All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
March 22, 2007 - Skeptoid
17:01
Skeptoid #34: Homeopathy: Pure Water or Pure Nonsense?

Contrary to what many supporters think, homeopathy is neither an herbal nor a natural remedy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Antique Snake Oil 00:01:41
You don't have to go very far back into history to find a time when we knew very little about the human body that was useful or true and concocted some pretty crazy medical notions.
But what's even crazier is that today, when real options are widely available, many people instead insist on turning to the antique snake oil that's proven today to have no benefits at all.
One such example is homeopathy.
And that's coming right up on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and we'll replace them with more Skeptoid.
The Extended Premium Show available now.
Come to skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Frozen in 1807 00:05:18
Homeopathy.
Today we're going to take a tiny sugar pill infused with specially charged water and cure our ills in a novel way.
For today's topic is homeopathy, one of my favorite of the many popular alternative medicine systems.
Homeopathy has a large following, but I suspect that a large number of its customers don't really understand what it is.
For example, I asked two friends who are homeopathy users on separate occasions to tell me about it.
By coincidence, both were attempting to treat headaches.
Both friends had the same general understanding of what homeopathy is.
They said it was essentially an herbal remedy and that the small pills they were taking contained some sort of herbal extract.
They could not have been more wrong.
I wonder if they would continue taking it if they knew what homeopathy really is.
Samuel Hahnemann was a German physician.
In the late 1700s, all medical conditions were believed to be caused by an imbalance in the four basic bodily humors, blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
Conventional medical practice was to attempt to equalize these humors by such practices as bloodletting, purging, or leaching.
Hahnemann observed that these practices often caused more problems than they solved, so he set about developing a better, safer way to balance the four humors.
He reasoned that the body may be able to balance its own humors if given a sort of kickstart by administering a small dose of whatever poison or toxin was thought to cause the imbalance.
He called this the law of similars.
The obvious problem was that administering poisons and toxins would kill the patient, so he devised a system of massively diluting the ingredients with water.
Hahnemann claimed that greater dilutions had greater effect in balancing bodily humors, and he called this the law of infinitesimals.
His dilutions were as high as one part in 10 to the 30th power.
This proportion is vastly larger than one grain of sand in all the deserts and all the beaches and oceans on the earth.
He published his theory in 1807, and homeopathy was born.
And then Hahnemann did a very subtle, a very clever little thing.
He made up a word.
The word he invented is olopathy.
Olopathy is Hahnemann's name for all evidence-based medical sciences.
That's right, every medical discipline you've ever heard of, including internal medicine, oncology, neurology, cardiology, psychiatry, pathology, surgery, infectious disease, hematology, geriatrics, gastroenterology, ophthalmology, radiology, orthopedics, nephrology, urology, pharmacology, emergency medicine, and critical care.
They're all simply olopathy.
Olopathy is only one word, so it's no better than homeopathy.
They're equals.
You have the musings of one guy 200 years ago on one hand, and on the other, you have everything medical science has taught hundreds of thousands of researchers since then.
Homeopathy versus olopathy.
It's nice to be able to conveniently dismiss so much with just one word.
This makes it possible to offer the innocent patient door A or door B. Knowing nothing further about either choice beyond its one word name, the innocent victim will probably take whichever the practitioner advises.
Homeopathy shares one very important component with most other alternative medicine systems.
It was developed a long time ago by one man during a time when almost nothing useful or true was known about medicine.
And it is rigidly required to stay frozen in time with the same original ancient world view.
Homeopathy, like other alternative medicine systems, does not, cannot, must not grow, evolve, or improve as we learn more about the human body.
If it did adapt to new knowledge, it would cease to be homeopathy and would be something different.
This ability to include and adapt to new knowledge is the central strength of modern medicine.
When we learn new things about the body, when we find a better way to treat a condition, we adapt.
We publish the results and we train doctors on the new techniques.
Every day, the knowledge base that modern medicine is built upon grows.
The collective experience of researchers and doctors grows.
But for homeopathy and other alternative medicine systems, the knowledge base stays frozen in 1807.
AIDS drugs, for example, are so much better now than they were just 10 years ago, and 10 years from now they'll be even better.
There may even be a cure.
But with homeopathy, AIDS is treated the same way that any unknown illness was treated in 1807, with a vial of water, possibly containing a few molecules of some compound that are hoped might stimulate a balance of bodily humors.
Immunity from Scrutiny 00:08:30
Dilutions of homeopathic products that are sold today usually range from 6x to 30x.
This is homeopathy's system for measuring the dilution, and it doesn't mean one part in 6 or 1 part in 30.
X represents the Roman numeral 10.
A 6x dilution means one part in 10 to the 6th power, or 1 in 1 million.
A 30x dilution means one part in 10 to the 30th power, or 1 followed by 30 zeros.
A few products are even marketed using the C scale, Roman numeral 100.
30C is 100 to the 30th power.
That's a staggering number.
