Math check for Homeopathic medicine please...

[Kizarvexis]

I've been hearing commercials on the radio here in Tampa for an ear ache drop called Similasan. The commercial mentions that Similasan is a homeopathic drug, which kicked off my alarm bells. When I found the website, Similasan is the name of the line of homeopathic 'drugs' marketed at Wal-Mart, Walgreens, Target, CVS/pharmacy, Rite Aid pharmacy, Eckerd, Safeway, Kroger, Albertsons, Longs Drugs, OscoDrug, Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats Natural Marketplace. Before I e-mail these companies, my local politicians and the Florida Department of Health, I wanted to run my math by you guys and gals to see if I did it right. (Anything copied from their website has only had the formatting changed for readibility in this post.)

http://www.healthyrelief.com/products-earache-relief.cfm
On this page the Similasan Earache Relief, has the following active ingredients.


Drug Facts

Active Ingredients - Purpose
Chamomilla 10x - calmative, pain reliever
Mercurius solubilis 15x - anti-inflammatory
Sulphur 12x - pain reliever, anti-itch

Here is what they say about these ingredients.


Chamomilla is found in Similasan Earache Relief ear drops. Relieves ear pain while calming and soothing. Works especially well for patients who appear anxious and frantic, and who complain their ears feel clogged. (plant-based)


Sulphur (elemental sulphur) is found in Similasan Earache Relief ear drops. Indicated for pain, itching, and ringing in the ear. Elemental sulphur—a mineral found in nature—represents about 0.25% of the human body weight and is not considered allergenic. This ingredient should not be confused with common allergens such as sulfonamides and sulfites found in many prescription drugs and other products.


Mercurius Solubilis (also known as Quicksilver or Mercurius Vivus) is found in Similasan Earache Relief ear drops, and addresses inflammation and pain of the inner ear. This form of mercurius is non-toxic. Click here to read more information about homeopathic Mercurius solubilis. (Adobe Acrobat Reader required.)

The pdf on Mercurius Solubilis referred above, which should tip off people that this is not an effective cure.

Similasan Products & Diluted Mercury as Active Ingredient
Similasan Dry Eye Relief and Similasan Earache Relief do contain an extremely safe
microdilution of inorganic mercury.
- Homeopathic dosages are highly diluted and applied “topically”. The remedies are
not swallowed or inhaled, which are the primary means of toxic build up.
- Homeopathy is regulated by the FDA, unlike herbal products. This means these
Similasan products have been determined “safe and effective” by the FDA.
- Mercurius solubilis (found in Earache Relief @ 15X) Mercurius Sublimatus (found in
Dry Eye Relief @ 6X) are inorganic forms of mercury and the safest of the three
types of mercury, which are listed below:
- Inorganic (used in the two Similasan products) = least ability to cause
toxicity or build up, because it is poorly absorbed by human skin and
membranes.
- Organic = found in fish and can accumulate in the body. Usually spread in
the atmosphere by power plants. This ingestion or inhalation is the primary
cause of mercury poisoning in the U.S.
- Elemental Mercury = Slippery metallic material we see in thermometers.
Passes through the body if ingested.
- The inorganic mercury found in Similasan products is so miniscule that it would be
virtually impossible to build up to toxic levels in the body, even with regular use:
- You would have to apply 512 billion doses* of Similasan Earache Relief ear
drops to equal the amount of organic mercury in an average 4oz tuna steak.
- You would have to apply 857 doses** of Similasan Dry Eye Relief to equal
the amount of organic mercury found in an average 4oz tuna steak.
- Remember, the forms of mercury used in Similasan products is inorganic and
a highly diluted dose.
- Earache Relief inorganic mercury dosage = 0.0000000003 ppm. You’d have to
apply 6.4 billion doses* Similasan Earache Relief to equal the amount of mercury the
EPA allows in every 8oz glass of water.
- Dry Eye Relief inorganic mercury dosage = 0.224 ppm. You would need to apply
more than 10 doses** to equal the amount of mercury the EPA allows in every 8oz
glass of water.
- FDA’s allowable level of organic mercury in fish is 1.0 ppm
- NO KNOWN SIDE EFFECTS FOR ANY SIMILASAN PRODUCTS = SAFE AND
EFFECTIVE
* Assumes one dose = 5 drops in affected ear
** Assumes one dose = 2 drops in both eyes


This page, http://www.healthyrelief.com/hopw.cfm, gave me the information on what they mean by the 10x, 12x, and the 15x.


Similasan products stimulate the body to heal itself by utilizing "microdilutions" of the active ingredients. This system of medicine is know as homeopathy.


In the production of Similasan homeopathic medicines, all active ingredients (originating from mineral, plant or animal) undergo the process of serial dilution. The result is a microdiluted concentration of the ingredient, and its dilution level is often represented by an "X." For example, an ingredient diluted to the level of 6X contains 0.0000001% of the active ingredient—just enough to jump start the immune system. This homeopathic mode of action is similar in theory to a conventional allergy or flu shot, yet the active ingredients in homeopathic products are much more dilute, and are therefore safe for all ages without known side effects.

You may ask why the ingredients, such as apis (honey bee), belladonna and mercurius are used as active ingredients? After all, those substances can trigger various symptoms when used in heavy concentrations. This is true. In homeopathy, however, the dosages are not concentrated enough to poison the body. In fact, the dosage level is only enough to cause the body to detect the presence of the ingredient and then react to it. The body then reacts by triggering the immune system to heal the underlying problem. For example, a microdilution of honey bee will trigger the body to fight symptoms such as burning, stinging and swelling. In many cases, the cause of such symptoms is an allergy, therefore the ingredient apis (honey bee) is used to treat allergies.

In summary, homeopathy is a completely unique way of treating ailments. Rather than imposing a chemical drug on the body with the hope of temporarily masking symptoms, homeopathic active ingredients attempt to stimulate a physiological reaction of the body's healing mechanisms. In other words, homeopathy encourages the body to maintain proper health by imposing a gentle stimulus.

At Similasan, we call this "Healthy Relief via Active Response Formulas.®"

As I understand it, this is the standard homeopathic mantra.

Now, onto the math.

So if there is 10x Chamomilla, 12x Sulphur and 15x Mercurius solubilis, then the concentrations for a 10ml bottle of Similasan Earache Relief should be as follows;

10x Chamomilla = .0000000001 ml Chamomilla per 10 ml or 1x10^-10 ml or 100 picoliters per 10 ml

12x Sulphur = .000000000001 ml Sulphur per 10 ml or 1x10^-12 ml or 1 picoliter per 10 ml

15x Mercurius solubilis = .000000000000001 ml Mercurius solubilis per 10 ml or 1x10^-15 ml or 1 femtoliters per 10 ml

Now here is where I get fuzzy.

Dioxin has a LD50 of 20 micrograms/kilogram or 2x10^-7g/kg according to chemistry.org. (http://www.chemistry.org/portal/a/c/s/1/feature_tea.html?id=c373e90097f810dd8f6a17245d8301 00)

So would that be 2x10^-11g per gram? And could you use that as a comparison to the active ingredients above?

BTW, does anyone know how many atoms of Mercurius solubilis would even be in a femtoliter?

Kizarvexis

P.S. The FAQ for Similasan admits it doesn't work!! (Bolding and italics mine)

http://www.healthyrelief.com/faqs.cfm#a7

What if I choose the wrong product?

If you use the wrong remedy, it will not harm or help you. It will do nothing at all. To know which Similasan formula is best for you, choose the one that most closely matches your symptoms. Use for a period of time, and if relief is not evident, you may want to visit a physician.

[The Supreme Canuck]

I get 2x10-10g/g.

But you'll want to wait for someone else to run the numbers, too.

[01101001]

Google Calculator: "20 micrograms/kilogram in g/g"

20 (micrograms / kilogram) = 2.0 × 10-8 g / g

[The Supreme Canuck]

Wait, micrograms? Crud! I used grams. Indeed, it is 2.0 × 10-8 g / g.

[SolusLupus]

I wish homeopathy were real. I only have to drink a milligram of coffee, and I'm infused with a caffeine rush. :D

[snarkophilus]

I wish homeopathy were real. I only have to drink a milligram of coffee, and I'm infused with a caffeine rush. :D

No... you'd have to drink a milligram of coffee diluted in several litres of water!

I'm glad it's not real. If every time someone dumped something in a river, the effects of that something were multiplied as it was diluted, we'd all be totally screwed. One drop of poison would become the ultimate weapon. (Or, if you're one of those people who says the reverse effect happens, then one drop of medicine would do it).

