Here are two articles, one by James Delingpole in The Spectator, the other in reply by Tom Chivers in The Daily Telegraph. It has been distasteful to dissect them, as the second comes across as something of an attempted mugging, and I can't pretend to have enjoyed reading it.
Delingpole leads off by introducing his favourite complementary practitioner, Fiona Gross, whose 'daughter broke out in eczema that conventional medicine couldn’t cure. After much reading, research and experimentation, Fiona did cure it, and decided thereafter to make a career of her new-found expertise...'
'she cured a woman...of a mysterious respiratory illness acquired on holiday in Greece. The woman’s GP was flummoxed, as were the various specialists she consulted.'
'...her GP...said it was utter nonsense [that Fiona had cured it]' and that '...the woman's illness had been psychosomatic'.
Delingpole's first point is that homeopathy isn't harmful, it works for some people, and it's inexpensive. His second is that he wouldn't use it for everything, cancer, piles and malaria being good examples, but that in general there are plenty of unknowns in the universe.
He adds that while in many respects he approves of 'celebrity debunkers of religion, magic, pseudoscience and superstition, from Ben Goldacre and Richard Dawkins to Derren Brown, James Randi and Penn and Teller', he wonders 'whether in their pursuit of post-Enlightenment heresies (from Christianity to homeopathy to climate change ‘denial’), they are not exhibiting just the kind of self-righteous fervour which in earlier times would have made them ideal witchfinders general or Spanish inquisitors.'
He questions whether the above-mentioned sceptics can be afford to be so certain that they know the scientific truth. In the fullness of time, homeopathy may be proven to be rubbish, or it may be vindicated, to the surprise of many, but until then there is no obvious harm in keeping an open mind.
Chivers goes on the attack by saying that the evidence suggests homeopathy doesn't work at all, and that the 'better quality the study' the more likely it is to show this:
'...a small-scale, non-blinded trial might well suggest that homeopathy has some effect, while large-scale RCTs [randomised controlled trials] and good meta-analyses very consistently show that it simply doesn’t work.' Then he professes his perennial amusement at the high levels of dilution used in homeopathy.
His response to the woman cured of the respiratory ailment was that while he is happy for her, 'no amount of "I got better!" stories count in the face of carefully gathered evidence'. They may not matter to Chivers, but they clearly do to the people who get better, including the woman in question. Not only that, she paid for a cure which her GP was unable to provide and she got one. The mechanism is, in a way, immaterial.
He then says, point blank, that homeopathy doesn't work, but 'true scepticism' is constantly evaluating. 'So, I promise you, if Ben Goldacre, or James Randi, or I (to put myself in some serious company), were to be presented with solid evidence that homeopathy worked, we would alter our position.'
He rounds off by saying that the harm in homeopathy is that people have been killed as a result of taking it instead of conventional medicine, and he mentions five of them by name, age and nationality.
Before going on, it is worth delving a little further into Delingpole's comment about piles, for which he has had surgery. Homeopathy has a strong philosophy behind it, and it would view piles (haemorrhoids) as something the body produces in its best attempt to deal with the difficulties presented to it, often by pushing things to the surface. While from its very beginnings before the 1800s, homeopathy has recognised surgery as being desirable and valuable in certain cases, it would view the removal of haemorrhoids as potentially leading to regrowth or else appearing in another form, in other words symptom suppression.
Critics of homeopathy always round on dilution of remedies, but that in itself doesn't make a remedy homeopathic, it has to have a similarity of symptoms to the disease to be cured. Dilution was done originally to reduce side effects, and the dilution is nothing without the shaking in between rounds of dilution, which is what homeopaths consider keeps the remedy active.
The thrust of Delingpole's argument is that the sceptics claim a monopoly on truth and that they share a rigidity of thought with Spanish inquisitors and the like. He has expressed something important here to which I shall return at the end.
