Last week, novelist Jeanette Winterson published an intelligent and lucid account of why she believes homeopathy works. Three days later, along came Ben Goldacre, who gave us a longer piece showing us all the errors of Winterson's ways. Yesterday, Tom Whipple reiterated several hoary, tired, and inept anti-homeopathy arguments in order to condemn the 206 MPs who signed an early day motion in support of NHS homeopathic hospitals.
Goldacre's article was laden with his usual sarcasm. In it, he paraded his superior knowledge and accused homeopaths of "killing patients" and being "morons". As a fellow sceptic I understand where he is coming from; I identify with his pro-science stance, and have as little time for unscientific nostrums as he, but I came away from this piece with a feeling of embarrassment, a conviction he doesn't know what he's talking about, just like Whipple. I don't mean all of it. The homeopathy community has its fair share of fools and charlatans, and many practitioners and gurus come from the counter culture. I have as little patience for them and their metaphysical weirdness as does Ben. But I'm also aware of an entirely rational world of doctor homeopaths, and many non-doctors who prefer to work alongside conventional medicine and would sooner die than manufacture a remedy from moonshine and call it "Luna". By tarring all homeopaths with the same brush, Goldacre does both them and their patients a disservice.
I said he doesn't know what he's talking about, and I meant it. I am sure he has not acquired any homeopathic qualifications, and I'm confident he has not sat in with an experienced homeopath for a year or so or worked at a homeopathic NHS hospital. He has read a few books and set himself up as the arbiter of things homeopathic. That is not a good basis for critical understanding.
His ignorance is most grossly displayed in the preface to his piece:
"Time after time, properly conducted scientific studies have proved that homeopathic remedies work no better than simple placebos."
What utter hooey. There has never been a proper trial of homeopathy. There have been countless trials based on the methodology applied to orthodox medicines, as if homeopathy is a form of orthodox medicine. Some have been positive, most negative. This proves nothing, because what they have tested was never homeopathy in the first place.
In orthodox trials, all patients in the "real" group are given the same drug for the same length of time. Homeopaths do not work like that. For one condition, they may select one of a dozen or more remedies, chosen after long and detailed interviews. They see patients repeatedly over the course of months or years, refining and changing prescriptions, and watching a steady development that follows a strong internal logic. It is a long process. But this is how homeopathy works: mangling it for the chance to jump on the clinical trial bandwagon is not science. No scientist of repute carries out tests of A by running trials of B. All the vaunted meta-analyses that proclaim the ineffectiveness of homeopathy are scientifically illiterate, as Ben Goldacre seems to be in this instance.
He must know something as elementary as this about homeopathy, yet he puts up an Aunt Sally, "proves" homeopathy does not work, and calls all homeopaths "morons". This is not science, and as someone who believes strongly in science, I would challenge the good doctor to prove that his vaunted trials had anything to do with homeopathy at all. It would be to his credit to come clean on this and to help design trials that would match the homeopathic way of prescribing. If he isn't willing to do that in collaboration with homeopathic doctors who know as much as he does about the science and are not morons, he is demeaning the very notion of scientific medicine.