One of my favourite (sort of) papers of all time: "Transatlantic Transfer of Digitized Antigen Signal by Telephone Link," J. Benveniste, P. Jurgens, W. Hsueh and J. Aissa, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. :wall:

[Ken G]

I have no doubt at all that the company in question never puts any of those substances in its "medicines". It's just water. Why would they bother? The levels probably cannot even be tested for, and there's no one to test it anyway. There's no reason to be accurate, I'm sure they're not, but roughly speaking, 12X must come out in the ballpark of 10^-12 g/g. The real problem is, can you imagine the hassle it is to dilute something by 10^12 times? Note they really claim they dilute it, they don't say they just add a tiny amount to begin with (that wouldn't work, it seems). If you started with a teaspoon of solution, this would require almost a billion gallons of clean water to dilute that much. How much would that cost? It's completely ridiculous to think they are even going through the motions. They just bottle and sell water, and the natural concentrations of those "active" substances are probably higher than 12X anyway. Sulphur? Are you serious? Just how dumb to they think people are? Or a better question, just how dumb are they? Here's my product-- it's called placebowater. Works for every ailment, never a side effect. I can even undersell the homeopaths.

[Wolverine]

I wish homeopathy were real.

Same here. I'd save a fortune on beer.

[Dragon Star]

:naughty: :p

lol

[snarkophilus]

If you started with a teaspoon of solution, this would require almost a billion gallons of clean water to dilute that much.

I can see that you've never dated someone who was obsessed with homeopathic medicine. Gather round, children, and I will explain how it is all said to work.

Here is what you must do to create a good homeopathic medicine. First, obtain some of whatever causes the same symptoms you are suffering from. It doesn't even have to be exact -- if you have a headache, a crowbar will work as well as dollop of mercury (which apparently causes headaches). Actually, the crowbar isn't "natural," so depending upon your homeopath, you may be told that you're just being a jerk. To me, the crowbar seems like it causes more headaches than mercury does. *shrug*

Second, carefully measure out some amount of this substance. You may have to use an approved, precise measuring tool, like a 100 mL beaker. (If you've ever measured a solid in a beaker, then left it to settle for ten minutes, you will understand how ridiculous this idea is. Heck, if you've ever baked with brown sugar, or if you've ever looked at the standard error of your basic 100 mL-range beaker, you should understand this.) A mortar and pestle is a nice tool for grinding stuff, and if you have one you can charge more for your remedy.

Now, combine a precise amount of water and your ingredients in a flask. The water is best if it doesn't come from the tap. It should be as expensive as possible, preferably coming from a glacier or mountain spring. This is true even if the water from your tap has a lower mineral content than what is listed on the bottle. It's usually in the 100 mL range, but it depends on how much of the original ingredient you added. Sort of.

Shake. Apparently the way they teach you to shake stuff in university chemistry labs is not correct. The correct homeopathic method involves shaking the solution a precise number of times. There's also something to do with swirling or not swirling or something like that -- I apparently can't do it properly, although it was never explained to me why this is the case. The more edumacated of homeopaths will tell you that incorrect shaking disturbs the quantum memory structure of the water, or some babble like that. To be honest, it would not surprise me if you had to draw a circle starting with the north-most point, light some candles, and chant songs in a long-forgotten language as well.

Now, draw out 1 mL (or 10 mL, or whatever) of your mixture and put in a new flask. Dilute to 100 mL. Shake. Repeat a whole bunch of times, dumping most of what you used at each step. In this way, fifteen dilutions takes only 1.5 L of water.

Finally, sell at grossly inflated prices, or feed to your children/younger siblings instead of getting them actual antibiotics or influenza shots.

That is the process, children. Now, go spread the good word.


Just how dumb to they think people are?

Extremely dumb. As in it's a multi-billion dollar industry in North America, and their lobby groups are powerful enough to keep the fraud suits away.


Here's my product-- it's called placebowater. Works for every ailment, never a side effect. I can even undersell the homeopaths.

There's a Futurama episode that has one of the greatest moments in comedy. Bender is sick, and the dialogue goes something like this:
Amy: "You should try homeopathic medicine, Bender. Take some zinc."
Bender: "I'm 40% zinc."
Amy: "Then take some echinacea, or St. John’s Wort."
Professor Farnsworth: "Or a big fat placebo! It’s all the same crap!"

Oh, the hilarity.

Anyway, I am certain that with the right marketing, you actually could make a billion dollars with that idea. Of course, you would have to have no shred of moral fibre whatsoever to do so....

[JohnD]

I like the quote that homeopathic products are found to be “safe and effective” by the FDA. Safe, no doubt. Effective?
And as the Snark Lover explained homeopathy can't be discounted by toxic spills - unless of course they are shaken the the right way.

But think about the dilutions in a different way. I'll approximate, because accuracy doesn't matter. And assume, because I can't find a exact description of how Mercurius Solubilis is prepared.

Gm molecular wt of mercury=200gms
Homeopathic preparation starts with one drop of the original substance with 99 drops of water, or equivalent amounts. So as we are scientists (Yes?) let's assume that they put 1ml of elemental mercury in 99 mls water. And shake it.

1ml Hg = 13.5gms = (Avogadro's No.x 13.5)/200 atoms Hg = 0.4 x 10^21 atoms
or 4 x 10^20

"mercurius solubilis" is described as 15X, so has been diluted in this way 15 times, in other words x100^15, or x10^30
So in the final solution there are 4x10^(20-30) atoms of Hg.
=4^-10 atoms

We are discussing aliquots of 100 mls, so to make this meaningful, we need a larger number of aliquots, in fact 10^10, or 100mlx10^10
=1000 million litres

This will contain 4 atoms of mercury, so there will be one atom in 250 million litres of the homeopathic preparation.

This assumes, of course that elemental mercury dissolves completely in distilled water. Which it doesn't. And I won't bother to calculate the probability that the 5 drops (15 drops/ml) you put in your ear contain a mercury atom, because that doesn't matter to the homeopathist.

So we can be confident that FDA, who can do these sums as well as you or I, have got it right if they say that it is harmless. I'd love to see the evidence offered about 'effectiveness'.

Please check these calcs, someone!

John

PS 1000 million litres is a cubic kilometer.

[trinitree88]

PS 1000 million litres is a cubic kilometer.

Actually, a cubic kilometer is 1000m X 1000m X1000m, for 109m3...and each m3 is 10dmX10dmX10dm...for 103dm3. Each cubic dm is a liter. So, it's 1012liters...a trillion, not a billion, in a cubic kilometer.

[Relmuis]

"Mercurius solubilis" means "soluble mercury", a mercury compound which can be dissolved in water. A saturated solution would be Mercurius Solubilis 0, and extremely poisonous.

Homeopathic dilutions are derived from this by repeatedly diluting the solution with 9 times as much water (decimal or D dilutions), with 99 times as much water (centesimal or C dilutions) or with 999 times as much water (millesimal or M solutions). M2, C3 and D6 solutions, for example, would all contain 1 part pro million of the original 0 solution.

Whether there are still molecules in such a solution can be calculaterd if we remember that N grams of a substance with molecular mass N contains 6.02 times 1023 molecules. (Avogadro's Constant.) Taking, for example, mercury disulfide, with molecular weight 265, and assuming that the original solution contains 0.265 grams per milliliter (I don't know the actual number), we get some 6 * 1020 molecules per milliliter in the 0 sulution. So, one milliliter of the D20 dilution will still contain some molecules, but one milliliter of the D21 dilution might or might not contain a molecule, and one milliliter of a D30 (or C15 or M10) dilution will almost certainly contain no molecule at all. If Avogadro's Constant is correct, that is.

But a D10 solution would contain some sixty billion molecules, and might very well have some physical effect if ingested. (I would use it sparingly.) And I have myself witnessed the effect of sedative homeopathic medicine on a cat (during the New Year festivities some years ago). The cat was duly (even alarmingly) sedated, and I do not think that any form of placebo effect or autosuggestion can have been responsible, at the cat didn't know that she was being sedated; the stuff (not Mercurius solubilis, but something else) having been surreptitiously slipped into her food.