It's one followed by 60 zeros, about the number of atoms in our galaxy.
In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact.
Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking.
And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media.
It's an easy ask.
Just send a quick message to your station's programming director.
By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction.
Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address.
You can even use the telephone.
I know that might sound crazy.
It's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication.
I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option.
The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless.
When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction.
And that's how we shape a better future.
In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless.
Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding.
Together, get them to air the Skeptoid files from Skeptoid Media, available on the PRX Exchange, and they'll know what that is.
In 1807, they knew more about mathematics and chemistry than they did about medicine, and it was known that there is a maximum dilution possible in chemistry.
Some decades later, it was learned that this proportion is related to Avogadro's constant, about 6 times 10 to the 23rd power.
Beyond this limit, where many of Hahnemann's dilutions lay, they are in fact no longer dilutions, but are chemically considered to be pure water.
So Hahnemann designed a workaround.
Hahnemann thought that if a solution was agitated enough, the water would retain a spiritual imprint of the original substance and could then be diluted without limit.
The water is often added to sugar pills for remedies designed to be taken in a pill form.
So when you buy homeopathic pills sold today, you're actually buying sugar, water, or alcohol that's channeling, for lack of a better term, some described substance.
The substance itself no longer remains, except for a few millionth part molecules in the lowest dilutions.
Let's look again at Avogadro's number.
6 times 10 to the 23rd atoms is called a mole, a term any chemistry student is familiar with.
How big is that number?
Well, if you had 500 sheets of paper, you'd have a stack about 2.5 inches high, like a ream that you'd buy at the stationery store.
If you had 6 times 10 to the 23rd sheets of paper, your stack would reach all the way from the Earth to the Sun.
And not only that, it would reach that distance 400 million times.
Think about that for a moment, one sheet of paper in a stack that's 400 million times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
That's a typical homeopathic dilution.
Sounds pretty potent, doesn't it?
One explanation made by some homeopaths is that it works the same way as a vaccine.
Putting a tiny amount of a disease-causing agent into the body, not enough to cause the disease, but enough to stimulate the body's natural defenses into fighting off that disease.
Well, this is indeed the way a vaccine works, but it's got nothing to do with the way Hahnemann defined homeopathy.
Vaccines are used to prevent an illness which does not yet exist in the body by triggering the production of preventive antibodies, and homeopathy is used to fight a disease already in the body, in which case any antibodies would already be in production.
The number of the antibodies triggered by a vaccine can be measured in the bloodstream, whereas homeopathy is not intended to and does not produce any measurable reaction.
Vaccines insert inert versions of the disease-causing agents into the body, where homeopathic substances are the same as that which causes the disease.
Finally, and most obviously, vaccines contain a large and fully measurable amount of active ingredient, whereas homeopathic remedies contain no measurable active ingredient.
So homeopathy can indeed be said to work just like a vaccine.
Well, at least it works just like a spiritual imprint of a vaccine.
So why do so many people claim that it works and swear by it?
Homeopathy has been tested over and over again, and though most studies show its effect to be consistent with the placebo effect, a surprisingly large number of studies do show that homeopathy produces results superior to a placebo.
But in every one of these cases, doubts have been raised about the quality of evidence in the studies.
According to the National Institutes of Health, problems include weaknesses in design and or reporting, choice of measuring techniques, small numbers of participants, and difficulties in replicating results.
A favorite study of homeopaths is that of the British Medical Journal in 1991, a meta-analysis of 107 controlled trials over a 25-year period.
The majority of the studies did show some positive results.
And homeopaths stop there.
They stop short of the journal's final conclusion, which was, at the moment, the evidence of clinical trials is positive, but not sufficient to draw definitive conclusions because most of the trials are of low methodological quality and because of the unknown role of publication bias.
If you need the term publication bias translated, it means that the studies showing positive results were conducted and or published by the homeopathy industry.
The British Medical Journal went on to say, This indicates that there is a legitimate case for further evaluation of homeopathy, but only by means of well-performed trials.
Well, good luck to you, gentlemen.
The UK Society of Homeopaths has stated, It has been established beyond doubt that the randomized controlled trial is not a fitting research tool with which to test homeopathy.
In other words, homeopathy has given itself a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Tests are not adequate to test them.
If you perform a clinical trial and find that homeopathy is no more effective than a placebo, the reason for the failure is that homeopathy should not be tested.
Claimed immunity from scientific scrutiny should stand out as a huge red flag.
When you hear anyone defend their claim by stating that its effect cannot be detected through testing, be skeptical.
The upside of homeopathy is that it's not going to hurt anyone, since it lacks any measurable active ingredients.
And when treating conditions that are not life-threatening, like headaches or fatigue, there's no harm done.
There is massive harm done when practitioners or store owners recommend homeopathy as a replacement for real medical treatment when a serious illness exists.
Dangerous Replacement Therapy 00:01:27
Be vigilant and protect the health of your family, your friends, and yourself.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrienne Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double-doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection