Unless you can show that QM operates at the macroscopic scale, and could plausibly be responsible for the Homeopathic effect, then you are just blowing smoke. There are many more down to Earth matters to address!

There’s observational data to suggest that effects which, at present, seem to be most amenable to explanation by a qualitative interpretation of QM, operate in therapeutic interactions (and possibly many others). These seem to be more obvious in therapies which don’t rely on a high degree of specific effect from a biochemical agent.

The ‘placebo effect’ is presently the trash can into which all non-specific effects of healing are dumped without much thorough investigation ever having been done to clarify exactly what’s going on there, or how many and what type of effects might be operating. With biomedicine’s philosophical and commercial focus on material interventions, the psychosomatic dimensions, although acknowledged, have scarcely begun to be explored. It would appear — to CAM practitioners and researchers at least — that these mechanisms can be harnessed far more effectively than is the case in biomedicine and, in combination with material agents which create far more subtle effects than pharmaceutical interventions (and with considerably less harmful side-effects), produce an effect that is every bit as powerful and efficacious.

Einstein had a long running battle of thought experiments with Bohr, but never bested him. Bohr was right, but is rarely quoted by the alternative sciences, I wonder why.

In the QM case, The Big E was wrong. Moreover, even though Einstein’s ideas were radical, they were not entirely novel. His papers on relativity are logical constructs, and as with all his work, lucidly described.

QM may well be science’s Cheshire Cat, but it is a cat with a job. It finds regular work within the semiconductor industry, for example. Nor is it so esoteric. Hobbyists are currently building Scanning Tunneling Microscopes at home. Not yet up to the resolution of commercial devices, but they are made from little more than scrap, as a Google search will show.

Unless you can show that QM operates at the macroscopic scale, and could plausibly be responsible for the Homeopathic effect, then you are just blowing smoke. There are many more down to Earth matters to address!

It’s been established in 3 major studies and at least 21 trials of individual conditions that homeopathy produces outcomes as good as, or better than, pharmaceutical interventions. This applies in chronic conditions as well as acute. This being the case, why do you persistently deny it’s of any use?

And if you continue to pursue your line that it’s of no use, what do these study results say about the state of biomedicine? Particularly in view of the fact that tens of thousands of people die annually from the side effects of medication alone?

Laughing, yes I have worked for several charities and I know how they operate. Rather than quibbling semantics, why not address the main thrust of my inquiry:

Call it “quibbling semantics” as much as you like M, it doesn’t make it any less valid. If the principles of good science and noble aims were always uppermost in peoples’ minds, then yes, this would be a good question. But the fact is, they’re not. Medical charities are no different to the population at large, or to “science” at large, and have no independence of thought when it comes to what’s regarded as “acceptable” research. (If anything, the larger the organisation, the more conservative and conventional the line of research appears to be.) They’re risk-averse and are not going to be rocking any boats when it comes to what they’re prepared to sponsor or investigate. CAM therapies by definition (and regardless of their merits) fall into the unconventional category, and whether or not homeopathy might prove a useful therapy in these conditions, they’re highly unlikely to consider it unless someone else has established a satisfactory degree of efficacy by conventional standards first, so they can justify the expenditure decision to the board of trustees and other stakeholders.

After all, given the very serious questions being posed about the validity of the causative link between HIV and AIDS and the way it’s diagnosed (Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Valendar F. Turner and John M. Papadimitriou. Is a Positive Western Blot Proof of HIV Infection? Biotechnology Vol 11, June 1993), you’d think, for instance, that an AIDS charity would put its efforts into establishing whether or not the link is scientifically verifiable before going chasing after “cures”. But that doesn’t seem to be happening any more than investigating CAM therapies as a possible means of treatment.

As P Balaram writes in the editorial in Current Science, Vol 85, No 2, 25 July 2003:

Duesberg asks provocatively: ‘Why is AIDS research not free to investigate non-HIV hypotheses?’ His answer, which may strike a chord, in many who pursue lonely and often quixotic approaches in science, points to the influence of ‘large government-sponsored research programs that dominate academic research… . Such programs favour individual investigators, who contribute to the establishment a maximum of data and a minimum of controversy’. Duesberg, argues that ‘the corporate equivalent of the academia’s peer review system would be to give General Motors and Ford the authority to review and veto all innovations by less established carmakers competing for the consumer’.