[Ken G]

This is a lot of good and more detailed information about homeopathic medicine. What I'm getting is that there is a lot of variance in what is even meant by the language used, like X15 dilution (is it D15 or one of the others?). Most importantly, there may be, or there may not be, a large number of atoms of the substance in question. So even the term "homeopathic" really has little meaning, you might be getting a total placebo, or you might actually be getting some powerful sedative (note that sometimes I think "homeopathic" and "herbal" are used almost synomymously, even though herbal remedies may of course contain active ingredients that could help or hurt you). And depending on the "active ingredient", you may certainly be getting more of it from your tap water (but it wouldn't really be all that "active", without the falderall.) So the real problem is not that it's all a placebo, because sometimes it may not be, the problem is there is no oversight or science or even agreement on vocabulary that is being applied. It's medicine as it was in the Dark Ages, or witch doctors. It leaves us to ask, which is worse, the snake oil version that is as pure as the water in your tap and is essentially a con like mediums or psychics, or the unregulated unknown concentrations in concoctions that actually do contain some active ingredient, which is like treating patients like guinea pigs and not even bothering to study the result of the experiment. Who is worse, someone who is well aware they are conning you and is only taking your money without harming your body, or someone who actually believes their own pretenses so could have a random effect on your health?

[Thomas(believer)]

Echinacea (http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/353/4/341)

[Halcyon Dayz]

Echinacea (http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/353/4/341)
That sounds clear-cut.

[The Supreme Canuck]

It's worse for ginsing. There are three varieties. One has an active ingredient that actually does some good. But the products you can buy are unregulated. So, you could get any of the three varieties. Also, even if you do get the right one, the concentration of the ingredient is unregulated. So, in a word, it's bunk.

I don't understand why people go for herbal medicine. I'd rather have the active ingredient (if there is one, and if it works better than any "artificial" substance) extracted, measured, tested, and then given to me.

[Ken G]

An interesting question left unanswered is, if echinacea is a pure placebo, then does alternative medicine channels provide a "better placebo" because of their emphasis on nurturing the patient psychology? Ideally, what you'd do is bring these better placebos, if they are that, under the aegis of science. In terms of the linked article, it doesn't say if the participants had any explanation of how echinacea is supposed to help you, which I suspect herbal providers generally do at length.

[RobA]

From the advertising blurb in the OP:


- Homeopathy is regulated by the FDA, unlike herbal products. This means these
Similasan products have been determined “safe and effective” by the FDA.
(my bold)

That claim might be worth looking into :D

[Metricyard]

What I find ironic, is that most of the "natural medicine" sold in the health stores are more then likely owned or subsidized by the large pharacutical companies.

Nothing like covering all the bases.

[snarkophilus]

It's worse for ginsing. There are three varieties. One has an active ingredient that actually does some good. But the products you can buy are unregulated. So, you could get any of the three varieties. Also, even if you do get the right one, the concentration of the ingredient is unregulated. So, in a word, it's bunk.

I don't understand why people go for herbal medicine. I'd rather have the active ingredient (if there is one, and if it works better than any "artificial" substance) extracted, measured, tested, and then given to me.

Oh, but ginseng is so tasty. Screw the imaginary health benefits -- follow your taste buds!

[The Supreme Canuck]

Hey, can't argue with that!

[JohnD]

Trinitree,
Thank you! Noughts always confuse me. Thats why the exponential notation was invented.

Thomas,
That NEJM paper used a straight plant extract. No homeopathic dilution technique, so no evidence that homeopathy is false. But good evidence that the extract doesn't work.

Relmius,
No argument with your calculations, just the interpretation.
"So, one milliliter of the D20 dilution will still contain some molecules"
Yes, 60 molecules. And D21, 6. D30? Can't be bothered.
But
"If Avogadro's Constant is correct, that is"
Please don't make throw-away comments like that. We are trying to have a rational conversation. Evidence, reference for this statement please?

Anyone who wnats to know, I found a detailed description of the dilution technique here: http://www.hpathy.com/pharmacy/potency-scales1.asp
Me, I'll stick to microgms/ml as a unit.

John

[grant hutchison]

I don't understand why people go for herbal medicine. I'd rather have the active ingredient (if there is one, and if it works better than any "artificial" substance) extracted, measured, tested, and then given to me.Hear, hear.
I think the herbal remedy industry has done a very canny job of marketing, by implying that "natural substances" are somehow less toxic than "chemical drugs". It seems like a moment's reflection on that idea should turn up the obvious fallacies and errors, but very many people seem happy to accept it as an article of faith.

Grant Hutchison

[gwiz]

Anyone been watching the alternative medicine series on BBC TV? I missed the first programme on acupuncture, but the second on faith healing was fascinating stuff. They first established that it could be remarkably effective, then we saw a lot of experiments on the effectiveness of things like actors pretending to be healers and dummy (cut through skin and sew up again) surgery. The conclusion of all this is that if you think some process will cure you, then your brain releases dopamine which can indeed cure some conditions and reduces pain in others. In other words it put the placebo effect on a sound neurochemical basis.

[SolusLupus]

Hear, hear.
I think the herbal remedy industry has done a very canny job of marketing, by implying that "natural substances" are somehow less toxic than "chemical drugs". It seems like a moment's reflection on that idea should turn up the obvious fallacies and errors, but very many people seem happy to accept it as an article of faith.

Grant Hutchison

Y'know, there's a woman in my local SCA that swears by herbal remedies. I talked to her about chemical drugs, and she said some interesting things. One of the things she said was that she doesn't get why people assume that one trumps the other, or why you can have one but not the other.

In short, she wants a combination of chemical and natural remedies -- because, quite frankly, there ARE herbal remedies that work. Yes, there are plenty of quacks that sell you junk that don't, but if you do some cursory research, you can find natural substances that do various beneficial effects.

[grant hutchison]

... you can find natural substances that do various beneficial effects.Sure. But then the lack of regulation comes into play. Do I really want to roll the dice on dosage every time I take such an active substance? No thanks. I'd rather someone extracted it, purified it and standardized the preparation. Unfortunately, this involves drug R&D costs and involves big pharma companies and all the complications they bring.

The relationship between herbal medicines and prescription drugs always strikes me as being analogous to that between hobbyists and professionals: I'm happy for a hobbyist to build a table for me, but not to service the brakes on my car. So I pay extra to have my brake work done by a certified professional. But everything about my personal physiology and biochemistry is as important to me as my brakes, so I'm always pushed towards the professionals. If I were messing with my brain chemistry, for instance, then I'd much rather go for a prescription drug in a standard dose with a standard side-effect profile, rather than an unpredictable hit of St John's Wort.

Grant Hutchison

[The Supreme Canuck]

Hear, hear.
I think the herbal remedy industry has done a very canny job of marketing, by implying that "natural substances" are somehow less toxic than "chemical drugs". It seems like a moment's reflection on that idea should turn up the obvious fallacies and errors, but very many people seem happy to accept it as an article of faith.

I just don't understand the distinction between artificial and natural. A chemical is a chemical, no matter where you get it from. Take organic food, for example. They fertilize it with manure and criticize others for fertilizing their crops with "artificial" chemicals. But they're getting the same chemicals from the manure! Not only that, but they also get bacteria not present in chemical fertilizer, like e. coli.

I don't get people.

[Nowhere Man]

Relmius,
..."If Avogadro's Constant is correct, that is"
Please don't make throw-away comments like that. We are trying to have a rational conversation. Evidence, reference for this statement please?
Avogadro's number has to be correct. It's in the definition. It's essentially the reciprocal of the atomic mass unit measured in grams. If there is any uncertainty, it's in the lesser significant digits.

If we used pounds instead of grams, it would be 2.73 * 1026. Call this Avacado's Number :lol:.

Fred

[grant hutchison]

Take organic food, for example. They fertilize it with manure and criticize others for fertilizing their crops with "artificial" chemicals. But they're getting the same chemicals from the manure!And the run-off from an over-manured field will cause the same algal overgrowth in river water that is seen with the overuse of "chemical" fertilizers.
Colin Tudge's book, So Shall We Reap, is an interesting and (apparently, to this ignoramus) balanced view of the advantages and disadvantages of various farming methods, if you're interested.

Grant Hutchison

[Metricyard]

I just don't understand the distinction between artificial and natural. A chemical is a chemical, no matter where you get it from. Take organic food, for example. They fertilize it with manure and criticize others for fertilizing their crops with "artificial" chemicals. But they're getting the same chemicals from the manure! Not only that, but they also get bacteria not present in chemical fertilizer, like e. coli.

I don't get people.

Bold mine.

I would guess it comes down to lack of basic knowledge of chemistry.

Being interested in hydroponics*, I get this argument all the time. The naturalists always cry, but you're using chemicals to feed the plants. Well, duh, yes I'm using chemcials. When all is said and done, nitrogen is nitrogen, phosphorus is phosphorus, etc. All that manure is eventually broken down to basic chemicals. Using hydroponics just skips a step or to have having to break down the material.

