Socked! Conclusions of The Lancet’s “end of homeopathy” study discredited

Two recent and related papers, published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology and Homeopathy (the journal of the Faculty of Homeopathy, the UK’s professional organisation of medically qualified homeopaths), have reconstructed the analysis carried out by the authors of The Lancet’s much vaunted 2005 meta-analysis, on the back of which the journal triumphantly editorialised “the end of homeopathy”, and have placed on record the fact that the study was hugely flawed and in some instances just plain incorrect.

These papers emphatically underline the position this blog has taken from the outset — that the underlying data does not support the assertion that homeopathy is no more than placebo. The jury is still out, and those that claim otherwise are misrepresenting their personal opinion as proven scientific fact when it’s nothing of the kind.

The anatomy of obsession

I learned something from running this blog. And that’s that it takes up a phenomenal amount of time and energy.

It got to the stage a few months ago when the extent to which it was impinging on the rest of life was unacceptable: disputing differences in perspective, for all the need for better public debate on the subject of homeopathy, isn’t quite up there with First Life. (Not to mention that the blog seemed to be doing perfectly well without me.) So having gone socks away for a bit, this business of the time and the energy brought me very conveniently round to the subject of this post.

Pseudoscepticaemia: signs, symptoms and socks

I didn’t write this article. It’s from the website Suppressed Science. I’m posting it here in the interests of raising public awareness of this increasingly common and rather unpleasant condition. We’re already aware of its non-self-limiting nature — sufferers have clearly demonstrated their incapacity to limit its effects to themselves — and so far there’s no evidence of it being curable.

It should not be confused with scepticaemia, the condition of having doubt in the blood. Scepticaemia is essentially healthy. DD Scientismic fascistitis.

Contributions from other homeopaths on candidates for genus epidemicus remedies are welcome.