He lost interest
You probably saw about the meta-study of all the studies the other day that found – surprise! – that homeopathy is as worthless as it says on the tin. The guy who chaired it did so much meta-studying he got bored.
Professor Paul Glasziou, a leading academic in evidence based medicine at Bond University, was the chair of a working party by the National Health and Medical Research Council which was tasked with reviewing the evidence of 176 trials of homeopathy to establish if the treatment is valid.
A total of 57 systematic reviews, containing the 176 individual studies, focused on 68 different health conditions – and found there to be no evidence homeopathy was more effective than placebo on any.
Homeopathy is an alternative medicine based on the idea of diluting a substance in water.
According to the NHS: “Practitioners believe that the more a substance is diluted in this way, the greater its power to treat symptoms. Many homeopathic remedies consist of substances that have been diluted many times in water until there is none or almost none of the original substance left.”
But why would more water than there is in the known universe have power to treat symptoms? Unless the symptoms are all thirst, I suppose. But I don’t grasp the basic principle that more dilution equals more power. Dilution should make the power less, not more. If you dilute coffee it doesn’t make you more awake. I suspect a practical joke lasting centuries here.
Writing in a blog for the British Medical Journal, Professor Glasziou states:
“As chair of the working party which produced the report I was simply relieved that the arduous journey of sifting and synthesising the evidence was at an end.
“I had begun the journey with an ‘I don’t know attitude’, curious about whether this unlikely treatment could ever work… but I lost interest after looking at the 57 systematic reviews which contained 176 individual studies and finding no discernible convincing effects beyond placebo.”
Poor guy. It does sound deadly boring.
H/t Omar
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1124830187535441/?type=3&theater
There is a logic to homeopathy. Here’s how it goes.
Suppose you have a poison, and it causes some symptom—say, a fever. For many of these poisons, there is going to be a discernible dose response: the fever increases with increasing dose, and decreases with decreasing dose. One way to decrease the dose is to dilute the poison. So you keep diluting and diluting, and at some point, the fever goes away. So our principle is that if you have something that causes a fever, and you dilute it enough, then you get something that reduces fever. Now we can use that dilute mixture as a treatment for fever; even fever that was caused by something besides the poison.
It sounds absurd, but remember that this was cooked up by people who didn’t have the benefit of the scientific method, or atomic theory, or germ theory, or even a very materialistic world view.
Here’s another example from back in the day. A soldier comes off the battlefield with a stab wound. Plan A is bandage the wound. Plan B is find the sword that stabbed him and bandage the sword. Again, sounds absurd. But plan B actually had better outcomes, because the bandages weren’t clean and bandaging the wound risked infection; bandaging the sword did not. It’s called sympathetic magic, and H. Sapiens pretty much grew up on it.
Of course, we know better now, so the interesting question is why homeopathy persists in the 21st century. In _Bad Science_, Ben Goldacre investigates this. On the supply side, it is largely a scam, but for every seller there is a buyer, and the demand side is more interesting. The placebo effect is important, but even more than that, patients get something out of the medical interaction—the interaction between patient and doctor—and this interaction is easier, cheaper, and often more satisfying when dealing with a Doctor of Homeopathic Medicine (DHM), than with a real doctor (MD).
If you go to a real doctor, it is expensive, and takes time, and may be inconvenient, and for all that the doctor may just order some tests and move on to his next patient. You are basically interacting with a bureaucracy. If you go to a DHM, it is cheap, and convenient, and the DHM will listen to you and talk to you, and attend to your needs, and send you off with a little vial of stuff that is supposed to make you better. People like this. They will pay money for it. And so it persists.
I see the same thing going on at General Nutrition Corporation (GNC) stores. GNC is a chain of retail stores that sells vitamins, minerals, nutritional supplements, etc. I shop there because they have the best price on a vitamin that I take. Every time I go there, the clerk tries to engage me in conversation: what am I taking, what I am I taking it for, what else am I taking, what are my needs, what are my goals. I never respond to this, because I’m not there to discuss my nutritional needs; I’m just there for this little bottle of pills that they have a good price on. But if there is another customer in the store when I walk in, the other customer is invariably deep in conversation with the clerk on these topics. GNC is selling vitamins, yes, but you can get vitamins at the drug store, or the grocery store. What GNC is selling that you can’t get other places is this kind of medical interaction, where you can talk to someone about your health and get some kind of (supposedly) knowledgeable advice. People really want this, and the science-based medical establishment, for all its wonders, often fails to provide it.
One of my favs. Dara O’briain on homeopathy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHVVKAKWXcg
After a while, I expect, the utter fruitlessness of it must get to be a grind. Yes, let’s check yet _again_ to see if, somehow, enough of chemistry and biochemistry will spontaneously repeal themselves to make this work… Aaaaand… No. Again. How very surprising.
There should be a general term for this kind of boredom. It’s generated in essentially similar ways in multiple fields, it seems to me. Whenever the universe is asked to yield to wishful thinking, really, to rearrange itself for our convenience. We’d rather stick to our medieval cosmology, so let’s keep looking for a way we can preserve it all the same against the evidence mounting against it over the past half millennium or so. The pleading will get more and more special, and anyone expecting a new answer will just keep waiting, drumming their fingers, waiting for the god, the perpetual motion machine, or whatever it is next. It may be there are no stupid questions… But only if you know when to stop asking, because, in fact, you’ve had the answer centuries now; it’s just it’s not the one you thought you wanted. There was that documentary a little while ago about the merchants of doubt, how the tobacco and petrochemical lobbies played similar games, used even the same agencies to insist there was ‘controversy’ in issues that should have been long settled. But these are mere amateurs and newcomers against theologians and magical thinkers, or seems to me. That’s been _their_ game far longer, but they’ve got so good at it, hardly anyone notices, most of the time.
Snake oil is probably more effective.