To Infinity and Beyond

What is a homeopathic remedy?  A sugar pill? ‘Just water’?  Homeopathy was named by one Dr. Samuel Hahnemann.  First-rate scientist, rubbish PR person.  Homeo-pathy?  Awkward man – awkward word: difficult to spell, easy to lampoon.  Even easier to misrepresent.

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My favourite skeptic skit… completely misleading, but – anything for a laugh, eh?

Laughs aside, homeopathy – a remarkably cheap, effective, low-tech health care option, affordable even to the poorest nations – deserves proper research funding.  Key elements of treatment:

• Symptom similarity  –  determined through tests on the healthy (pathogenic trial, proving)
• Individualisation – symptom similarity is as individual as people
• Serial dilution/agitation –  developed to minimise drugs toxicity/side effects

‘Homeopathy’ is not a protected term; mis-use of the word commonly confuses public perception.  Here is someone else who seems confused about homeopathy:

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Very likely this man knows quite well that his seaside dropper stunt is misleading nonsense.  Ah – isn’t that… yes, skeptics call homeopathy ‘misleading nonsense’ while spreading misleading nonsense about this widely used and accepted healing modality.

Dilution to the infinitesimal  is not what makes a medicine ‘homeopathic’.  Ultra-high diluting was Hahnemann’s answer to drug-induced pathogenic (‘side’) effects.  He employed serial dilution, a method still commonly used in pharmaceutical labs.  He just took it an inexplicable, observation-based step further.

Confirmed similarity to symptoms of disease makes a substance homeo-pathic – similar to the individual’s suffering.  Fact is, most ordinary medication too works because a given substance can cause in the healthy just those symptoms it is designed to treat –  medicinal substances have naturally both anti- and homeo-pathic effects.  This is most easily seen in the so-called ‘paradoxical effect’ – e.g. analgesics inducing pain.  The use of Zolpidem*, an insomnia treatment, to rouse coma/PVS patients is one example of the homeopathic similarity principle in ‘off label’ drug use.

The simillimum aspect of ordinary medicines is easiest to spot in herbal remedies, for example chamomile (e.g. induces nausea if over-used = soothes stomach in normal use) or arnica (over-use a.o. causes microhaemorrhages = effective treatment for bruising).  Such similarity is a key factor in much primary drug action – which means a large chunk of medicine is in fact crudely homeopathic.

Conversely, if someone dishes out potentized remedies bought from a homeopathic pharmacy, this does not equate to homeopathicity: no similarity, no treatment, no effect.  That’s one reason why the ‘homeopathic suicides’ stunts are so risible: “Look, look I’m not dead – ha ha ha!”  “Yes, we know, dear… isn’t that nice?  We’d hate to see you damaged by your own stupidity.”

this man does not understand homeopathy - skeptic campaigner 'suicide' stunt

The beauty of potentized ultra-high dilutions is just that:  they can induce amazing health changes if properly prescribed  –  yet pass through harmlessly if ‘dissimilar’, that is, not needed or not properly individualised to a patient.

Hahnemann prescribed standard doses of  his newly discovered ‘similars’, successfully, for several years.  In his quest for minimising side effects, why would an ambitious young doctor still building a reputation scupper his chances? Why refine this peculiar dynamization process unless it worked well?  Were both he and his patients the first gullible victims of homeoathy – just like the 500 million worldwide who use it today?  All of us? Just fools?  Really?

Some medics were disparaging homeopathy on the grounds of implausibility decades before the science community accepted Avogadro’s Constant.  What today’s skeptics believe about homeopathy is worn-out old tricorn jazzed up with the high-tech feathers of molecular biochemistry.

Edzard Ernst demonstrates the double blind method

In Europe, much homeopathy (and a related application, ‘homotoxicology’) is practiced using low 1:10 serial dilutions.  Definite material doses are still present in such preparations. In dismissing these as much as high potencies, professional CAM ‘debunker’ Edzard Ernst and friends gloss over the pharmacologically quantifiable content.   I’d agree that the degree of homeopathic dilution really is just a question of … degree.  So, naturally, 1:10 dynamisations, like infinitesimal ultra-high preparations, do work. Being materially small doses, they act less subtly, treatment indications are more limited: a half-way-house between the holistic, individualised applications of the ultra-high level and the single-track biochemical usage of modern medicine.

Ultra-high dilutions are not easy to understand.  There is no known mechanism that shows definitely why they work; there is much new-agey mis-information.  Some people are attracted to homeopathy because it all seems so miraculous.  Others get angry at the inexplicable.

Science has a long history of revolutionary discoveries that overthrow old world orders, from Copernicus to Einstein and beyond. The unknown is unknowable – until it is discovered.   I can see the action – and results – of the infinitesimal in my practice every day.  Whether or not a biochemical, quantum or other explanation for homeopathic medicine will be discovered eventually… it really doesn’t matter to the people who get better.

*Incidentally, Zolpidem is an example of the evidence-mindedness of medical care: although studies have to date failed to confirm the early promise of this application for the drug, many if not most PVS patients are given Zolpidem on an experimental basis.  And why not?  It’s just that if one went strictly by the demands of EBM, doctors would not agree such off-label use until confirmed in large-scale trials.

“The Plural of Anecdote is Data”

Once upon a time… but no, hold on.  Every homeopath, every patient, can give many ‘anecdotal’ reports of treatment success.  So what is an anecdote?  “a narrative of […] a single event […] in itself interesting or striking”.   In terms of someone’s experience, what’s wrong with that?  And when is an anecdote not an anecdote?  When it’s qualitative research.  Or as political scientist Raymond Wolfinger said, “the plural of anecdote is data”.

Statistics rule modern medicine, seemingly – yet much of the information that shows what patients and healthcare professionals do and experience derives from qualitative research.  That’s when a group of individuals is given the space to talk about their personal experience, embedded in a formal piece of research.  Large quantitative studies lack the instruments to capture such information, and healthcare providers are happy to use qualitative data to assess quality of care, including outcomes.  But in science ‘anecdotal’ is a dirty word: it implies value-less, baseless assumptions, wishful thinking, deliberate charlatanery – so is favoured by skeptics when discussing ‘implausible’ modalities.

Until about fifty years ago, humanity’s medical evidence base derived largely from experience and observation.   Yet modern medicine is a development of what went before, not a grail that sprang, new- forged, from a sudden realisation that all that had gone before was false.  There have always been theories: humours theory, spagyrics and hundreds more.  Our medical model, amazingly, stands on the ancient shoulders of Galen and Avicenna as much as Koch and Pasteur – and it is just as much based on theories.  Because new, we trust today’s theories to be true.

But seemingly scientifically well-founded ‘best practice’ often enough turns into its opposite.  Much like Delia’s latest ‘superfood’ promotions, it changes all the time:  Take aspirin daily, it will save your life.  Don’t take aspirin – it doesn’t prevent heart attacks, it makes your stomach bleed.  And aspirin, like vast numbers of modern medicines, originates in ‘superstitious’ folk medicine: pharmacists learnt to synthesise the active ingredient of willow bark in the 19^th century, one of the earliest pharmaceutical best-sellers.  Did it matter that Culpepper 300 years before thought willow was ‘ruled by the moon’?  He knew how to use it – for pain and fever, as today – from handed-down folk experience: anecdote.

© David Davies 2009

Homeopathy works.  A bold statement – from my own experience and the experience of millions who have been helped, often saved, by homeopathy. One chestnut skeptics like to hurl invokes an analogy between the millions who ‘believe’ in homeopathy and the masses adhering to faith and religion.

The difference: faith in the existence of a higher being is necessarily just that: the ability to have faith itself is a predicate of faith.  Philosophers  of all schools argue the essential unknowability of divinity.  In homeopathic treatment, the patient need not ‘believe’ in the method, may not know they are receiving treatment (babies, coma patients), may be extremely sceptical: the most fanatical homeopathy-denier will still benefit.  Few expose themselves to such a risk of challenging cherished beliefs, not to mention loss of a close-knit community. Like leaving the church for a Catholic, only on the internet?

So what’s the proof of my anecdotal pudding?  Even some homeopathic researchers propose that ‘the consultation’ may be the key to success.  But no: in many settings, the consultation is no longer or ‘nicer’ than the average GP appointment.  Overall, homoepathic treatment outcomes are comparable, no matter interview style and length (across the board, around 85% of homeopathic patients improve significantly in vastly varied treatment conditions).

While, just as in ordinary medicine, other explanations may apply in a proportion of cases – natural resolution to an acute episode, sudden remission of serious illness – the sheer mass of direct reporting of homeopathic successes speaks for itself: not every cure can be explained away, not every patient is a gullible fool, by the million, worldwide.  People understand this, otherwise homeopathy would have long-since been consigned to the quack-heap of history.

Key factor: if the wrong remedy is prescribed, the patient doesn’t improve; once the right prescription has been found, the patient’s health changes.  Wrong remedy = no cure, right remedy = cure – no matter the belief of patient or practitioner.  It’s when homeopaths get it wrong that the crucial importance of the remedy shows itself – if the remedy were ‘only’ a placebo, the actual prescription would make no difference.  We may not know why medicines at such high dilutions work, but we can see their effect on health, directly and patently.  Patients and practitioners everywhere tell us so – whether you want to call that data or anecdote.