77: A Homeopathy Episode So Potent You Can’t Hear It (w/Jonathan Jarry)
To prepare this curative episode, we listened carefully to alternative health consumers for many hours, taking an exhaustive history of life challenges on physical, mental, and emotional planes. We scanned the symptoms against our compendium of disease states and prescribed the precise substances that would mirror them.Then, we took minuscule audio samples from our podcasting apothecary — skepticism, melancholy, and empathy. We mixed these, diluted them a thousand times, to the point at which they became completely inaudible. Then we shook them up and down while chanting the spell of this bespoke remedy: Conspiritualitis investigarium.Please don’t try to turn up your volume on this episode. You can’t actually hear it, and that’s what makes it so powerful. But seriously folks. Welcome to our long-awaited homeopathy show — and not a week too soon. NFL’s leading quarterback Aaron Rodgers has just admitted to endangering the entire league by opting to be “immunized” via homeopathy rather than complying with the league’s vaccination requirements. (He’s also a lying liar.) There are reports of homeopaths selling COVID19 remedies — through both small ops in the U.S., and federally-approved dispensers in India, where Narendra Modi’s Hindu Nationalists mingled sugar pills with astrology to help disguise their negligent pandemic response. Derek takes us on a tour through the strange history of this medicine that isn’t there, and interviews Jonathan Jarry of the McGill Office for Science and Society on why it haunts us. Julian contextualizes homeopathy against the broader “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” landscape. And Matthew wonders about the uses of magic. Show NotesA brief history of homeopathyVaccines and HomeopathHomeopathy: A HistoryBerlin Wall pills: a cure for emotional trauma – or royal-endorsed quackeryJonathan Jarry's homeopathy videoJonathan's articles for McGill UniversityHomeopathy And Its Founder: Views Of A British ResearcherMEASURING MYTHOLOGY: Startling Concepts in NCCAM Grant$2.5 billion spent, no alternative cures foundComplementary And Alternative Medicine
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Conspirituality 77, a homeopathy episode so potent you can't hear it.
To prepare this curative episode, we listened carefully to alternative health consumers for many hours, taking an exhaustive history of life challenges on physical, mental, and emotional planes.
We scanned the symptoms against our compendium of disease states and prescribed the precise substances that would mirror them.
Then, we took minuscule audio samples from our podcasting apothecary.
Skepticism, melancholy, and empathy.
We mixed these, diluted them a thousand times, to the point at which they became completely inaudible.
Then we shook them up and down while chanting the spell of this bespoke remedy, Conspiritualitis Investigarium.
So please, don't try to turn up your volume on this episode.
You can't actually hear it, and that's what makes it so powerful.
But seriously, folks, welcome to our long-awaited homeopathy show.
And not a week too soon, NFL's leading quarterback Aaron Rodgers has just admitted to endangering the entire league by opting to be quote-unquote immunized via homeopathy rather than complying with the league's vaccination requirements.
He's also a lying liar.
There are reports of homeopaths selling COVID-19 remedies through both small ops in the US and federally approved dispensers in India where Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalists mingled sugar pills with astrology to help disguise their negligent pandemic response.
Derek takes us on a tour through the strange history of this medicine that isn't there and interviews Jonathan Jerry of the McGill Office for Science and Society on why it haunts us.
I'll contextualize homeopathy against the broader complementary and alternative medicine landscape, while Matthew wonders about the uses of magic.
I've talked before about my 25-year battle with anxiety disorder, which ranged from being a nuisance to a full-on crippling war with myself during that quarter century.
And thankfully, I've worked that out.
But as with any chronic mental health issue, you're willing to try out any potential solution while you're going through it.
So I did try homeopathy, being sold on the promise of a one-stop intervention that was, as I was told, It would cure me of my ailment.
Edgar was a homeopathic doctor who often took my class.
Not his real name, but it's been a while and I don't need to reveal his identity.
We became friends while he was dating a mutual friend of ours and one day I mentioned my longtime struggle with anxiety.
He said he could help.
He was a successful homeopath.
I won't list his celebrity clientele, but they afforded him access to a rarefied world.
Knowing that I would be hard put to pay his session fee of $1,000, he only charged me a third of that.
And so one evening I walked up three flights of stairs in his Upper East Side apartment building and we began.
In retrospect, the session reminds me of that scene in the movie The Master, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing the L. Ron Hubbard-inspired character Lancaster Dodd, audits the psychologically unstable Freddie Quell, played by Joaquin Phoenix.
Moment by moment, Dodd dissects Quell, taking him deeper into his anxiety and neurosis.
My dialogue with Edgar was equally grueling, and this is part of homeopathy.
Hanuman wanted that one-hour talk session at the beginning of all of his treatments.
By the end of my session, I'm emotionally and physically exhausted.
Edgar had me in there for three hours as he broke me down, asking the same question five times in a row as if my first response wasn't honest.
He prodded and searched and kept me searching.
He'd move on and return to the question a minute later, even an hour later.
I wanted to scream in rage or curl into a ball.
And all the while, he never broke form, stoic and patient and relentless.
To be honest, that was the good part.
I recognize what Edgar was doing from religious texts, intentionally breaking me to find some essence of what I am, why I exist, how I perceive myself.
He sifted through the scattered remnants of my past, foraging for clues as to why I'm so anxious.
What could possibly co-opt my nervous system in such a way as to make me believe that at the sight of a particular downtown subway station, or feeling the wrong temperature of a breeze on my skin, or any of the other numerous triggers I suffered from, that I could very well die at any moment?
He reconstructed my identity in order to show me the folly of my ways.
Not in order to control me as, say, a cult leader would, but in order to steal me against the indifferent danger signals I experienced every day in New York City.
And my payment was worth that alone.
But then came the cure.
You're a vegetarian, correct?
He asked me.
And at the time I was.
Well, he continued, how do you feel about self-shellfish?
Edgar told me about calcarea carbonica, which is a homeopathic remedy that squashes the terror of anxiety triggers among a host of other symptoms, including an inability to keep warm and heavy sweating.
And if that sounds strange, well, many homeopathic products purport to treat extremes in either direction.
This shellfish concoction claimed to help people from going insane, as well as those scared of the dark, neither of which affected me.
But that didn't matter.
This compound would work, and he knew it.
And I believed him.
He faxed the order to his compounder.
A week later, I received a package in the mail, and I briefly sidestepped vegetarianism in the name of science.
And as you can imagine, it didn't work.
Spoiler.
Okay, I've got some questions, Derek.
I mean, first of all, were you familiar with homeopathy at this point?
Did you know what the purported mechanism was?
I would say I had the level of knowledge as some commenters on Julian's Instagram post preempting this episode, meaning I filed it in the, it's a natural sort of remedy.
It has something to do with that world that I was involved in.
Did I know the specifics that we're going to get into in this episode?
No, I did not.
I know your ambivalence in your description because you compare the encounter with the master and then you describe a kind of almost religious encounter where here's this guy breaking you down in order to put you back together.
You want to rage and curl into a ball, but then you also found that it was worth it in some way.
But it sounded to me like his therapeutic style was, was also like Cure's like in the sense that the encounter was grueling and exhausting, like he was giving you anxiety just through the consultation.
Right, it's kind of like how bee pollen or honey will help you with your allergies, your seasonal allergies, right?
The same concept effectively.
I've never gone to therapy So I don't know that experience, but I would say that was the only such session I was in.
And from what I've talked to with people who go to therapy or have gone to therapy, it seems to me to be a similar encounter.
And yes, it did impact me because there is something about as grueling as it was, as challenging as it was to answer the same question so many times and to really dig in.
Once you kind of get it out, you feel better.
And I left that session, I remember feeling lighter than I normally did.
Yeah, I think that the tricky thing that stands out to me about that is that in that process of a fairly confrontational self-reflection, some insight will arise, right?
Some emotional shift will happen.
And it does have echoes of certain forms of cognitive behavioral therapy or exposure therapy that's used for people who have OCD.
Learning how to get into the triggered state and then deal with it so that you're not so overwhelmed by it.
But yeah, it's, it's, it's, your description was, was grueling.
And I wanted to say at one point, if you, if you felt like curling up in a ball or screaming, that must mean it's working, right?
Yeah, that again, that, that, that alone was worth it to me.
I think if I had paid him for that, I would have felt better than the fact that I, you paid for the cure.
And I'll also add that when the first one didn't work, he tried another and it didn't work.
And then he tried a third and it didn't work.
And at that point, I just stopped talking to him about it because I wasn't going to keep paying the compounder for whatever they were sending me.
I just want to say that like being around a lot of psychotherapists, I don't know which ones you speak to, but a lot of red flags go up for me in the description of an encounter like this, not only because of its length and intensity, also because it is really not, I mean, there might be some exposure therapy or CBT elements involved here, but this is not an encounter in which the person is seeking to build relational trust or any kind of modeling of sort of equitable but this is not an encounter in which the person is
Like it is a relationship of mastery in which you wind up being at a profound disadvantage on Almost it sounds like traumatized.
It sounds by some of your description.
And, you know, one of the things that I know from the psychodynamic psychotherapists that I know is that like, It's a real mistake to push somebody really far into a place that you don't really know anything about as a therapist.
You don't know where they're going to go.
You don't know what kind of support they might have.
You don't know what you're going to be bringing up.
I asked the same question five times, assuming that the patient was lying or not telling the truth or not being clean about themselves.
I don't know.
Anyway, I'm really glad that you came away feeling that it was worthwhile, but I would just add a note of caution.
I feel like there's some red flags there.
And if people are experiencing something like that, I wouldn't categorically say that this is a safe environment.
From my understanding of therapy, and I'm sure you can back this up from what you just said, There is a relationship you develop with your therapist.
I think of The Sopranos and Tony Soprano and his evolution of admission over time, whereas this was just like three hours jam-packed right in there of everything.
And from my understanding, that's not really how you would do it.
You want to flirt a little before you really get into dating, you know, with that in that sense.
Well, to use a figure of speech, I guess.
I think the key thing is that you're modeling and building trust and equitable power dynamics, and you're having good boundaries, and you're not pressing too hard, and you're also not divulging too much.
It would be slow and relational.
To understand the origins of homeopathy, let's consider malaria.
The oldest known treatment of this deadly disease dates back to the 4th century, when Chinese doctors realized that the Qing-Ha-Zu plant alleviates symptoms.
Artemisinin, still a cure today, dates back to ancient Chinese texts.
In Peru, locals grappling with malaria have long bathed in water that was made bitter by the synchona tree.
And the bitterness is due to quinine, which also gives tonic water its bite.
Quinine has more side effects than artemisinin, yet has been used to treat malaria since the 17th century.
Artemisinin and quinine are frontline defenses against malaria today.
In fact, quinine costs $2 a dose in most of the world, but it also costs $200 in America.
That's another story we can do on healthcare, perhaps.
But this is where Samuel Hahnemann comes into the picture, who learned about the Sinkona while translating the Scottish physician William Cullen's book on malaria.
Hanuman left his medical post because he objected to practices like bloodletting and the forceful expulsion of stomach fluid that was popular in the hospitals at that time.
Inspired by Cullen's work, Hanuman slathered cinchona all over his body to induce malaria-like symptoms.
And while he likely developed an inflammatory reaction, he was trying to induce the symptoms that mimic malaria.
And it was this experience that became the basis of homeopathy, like cures like.
Okay, so what is his reasoning here?
Is he thinking that if you induce the symptoms that you don't have to experience the actual disease?
And, like, did he feel that he was giving himself malaria or just the appearance of malaria?
Is there this split between sort of the symptoms of something and the reality of the thing that sort of Paints a metaphysical picture of what he's doing?
I looked for evidence that he thought he got had malaria and I didn't come across any of that but there is something in developing the symptomatology that mimics the disease that he felt would steal his body against actually Getting the disease down the line.
Remember, he was influenced by Edward Jenner and vaccination science at that time.
We'll get into later, especially with Jonathan Jarry, why those don't match up, but he was reading those texts and so he thought that it protected him in some manner against developing a disease that had similar symptoms down the road.
Okay, but that would be sort of proactive, and so the sort of inoculatory idea would be, okay, I've had the symptoms, I've trained myself, I know what that is, I'm now protected.
But homeopathy goes on to be practiced on people who are experiencing symptoms.
Prescriptive.
Yeah, so how does he make that leap?
Or does he just sort of want everything to be true?
That seems to be the case.
I don't know for sure if he just used that because he was okay after the inflammatory symptoms.
He might have then assumed that if I were to give this to someone who is actually experiencing it, then they would get better as I did.
Because they were experiencing the symptoms and I would give them the likening, the like poison, they were experiencing them harder or better or something and then it would be okay?
Yes.
I'm trying, help me out here man, come on.
It is confusing.
I think we're going to tease it apart a little bit more.
The actual origin story of that episode was a little harder to come across besides what I presented there.
But how he makes the leap from disease specificity, which was also being developed at the time, To the metaphysics of the disease is still something that we're trying to grapple with.
And that's why I think that Hanuman would be a conspiritualist today if he were alive.
And that's why he lines up so well with what we're discussing on this podcast in general.
And he did.
He approached his newfound theory with religious fervor.
He coined the word homeopathy in an 1807 essay, and three years later in the preface to his most famous work, which is the Organon of the Art of Healing, and that book remains required reading for homeopathic doctors today, He claimed to be the only person in recent times to take the principle of like cures like seriously.
But here's where the leap, Matthew, happens, because he then said that any physician working in such a spirit, quote, becomes directly assimilated to the divine creator of the world.
Wow.
He'd be doing channeled readings on Instagram, no doubt.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Not only was he riffing on the burgeoning science of vaccination, his spiritual associations, again, are just like everything we talk about today.
And it should be noted, this is an interesting evolution of science, that the first known notions of vaccinations were also cited in traditional Chinese texts Around the time of the malaria cures as well.
So despite his belief that he was the sole champion of his ideology, Hahnemann wasn't working in a vacuum.
Austrian physician Anton von Stork speculated that toxic herbs and substances are beneficial in small doses, and this comes from Paracelsus, who was working with the same theory a few centuries earlier.
Von Stork's work influenced Hahnemann, but this is where the homeopathists veered off in a strange direction.
Instead of ingesting small quantities of a substance, Hahnemann He eventually removed the active ingredient altogether in his distillations.
He believed that less substance equals higher potency.
And it was his middle finger to the medical system's polypharmacy.
By aiming to only invoke the slightest response possible, he eventually rendered the active ingredient moot through extreme dilutions that Okay, so it's all making sense now.
It's all making sense.
I get it.
You're welcome, Julian.
We get there.
Yeah, so here's the next leap, which is why did he go from he takes real cinchona, smears it all over his body, He induces a malarial symptomatic response, but then he goes to the principle of like cures like is going to be sort of instantiated through a dilution of the material down to nothingness.
Now, so in trying to figure out how does he make this leap, I found one source through something called the American Council of Science and Health that says that Hahnemann turned to dilution Conveniently, after going through a professional spell in which he really did apply Light Cures Like in the same way that he conceived of it through his own experience with Synchona, which was not diluted.
Now, there's a grain of salt that I want to offer with this report because the byline is ACSH Staff.
The article's from 1999.
I phoned their office and the admin there said that the byline meant the article was reviewed and signed off on by the council members, and I looked through the list of council members.
Seems to be a few dozen doctors.
I don't know much more about the organization, but this article, it gives a certain, there's something about this description that makes sense to me.
So, the report says, Hanuman would begin his consultations by putting wearisomely numerous questions to the patient.
The replies, this sounds familiar Derek, the replies would contribute to his building a picture of the patient's condition.
Based exclusively on these replies, the patient's appearance, and Hahnemann's supposedly God-given intuition.
For example, if the patient had a gray pallor, was sweating profusely, and said that he or she suffered from abdominal cramps, Hahnemann would in effect look up gray pallor, sweating, abdominal cramps in his tome, use cross-references to narrow down possible remedies, and thus decide that strychnine, a toxic alkaloid, was the ideal cure for the patient's condition.
But, If strychnine is ingested in significant quantities, it will indeed cause sweating and severe abdominal cramps.
And Hahnemann's original records on his patients detail his prescribing many noxious substances according to the doctrine of like cures like.
For stomach pains, he regularly prescribed quarter ounce doses of mercury.
He instructed one poor soul to take half an ounce of sulfuric acid in the morning and another half ounce later in the day.
So a purported healing system that Hahnemann asserted God had revealed to him was having devilish effects on his patients.
So that's this researcher's explanation of why he moved.
He just flipped to, you know, dilution because he had found this sublime principle that he didn't want to abandon when it went south.
You know, there's too much sunken cost in it.
And so he has to neutralize it anyway.
It's really typical of religious revelation because it's more important to hang on to the ideology and then tweak the sort of performance than to abandon the delusion of the person's mastery, which has to feel really powerful for this guy.
And by the way, strychnine, mercury, and sulfuric acid are all indeed used in homeopathic preparations, but of course they should be diluted so that they're not actually there.
Yeah.
Can I just ask you guys what year this was?
What general period?
Early 19th century.
So 1807 is when he coined the term.
He died in the middle of the century, so he was working in the teens and 20s and 30s on this.
Everything you describe, Matthew, this is where the spiritual idealism enters the picture.
It seems like it was there from the beginning, but we get to the process of shaking that he called potentization.
Let's understand how this works.
So we'll think about the most popular homeopathic flu remedy in the world, ocilococcinum.
It is one of France's top selling medicines, but it also rakes in $20 million a year in America.
The remedy is based on French physician Joseph Roy's discovery of an oscillating bacterium, which was discovered in the blood of flu victims in 1917.
Roy speculated that this bacterium was responsible for a host of diseases ranging from eczema to cancer.
Of course, right.
And I talked to Jonathan Jarry, who's a cancer researcher, about the real dangers of homeopathy later.
But Joseph Roy discovered that the same bacterium was in the blood of a Long Island duckling.
Today, the process of potentization in Oscillococcinum begins with the heart and liver of the Muscovy duck.
Technicians mix one part duck heart and liver with 100 parts sugar in water, and then the process is repeated 200 times.
Now, to be clear, Of all of the hundreds of thousands or even millions of doses of oselococcinum produced in the world every year, it comes from one duck that is not in any of those vials.
So you are actually getting sugar pills.
But that's a very, that's a materialist point of view.
I know, I'm sorry.
You explain your materialism.
We just don't have the instruments to measure homeopathy.
Exactly.
It's such a paradox because it's like one duck, which you can visualize, it's like, there's the duck, he's quacking, and then he gets subdivided up to nothingness, and there's millions of doses of this thing, And the duck disappears, but there's something sort of very vital and imaginative about the duck, but the duck isn't actually there.
It's really, it's so mind-fucking, this stuff.
He's kind of a guru duck.
He's a duck who has achieved pure non-dual emptiness.
He's disappeared.
Maybe that's how, because I asked Jonathan this, how vegetarians and vegans who take ocilococcinum can square their belief in this because, yes, they're not actually ingesting any animal parts, but an animal had to be killed to make it.
So if you're an ethical vegetarian or vegan, how do you square that?
And, you know, Jonathan has his response.
How would you square it?
I couldn't.
I think what's so, but that's, that points me back to the paradox because the duck has to die and yet there's no duck left over.
Right?
It's like the duck is sacrificed to this process.
It's like the Jesus duck, right?
So, the duck is sacrificed for the healing of the world and everybody consumes it, but because we can't all have a little nibble of Jesus' body, it has to be transubstantiated into the bread, right?
Is that what's going on here?
Is we're having this kind of mimicry of transubstantiation going on?
Actually, this reminds me of the Oliver Wendell Holmes quote that I found that I'll read later.
So yeah, we'll get to that.
Let's continue about these dilutions because Some over-the-counter homeopathic remedies actually do contain ingredients.
You know, what Edgar gave me did not, but let's look at a little bit of their math.
So, a homeopathic prescription that claims a potency of 6X means there's one part of an active ingredient per million bits of sugar water.
And by the time you get to 6C, there's one part in 10 trillion.
And so I'm not giving any math lessons here, I'm not good at math, but 6C equals 12X according to their dilution process.
So you can do the math when you look on your remedies if you buy them.
But at 13C, no parts of the active ingredient remain.
And a typical homeopathic remedy is 30C.
Former U.S.
Air Force flight surgeon and family physician Harriet Hall points out that at this level of 30C, you would need a container 30 times the size of the Earth just to find one molecule of the initial active ingredient.
That's such a lonely duck, oh my god.
Just one fucking duck right at the center of the universe.
30C is 30 times the size of the Earth.
Oscillococcinin is 200C.
Okay, but if by 13C no parts of the active ingredient remain, all numbers above that are just flying spaghetti monster, right?
There's no difference between... It's the force of the shaking.
It's the shake weight.
The more you do the shake weight, the stronger your arm gets.
It's getting more potentized, regardless of the fact that we know there's nothing left there, but the spiritual energy is still there and it gets potentized by the continuous process, right?
Potenticized.
Potenticized.
Yeah, this has been a language lesson for this episode.
I was going to say, Derek, we need to give you some kind of award this episode for the number of tongue-twisting, difficult-to-pronounce words that you've included.