This is the territory in which medical charities operate, like it or not. If you think they ought to be taking a more independent line and investigating unconventional avenues to possible cure, then why don’t you ask them that question at their next public meeting?

Why do you think that an organisation dedicated to finding a cure for [cancer, HIV, whatever] would spend its precious, hard-won funds on research into pharmaceutical treatments if there is already a cheap, safe treatment which has been proven to be effective? Why would an organisation devoted to relieving the suffering of people with [cancer, HIV, whatever] steadfastly ignore a cheap, safe, reliable treatment which could relieve so much of that suffering? Why would these charities do something so completely opposed to their stated aims?

Socks, you keep insisting that there is a large body of reliable evidence for homeopathy working at the same time you are basically claiming that it’s untestable. It can’t be both.

Read what I wrote again. Carefully. I’m not claiming it’s untestable, only that the interpretations that are being made as a result of the testing are not the only plausible or logical ones that can be made, and that a bit of lateral thinking may well provide the resolution. In this kind of situation it usually does.

The very reason there is so much to-ing and fro-ing about this is precisely because the proffered rationales don’t fit the evidence when it’s examined in depth. You’re obviously fond of the red flags: well this is a MAJOR one. The sceptical position is receiving so much opposition from homeopaths precisely because it’s not consistent with the evidence. Anecdotal evidence and personal experience are not 100% reliable. Agreed. But they’re very very far from being 0% reliable. You can’t dismiss them altogether and as a result claim there’s no evidence in support of homeopathy (and by the way all homeopaths and their patients are deluded fools) and still claim to be scientific. There’s plenty of evidence: it’s of varying quality, certainly, but that doesn’t make it “no” evidence. And there’s quite sufficient to justify investigating this phenomenon in more depth, which is why — d’oh — it’s being investigated in more depth.

The cardinal rule of scientific experiment when you’re investigating a phenomenon that has this sort of evidence going for it is that if your test fails, then you question your assumptions. Most of the people regularly involved in scientific testing of homeopathy are doing just that. I don’t see any evidence from any of them that they’re ready to write off homeopathy yet. It seems the vast majority of those who are trying to are onlookers who already hold preconceived notions about its implausibility because they can’t seem to think past Avogadro.

As Rustum Roy said, this assumption ” … relies on a quaint old idea from the nineteenth century that the ONLY way that the property of water can be affected or changed is by incorporating foreign molecules. This is the Avogadro-limit high-school level chemistry argument. To a materials scientist this notion is absurd, since the fundamental paradigm of materials-science is that the structure-property relationship is the basic determinant of everything. It is a fact that the structure of water and therefore the informational content of water can be altered in infinite ways”

Whether it turns out that there is a measurable, consistent and replicable physical property to homeopathic remedies or not, the FACT is that people are helped by homeopathy to a degree comparable to, or even better than, pharmaceutical interventions. I don’t see any of you addressing this data. (Check out Lies, Damn Lies and Socks if you want the citations.)

These are independent, philanthropic organisations, uncontrolled by governments or big pharma.

Your idealised notion is very plausible in theory, M, but try coming back down to earth.

Have you ever worked for a charity? Or talked to anyone who’s responsible for fundraising for one? These organisations are totally dependent on donations for their survival. The larger the organisation becomes, the more infrastructure it has to find regular cash flow to finance, the more fearful it becomes of doing anything in the least bit unconventional that might jeopardise its funding. Public whims change like the wind. One minute you’re this year’s favourite cause. The next you’re forgotten about. And if you want to undertake any sort of sizable project, you have to compete for block grants which are invariably ring-fenced by all kinds of restrictions on what you can do with the money. Charities are very very far from being “independent”.

I’m not sure you even understand what I meant by observer bias. The point is that your body of anecdotes is highly suspect precisely because there are so many potential problems with interpreting anecdotal experience. You’ve so far failed to rule out all of these effects coloring the interpretation and making it seem like there’s something there when there isn’t. You keep admitting that some of that could explain some of the data, but not all of it. But lots of different tiny mistakes can add up pretty easily to big mistakes in judgment. It happens ALL THE TIME in actual science, especially social science. Even some of the best examinations of phenomenon still turn out to be wrong because it turns out something unexpected wasn’t controlled for. And yet you want us to take seriously the idea that you just know it works with no controls at all.

So where is the scientific validity in this assumption that the only way a therapy can be considered to “work” is if the therapeutic effect is objective/material/biochemical?

This is simply a straw man. Very few of the well-designed studies which tried to find an effect, ANY effect from a homeopathic tincture did anything that mandated or restricted any particular mechanism for the effect. They simply tested the procedures, and found that when you control for bias, the effects go away. This is the case regardless of whatever sort of magic you are claiming takes place. The fact is, handing people vials of what is simply water (because of the number of dilutions) doesn’t itself seem to have any effect. If you think that there is some special power in the ritual of homeopathy that transfers through the doctor into the patient or something, that should show up as well, and isn’t any harder to study than anything else. But nothing shows up with that, either.

Why are tens of thousands of people dying, and the quality of life of many more being ruined by the side effects of drugs alone?

Because drugs are primarily used on people that are really and seriously sick, and because these drugs actually do something to the body, they have all sorts of effects and side-effects.

Quantum mechanics demonstrated the role of the observer in the outcome of any experiment getting on for a century ago now

Just about any time someone tries to say that QM proves this or that, they are just making stuff up. It’s no different here. Observance is relevant in QM in the case of the way single particles behave, and especially given that the only means we have to measure things at this scale involves effects that are just as if not more powerful than the things they are measuring. It is not a glibly generalizable principle.

Change the assumptions, and your experience of reality changes accordingly.

Again: that data can be thought to appear and vanish dependent on whatever assumptions one takes is another huge red flag.

Why indeed? Consider the many medical charities out there, large and small, all around the world. Each concentrates on a disease or condition – HIV, cancer, MS, ME, diabetes, whatever – and their only aims are to relieve the suffering of those who currently have the condition and to help in finding something which will prevent and/or cure that condition. These are independent, philanthropic organisations, uncontrolled by governments or big pharma.

So why do they plough millions of dollars every year into funding drug research? Why would they do that if there is already a very cheap, completely safe, easy to mass-produce alternative which provides “consistent, replicable, predictable and powerful results”? The amount of money that just one or two big cancer charities spends on pharmaceutical research every year would pay for enough homeopathic treatments for, well, pretty much everyone.

These organisations are devoting vast amounts of time, effort and money into the search for a cure for cancer, a cure for AIDS etc. If those cures already exist, if they have been proven to work and if the effects that they produce are “consistent, replicable, predictable and powerful” then what the heck are ALL those major medical charities doing with the money we give them?

Is there some sort of conspiracy among all the major medical charities to try and keep the cure – for which they constantly say they are still searching – a secret? And how could it possibly be kept a secret if the proof is already out there, published in journals and supported by overwhelming anecdotal evidence from around the world over more than two centuries?

This doesn’t make sense to me. What is your explanation?

But the ways in which they’ve done so look very very suspiciously like the very sorts of mistakes and self-deception that I was talking about. Self-selecting and observer bias look rampant. Regression to the mean and “curing” self-limiting conditions seem the rule, not the exception.

It may look and seem like that to you, Bad, but I’d be willing to wager at least 30 pairs of socks that you’ve never gone further than your superficial assumptions to examine whether your theory actually does hold water. It appears that you’re also not perceiving the extent to which observer bias is colouring your own assessment of the situation, and to which self-selection is operating in what you’re accepting as “evidence”.

It’s also supremely arrogant of you to presume that no homeopathic practitioner or researcher is capable of approaching homeopathy from a rigorous scientific perspective. Any theory that relies on assuming all proponents of a conflicting system of thought are deluded idiots is ridiculously unscientific, and in Jungian psychoanalytical terms equates to you looking at your own reflection.

If it defies attempts at replication under controlled conditions, then you simply cannot claim that the data show much of anything at all. Controlled replication is pretty much the only way to be absolutely sure that one of those major bias errors (many of which are perfectly honest mistakes) aren’t to blame for a perceived or interpreted result.

That might seem wholly plausible from your standpoint, but in actuality, controlled replication can write as many biases into the trial as it’s attempting to remove. We saw that very clearly in Shang et al where the meta-analysis did no more than conform to the initial assumption that all positive effects of homeopathy were either due to bias or methodological flaws.

But let’s take a more tangential angle on this and see if you can follow my reasoning.

If you control for a dependent variable that’s essential to the mechanism of action, then of course you’re going to get equivocal results. Trials on homeopathic remedies have been undertaken on the assumption that the entire therapeutic effect resides in the physical properties of the remedy. That assumption is predicated on the biases of the biomedical model which assumes that therapeutic interventions are only of value or “valid” if they operate “objectively” in the material/biochemical realm. This despite the so-called “placebo effect” which has been the elephant sitting in the room for a long long time now, and operates in biomedicine every bit as much as it does in homeopathy.

So where is the scientific validity in this assumption that the only way a therapy can be considered to “work” is if the therapeutic effect is objective/material/biochemical? That’s just a bias of the biomedical model derived from an inductive/deductive feedback loop in reasoning (see my previous post). It’s NOT particularly scientific, not least because it’s ignoring the “placebo effect”.

So you say… but when people control for observer bias (things like remembering hits, forgetting misses, and so on), the effect vanishes. That’s a HUGE red flag.

You people put so much faith in these methods, don’t you? How on earth do you assess the number of remembered hits in relation to forgotten misses if the misses are forgotten?! And individual variation in this respect will be enormous. Study the methods — they’re little more than guessing games, approximations, imputed averages. In any case, those are not the things being controlled for in meta-analyses. Read them. Filtering for bias looks at things like the number of positive trials published in relation to the number of negative ones, and in the absence of what is felt to be a “realistic” figure, a certain level of bias is assumed. Ditto with the extent to which trials are published in “sympathetic” journals as opposed to more “mainstream” ones, etc. Quantifying bias in any way is fraught with difficulty and is a highly subjective judgement which can vary enormously according to the underlying assumptions of the individual researcher. Further, using imputed averages in this way can only ever ultimately result in regression to mean, which is exactly what we’re seeing. All this is only to be expected when inductive reasoning is the primary logic being employed here and a review of the literature would seem to support the idea that the more “bias” a researcher perceives in a conflicting system, the less he perceives his own. Bias is inherent, and can’t be adequately or even scientifically controlled for.

The thing is, both sides of this argument are pointing up valid observations about the way the therapy works, but the rationales each are deriving are inappropriate, i) because they’re not wholly consistent with the observed phenomena, ii) because they’re irreconcilable, and iii) because they’re not adequately taking account of conceptual bias.

What we appear to have in homeopathy is a therapeutic system which engages primarily with non-material aspects of the organism and brings about a reversal of pathology through those means (which is basically what Hahnemann outlines). It’s an interdependent system, so if you conceptually fragment it into its component variables and start to test them in isolation, results start to become unstable. But the point is that when all those variables come together, the results demonstrate consistency, replicability and predictability and in many cases are more powerful than the results obtained in biomedicine. There is plenty of evidence to this effect, and it can’t be ignored in any rational assessment of the therapy. Your notion that homeopaths are “anomaly hunting” is frankly absurd in the face of the volume of case history, much of which relates to non-self-limiting conditions (see citations in my previous post for starters).

The bottom line here is that it doesn’t matter one jot if a conscious correlation between patient and practitioner is an essential part of engaging the specific effect of the remedy. If this produces consistent, replicable, predictable and powerful results that are at least as effective as pharmaceutical interventions (again, see above citations), then why are the health services of western nations bankrupting themselves to the pharmaceutical industry? Why are tens of thousands of people dying, and the quality of life of many more being ruined by the side effects of drugs alone?

What the trials tell us is that “bias” is essential to the therapy working, and when it’s present, then it works very well. What on earth is “wrong” with that? It’s no less true of biomedicine which holds a different set of biases which it takes to be self-evidently “true”, and it’s not in the least “unscientific”. Don’t conflate “science” with “objectivity”. Quantum mechanics demonstrated the role of the observer in the outcome of any experiment getting on for a century ago now, and the cutting edge of new scientific explorations into the nature of consciousness is revealing more and more the extent to which consciousness equates to a “reality creation software” with quantum mechanical properties. In other words, what you take to be self-evidently “true” invokes a feedback loop whereby your personal experience of reality constantly reinforces those assumptions. Change the assumptions, and your experience of reality changes accordingly. Psychologists are well aware of this dynamic, as have been eastern religious philosophers for centuries, and it’s no less rampant within the sceptic camp as you perceive it to be amongst homeopaths.