Chivers says that homeopathy doesn't work, and the more generalised and larger scale the research, the more likely it is to show that homeopathy doesn't work. That is hardly surprising, since homeopathy is largely based on individualising the remedies to the person and the case. There's also the point he hasn't addressed, which is that in both cases Delingpole mentioned, the patients had already tried conventional medicine which was completely powerless to help them or even to cast any light on what had been causing the problem.
The GP's response in the second case that the illness had been 'psychosomatic' doesn't actually absolve him or her from anything; in that case he or she should have treated it 'psychosomatically'. Even in medical terms the GP's placebo simply wasn't as good as Fiona Gross's. If we change the word psychosomatic to 'neurosomatic' (I just thought of that word, and hoped I'd invented it, but wasn't surprised to find on Google that others have got there before me), it implies a solid physical basis mediated through the brain and nervous system, and doesn't have the implied ridicule and condescension of the earlier term.
I've heard it mentioned that the 'dirty little secret' of psychiatry is that it doesn't actually cure anything, it only manages various conditions. Many procedures and remedies and procedures in conventional medicine haven't been tested as rigorously as you might imagine, if at all. In other words Chivers and the others aren't examining conventional medicine by the same standards they apply to complementary medicine, though some of them, such as Ben Goldacre, profess to.
Which leads us to Chivers's final point. As I said, he names five individuals who have died, not actually from homeopathic treatment, but from failing to take the conventional medicines which would have been prescribed for them. Leaving aside the woman who didn't take antiretrovirals for HIV (hardly a guaranteed cure), what he slickly, but nauseatingly, fails to mention are the figures for iatrogenic (doctor-produced) death by the medical profession's own records: in the USA, 200,000 a year die from conventional medicine, correctly prescribed. That's a million people in a decade. Extrapolating from the figures, that would be about 40,000 people a year dying in Britain from conventional medicine, correctly prescribed. By that token, Chivers's philosophy accords with what Stalin is supposed to have said: "One death is a tragedy; one million a statistic".
Here's another statistic for Chivers: 'Around 100,000 people in England may have been incorrectly diagnosed with diabetes, an audit of GP patient records suggests.' That's actually the title of this article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12612344
"Diabetes is a serious condition and, if untreated or not diagnosed early, it can lead to devastating complications including heart disease, stroke, amputation and blindness." Does that put Chivers's five individuals into some perspective?
I said I would return to Delingpole's point about the quasi-religious fervour of the sceptics. Chivers says that, presented with evidence that homeopathy worked, he and the others would change their viewpoint. I beg to differ. Everything I have learned, read and lived through tells me the contrary. More honest was Dr. Jonathan Miller whom I remember many years ago saying, "I don't believe in homeopathy, and even if it was proved to me that it worked, I still wouldn't believe it".
As for that line, much quoted by self-certified sceptics, and again by Tom Chivers, “If you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out” ', it sounds impressive and utterly hilarious until about the 17th time you see it and you realise that it's not your mind. It's your skull, Tom. Open your skull too much and your brain may well fall out, especially if your head is lower than your knees. Anyway, don't try this. Open your mind and nothing physically damaging will happen to your brain. Trust me.
The nature of scientific revolutions is not that people change their opinions, but that the old guard die. Doomsday predictors, once the predicted end-of-the-world day has passed, apparently believe even more strongly, and find elaborate justifications for why the world hasn't ended, and maybe just set another date.
This may seem a cheap shot, though no less true for that, but it may just be that the sceptics are uncomfortable with, and fearful of, uncertainty. Human nature is to maintain an internal psychological consistency; other options point to the slippery slope towards madness. People tend to find what they choose to look for. We are intelligent (in some cases) monkeys with clothing.
We have no control over when we are born and none over the inevitability of death. In a hundred years, unless something changes radically, all of the people reading this will be dead; as dead as the ghostly figures in film footage of World War I. None of our opinions will matter, except as history. Few really matter now. For anyone, set against this background, to have the arrogance to say they really know the truth is astonishing, or possibly hilarious.
Chivers describes Goldacre and Randi as 'serious company'. You decide: