or, if they’re lucky, they’re just throwing their money away.
• Pharmaceutical products do often have side effects, and some of these can be dangerous (not most, as Bloom believes). And it was Science that discovered that, not magic, and not homeopathy. So he’s happy to go with science when it supports his quackery, but to lambast it the rest of the time. What’s more, we know about those side effects, and we can therefore judge accordingly – consumers are rarely given this depth of information on homeopathy, because if they did they wouldn’t buy it.
• People should have a choice, but an uninformed choice is not a real choice. Homeopathy has been proven not to work – to deny this fact is to really deny people the right to choose.
• The Royal Family are not doctors, they’re not scientists and they’re not experts. They are, however, in a position of rare privilege whereby they can afford to dabble with quackery, safe in the knowledge that the very best help is at hand when conditions start to get more serious. Most people don’t have the wealth and the privilege to afford this luxury, and even if they did – it’s their choice to make, based on real information.

Phew. OK, rant over. Still, I’m not alone in my annoyance with Bloom’s attitude and response, and in fact Marc has followed up with a second email:

From: Marc Callinan
Sent: 30 March 2010 11:39

Dear Mr Bloom

Many thanks for taking the time to reply to my email regarding Homoeopathy, I appreciate the effort you took in doing this.

I certainly would not wish to test pharmaceutical drugs in the same way that homoeopathy is tested, relying on anecdotal ‘evidence’ has been shown to be a terrible method of testing treatments.That however does not mean that homoeopathic pills should not be required to prove their efficacy with high quality trials. DBRCT’s are more than capable of testing the efficacy of homoeopathy and unfortunately they show it to work as a placebo.

You say that homoeopathy can do no harm, while for direct harm it is true that homoeopathy being an inactive substance will cause no ill effects, this is because an inactive substance causes no effects. However I believe that in the recent evidence check a claim was made that homoeopathy could not be a placebo because it can cause side effects, clearly this is something that homoeopaths disagree on. There is also the indirect harm that can be caused by homoeopathy, are you familiar with what happened to Baby Gloria Thomas? Her father is a homoeopath that mistakenly believed that homoeopathy could cure her eczema, this sadly was not the case and at the age of 9 months she lost her life to a disease that can be treated very easily by medicine. Had homoeopathy been required to meet the same standards of proving efficacy before being allowed to be sold as a treatment then this little girl would still be alive today.

I have no issue with people choosing to use homoeopathy if they wish, however I do not believe that it should be funded with public money until it proves its efficacy. Placebos can be a great treatment for self limiting illnesses such as headaches or colds etc. however they need to be regulated so they are not supplied in place of malaria tablets or other essential medical interventions.

The Royal family may be supporters of homoeopathy but this is still no proof of its efficacy. If Public money is to be used on a treatment of any sort do you not feel that there should be strong evidence for its efficacy? this is the case with conventional treatments why should it be any different for homoeopathy?

Again many thanks for taking the time to reply to my correspondence

Regards
Marc Callinan

I eagerly await the response he receives from Bloom, and from the other MEPs he contacted. Great work, Marc.

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.

Then we heard about the Belgians. Then some of our number went to TAM London and met others who felt it was a good idea to do a big “overdose” protest. The MSS got to work.

When the parliamentary Science and Technology Committee met to hear the evidence about homeopathy, wheels of dissent began rolling that could not be stopped. A story emerged and Boots was implicated. There was outrage, and it hit the headlines too. Boots took a small amount of fire, which they undoubtedly felt. Perhaps not in their profits but certainly they felt it. The plans changed. We had already written an excellent open letter that we had intended to send to Boots around March time. We brought it forward and published it immediately, in November. The letter got some attention and we were heartened by that. The plan for the mass overdose really got going. We created roles and started getting people to fill them. Campaign project manager, International liaison, website design, website development, PR, research. All these roles were created. Some were filled quickly from within the Society and some took more time.

We recognised early on how importantly the marketing and PR side would feature in the campaign. While we were waiting to find the right person for the PR job, we set about it. Marsh came up with an inspired idea, later characterised as “Curiosity Driven Marketing”. The idea was to take the name of the campaign, by now we had settled on 10:23, and reveal its meaning in a controlled way. So we knew we were going to announce a mass “overdose”, we knew roughly when it would happen and also how it would happen and we had planned roughly the number of swallowers we needed to make it work, PR-wise. But the curiosity driven marketing angle meant we started with just the simple message “10:23″ which began appearing at the end of blogs and podcasts. Most people knew it was a homeopathy campaign but very few knew about the swallow. The information was gradually increased. First a website, then twitter and then the big media push in the last couple of weeks before H day. The campaign slogan was also crucial. It had to reflect the entire message in a simple fashion that could be understood by the general, non-skeptic, public. It worked. The focus of many media interviews was in addressing the premise “there’s nothing in it”. Indeed this was the title of a number of articles.

This would be an exciting day for the skeptics but it was all about getting the message out there to the general public. We were shooting for a reduction in demand for homeopathy and so we had to get headlines.

