With thank to Tim Adams and the Observer 5.2.12:

It is not often, in liberal north London, that you come face to face with a heretic, but Rupert Sheldrake has worn that mantle, pretty cheerfully, for 30 years now. Sitting in his book-lined study, overlooking Hampstead Heath, he appears a highly unlikely candidate for apostasy; he seems more like the Cambridge biochemistry don he once was, one of the brightest Darwinians of his generation, winner of the university botany prize, researcher at the Royal Society, Harvard scholar and fellow of Clare College.

Rupert Sheldrake’s web site is here: http://www.sheldrake.org/B&R/booksusa/

All that, though, was before he was cast out into the wilderness. Sheldrake’s untouchable status was conferred one morning in 1981 when, a couple of months after the publication of his first book, A New Science of Life, he woke up to read an editorial in the journal Nature, which announced to all right-thinking men and women that his was a “book for burning” and that Sheldrake was to be “condemned in exactly the language that the pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy”.

For a pariah, Sheldrake is particularly affable. But still, looking back at that moment, he still betrays a certain sense of shock. “It was,” he says, “exactly like a papal excommunication. From that moment on, I became a very dangerous person to know for scientists.” That opinion has hardened over the years, as Sheldrake has continued to operate at the margins of his discipline, looking for phenomena that “conventional, materialist science” cannot explain and arguing for a more open-minded approach to scientific inquiry.

His new book, The Science Delusion, is a summation of this thinking, an attempt to address what he sees as the limitations and hubris of contemporary scientific thought. In particular, he takes aim at the “scientific dogmatism” that sets itself up as gospel. The chapters take some of the stonier commandments of contemporary science and make them into questions: “Are the laws of nature fixed?”; “Is matter unconscious?”; “Is nature purposeless?” “Are minds confined to brains?”

Sheldrake is a brilliant polemicist if nothing else and he skilfully marshals all the current thinking that undermines these tenets – from apparent telepathy in animals, to crystals having to “learn” how to grow, to some of the more fantastical notions of theoretical physics. On the morning I meet him, his book is sitting near the top of the science bestseller list on Amazon. It has also, unlike most of his previous work – Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home – been generally reviewed respectfully. Perhaps it is something in the air.

One of the habits in nature that Sheldrake is interested in is polarity, and if he has a natural nemesis then it is Richard Dawkins, arch materialist and former professor of public understanding of science at Oxford. The title of his book seems to take direct aim at Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Was that, I wonder, his express intention in writing it?

“Slightly,” he suggests. But the title was really his publisher’s idea. “It is dealing with a much bigger issue. But Richard Dawkins is a symptom of the dogmatism of science. He crystallises that approach in the public mind, so to that extent, yes, it is a pointed title.”

Sheldrake is the same age as Dawkins – 70 this year – and though their careers began in an almost identical biochemical place, they could hardly have ended up further apart. If Sheldrake’s ideas could be boiled down to a sentence, you might borrow one from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Richard, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…”

“What we have in common,” Sheldrake says, “is that we are both certain that evolution is the central feature of nature. But I would say his theory of evolution stops at biology. When it comes to cosmology, for example, he has little to say. I would take the evolutionary principle there, too. I think that the ‘laws of nature’ are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws. Much of what we are beginning to understand is that they clearly have evolved differently in different parts of the universe.”

Sheldrake talks a good deal of the fact that, as all good Brian Cox viewers know, 83% of the universe is now thought to be “dark matter” and subject to “dark energy” forces that “nothing in our science can begin to explain”.

Despite this, he suggests, scientists are prone to “the recurrent fantasy of omniscience”. The science delusion, in these terms, consists in the faith that we already understand the nature of reality, in principle, and that all that is left to do is to fill in the details. “In this book, I am just trying to blow the whistle on that attitude which I think is bad for science,” he says. In America, the book is called Science Set Free, which he thinks is probably a better title. “They were aware that if they called it The Science Delusion it would be seen as a rightwing tract that was anti-evolution and anti-climate change. And I want no part of that.”

The evolution of Rupert Sheldrake, would, you guess, be a worthwhile scientific study in itself, but one for which you might struggle to attract funding. Like all heretics worth their salt, he started out in good faith, a true believer, but he has been beset by increasing doubt ever since.

“I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14,” he says, with a grin. “I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism. I was the only boy at my high Anglican boarding school who refused to get confirmed. When I was a teenager, I was a bit like Dawkins is today, you know: ‘If Adam and Eve were created by God, why do they have navels?’ That kind of thing.”

Over a period, he found the materialist view of the universe – that matter was all that life consisted of, that human beings were in Dawkins’s term “lumbering robots” – did not accord with his own experience of it. Sheldrake was a gifted musician and “electrical changes in the cortex didn’t seem able to fully explain Bach”. Likewise: “To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn’t seem to give a very full picture of the world.”

The other thing that troubled him about scientific orthodoxy might be condensed into a single word: pigeons. As a boy in Newark-on-Trent, Sheldrake had kept animals – a dog, a jackdaw and some homing pigeons. He would place these pigeons in a cardboard box and cycle all morning with them and then release them to marvel how they would always beat him home. Newark happened to be a hub of pigeon racing. “Every weekend in the season, people would bring piles and piles of wicker baskets containing their birds; my father would take me there and the porters would let me help release the pigeons. Hundreds would fly up and circle round, then you would see them form into little groups and head off around Britain, back home. Pigeon fanciers were mostly plain working men, but they were fascinated by this mystery, which they did not understand.”

They were not alone. When Sheldrake won his scholarship to Cambridge several years later, he asked various scientists how they thought this happened. The scientists talked about the sun’s position and an internal clock and scent traces, but what “they weren’t prepared to say was that it was a total mystery”. That refusal, and others like it, troubled Sheldrake. “There is a lot of science that you can’t directly experience,” he says, “but to concentrate on quantum physics when we couldn’t begin to explain homing pigeons seemed to me,” he suggests, “a great distortion.”

For a decade or so, Sheldrake kept some of these thoughts to himself, but as his career developed his doubts about the idea that “conventional, materialist” science would one day explain everything seemed increasingly wrong-headed. He took a job working at the University of Malaya on ferns and rubber trees and to get there travelled for some months through India and Sri Lanka. It was 1968 and India was a very interesting place to be. “I met people, highly intelligent people, who had a completely different world view from anything to which I had been exposed.”

Returning to Cambridge, Sheldrake became interested in a notion of biology and heredity that shared close affinities with Carl Jung’s ideas of a collective unconscious, a shared species memory. He was profoundly influenced by a book called Matter and Memory by the philosopher Henri Bergson. “When I discovered Bergson’s idea that memory is not stored in the brain but that it is a relation in time, not in space, I realised that there might potentially be a memory principle in nature that would solve the problem I was wrestling with.”

In 1974, Sheldrake returned to south-east Asia and took a job at an agricultural institute near Hyderabad developing new varieties and cropping systems in chickpeas. “By day, I was working on these practical things,” he recalls, “but in the evening I was reading a lot about crystallography and the philosophy of form.” He had become friendly with an eccentric woman called Helen Spurway, widow of JBS Haldane, the great British biologist. She lived in a remote full of animals, with a tame jackal and wasps’ nests in the living room; Haldane’s library was being eaten by termites; Sheldrake felt right at home.

“At around the same time,” he recalls, “I had some exposure to psychedelics, and that opened me up to the idea that consciousness was much richer than anything my physiology lecturers had ever described. Then I came across transcendental meditation, which seemed to give some access to that without drugs.” Alongside that, to his surprise, Sheldrake began to realise that there was “a lot more in my makeup that was ‘Christian’ than I cared to admit. I started praying and going to church.”

Did he pray with a sense of its efficacy?

“Well,” he says, “I still say the Lord’s Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world. ‘Thy will be done’, that sense that we are part of a larger process that is unfolding that we do not comprehend.” By the time Sheldrake went to live at the ashram of the exiled Christian holy man, Father Bede Griffiths, he had been confirmed in the Church of South India and was the organist of St George’s, Hyderabad. It was at about that time, “living in a palm-fringed hut under a banyan tree”, that Sheldrake decided to set out his decade’s worth of thinking about memory being a function of time, not matter, shared by all living things, that he called “morphogenetics”.

Was he aware that the book would be incendiary?

“Well,” he says, “I wrote it to try to find a broader framework for biology. A more holistic one, proposing the argument that the laws of nature were also evolving in time.”

For the first three months after it was published, the speculative book got a generally favourable reception. But then the “book for burning” editorial was written in Nature, by its editor, Sir John Maddox, and Sheldrake’s new life began, as a discredited scientist and bestselling author.

Far from refuting his ideas in the face of this broadside, Sheldrake went on the offensive. His research since then has concentrated almost entirely on the kinds of phenomena that science dismisses out of hand “but which people are generally fascinated by and made to feel stupid about”. He has a long-running experiment that collects data about how dogs “know” when their owners are coming home; another is concerned with the apparently strong deviations from chance in human ability to predict when they are being stared at from a distance. He retains an interest in subjects as diverse as the mysteries of crystal formation, the efficacy of Chinese medicine, the forces that trigger migrations of birds and animals over vast distances, and the nature of consciousness.

None of these pursuits has enhanced his standing in the professional scientific community. Sheldrake is unrepentant. He cites Darwin as an example. “If you look at his books, almost all the data there come from amateur naturalists, practical breeders, gardeners. TH Huxley, meanwhile, ‘his bulldog’, was very much against amateurs, largely because many of them were vicars and he was very anti-religious. He wanted to marginalise anyone who saw science and faith as compatible and mutually reaffirming.”

Though he remains at best a contentious figure, and to some an irredeemable charlatan, Sheldrake sees some evidence that this old opposition is breaking down, that doubt and wonder might be returning to science.

“I think one of the reasons why my book has – so far – been well received is that times are changing,” he suggests. “A lot of our old certainties, not least neoliberal capitalism, have been turned on their head. The atheist revival movement of Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett is for many people just too narrow and dogmatic. I think it is a uniquely open moment…”

His hope is that there will be a “coming out” moment in science. “It’s like gays in the 1950s,” he suggests. “I think if people in the realm of science and medicine came out and talked about the limitations of purely mechanistic and reductive approaches it would be much more fun…”

The imminence of Sheldrake’s three score years and ten has made questions of mortality and consciousness seem a little more pressing to him. He almost came face to face with his morphic energies in 2008; speaking at a consciousness conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was attacked with a knife by a Japanese paranoid schizophrenic. He suffered a huge wound in his thigh, which just missed his femoral artery. “Apparently,” he says, “he was aiming at my heart and stumbled at the last moment. It certainly made death a bit more present.”

Given his speculative nature, I wonder what he imagined, as his life flashed before him, would happen next?

“I’ve always thought death would be like dreaming,” he says, “but without the possibility of waking up. And in those dreams, as in our dreams in life, everyone will get what they want to some degree. For the atheists convinced everything will go blank, maybe it will.” He trusts in a more colourful future for himself. After Sheldrake shows me out, I walk to work across the heath, imagining how his dream eternity might work out: hammering out The Goldberg Variations on his Hyderabad organ, while the jungle grows around him, wondering all the time how he got here.

With thanks to The Telegraph and Will Storr 20.11.11:

Over and over again, the doctor told her she was being silly. But Gemma knew there was something wrong. She’d fall asleep on the sofa and couldn’t be woken. She’d see strange shapes and colours. She was having difficulties remembering things in the office. And yet every time she saw the doctor, he would say the same thing: you’re just a young girl, panicking.

Eventually, they found tumours on her brain, and they grew and spread. They tried chemotherapy. She felt sick. She gained four stone in four weeks. Her hair fell out over one weekend. She had to lift her eyelids with her finger to see. She had a wheelchair, a stick. Her bowels stopped moving. Her sight was so bad she couldn’t watch television or read. So she just lay there.

Then, in October 1995, the oncologist visited her hospital bed. “These are your options,” he said. “You can stay here, you can go to a hospice or you can go home.” Gemma was groggy; confused. She thought, well, let me think: sick people go to hospital, dying people go to a hospice, fit people go home.

“I’ll take home.” “Well,” said the doctor. “You’ve got those little pills and you’ve got Him up there. Make sure you have a happy Christmas.” It took Gemma a while to realise that this was her doctor’s way of telling her the cancer was, in fact, terminal.

Despite her dark prognosis, she carried on taking the “little pills” her oncologist had mentioned with a gently patronising smile. They’d been given to her by a homeopath recommended by her sister-in-law – she went out of politeness, really. But the more she took, the better she felt. At Christmas, her eyelids opened up. Her sight returned. A year later, she saw her oncologist. He wrote in his notes: “Gemma has made a remarkable recovery. Her case will remain a mystery.” But it wasn’t a mystery to Gemma, who has been telling me her story in the front room of her modest Sutton Coldfield house over the past hour. Gemma Hoefkens believes those little homeopathic pills had not only saved her life but changed it. She’s now a practising homeopathist who claims not to have been to the doctor for years.

Available on the NHS and for sale in Boots, homeopathy is an industry worth £40 million a year in the UK alone (and $1.4billion in the United States). And yet Gemma’s doctor wasn’t alone in his reservations. Throughout its weird and defiant 230-year history, homeopathy has attracted the fury of doubters all the way from Charles Darwin to Richard Dawkins. Over the past decade, the campaign against homeopaths has accelerated to such a pitch that questions have been asked in Parliament. In February 2010, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee recommended the NHS cease funding the discipline, calling the £4 million that’s spent annually a “waste”. Tony Blair has even got involved, saying “my advice to the scientific community would be [don’t] bother fighting a great battle over homeopathy”. But they do and they are.

That same February, Gemma told her story on BBC Radio Five Live. Someone posted the interview on YouTube. On the video, every time Gemma speaks, a yellow rubber duck appears with the word “Quack!” flashing out of its mouth. At the end of the video, a photograph of Gemma herself appears. It says, “DO NOT BE FOOLED. HOMEOPATHY IS A CROCK OF S—”.

I unfold a print out of Gemma with a yellow plastic duck over her face. She scowls towards the paper. “How professional are they?” she says. “Who are these people who are so unprofessional? You know, who are they?” I decided to find out.

In the bar of a Manchester hotel, a pale platoon of anti-homeopaths are getting politely drunk. These are members of the “sceptic” community, a large and swelling movement of activists and thinkers who campaign against people such as Gemma and on behalf of science and reason. They organise in loose “cells” up and down the country, in collectives known as “Sceptics in the Pub”, and gather online to compose irritable and unusually well-footnoted blogs.

This weekend, the sceptics are gathered for the “QED conference” that has been organised by the Merseyside branch of Sceptics in the Pub, led by a 27-year-old marketing executive named Michael “Marsh” Marshall. It will culminate in a mass international homeopathic overdose – a stunt that will seek to demonstrate that, as the campaign’s slogan has it, “there’s nothing in it”.

Invented in 1790 by German physician Samuel Hahnemann (who, like Gemma, had grown disillusioned with conventional medicine), the theory behind homeopathy says that illnesses can be cured by taking minute portions of substances which cause similar symptoms to those which ail you. So, if the bark of a toxic Peruvian tree causes symptoms similar to malaria, say, then a tiny dose of that can cure malaria. In Gemma’s case, her many maladies were, she believes, cured by causticum. When I inquired what causticum was, she said, “Er, you put it down drains”.

The amount of causticum in one of Gemma’s pills is unbelievably small. In fact, if you buy a standard “30C” dose, it means the active ingredient has been diluted 30 times, by a factor of 100. Your chance of getting even one molecule of the original substance in your pill is one in a billion billion billion billion. Imagine a sphere of water that stretches from the Earth to the Sun. That’s how much you’d have to drink to get just one solitary molecule of it.

This is why Marsh’s campaign’s slogan insists that “there’s nothing in it”. Homeopaths deny this, however, saying that when they dilute the substance, they first shake it (or “succuss” it) which “potentises” the water, causing it to somehow remember the active substance.

I accuse Marsh and his sceptics of being curmudgeons. Even if it is expensive water, so what? He responds with the case of an Australian baby, Gloria Thomas, who was diagnosed with eczema aged four months and died five months later after it became infected. Her father, a homeopathy lecturer, insisted on treating Gloria with his diluted remedies rather than conventional medication. When he was imprisoned in 2009, the judge blamed Gloria’s death, in part, on her father’s “arrogant approach” to homeopathy.

“I find cases like that genuinely distressing,” says Marsh. “Homeopathy is magic. It’s 18th-century magic. That’s what we’re trying to get across with the overdose. To the people who might wander into Boots with a headache and say ‘Homeopathy – I’ll try that’, we want to say ‘there is no evidence for homeopathy. The science has been done. It simply doesn’t work’.” The day’s final act is sceptic singer George Hrab. I leave the convention hall for bed as he attempts to lead the reluctant sceptics in a sing-a-long: “You won’t believe what a sceptic I am/I can’t believe you believe in that sham…”

Sceptic after sceptic at the QED conference told me the same thing: “There is no evidence for homeopathy”. But this isn’t absolutely true. Dr Alexander Tournier of the Homeopathy Research Institute tells me, “This is very spurious. If you talk to sceptics they will acknowledge, for example, a paper that was published in The Lancet in 2005, which is known as ‘Shang et al’. That included 110 respectable studies of homeopathy [that showed some positive effects]. One-hundred and ten trials! You can’t say that’s nothing.”

