A group of brave doctors has tried, again, to stop our precious NHS resources being spent on quackery.
Oh yes, I'll get in trouble for saying "quackery"; I'll be told that alternative therapists are not quacks, that they are all kind, caring, open-minded people who help the sick and fight against the oppression of closed-minded scientists who don't understand the holistic nature of these truly spiritual human beings.
But these poor doctors will have it worse. They will get hate mail from people who claim to be more loving and caring than them; they will be called "arrogant" by people who "just know" that homeopathy works; they will be threatened and ridiculed by people whose children have been "saved" from the horrors of modern medicine by a homeopathic remedy that their hardhearted doctor denied them on the NHS; and they will be questioned by reporters who are nervous about siding with the unfashionable, commonsense practice of actually testing whether a medicine works or not.
How do I know? Because it all happened to me during my 30 years of tackling paranormal and alternative claims. And little has changed. Indeed, the fact that mountains of negative evidence are simply ignored was one of the reasons I finally got out. You can only bang your head against true believers for so long. And being told you are arrogant, closed-minded, unspiritual and heartless when all you are doing is trying to find out the truth eventually gets you down.
We know that homeopathy doesn't work. We know this because (unlike those of some treatments) the claims it makes are straightforward and testable. Traditional homeopathy claims that if you choose the right remedy for that particular person and give it at the right dilution (usually diluted so much that it is nothing but water), then the person will get better. In hundreds of experiments, this claim has been disproved (among them the famous "remembering-water" experiment James Randi showed to be fraudulent and repeated for television).
The opposition has recently become more sophisticated, with the claim that conventional double-blind testing is not appropriate for alternative therapies. We heard a version of this on BBC Radio 4's Today programme from the wonderfully articulate, 93-year-old Jane Gilcrest, who said it was "difficult to collect data" because it was hard to prove the effectiveness of a therapy "based on people, not on symptoms".
Don't be fooled by this claim: the double-blind design works perfectly well for people, not symptoms. Take 100 people suffering from anything you like, as long as their state of deterioration or recovery can be measured. Then let the best homeopaths do whatever it takes to choose the right treatment for each one. They can spend hours or days questioning them; they can explore their symptoms in any detail they like; they can do anything it takes (other than give them real medicine, of course).
Now divide the group in half (ideally with roughly equal types of illness, age, sex and so on in each of the resulting two groups); give the people in one group whatever the homeopaths advised for each of them on the basis of their personalised, holistic appraisal; take the other 50 and give them someone else's bottle of specially chosen dilute solution (it won't do them any harm: it's only water). And here's the critical point (the double-blind): don't tell either the homeopaths or the patients whether they are receiving their own treatment or someone else's. Now what happens?
We know what happens: it makes no difference. Experiments of this kind have been done again and again. The people given the wrong homeopathic solution get better just as often as the people upon whom time and effort was lovingly lavished to choose exactly the right subtle combination of spiritually attuned dilutions for their individual situation.
Homeopathy is bunkum; the time and effort are not. And there's the rub. Please, please let's use NHS money to provide more time for doctors instead of treatments we know don't work. If there is any money to spare on holistic practices and on caring for the whole patient, not just the symptoms, then let's give it to real nurses and doctors who use real medicine that actually works. Then they, too, will be able to lavish time and effort on their individual patients and bring about better medicine and a better NHS.