The record needs to show that we approached this as a professional project. We set our objectives, wrote them down, invoked them whenever decisions needed to be made, communicated with the hub leaders and modified the plan as we went along to suit the ever changing circumstances. The record should also show that, alongside the incredible support lent to the campaign from all over the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, US, Spain, and many others, we weren’t able to get the most prominent skeptical podcast in the world, the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, to join in.  We can only assume they felt it was UK-only – a bit of a shame, as Steve Novella has often said he thinks that skeptics often fail at the marketing side of things.  I think had we been able to overcome that sense of Britain-centricity, we could have had enough time for the rogues to give it a push and take the international effort ballistic. They didn’t, and nor did the JREF. Perhaps there will be an article to follow up.

Still, we kept up the pace and got Martin Robbins on board. As well as proving himself as an outstanding journalist, he advised on the timing and release of news. He also took the trouble to demolish my own writing style. My point being that he took things seriously and made his voice heard.

With two weeks to go, tshirts ordered, the press campaign began in earnest with all the hubs sending out local press releases, and national news being primed with details of what was to happen.

Fairly late in the day we decided it was better to ask permission and advised the hubs accordingly. Which caused problems in Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh. These problems were overcome and the thing went off without a hitch really.

Unprecedented publicity both for the truth about homeopathy and for the skeptical community of Britain were two objectives for the campaign. We managed both, and the story is continuing too with further articles and activism planned in the next fortnight. The international effort gained some momentum despite the failure of SGU to show up and full credit to them for capturing the Zeitgeist.

The skeptical community of Britain had a great day on Saturday 30th January 2010. This success had been waiting to happen. All we did was give that powerful body of effort a single point of focus. And everyone who participated did so in an entirely personal way.

Although we all know that trying to have a rational discussion with a homeopath apologist is akin to trying to stop John Prescott talking, we met with them in the battlefield and fought it out on twitter. The writing bloggers created an accelerated amount of content that would be found by the general public when seeking out information. The creating bloggers did cartoons, songs, crazy videos (I even got a mention in Jago’s), and even a book (Ladybird actually, darling).

And then, of course there was the Hub leaders who suffered an almost intolerable amount of paranoid over-controlling emails from yours truly on the event logistics and safety. They did much more than could have been expected, and achieved more than could be hoped for. The swallowers and followers, the journalists, TV and Radio presenters, Evan Harris MP, Dave Gorman, Simon Singh, Chris French all getting beghind this single point of focus…and making themselves heard. It’s not the first time skeptics have worked together in support of an objective. We’ve all been supporting and contributing to the Simon Singh story. The difference this time I think is that people know who we are, and that we speak with one voice.

The protest yesterday has contributed to achieving a rational status for homeopathy in the British psyche. There is more to come and we have several next steps in mind already, some of which will work their way out over the next couple of weeks. For example it’s a little known fact that as part of this campaign we have also sent a series of complaints to the MHRA asking them to investigate some elements of the Boots marketing of Homeopathy (Thanks Dr *T).

We have proven we are capable of effective action. The 10:23 campaign objective of getting Boots to stop selling homeopathy is not yet achieved. So the effort must continue.

I don’t think we’ve even dared to think yet, what we might possibly achieve in the future as a community. Certainly more than we have in this campaign. That’s a lot to look forward to.

Thanks to everyone who played.

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.

The whole event had a particularly surreal quality for me – four months earlier we at the Merseyside Skeptics Society hatched the ludicruously-ambitious plan to have hundreds of people join us in a mass ‘overdose’. The idea was simple: if we could show that it was possible for hundreds of people to take a whole tube of homeopathic pills and suffer no effects (positive or negative), then it would help get people interested in what homeopathy is, and why it can’t possibly work. We had no budget, no experience and no right to expect it to work – all we had to rely on was the energy and passion of the skeptical community, and the hard work of those involved. Fortunately, come the day of the event came, the skeptical community didn’t disappoint…

In London, over 100 people gathered in Red Lion Square in what was the most high-profile event of the day. Sporting the stylish-yet-practical-yet-obligatory 10:23 T Shirts, the crowd heard speeches from Simon Singh and Dr Evan Harris MP – the latter recounting comic highlights from the Parliamentary Science and Technology Sub-Committee’s homeopathy evidence check session in November last year. Counting down to the ‘overdose’ was comedian and author Dave Gorman, who learnt about the protest during an appearance on a TV chat show. Meanwhile, back in campaign headquarters in Liverpool 40 of us took to the steps of the iconic St George’s Hall to overdose on a variety of Boots-brand 30c remedies, before promptly heading to the pub to await reports from around the country (those wanting to see a real overdose might have wished to witness the levels of merriment in the bar).

Elsewhere around the country, events were successfully taking place outside branches of Boots pharmacy in Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, Leicester, Manchester, Oxford and Southampton. What’s more, the UK weren’t alone in hitting the streets with their sugar pills – following suit were groups in Sydney (lead by Richard Saunders) and Perth (with Kylie Sturgess), as well as Madrid, Spain – and even a charming family affair in Tampa, Florida. Other events were planned in Ohio, US and Vancouver, Canada. In short, the level participation across the country – and indeed the world – was staggering.

Besides the level of participation and the attention of the press, what impressed me most about the day was the spirit and atmosphere of the events – this wasn’t the grumpy, nay-saying, self-righteous skeptic we see so often in the media. Instead, the protests were peaceful and jocular, the onus very much on raising awareness and having fun. Personally, I’m delighted at what we’ve managed to achieve with the 10:23 campaign so far – and with further actions planned for the coming weeks and months, I hope we’re able to build on this fantastic momentum to help reach even more people with the message – Homeopathy: There’s Nothing In It.