Yeah, this was not easy.
Hanuman founded this field by focusing on barks and herbs, yet it has stretched quite a bit in the preceding centuries.
Roy's oscillating bacterium was never actually seen by another set of eyes, and critics speculate that dust was on his slide because people have tested His theory and have never found efficacy.
And yet, Borham, who makes millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars every year on this, and they still will claim on packaging that it reduces the severity of flu symptoms.
Holistically, Hahnemann has pushed back against the medical system in every regard.
Again, we can understand that in the wellness industry today.
Let's look at some other ideas.
He believed that the internal and external realities of one's body are always concurrent, that every element shows apparent physical signs in his belief system.
So in his belief system, meaning that if you are sick, your body will show the signs, to be clear on that.
And And this is false.
And even doctors at that time knew that because heart attacks and strokes don't have to show warning signs yet can still be fatal all of a sudden.
So many chronic issues escape conscious detection.
What he wants to be is a diviner as well.
He wants to be able to read the signs in the mysteries of the physical world, but at the same time he doesn't believe that those material things are ultimately consequential.
Yes, exactly.
Amazing.
His belief in an unbreakable bond between internal and external causes of disease was overturned when he was developing homeopathy.
Don't get sick because you're not sufficiently spiritual enough or because you treated diarrhea with an antidiarrheal instead of a laxative.
And just to name two ideas that were being confirmed at that time, germ theory and disease specificity were in circulation at the time of homeopathy's origins.
But You know, even when I open my conversation with Jonathan Jarry, there are parts of Hanuman that I can't even look back and respect.
He has good reason or he had good reason to suspect that his peers were not creating the most effective methods of treatment with bloodletting or, again, forced expulsion of stomach fluid.
And like is an appropriate remedy for like in small doses, but not in no doses.
So that's where this mysticism continues in our medicine.
But before we end this section, let's look at a few other magical ingredients that don't exist in homeopathic remedies.
So if you're feeling confined and oppressed, you can get a treatment of the Berlin Wall.
Come on.
One part concrete mixed to the same potency is also said to treat asthma, shifty eyes, terror, and headaches.
Of course.
A few other ingredients, the south pole of a magnet.
Eclipsed moonlight is an ingredient in homeopathy.
Eclipsed moonlight, meaning moonlight that can't be seen, but it's collected somehow?
Yes, exactly.
Okay, all right, excellent.
You just collect it like you would any other homeopathic remedy.
Tears from a weeping young girl are sometimes used.
That is so creepy.
A dog's earwax?
Julian, you're the dog!
So hey, you didn't know he was a pharmacy right in your heart.
Arsenic, as you mentioned, strychnine arsenic is a popular one.
Poison ivy is used in homeopathic medicine.
And this all is further confused by the fact that some homeopaths claim that an improvement in symptoms is proof of its efficacy, yet also believe if you get sicker, their treatments are working.
So Harriet Hall calls this entire charade sympathetic magic, and she compares it to coffee.
If you imagine dumping more sugar into your cup would actually make the coffee more bitter.
Yeah, you know, I wanted to add in here, seeing as you're invoking Harriet Hall, that James Randy at the beginning of some of his talks, public talks in front of thousands of people, would swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills before he started talking and say, you know, please do call the paramedics if I suddenly collapse.
And of course, he would feel no effects whatsoever.
The Berlin Wall thing is really bizarre because now we're getting way out of the realm of naturalism altogether.
Right?
I mean, we're talking about a geopolitical structure with memory.
That was endorsed by the royal family, by the way.
The UK's royal family?
Yes.
Prince Charles, yes.
Okay, nice.
It's a weird one because I can personally imagine having a magical disposition towards something additive, right?
Involving a building that, you know, if somebody gave me little grains off of Stonehenge, I can imagine taking them in water for strength or courage or something like that.
But that's not homeopathic, right?
That would be, I would be trying to gain the strength of something.
But, I mean, people were shot against the Berlin Wall.
Like, how weird would that get?
Do you know of any other weird political monuments?
No, I... Are they going to take the old Confederate soldiers and melt them down into homeopathic remedies?
For the universe!
Yeah, if you're experiencing white supremacy, you can take a little bit of... General Lee.
General Lee's fucking bronze toenail That's so weird.
I fixed you right up.
Our last segment on Mr. Hanuman, who is as much a fighter as a healer.
I'm guessing he would be a troll on Twitter.
I just know it.
Can't prove it, as Bill Maher says, but I just know it.
He challenged the prevailing wisdom of the medical system at every turn.
He also resurrected the disproven idea that miasma, or bad air, caused diseases like cholera, chlamydia, and the plague.
In order to cure a patient, he believed, you need to address whatever miasms disturb their vital force through provings, which was his name for the collection of sugary elixirs that are the trademark of homeopathy.
And interestingly, miasma theory was disproven by none other than Benjamin Franklin, who went to France to actually work on that and actually worked for months on this and realized that there's no such thing, but he brought it back.
It was all part of his attempt to contradict the growing field of biology that would effectively render his ideas meaningless, but he called all conventional medicine allopathic, which is a term that is uttered as a derogatory slight of treatments that contain active ingredients.
So more specifically, allopathy refers to opposite cures alike, so that was my anti-diarrheal He struck a chord.
Homeopathy flourished throughout the 19th century and it was introduced in America in 1825.
that wasn't actually there.
But he struck a chord.
Homeopathy flourished throughout the 19th century, and it was introduced in America in 1825.
In less than two decades, the American Institute of Homeopathy was established.
The Nazis became fascinated by it, but they ended up abandoning it because they couldn't find any use for it.
But it persisted in America.
Provings were classified as drugs in the United States in 1938.
Even with all of that momentum, the entire field petered out in the coming decades and the last homeopathic hospital closed in the 1950s.
And as we got into the 60s, it was nearly extinct, and then the hippies came around.
So the back-to-nature mindset of the hippies and maybe the Beats, although they were a little wary of the hippies sometimes, but they combined in this severe distrust of authority and unnatural medications, which opened the doors for homeopathy to slip back in.
And look what was going on at the time.
The first billion-dollar class of drugs, tranquilizers, and specifically Miltown, were being shown to have severe negative effects on people, which further stigmatized pharmacology in the eyes of the public.
Medicine had advanced greatly.
Fewer children were dying thanks to sanitary hospital conditions, antibiotics, and vaccines, but alternative medicine It fulfills an inner yearning for connection to an earth so many of us are actually connected to these days.
And besides that, homeopathy speaks to many problematic issues in modern healthcare.
Conventional psychiatry, for one, it favors pharmaceutical interventions over talk therapy even though research time and again has shown that talk therapy is more beneficial than pills or Talk therapy in conjunction with pills is more beneficial than just pills alone.
You have our food system.
It is broken.
It has a major impact on our health.
Sedentary lifestyles have made us weak and vulnerable.
There are problems that Hanuman was trying to address, but this belief in ancient medicines or the idea, and we can talk about Hippocrates as well, where he pulled some of his ideas from, It denies the fact that we've made real hard-won advancements in science and medicine.
This romanticization of nature also denies the fact that the Earth is not here for our benefit.
Humans have evolved despite it, not because nature just welcomes us.
The secrets of science have been hard-fought every step of the way for a very long time.
And for most of history, disease was an invisible process beyond comprehension.
And yet step by step, medicine has been a process of experimentation and failure fueled by an occasional breakthrough.
And every advance is just another jigsaw piece in the fascinating puzzle of life.
And many of us alive right now have germ theory and disease specificity to thank, not a mysticism of symptomatology.
Yeah, I think as we try to reverse-engineer some of this in seeking to make sense, for example, of Hanuman's process, it's easy to forget many of the scientific principles that, for the most part, we take for granted today about how a lot of this stuff works.
Probably, like both of you and most of our listeners, I have for decades listened to friends and colleagues in health food stores and at yoga studio waiting areas, at social gatherings, repeat this trope that whatever their favorite alternative cure is, it's widely respected and very effective, but that a lack of funding for research combined with political suppression by greedy big pharma has kept it marginalized.
And in this framing, alternative medicine is kind of the hip, all-natural, underground, underfunded little engine that could, fighting an uphill battle toward well-deserved recognition.
And to be completely honest, guys, I've heard some version of this argument come out of my own mouth on many occasions in the past as well.
And so I wanted to just look at, does it really hold water?
Well, speaking of H2O, let's look at the global homeopathy market.
It was evaluated at $4.6 billion in 2020 and projected to reach $13.5 billion in 2028 by researchandmarkets.com.
The much larger global complementary and alternative medicine market, of which homeopathy is a slice, was reported by Grandview Research at $82.7 billion in 2020.
And projected to grow to over $100 billion this year and then balloon up to $404 billion by 2028.
And just as an aside, do either of you want to hazard a guess at which novel treatment within the CAM, Complementary and Alternative Medicine grab bag, is projected to grow the fastest in terms of its compound annual rate due to consumer demand?
Fecal transplants.
Well, that actually might be a good one.
There's a really good South Park episode this season on fecal transplants.
Highly recommended.
It would fit very well for conspiritualists.
The data I've heard is that fecal transplants may be the only way to actually get good gut flora back into your intestines, right?
But it's not.
It's magnetic therapies.
Which, despite having shown insufficient evidence for any and all of their marketing claims, which include things like helping with pain, nerve function, cell growth, blood flow, longevity, or to treat either arthritis or cancer, no evidence for any of that.
Nonetheless, they're still projected to increase revenue by over 23% annually during the coming seven years.
These are magnets?
These are magnets.
Like on your fridge?
Well, precisely, but they're put into pseudo-medical devices that you wear on your body, or that you sleep on in your mattress, or that are used by some kind of machine to conduct weak electromagnetic fields through your body to cure you of certain things.
Oh man, that's like playtime.
That's like, it reminds me of, did you guys have magnetic toys?
Like things that would, magnets that would be embedded in little sort of plastic pillars and they would connect together?
My daughter's obsessed with them.
That's got to be some of what's going on, right?
Is that, is that you, you, you play with magnets and the magnets are cool.
Magnets are magical.
I mean, there's a, there's that insane clown posse song, right?
That has that line, magnets, how the fuck do they work?
Right?
About the mysteries of the universe that only God can explain.
Magnets are used in research to induce out of body experiences.
Yes.
So what's fascinating is people will use magnets and think it might help nerve function and cell growth and blood flow, which it hasn't been proven for, but tell them that dualism can be induced in a laboratory by the same, you know, the same substance.
Technology.
Technology, thank you.
Then they would deny that.
They can stimulate very specific regions of the brain, Matthew, with transcranial magnetic impulses and induce all sorts of interesting altered states.
Is that because of, what, iron deposits in your head or something?
Well, I mean, you know, they use functional magnetic resonance imaging works on the fact that there is iron in your blood.
And so blood flowing to different regions of the brain indicates different types of activity or lack of activity.
But I don't think it's so much that.
I think it's that the fields temporarily either shut down or overstimulate specific areas that will then mess with your perception of reality.
Wow.
This has been repeated dozens of times, Matthew, by the way.
It was first done in Spain, I believe, about almost 14 years ago, and now it's been repeated.
And I actually know at least one person who has been The place doing the research that I found the most interesting is called the Karolinska Institute, which I'm not sure exactly which country they're in.
He said it was one of the most spiritual experiences of his life, and it was purely because of the magnets. - Yeah, the place doing the research that I've found the most interesting is called the Karolinska Institute, which I'm not sure exactly which country they're in.
Sounds maybe Polish, but Karolinska, they have a fascinating YouTube channel.
So anyway, regardless of the trope that complementary and alternative medicine, which I'll refer to as CAM for now on, is the noble underdog being suppressed for corrupt financial reasons, there's obviously plenty of money based on those figures, right, being made on this kind of medicine and its claims, and it's only increasing.
In fact, the lack of evidence for its efficacy doesn't seem to matter at all.
So, we can maybe chalk that particular popular objection off the board, but what about the other one?
Is the lack of evidence itself a kind of evidence for the conspiracy against CAM?
Are there studies being done, or is the Western medicine pharmaceutical cabal using mafia tactics in collusion with corrupt governments to kneecap holistic remedies and modalities?
Well, Let's talk about the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health or the NCCIH.
This is the U.S.
government agency founded in 1991.
Their stated mission, and I'll quote it here, is to define through rigorous scientific investigation the usefulness and safety of CAM interventions and their roles in improving health and health care.
And it turns out They have a large government budget allocated precisely to fund the kind of research that should demonstrate the efficacy and legitimacy of CAM.
Since its inception, the agency has been a site of friction between directors who insisted on implementing rigorous science and the politicians who had lobbied for its creation in the first place, like Senator Tom Harkin, who had become convinced that his allergies were cured by taking bee pollen pills, and Iowa State Rep.
Berkley Bedell, who used cow colostrum to treat his Lyme disease.
These powerful enthusiasts criticized what Harkin called the unbendable rules of randomized clinical trials.
Don't use too much science in your science here.
Saying it's not necessary for the scientific community to understand the process before the American public can benefit from these therapies.
And directors who were sympathetic to this subversion of the science that the agency has actually funded to enact, like Wayne Jonas, who served from 95 to 99 and was himself a proponent of homeopathy, tended to be praised by people like Bedell and Harkin.
Who controlled the purse strings or were actively involved in the agenda there.
Other agency heads like Joseph Jacobs, who resigned in disgust, have joined the chorus of concerned observers from the scientific community in public critique of the agency, calling it an embarrassment to serious scientists that should not get cover from its umbrella organization, the NIH.
Now, between 91 and 2009, the agency's budget grew from twelve million to 122 million a year.
And during that 18-year period, with a total of around $2.5 billion having been spent on research into complementary and alternative medicine, hardly any treatments were proven effective.
It turns out that while ginger capsules may help for chemotherapy nausea, all other herbal remedies, including echinacea, glucosamine, black cohosh, and salt palmetto, which are variously touted as cures for heart flashes, prostate conditions, It turns out that while ginger capsules may help for chemotherapy nausea, all other herbal remedies, including echinacea, glucosamine, black cohosh, and salt palmetto, which are variously touted as cures for hot flashes, prostate conditions, memory, immune function, cancer, and arthritis, all of them failed immune function, cancer, and arthritis, all of them failed when tested to do better than placebo.
The data also showed that acupuncture may help with chemotherapy nausea and some joint pain, but that sham treatments that either used retractable needles that didn't actually penetrate the skin or ignored acupuncture points or meridians altogether worked just as well.
Yoga and meditation might help anxiety, pain, or fatigue, and that's as strong as any of this evidence gets.
As for homeopathy, to their credit, the NCCIH correctly reports on its website that there's little evidence to support it as an effective treatment for any specific Health condition, which says a lot, given that some who formerly worked at the agency have pointed out a pattern of being reluctant to ever say that a treatment had not been shown to work, right?
We still need some more research just to make sure.
And that they routinely actually gave grants to alternative therapy providers themselves to run those testing protocols.
So, the argument that, you know, not enough research is being done and there's no funding seems to be falling apart as well.
In 2012, the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, published criticism that the agency had funded study after study but failed to prove that these therapies are anything more than placebos.
They also pointed out how much money was being spent on scientifically implausible claims.
And I wanted to just list a few of these.
Because they're fascinating.
And we'll go in ascending order here.
So, $250,000 spent to test the effects of energy healers on cholesterol-fed rabbits.
$374,000 to test aromatherapy's effectiveness for wound healing.
Wait, I'm back at the rabbits.
So, wait a minute.
So, the energy healers were doing energy healing on the rabbits that were stuffed full of cholesterol?
Yeah, to see if they could reduce their cholesterol levels.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
406,000 on coffee enemas as a cure for pancreatic cancer.
417,000 on distance healing for HIV patients.
No, that's awful.
Yeah, I mean, you got to wonder how they set that up in terms of the control group, right?
When we prayed for universal peace in my yoga studio, it didn't work.
Didn't work.
Didn't work.
Shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Got to watch the news to find the results.
$2 million spent on using magnets for arthritis, carpal tunnel and migraine headaches.
$22 million on prayer treating diseases and a whopping $110 million spent on a range of methods to reduce diabetes symptoms.
One of which was expressive writing, which we're all fans of, but we don't think it's going to protect us from diabetes.
And the important part here is that in all of these examples, either no positive evidence was found or no results were ever reported.
They have a kind of mulligan, a do-over approach to failed studies, which seems to be business as usual there.
An example, 52 clinical trials on HIV and cancer.
But nonetheless, as we know, CAM has insinuated itself into how doctors are trained as well, with big money donors setting up programs at major medical universities in ways that make it seem to integrate well with actual medical science.
The most extravagant example of this, and I know that Jonathan Jarry is is gonna mention this in your interview, Derek, has been the Susan and Henry Samuele College of Health and Sciences at UC Irvine.
This billionaire co-founder and chairman of Broadcom and his part-time homeopath wife donated $200 million and began construction last year in what is touted as the first truly integrative health sciences complex projected to occupy nine acres dedicated to training, research, and patient care And remember, this is on the campus that houses a medical school.
So it's no wonder that the Overton window has moved so much in the last 30 years.
These therapies and remedies are seen not only by the public, but also by many doctors as natural adjuncts or even holistic alternatives to medical science.
And this perception is only reinforced by homeopathic and herbal remedies being sold in pharmacies, despite performing no better than placebos when tested.
Okay, so Julian, a lot of your presentation data is US-based.
Do we have a sense of the sign of growth or the slackening of CAM economies in other countries?
I wasn't finding a lot of segmented data like that.
The best I could find is that around 6 million Americans spent over $3 billion on homeopathy a year, and this is going back a few years now, which meant that it left around one point 1 to 2 billion spent by the rest of the world in that period.
Homeopathy is incredibly popular in the EU, which generally has socialized medicine and almost 30% of people there use it, but it tends to go back and forth in terms of whether or not it's included in socialized medicine allowances.
The Lancet says that 10% of people in India rely solely on homeopathy.
And the market there is growing by 25% per year, so the PR seems to be working everywhere.
Yeah, I mean, my first question about this stuff, because I'm going to change direction a little bit, is why wouldn't it proliferate as just sort of raw capitalistic competition continues to fragment the possibility of universal healthcare in places like the States?
You know, we talk a lot about the problems of distrust in evidence-based care, but you know, how much of that is just a purely economic issue?
You know, on Twitter this week I was reading about people and their terrible medical bills and somebody was reporting getting a bill for 900 bucks because they waited in the ER waiting room for two hours and then they left without treatment.
Like, I don't even know if they were touched.
I mean, maybe they did the triage with a...
Yeah, maybe they did a triage with a nurse and got BP taken or something like that, but they were charged 900 bucks.
Anyway, so if everything is for a fee, why wouldn't the poorer person go to the kinder practitioner?
I mean, maybe not Edgar, who's going to grill you for three hours, but somebody who sits with you and gives you a holistic feeling of being seen.
Well, I think that argument makes sense up to a point.
In my experience of most human beings, if you have something that's severe enough that you need to go to the emergency room, you typically go to the emergency room.
You don't go and see your local homeopath or chiropractor, right?
So it's a great leveler, like that level of discomfort and fear kind of tends to make everyone go, okay, let's go somewhere where they actually can help me.
I agree that the health insurance model in the US is broken, but my sense is that the lion's share of the CAM market here is driven by people with disposable income.
And part of that is that they can pay out of pocket.
For products and services that are usually quite expensive and not covered by insurance.
I would say that in the West, complementary and alternative medicine is not so much the medicine of the proletariat.
It's bourgeois as fuck.
It's the goop folks who are really supporting that whole industry.
Yeah, I'm wondering about the precariat though, because I know a lot of US yoga teachers who are buying, they're selling, they're practicing chem.
As primary healthcare because it's actually cheaper than entry-level insurance.
Well, there's an important distinction here, right?
And I'm sure everyone's familiar with this.
Some people use it as a kind of, you know, a proverbial sort of statement about the difference between quote-unquote Western and Chinese medicine.
They'll say, when you go to the Western doctor, you pay them, you're sick, and you pay them to make you well.
But when you go to the Chinese doctor, They keep you well and you don't pay them if you end up getting sick, right?
So the whole idea of wellness is typically that you're doing something to keep up leveling your level of wellness, your immune response, your overall balance, right?
So I don't know that You know, these yoga teachers that you're talking about, they're not actually providing alternative healthcare for when people really need help.
They're selling the idea that if you do this cleanse and if you use this essential oil and if you, you know, whatever the different things might be, if you take this supplement, then you won't get sick because it will keep you healthy.
And I think that's, it's almost like a different lane, actually.
I don't know that it's necessarily related to people not being able to afford healthcare.
Well, I mean the other part is that in your story we've got this billionaire who is living in an environment in which healthcare is a consumer item and it's sort of a la carte, there's a buffet.
And why wouldn't he be sort of encouraged to expand that range of consumer items?
It's probably how he makes money.
So he gives a $200 million donation to UC Irvine, and it buys two things, I imagine, which is one, the validation of the billionaire's sort of fantasy of self-actualization, but then also this feeling that they're filling in the gap in a broken system instead of fixing it, right?