Tournier himself became an adherent when he was studying quantum physics at Cambridge University and he became ill with the Epstein Barr virus, a form of chronic fatigue. Homeopathy, he says, cured him. He explains that homeopathy has been available on the NHS since 1948, and that a 2007 study found that six million Britons were users and it was increasing at a rate of around 20 per cent a year. “There’s also a big tradition of homeopathic hospitals, like the one in London.” He means the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, founded in 1849 and renamed “The Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine”. It offers complementary treatments, including homeopathy, alongside conventional medicine.

One GP I speak to admits to an “establishment bias” around homeopathy, but approves of its undeniably powerful placebo effect – “even prescription by a doctor has one,” he says. Ultimately, though, he believes “the balance of evidence isn’t overwhelming enough yet” for him to use it.

I contacted Dana Ullman, a homeopath who has become the industry’s chief defender in the US, to find out what he makes of the sceptics. (One had described him to me as “despicable”.) “Some of them are big pharma shills [stooges], others are just misinformed,” says Ullman, on the phone from Berkeley, California.

I ask Ullman about the Lancet paper mentioned by Tournier. A team from the University of Berne in Switzerland, led by one Professor Aijing Shang, sought to finally answer the question of whether or not homeopathy works by doing a meta analysis, which essentially blends the results of lots of studies in an attempt to find The Ultimate Answer. The resulting paper has since become iconic.

The team started by looking for studies of homeopathy that took into account the placebo effect – which is acknowledged by all as being remarkably powerful and can skew the results of any medical trial. Shang’s team ended up with 110 studies that looked at homeopathy’s effect on an array of medical conditions. They matched these with studies, looking at the same conditions, except using conventional medication. First, they analysed both sets of papers separately. They found that both conventional medicine and homeopathy showed a positive effect above placebo. Simply put, they both worked. Next, they looked at the quality of the studies. They found that the better the study was, the worse the result for homeopathy. Finally, they isolated eight studies which were of the very highest quality.

They concluded that evidence for homeopathy was “weak” and “compatible with the notion that the clinical effects of homoeopathy are placebo effects”. Shang et al essentially found that the better the study was, the more likely it was to show that homeopathy is no better than a placebo. It was published alongside an editorial headlined: “The End of Homeopathy”.

“Ha, ha, ha!” says Ullman, down the phone. “I laugh at sceptics who use Shang as their firmest body of evidence.” Ullman says that several studies showing strong effects for homeopathy were ignored by Shang et al for mysterious reasons. He says that a subsequent study of Shang accused them of “post hoc analysis” – gathering evidence and then deviously working out a way to prove homeopathy wrong.

He says that some of the studies included were not intended to show if homeopathy worked in the first place. Rather, they were exploratory “pilot studies”, carried out to test the design of a proposed full study. And yet negative results for pilot studies were taken by Shang to be conclusive.

Finally, Ullman disputes Shang’s assertion that a larger study will be of higher quality. He says that this ignores the basic principles of homeopathy. When you visit a homeopath, they talk for an hour and consider all sorts of apparently unrelated facts before deciding what to dispense. Ullman says this process of “individuation” means that small studies are more accurate, because these are more likely to be the ones in which the homeopath took the time to dispense an appropriate remedy.

When I list these complaints to Andy Lewis, author of the popular sceptical blog The Quackometer, he gives an amused yet sorrowful sigh. But of Ullman’s complaint that exploratory “pilot” studies were included, Andy admits: “Yes, the vast majority of homeopathy studies would be pilot studies. I don’t think the inclusion criteria took that into account.” Would he go so far as to say Ullman has a point? “Dana’s always wrong. So, no. I wouldn’t go that far.”

It took me a while to understand what I now hold to be the truth about homeopathy. I was in the thicket of Shang, trying to carefully understand everything Ullman was telling me, when I suddenly thought: if homeopathy worked, shouldn’t it be more obvious? If it really did have the power to cure a cancer as advanced as Gemma’s then wouldn’t we see, in study after study, significant wins for the homeopaths? Science moves forward by consensus. Unlikely claims backed up by marginal results cannot and should not lead to a change in establishment opinions.

And yet the sceptics are wrong when they say there’s “no evidence” for homeopathy. There is evidence. But there’s much better evidence that says it doesn’t work.

For me, it seems clear that Gemma’s recovery is a mystery. But her story does show that, for us fallible humans, personal experience will always trump the dry analyses of science. Indeed, as Gemma walked me to her door at the end of that afternoon, I asked her one final question.

If God sat you down and said, “homeopathy is nonsense”, would she believe him?

She answered in an instant. “No.”

With thanks to Ian Sample, science correspondent at guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 October 2011: Nobel Prize in Chemistry for dogged work on ‘impossible’ quasicrystals awarded to Daniel Shechtman.

How cruel and taunting science can be to anyone who breaks the mould of ‘accepted’ wisdom. It is good news to know that despite the vicious attacks on free thinking and true scientific observation, every now and then, the stunning and the unexpected is sometimes heard through the cacophony of dementors and detractors!!

Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and a double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening “crusade” against him. After telling Daniel Shechtman to go back and read a crystallography textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for “bringing disgrace” on the team. His discovery was extremely controversial. In the course of defending his findings, he was asked to leave his research group. However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter …

In addition to the kudos of the award, Shechtman receives 10 million Swedish kronor (£934,000).

A scientist whose work was so controversial he was ridiculed and asked to leave his research group has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Daniel Shechtman, 70, a researcher at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, received the award for discovering seemingly impossible crystal structures in frozen gobbets of metal that resembled the beautiful patterns seen in Islamic mosaics. Images of the metals showed their atoms were arranged in a way that broke well-establised rules of how crystals formed, a finding that fundamentally altered how chemists view solid matter.

In addition to the kudos of the award, Shechtman receives 10 million Swedish kronor (£934,000).

Crystallised materials are normally made up of “unit cells” of atoms that repeat over and over to make a single, uniform structure. This kind of crystal structure makes graphite a good lubricant, for example, because it can cleave easily across certain planes of weakness.

On the morning of 8 April 1982, Shechtman saw something quite different while gazing at electron microscope images of a rapidly cooled metal alloy. The atoms were packed in a pattern that could not be repeated. Shechtman said to himself in Hebrew, “Eyn chaya kazo,” which means “There can be no such creature.” The bizarre structures are now known as “quasicrystals” and have been seen in a wide variety of materials. Their uneven structure means they do not have obvious cleavage planes, making them particularly hard.

“His discovery was extremely controversial. In the course of defending his findings, he was asked to leave his research group,” the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement. “However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter … Scientists are currently experimenting with using quasicrystals in different products such as frying pans and diesel engines.”

In an interview this year with the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, Shechtman said: “People just laughed at me.” He recalled how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and a double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening “crusade” against him. After telling Shechtman to go back and read a crystallography textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for “bringing disgrace” on the team. “I felt rejected,” Shachtman said.

The existence of quasicrystals, though controversial, was anticipated much earlier, but Shechtman was the first to see them in nature. The 16th century astronomer Johannes Kepler drew quasicrystal-like patterns in his book Mysterium Cosmographicum.

In the 1970s, Sir Roger Penrose, the Oxford University mathematical physicist, created “aperiodic” tiling patterns that never repeated themselves, work that he suspects was inspired by Kepler’s drawings.

“I once asked Shechtman if he knew about my tilings when he saw the things he saw. He said he did, but that he didn’t have them in mind when he was looking at them,” Penrose told the Guardian. “I think it was rather similar to my experience with Kepler’s patterns. Probably he was influenced unconsciously.”

Penrose’s own contribution to the field led some scientists to suggest he might himself be a contender for the Nobel prize. “Some people have said that, but I was a bit doubtful that would happen. Shechtman was the first person to see these things and it took a while to come around to the view that the things that were seen were the same kind of patterns I’d produced about 10 years earlier,” he said.

While the patterns were beautiful and fundamentally interesting, Penrose said he was not aware of any very successful commercial applications. Though quasicrystal frying pan coatings exist, he said: “I am not sure they are terribly effective. I believe they interact with egg.”

Astrid Graslund, professor of biophysics at Stockholm University and secretary for the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, conceded: “The practical applications are, as of now, not so many. But the material has unexpected properties. It is very strong, it has hardly any friction on the surface, it doesn’t want to react with anything, [it] cannot oxidize and become rusty.”

David Phillips, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, said: “Quasicrystals are a fascinating aspect of chemical and material science – crystals that break all the rules of being a crystal at all. You can normally explain in simple terms where in a crystal each atom sits – they are very symmetrical. With quasicrystals, that symmetry is broken: there are regular patterns in the structure, but never repeating.”

He added: “They’re quite beautiful, and have potential applications in protective alloys and coatings. The award of the Nobel Prize to Danny Shechtman is a celebration of fundamental research.”

My belief in honest science has been restored and my faith in human nature washed in cool waters!! A most heartfelt thank you to all the honest scientists and sceptics with whom I am privileged to share this world!!!

Can these honest people now make the leap to comprehend the way the pharmaceutical companies push out lies and misinformation (*see below) to destroy any perceived threat from the competition posed to them by homeopathy and alternative medicine?

Just how far does their honesty and integrity actually go?

Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies. PLoS Med 2(5): Smith R (2005). 

Richard Smith was an editor for the British Medical Journal for 25 years. For the last 13 of those years, he was the editor and chief executive of the British Medical Journal Publishing Group, responsible for the profits of not only the British Medical Journal but of the whole group, which published some 25 other journals. He stepped down in July 2004. He is now a member of the board of the Public Library of Science, a position for which he is not paid. Richard Smith is Chief Executive of UnitedHealth Europe.

‘… Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry’, wrote Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, in March 2004. In the same year, Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, lambasted the industry for becoming ‘primarily a marketing machine and co-opting ‘every institution that might stand in its way’. Medical journals were conspicuously absent from her list of co-opted institutions, but she and Horton are not the only editors who have become increasingly queasy about the power and influence of the industry.

‘Jerry Kassirer, another former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, argues that the industry has deflected the moral compasses of many physicians, and the editors of PLoS Medicine have declared that they will not become ‘… part of the cycle of dependency…between journals and the pharmaceutical industry’. Something is clearly up.

‘The most conspicuous example of medical journals’ dependence on the pharmaceutical industry is the substantial income from advertising, but this is, I suggest, the least corrupting form of dependence. The advertisements may often be misleading and the profits worth millions, but the advertisements are there for all to see and criticise. Doctors may not be as uninfluenced by the advertisements as they would like to believe, but in every sphere, the public is used to discounting the claims of advertisers.

‘The much bigger problem lies with the original studies, particularly the clinical trials, published by journals. Far from discounting these, readers see randomised controlled trials as one of the highest forms of evidence. A large trial published in a major journal has the journal’s stamp of approval (unlike the advertising), will be distributed around the world, and may well receive global media coverage, particularly if promoted simultaneously by press releases from both the journal and the expensive public-relations firm hired by the pharmaceutical company that sponsored the trial.

‘For a drug company, a favourable trial is worth thousands of pages of advertising, which is why a company will sometimes spend upwards of a million dollars on reprints of the trial for worldwide distribution. The doctors receiving the reprints may not read them, but they will be impressed by the name of the journal from which they come. The quality of the journal will bless the quality of the drug.

‘Fortunately from the point of view of the companies funding these trials—but unfortunately for the credibility of the journals who publish them—these trials rarely produce results that are unfavourable to the companies’ products. Paula Rochon and others examined in 1994 all the trials funded by manufacturers of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for arthritis that they could find. They found 56 trials, and not one of the published trials presented results that were unfavourable to the company that sponsored the trial. Every trial showed the company’s drug to be as good as or better than the comparison treatment.

‘By 2003 it was possible to do a systematic review of 30 studies comparing the outcomes of studies funded by the pharmaceutical industry with those of studies funded from other sources. Some 16 of the studies looked at clinical trials or meta-analyses, and 13 had outcomes favourable to the sponsoring companies. Overall, studies funded by a company were four times more likely to have results favourable to the company than studies funded from other sources. In the case of the five studies that looked at economic evaluations, the results were favourable to the sponsoring company in every case.

‘The evidence is strong that companies are getting the results they want, and this is especially worrisome because between two-thirds and three-quarters of the trials published in the major journals—Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, and New England Journal of Medicine—are funded by the industry. For the British Medical Journal, it’s only one-third—partly, perhaps, because the journal has less influence than the others in North America, which is responsible for half of all the revenue of drug companies, and partly because the journal publishes more cluster-randomised trials (which are usually not drug trials).

‘Why are pharmaceutical companies getting the results they want? Why are the peer-review systems of journals not noticing what seem to be biased results? The systematic review of 2003 looked at the technical quality of the studies funded by the industry and found that it was as good—and often better—than that of studies funded by others. This is not surprising as the companies have huge resources and are very familiar with conducting trials to the highest standards.

‘The companies seem to get the results they want not by fiddling the results, which would be far too crude and possibly detectable by peer review, but rather by asking the “right” questions—and there are many ways to do this. Some of the methods for achieving favourable results are listed in the Sidebar, but there are many ways to hugely increase the chance of producing favourable results, and there are many hired guns who will think up new ways and stay one jump ahead of peer reviewers.

‘Then, various publishing strategies are available to ensure maximum exposure of positive results. Companies have resorted to trying to suppress negative studies, but this is a crude strategy—and one that should rarely be necessary if the company is asking the “right” questions. A much better strategy is to publish positive results more than once, often in supplements to journals, which are highly profitable to the publishers and shown to be of dubious quality. Companies will usually conduct multicentre trials, and there is huge scope for publishing different results from different centres at different times in different journals. It’s also possible to combine the results from different centres in multiple combinations.

‘These strategies have been exposed in the cases of Risperidone and Odansetron, but it’s a huge amount of work to discover how many trials are truly independent and how many are simply the same results being published more than once. And usually it’s impossible to tell from the published studies: it’s necessary to go back to the authors and get data on individual patients.

‘Journal editors are becoming increasingly aware of how they are being manipulated and are fighting back, but I must confess that it took me almost a quarter of a century editing for the British Medical Journal to wake up to what was happening. Editors work by considering the studies submitted to them. They ask the authors to send them any related studies, but editors have no other mechanism to know what other unpublished studies exist. It’s hard even to know about related studies that are published, and it may be impossible to tell that studies are describing results from some of the same patients. Editors may thus be peer reviewing one piece of a gigantic and clever marketing jigsaw—and the piece they have is likely to be of high technical quality. It will probably pass peer review, a process that research has anyway shown to be an ineffective lottery prone to bias and abuse.

‘Furthermore, the editors are likely to favour randomised trials. Many journals publish few such trials and would like to publish more: they are, as I’ve said, a superior form of evidence. The trials are also likely to be clinically interesting. Other reasons for publishing are less worthy. Publishers know that pharmaceutical companies will often purchase thousands of dollars’ worth of reprints, and the profit margin on reprints is likely to be 70%. Editors, too, know that publishing such studies is highly profitable, and editors are increasingly responsible for the budgets of their journals and for producing a profit for the owners. Many owners—including academic societies—depend on profits from their journals. An editor may thus face a frighteningly stark conflict of interest: publish a trial that will bring US$100 000 of profit or meet the end-of-year budget by firing an editor.

‘How might we prevent journals from being an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies in publishing trials that favour their products? Editors can review protocols, insist on trials being registered, demand that the role of sponsors be made transparent, and decline to publish trials unless researchers control the decision to publish. I doubt, however, that these steps will make much difference. Something more fundamental is needed.

‘Firstly, we need more public funding of trials, particularly of large head-to-head trials of all the treatments available for treating a condition. Secondly, journals should perhaps stop publishing trials. Instead, the protocols and results should be made available on regulated Web sites. Only such a radical step, I think, will stop journals from being beholden to companies. Instead of publishing trials, journals could concentrate on critically describing them.

Examples of Methods for Pharmaceutical Companies to Get the Results They Want from Clinical Trials:

• Conduct a trial of your drug against a treatment known to be inferior.
• Trial your drugs against too low a dose of a competitor drug.
• Conduct a trial of your drug against too high a dose of a competitor drug (making your drug seem less toxic).
• Conduct trials that are too small to show differences from competitor drugs.
• Use multiple endpoints in the trial and select for publication those that give favourable results.
• Do multicentre trials and select for publication results from centres that are favourable.
• Conduct subgroup analyses and select for publication those that are favourable.
• Present results that are most likely to impress—for example, reduction in relative rather than absolute risk.

