Homeopathic “Where’s Wally” Part 2 — The Missing “Fact”

In an earlier post I looked at homeopath Louise McLean’s rather long and tedious list of “50 Facts About Homeopathy”. With the help of Wally (of Where’s Wally fame) we identified the occasions where McLean flipped between claiming that:

a) homeopathy has been proven in clinical tests, and 

b) homeopathy can’t be tested.

Vitally entertaining as that was, I decided to deal with only 49 of McLean’s 50 “facts”. In this post, I want to highlight the remaining “fact” (it was Fact 20), which demonstrates an important point that is often obscured by the absurdity of all the other claims that homeopaths make.

And the point is this….

Everyone assumes that when homeopaths talk about how a particular clinical trial was “successful”, they mean that the particular remedy that was tested has been vindicated. But that’s not the case. They never say it at the time, but homeopaths take each supposed “positive” result as a vindication for the entire Law of Similars*(see footnote) — and therefore as a vindication of all their other remedies as well.

The Lancet might think it’s publishing a study on homeopathic cough remedies, but homeopaths are thinking rather more grandly. No wonder they get so excited about the faintest whiff of a percent above the placebo effect, and will quibble about it for decades to come.

Clearly, if homeopaths stuck to using only those remedies that have been properly studied, they would have to limit themselves to dispensing (ineffective) cold medicines or headache tablets and the like.

Instead, after a few dubious (no, entirely spurious) “positive results” for minor studies, homeopaths like Louise McLean inform their customers that their “empirically based, clinically proven” method can treat serious illnesses: 

Fact 20 – Homeopaths treat genetic illness, tracing its origins to 6 main genetic causes: Tuberculosis, Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Psora (scabies), Cancer, Leprosy.

[Links to remedies added by me, not in the original.]

And this is where their fanaticism turns deadly. Anyone still wondering why there is such vehement opposition to nice caring homeopaths now has their answer.

Bruce Lipton PhD: Quack, ignoramus

People googling “Bruce Lipton quack” often get referred to this blog, as that phrase was briefly mentioned in a comment on one post or another. I always got a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t written about him yet, so here goes…

Bruce Lipton, PhD has made a name for himself as a more science-savvy version of Deepak Chopra. But Unlike Chopra, seems to have largely escaped the attention of the skeptic community. He peppers his talks with technical terms from biochemistry, hoping that no one with the relevant training will pay any close attention and call him to account. I have no relevant training, so I will deal with a fairly straight forward talk, and consider its merits.

This two minute video talk is probably a good place to start. No need to watch it. I’ve already sat through the whole two minutes of it and transcribed a few of his barely articulate and ungrammatical sentences.

 Cancer quack Bruce Lipton PhD with face-lifted cancer quack Louise Hay

… 

Lipton tells us that the earth is going through its sixth mass extinction, which scientists say is caused by human behavior. Lipton agrees. But that’s where any agreement between Bruce Lipton PhD and modern science finishes. Lipton finds a rather curious origin for the whole thing:

Much of this human behavior is in fact related to a concept that we arose in this garden as a total result of accident, when in fact this is the complete opposite from the…the…I mean…we were, we were….it was purpose and design through the entire process.

I’d like to play dumb here and say that he couldn’t possibly be referring to evolution, because that doesn’t propose that life arose by accident or chance. But I can’t play dumb. I know he means evolution, because Creationists talk like this all the time. Now, I can understand why the average member of the public hears the words “random mutation and natural selection”, and focuses on the easiest word — random. It takes a bit of background reading to clear up the confusion: genetic mutations are only “random” within some clearly defined parameters; and beyond that, natural selection is not random, (which is why the word selection appears rather prominently in the term).

But Bruce Lipton isn’t an average member of the public. He has a PhD in developmental biology! Why is he ignorant of the most basic concepts of his own field?

Homeopathic “Where’s Wally” (Part 1)

Homeopath Louise McLean has written an article called 50 Facts About Homeopathy. This is a fact. So that counts as my first fact today. Thank you, thank you. Once I got about half way through that sentence I realized it might turn out to be a fact, and it was!

And Louise McLean can do it too!

…..Okay, I’ll just come out with it……This post will probably get a bit dull in places. But I am going to go through with it anyway, because the best way to observe the behavior of homeopaths is to watch how they try to hide amongst their own camouflage. To make things a bit easier, I’ll point out that she will be following standard homeopathic rhetorical procedure:

She’ll claim that homeopathy has already been proven by clinically controlled tests, and that it can’t be tested.

Yes, you read that right. But she can’t say it as clearly as I just did because people would notice it’s crazy. So she’ll bury it among dozens and dozens of other statements. These other statements in fact turn out to be just as absurd, but will at least serve as a distraction.

See if you can stay awake long enough to catch her doing it! It’s a bit like playing Where’s Wally (or Where’s Waldo for US readers), but with Wally hidden amongst thousands of other Wallys. See how many times you can find that particular Wally!

(You might also notice that one of the “facts” is missing. That extra one is dealt with in the next post, here. There’s a reason for this.)

McLean’s article is quoted in bold. The plain text in between is my commentary.

More on Louise Hay & some general statements about Alternative Medicine

Another commenter on my earlier post about Louise Hay’s cancer quackery has raised some issues concerning alternative medicine. I responded  to her criticisms (or lack of them as the case may be) over on that thread, but I’ll also take the opportunity here to gather a few points about the way proponents of alternative medicine deal with criticism in general.

Responses usually seem to follow a formula: a mix of smokescreen, personal attack and insistence on an entire worldview or ideology — an ideology that is opposed to “western” medicine and must be swallowed whole to be understood. None of this involves the idea of small incremental gains in knowledge or rejection of failed hypotheses. It’s all or nothing, because, well it has to be. There are a whole lot of modalities and treatments for which there is little or no evidence, which must be bolstered by an ideological armoring in order to survive. Criticizing one aspect of it can bring down the whole modality. So any criticism meets an ideological counter-attack on multiple fronts, none of which address the original criticism.

For evidence of this, read the entire comment thread on that post.

This is an attempt to deal with some aspects of that kind of multiple front ideological attack.