Yeah, no, I absolutely agree.
I mean, I think it's a complicated thing to untangle, right?
Because on the one hand, it seems clear to me that this is a bit of a vanity project for his wife that he's supporting.
And he's made public statements to the effect that he didn't really used to buy into this kind of stuff, but his wife has helped him to see how important it is.
And he's had some success, maybe with his allergies or something.
And so now anytime he has any kind of malady, he goes to his wife and she helps him.
And she has herself become a practicing homeopath to whatever extent she's doing that.
It's probably just a part-time gig.
So I feel that there's a sincerity there.
I feel that there's a sincerity there.
This is my speculation.
This is my speculation.
That's probably driving why they're doing it.
That's probably driving why they're doing it.
And they do believe there's a gap in the system.
And they do believe there's a gap in the system.
And they probably do believe that all manner of homeopathic and alternative providers and people who make remedies deserve to be paid well and make a living.
And they do want to support that.
And I don't see any evidence that they're necessarily seeking to themselves profit financially from expanding the market and the a la carte kind of options, as you suggest.
But it's all in there in some kind of relationship, right?
Well, and all of the concentration draws the attention away from basic questions of public health and vaccine access.
And, you know, that's $200 million going to medical professionals at UC Irvine that could be doing something else with that money.
Absolutely.
But I tend to fall on the side that says, well, they probably don't think vaccines are as crucial of an aspect of public health as we do.
They probably think, well, if everyone was just, you know, had access to these other remedies, that would be better for the larger population.
Well, here's where I want to go with this because, you know, you have both, and I've done it to a certain extent, to close the door on homeopathy as a practice in terms of its theoretical absurdity and its complete, you know, sort of clinical failure.
You know, and in this great interview that you did with Jonathan Jarry Derrick, we're going to hear him say things like, homeopathy just doesn't work.
It can't work.
It can't work because the mechanism is nonsensical.
It can't work because there's no evidence that says that it works.
And, you know, he's right.
He's an expert at what he does.
And also there's this, to me there's a troubling finality to that kind of argument, not because it's not factual, but because I don't think it's going to speak to a significant chunk of the population that we actually want to communicate with.
So anyway, I feel this door is closed, the evidentiary door is closed, it's almost like You know, the door of science can close shut on a particular pathway of understanding the world, and on the other side of that door is a bunch of people who just are gonna not be seen anymore.
So I would like to find some windows here, because I think that our arguments can start to sound like one of two options, which is, you know, you're telling the homeopathy consumer, hey, you should really just surrender to the evidence.
Right?
Which is what it would feel like.
It would feel like, okay, I guess I believed something that couldn't possibly work.
And that might take, you know, some emotional bandwidth.
It might take some effort.
But then, you know, especially when you get into arguments around, you know, is The Overton window around CAM being expanded or moved, Julian, you know, in terms of what's becoming more acceptable to medical professionals.
There's also this sense that I'm getting from our argument that, oh, it looks like people are getting stupider.
Yeah, I don't think so at all.
I think that there's a very effective PR campaign that's very deliberate, that over time has changed language and changed strategy and sought to make inroads in a way that seems to legitimize something alongside something that has no evidence to support it.
Or that whenever it is tested, it turns out not to live up to its claims alongside real science-based medicine.
That is a cultural phenomenon that's going on.
But we can look at other cultures.
For example, you can look at most of the Scandinavian countries where between 1 and 2% of people use homeopathy, for example.
Where you've just had, there's a difference between being stupid and just being misinformed.
And we have a misinformed populace.
We have a very low level of scientific education in the States.
And there are other countries where that's not the case.
And as a result, people look at something like homeopathy and they can correctly parse it out and go, yeah, actually that doesn't, that violates the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.
It probably doesn't work.
Is it final?
Well, no, nothing is final, but it's highly, highly, highly unlikely to be true.
I just have a hard time, given the feedback that we got in previewing this episode on socials, any of the people who are really fans of homeopathy listening to this episode not feeling like they're on the other side of that door.
But it's really hard, I mean, do we have to approach every question that people, I mean, just as a general sort of rule about how we navigate things as human beings, do we have to approach every belief, every untrue belief that someone might have In a way that, that is never going to make them feel like they're being told, you know what, that's actually just not true because that might hurt their feelings or make them dig their heels in deeper.
I mean, I think we, the progress we've made from the time when, when people, when witches were being dunked in the water, you know, and, and, and drowned in a, in a heads you tail, heads, heads you lose, tails I win kind of thing, or whatever the different, Practices that have gone on, bloodletting, etc.
We've moved forward because we've just come to a point collectively where we've said, actually, it turns out that's not true.
And I think that there are other, there are needs that those untrue perspectives might fill, but those needs can be understood on their own terms and met in other ways without enabling falsehoods that are potentially quite dangerous.
Well, let me talk about those needs in terms of magic in an empathetic way, let's say.
And I'll start with a little bit of a critique in this quote that I found from Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court Justice.
This is from his medical essays.
I guess he was a doctor, too?
Anyway, he says, some of you will probably be more or less troubled by that parody.
of medieval theology which finds its dogma in the doctrine of homeopathy, its miracle of transubstantiation in the mystery of its dilutions, its church and the people who have mistaken their century, and its priests and those who have mistaken their calling.
As I was going through the literature and preparing for this, I think what really struck home for me was that homeopathy seems to be an ideal type of medical intervention for the highly sensitive person who feels alienated from the I think what really struck home for me was that homeopathy seems person who feels alienated from the clinical world.
And I'm thinking specifically about parents here who are, you know, extremely vigilant about their children's well-being and who are like really protective in all areas of life.
You know, I'm thinking of the parent who is constantly on the lookout for a viral or bacterial infection, although that's maybe not how they would frame the actual illnesses or understand them, given that they're laypeople.
But hold on, when you say an ideal type of medical intervention, I think what you mean to say is the type of quote-unquote medical intervention that they would be vulnerable to or that would appeal to them, even though it's not actually a medical intervention.
No, no, I think it's actually, well, okay, so take out the word medical.
I think it's an ideal type of way in which they might be able to perform the role of healer in their own homes.
If within your definition of ideal you include probably won't work, Then maybe.
Well, yes, but that's based upon their belief state at the time of applying it, right?
Yeah, so you're saying to them it would seem ideal.
Yeah, yeah, right.
You know, I was thinking about this fellow parent who I don't really know very well Who turned to me in the schoolyard one day and said, my child is going on a plane to visit their grandparents in Alberta tomorrow and they're flying on an Air Canada plane.
It's got a big, you know, red maple leaf on the back.
And so you can visualize it, right?
And I said, yeah.
And you know, this, this kid is nine years old or so.
And they said, can you do me a big favor?
And I said, yeah, what do you have in mind?
And this person was a little bit shy to say, but she said, the plane takes off at 9.30.
Can you visualize it?
Can you visualize my kids sitting in the plane?
And when it's about to take off, can you just surround it with a halo of protective light?
That would make me feel better.
And I said, sure, I can do that.
And she said, you know, I know it's kind of silly, but I just feel that it makes a difference.
And I don't know, it reminded me of this because I think there's a lot of parents who have rituals.
I mean, I've spoken about this a little bit in a previous bonus episode where, you know, I talk about my own religious attitudes towards science, but I think parenting adds this whole other level of Ritual action that involves safety and wellness and so on.
And what I loved about this story was that this person actually admitted to me that she thought it was kind of silly, that it wasn't going to work, but that that was not enough to inhibit her from asking me for this kind of vulnerable favor.
This is not somebody who knew me very well, certainly not somebody who had heard this podcast, or she wouldn't have known, you know, which way I track, but You know, so now I'm a little bit exposed and that makes me a little bit sad because I doubt that anyone who hears this podcast will entrust me with a request like that.
And standing in the schoolyard, that's like a meaningful conversation.
And so my point is that I think with homeopathy we have something similarly innocuous but also powerful.
And setting aside the stuff around, like, will it delay people's treatment?
Will people think that it cures cancer?
I'm thinking more about the fact that as a parent you can stand at the rack of bottles at Whole Foods and you can go through this complex ritual of safety providing and look at all of the racks and racks and, you know, Pick out the tiny, hundreds of tiny little bottles with these Latinate names, you know, and, and, you know, they sound like Harry Potter.
I mean, just like when we're reading Harry Potter, I think that the parents standing in front of those bottles also know that these little white pills are fantastical.
There's a part of them that has to know that.
And so, because I haven't met anybody, I haven't met anybody who says, who doesn't say, well, it's just, they're just, they're mainly sugar, right?
I don't know how it works.
This is a sort of a folk knowledge and conversation.
And so I think it's a way for them to engage in this process of doctoring with very low stakes, but very high intentionality and emotional commitment.
And you know, and parents will say, You know, it can't hurt.
And so, you know, I think it allows a kind of ritual environment that feels more trustworthy, certainly than walking into the ER.
Of course, when push comes to shove, they're going to do that.
Or going to the pediatrician, who might be speaking in a specialized language that they don't have access to.
But you know, it's like this perfect system where you can go and you can look up the symptoms, you can match the symptoms with the medication, it's open access.
And so there's this magical quality to parenting which is also reflective of the magical imagination of childhood.
And so I don't think we're going to get past this unless we crack this sort of mysterious nut of How is it magically important to people?
I like what you're saying for several reasons.
I think that it's very kind and it's very empathic.
There's a sweetness to it.
There's a tolerance to it.
There are several things you said around it maybe being innocuous yet powerful, that people who are using it don't really believe that it's going to do something, that it's a kind of a role-playing game.
Some of it, it's interesting, there's a split between how people think about this.
Some people think it's more condescending to tell people that they're wrong and they're being childish, and other people think it's more condescending to say, oh they don't know any better so we shouldn't interrupt their fantasies.
I'm not talking about interrupting their fantasies so much as trying to understand what is missing from the clinical environment that you are fulfilling by standing in front of the racks of bottles and performing this diagnostic ritual for your child.
Because it's not going away, this is the thing, it's not going away.
But it has gone away in certain cultures that have a different way of thinking about these topics and communicating about them and legislating about them.
So in a way, yeah, it's not going away in our particularly privileged culture where lay people like to pretend that they know something about medicine because this alternative
I think it's actually healthier for them to feel less empowered and so no actually you should go to the experts and you should look at what the science says and if you don't understand it you should talk to someone who does rather than thinking you can just stand in Whole Foods and you know decide for yourself which of these magical sounding remedies you're going to give to your kid for their ear infection until it gets bad enough that you actually take them to a real doctor.
I have to say, I had a child, my wife had a child, I was involved in the birth of my child about three and a half years ago.
I was just in the emergency room and then in the hospital with my wife who got a diagnosis for multiple sclerosis in the last 10 days.
Prior to that, we were in and out of the hospital with my daughter.
She spent three nights there.
We had 10 days of back and forth to the ER with terrible fevers.
She had a complex pneumonia that it took them about six days to figure out exactly what was going on.
Her stomach was bloated.
It's been a terrible experience.
Every single one of these interactions with the medical establishment that I've had in the last several years has been incredible.
I feel like there's this really unfair caricature of what doctors are like.
The doctors have been empathic, they've been kind, they've been respectful, they've been great communicators.
All of the nurses have been incredible.
Every single procedure we've gone through, they've explained it to us carefully.
There's been a sense of back and forth and consent and asking what would make us more comfortable and navigating through that process together.
I have very similar experiences, by the way, in the births of our two children and some other instances that I've had, but we can't ignore that our mentions, our social media feeds, our social circles are filled with stories of medical trauma where people say repeatedly, I've had exactly the opposite experience to the experience that Julian and Matthew are describing.
I don't know that that's going to bridge any gaps, right?
Sharing good stories is good.
I don't think that enabling magical thinking is the solution for aspects of the medical system or people within the medical system that are not skillful or have maybe been bad at their jobs or bad at communicating.
I mean, last thing that I would say is that Derek brought up the report about the French hospital giving homeopathy to chemo patients, and I don't know what prognosis that takes place under, but it made me think about that threshold of terminal illness where medicine gives way to
A kind of different thing like magic or ritual or things that cannot be measured because at a certain point in terminal treatment, the evidence-based practitioner has to say there's nothing more we know how to do and at that point, calls are made to hospice care, the protocols change, in come the harps, the aromatherapies, whatever lifts the person up.
Sure.
Right?
And so, I feel like That just proves that within the paradigm, the clinical paradigm, there at the margins, there is going to be the need and the presence for something beyond evidence-based care that people are aware of and reach for.
And so, I don't know, maybe I can round up by saying it feels like I've got Three ways of looking at CAM now, which is, geez, it's crap that it's taking up space and money in relation to evidence-based care and drawing attention and cash away from public health.
That's a problem.
Also, wow, it's plugging the economic and psychosocial gaps in predatory medicine.
And also, it's probably always going to be with us, so long as it addresses existential questions beyond the scope of evidence-based practice.
You bring up an important point I'll conclude with, Matthew, which is it is going to be with us.
Magical thinking is part of our DNA, really.
And to try to get it across, there are so many different ways, Julian, you brought up.
There are different ways of seeming to be A little bit derogatory toward people and they're going to take it differently.
I can say the same thing to different people and they're going to read it completely differently depending on their experiences.
So this is no easy task.
It reminds me of a quote that pediatrics professor Paul Offit That's the closing door.
there's no such thing as conventional or alternative or complementary or integrative or holistic medicine.
There's only medicine that works and medicine that does not.
That's the closing door.
Oh my gosh.
But we can expand medicine to a lot of different things and maybe we should do an episode on I know we've talked about that because I think Jerry gives the best definition of placebo I think I've heard.
Yeah, me too.
And the reality is our body's most effective therapeutic agent Is our body itself?
Eula Biss writes beautifully about that fact and her father who is a physician.
And these are the biological processes that we've evolved over millions of years of trial and error.
So in reality, if you're spending $15 for a bottle of Sambucus at Whole Foods, you're probably just wasting $15.
And if the placebo response kicks in and you feel better after taking it, then it might be worth it.
But if you're using homeopathy to treat cancers, as I talked with Jonathan about, there's a real problem.
And I just hope that in these conversations, whether people agree to us, with us or not, in their relationships to medicine and healing, I just hope it doesn't get to that point where they have to really be harmed or lose someone because they've taken these remedies that don't work.
And then they only find out when it's too late.
Jonathan Jarry is a science communicator with the McGill Office for Science and Society.
He dedicates his time and work to separating sense from nonsense in terms of science communication.
He comes from a background of cancer research, human genetics, rehabilitation research, and forsenic biology.
He used to create, write, and host the YouTube show Crack Science.
I've included one of the episodes on homeopathy, in fact, in the show notes, and I highly recommend checking it out.
When I started Conspiratoriality with Matthew and Julian, I found Jonathan's work shortly thereafter.
I loved his Crack Science column.
This episode on YouTube really shows what we talk about in terms of what homeopathy actually is in the dilution process.
He's been featured in the BBC, CBC, Wired, Global TV, all over the place.
He talks to the press often, and I'm really happy he took some time out to talk to Conspirituality about a few aspects of homeopathy recently.
We've already talked about it a bunch, but he brings real clarity to science communication.
I also recommend following him on Twitter, at Crack Science.
I read all of the articles that he writes and puts out about the broader science world and the misinformation and disinformation out there.
What a day to talk to you.
I don't know how closely you're following this Aaron Rodgers ordeal.
I actually, I had to look it up earlier today because I know I was, I knew there was going to be a question about this and I don't follow sports at all.
Um, so I, I read about this.
I was like, Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Figures.
Yeah.
He just did a 45-minute segment on this sports podcast.
I am not a sports follower either.
It actually is broken down.
Someone on Twitter, Computer Cowboy, that I retweeted shared the entire play-by-play, and I just watched it before talking to you.
You don't have a ton of reference with this, but let's just start here.
Someone tells you that they're immunized from COVID-19 because they've taken a homeopathic remedy.
What is your response?
So, I mean, my response internally is to think, no, you're not immunized.
But what I will ask the person is, what exactly did you take?
Because the word homeopathic is often misunderstood.
I think a lot of people believe that it just means natural stuff.
So they will equate natural health products with homeopathy and vice versa.
But homeopathy is a very, very specific system of beliefs with very clear and nonsensical principles behind it.
So I would be curious to know what it is that they took and then I could explain to them why that did not give them immunity against the coronavirus.
Before the interview runs in the episode, we'll be doing a history of homeopathy.
I actually find Samuel Hahnemann somewhat endearing, but also a bit off.
Yeah, there are good things about him and there are some really diluted stuff in there.
Yes, I want to go a little in the history, but the first thing to mind was when I realized I wanted to talk to you for this episode, I found some of your writings, but I also found your 2014 video about homeopathy, and I hope your friend has recovered from his alcohol poisoning.
Yes, he has, and we're still friends.
Okay, wonderful.
He's fine now.
But one thing that's interesting about homeopathy is it became hugely popular in Europe and America, and then in the 1950s, it almost completely disappeared.
And then in the late 60s, it came back with a vengeance.
And why do you think it's grown in popularity since that point in the late 1960s?
That's a good question that I don't have an answer to.
You know, I do have to wonder, I don't know, I have to wonder if it is in response to the growth of the pharmaceutical industry, if this is seen as sort of a a rebellious pushback against it, if it's just better marketing by the companies that are making these remedies and by the homeopaths themselves.
I don't know.
I don't really know.
Well, there was an inflection point, and this was part of the research for my last book, so I'm a little more aware of the specifics of that.
Well, there was an inflection point, and this was part of the research for my last book, so I'm a little more aware of the specifics of that.
In terms of in the 1950s, you had this surge of tranquilizers that Americans were taking, and it was in the mid to late 60s that they found out how damaging tranquilizers were, which eventually led to the creation of antidepressants, which has its own problems.
So let me reframe that question then.
Why do you think homeopathy is so popular now, and it persists despite being completely unproven?
I can't even call it medicine, really.
No, no, I mean, that's why I say remedies, I say products, because yeah, it is not medicine.
I think there are two reasons why it remains popular.
I mean, the first one is the people who understand what it is, I think they respond to it because they see it as something that is effective and 100% safe.
Because that's how it's been sold to them.
And they may have a lot of skepticism toward the pharmaceutical industry, which I share to a certain extent, but certainly not to their extent.
And then there are the people who are buying these products and they're being deceived because they don't know what homeopathy is.
They just think that because they are being sold in pharmacies and they're often being sold next to actual pharmaceuticals, that they clearly must work.
Otherwise they wouldn't be there.
They wouldn't have the approval of the regulatory agencies to be there.
And when you tell them what homeopathy actually is, they feel deceived.
They feel cheated.
So I think there are two main reasons why people gravitate toward these products.
Matthew preempted this episode on Instagram this morning, and as expected, we've gotten some pushback from homeopathic practitioners or people who have experienced what they consider some success with these remedies.
They invoke the placebo effect, which I am personally fascinated by.
How do you feel about someone who takes homeopathic products and believes it's doing something and then will say, I don't care if it's the placebo response?
The placebo response, the invocation of the placebo response is very interesting in this context because what placebo typically means in biomedical research is the idea of removing non-specific effects to see if the intervention that you are studying has a direct effect.
on the condition that is being studied.
So these are things like wanting to please the investigator, like regression to the mean, of having symptoms that go back to their mean value because they were at their extreme value, of self-limiting illnesses, of using different kinds of treatments, interventions, all those kinds of things that have nothing to do with the intervention itself, but that happen naturally.
And so you want to get rid of those, That's why you have a placebo group to take those into account, and then you can subtract that from the intervention group to see if at the end of this subtraction you are left with an actual specific effect.
And because when we test interventions like homeopathy, for example, in rigorous studies, there is no difference between the placebo group and the group that got the homeopathy.
And this is true also for other kind of alternative healing modalities.
What has happened is that they have jumped on this and they have sort of changed the definition of the placebo effect by saying, well, the reason that it works is through the placebo effect.
See, there's a placebo effect there.
You see it, it's in the placebo group.
And that's what, that's the thing.
Homeopathy works through the placebo effect.
But this idea of the mind influencing the body and sort of healing the body through the strength of belief is not something that I have seen being well justified scientifically.
It seems to me from what I've read that the placebo effects are mostly everything else and there's not a lot of that You know, mind influencing the body left at the end of this definition.
And the problem with believing that or simply saying to yourself, well, you know, it works with a placebo effect, I'm happy with that, is that there are real harms that can be caused by resorting to homeopathy.
You may end up delaying real treatment.
And if your condition is something that can worsen and that can be treated medically, then you're delaying an actual treatment and your condition can worsen.
There's also the financial aspect, right?
So if you care about consumer advocacy, consumer protection, these remedies, these products, they're not free, they cost money.
And if you go and see a homeopath, that is again, money out of your pocket for something that does not work.
There's the broader philosophical argument that believing nonsense is harmful.
You want, you know, there is value in knowing things that are true and understanding how the world around us functions.
And the thing about homeopathy is that, you know, and hopefully we'll get into what it actually is, you might think that it's always safe because there's really nothing in there.
But that's not necessarily the case.
So, for example, there was an infamous case of teething tablets a few years ago meant for infants that had too much belladonna in them.