This article is based on a talk that Richard Smith gave at the Medical Society of London in October 2004 when receiving the HealthWatch Award for 2004. The speech is reported in the January 2005 HealthWatch newsletter [20]. The article overlaps to a small extent with an article published in the BMJ. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020138

Pharmaceutical company advertising in The Lancet The Lancet, Volume 378, Issue 9785, Page 30, 2 July 2011. Geoffrey Spurling University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4029, Australia, Peter Mansfield Health Skepticism, Willunga, SA, Australia University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia, Joel Lexchin chool of Health Policy and Management, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada. 

‘The Editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, is famously quoted (2004) as saying: ‘Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.’ (Horton R. The dawn of McScience. New York Review of Books 2004; 51: 7. PubMed).

‘This sentiment is echoed by former New England Journal of Medicine Editor, Marcia Angell, who describes information from the pharmaceutical industry as coming, ‘… mixed with hyperbole, bias and misinformation, and there is often no way to tell which is which.’ (Angell M. The truth about the drug companies: how they deceive us and what to do about it. (New York: Random House, 2004). ((Marcia Angell was for 20 years editor of New England Journal of Medicine. Currently a professor at Harvard Medical School) 2004, quoted as ‘… The pharmaceutical industry is “primarily a marketing machine” which is willing to co-opt ‘… every institution that might stand in its way.’)

‘Both of these statements were cited by the Editors of the Journal of Emergency Medicine Australasia in their decision earlier this year to ban drug company advertising from their journal. (Jelinek GA, Brown AF. A stand against drug company advertising. Emerg Med Australas 2011; 23: 4-6. CrossRef | PubMed). We published a systematic review of 40 years of scientific literature dealing with the effect of information from pharmaceutical companies on physicians’ prescribing. (Spurling GK, Mansfield PR, Montgomery BD, et al. Information from pharmaceutical companies and the quality, quantity, and cost of physicians’ prescribing: a systematic review. PLoS Med 2010; 7: e1000352. CrossRef | PubMed).

‘Some studies found that journal advertisements were more strongly associated with prescribing than the scientific articles in the same journals; others found advertising associated with less rational prescribing and greater prescribing costs. However, none found associations between exposure to journal advertisements and improved quality of prescribing, reduced cost, or reduced prescribing overall. Our review was published in PLoS Medicine—a top-tier medical journal that does not accept pharmaceutical advertising. The Editors’ summary of our review concluded that ‘… the findings support the case for reforms to reduce negative influence to prescribing from pharmaceutical promotion.’ Is The Lancet prepared to take a stand against drug company advertisements similar to the Journal of Emergency Medicine Australasia? We declare that we have no conflicts of interest. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)61019-2/fulltext

Prescription for a Healthy Journal. PLoS Med 1(1): e22. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0010022. The PLoS Medicine Editors (2004), Virginia Barbour, James Butcher, Barbara Cohen, and Gavin Yamey. 19.10.2004. 

‘We have decided not to be part of the cycle of dependency that has formed between journals and the pharmaceutical industry, an industry that focuses overwhelmingly on the most profitable drugs, thus sidelining many of the world’s health problems. Medical journals have allowed their interests to become aligned with those of the pharmaceutical industry by printing advertisements for drugs, publishing trials designed by drug companies’ marketing departments, and making profits on reprints used as marketing tools.

‘PLoS Medicine will not accept advertisements for pharmaceutical products or medical devices. Our open-access license allows free distribution of articles, so PLoS cannot benefit from exclusive reprint sales. And we consider as the lowest priority for publication papers that are simply aimed at increasing a drug’s market share without obvious benefit to patients. We will aim to have the highest levels of transparency in our published papers. We require authors to tell us of any possible competing interests; we in turn will tell readers about them. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0010022

See ‘…it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published…‘

See The Whole Truth? Meta-Analysis of Reboxetine Trials Calls Into Question Veracity of All Industry-Sponsored Research

See Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

See Science for Sale: Protect Yourself From Medical Research Deception

See British Medical Journal – now only 11% of NHS Treatments Backed by Evidence (was 13%)

See Big Pharma researcher admits to faking dozens of research studies

See CAM deaths 0 Iatrogenic deaths 999,936 annually

See Big Pharma Bias at Harvard Medical School

See Andrew Wakefield demands retraction from BMJ after documents prove innocence from allegations of vaccine autism data fraud

See Reporting of Conflicts of Interest in Meta-analyses of Trials of Pharmacological Treatments. Michelle Roseman, BA; Katherine Milette, BSc; Lisa A. Bero, PhD; James C. Coyne, PhD; Joel Lexchin, MD; Erick H. Turner, MD; Brett D. Thombs, PhD. JAMA. 2011;305(10):1008-1017. doi: 10.1001/jama.2011.257

See http://avilian.co.uk/2011/08/results-of-medication-studies-in-top-medical-journals-may-be-misleading-to-readers/

* So Just how far does the honesty and integrity of ‘honest scientists and sceptics’ actually go? Why are they so quiet about these abuses? Read on and wonder!!! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-ullman/disinformation-homeopathy_b_969627.html Disinformation on Homeopathy: Two Leading Sources by Dana Ullman in The Huffington Post 10.3.2011

‘… Prior to actually conducting this research, the researcher wrote me saying, “Without agreement by all participants on the manner of how things were done, the outcome of the experimentation is indeed virtually meaningless.” And yet, he and the “20/20″ team continued to conduct this junk science experiment with an outcome that indeed was meaningless…. It is further confusing that the “Amazing” James Randi or any of his many followers never commented about the quality of this study, even though they are known to ridicule virtually any and every study that has had a positive result from a homeopathic medicine. It certainly makes sense for a magician to want to expose frauds and charlatans. And yet, if Randi was truly serious about exposing frauds and charlatans, it is quite curious that he has chosen to go after alternative medicine rather than Big Pharma and Big Medicine when there are many more egregious frauds that occur regularly and with much greater impact on society….’ Continue reading if you dare…

FOR HOMEOPATHY: A PRACTICING PHYSICIAN’S PERSPECTIVE by Richard Moskowitz, M. D.

I am writing in response to “Against Homeopathy: a Utilitarian Perspective,”¹ by Kevin Smith, Ph. D., whom I commend for the clarity of his writing and the thoroughness of his logic.   I suppose I should also derive some comfort from the fact that, contrary to the advice he gives to his readers, he takes homeopathy at least seriously enough to go to such trouble to denounce it.

Long familiar to every homeopath, his main argument that homeopathic remedies are nothing but placebos was already current in Hahnemann’s time, decades before Oliver Wendell Holmes made it famous 150 years ago,² and has since been incorporated into the conventional wisdom.   When I was in medical school, the term “homeopathic dose” was used almost affectionately to signify an amount of medicine far too small to have any noticeable effect; and even today, as various modalities of alternative and complementary medicine enter the mainstream, and many American physicians aspire to broaden their outlook in order to accommodate them, most would probably still agree with Dr. Smith, at least in private, that homeopathy defies common sense, ordinary logic, and some basic laws of chemistry.

Indeed, I often feel a bit uncomfortable with patients who swllow the whole package without any hesitation or skepticism, as if they don’t really grasp the implications of what I’m asking of them.  For Hahnemann’s Law of Similars, Similia similibus curentur, “Let likes be cured by likes,” the fundamental principle of homeopathy, is still far from intuitively obvious, even to those of us who use it every day, and remains essentially a postulate, by definition not amenable to conclusive proof or disproof, as a scientific hypothesis must be.  Nor has anyone ever satisfactorily explained how medicines diluted beyond the level of Avogadro’s number could possibly have any effect on a patient, let alone a curative one.

But the mere fact that homeopathy is based on a mystery as yet unexplained by the science we have now is by no means sufficient to prove that it is a nullity, a fake, and therefore a false belief, indeed a delusion, on the part of anyone who takes it seriously enough even to entertain the possibility that there might just be something to it.  It almost embarrasses me to have to say that Dr. Smith’s entire argument boils down to one defective syllogism, that because homeopathy can’t work, it therefore doesn’t work.

Once that premise is accepted, to be sure, his reasoning seems persuasive.   For if it could be shown that the homeopathic phenomenon does not exist, that medicines do not in fact have the power to elicit or provoke the same symptoms that they help to cure, and that remedies diluted beyond the level of Avogadro’s number are simply inert and have no effect whatsoever on any living system, then he would be entirely right to insist that such beliefs are utterly groundless, that those who persist in them are delusional, and that public funds should not be provided for the medical care of indigent people based on them, or even for further research as to their efficacy, since more than enough would already have been carried out to disprove the need or value of proceeding any further along this path.  As a final flourish, as if all that were not enough, he concludes that homeopathy is not only ineffective, but indeed immoral, according to the utilitarian standard of doing the greatest good for the greatest number, mainly to the extent that it dissuades people from seeking the kind of heavy artillery that really does work.

Such a virtuoso display of logical reasoning might have been more persuasive had he not named as authorities on the subject the likes of Wallace Sampson³ and Stephen Barrett,⁴ professional “quackbusters” who have made discrediting homeopathy their life’s work, and who automatically offer the most damning possible interpretations of everything pertaining to it.  Proudly acknowledging Prof. Sampson as his main inspiration and source of information,⁵ and basking in the absurdity of infinitesimals, he sheds all pretense at even-handedness, making quick work of the alleged benefits of the method, and deducing a number of serious faults ex cathedra without any knowledge of or interest in such practical details as how the interview is conducted, how the various possible reactions to the remedy are identified and followed, and so forth.

In any case, all his excellent reasoning goes for naught, because the postulate that it all depends on, the common assumption that the remedies are nothing but blanks, turns out to be simply and demonstrably false.  The basic claim of the Law of Similars, the phenomenon of drugs causing the same symptoms that they are designed to relieve, is familiar even in allopathic medicine, where “paradoxical” effects, such as antihypertensives raising blood pressure, antidepressants making depression worse to the point of suicide, and so on, are commonplace and well-documented in standard reference texts like the Physicians’ Desk Reference,⁶ just not proclaimed as a general rule.

As for those absurdly infinitesimal doses, experiments have repeatedly shown that highly diluted remedies are capable of both stimulating and inhibiting colony growth in bacterial cultures,⁷in vitro enzymatic activity in tissue culture and cell-free extracts,⁸ seed germination and growth in various plant species,⁹ and other global properties of living organisms.¹⁰ While such unambiguous results are much more difficult to attain with human subjects in clinical situations, it is nevertheless irrefutably clear that highly diluted homeopathic preparations are capable of significant biological activity.

No matter what the correct explanation of these mysteries may prove to be, it is also undeniably true that dedicated physicians have continued to follow the same principles and to practice medicine on the basis of them for more than two hundred years, and now do so on every continent and in most countries of the world.  In the face of determined opposition and the sacrifice of more prominent and lucrative careers for its sake, such a long period of continuous growth and development cannot be satisfactorily accounted for as a delusion, as Dr. Smith and the other quackbusters assume.  At the very least, the fact that homeopathy has continued to attract licensed doctors from all over the world at a time when allopathic medicine has risen to become the dominant model of health care indicates that there must be something interesting and valuable about it.  That it has even managed to survive intact for so long and under such adversity not only represents a major historic achievement, but indeed argues persuasively for the validity of the Law of Similars, the efficacy of Hahnemann’s infinitesimal doses, and the authenticity of the homeopathic phenomenon itself.

I have practiced general and family medicine for 44 years.  No matter what type of treatment we prefer to use, all physicians are obliged to know what Dr. Smith seems to have overlooked, that our reputation and livelihood depend on the extent to which our patients are benefited by our efforts on their behalf.  For the past 37 years, I have treated mine with homeopathic remedies more or less exclusively, not because I believe that pharmaceutical drugs have no value:  I often refer patients whom I have not been able to help to my colleagues who offer such treatment, and am certainly grateful for what they do.  I have chosen to practice homeopathy in part because I prefer to try a gentler and safer approach first, whenever possible, but mainly because matching the treatment to the individuality of the patient allows and encourages a deeper and more comprehensive level of healing than is possible with drugs that merely counteract a specific symptom or correct a particular abnormality by applying superior chemical force at that strategic point.

I will give a few examples from the early years of my practice.  The first was an eight-pound baby girl who was born covered with thick meconium, took one gasp, and then breathed no more.  Brisk suctioning produced only more of the same.  At this point the child lay limp, white, and motionless, with a heartbeat of 40 per minute, responding feebly to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but unable to breathe on her own.   I put a few tiny granules of Arsenicum album 200C on her tongue,¹¹ and almost instantaneously she awoke with a jolt, crying and flailing, her heart pounding at 140 per minute, her skin glowing pink with the flame of new life.  The whole evolution took no more than a few seconds.  After a night in the hospital to be on the safe side, mother and baby went home in the morning with no outward sign that anything untoward had happened.  Experiences like these are imprinted for life in every practitioner’s mind.¹²

Of course, I am well aware that this could have happened spontaneously without any remedies at all, for the child was well-formed and appeared normal in every other respect; and anyway, it was just one patient, a mere “anecdote,” utterly without statistical significance.  But all of us who were present, including my nurse and the baby’s mother and father, and indeed I daresay the baby herself, by now fully-grown and undoubtedly steeped in the legend of her birth, know as surely as we can know anything on this earth that the conjunction of the infinitesimal dose and her abrupt awakening was no mere coincidence.

My second case was that of a 34-year-old R. N. who had been plagued with severe endometriosis since her teens.  Already a veteran of four surgeries to remove large blood-filled cysts from her bladder and pelvic organs, and several courses of male hormones to suppress the condition, she came seeking only to restore her menstrual cycle, having long since abandoned any hopes of childbearing.  While intensely painful at first, her periods had become “dead,” dark-brown, and scanty from so many years of surgery and hormonal treatments in the past.

After a few remedies, her menstrual flow became fuller and richer, and within six months she was pregnant.  By the next time I next saw her, for a different ailment eight years later, she had had two healthy children after uncomplicated pregnancies and normal vaginal births, and had remained in good health ever since.¹³ While no one can attribute such an outcome to a homeopathic remedy or any other agency in precise, linear fashion, my patient has never stopped thanking me for it, which is reason enough to be thankful for a process that by its very nature acts catalytically and persuasively rather than by force or compulsion.

Still less can these happy endings be imputed to any unusual skill of mine, since they are entirely comparable to what every competent prescriber has seen or could easily duplicate, and I could just as well have cited other patients whose conditions were far from hopeless, who believed in the remedies and in me, but whom I was nevertheless unable to help.

As Dr. Smith is at pains to insist, homeopathic remedies are safe, economical, simple to use, and gentle in their action, with notably few serious or prolonged ill effects.  What he does not say and clearly does not know is that they are also capable of acting thoroughly, deeply, and for a very long time, requiring only infrequent repetition of the dose, and posing minimal risks of chronic dependence.  Patients, friends, and loved ones alike often notice a general improvement in vitality and a sense of well-being, such that recurrence seems less frightening and indeed less likely.

To be sure, it is far from a panacea for all ills.   Homeopathy is a difficult and exacting art, and even after years of study and practice a skilled prescriber may need to try several remedies before obvious benefit is obtained, while in other cases, despite the most devoted efforts, there is little or no benefit at all.  But if the ultradilute remedies can be seen to have worked often and well enough to sustain me in a general practice for 37 years, like so many others over the past two centuries, that is surely enough to refute Dr. Smith’s blanket assertions that they are no treatment at all.  Much as I’m flattered by his contention that we heal our patients solely by some kind of magic or shamanic spell that we cast over them unawares, my experience suggests that the “placebo effect,” that starved and tattered remnant of the innate self-healing capacity, is an essential and inseparable component of all healing, even with pharmaceuticals, but certainly not the whole of it.

For allopathic drugs, the current standard of their effectiveness is the Random Controlled Trial, in which the subjects are randomized into two groups, one receiving the drug, the other only a placebo or inert imitation, with both patients and doctors blinded as to who gets which.  In these experiments, the causal power of any drug against a particular symptom or abnormality equals the extent to which patients actually taking it outperform their placebo controls; and rather than an optimal qualitative fit with the illness of each patient as a whole, as homeopaths aspire to, the best drugs and the ones most diligently sought after are simply the most potent ones, those with the most chemical power to compel the organism to function in whatever ways the profession decrees that they should.

Modern physicians are equipped with the latest chemical weapons to attack a vast array of diseases and abnormalities as if they were enemies on a battlefield: antibiotics to kill bacteria, antihypertensives to lower the blood pressure, anticonvulsants to control seizure activity, antimetabolites to destroy cancer cells, antihistamines to suppress the allergic response, and so forth, all developed to act as selectively as possible, with little or no regard for the individuality of the patient.  In advanced cases, such drugs may indeed save life, give miraculous relief, buy valuable time, or do the best that can be done under adverse or extreme circumstances.

Leaving aside the bottom-line question, whether most patients taking such drugs will actually feel better, live longer, and suffer fewer complications as a result of taking them, I will simply stipulate what is not always true in practice, that many of the drugs in common use do indeed have the power to accomplish at least some of what we ask and expect of them, in the hope that these more subjective and personal goals will eventually follow.   But the high and often exorbitant price that we pay for such seemingly precise and overriding causal power is threefold.

First, when a drug really works to suppress or counteract the target symptom or abnormality, the condition is likely to reappear with equal or greater intensity as soon as the drug wears off.  Using chemicals to force the issue, rather than assist whatever self-healing processes are already under way, thus automatically poses the substantial risk of needing to continue using them for long periods of time, if not indefinitely.

Second, targeting drug treatment to abstract pathological “entities” without also rebalancing the energy dysfunction of the patient as an integrated whole regularly leads to polypharmacy, the need for still other drugs to correct or control as many other identifiable diseases and abnormalities as will appear in the future.

Third, drugs powerful enough to do what we expect them to do are also capable of acting coercively on various other physiological functions, even though these undesirable “side effects” typically vary quite a lot from patient to patient, according to their unique tendencies and predispositions, and will therefore be somewhat more difficult to attribute unequivocally to the action of the drug.

The ubiquity and relative invisibility of such adverse reactions make it easier to understand why homeopathy has become so popular with patients either caught in the center or having fled to the periphery of the medical system, yet so easily dismissed by those who administer that system as ineffective, impossible, or unworthy of serious study.  In pointed contrast to allopathic drugs, which are developed solely for their power to force the organism to do what it has no natural inclination to do, homeopathy seeks rather to assist and enhance the innate self-healing capacity that is synonymous with life, continually at work in every patient, and encompasses precisely the same individualizing tendencies, sensitivities, and predispositions which as physicians we are conditioned to ignore in our diagnoses, outperform in our research, and override in our treatment.

That is also the reason why, even when homeopathic remedies do act curatively, the results are simply dismissed or written off as isolated cases, perhaps “miraculous” at times, but in any case merely “anecdotal evidence” without scientific import, and therefore always located on the placebo side of the ledger, because medical science as presently constituted restricts the term “cause” to those interventions that force things to happen, and measures that power against the idiomatic tendency of patients to recover without it.

Even in the case of well-designed RCT’s that demonstrate a statistically significant benefit from homeopathic treatment, the result still “feels” unscientific and unpersuasive to most people, simply because no chemical force was exerted and no resistance had to be overcome, while to trained scientists its looser interpretation of causality and its major emphasis on subjective and individual variables similarly disqualify it from serious consideration as a force potent, measurable, and consistent enough to count as “hard science.”

So the standard argument that homeopathic remedies are merely placebos actually cuts both ways.  To begin with, it’s simply wrong, as we saw. From my own experience and that of my colleagues, I would add that homeopathic treatment has an impressive track record in the treatment of animals, newborn babies, and comatose patients, in whom the influence of suggestion is universally agreed to be negligible.  In addition, if giving placebo or natural remedies or nothing at all can achieve clinical results better than or even comparable to those obtainable with suppressive drugs or crippling surgery, who of sound mind would not prefer the cheaper, gentler, and safer alternative, at least to begin with?  Finally, when homeopathic remedies do act curatively, our patients rightly feel that they have healed themselves, and may sometimes wonder if they might have done so without our help.  To my mind, that “delicious quandary” is no cause for complaint or ridicule, since I can imagine no higher compliment to pay to a medicine than that its action cannot be distinguished from a gentle, spontaneous, and long-lasting cure requiring no further treatment.

Indeed, I submit that the irony lies wholly on the other side, given that this optimal response is relegated to the placebo side of the equation, while pharmaceutical drugs are valued and considered effective only to the extent that they can overpower the physiology of as many patients and for as long a time as possible.  I find it absurd and contemptible to boast of standards that prize brute force over elegance of fit, and subordinate healing the sick to manipulating their life functions artificially, whether for the sake of science, ambition, mastery over nature, or some equally abstract, hypothetical goal that we are obliged to take on faith.

That is why, for the present at least, I am thankful that our cures tend to remain snugly ensconced on the placebo side of things, because until we develop a kinder, more accurate, and inclusive model of causality, and a workable notion of the unified life energy of the patient as a whole, that is precisely where they belong.  What the nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer once told a group of psychologists seems even more apposite for the medical community as a whole:

We inherited at the beginning of the Twentieth Century a notion of the physical world as a causal one, in which every event could be accounted for if we were ingenious, a world characterized by number, where everything interesting could be measured, and anything that went on could be broken down and analyzed. This extremely rigid picture left out a great deal of common sense which we can now understand with a complete lack of ambiguity and phenomenal technical success.

One [such idea] is that the world is not completely determinate.  There are technical predictions you can make about it, but they are purely statistical.  Every event has in it the nature of a surprise, a miracle, or something you could not figure out.  Every pair of observations taking the form “we know this and can predict that” is global    and cannot be broken down.  Every atomic event is individual: it is not in its essentials reproducible.¹⁴

For all of these reasons, rather than competing with the placebo effect in order to defeat it, I believe that the highest goal of medicinal treatment, whether homeopathic or otherwise, is instead to assist and indeed to maximize it, by doing everything possible to promote healing in a more global sense, not merely to correct abnormalities, and by cultivating a more intimate knowledge of our patients, instead of ignoring, circumventing, or overriding what they have to teach us.   While certainly admiring the ingenuity and dedication of my colleagues who conduct RCT’s to try to demonstrate the effectiveness of homeopathic treatment in the approved manner of established biomedical science, I would like to propose a very different model for clinical research, based on self-healing, which to my way of thinking would be more suitable for allopathic medicine as well:

1) Nobody is blinded: all subjects know whether they are receiving homeopathic or allopathic treatment, having chosen it beforehand precisely because of their interest, belief, or faith in it.

2) Nobody gets placebo: everyone gets the treatment they select, while the doctors giving it out are matched to them by their beliefs, and encouraged to use prayer, suggestion, exhortation, shamanic incantation, or whatever they or their subjects believe will most effectively assist them on their healing path.  In other words, each group will serve as the control of the other.

3) Using the totality of signs and symptoms over time, including both subjective and objective criteria, and reports of family, friends, teachers, employers, etc., both homeopathic and allopathic subjects will be followed for a period of months or years, depending on the condition, and extending beyond the acute phase to include the chronic dimension.  Both groups will then be evaluated as to how well or badly they are measuring up in their own lives, by their own standards and those of their community, and also with respect to appropriate clinical and pathological criteria.

4) Qualified judges not exclusively or doctrinally committed to either point of view will then ascertain which form of treatment proves more beneficial in which respects, and will publish the results in a friendly, fair, and unbiased journal of good repute, to be selected and agreed upon in advance.¹⁵

For myself, and my colleagues who also practice it, homeopathy has stood the test of time as a philosophy, a coherent, logical system of thought, derived from the self-evident unity of the life force, a mere truism, and the “Law of Similars,” a bold postulate, neither of which follows logically from anything else, or is therefore subject to experimental proof or disproof, like ordinary scientific hypotheses, as in Bertrand Russell’s whimsical definition:

. . . the point of philosophy is to start with something so obvious as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.¹⁶

I freely admit, as I think even Dr. Smith would heartily agree, that homeopathy fits this description perfectly.  Yet the authenticity of the homeopathic phenomenon, the enduring relevance of the point of view it offers, and the obvious effectiveness of minute doses when competently used, all imply the existence of a bioenergetic science that is still in its infancy, and that will undoubtedly add to the atomic theory of matter and the laws of chemistry as we know them, just as Dr. Smith has foretold, a further set of rules, laws, hypotheses, and predictions as it develops in the future.   Homeopathy thus also looks beyond itself, to a more open and inclusive conceptual scheme that can accommodate both points of view, as well as perhaps others as yet unknown to us.  Helping to envision, identify, and elaborate this new synthesis is therefore our highest mission, which we share with like-minded physicians and healers of all persuasions and in every part of the world.

NOTES.

1.  Smith, K., “Against Homeopathy — A Utilitarian Perspective,” Bioethics, 14 February 2011, pp. 1-12.

2.  Holmes, O. W., “Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions,” 1847, included in Medical Essays, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1895, pp. 1-102, passim.

3.  Cf. Sampson, W., The Braid of Alternative Medicine, Prometheus, New York, pp. 21-31, and “Homeopathy Does Not Work,” Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 1:48-52, 1995.  Cf. the Health Care Reality Check website, www.hcrc.org: “Dr. Sampson is Professor of Medicine (Emeritus) at Stanford, Editor-in-Chief of  Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, and teaches about unscientific and aberrant medical claims.  He sits on the Board of Directors of the National Council Against Health Fraud, and is affiliated with other organizations that protect consumers from bogus healthcare claims and products.”

4.  Cf. Barrett, S.,”Homeopathy’s ‘Law of Similars’ ” and “Homeopathy’s ‘Law of Infinitesimals,’ ” Homeowatch Home Page, www.homeowatch.org, posted March 20, 2002; and “Homeopathy: the Ultimate Fake,” Quackwatch Home Page, www.quackwatch.org, revised August 23, 2009.

5.  Smith, op. cit., p. 12, Acknowledgement: “The author would like to thank Wallace Sampson, M. D., for valuable comments and criticism.”

6.  Physicians Desk Reference, 63rd Edition, 2009, Montvale, NJ. Cf., for example, ”Catapres, Overdosage,” p. 842: “Hypertension may develop early . . .”; and “Prozac, Warnings: Clinical Worsening and Suicide Risk,“ p. 1854: “Patients with major depressive disorder may experience worsening of their depression and/or the emergence of suicidal ideation and behavior . . .”; etpassim.

7.   Cf., for example, Noiret, P., “Activity of several dilutions of copper sulfate (Cuprum sulph.) in different microbial species,” Proceedings of 31st Congress, International League of Homeopathic Physicians, Athens, 1976, pp. 137-147; and Brack, A., et al., ”Effect of ultra-high dilutions of 3,5-dichlorophenol on luminescence of the bacterium Vibrio fischeri, in Biochim. et Biophys. Acta 1621:253-260.

8.   Cf., for example, Davenas, E., et al., “Effect on mouse peritoneal macrophages of orally- administered, very high dilutions of Silica,” in European Journal of Pharmacology 135: 313-319; Petit, C., “Effect of homeopathic dilutions on subcellular enzymatic activity,” Human Toxicology8:125-129; and Shabir, S., et al., “Effect of homeopathic drugs on in vitro activity of alpha-amylase from human saliva,” Indian Journal of Homeopathic Medicine31:93-98.

9.   Betti, L., et al., “Effect of high dilutions of Arsenicum album on wheat seedlings from seeds poisoned with the same substance,” British Homeopathic Journal86:86-89, 1997; and Binder, M., et al., “Effects of Arsenicum album 45X on wheat seedling growth,” Forschende Komplementärmedizin und Klassische Naturheilkunde12: 284-291.

10.   Banerjee, P., “Comparative efficacy of two dilutions of Arsenicum album to ameliorate toxicity by repeated sublethal injections of arsenious trioxide in mice,” Pathobiology75:156, 2008; Fisher, P., “The influence of the homeopathic remedy Plumbum metallicum on the excretion kinetics of lead in the rat,” Human Toxicology 6:321, 1987; and Doutremepuich, C., et al., “Aspirin at ultra-low dosage in healthy volunteers: effects on bleeding time, platelet aggregation, and coagulation, Hemostasis 20:99-105.

11.   The 200C, or 200th centesimal dilution, means a dilution on a scale of 1:100, carried out 200 times, for a concentration on the order of 10^-400!

12.   Cited in Moskowitz, R., Resonance: the Homeopathic Point of View, Xlibris, Philadelphia, 2001, pp. 14-15.

13.   Ibid., p. 15.

14.   Oppenheimer, J. R., “Analogy in Science,” The American Psychologist2:134, March 1956.

15.   Moskowitz,  op. cit., p. 342.

16.   Russell, B., “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” in Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901-1950, Allen & Unwin, London, 1968, p. 193.

 

Homeopathy and the New Fundamentalism: a critique of the critics by Lionel Migrom on http://www.similima.com/2008:

ABSTRACT

Though in use for over 200 years, and still benefiting millions of people world-wide today, homeopathy is currently under continuous attacks for being ‘unscientific’. The reasons for this can be understood in terms of what might be called a ‘New Fundamentalism’, emanating particularly but not exclusively from within biomedicine, and supported in some sections of the media. Possible reasons for this are discussed.

New Fundamentalism’s hallmarks include the denial of evidence for the efficacy of any therapeutic modality that cannot be consistently ‘proven’ using double-blind randomised controlled trials. It excludes explanations of homeopathy’s efficacy; ignores, excoriates, or considers current research data supporting those explanations incomprehensible, particularly from outside biomedicine: it is also not averse to using experimental bias, hear-say, and innuendo in order to discredit homeopathy. Thus, New Fundamentalism is itself unscientific.

This may have consequences in the future for how practitioners, researchers, and patients of homeopathy/CAMs engage and negotiate with primary healthcare systems. 

INTRODUCTION

Acts of terrorism aside, in a pluralistic society intolerance can work far more insidiously on an intellectual level, by stifling and ultimately removing access to alternative forms of knowledge. For example, the evidence-based discourse that some think has ‘colonised’ much of contemporary conventional medicine,¹ could be said to be based on a ‘naïve inductivist’ scientific paradigm² (i.e., that purely objective observations can be made which lead to irrefutable facts: that generalisations can be induced from these facts; and that scientific laws and theories result from these inductions) which ideologically excludes alternative therapies (such as homeopathy), and their discourses. The discourse of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) has recently been compared to a ‘fascist’ structure for its active intolerance of pluralism in healthcare systems.¹

As such; over-zealous interpretation of the principles of EBM could be said to promote an attitude that demeans and attempts to disempower practitioners and patients of homeopathy/CAMs; ultimately seeking to deprive millions of people of these therapeutic choices because they are considered ‘unscientific’. The uglier side of this attitude is displayed on Internet web-sites virtually on a daily basis.

An examination of such sceptical web sites reveals a high level of emotive subjectivity directed against CAMs, particularly homeopathy. Given the warnings these sites display, about not tolerating offensive language, it is remarkable that what can only described as abuse masquerading as debate, is allowed onto a widely-used communication medium: easier, perhaps, to ignore these websites, and go about one’s business. Unfortunately that would be to bury one’s head in the sand, for it is now appearing in mainstream literature.

Take, for example, the respected and influential UK Sunday newspaper The Observer. One of its columnists, Nick Cohen (ironically, a popular scourge of political correctness in what is essentially a left-wing newspaper) recently had this to say.^3a “….Yet dismissing homeopathy as quackery given by and for the feeble-minded is surprisingly hard. Anti-elitism dominates our society and many feel uncomfortable saying that the six million people who take alternative medicines are foolish – to put the case against them at its kindest. They sincerely believe in phoney remedies and sincerity trumps sense in modern culture.” And, “(homeopathy’s) effects can be positively deadly”, a sentiment repeated recently in the Lancet.³

All this ignores conventional medicine’s own highly questionable safety record, something that has recently come under scrutiny from the UK’s House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. Thus, it concluded that in 2006 alone and including fatalities, at least 2.68 million people were harmed by conventional medical intervention: that represents a staggering 4.5% of the UK population.⁴

Clearly, homeopathy is being deliberately misrepresented when it is referred to as ‘deadly’, but is now considered fair game; to be lambasted and lumped together with religion and creationism, etc: a point of view that uncritically condones a Procrustean version of scientific rationality. From whence does it spring?

THE NEW FUNDAMENTALISM

In the UK, attacks on homeopathy/CAM as non-valid therapeutic procedures emanate mainly from individuals such as Edzard Ernst (oddly, the UK’s first professor of CAM at the University of Exeter), Oxford academic and author Richard Dawkins, pharmacologist David Colquhoun, and some emeritus medical professors and doctors (including oncologist Michael Baum, and gerontologist and philosopher Raymond Tallis) who recently wrote to the Times newspaper urging health authorities to stop supporting ‘unproven’ therapies like homeopathy/CAMs.⁵

As well as the recently formed organisation Sense About Science, they and those like them around the world, I call the ‘New Fundamentalists’.  It is perhaps only fair to say at this point that not all scientists who value the essentially scientific principles behind EBM are ‘New Fundamentalists’; equally not all those who defend homeopathy/CAMs do so within a spirit of scientific enquiry.

New Fundamentalists tend to represent themselves as the last bastions of reason, against a perceived tide of irrational belief in, among other things, ‘quack’ medicines. Their certainty that all the evidence indicates homeopathy doesn’t work and, in fact, is positively deadly, leads them to ignore or condemn out of hand anything which contradicts their beliefs. And behind them, like some Eminence Gris, is the financial reach of the globalised pharmaceutical industry.

In the UK, the New Fundamentalists’ raison d’être is to ensure the total exclusion from the National Health Service of all what they consier to be ‘quack’ therapies, and to bring about the closure of the five state-funded homeopathic hospitals, regardless of the many who have and continue to benefit from them.⁵ Subsequently, there have indeed been reductions in NHS referrals to homeopathy, and the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital is currently under threat of closure.

Though no more than a clash of paradigms, and in the history of science nothing new; what marks the present attacks on homeopathy/CAMs as different is that we now live in an age of easily accessible mass communication. And the New Fundamentalists are helped in propagating their ‘quack-busting’ message by many in the media, some of whom share their beliefs.

SCIENCE, EDUCATION, AND DETERMINISM

Journalism was not always specialised. So any journalist interested in the subject or commissioned to do so, wrote about science. For, the fact is, a good investigative reporter can usually turn their hands to anything and write balanced entertaining copy. But over the last couple of decades this situation has changed.

Increasingly, one finds journalists and writers who are ex-science graduates and post graduates, many with a bio-medical sciences training.⁶ Either they became bored with the practice of science and sought something new, or they could not find long-term gainful employment in their chosen disciplines (I exclude here career scientists who write in order to popularise their subject).

Some universities now offer post-graduate conversion courses in science communication. In addition, scientists have realised their subjects are perhaps not as well understood as they would like by the general public who, through their taxes, pay for state-sponsored scientific research. This has led to a growing ‘industry’ in the public understanding of science.

And there is nothing wrong with that per se. Ideally in any democratic society, the public should be well informed and able to engage with the big scientific and ethical questions of the day, e.g., climate change and stem-cell research. Then through the democratic process they can have their input into political debate concerning the choices that need to be made.

Education has a vital role to play here, but in the last 20 years, there has been serious dumbing-down of school science curricula, and evidence that in the developed world, children are increasingly being turned off science.⁷ This may be partly due to fears of real hands-on and engaging curiosity-driven experience – chemistry experiments in particular, can be dangerous, and parents litigious – and that perhaps in their early teens, children tend to be more interested in other things (including each other) than science.

There are also the effects on education of what some consider is a Post-Modernist anti-elitism,³ part of whose agenda has been to deconstruct the assumed supremacy of scientific ‘truth’ over other forms of discourse.⁸ New Fundamentalists might argue this attitude is at least partly to blame for the current disenchantment with science in the developed world.

Thus instead of being humanity’s crowning achievement or indeed its ‘saviour’, as science was perceived to be back in the 1950’s, it could be argued that science has become a slave to ‘the military-industrial complex’, globalised (e.g., pharmaceutical) profit, and a corporate arrogance that, for example, regards genes as nothing more than sets of privatisable molecular ‘Lego®’ bricks. Between boredom, raging hormones, and Post-Modernism, is it any wonder the kids are turned off science?

So, there is a felt need for more and better science communication and qualified communicators. However, in a media age where sound-bites rule, science has to compete for time and space in a crowded and increasingly commercialised media market place. Inevitably, this leads to over-simplification of complex scientific issues. Thus, though perhaps a readily accessible and media-friendly version of science, the New Fundamentalists’ naïve inductivism² had its limitations pointed out in the 1950’s by Karl Popper,⁹ not to mention being undermined by Post-Modernism⁸ and other philosophical movements.

In all this, it is perhaps easily forgotten that science is not a homogeneous entity, and that its separate disciplines do not all share the same intellectual depth and rigour. For example, compare the largely ‘belt and braces’ empirical approach of bio-medicine (which in an A&E setting saves lives, but is not so effective in treating chronic conditions), with the intellectual subtlety and sophistication of quantum physics. And through concepts such as non-locality and entanglement, the latter offers a worldview profoundly at odds with the determinism embedded in Western culture since the Enlightenment.

The consequences of the quantum worldview – that there is a subtle, indissoluble link between observer and observed, such that the universe cannot always be considered objectively separate from us – is however an ontological and for some, disturbing conundrum even within the academic teaching of the subject.¹⁰

It is simply referred to as ‘quantum weirdness’;¹¹a telling phrase indicating how difficult the quantum world-view is to understand within the confines of deterministic Western thinking.

Yet this subtle connection between observer and observed has long been recognised in the social, anthropological, and psychological sciences.¹² It could well be that it has a much more important role to play in the healing process than is currently admitted to in conventional medicine: certainly it is beginning to inform non-deterministic explanations and interpretations of how homeopathy/CAMs might work.¹³

TRIALS, TRIBULATIONS, AND THE MEMORY OF WATER

The combination of New Fundamentalism with some science writers’ natural desire to inform and educate the public, can provoke in them a crusading zeal to rid the world of unreason, thoughtless belief, and anything that cannot readily be proved and explained by ‘black and white’ deterministic science, e.g., homeopathy/CAMs. Unfortunately, such an attitude does not accommodate ‘grey’ very well: so, it defaults to black in order to establish ‘the truth’.

Take, for example, that ‘gold standard’ of research quality, the double-blind randomised controlled trial (DBRCT). Against placebo, it provides at best only equivocal evidence of homeopathy’s efficacy; some trials proving positive, while others return negative results.

To a New Fundamentalist, such inconclusiveness is intolerable (especially as homeopathy appears to contradict the bio-molecular paradigm of conventional medicine); the negative trial data are taken as ‘true’, positive trial data discounted, and so homeopathy is considered as being no better than placebo, i.e., it does not work. Yet around the world, millions of people have benefited, and continue to benefit from homeopathy. This is usually discounted as mass delusion, the workings of the placebo effect, or self-hypnosis.

The assumption here is that the DBRCT is the best research tool with which to establish the evidence base of any therapy. Indeed, it could be argued that the DBRCT is predicated more on Popperian principles of falsifiability, than on naïve inductivism. However, deconstructing the DBRCT’s rationale reveals that it imposes on any therapeutic procedure an implicit and simplistic division of therapy from context. This turns out to be nothing more than an arithmetic convenience which allows the measurements made, statistics gathered, and inferences drawn from a trial, ultimately to have significance within a deterministic framework.

It has been demonstrated¹⁴ and explained (by analogy with quantum theory’s notion of wave-function collapse during observation),¹⁵ that this separation can seriously interfere with homeopathy/CAMs’ therapeutic effects. However, such an explanation of the inconclusiveness of DBRCTs of homeopathy/CAMs has recently been dismissed by New Fundamentalists as ‘quantum mysticism’.¹⁶

What tends to be forgotten by those who promote an over-zealous adherence to the DBRCT as the ‘gold standard’ for testing any therapy’s efficacy is that no therapeutic modality, conventional medicine included, is ever practiced in real life according to the DBRCT’s procedural separation of therapy and context. As a result, the evidence-based movement’s increasing hold on the health sciences is now being challenged (even from within conventional medicine), for its exclusion of alternative therapeutic discourses.^{1, 12}

Explanations of how homeopathic remedies might work, e.g., the Memory of Water effect,¹⁷ are similarly discounted,¹⁸ regardless of mounting evidence suggesting that memory effects may indeed exist.^{19, 20} They can be explained in materials science terms, as homeopathy’s succusive dilution process inducing observable alterations to the dynamic supra-molecular structure of liquid water.^{20, 21} Yet, cancer physician Stephen Sagar, for example, has dismissed the Memory of Water hypothesis as a ‘belief in undetected sub-atomic (my italics) fields’.¹⁸ Far from delivering the intended coup de grace to the Memory of Water and homeopathy, the use of the term ‘sub-stomic’ might be seen as inappropriate when describing what is in essence current research in molecular physics, materials science, and chemistry.

This attitude could partly explain why there is so little published research on how cellular water memory effects might lead to cure of the whole patient:²² it would require much closer collaboration and understanding between biomedical and physical scientists than currently exists, assuming it ever were to achieve proper levels of funding.

INNUENDOES AND BAD SCIENCE

Besides ignoring or not understanding the latest research, New Fundamentalists can sometimes employ insinuation and innuendo in order to discredit homeopathy. For example, Edzard Ernst reported recently that trials of homeopathy performed by the Nazis (which had been considered ‘lost’) were so “wholly and devastatingly negative”, German homeopaths have covered it up ever since.²³

Apart from the ethical problems involved in quoting uncritically the results of Nazi research (especially as conventional medicine is well-known to have benefited from the Nazis’ medical ‘experiments’),^{24, 25} Ernst’s source material has proved to be highly suspect..^27-30 At best, Ernst might be considered to be acting unethically and unscientifically by endorsing essentially 60-year-old hearsay as a condemnation of homeopathy.

Though exposing every case like this is no doubt necessary (if only to bolster morale!), ultimately this is a reactive strategy and doesn’t advance the cause of homeopathy/CAMs very far. Just like the sound-bite or the attention-grabbing headline, it is the initial impression that sticks, not the more complex retraction buried in the back pages that appears months later.

Perhaps the most famous case of this in point is the by-now (in)famous 2005 Lancet ‘meta-analysis’ by Shang et al.³¹ This managed to conclude that homeopathy is no better than placebo, even though it patently failed to meet any of the generally accepted standards and criteria (e.g., transparency)³² for such meta-analyses, some of which the Lancet itself had laid down.³³

This Lancet meta-analysis appeared during that peculiar late-summer news ‘quiet time’ in the UK media cycle known as the ‘silly season’. As a result, the media descended en masse on this putative ‘end of homeopathy’ story.³⁴ It is perhaps not surprising, that the fact that the Lancet meta-analysis was totally debunked in the literature a few months later by many reputable researchers and scientists,³⁵ went totally unnoticed by the media.

THE ‘JOYS’ OF HERDING CATS

So, we are left with the dilemma of how to address pro-actively the New Fundamentalism. Obviously research on efficacy and possible modes of action of homeopathy/CAMs must continue to be prosecuted, published and promoted. However, it is unlikely in the near term to command the media’s attention in the way New Fundamentalists can. Nevertheless, debating with them should continue because, though a thankless task, it keeps these issues alive and before the public, however one-sided (through media exposure) the debate may appear at times.

But first things first: there is the problem of achieving unity amongst the various CAM professions; a vital pre-requisite for any concerted action. And this is not trivial; homeopathy being a case in point.

From Hahnemann to the present day, its history has been one of such factionalism herding cats might seem a more tempting prospect than getting homeopaths to agree. Apart from homeopathy in the UK apparently having been overtaken by a particularly narrow-minded form of political correctness, the profession itself is fragmented. There are medical homeopaths, classical homeopaths, polypharmacists, homotoxicologists, etc, all with their associated professional organisations, and all incapable of agreeing on a unified way forward. For example, after over six years of increasingly bad-tempered negotiations, homeopathic organisations in the UK finally gave up trying to achieve the modicum of unity necessary for them to combine under a single register. This would have given them at least some modicum of regulatory transparency.

The message of disunity and unprofessionalism this sends out especially to government, plays directly into the hands of the New Fundamentalists and makes it easier for them to isolate and target the CAM professions one at a time. Homeopaths as a group have simply got to wake up and learn to unite among themselves, and with other CAM disciplines. There are however, some encouraging signs going forward.

First, the UK is currently in the throes of modernising its much-admired National Health Service (NHS). Policy makers have realised there is an explosion of interest in CAM both from within and outside the NHS. So, like CAM, primary health care is increasingly being seen as inherently holistic, patient-centred, and multi-professional.³⁶ Add to this that CAMs are low-tech and low-cost, policy makers see them as resonating with the central themes of government health policy. These include a pro-actively health-oriented NHS and informed patient choice of relevant CAM options, as well as conventional health care: in other words, central government policy is moving more towards a model where patients ‘own’ their health and healthcare.

So, by-passing the New Fundamentalists’ insistence on a narrowly-defined deterministic evidence base for homeopathy/CAMs, what the policy-makers are really after in order to properly integrate them into primary healthcare are, a) evidence of cost-effectiveness; b) many real-life working examples of CAM therapies in action; c) proper regulation of CAMs; and d) good clinical governance. Homeopaths and homeopathic organisations need to urgently take note, especially of points c) and d).

Second, and again in the UK, homeopaths are becoming increasingly impatient with the institutionalised torpor of their professional organisations in the face of continued attacks in the media and literature. An organisation has been formed called ‘Homeopathy: Medicine for the 21^st Century’ or HMC21, which is asking satisfied patients to sign a declaration saying homeopathy has worked for them.³⁷ In the very short time since its inception, and with no publicity except a web-site, HMC21 has already gathered thousands of signatures world-wide, and sent a wake-up call to the UK homeopathic community. Ultimately they hope to harvest a quarter of a million signatures by the middle of 2008, and so achieve the critical mass needed to bring public opinion to bear on the problems of saving homeopathy in the NHS, and the state-funded hospitals that provide it. This has been mirrored politically in the UK’s House of Commons recently, where over two hundred MPs across all parties, signed an Early Day Motion to debate the future of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, despite being targeted by sceptics.³⁸

CONCLUSIONS

The continuous attacks on homeopathy/CAMs for being ‘unscientific’, emanating from an informal combination of largely bio-medically-oriented scientists and sections of the media (collectively termed the New Fundamentalists), are themselves unscientific.

Regardless of their lack of compliance to a narrowly-defined version of evidence-based discourse, homeopathy/CAMs are used successfully on a regular basis by millions around the world. In the UK, there will be increasing opportunities for homeopathy/CAMs to make significant contributions to primary healthcare within a modernising more holistic NHS, if they can provide evidence of cost-effectiveness; real-life efficacy; proper regulation; and good clinical governance.

One can only hope it is not too late for the homeopathy/CAM community to unite; for public opinion to be galvanised; and for their combined might to be brought to bear on government and NHS Trusts in order to retain their homeopathy/CAM services. It would be the best possible critique of the New Fundamentalists; and would mark, not as they hope ‘the end of homeopathy’ but as Winston Churchill once said in a different context and a different century, “the end of the beginning”.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In preparing this article, the author gratefully acknowledges the help of Ms Suse Moebius RSHom, and Ms Jane Wilkinson, Senior Research Fellow, University of Westminster.

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FASEB Journal 2006;20:23-28.

20.  a; Samal S, Geckler RE Unexpected solute aggregation in water on dilution. Chem Commun
2001;21:2224-5: b; Rey L. Thermoluminescence of ultra-high dilutions of lithium chloride and
sodium chloride. Physica A 2003;323:67-74: c; Elia V, Niccoli M. New physico-chemical properties
of extremely diluted aqueous solutions. J. Thermal Anal Calorimetry 2004; 75: 815 and references
therein.

21.  For example, see Chaplin M. Water structure and behaviour. Regularly updated online
document www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/. Accessed October 30th 2007.

22.  Roy R, Tiller WA, Bell I, Hoover MR. The structure of liquid water; novel insights from
materials research; potential relevance for homeopathy. Mat Res Innovat 2005;9:559-576.

23.  a; Ernst E. The truth about homeopathy. Br J Clin Pharmacol, doi:10,1111/j.1365-2125.2007.03007x:
b; Milgrom LR and Moebius S. Is using Nazi research to condemn homeopathy ethical or scientific?
Br J Clin Pharmacol (in press).

24.  Bogod D. The Nazi hypothermia experiments: forbidden data? Anasthesia 2004;59:1155.

25.  Fernandez JP. Rapid active external warming in accidental hypothermia. J Amer Med Assoc
1970;212:153-6.

26.  Garfield E. Remembering the Holocaust, parts 1 & 2. Essays of an information scientist. 1986;8:254-
75.

27.  Donner F. Bemerkungen zu der Überprüfung der Homöopathie durch das Reichsgesundheitsamt
1936–39. Teil I. Die Vorbereitungsphase. Perfusion 1995; 8: 3–7.

28.  Donner F. Bemerkungen zu der Überprüfung der Homöopathie durch das Reichsgesundheitsamt
1936–39. Teil II. Das Kozept. Perfusion 1995; 8: 35–40.

29.  Donner F. Bemerkungen zu der Überprüfung der Homöopathie durch das Reichsgesundheitsamt
1936–39. Teil III. Probleme. Perfusion 1995; 8: 84–8.

30.  Donner F. Bemerkungen zu der Überprüfung der Homöopathie durch das Reichsgesundheitsamt
1936–39. Teil IV. Experimente und Ergabrisse. Perfusion 1995; 8: 124-9.

31.  Shang A, Huwiler-Müntener K, Nartey L, Juni P, Dorig S, Sterne JA, et al. Are the clinical effects of
homoeopathy placebo effects? Comparative study of placebo-controlled trials of homoeopathy and
allopathy. Lancet 2005; 366: 726–32.

32.  Moher D, Cook DJ, Eastwood S, Olkin I, Rennie D, Stroup DF. Improving the quality of reports of
meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials: the QUOROM statement. Quality of Reporting of
Meta-analyses. Lancet 1999; 354: 1896–900.

33.  Fisher P. Homeopathy and the Lancet. Evid Comp Altern Med 2006 3(1):145-147.

34.  Editorial. The end of homeopathy Lancet 2005; 366: 690.

35.  See, for example, a; Bell IR. All evidence is equal, but some evidence is more equal than others: Can
logic prevail over emotion in the homeopathy debate? J Altern Complement Med 2005;11:763–769:
b; Frass M, Schuster E, Muchitsch I, et al. Bias in the trial and reporting of trials of homeopathy: A
fundamental breakdown in peer review and standards? J Altern Complement Med 2005;11:780–782:
c; Kienle H. Failure to exclude false negative bias: A fundamental flaw in the trial of Shang et al. J
Altern Complement Med 2005;11:783: d; Peters D. Shang, et al. Carelessness, collusion, or
conspiracy? J Altern Complement Med 2005;11:779–780.