They were homeopathic belladonna teething tablets.
So, there shouldn't be any belladonna left in there, but there were.
And belladonna can increase your heart rate, can increase your body temperature, can give you constipation, give you hallucinations.
And so there were some very high levels of belladonna in those products because the manufacturing standards of homeopathic products are not at the same level as those for pharmaceutical drugs.
In fact, there was a letter by the FDA A few years ago there was following inspections of a manufacturing plant for homeopathy in England that stated that one out of every six bottles was not receiving the dose of quote-unquote active homeopathic drug solution because the whole assembly was wobbling during the filling so the ingredients were dripping down the outside of the vial.
So they were literally getting nothing one out of every six bottles there.
So that's the issue.
And then what you brought up earlier, the thing about immunization through homeopathy, there are things called homeopathic vaccines, they're called nosodes, and they're made from excretions, from excreta and all kinds of bodily fluids of infected people.
So somebody with measles, for example, you would get some of their excreta and then you would dilute it.
And that would be a homeopathic vaccine.
They do not work.
They do not immunize you.
And that's potential harm there.
You think you're immunized against a very serious infection and you're not.
And then the last bit of harm that I can think of is this belief in grand conspiracy theories, because a lot of people, unfortunately, in the alternative health sphere, they do embrace these large conspiracy theories of big pharma.
Every scientist who works for the pharmaceutical industry is in the pocket of big pharma, and they're hiding the truth about natural cancer cures, et cetera, et cetera.
So by being part of this community, you can start to feel the pull of believing into these grand conspiracy theories that are just not true.
I've heard this often with both homeopathy and acupuncture.
They'll say that Western medical research does not have the tools to understand how these interventions work.
Well, I mean, we do.
You know, the claims that are being made for homeopathy are absolutely testable within a Western scientific framework, right?
So if you claim that your particular remedy, for example, will help with insomnia, that is a testable claim.
You can try it.
You can give a placebo, so you can give a different kind of sugar pill to some of your participants at random and the other half gets the homeopathic insomnia remedy and then you can put them in a sleep clinic and test and measure exactly when they fall asleep and you can so you can give a different kind of sugar pill to some of your participants at random and the I mean, there was a, I have to mention the 1023 campaign, which started in England.
They did it two years in a row where they did a public quote unquote overdose of homeopathic sleeping pills.
And it's reassuring to know that nobody died because you can't overdose on homeopathic sleeping tablets because there's nothing in them.
Say you come across someone, and I'm sure you have, you preempted it, that says, well, this homeopathic remedy worked for me, and it's someone who conflates natural and homeopathy, as you mentioned.
Give me your explanation to that person who doesn't actually realize what homeopathy is.
Right, so when we say it worked for me, what can often happen is that you're conflating correlation and causation.
And something funny happened a few weeks ago.
I'm regularly on the news here in Montreal.
And I was chatting with the anchor during the break and I was having this recurrent cough and she was saying, so how's the cough going?
And I said, well, you know, I'm on this new medication and the cough has gone down in frequency.
So, you know, it's possible that the drug is helping, but I don't know for sure.
And she started to laugh and she was like, well, only you would phrase it in that way.
And I was like, well, you know, Because I don't know what the natural history of this particular bit of cough would have been had I not taken this drug.
So I'm very careful in saying, you know, there's a correlation there.
It may be causative.
There's a reason to think that it's causative, but I don't know for sure.
That's why we do the big clinical trials, not for the fun of it and to just spend millions of dollars, but because one person's, you know, own experience with something is, it's full of variables that you're not controlling for.
And so, Somebody says, you know, I had the flu and then I took this bit of Osteococcinum, which is a homeopathic remedy against flu-like symptoms, and I started to feel better.
The flu went away.
Therefore, Osteococcinum worked for me.
You know, if they were interested, of course, I'm not gonna impose this on someone, but if they were interested, I would say, well, you know, the flu doesn't last forever, right?
It's a self-limiting illness for the most part.
I mean, it does kill some people every year.
But for the most part, your immune system kicks in, gets rid of the virus, and then your symptoms go away, and then you're fine.
So whatever you do, the flu is going to go away.
There's an old saying that an untreated flu lasts seven days, but with the right medication it lasts a week.
That's the thing about self-limiting illnesses, there's not much that you can do about them, but if your flu symptoms get to be at their worst, you will reach out for whatever you can find, and that may be osteococcin, and you start taking it, and then of course you start to feel better because your symptoms can only get better.
After they have been literally statistically at their worst.
So that's one of those placebo effects.
It's self-limiting illnesses, it's regression to the mean.
Sometimes it's just a psychological investment that if you start to see a particular alternative health practitioner, you want it to work and you've invested money in this relationship, you want that to work.
And so there's a bit of self-delusion at play sometimes when the intervention itself doesn't work.
You want it to work so much that you convince yourself that it is working.
There might be a memory bias at play, right?
So you remember the days when you felt better, you forget the days when you felt the same or you felt worse, and so you're building this idea in your head that is biased toward the intervention working, whereas if you were keeping a daily diary for example and you were rating your symptoms on a scale, you might realize that actually you have had as many improved days before the intervention as you've had after.
So all of those things can contribute to making you think that an intervention like homeopathy worked when it actually didn't. - You bring up ocelococcinum, I'll be using that in the episode to explain homeopathy because I'm kind of fascinated with this ethical question and I'll pose it to you and see if you have any thoughts on it.
If you're a vegetarian or vegan who is anti-pharmaceuticals and you use homeopathic remedies and you are a big fan of oselococcinum, Well, you can argue that there actually isn't any animal product in it, but there had to be suffering along the way to produce it.
Have you come across this?
How do you square that?
You squared this by no longer using homeopathy.
That's how I would square it.
But you do raise a good point.
So, what is Osteococcidum?
So, if you read the Latin, it's called Anus Barbariae Hepatis Cordis Extractum 200 C. And when the Center for Inquiry in the United States did a survey of about 1,000 Americans, on the topic of homeopathy, something like 1% of them were able to identify what that meant.
And the majority of respondents were like, I have no idea what you just said to me.
So it is indeed, it's an extract of Muscovy duck liver and heart.
It's been diluted one in a hundred times, 200 times in a row.
And there was an article many years ago, I forget if it was, I think it might've been Forbes, where they focused on that one duck that gets sacrificed every year to make enough osteococcinum for the entire flu season.
And I think it was called the $200,000 duck, or however, I mean, it's more than that, it's 2 million.
However much money they make off of osteococcinum, that's how much this duck was worth.
So you're right in that there is no molecule of the duck left in the final product.
It is a scientific impossibility.
But there is a duck that is sacrificed every year so that its liver and heart can be harvested.
Is that vegan?
I guess not.
There are worse vegan infractions, I guess.
But the bottom line is that it doesn't work and it cannot work.
So if you're a vegan, you can just leave the osteococcinum aside and you will feel exactly the same way.
You're severely undervaluing that duck.
That duck is worth $20 million in America alone.
$20 million, wow!
Just in American sales, and it is the number one homeopathic medicine in France.
So I don't even know what the sales are there.
I mean, you're probably talking about a $100 million duck.
I don't think the duck knows how much it's worth, though, because it would be surrounded by lawyers and there would be some good discussions with the homeopathic industry as to how much money its family should be getting in the process.
You I'll share the video I referenced earlier in the show notes for listeners because you actually line up 200 cups around the pool when you when you're actually showing I love that video for so many reasons but there's something else you say in that video which really struck me and because
I've gotten into arguments with homeopathic practitioners before where they are anti-vax and I say, well, Samuel Hahnemann was so happy when vaccination science was proven because he thought that it proved his system as well.
And then the responses usually end at that point.
Now, but you also point out something important because there is this idea of like cures like that seems to cross over, but vaccines are preemptive and homeopathy, I guess sometimes like the immunization thing with Aaron Rodgers, it seems like it's preemptive, but it's not.
But can you explain the difference between vaccines and what homeopathy is?
Yeah, I mean you bring up a good or rather a frequent argument that yeah, it works just like a vaccine, but it doesn't.
So a vaccine gives you an actual bit of the microorganism that causes the disease or the whole microorganism that's been inactivated in order to trigger an immune response and an immunological memory of this quote-unquote attack.
without giving you the actual disease.
Now, homeopathy gives you an ingredient that does not cause the disease, that is often not related to the disease, and often the ingredient isn't even in there.
So there is no immune response that is triggered because these are They're just sugar pills.
So, you know, on a very, very superficial levels, because of the dilutions that are involved in homeopathy, it may look as if it is a type of immunization, but it really isn't.
It does not function in that way at all because there's nothing in there and the ingredient that was chosen is in there because it was triggering, you know, the symptoms of the disease in somebody who was healthy and thus, by this weird logic, it will cure the disease in people who have it.
So it's not like a vaccine at all.
A few months ago, a homeopathic practitioner, or doctor, in California, her name is Julie Mazzi, she allegedly sold unproven vials of pellets for $243.
Her claim was that it provided lifelong immunity to COVID-19.
When asked, she said she didn't know exactly how it was made, but that there was a very minute amount of COVID-19 in it, and she said it worked Better than vaccines because vaccines contain toxic ingredients.
How do you counter this idea that vaccines are toxic but homeopathy is benign or only good?
Yeah, so this is the old claim that, for example, the adjuvants that are used in vaccines are toxic because sometimes there's aluminum in there.
There was the whole thing about thimerosal, which is a mercury compound.
And what these people often don't understand or sometimes don't want to understand is that it's the dose that makes the poison.
We regularly consume things that if you knew they were in our fruits and vegetables naturally, you would think twice about biting into an apple, right?
But it's because the dose is so small.
The thing about homeopathy is that, yeah, it just...
I mean, the claim that there was coronavirus in there, in those homeopathic tablets, and who knows if that's even true, but you don't work with the coronavirus outside of a lab of a certain safety level, and I'm sure that that's not what she was doing.
But if you believe in homeopathy, I mean, one of the foundational principles of homeopathy is that the more you dilute a substance, the more you get rid of its harmful effects.
while retaining the vitalistic essence of the ingredient.
So by that logic, which is not true, you know, you would take the coronavirus, you would dilute it so much that you would think that its harmful effects are now completely gone, but somehow you've kept the vitalistic essence of it, which is not a scientific concept, of course, but that's how homeopaths think.
You wrote two articles in 2019 about the problem in Canada with naturopaths and homeopaths influencing pharmacists.
And I'm wondering, and you went to a series of different pharmacies and asked people, you know, questions about whether to take our old friend Asalok...
I always have trouble.
Oscillococcinum.
Thank you, thank you.
Sometimes I get it right.
But have you followed up on that story?
Is there still homeopathic medicine being sold in pharmacies in Canada?
So what I was curious to know was how many pharmacies in my neck of the woods was selling oscillococcinum, which is a particularly egregious form of homeopathy, because again, it's 200 C.
So it's one in 100 dilution done 200 times in a row based off of some duck liver and heart.
And it's a particularly nonsensical example.
And so I basically got a list of as many pharmacies as I could find on the island of Montreal.
I randomized them, making sure they were representative of all three main parts of the island and that I had enough of each of the main, the big chains in there.
And I proceeded to call them to ask them if they had oslocoxinim.
So it is possible that some of them said no simply because, I mean, I had to spell this out a number of times.
It's possible that they just couldn't find it.
And so it's possible that there's more than what I found.
But the take home message was that about two thirds of pharmacies in Montreal were selling oslocoxinim.
And what was great is that a journalist at La Presse, which is one of the biggest French-language newspapers in Quebec, went further after he heard about this.
And so he went to 20 pharmacies, telling them that his child had the symptoms of the flu and asking the pharmacist, should I give my child osocoxinim?
And what he found and what he reported on, and this was front page news, is that about a third of pharmacists said no, that it will not work.
A third said, maybe some people believe in it, some people don't, I don't know what to tell you.
And then a third said, yes, this should work.
And what was very interesting is that he then, as part of his reporting, he questioned all of the cogs in that system because the problem is that nobody wants to take responsibility for this.
The pharmacists will say, well, I'm only in control of what's behind the prescription counter, the rest is a store, and so it's the banner, really, it's the whole store that decides what gets put on shelves.
Those stores and their owners will say, well, Health Canada, which is our regulatory agency for health products, here in Canada, they approve these products.
So who are we to disagree?
And Health Canada will say, well, you know, it's up to pharmacists to use their expert judgment and guide consumers toward the right choice.
So nobody wants to take responsibility for this.
But as part of this piece for La Presse, the order of pharmacists of Quebec who were confronted with this had to basically send a letter to all of their pharmacists all over the province and say, you are not allowed to endorse homeopathy.
You are pharmacists.
This is not science-based.
If you are caught endorsing homeopathy, there will be potential sanctions.
So there was that.
And then the other thing was that there's a small organization called the ABCPQ, which is an association of pharmacy chains in Quebec.
So we have things like Shoppers Drugs Mark and Uniprix and a bunch of different pharmacies that have a lot of stores all over Quebec.
And so that association decided to, and this is really, I think it's, It's a question of having the right person at the right place, being asked the right question by the right journalist.
They decided that they had to do something about this.
And so they voluntarily made signs that they mailed to every pharmacy in Quebec.
These signs are optional.
And the sign basically states that there is no scientific evidence behind homeopathy.
If you need more advice on this, please consult with your pharmacist.
And these signs were meant to be posted right next to the homeopathy inside of the stores.
So that was a very interesting victory.
Now again, those signs are optional.
Then the pandemic happened.
That was two years ago.
The pandemic happened.
And at my own pharmacy, the sign went away at some point and I was very worried that those signs had just, you know, just been trashed or maybe some homeopathy activists had gone in and removed them all.
I don't know.
And what I can say at the moment is that I am working on a bit of a follow-up.
I'm working on this with some interesting people who have a very large platform.
And what I can say is that many of these signs are still there and we'll have to see if we can put an additional bit of pressure to see if more changes can be enacted. - Oh, a teaser, I like it.
You gotta keep me updated. - Sure. - Now, Paul Offit wrote that there is no such thing as alternative medicine.
There's medicine that works, and then there's everything else.
And that's always stuck with me since I read one of his books.
But we see this point where complementary and alternative medicine, known as CAM, has made real inroads in France at an oncology hospital, which is offering homeopathy next to, or post-chemotherapy, potentially to alleviate symptoms.
And you have, in America, Johns Hopkins, which has a whole CAM Center now, which is investigating them, but also offering acupuncture.
I don't know about homeopathy, but they have integrated it into, not curriculum, well, curriculum for students.
Yeah, but for patient care.
But for patient care, exactly.
And we'll stick specifically to homeopathy.
I don't want to bring other modalities into this, but when these institutions are now exploring it and offering it for patient care, do you see this as it being legitimized?
Absolutely.
And this is something that really worries me.
You hinted at this when you said integrated.
Yeah, it's called integrative medicine.
And it is a rebranding of alternative medicine, alternative and complementary medicine.
And the main, the foundational idea there is that, quote unquote, Western medicine is not sufficient.
"Alternative medicine is not sufficient, but when you integrate the two together, you get the best of both worlds." And that is not true because as you pointed out, if the alternative to medicine does not have good evidence behind it, and it has not been actually, you know, naturally integrated into medicine per se, naturally integrated into medicine per se, then why are you offering it?
And the answer is that, you know, a lot of the people who are in sort of positions of making decisions in those hospitals probably don't know any better.
They probably have pressure from public, from patient advocacy groups, from people who believe in stuff like homeopathy.
And sometimes there's a lot of money into it.
I'm reminded of, I believe it is UC Irvine.
They got a massive donation a few years ago, about four or five years ago, from a donor who is a big believer in alternative medicine.
And so, you know, this guy shows up, gives them, I think it's something like $200 million to build a center for integrative medicine on their campus.
And so how would you refuse that kind of money, right?
So if somebody shows up with that kind of money because they have, you know, personally experienced alternative medicine and they believe in it and they want to make sure that it's part of universities and they arrive at a big fat check, which, what university is going to make a stand and say, well, no, actually those practices have not been, you know, scientifically validated or they've been shown to be wrong.
I mean, no, you're going to take the money.
You're going to build the center.
So unfortunately, that's what's happening is that these practices are being legitimized by being part of integrative medicine in major academic health centers in the US and some in Canada as well.
And yeah, homeopathy, I remember a few years ago, the Cleveland Clinic is a particular offender.
It has a very good reputation, but it also has endorsed all kinds
of nonsense, and one of their higher-ups, Dr. Daniel Niedes, had written an anti-vaccine screed on cleveland.com, and that made it into a lot of publications like the Washington Post, and that led reporters to investigate the Cleveland Clinic a little bit more, and they noticed that they were selling homeopathic kits in their gift shop in the hospital, and the Cleveland Clinic had to admit publicly that, yeah, we're gonna remove those from the gift shop,
I know one of your areas of expertise is cancer research.
I'm a cancer survivor, testicular cancer about seven years ago, so I went through the process.
I really appreciated my oncologist.
I think any good communicator in terms of cancer, someone like Siddhartha Mukherjee comes to mind, they will tell you that chemotherapy is not the best option.
It's the best option we have right now, and we will develop better therapeutics.
There is a sort of religious fervor that happens with, quote unquote, alternative medicines.
But have you seen homeopathic remedies in cancer recovery, and how do you speak to that?
I mean, I did spend a few years working in cancer research, also working in cancer diagnostics, but I was removed from the patients.
I mean, I was doing basic research or I was part of a lab that was running tests on tumors or on blood samples in order to guide doctors in their diagnoses and in their prognoses for their patients.
Or on choosing the right therapy for the patient.
So I haven't had that kind of contact but I mean certainly there is an appeal to complementary medicine if you're undergoing any kind of treatment for cancer.
I mean I've been lucky enough to not have had cancer so far so I haven't gone through chemotherapy but I know that it is horrible.
As you pointed out, it's one of the best tools we have, but only because we don't have better tools at the moment.
It's a bit like democracy.
It's the best system we've got, even though it's not all that great.
So I understand that if you're feeling like crap because the inner lining of your stomach is being destroyed and you're losing your hair and you're vomiting and it's horrible because of how nonspecific it is, relatively speaking, that you're gonna be looking for anything to make life better.
And I totally understand people who will jump on homeopathy, on Reiki, on those kinds of practices in order to feel a little bit better.
The problem again is that there's no good evidence that they work.
And when they are offered by a hospital, as you pointed out, it legitimizes the practice well outside of cancer care and people start to see it as not just a compliment but an alternative to treatment.
There was a small study that came out a few years ago.
about this particular thing of, you know, well, if it's a complement to medicine, I mean, what's the harm?
And the problem that they were seeing is that often when something is pegged as a complementary medicine within cancer care, it turns out to be an alternative to cancer care.
Because what it is, is that If somebody has cancer, they're being told, well, we suggest surgery and chemotherapy.
This is what the best evidence tells us.
What will happen is that people who go for complimentary medicine, yeah, it will be a compliment to the surgery, but actually it's gonna be an alternative to the chemotherapy.
So they find themselves refusing chemotherapy and replacing it with homeopathy, with herbal medicine.
And so on the outside, it looks like you're complementing your medical care with this thing, but actually it is an alternative to a particular intervention that you didn't like.
And these people do more poorly than the people who accept the best medical standard of care.
Pre-empted the last question I have for you with that religious fervor line as well because we know that I mean this can happen in any domain but specifically a lot of the people we cover on conspirituality they have a level of certainty to their belief system and I've found humility in the medical system refreshing.
And fortunately, a lot of the doctors I've worked with have had humility about it, which I find comforting personally.
But we also know the challenges of communicating these ideas across microphones, across, you know, we're in people's earbuds right now.
And so for you as a science communicator specifically, What are the best mechanisms that you believe we have for communicating science in this current environment?
Facts do work.
You know, just bringing up good information from as much as possible independent sources can work.
Using empathy really helps.
I have a natural snarkiness about myself.
I love to be sarcastic, but it's something that I've had to tone down, especially as a science communicator, because when was the last time you changed your mind after being called an idiot?
If your goal is to persuade, if your goal is to educate, you can't be shaming people or putting them down.
Now, obviously, there are influencers at the top of this pyramid who are making money out of this stuff and who are endorsing these interventions after being told by critics time and time again that there's no good evidence behind them.
And I think that these people do deserve our scorn and our denunciations.
But the people at the bottom who are essentially victims of misinformation and who are buying into this stuff, I mean, they deserve our empathy and our compassion.
I think we need to build relationships of trust with them.
You need to make them understand why we have the opinion that we have.
But yeah, facts can work.
Using empathy, listening to them, listening to their concerns as well because sometimes they've turned to alternative medicine because they had bad experiences in the medical system and I can certainly empathize with that.
Some bad interventions there as well, but I've also had some wonderful doctors too.
So I can sympathize with that.
And so again, bringing this to the table and saying, I get why you are skeptical of medicine.
I've had similar experiences, I understand.
But there's a great saying by Ben Goldacre, which is that just because there are problems with airplanes does not mean that magic carpets can fly.
And that's really the core of this issue, which is that, yeah, there are problems in medicine.