36.  Wilkinson J, Peters D, and Donaldson J. Clinical governance for complementary and alternative
medicine in primary care. Executive summary of the final report to the Department of Health and
King’s Fund: October 2004.

37.  Defending choice in medicine. http://www.hmc21.org/. Accessed November 2^nd 2007.

38.  See the web-site; http://homeopathy.wildfalcon.com/archives/2007/12/08/responses-from-
signatories-to-homeopathy-parliamentary-early-day-motion/ accessed 21/12/07.

39.  Churchill WS. Speech given at The Lord Mayor’s Luncheon, Mansion House, London after The
Battle of El-Alamein: November 10^th 1942.

 

Contact : The Homeopathy Research Institute,  63 Vale Road, London N4 1PP: Tel: 0044(0) 208 450 8760; and 0044(0) 7970 852156:   e-mail:  lionel.milgrom@hotmail.com

 

With thanks to The Huffington Post and Dana Ullman 27.2.2011:

I believe what prevents men from accepting the homeopathic principles is ignorance, but ignorance is criminal when human lives are at stake. No honest man faced with the facts of homeopathy can refuse to accept it. He has no choice. When I had to face it, I had to become a follower. There was no choice if I were to continue to be an honest man. … Truth always demands adherence and offers no alternative.

John Weir, physician to George VI and to four generations of British monarchs.

“The King’s Speech” depicts the compelling story of George VI and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue. Lionel Logue was neither a physician nor a conventional speech therapist, but his treatment strategies were impressively successful.

The British Royal Family has been known for being exceedingly conservative and embodying traditional ideals of family and public service, but they are also known to have special appreciation and even advocacy for certain unconventional treatments that really worked, whether conventional medicine accepted them or not. Such were their experiences with Lionel Logue‘s speech therapy and the respected and widely practiced, but often misunderstood science and art of homeopathic medicine.

George VI was neither the first nor the last of the British royals to use and benefit from homeopathy. Queen Adelaide, wife of King William IV, first made public her special interest in this “new medicine” in 1835. Other British aristocrats shared the queen’s interests, including Henry William Paget Marquess of Anglesey who crossed the British Channel to go to Paris for treatment by the founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann.

Queen Adelaide had been suffering from a serious malady that the court physicians couldn’t cure. The queen called for the services of one of Hahnemann’s oldest and most faithful colleagues, John Ernst Stapf, who cured her, creating the first of many supporters of homeopathy among British royalty.

Various kings and queens of Great Britain since Queen Adelaide have openly sought medical care from homeopathic physicians. Queen Victoria was treated by Frederick Hervey Foster Quin, the personal physician/homeopath to Leopold I Belgium, who was the father of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria‘s much loved husband. A recent popular movie, “Young Victoria” chronicled their love affair.

Mary of Teck, who later became Queen Mary, wife of George V, headed the fundraising efforts to move and expand the London Homeopathic Hospital. George V was appreciative of homeopathy because it provided him with the practical benefit of treating his seasickness, a condition that he tended to experience because he was so fond of sailing.

George V was known to have treated for this condition with Tabacum, a homeopathic dose of tobacco that was prescribed by his homeopathic doctor, John Weir.(1) Because smoking of tobacco is known to cause symptoms of dizziness and nausea, homeopathic doses of this medicine can help to relieve common symptoms experienced with seasickness.

During more recent times, a study published in a medical journal published by the American Medical Association found that Cocculus compositum (aka Vertigoheel, a mixture or formula of homeopathic medicines) was as effective as a conventional drug for dizziness…and was safer.(2) This study showed that homeopathic treatment showed a clinically relevant reduction in the mean frequency, duration, and intensity of vertigo (dizziness) attacks.

Ironically, his son, who later became George VI, had a completely different experience with tobacco. In contrast, he was chronically addicted to tobacco which led to his early death. Still, George VI was appreciative enough of homeopathy that he named a prize racehorse Hypericum, after a notable homeopathic medicine for injury to nerves.

George VI was an expert user of homeopathic medicine, and in 1948 he showed his profound appreciation for this system of medicine by granting royal title to the London Homeopathic Hospital. It was deemed the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital for many decades, until 2010, when its name was changed to become the Royal London Hospital for Integrative Medicine.

The wife of George VI was Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who bore two daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon become known as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, to differentiate her from her daughter today’s Queen Elizabeth II (1926- )

The Queen Mother was particularly appreciative of the homeopathic medicine, Arnica. She asserted, “I think Arnica is the most marvelous medicine and every doctor, including those not trained in homeopathy, should use Arnica.” She realized that some people are skeptical of homeopathy, but she knew that such skepticism was common in people who didn’t understand homeopathy or had simply not used it. She commonly used Arnica on her dogs whenever they injured themselves and encouraged her friends to use it.

Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne in 1952 and has been a long-time patron to the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, which underwent a $35 million refurbishing in 2005. When Queen Elizabeth II visited the Hospital in 2000, she looked straight at the picture of John Weir, who was his homeopathic physician, and said “he did a lot of good for my father.” To keep up with the times, in 2010, this hospital changed its name to Royal London Hospital for Integrative Medicine.

The early growth of homeopathy in Britain in the mid-1800s became possible in large part through royal support and British aristocracy. The first British homeopath to British royalty, Frederick Hervey Foster Quin, was a son of Elizabeth Duchess of Devonshire, and thus himself an aristocrat. When Frederick Hervey Foster Quin began his full-time homeopathic practice in London in 1832, he primarily treated members of his own noble class.

Today, the homeopath to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is Dr. Peter Fisher, who is also medical director of the Royal London Hospital for Integrative Medicine.

Other European Monarchs’ Love for Homeopathy

Ultimately, John Weir was not only the homeopathic physician to George VI, he also provided homeopathic treatment for six other monarchs, including Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, Edward VIII Duke of Windsor, George VI, Elizabeth II, King Gustav V of Sweden (1858-1950), and Haakon VII of Norway.(3)

It is worthy of note that British royalty were not the only nobles to embrace and advocate for homeopathy. In the mid-19th century, a remarkable 77 homeopathic physicians served as the personal physicians to monarchs and their families.(4) More detail about these physicians and their treatment of various monarchs are readily available.(5)

Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie of France were known advocates of homeopathy, and in fact, Napoleon III bestowed the Knight’s Cross of the Legion of Honor upon his family’s homeopathic physician, A J Davet, as well as upon Alexandre Charge for his remarkable results using homeopathic medicines in treating patients with cholera and upon Jules John Mabit for his work as the head of a hospital in Bordeaux where he consistently found that homeopathic treatment was effective.

Numerous kings, queens, and dukes from Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Prussia were known advocates for homeopathy as were Tsar Nicholas I, Tsar Nicholas II and Tsar Alexander I, Tsar Alexander II, Tsar Alexander III of Russia. Despite the immense power that these monarchs had at that time, the resistance to homeopathy from conventional physicians was so strong that these monarchs were unable to overcome the economic power of the doctors and pharmacists of that era. One reporter noted that even the Tzars of Russia were unable to breakdown “the Chinese wall by which the medical hierarchy surrounds its domain”.(6)

Still, these monarchs could exercise their free will with any health care, and they consistently chose homeopathic treatment, making homeopathy “the royal medicine.”

References:

(1) Morrell P. Tobacco: Two Royal anecdotes. BMJ. 29 January 2001, 322:203.

(2) Weiser, M, Strosser, W, Klein, P, “Homeopathic vs. Conventional Treatment of Vertigo: A Randomized Double-blind Controlled Clinical Study,” Archives of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery, August, 1998,124:879-85. Although Tabacum is a leading medicine in homeopathy for vertigo/dizziness, this ingredient is not in this specific homeopathic formula medicine. The homeopathic medicine formula, Vertigoheel/Cocculus compositum, has been found to be effective for various ailments for which dizziness is a leading symptom.

(3) In 1939, Haakon VII of Norway bestowed upon John Weir the Knight Grand Cross of St. Olav, the highest honor granted by his country (Homeopathy, 1939). Homeopathy, Knight Grand Cross of St. Olav, March 1939, p. 96.

(4) Thomas Roupell Everest A Popular View of Homeopathy. New York: William Radde, 1842.

(5) See the chapter “The Royal Medicine: Monarchs’ Longtime Love for Homeopathy” in Ullman D. The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy. Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2007.

(6) Historical and Statistical Report of the Rise, Progress, and Present Condition of Homeopathy in Russia, Transactions of the American Institute of Homeopathy, 1876, vol. II.

 

With thanks to The Huffington Post and Dana Ullman 30.1.11:

Dr. Luc Montagnier, the French virologist who won the Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering the AIDS virus, has surprised the scientific community with his strong support for homeopathic medicine.

In a remarkable interview published in Science magazine of December 24, 2010, (1) Professor Luc Montagnier, has expressed support for the often maligned and misunderstood medical specialty of homeopathic medicine. Although homeopathy has persisted for 200+ years throughout the world and has been the leading alternative treatment method used by physicians in Europe, (2) most conventional physicians and scientists have expressed skepticism about its efficacy due to the extremely small doses of medicines used.

Read DNA molecules can ‘teleport’, Nobel Prize winner claims

Read French Nobelist Escapes “Intellectual Terror” to Pursue Radical Ideas in China

Read Nobel Scientist discovers scientific basis of homeopathy

Read Luc Montagnier Foundation proves homeopathy works

Read Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen’s University Belfast proves Jacques Benveniste’s research is correct

Read more about scientific research on homeopathy

Most clinical research conducted on homeopathic medicines that has been published in peer-review journals have shown positive clinical results,(3, 4) especially in the treatment of respiratory allergies (5, 6), influenza, (7) fibromyalgia, (8, 9) rheumatoid arthritis, (10) childhood diarrhea, (11) post-surgical abdominal surgery recovery, (12) attention deficit disorder, (13) and reduction in the side effects of conventional cancer treatments. (14) In addition to clinical trials, several hundred basic science studies have confirmed the biological activity of homeopathic medicines. One type of basic science trials, called in vitro studies, found 67 experiments (1/3 of them replications) and nearly 3/4 of all replications were positive. (15, 16)

In addition to the wide variety of basic science evidence and clinical research, further evidence for homeopathy resides in the fact that they gained widespread popularity in the U.S. and Europe during the 19th century due to the impressive results people experienced in the treatment of epidemics that raged during that time, including cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, scarlet fever, and influenza.

Montagnier, who is also founder and president of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, asserted, “I can’t say that homeopathy is right in everything. What I can say now is that the high dilutions (used in homeopathy) are right. High dilutions of something are not nothing. They are water structures which mimic the original molecules.”

Here, Montagnier is making reference to his experimental research that confirms one of the controversial features of homeopathic medicine that uses doses of substances that undergo sequential dilution with vigorous shaking in-between each dilution. Although it is common for modern-day scientists to assume that none of the original molecules remain in solution, Montagnier’s research (and other of many of his colleagues) has verified that electromagnetic signals of the original medicine remains in the water and has dramatic biological effects.

Montagnier has just taken a new position at Jiaotong University in Shanghai, China (this university is often referred to as “China’s MIT”), where he will work in a new institute bearing his name. This work focuses on a new scientific movement at the crossroads of physics, biology, and medicine: the phenomenon of electromagnetic waves produced by DNA in water. He and his team will study both the theoretical basis and the possible applications in medicine.

Montagnier’s new research is investigating the electromagnetic waves that he says emanate from the highly diluted DNA of various pathogens. Montagnier asserts, “What we have found is that DNA produces structural changes in water, which persist at very high dilutions, and which lead to resonant electromagnetic signals that we can measure. Not all DNA produces signals that we can detect with our device. The high-intensity signals come from bacterial and viral DNA.”

Montagnier affirms that these new observations will lead to novel treatments for many common chronic diseases, including but not limited to autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis.

Montagnier first wrote about his findings in 2009, (17) and then, in mid-2010, he spoke at a prestigious meeting of fellow Nobelists where he expressed interest in homeopathy and the implications of this system of medicine. (18)

French retirement laws do not allow Montagnier, who is 78 years of age, to work at a public institute, thereby limiting access to research funding. Montagnier acknowledges that getting research funds from Big Pharma and certain other conventional research funding agencies is unlikely due to the atmosphere of antagonism to homeopathy and natural treatment options.

Support from Another Nobel Prize winner

Montagnier’s new research evokes memories one of the most sensational stories in French science, often referred to as the ‘Benveniste affair.’ A highly respected immunologist Dr. Jacques Benveniste., who died in 2004, conducted a study which was replicated in three other university laboratories and that was published in Nature (19). Benveniste and other researchers used extremely diluted doses of substances that created an effect on a type of white blood cell called basophils.

Although Benveniste’s work was supposedly debunked, (20) Montagnier considers Benveniste a “modern Galileo” who was far ahead of his day and time and who was attacked for investigating a medical and scientific subject that orthodoxy had mistakenly overlooked and even demonized.

In addition to Benveniste and Montagnier is the weighty opinion of Brian Josephson, Ph.D., who, like Montagnier, is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

Responding to an article on homeopathy in New Scientist, Josephson wrote:

Regarding your comments on claims made for homeopathy: criticisms centered around the vanishingly small number of solute molecules present in a solution after it has been repeatedly diluted are beside the point, since advocates of homeopathic remedies attribute their effects not to molecules present in the water, but to modifications of the water’s structure.
Simple-minded analysis may suggest that water, being a fluid, cannot have a structure of the kind that such a picture would demand. But cases such as that of liquid crystals, which while flowing like an ordinary fluid can maintain an ordered structure over macroscopic distances, show the limitations of such ways of thinking. There have not, to the best of my knowledge, been any refutations of homeopathy that remain valid after this particular point is taken into account.
A related topic is the phenomenon, claimed by Jacques Benveniste’s colleague Yolène Thomas and by others to be well established experimentally, known as “memory of water.” If valid, this would be of greater significance than homeopathy itself, and it attests to the limited vision of the modern scientific community that, far from hastening to test such claims, the only response has been to dismiss them out of hand. (21)

Following his comments Josephson, who is an emeritus professor of Cambridge University in England, was asked by New Scientist editors how he became an advocate of unconventional ideas. He responded:

I went to a conference where the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste was talking for the first time about his discovery that water has a ‘memory’ of compounds that were once dissolved in it — which might explain how homeopathy works. His findings provoked irrationally strong reactions from scientists, and I was struck by how badly he was treated. (22)

Josephson went on to describe how many scientists today suffer from “pathological disbelief;” that is, they maintain an unscientific attitude that is embodied by the statement “even if it were true I wouldn’t believe it.”

Even more recently, Josephson wryly responded to the chronic ignorance of homeopathy by its skeptics saying, “The idea that water can have a memory can be readily refuted by any one of a number of easily understood, invalid arguments.”

In the new interview in Science, Montagnier also expressed real concern about the unscientific atmosphere that presently exists on certain unconventional subjects such as homeopathy, “I am told that some people have reproduced Benveniste’s results, but they are afraid to publish it because of the intellectual terror from people who don’t understand it.”

Montagnier concluded the interview when asked if he is concerned that he is drifting into pseudoscience, he replied adamantly: “No, because it’s not pseudoscience. It’s not quackery. These are real phenomena which deserve further study.”

The Misinformation That Skeptics Spread

It is remarkable enough that many skeptics of homeopathy actually say that there is “no research” that has shows that homeopathic medicines work. Such statements are clearly false, and yet, such assertions are common on the Internet and even in some peer-review articles. Just a little bit of searching can uncover many high quality studies that have been published in highly respected medical and scientific journals, including the Lancet, BMJ, Pediatrics, Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, Chest and many others. Although some of these same journals have also published research with negative results to homeopathy, there is simply much more research that shows a positive rather than negative effect.

Misstatements and misinformation on homeopathy are predictable because this system of medicine provides a viable and significant threat to economic interests in medicine, let alone to the very philosophy and worldview of biomedicine. It is therefore not surprising that the British Medical Association had the sheer audacity to refer to homeopathy as “witchcraft.” It is quite predictable that when one goes on a witch hunt, one inevitable finds “witches,” especially when there are certain benefits to demonizing a potential competitor (homeopathy plays a much larger and more competitive role in Europe than it does in the USA).

Skeptics of homeopathy also have long asserted that homeopathic medicines have “nothing” in them because they are diluted too much. However, new research conducted at the respected Indian Institutes of Technology has confirmed the presence of “nanoparticles” of the starting materials even at extremely high dilutions. Researchers have demonstrated by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), electron diffraction and chemical analysis by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Atomic Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-AES), the presence of physical entities in these extreme dilutions. (24) In the light of this research, it can now be asserted that anyone who says or suggests that there is “nothing” in homeopathic medicines is either simply uninformed or is not being honest.

Because the researchers received confirmation of the existence of nanoparticles at two different homeopathic high potencies (30C and 200C) and because they tested four different medicines (Zincum met./zinc; Aurum met. /gold; Stannum met./tin; and Cuprum met./copper), the researchers concluded that this study provides “concrete evidence.”

Although skeptics of homeopathy may assume that homeopathic doses are still too small to have any biological action, such assumptions have also been proven wrong. The multi-disciplinary field of small dose effects is called “hormesis,” and approximately 1,000 studies from a wide variety of scientific specialties have confirmed significant and sometimes substantial biological effects from extremely small doses of certain substances on certain biological systems.

A special issue of the peer-review journal, Human and Experimental Toxicology (July 2010), devoted itself to the interface between hormesis and homeopathy. (25) The articles in this issue verify the power of homeopathic doses of various substances.

In closing, it should be noted that skepticism of any subject is important to the evolution of science and medicine. However, as noted above by Nobelist Brian Josephson, many scientists have a “pathological disbelief” in certain subjects that ultimately create an unhealthy and unscientific attitude blocks real truth and real science. Skepticism is at its best when its advocates do not try to cut off research or close down conversation of a subject but instead explore possible new (or old) ways to understand and verify strange but compelling phenomena. We all have this challenge as we explore and evaluate the biological and clinical effects of homeopathic medicines.
REFERENCES:

(1) Enserink M, Newsmaker Interview: Luc Montagnier, French Nobelist Escapes “Intellectual Terror” to Pursue Radical Ideas in China. Science 24 December 2010: Vol. 330 no. 6012 p. 1732. DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6012.1732

(2) Ullman D. Homeopathic Medicine: Europe’s #1 Alternative for Doctors. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-ullman/homeopathic-medicine-euro_b_402490.html

(3) Linde L, Clausius N, Ramirez G, et al., “Are the Clinical Effects of Homoeopathy Placebo Effects? A Meta-analysis of Placebo-Controlled Trials,” Lancet, September 20, 1997, 350:834-843.

(4) Lüdtke R, Rutten ALB. The conclusions on the effectiveness of homeopathy highly depend on the set of analyzed trials. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. October 2008. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2008.06/015.

(5) Taylor, MA, Reilly, D, Llewellyn-Jones, RH, et al., Randomised controlled trial of homoeopathy versus placebo in perennial allergic rhinitis with overview of four trial Series, BMJ, August 19, 2000, 321:471-476.

(6) Ullman, D, Frass, M. A Review of Homeopathic Research in the Treatment of Respiratory Allergies. Alternative Medicine Review. 2010:15,1:48-58. http://www.thorne.com/altmedrev/.fulltext/15/1/48.pdf

(7) Vickers AJ. Homoeopathic Oscillococcinum for preventing and treating influenza and influenza-like syndromes. Cochrane Reviews. 2009.

(8) Bell IR, Lewis II DA, Brooks AJ, et al. Improved clinical status in fibromyalgia patients treated with individualized homeopathic remedies versus placebo, Rheumatology. 2004:1111-5.

(9) Fisher P, Greenwood A, Huskisson EC, et al., “Effect of Homoeopathic Treatment on Fibrositis (Primary Fibromyalgia),” BMJ, 299(August 5, 1989):365-6.

(10) Jonas, WB, Linde, Klaus, and Ramirez, Gilbert, “Homeopathy and Rheumatic Disease,” Rheumatic Disease Clinics of North America, February 2000,1:117-123.

(11) Jacobs J, Jonas WB, Jimenez-Perez M, Crothers D, Homeopathy for Childhood Diarrhea: Combined Results and Metaanalysis from Three Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trials, Pediatr Infect Dis J, 2003;22:229-34.

(12) Barnes, J, Resch, KL, Ernst, E, “Homeopathy for Post-Operative Ileus: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology, 1997, 25: 628-633.

(13) M, Thurneysen A. Homeopathic treatment of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a randomised, double blind, placebo controlled crossover trial. Eur J Pediatr. 2005 Dec;164(12):758-67. Epub 2005 Jul 27.

(14) Kassab S, Cummings M, Berkovitz S, van Haselen R, Fisher P. Homeopathic medicines for adverse effects of cancer treatments. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2009, Issue 2.

(15) Witt CM, Bluth M, Albrecht H, Weisshuhn TE, Baumgartner S, Willich SN. The in vitro evidence for an effect of high homeopathic potencies–a systematic review of the literature. Complement Ther Med. 2007 Jun;15(2):128-38. Epub 2007 Mar 28.

(16) Endler PC, Thieves K, Reich C, Matthiessen P, Bonamin L, Scherr C, Baumgartner S. Repetitions of fundamental research models for homeopathically prepared dilutions beyond 10-23: a bibliometric study. Homeopathy, 2010; 99: 25-36.

(17) Luc Montagnier, Jamal Aissa, Stéphane Ferris, Jean-Luc Montagnier, Claude Lavallee, Electromagnetic Signals Are Produced by Aqueous Nanostructures Derived from Bacterial DNA Sequences. Interdiscip Sci Comput Life Sci (2009) 1: 81-90.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/0557v31188m3766x/fulltext.pdf

(18) Nobel laureate gives homeopathy a boost. The Australian. July 5, 2010. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/nobel-laureate-gives-homeopathy-a-boost/story-e6frg8y6-1225887772305

(19) Davenas E, Beauvais F, Amara J, et al. (June 1988). “Human basophil degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE”. Nature 333 (6176): 816-8.

(20) Maddox J (June 1988). “Can a Greek tragedy be avoided?”. Nature 333 (6176): 795-7.

(21) Josephson, B. D., Letter, New Scientist, November 1, 1997.

(22) George A. Lone Voices special: Take nobody’s word for it. New Scientist. December 9, 2006.

(23) Personal communication. Brian Josephson to Dana Ullman. January 5, 2011.

(24) Chikramane PS, Suresh AK, Bellare JR, and Govind S. Extreme homeopathic dilutions retain starting materials: A nanoparticulate perspective. Homeopathy. Volume 99, Issue 4, October 2010, 231-242.

(25) Human and Experimental Toxicology, July 2010: http://het.sagepub.com/content/vol29/issue7/
To access free copies of these articles, see: http://www.siomi.it/siomifile/siomi_pdf/BELLE_newsletter.pdf

Dana Ullman, MPH, is America’s leading spokesperson for homeopathy and is the founder of www.homeopathic.com . He is the author of 10 books, including his bestseller, Everybody’s Guide to Homeopathic Medicines. His most recent book is, The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy (the Foreword to this book was written by Dr. Peter Fisher, the Physician to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II). Dana lives, practices, and writes from Berkeley, California.

Part of the Introduction to *The Lost Book of British Homeopathy by Sue Young

Of Elephants and Mice and The Vital Force Copyright©Sue Young November 2010

During the early part of the 20^th Century, two theoretical systems emerged – the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Theory – two systems that were not necessarily in contradiction to one another, but they nonetheless split the World into two opposing camps.

Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955 and the Theory of Relativity led to the Manhattan Project (6) and the total dominance of modern Materialism, Parascience (1) and Scientific Fundamentalism. Max Planck 1858 – 1947 and his theory of Quantum Theory led to far more uncertainty and vulnerability (6).

The First Vienna Circle in 1918 met to establish concrete opposition to all metaphysics, not because it was wrong, but because it ‘had no meaning’. Based on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 – 1951 (4), the idea that all knowledge should be codified in a single standard language of science took complete hold, stating without any arguments allowed, that all ideas were to be replaced by more precise scientific terminology. Metaphysics, Soul, Mind, Thought – all these concepts were ditched as ‘irrelevant’. The missionary zeal of Positivism and Materialism to definitively win this war and defeat the Zeitgeist of past ages – the domination of religion – could finally and comprehensively be won (1).

Logical Positivism immigrated to America in the 1930s and became Logical Empiricism, Constructive Empiricism (evolved in 1980 from the work of Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen 1941 – , which holds that theories do not aim for truth about unobservable phenomena), Positivism (evolved from the work of Auguste Comte 1798 – 1857 who coined the term Altruism) and Postpositivism (evolved from the work of Karl Raimund Popper 1902 – 1994, who argued that it is impossible to verify that a belief is true, though it is possible to reject false beliefs if they are phrased in a way amenable to falsification) (5).

However, too much squeak and scrabble about in the rafters indicated such a confusion and uncertainty surrounding imponderables and unobservable phenomena – and that dratted term Metaphysics and its terrifying spiritual children continued to pollute the pure, unadulterated and exquisitely defined and totally exact safety and delight of ‘real’ scientific thought – the absolutes of modern Materialism and Scientific Fundamentalism coalesced into Parascience (1) and they all became elephants frightened of mice. The Numinous completely unmaned them.

These elephants were forced to live in a closed ontology, defining humanity by excluding our distinguishing features, and Auguste Comte’s altruism and universal love were the first casualties of such Parascience. They forget that Quantum Indeterminacy reminds us that the first thing we know about reality is its unknowability. These self appointed experts suppress our subjectivity and proclaim that we do not know our own minds, although they of course do know them. So terrified of us and our untidy minds are these elephants that they deny us consciousness itself and the fruits of our thoughts and the existence of our souls (1) – such that we become mice. This is ḥuṣpâ! (11)

Max Planck and Albert Einstein were close friends who worked intimately together, blending the work of  James Clerk Maxwell 1831 – 1879 and his Electromagnetic Theory, Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard 1862 – 1947 and his research on cathode rays, Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrodinger 1887 – 1961, and his work on the Schrodinger equation, and his Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment, Max Theodor Felix von Laue 1879  – 1960 and his work on the diffraction of X-rays by crystals, Niels Henrik David Bohr 1885 – 1962 and his work on atomic structure, Werner Heisenberg 1901 – 1976 and his work on the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Theory, Wolfgang Ernst Pauli 1900 – 1958 and his work on the Pauli Principle, Otto Stern 1888 – 1969 and his work on the Stern-Gerlach Experiment with Walther Gerlach 1889 – 1979, Walther Hermann Nernst 1864 – 1941 and his work on chemical affinity (9).

However, World War II tore apart this scientific collaboration, and in the dark days of the 1930s and 1940s, a split occurred that has left dangerous consequences for the World.

All Jewish scientific work was rejected out of hand by the Nazis, so Jewish scientific work ‘escaped’ to the West to become the basis of the Manhattan Project, and to become unfortunately and ultimately swept up by the vulgar riches and vested interests of the victors to establish a settled belief in might is right – upheld by shock and awe. Albert Einstein later admitted his error to Linus Carl Pauling 1901 – 1994 in 1954 “I made one great mistake in my life…. ‘(7).

Max Planck managed to avoid open conflict with the Nazi regime during the war, despite his youngest son Erwin being implicated in the attempt made on Hitler’s life in the July 20 plot and consequently being murdered by the Gestapo in 1945 (6). Max Planck’s settled belief was twofold, reflecting a certain uncertainty principle. Max Planck believed in the Causality Principle – that existence is not true or false, rather it is an act of faith – a belief which held comfortable counterpoint with his other settled belief that it is ‘…utterly impossible for a person possessing some training in natural science to recognize as founded on truth the many reports of extraordinary contradicting the laws of nature, of miracles which are still commonly regarded as essential supports and confirmations of religious doctrines, and which formerly used to be accepted as facts pure and simple, without doubt or criticism.” (8)

These impossible dilemmas of thought and belief illustrate the difficulties between elephants and mice, and they have led us to the confusions of the modern World. We no longer live in a World of comfortable counterpoint, rather we inhabit a World where peace now hinges on the shaky ground of Scientific Fundamentalism vs Religious Fundamentalism, or Creationism or Intelligent Design vs Darwinism. Everyone is terrified at this instant, and the mice are now frightened of the elephant. Touche!

Quantum Evolution indicates that the quantum coherence of subatomic particles may change very rapidly by choosing a state over all others purely based on interaction with the environment, bypassing the theories of Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882, though his Theory of Evolution then takes over to flow out these changes. Such a collapse of potential is caused by observing or measuring subatomic particles – the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle again – and that the environment fixes reality by constantly observing or measuring sub atomic particles (2).

If a sub atomic particle has the potential to be in two places at the same time – wave or particle – then it is in two places at the same time until something observes or measures it. Living cells act as quantum measuring devices, and offer constant measurement and observation of the sub atomic particles they contain, such that Adaptive Mutation may be the result of our own cells directing evolution – so the Intelligent Designer may be us! Life may be a better quantum measuring tool than random exposure to the environment, such that Quantum Decoherence occurred spontaneously as a mutation to produce it. (10) Are we gods or is Life a quantum phenomenon?

Consciousness has puzzled science for centuries. Can science reject the fruits of consciousness – soul – mind – thought – spirituality? What gives science the right to do this? Are elephants and mice forever doomed to live in fear?

Is there no third way? Is our choice always going to be between zero and one – or can we have zero and one? Science only allows us to regard our brain as a complex computer, with consciousness as a simple by product. What if Consciousness is a better quantum measuring tool than random exposure to the environment, such that Quantum Decoherence occurred as a mutation to produce it?

What if Consciousness is a Quantum Computer that can collapse potential by thought – by Free Will – by an idea?

Memes replicate like genes (12) and history has demonstrated many times that ideas do lead to wars, revolutions, upheavals, insurrections, rebellions, riots and the new world orders we see around us today. Ideas that spread – win! (13)

No wonder the elephants are scared! The mice will inherit the Earth! (14)

The Vital Force

Samuel Hahnemann 1755 – 1843 was inspired by many influences in the 18^th Century, and his life story has been described in detail, originally by Richard Haehl 1873 – 1932 in 1922.

After millennia, and by the end of the 18^th Century, the ‘Vital Force’, or the ‘Anima’, or the ‘Spiritual Force’ – – it had many names – was producing language and ideas all of its own. Throughout the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th Centuries, these ideas influenced society so profoundly they did indeed lead to wars, revolutions, upheavals, insurrections, rebellions, riots and the new world orders we see around us today.

The Egyptian concept of Maat was disrupted. Maat was personified as a goddess – a quantum goddess – representing truth, balance, order, law, morality, and justice. She regulated the stars, seasons, and the actions of both mortals and the deities, and she set the order of the universe from chaos at the moment of creation (1). The ‘Vital Force’ calms Maat and order is restored. The night sky is at ease in its Zero Point Energy (7).

Today in the 21^st Century, these swirling ideas are barely understood, nor is it easy to recapture the language or thoughts of bygone ages. The thinkers and philosophers of the past were not describing something physical or material – this is a Category Error made by Parascientists who cannot understand the difference between a noun and a verb (6).

“Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.” (3)

Our ancestors were instead describing currents in the very patterns of thought itself. No wonder the Parascientists of our own age crash on these ideas like ships in a storm, completely unable to grasp the atmospherics of history. Or maybe they understand them all too well? Is this why Parascience pretends superiority over the intricacy and complexity of consciousness itself? How can they claim supremacy over a verb? Consequently like the elephant, they must remain terrified of mice.

So why do Parascientists forbid us to meditate on the contents of our consciousness and claim that they alone are the gatekeepers to what is real or unreal? Is an idea real? Do Parascientists deny that in the beginning was the Word (an idea)? Because that is where the thinkers and philosophers of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries begin and where most of them end.

Our ancestors lived in an age where words and ideas were profoundly important. The many and varied attempts throughout history to control the spread of an idea are well documented. Words and ideas may not be ‘real’ enough to satisfy Parascientists, nor could they find their physical location no matter how many brains they dissect. However, these metaphysical intangibles have been real enough to upend the World many times over – real enough to cause Parascientists to take refuge against the scritch scratch scuffling behind the skirting boards of freedom of thought and action. The mice breathe for us and the elephants are very afraid.

“Whoever controls the definition of mind controls the definition of humankind itself, and culture, and history… I consider this tendency in modern and contemporary thinking significant and also regrettable.” (4)

*So come with me into the world of our ancestors, and observe and measure them as they look into a glass darkly and describe what they saw, what they knew, what they believed and what they wanted to believe.

“…the human mind itself yields the only evidence we can have of the scale of human reality.” (5)

For a moment, forget that Parascientists even exist, because in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, they did not exist in the form we know them today, and their immediate ancestors were roundly decried as satanists and heretics at the time. It is indeed ironic that today, Parascientists decry the ideas of our immediate ancestors as dangerous religious nonsense – in fact they accuse them and us of witchcraft. Obviously, Parascientists prefer to rigidly control verbs and then rely on the precarious protection this promises – such is the legacy of the 20^th Century and the white out effect of World war on the human psyche.

The ‘Vital Force’ is the metaphysical key phrase which emerged triumphant from all of the arguments and discussions of the last two thousand years, culminating in the struggles and arguments of our ancestors, and surviving to represent the spiritual Zeitgeist of all Ages, right up to our own modern day.

The term ‘Vital Force’ moved forward through time, gaining strength and a profound meaning and vigour, so incredibly robust that its very essence has not morphed or become deformed in any way, a miracle that would not have surprised your average thinker or philosopher of the 18^th or 19^th Century. Indeed, this was the very point of the whole exercise (and maybe why so many Parascientists foam at the mouth every time it is mentioned?)

So what does this term ‘Vital Force’mean? Why does it derange and upset so many Parascientists? Why does the very idea that the Universe is ‘Vital’, and that all life within it is imbued with a ‘Vital Force’, and that the homeopathic dilution and succussion of substances releases the ‘Vital Force’ (Spiritual Power) of medicines, drive Parascientists into such violent and apoplectic frenzy?

In a nutshell, by the beginning of the 20^th Century, the ‘Vital Force’ meant the ‘Life Force’ – basically the difference between a dead body and a live body – Zero Point Energy? (7)

In 1810, when Samuel Hahnemann published his 1^st edition of The Organon in the medical journal of Christoph Wilhelm von Hufeland 1762 – 1836, the World and his wife knew exactly what was meant by the idea of ‘Vital Force’.

Samuel Hahnemann had postulated that dis-ease is a reflection of, and a material expression of dis-harmony in the ‘Vital Force’, and that homeopathy is more than capable of ‘retuning’ the ‘Vital Force’ and restoring health, balance, peace and harmony. Samuel Hahnemann believed that the perfect balance of the ‘Vital Force’ is our destiny and the very definition of health. Any imbalance in the ‘Vital Force’ is expressed in the material world by dis-ease or symptoms, which are the root cause of wars, revolutions, upheavals, insurrections, rebellions, riots and the new world orders we see around us today. This is because they are all symptoms of the imbalance in the ‘Vital Force’.

It really is that simple! Restoring Maat in fact. Homeopathy is a quantum leap of science and faith. A third way of observing and measuring zero and one.

Orthodox medicine, or allopathy, on the other hand, introduces chemicals, toxins and poisons directly into the body which increase the distortion and imbalance in the ‘Vital Force’. Despite the profound insights and advances medicine has made over recent centuries – credit where credit is due – orthodox medicine has not learnt to listen to Nature. Rather than asking ‘why is there an imbalance in the body producing all these symptoms’-  the orthodox approach is to ignore these ‘red warning lights’ and simply disconnect them – and then to force the body and the mind to mimic a supposed ‘natural balance’ using gross medication to do so. Orthodox medicine also uses dramatic and traumatic abuses and assaults into and onto the body, an ‘Artificial Force’ which decreases any prospect of natural balance or harmony in the ‘Vital Force’.

In their defence, orthodox medicine is really trying to shock the body into a restart position using jump leads – an attempt to reboot the internal forces which control the balance between health and disease – though they would not thank me for pointing this out I suspect! Maybe they are attempting to collapse a disease potential, but instead of using a subtle whisper, they try an atomic bomb? The truth, as always, is in between. Sometimes medicine does need to use heroic intervention and the subtle whisper needs to step aside – and vice versa. Not zero or one – rather zero and one.

Samuel Hahnemann realised in the 18^th Century that orthodox medicine of his time was therefore profoundly far from healing dis-ease. In fact it ensured that imbalances in the ‘Vital Force’ were worsened and could not be corrected.

The natural voice of the allopath has never been the enemy of the ‘Vital Force’ as history fully attests. So very many orthodox medics over the centuries have stood up to defend the ‘Vital Force’ and indeed to defend homeopathy, that these inspired physicians and surgeons must be fully acknowledged here. The natural voice of the homeopath also wishes for balance between different systems, and the best philosophers understand that the amount of light and darkness in existence remains more or less constant. There is darkness at the centre of light and light at the centre of the darkness. Each makes a huge mistake in disparaging the other (8).

However, and despite the heroic efforts of many superb doctors, unfortunately, more often than not, the tactics of modern orthodox medicine destroys or overwhelms the ‘Vital Force’, and we now have a new disease – iatrogenic disease – and they most definitely will not thank me for pointing this out!

Tragically, and because some sectors of modern orthodox medicine does this work through wilful ignorance, without apology or introspection, with no curiosity or conscience regarding iatrogenic phenomena, they have become the servants of Parascience. In their arrogance, they prefer the glamour of ‘Artificial Force’ and its pretend promise to overwhelm Nature and suppress and destroy all notion of the ‘Vital Force’ finally and forever. Orthodox medicine also prefers ḥuṣpâ!

We are allowed freedom of religious thought in the 21^st Century, but we are far away from freedom of health choice. So now we have two invisible elephants in the room that no one dare mention because everyone is so terrified of the awe-inspiring violence and power of this modern Inquisition. Has no one noticed that these invisible elephants are still terrified of mice?

Similia similibus curentur is the only possible method of repairing this imbalance and restoring harmony to a cruel and evil World that had lost its way so profoundly, or so thought Samuel Hahnemann, and many of the thinkers and philosophers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries agreed with him. The rejection of such violence and ignorance by the long suffering populations of the World coalesced then and now into one phrase – the ‘Vital Force’- a rejection of ‘Artificial Force’so total and complete that the invisible elephants must maintain their delusion of total authority with increasingly desperate tactics of shock and awe.

The mice continue to squeak and scrabble about in the rafters and behind the skirting boards, and the ultimate war behind these ideas still rages today. If the perfect balance of the ‘Vital Force’ is our destiny, we are lost and very far from home. Or may be we are far too close to home?

References:

Of Elephants and Mice

1. Absence of Mind Marilynne Robinson Yale University Press 2010 pages 36/7, 54, 58, 71, 77 and others. Parascience – ‘… the difference between science and parascience, is the desire by the latter case to treat scientific knowledge as complete… in order to further the primary object of closing questions about human nature and the human circumstance.’ Page 129 and ‘.. the ancient assumption of parascience, that we are playing with a full deck, that we can proceed from an understanding of reality that is in every important sense sufficient, is a feature of the literature carried forward from a primitive notion of what sufficiency would be.’ Page 122 and ‘In order to arrive at a parascientific view of humankind we are obliged to put aside whatever is not to be accounted for in the apparently simple terms of genetic self interest. I say ‘apparently simple’ because in every instance these theorists build in devices to account for the inadequacies of their theories’ page 131.
2. Quantum Evolution: How Physics’ Weirdest Theory Explains Life’s Biggest Mystery by Johnjoe McFadden. W W Norton & Co Inc, 2002
3. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature Steven Pinker Penguin Group US, 2003
4. Wikipedia entry on Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 – 1951
5. Wikipedia entries on Logical Positivism, Constructive Empiricism, Positivism, Post Positivism.
6. Wikipedia entry for Max Planck 1858  – 1947 and Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955
7. Einstein: The Life and Times by Ronald Clark. page 752
8. Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
9. Wikipedia entries for James Clerk Maxwell 1831 – 1879, Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard 1862 – 1947, Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrodinger 1887 – 1961, Max Theodor Felix von Laue 1879  – 1960, Niels Henrik David Bohr 1885 – 1962, Werner Heisenberg 1901 – 1976, Wolfgang Ernst Pauli 1900 – 1958, Otto Stern 1888 – 1969, Walther Gerlach 1889 – 1979, Walther Hermann Nernst 1864 – 1941
10. The Origin of Mutants, Cairns et al. 1988 Nature. 1988 Sep 8;335(6186):142-5.
11. Black Order. James Rollins. William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2006
12. The Hebrew word ḥuṣpâ means “insolence”, “audacity”, and “impertinenc,” is used to describe someone who has over-stepped the boundaries of accepted behavior with no shame – presumption plus arrogance.
13. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Oxford University Press, 2006 – a meme is an idea which can be transmitted from one mind to another as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures and evolve by natural selection.
14. Tribes Seth Godin. Piatkus 2008
15. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams. Pan Macmillan, 2005

The Vital Force

1. Wikipedia entry on Maat.
2. Samuel Hahnemann His Life and Work Volumes 1 and 2 Richard Haehl 1922
3. Absence of Mind Marilynne Robinson Yale University Press 2010 page 29
4. Absence of Mind Marilynne Robinson Yale University Press 2010 page 32
5. Absence of Mind Marilynne Robinson Yale University Press 2010 page 34
6. The Concept of Mind. Gilbert Ryle. 1946. The confusion over the nature of mind born from Cartesian dualism.  Gilbert Ryle argues that there is no’ Ghost in the Machine’ – a term he coined  - the mind (or soul or spirit)  is not a physical object (a noun) – it is rather a function (a verb). Gilbert Ryle called this silly mistake a Category Error.
7. Wikipedia entry on Zero Point Energy.
8. Private conversation with Brian Kaplan.

* The Lost Book of British Homeopathy is currently being written, though it will take a while… Sue

*A Brave Medical Life, The Founder of Homeopathy, BBC Radio 4, Friday 10 December 2010 by Mark Whitaker, reviewed by  Peter Morrell

Although this recent radio programme was informative, it was also misleading and something of a disappointment.

Though it was generally factually accurate, it said Hahnemann spent ten years after graduation looking for a suitable medical practice. In reality, he only practised medicine on a regular basis as his main income from 1780-1 until soon after his marriage in November 1782 and he did not resume regular medical practice for about nine years when he was commissioned to start treating Herr Klockenbring in 1792.

The programme was a disappointment because it did not convey the best possible slant on his life, choosing to emphasise things of little consequence and failing to explore some things of greater consequence.

For example, much time was wasted talking to people of no consequence in Coethen. None of it had anything useful to add to Hahnemann’s life story, especially the nonsense about Indian homeopaths allegedly turning his house and garden into a shrine. This was not only poisonous gossip, but revealed a very biased programme maker far too willing to pander to the current attacks on homeopathy by pro-science fundamentalists. And that unfortunately was the covert subplot of the entire programme. Therefore as a totality, it gave a skewed, misleading and disappointing account of his life.

Although the programme set off well by saying he railed against bloodletting and that Hippocrates had recommended medical similars, with Dinges adding that Hahnemann disliked the multiple prescriptions
in common use at the time, yet it failed to say why he focused on single drugs, small doses and the proving of medicines.

Too much was left implied or only vaguely hinted at which should have been stated boldly and explicitly. Subtle implications and hints are only really clearly grasped by those who already know the facts, while the rest of the audience are left uninformed or misinformed.

No mention was made of his study of poisons, for example, and why they took centre stage in his early thinking or why he commenced to study poisonings in the first place and what these studies suggested to him. No mention was made of the others in his day, such as von Stoerck, who also studied poisonings and who conducted some simple provings before Hahnemann. These crucial aspects of the origin of homeopathy were entirely omitted. By no means can this programme be construed as a serious attempt to explore Hahnemann’s life neutrally and objectively.

Though the programme correctly stated that he gave up medicine and chose instead to endure for many years the demoralising and desperate grind of poverty, yet no explanation was given as to why he gave up
the lucrative practice of medicine in favour of enduring translation work and poverty for so long. Nothing was mentioned about him being a man with a troubled conscience: a man troubled for patients, for humanity and for a medicine that killed far more than it cured.

Though his gift for languages was mentioned, and that he made some translations, yet it did not state the extent of his linguistic gifts, or that he made over 20 translations of large textbooks over an extended time period (1777-1806), or how magnificent and well received those translations were and why they were so highly regarded by the German scientific community as superior to the originals — being enriched and improved by him with numerous annotations, corrections and footnotes. No mention either about his scholarly learning and erudition or the meticulous way in which he engaged with every task before him.

Only a few minor changes to the programme would have easily conveyed these crucially important points. Such amendments would have reduced the length of the broadcast if all the obvious rubbish it did contain had also been removed, and it would have transformed a very second-rate programme into an excellent one.

Little mention was made of the many years he spent wandering through Saxony with his growing family or the reasons for that. Though the programme mentioned his acceptance as a medical tutor at the university of Leipzig in 1812, and of his lectures on homeopathy to what was a dwindling group of students, yet it failed to mention how many of these students went on to become great homeopaths. It preferred to emphasise the mockery of his lecturing style by allopaths of the day rather than point to the fact that at Leipzig university Hahnemann singlehandedly inspired a hardcore of a dozen or so future homeopaths who not only formed the nucleus of loyal homeopathy disciples and his group of provers, but who also comprised the embryonic form of an entire movement that successfully spread throughout the rest of Europe and to Russia, India and the Americas.

Why therefore did this programme always choose to emphasise the negative and too often ignore the positive?

Yes, the numbers of his loyal students dwindled, but largely because of unrelenting allopathic
attacks against him.

Yes, his lecturing style was rhetorical and hectoring against mainstream medicine, but how else could he effectively emphasise the key points and advantages of his new system?

Yes, Hahnemann was an outcast, a deviant, a rebel, a dissident, a radical, a rulebreaker, a freethinker, an heretic, a pariah.

How such a man managed to survive at all totally outnumbered, living and working in such a blatantly hostile place is more remarkable than it might seem. Having lived and survived, working alone “in enemy territory” for ten years actually reveals not his weakness but his strength of character.

Nor did the listener hear about the numerous publications that flowed from his pen throughout the time of his stay in Leipzig. It merely portrayed his time there as a failure, with him finally being driven out by the lawyers and apothecaries.

In truth, it was a hugely productive period. So once again the emphasis of the programme was all wrong.

Emphasis was rightly placed on the terrible state of medicine in his times and well-documented examples were given of medical manslaughter. It also correctly stated Hahnemann’s relentless emphasis on safe,
simple and gentle methods and upon the empiricism which, as Fisher mentioned, drove him on and which he saw as the only reliable gateway to future medicine.

But it failed to reveal the state of his thinking through time and why the events of his life unfolded in the way they did.

It failed to lay bare the roots of homeopathy in his academic study of medical history and in his unrelenting empirical search for safe and effective medical methods.

It failed to say why he came to focus on single drugs and similars, why he was studying dosage in the first place or that it was his investigations and clinical experiences that led him to experiment with ever smaller doses. It was solely clinical practice and not theories that drove him to employ smaller and safer effective doses of drugs.

The programme failed to explore his scientific investigations or his numerous publications on subjects other than homeopathy. These highly pertinent aspects of such a multi-faceted life would have greatly enriched this mediocre programme. A brief mention of them in passing would have given a more rounded picture of the man and his work.

The interviews with Fisher, Dinges, Dean and Nicholls could have been better edited and used more effectively. The point made by Nicholls at the end of the programme that homeopathy might have gained wider acceptance had it not chosen to employ such small doses was quite ludicrous and should have been edited out as it reveals a miserable failure to appreciate how distinctive and different homeopathy was
(and fundamentally had to be) as compared to the brutal allopathic methods of the day.

Even though the brutality of those methods was referred to several times, yet still that disastrous quote by Nicholls seemed to dig the programme into a hole. His point was well made that homeopathy acted like a mirror to allopathy and thus inspired allopathy to navigate away from heroic methods, yet it was ludicrous to suggest that homeopaths should not have used their curative small doses simply in order to gain some acceptance from allopaths.

Were homeopaths in truth under any compunction to grovel to allopaths?

One could equally argue that homeopathy was less in the business of ‘gaining acceptance’ but more in the curing of patients.

Every generation of homeopaths has had to grapple with the question: how can there be any room for negotiation between a medicine that kills and one that cures?

And in any case, regardless of what Hahnemann said in the 5th Organon, Nicholls should have known that most homeopathic prescriptions have always employed doses below 30c, and that in the 19th century most cures were made with doses of 3x and 6x, so in the end the point being made was silly, minor, off-topic and gave a very misleading impression.

What all these problems tend to show is that the programme was not researched thoroughly enough and nor was it drafted out in such a way to best emphasise all the key features of Hahnemann’s life. Though in
some respects it was a good attempt, yet ultimately it was a failure and a disappointment. A wonderful opportunity to state the truth about Hahnemann to a wide audience, was very sorely missed. That chance
might never come around again.

*A Brave Medical Life, The Founder of Homeopathy, BBC Radio 4, Friday 10 December 2010 by Mark Whitaker

This programme marks the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of homeopathy’s founding text ‘Samuel Hahnemann’s Organon of Rational Medicine’.

It recognises that homeopathy remains deeply controversial, and that while some in Britain are convinced of its benefits there are many who argue that it is scientifically invalid and should not continue to be recognised by the NHS. This is not intended as an intervention in that debate. It is a historical programme locating the development of Hahnemann’s thinking within the context of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century medicine.

It’s been said that Hahnemann would be more famous than he is if he had not developed homeopathy; that this has meant he’s come to be seen either as a saint or a charlatan. He was neither. He was first and foremost a critic of what he saw as the cruel, ineffective and unscientific treatments that he was trained to deliver- bleedings, purges, and huge doses of mercury.

He renounced being a doctor for a time because he felt he did more harm than good. What was to become homeopathy developed from his insistence that medicines be tested before they were used, and even its opponents recognise Hahnemann’s significance in the history of pharmacology and therapeutics.

We examine his arguments and those of his opponents. But the programme also questions how useful the distinction between ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ is for understanding the history of western medicine.

We interview leading medical historians in both the UK and Germany; and actors bring to life the medical conflicts of Hahnemann’s own time.

Written and presented by Mark Whitaker