*No, I'm not growing anything illegal. :)

[The Supreme Canuck]

Colin Tudge's book, So Shall We Reap, is an interesting and (apparently, to this ignoramus) balanced view of the advantages and disadvantages of various farming methods, if you're interested.

Thanks. I'll look into it.


I would guess it comes down to lack of basic knowledge of chemistry.

Now it's time for me to recommend reading material...

Anything by Dr. Joe Schwartz. He's to chemistry what the BA is to astronomy. He's collected a bunch of chemistry myths and debunked them in a number of books. All are great.

[Bobunf]

These herbal concoctions will do amazing things. I was at Plimouth Plantation in Massachusetts last summer and saw a host of herbal products apparently known to the colonists in 1627. I was with a woman who took it all very seriously with all the buzzwords, like “ancient knowledge,” and “natural.”

Eventually we came to a moss, which, when put in your shoes, reportedly would enable you to run 40 miles in a day without fatigue. While I didn't get a chance to try it, even she seemed a bit skeptical of this claim.

I think the reason these baseless beliefs exist has to do with fear of lack of control of the forces in the world. Magic, in whatever form, takes away the uncaring randomness of nature, and gives individuals some feeling of influence and protection against that chaos.

The thing obviously has really deep cultural and psychological roots since we see such phenomenon is all times, places, and cultures. Even today, even amongst educated, smart people.

On the other hand one can imagine some of us skeptics saying something like, “Methinks only you and I have the right; and sometimes I wonder about you.”

Bob

[JohnD]

I think you are right, Bobunf.
In another thread ( http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php?t=37829 ), the recent work on the nature of dark matter is discussed.
I can't get a hand hold on any of it, and it's scary!
Not threatening, but scary because I don't understand, and I had some sort of grip even on relativity.
Anyone without a science background, including 18th century people must feel (have felt) the same way about health and disease.

John

[Ken G]

Yes, I think there are two defenses against the fear of the unknown. One is knowledge, which takes a lot of work and study and might yield uncertain or unsatisfying results at any given point in the process. The other is the "magic bullet" approach, which is instantaneous and perfectly easy. It is the belief in Santa Claus, which no child has to work at or study about. Yet it creates joy and happiness. So why do no adults believe in Santa Claus? Because it gets tested, that's the only reason. All the "magic bullets" that do not get tested continue to be believed by noncritical thinkers. The only counter to that is to provide a better alternative.

[Fr. Wayne]

What I find ironic, is that most of the "natural medicine" sold in the health stores are more then likely owned or subsidized by the large pharacutical companies.

Nothing like covering all the bases.

Whatever Lola wants, :whistle: Lola gets...:whistle: Now I want a pill that will make me regular!

[Relmuis]

Relmius,
No argument with your calculations, just the interpretation.
"So, one milliliter of the D20 dilution will still contain some molecules"
Yes, 60 molecules. And D21, 6. D30? Can't be bothered.


As I calculate it, one milliliter of D20 solution will contain roughly 6 molecules, not 60. Which I take to mean that one is likely to ingest at least 2 and at most 10 molecules of the active ingredient. One milliliter of a D21 solution will contain roughly 0.6 molecules, which I take to mean that one molecule might or might not be present (more or less equal probabilities).

If Avogadro's Constant is right, that is. Of course a constant cannot be right or wrong as such, but different ideas might exist about its real magnitude. Which is what I meant. Personaly, I have little reason to doubt the generally accepted magnitude of the constant, but I suspect that people who believe in the efficacy of D30 or even D100 dilutions may have different ideas. (Unless the mere possibility of a molecule being present, may, through some quantummechanical principle, influence the body?)

One of the great advantages of using dilute solutions seems to be that there are nearly no unpleasant side effects. Allopathic medicine (such a beta blockers to lower blood pressure) may occasionally produce quite severe side effects (such a beta blockers interfering with the thyroid gland, or exacerbating pre-existing asthma). Homeopathic medicine is rarely dangerous in itself -- though I would still be careful with mercury compounds. The idea behind homeopathy is problematic, though: the body is supposed to overcompensate for the presence of a small amount of poison, thereby reducing the very symptoms which a large amount of the same poison would produce. It is not clear why the body would overcompensate in this way; what evolutionary advantage would such overcompensation convey? If Darwinian evolution is right, that is.

[grant hutchison]

It is not clear why the body would overcompensate in this way; what evolutionary advantage would such overcompensation convey?It's even less clear why the body would have developed such a response to massive dilutions of substances only if they have been prepared in a very specific manner that was invented just 200 years ago, and which seems to require the existence of sentient creatures with too much time on their hands. (There is, as far as I know, no mechanism in nature that generates "homeopathically active" dilutions.)
Doesn't this imply some massive purposeful intent to evolution, in order to prepare humans (and their pets and farm animals) for the advent of homeopathy? Seems like the IDers and the homeopaths should be joining forces ...

Grant Hutchison

[Fr. Wayne]

Remuis: Ding Ding Ding since I been here at Baut, you are the first one I've seen who said the magic word:
Avogadro's You are automatically entered into Cool Avatar Search as the blank (no avatar) contestant. You do retain the right to withdraw from mini-contest at any time.

[worzel]

Doesn't this imply some massive purposeful intent to evolution, in order to prepare humans (and their pets and farm animals) for the advent of homeopathy? Seems like the IDers and the homeopaths should be joining forces ...
That doesn't follow though, you could use the same argument to debunk any modern miracle of medicine (not that I'm defending homeopathy).

[grant hutchison]

That doesn't follow though, you could use the same argument to debunk any modern miracle of medicine ...I don't think you could.
It doesn't debunk the effectiveness of surgery, because surgery is adapted post hoc to the structure of the body.
And it doesn't debunk the effectiveness of conventional drugs, since these simply act on receptor sites that have evolved for other purposes, and the commonality of molecular signalling mechanisms across species (which arises because of evolution) make it no surprise that molecules extracted from one species might have an effect on receptors from another.
Homeopathy, on the other hand, "exploits" a "mechanism" that has had no chance to evolve until 200 years ago.

Grant Hutchison

[worzel]

I don't think you could.
It doesn't debunk the effectiveness of surgery, because surgery is adapted post hoc to the structure of the body.
And it doesn't debunk the effectiveness of conventional drugs, since these simply act on receptor sites that have evolved for other purposes, and the commonality of molecular signalling mechanisms across species (which arises because of evolution) make it no surprise that molecules extracted from one species might have an effect on receptors from another.
Homeopathy, on the other hand, "exploits" a "mechanism" that has had no chance to evolve until 200 years ago.

Grant Hutchison
I understand and accept your point. I was just referring to the dismissal of homeopathy simply on the basis that for it to work we must have evolved the supposed response either in the last 200 years or in anticipation over many more years.

While I give no credence whatsoever to homeopathy, we do have some strange responses that seem to serve no useful purpose now but that we've relatively recently figured out how to exploit. Wasn't vaccination discovered almost by accident and seemingly at odds with the then current common sense? (EDIT: not that that is an example of a strange response btw - ummm. what purpose does swelling serve? why does ice reduce it? what reason did we have to elvolve that response prior to the discovery of refridgeration?)

Given a strange response that we have evidence for, we can probably come up with a few plausible reasons for it, and given the lack of evidence for the supposed response that homeopathy is supposedly exploiting (not to mention its other credibility problems) we feel no need to seek an explanation for that. But the difference, and the overriding reason for why we reject homeopathy, is surely because there simply is no evidence that it works, not that we must have had super fast or preemptive evolution to meet an odd discovery.

[grant hutchison]

I was just referring to the dismissal of homeopathy simply on the basis that for it to work we must have evolved the supposed response either in the last 200 years or in anticipation over many more years.I don't think I wrote anything to suggest I was dismissing homeopathy simply because it would require teleological evolution. All I wrote was "It's even less clear why ..." Surely that phrasing doesn't close the door on all the other evidentiary gaps you're alluding to? It certainly wasn't my intention to make such an assertion: I believed I was merely throwing another (large!) stick on to an already raging funeral pyre.


(EDIT: not that that is an example of a strange response btw - ummm. what purpose does swelling serve? why does ice reduce it? what reason did we have to elvolve that response prior to the discovery of refridgeration?)Just by way of explanation, and in no sense refuting your point ...
Swelling serves no purpose. It's a side effect of increased vascular permeability, which is mediated by the inflammatory response, which is a means of delivering various immune mediators like white cells and antibodies to the site of injury by leaking fluid from the blood vessels into the tissues.
Ice reduces swelling because the amount of fluid in the tissues is determined by the rate of delivery (from the arteries to the capillaries) and the rate of removal (by the lymphatics). Ice causes constriction of the arterioles (a reflex in order to conserve heat), but the lymphatics continue to drain as normal (they have no muscular walls). Fluid is removed faster than it is delivered, and so swelling is reduced.
Ice simply exploits a pre-existing evolutionary mechanism for thermoregulation.
(Just in case you're interested ...)


But the difference, and the overriding reason for why we reject homeopathy, is surely because there simply is no evidence that it works, not that we must have had super fast or preemptive evolution to meet an odd discovery.There are studies which appear to show homeopathy does work, published in reputable mainstream medical and scientific journals. Simply saying "no evidence" will immediately embroil you in a paper-by-paper running battle with homeopathy proponents. So while in no way disagreeing with your point that evidence of efficacy is very poor, I think arguments from the absence of a plausible mechanism (evolutionary, physical or chemical) are still valuable additions to our armamentarium.

Grant Hutchison

[worzel]

I don't think I wrote anything to suggest I was dismissing homeopathy simply because it would require teleological evolution. All I wrote was "It's even less clear why ..." Surely that phrasing doesn't close the door on all the other evidentiary gaps you're alluding to? It certainly wasn't my intention to make such an assertion: I believed I was merely throwing another (large!) stick on to an already raging funeral pyre.Fair point. But this was this sentence that I was referring to, and the one I quoted:

Doesn't this imply some massive purposeful intent to evolution, in order to prepare humans (and their pets and farm animals) for the advent of homeopathy?

If sufficient evidence were there to suggest that something was going on it wouldn't imply anything of the sort to me, but rather that there was something interesting we have yet to understand.


Just by way of explanation, and in no sense refuting your point ...
Swelling serves no purpose. It's a side effect of increased vascular permeability, which is mediated by the inflammatory response, which is a means of delivering various immune mediators like white cells and antibodies to the site of injury by leaking fluid from the blood vessels into the tissues.
Ice reduces swelling because the amount of fluid in the tissues is determined by the rate of delivery (from the arteries to the capillaries) and the rate of removal (by the lymphatics). Ice causes constriction of the arterioles (a reflex in order to conserve heat), but the lymphatics continue to drain as normal (they have no muscular walls). Fluid is removed faster than it is delivered, and so swelling is reduced.
Ice simply exploits a pre-existing evolutionary mechanism for thermoregulation.
(Just in case you're interested ...)Thank you, that is very interesting.


There are studies which appear to show homeopathy does work, published in reputable mainstream medical and scientific journals. Simply saying "no evidence" will immediately embroil you in a paper-by-paper running battle with homeopathy proponents. So while in no way disagreeing with your point that evidence of efficacy is very poor,Well that's the case with any particular strain of nonsense one cares to entertain. I should have used better wording like what you did :)


I think arguments from the absence of a plausible mechanism (evolutionary, physical or chemical) are still valuable additions to our armamentarium.Additions yes, but without lack of evidence it's a pretty weak argument. By what mechanism does space and time warp to accomadate constant c? We accept that that is just the way it is because the evidence suuports it (yeah, I know that's cheating a bit).

[grant hutchison]

OK.
Would it be a fair summary to say that we both have the same opinion about the dubious nature of homeopathy, but that we disagree about the relative emphasis to be placed on "lack of supportive experimental data" and "lack of theoretical underpinning"?
If you'd agree with that, I wonder if our difference may be because of what I see as a quite basic difference between the "proper" physical sciences and medical science.
The level of certainty that can be obtained from randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials is rather low, in general, and so "Is there a plausible mechanism?" is a very important subsidiary question that clinicians frequently ask themselves when presented with weak evidence.
Huge changes in medical practice have taken place on the basis of very weak evidence backed up by strongly plausible mechanism. But the last case I can think of in which practice changed radically because of strong evidence in the absence of plausible mechanism is the discovery of general anaesthesia in the 1840s, though I suspect there must be others more recently that I'm just not thinking of.

Grant Hutchison

[worzel]

Yep, that's a fair summary. I didn't realize that such importance was placed on a plausible mechanism in medicine, but I can see the sense of what you're saying regarding the levels of certainty in the evidence.

[Ken G]

Homeopathy is an excellent case study for the importance of a plausible mechanism. Although I'm sure that many treatments have been introduced over the years before they had a plausible mechanism (like herbal aspirin delivery mechanisms, chewing bark was it not?), I think Grant's point is that at least there was plenty of room to develop a plausible mechanism once more was understood. But homeopathy, taken whole hog, certainly has no room for developing a plausible mechanism without throwing out volumes of physics and medical knowledge that has been tested and retested ad nausea (no pun intended). Any efficacy attributed to homeopathy must instead be tracable to the influence on the patient's mental, rather than physical, response to the treatment. Thus rather than to just say, OK, it sometimes helps but let's not ask why or we'll mess it up, it is better to include the study of this mental response into mainstream medicine and ultimately develop better homeopathy, in a nutshell. This essentially means develop a better approach to placebo medicine, and that does involve ethical dilemmas for mainstream medicine that the alternatives can avoid. Perhaps one solution is to just leave placebo medicine where it it, in the hands of semi-professionals, but that's kind of the coward's way out for mainstream medicine, and comes with all the unwanted results we've been talking about.

[grant hutchison]

Although I'm sure that many treatments have been introduced over the years before they had a plausible mechanism (like herbal aspirin delivery mechanisms, chewing bark was it not ...Yes indeed. Willow bark. Salicylic acid, the substance from which aspirin is derived, gets its name from Salix, the genus of the willow tree. It's also a fine example of the evolutionary plausibility of the origin of conventional drugs, since it functions as a hormone for the tree, and interacts with similarly structured receptor sites in human tissues: nature pulls the same receptor/ligand tricks over and over again in different species, for different purposes.
But your point is well taken. I was necessarily referring to modern scientific medicine when I wrote about the importance of mechanism: first we had to understand how stuff works, and that was a very long haul. Even the little potted summary of "swelling" I gave earlier calls on the fruits of many person-years of research. The exact mechanisms of general anaesthesia have been honed down to specific receptor subunits only in the last 10 years. (By a man just down the corridor from me, actually.)

Grant Hutchison

[Relmuis]

Although it is slightly off-topic, I would like to point out that herbal medicine has an aspect which is just as weird as the non-evolvable reaction of the human (and animal) body to homeopathic dilutions. The aspect of synergy. It was mentioned on the B.B.C. just yesterday.

Many mainstream medicines are derived from herbs, or other plants (such as the willow-tree and the marsh spirea which both produce aspirin-like substances.) But strangely, these medicines tend to address only one aspect or symptom of the disease, whereas taking the plant as found addresses many aspects or symptoms, and produces less side effects to boot. How is this possible.

It appears that the plant in these cases contains a whole cocktail of pharmacologically active ingredients, who either reinforce each others main effect or combat different aspects, symptoms or causes of the disease, while also compensating for each others side effects. The B.B.C. use the word orchestra to describe this subtle interplay between several substances.

How could such a plant (or many such plants, rather) have evolved? What advantage would it gain in its natural habitat from being perfect to cure an ailment like prostate hypertrophy, for example?

And if it hasn't evolved, is there an alternative to it's having been created by an Intelligent Designer? Yet, wouldn't it be more plausible for such a Designer to design these substances into the human body itself? Or to prevent the ailment from occurring in the first place?

However, in this case (as opposed to the case of homeopathy) there is an alternative explanation. An ancient civilization may have artificially selected these plants to enhance their medicinal qualities.

[Fr. Wayne]

That's why I love the medieval scholastics approach to plants. To discover in the plants physical structure allegorical properties of the nutritive soul in all living creatures (as vague as that sounds). In other words, study the human soul and its properties, generalize to nature's physical structures, and then discover (you may call it placebo or orchestrations) remedies. So very unscientific yet based on a theory that nature contains the solution to all our natural problems- Homer' beer joke is only funny (if you are not an alcoholic) because it is an extreme sarcasm of this approach to life. No need to rebut, I hear ya loud and clear already.

[Ken G]

There's nothing unscientific about formulating a theory, even if vague, and then testing it. The problem is the testing part, and whether or not this vague theory has any hope of standing up in practice. If it is really true that plants are orchestrated to combine a "cocktail" of active ingredients that somehow work together to fight disease, my guess is that Grant could explain such a convergence in the same kinds of terms he has used already-- that the plant uses these active ingredients in a unified way for its own purposes, and to the extent that there are similarities in the activity of the ingredients in humans, there can also be a similar complementarity of function in a human. In other words, the plant contains the cocktail for a reason, and that reason may carry over into beneficial results for humans. The point is, this might be true in some cases, while in other cases the cocktail could be fatal, even though parts of the cocktail could be beneficial. It is not likely to be very effective to form some kind of general principle that says it's better to eat the whole plant rather than just some extracted ingredient, the question must be tested separately in every instance. What it does suggest is that pharmaceutical companies might want to consider how combinations of ingredients might enhance the result, and perhaps they have something to learn from these cocktails.

[grant hutchison]

... my guess is that Grant could explain such a convergence in the same kinds of terms he has used already-- that the plant uses these active ingredients in a unified way for its own purposes, and to the extent that there are similarities in the activity of the ingredients in humans, there can also be a similar complementarity of function in a human.I've never encountered the claim for "orchestration" of herbal activities before, but my immediate response is doubt and a desire to see some evidence. (While there's no doubt that many plants contain therapeutically active substances, unfortunately many of the claims made by the herbal lobby are either untested or undemonstrated by clinical trials.)
Reasons for doubt are:
a) The physiological activities of plants and humans have little in common. While it's eminently plausible that a substance used for one effect in a plant will have some activity in humans (because of the commonality of signalling molecules), it seems unlikely to be the same activity, or to occur at precisely the same molecular concentration.
So it would be a remarkable coincidence if several substances from the same plant happened to have additive beneficial effects in humans at precisely the ratio of concentrations used by the plant to achieve (presumably) a completely different purpose or combination of purposes.
b) Orchestration is a fairly common therapeutic manoeuvre in conventional medicine. If you have high blood pressure you'll likely end up taking several different drugs with additive or synergistic benefits. The adverse effects are minimized because each drug can be used in a relatively low dose, reducing its side-effect profile. However, the relative doses and combination of drugs often have to be tailored to an individual patient's physiology. For this reason, although combine preparations of drugs are available (which would he the mainstream analogy to an "orchestrated" plant leaf), they're rarely particularly useful, because clinicians need to tinker with the mixture.

So offer me a plant leaf and tell me it contains a balanced orchestra of herbal activity, and I'll doubt if it's true; if it is true, then I'll doubt if it'll be particularly useful.
It would be nice to look at the evidence.

Grant Hutchison

[gwiz]

One example they gave in the TV programme was a herb that contained an active ingredient that had too large a molecule to cross a cell wall in normal conditions and also an ingredient that weakened cell walls sufficiently for the active ingredient to cross.

[Ken G]

Yes, that sounds like what I meant, a synergy in the plant that exists for a reason. But Grant's point is well taken that you'd better look at human physiology carefully before concluding that you'll have a similar benefit in humans, and even if so, you should feel free to tinker with the mixture to make a better match in humans.

[snarkophilus]

One example they gave in the TV programme was a herb that contained an active ingredient that had too large a molecule to cross a cell wall in normal conditions and also an ingredient that weakened cell walls sufficiently for the active ingredient to cross.

Then of course comes the question: do you really want to be weakening your cells (if it works on animals at all)? Maybe if you target the drug to the specific cells you're looking at, or the specific area of the body that needs medication....

That kind of argument is often used by people who say you need to take natural medicines rather than synthetic ones (medical marjuana advocates in particular go nuts with this). After all, the two ingredients come together in the herb, so of course they're going to stay together in your body, increasing efficiency, right? Right? Well, right, if you ignore the fact that whatever you put into your stomach gets digested, mixed around, and eventually thrown randomly into your bloodstream, which also splits up the stuff that gets pushed into it.

[John Dlugosz]

An interesting question left unanswered is, if echinacea is a pure placebo, then does alternative medicine channels provide a "better placebo" because of their emphasis on nurturing the patient psychology? Ideally, what you'd do is bring these better placebos, if they are that, under the aegis of science. In terms of the linked article, it doesn't say if the participants had any explanation of how echinacea is supposed to help you, which I suspect herbal providers generally do at length.

Sure. People in the food industry understand that. I recall a study about how the same brownie tasted better when served on a nicer napkin. They know that the whole experience contributes.

So, maybe we should perform some ritual when taking (real) medicine.

[grant hutchison]

One example they gave in the TV programme was a herb that contained an active ingredient that had too large a molecule to cross a cell wall in normal conditions and also an ingredient that weakened cell walls sufficiently for the active ingredient to cross.I'm not really sure what the story underlying this is.
Most drugs don't enter the cell at all: they bind to receptors on the cell membrane, and trigger intracellular events that way. But a small number of active substances, like some hormones, act on receptors in the nucleus. My understanding is that they get into the cell because they're fat soluble, and so can diffuse through the outer lipid membrane. My guess, then, (and very much a guess) would be that we're talking about some sort of "helper molecule" that binds to the active substance and increases its fat solubility to facilitate diffusion. In which case, the facilitation is carried out by physics & chemistry rather than physiology, and most of my doubts about drug "orchestras" wouldn't apply in this case.

Grant Hutchison

[worzel]

An interesting question left unanswered is, if echinacea is a pure placebo...
Does anyone here know if echinacea is just a placebo? My girlfriend swears by it and is making me take it for my cold at the mo. Not knowing how I'm going to feel from one day to the next anyway, I really can't tell whether it's making any difference or not.

[Ken G]

So, maybe we should perform some ritual when taking (real) medicine.
That's quite an interesting suggestion. Note that we do at present have a ritual-- I'm gonna guess it looks like a person in a bathroom with a handful of multicolored pills and a stark glass of water, throwing their head back. Choke, gurgle. Not exactly aromatherapy, is it?



Does anyone here know if echinacea is just a placebo?

My mom (not a scientist) swears by it as well. But after the recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine that found no effect, I heard some herbal medicine types interviewed on the radio. What they said was, "yeah, we knew echinacea doesn't really work for colds, but if you believe it will help, then it does." Thus, there were already people in the "biz" who claimed to know it was a placebo. Of course, had the result of the study been different, they might have said "told ya so, knew it all along".

[grant hutchison]

Does anyone here know if echinacea is just a placebo? My girlfriend swears by it and is making me take it for my cold at the mo. Not knowing how I'm going to feel from one day to the next anyway, I really can't tell whether it's making any difference or not.Just pulled a (relatively) recent review article off my shelf for you. Hodges & Kam, Anaesthesia 2002: 57; 889-99.
In five randomized placebo-controlled, blinded trials of echinacea used for 8-12 weeks as prophylaxis against upper respiratory tract infections, two found a statistically significant lower incidence of infection in the treatment group, and three did not. The structure of the trials was sufficiently heterogenous that nothing can be deduced from the pooled data.
A more recent randomized placebo-controlled trial involving 109 patients with a high incidence of colds also failed to show any value of echinacea as prophylaxis.
There are, however, eight randomized placebo-controlled studies which show a reduction in the duration and severity of cold symptoms if echinacea is started early in the course of the infection.
Mechanism is plausible, since in vitro and in animals echinacea has been shown to modulate part of the inflammatory response and activate some types of white blood cell.
Adverse effect include unpleasant taste, gut upsets, headache and dizziness. It's contraindicated if you suffer from any kind of disease of the immune system, or if you're allergic to sunflowers or daisies.

I personally can't see why anyone would even consider ingesting an unregulated drug that messes with their immune system, just so their cold symptoms will get a little better a little faster, but that seems to be just me: echinacea is the top-selling herbal product in the USA.

Grant Hutchison

[Ken G]

That's interesting, because it doesn't agree with the results of the New England Journal of Medicine study linked to elsewhere in this thread. That paper concluded that there was not even a measurable effect on severity of illness. But Grant raises a good point-- even if the efficacy is debatable, one has a catch-22: either it does nothing, in which case it's money for nothing (or nothing more than a placebo), or it does something-- which is scary given that we are talking about messing with vital internal systems in ways that have not been tested in the exhaustive way that pharmaceuticals are tested (and suppressed, in the case of Vioxx....).

[grant hutchison]

That's interesting, because it doesn't agree with the results of the New England Journal of Medicine study linked to elsewhere in this threadYes, it's a good example of the sort of scrappy level of experimental evidence that medicine has to deal with all the time. Biological systems are so variable and so complex that teasing out a single bit of information from the morasse of other influences (both known and unknown) is often very difficult indeed.

Grant Hutchison

[Fr. Wayne]

Sad London story over pharmaceuticals in teens: http://www.infowars.com/articles/ps/banned_drugs_prescribed_for_children.htm

[worzel]

Thanks guys, I think I'll pass on it from now on. After two days my cold has taken pretty much the same course it always takes so if it has some effect, it's pretty minimal anyway. Now where's the Sinex, I know that works, it almost blows my head off :)

[Skipjack]

I was just thinking something:
If homeopathy worked as it claims to work, then I should be able to kill someone by putting some poisonous substance into the mix.
It would be the perfect murder since noone would ever be able to find any trace of the substance in the victims body, right.
CU
Skipjack

[clop]

Surely the entire argument relating to the physiological effectiveness (or lack thereof) of homeopathic remedies could be decided once and for all simply by taking an off-the-shelf remedy and subjecting it to a double-blind medical trial with a true placebo and a statistically-significantly large test population.

I'd be surprised if this hasn't already been done somewhere?

clop

[snarkophilus]

I was just thinking something:
If homeopathy worked as it claims to work, then I should be able to kill someone by putting some poisonous substance into the mix.
It would be the perfect murder since noone would ever be able to find any trace of the substance in the victims body, right.
CU
Skipjack

No no... the whole idea is that you put something poisonous in, but dilute it, and it then acts to counter symptoms that are similar to those that would be caused by your poison. Putting a poison in will cure your intended victim. Allegedly.

Here's how homeopathy was developed. This guy named Hahnemann was a doctor. He took some quinine and noticed that he got sick. He also noticed that malaria makes you sick, and that quinine was used to treat malaria.

So he did some tests. He gave some people quinine, and some people diluted quinine, and noticed that the diluted quinine made people less sick. In fact, the more he diluted it, the less sick they became. Somehow, he concluded that a highly diluted solution of quinine must cure malaria more effectively. After all, if it makes healthy people more healthy than an undiluted solution does, it should also make sick people more healthy, right? Well, that's the idea.

[grant hutchison]

Surely the entire argument relating to the physiological effectiveness (or lack thereof) of homeopathic remedies could be decided once and for all simply by taking an off-the-shelf remedy and subjecting it to a double-blind medical trial with a true placebo and a statistically-significantly large test population.

I'd be surprised if this hasn't already been done somewhere?Sure. Many times. Most of the positive studies are identifiably poorly designed. Some of the apparently good quality studies show positive results, a lot show negative results.
Doubters and believers spend hours arguing about the design of the positive studies.

Grant Hutchison

[Ken G]

Not to mention the problem of what a positive study means-- it means there is a signal in the data that is hard to attribute to chance. What hard to attribute means is debatable, but let's say, there's only a 5% chance that the result could have come out that way if the medicine was a pure placebo. But here's the rub-- if you do 20 studies, chances are 1 will be
"positive" under this definition, even though the medicine doesn't do anything. So all the proponents have to do is look at that 1 study and ignore the other 19, and voila, the treatment is validated.

[grant hutchison]

But here's the rub-- if you do 20 studies, chances are 1 will be "positive" under this definition, even though the medicine doesn't do anything. So all the proponents have to do is look at that 1 study and ignore the other 19, and voila, the treatment is validated.And it gets worse. There are well-proven distortions in the published literature from submission bias and publication bias: researchers are less likely to write up and submit studies that show no difference between treatment and placebo; and editors are less likely to publish such "no difference" studies if submitted.
There is also an extremely unfortunate culture in medical research in which attempts to duplicate findings from other centres are infrequently made, and are less likely to be published if carried out ("that's been done already").
The medical literature is therefore biased towards positive findings which have not been checked by other researchers. It would make you laugh if it weren't so potentially lethal.
Hence, again, the sanity-check question "Is there a plausible mechanism?" is a very important one for clinicians trying to make safe decisions based on the medical literature.

Grant Hutchison

[Relmuis]

I was just thinking something:
If homeopathy worked as it claims to work, then I should be able to kill someone by putting some poisonous substance into the mix.
It would be the perfect murder since noone would ever be able to find any trace of the substance in the victims body, right.
CU
Skipjack

No no... the whole idea is that you put something poisonous in, but dilute it, and it then acts to counter symptoms that are similar to those that would be caused by your poison. Putting a poison in will cure your intended victim. Allegedly.

In some cases murder (or suicide) by homeopathic means might be feasible. Consider someone who already has an ailment which would improve if he or she got a certain medicine X. Then a homeopathic dilution of X might plausibly make the condition worse. One person's poison (digitalis for example) is another person's lifesaver.

But I am not sure whether this would work, as the details of the mechanisms by which the body compensates for tiny doses of X are unknown. And I suspect it wouldn't work if allopathic doses of X were already taken by the intended victim, as these would drown out the signal from the homeopathic dose. (The allopathic dose would merely be enlarged by a tiny amount.)

There was a scare in my country some decades ago about humic acids in subsurface water combining with the chlorine used to purify it and making chloroform, which would then be present in tapwater. But the amounts of chloroform detected were found to be negligible. However, this could mean that there are homeopathic doses of chloroform in tapwater, which might result in, say, more people being "edgy", hyperactive, insomniac, irritable, prone to have nervous breakdowns, or even to commit crimes. And crime (especially violent, apparently spur-of-the-moment crime) has risen rather spectacularly in these parts of the world.

[grant hutchison]

There are, however, homeopathic doses of everything else in tapwater, too. Hence, I think, the homeopaths' emphasis on the method of preparation as being the only way to produce an (allegedly) active homeopathic solution.
Another feature of "mainstream" homeopathy is that the preparations (allegedly) work only to counteract a pre-existing set of symptoms in the patient. A symptomless patient therefore has no handle for homeopathy to work on, so mainstream homeopaths are as outraged at the idea of "homeopathic vaccines" and "homeopathic malaria prophylaxis" as are conventional medics.
I've never discussed it with a homeopath, but if I follow their reasoning it seems they therefore wouldn't accept the idea of a homeopathic poison being able to affect a healthy person. Your idea of magnifying a disease state with homeopathic preparations of the therapeutic drug is an interesting one, though; I must ask the next homeopath I encounter.

Grant Hutchison

[Ken G]

Given that the mind is even better at harming our health than improving it, I've no doubt that reverse-placebos (i.e., hysteria) would be even more effective than regular placebos. So on that basis, I suspect the reverse-homeopathic treatments you are discussing could indeed be harmful, though perhaps not fatal. Of course, you have to tell the person they've received a reverse-homeopathic dose of the therapeutic agent-- and whether or not you actually do is of course irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant if the regular homeopathic agents contain the ingredients they claim (I would guess they do not, it's cheaper).

[Relmuis]

I am not sure whether there would be homeopathic doses of everything else in tapwater, but I suspect that there might be homeopathic doses of many things, including some harmful ones.

To clarify: I would not consider any amount of tap water to be a homeopathic dilution of X, unless the amount (to be ingested over one day, say) contained at least one molecule of X. Some homeopaths would disagree, and for them the absurd conclusion could only be avoided by insisting on a special way of preparing the dilution.

As for telling one's intended victim that one is going to try and murder him or her; this strikes me as impractical, and somewhat dangerous, even if the victim wouldn't believe it at that time. A message might be left for the police to find, or some form of retaliation might be devised. But the dose could be used as a suicide weapon, without telling anyone beforehand. Or someone who is awaiting capital punishment might agree to participate in a homeopathic experiment instead.

[JohnD]

Homeopathic murder?
Anyone who persudes another that their potentially fatal condition is better and exclusively treated by homeopathy is guilty of murder.
"While the balance of the mind is disturbed" would be a useful defence, but only if they consented to subsequent incarceration at Her Majesty's Pleasure, in case they tried it on someone else.
John

[grant hutchison]

To clarify: I would not consider any amount of tap water to be a homeopathic dilution of X, unless the amount (to be ingested over one day, say) contained at least one molecule of X. Some homeopaths would disagree, and for them the absurd conclusion could only be avoided by insisting on a special way of preparing the dilution.That's interesting. The several homeopaths I know all insist that strength continues to increase beyond the point at which their dilution is unlikely to contain a single active molecule. Hence my contention that even pure water contains everything at homeopathic dilutions.
I was under the impression that acceptance of "dilution to extinction" was part of the homeopathic credo. Do you know otherwise?

Grant Hutchison

[clop]

Not to mention the problem of what a positive study means-- it means there is a signal in the data that is hard to attribute to chance. What hard to attribute means is debatable, but let's say, there's only a 5% chance that the result could have come out that way if the medicine was a pure placebo. But here's the rub-- if you do 20 studies, chances are 1 will be
"positive" under this definition, even though the medicine doesn't do anything. So all the proponents have to do is look at that 1 study and ignore the other 19, and voila, the treatment is validated.

No I don't agree with you or Grant.

You seem to be saying that "if there is a 5% chance that the result could have come out that way due to chance alone, that all proponents have to do is present the 1 study out of 20 that shows that the homeopathic remedy works over the placebo."

This is a common misunderstanding of the nature of statistical significance. A p value of 0.05 does not mean that 20 replications of the study will result in 1 positive result and 19 negative results.

I quote from a text book

"A p-value of .05 (i.e.,1/20) indicates that there is a 5% probability that the relation between the variables found in our sample is a "fluke." In other words, assuming that in the population there was no relation between those variables whatsoever, and we were repeating experiments like ours one after another, we could expect that approximately in every 20 replications of the experiment there would be one in which the relation between the variables in question would be equal or stronger than in ours.

Note that this is not the same as saying that, given that there is a relationship between the variables, we can expect to replicate the results 5% of the time or 95% of the time; when there is a relationship between the variables in the population, the probability of replicating the study and finding that relationship is related to the statistical power of the design."

Therefore if the effectiveness of a remedy is not statistically significant it would not be possible for the proponents to simply choose 1 study in 20. There would be no statistically significant study available for them to choose.

clop

[TheBlackCat]

The whole thing about the immune system is bunk as well. The immune system is extremely specific. It is not based on effect, it is based on chemical structure. If the chemical structures are effectively identical, then it can catch it, but injecting something with a certain effect then expecting completely different chemicals with remotely similar effects to also be targetted is baloney. Even pretty similar chemical with identical effects probably won't be targetted by the same antibody.

[TheBlackCat]

No no... the whole idea is that you put something poisonous in, but dilute it, and it then acts to counter symptoms that are similar to those that would be caused by your poison. Putting a poison in will cure your intended victim. Allegedly.

Forget a necessary medicine. By that logic, if you gave someone a homeopathic amount of something that everyone needs, say a vitamin, then you should be able to counter any positive effect from the vitamin. Or better yet, how come reverse osmosis water isn't acutely toxic? Sure it is not great for you because it screws up your electrolyte levels, but considering your diet needs some salt then water that has purposefully had all the salt forcibly extracted from it should counter all the electrolytes in your body and and kill you instantly as your nervous sytem, cardiac muscle, and respiratory system completely stop functioning.

[grant hutchison]

Therefore if the effectiveness of a remedy is not statistically significant it would not be possible for the proponents to simply choose 1 study in 20. There would be no statistically significant study available for them to choose.Ken and I aren't saying anything about how the results will turn out if there is some benefit to homeopathy.We're saying exactly what your textbook is saying: that if there is no difference between a remedy and placebo, and you perform multiple trials of that remedy against placebo, a difference significant at the 0.05 level will be detected, by chance alone, one time in 20.
So you can always get a statistically significant result, at any level of significance you choose, simply by doing enough studies, or testing enough variables; just as you can always toss 100 heads in a row with a fair coin, if you perform enough trials.

Grant Hutchison

[clop]

Ken and I aren't saying anything about how the results will turn out if there is some benefit to homeopathy.We're saying exactly what your textbook is saying: that if there is no difference between a remedy and placebo, and you perform multiple trials of that remedy against placebo, a difference significant at the 0.05 level will be detected, by chance alone, one time in 20.
So you can always get a statistically significant result, at any level of significance you choose, simply by doing enough studies, or testing enough variables; just as you can always toss 100 heads in a row with a fair coin, if you perform enough trials.

Grant Hutchison

No Grant.

You say "if there is no difference between a remedy and placebo, and you perform multiple trials of that remedy against placebo, a difference significant at the 0.05 level will be detected, by chance alone, one time in 20." But this level of 0.05 is far, far, far from being statistically significant. You're getting your p values back to front.

When p=0.05 it means that there is a 5% probability that the relationship is due to chance, and therefore a 95% probability that the relationship is genuine.

If you do a p=0.05 trial 20 times then 19 of these will give p values less than 0.05 (statistically significant relationship) and only 1 will give a p value greater than 0.05 (still extremely likely, but not statistically significant relationship). So in 95% of trials the results are statistically significant and "prove" that homeopathy works.

What you are talking about is doing a p=0.95 trial, where there is a 95% chance that the relationship is due to chance, where 19 trials in 20 yield a p value greater than 0.95 (extremely not statistically significant relationship) and 1 trial in 20 gives a p value less than 0.95 (very not statistically significant relationship).

You're getting mixed up.

In order for a true p=0.95 trial to give a p value below 0.05 (statistically significant) you would need to repeat the same trial r times where (0.95)^r < 0.05. You can solve this equation by taking logarithms of both sides, hence r log(0.95) = log(0.05), r = log(0.05)/log(0.95) = 59.

And p=0.05 is the absolute threshold adopted for statistical significance anyway. To be really sure you would need a p value down around 0.005 or 0.001. In the latter case you would need to repeat an exact same true p=0.99 trial (generous for homeopathy) in an identical fashion 688 times to get 1 statistically significant result.

clop

[Ken G]

In order for a true p=0.95 trial to give a p value below 0.05 (statistically significant) you would need to repeat the same trial r times where (0.95)^r < 0.05. You can solve this equation by taking logarithms of both sides, hence r log(0.95) = log(0.05), r = log(0.05)/log(0.95) = 59.

But this is exactly the kind of mathematics we are using in our argument. Let's say you are trying to argue that a coin is not "fair", i.e., not completely random with a 50/50 chance of heads or tails (perhaps the coin has been subjected to some hocus pocus preparation scheme). You carry out many trials, and in each trial, you flip the coin 5 times. Note that in about 3% of the trials, the coin will come up heads every time. Thus if you conduct dozens of trials, your chances are pretty good of being able to find one in which the coin came up heads all five times. Can I now trot out that particular trial and argue that it proves, to 97% confidence, that the coin is unfairly slanted towards heads? Of course not. Yet what would stop me from doing so?

What we are talking about was stated quite explicitly in your own quote:


In other words, assuming that in the population there was no relation between those variables whatsoever, and we were repeating experiments like ours one after another, we could expect that approximately in every 20 replications of the experiment there would be one in which the relation between the variables in question would be equal or stronger than in ours.

This is the paragraph you should have put in bold, the one you chose is only relevant "given that there is a relationship between the variables", which is precisely the situation that we claim we are not in. So how can your paragraph be relevant to testing the null hypothesis that there is no such relationship? What we are talking about is the role of conscious selection, when people quote the results they like rather than taking the results of all the studies on balance.

[clop]

But this is exactly the kind of mathematics we are using in our argument. Let's say you are trying to argue that a coin is not "fair", i.e., not completely random with a 50/50 chance of heads or tails (perhaps the coin has been subjected to some hocus pocus preparation scheme). You carry out many trials, and in each trial, you flip the coin 5 times. Note that in about 3% of the trials, the coin will come up heads every time. Thus if you conduct dozens of trials, your chances are pretty good of being able to find one in which the coin came up heads all five times. Can I now trot out that particular trial and argue that it proves, to 97% confidence, that the coin is unfairly slanted towards heads? Of course not. Yet what would stop me from doing so?

What we are talking about was stated quite explicitly in your own quote:

This is the paragraph you should have put in bold, the one you chose is only relevant "given that there is a relationship between the variables", which is precisely the situation that we claim we are not in. So how can your paragraph be relevant to testing the null hypothesis that there is no such relationship? What we are talking about is the role of conscious selection, when people quote the results they like rather than taking the results of all the studies on balance.


Ha ha Ken. I know exactly what you're saying but the mistake you've both made is thinking that a 5% probability that chance is to blame, giving a significance of 0.05, means that 1 in 20 replicates will yield a positive result. This is simply not true. If there is no relationship between the variables then the p value is 0.95 not 0.05, and 1 in 20 replicates will yield a result that is less than 0.95, but so what? 0.93 is not statistically significant. Neither is 0.71, or 0.10. I agree that if you do enough trials (59 in the case of a true p=0.95 trial to yield a single result of p=0.05) you will get a "false positive" result, but not 1 in 20!

From my explicit quote

"in every 20 replications of the experiment there would be one in which the relation between the variables in question would be equal or stronger than in ours."

Yes, but "equal or stronger than in ours" does not mean it is a statistically significant result.

Just accept it's 1 in 59 for p=0.95 not 1 in 20.

clop

[Ken G]

OK, let me go over this with another specific example. Let's say you pick up a 6-sided die you've never seen before, and it shows a particular number on the visible face. You think "I wonder if this die has a that same number on all six sides, or if it's a normal die?" You roll it and it shows that number again. Then you roll it a second time and, sure enough, the same number. What are the chances that this is still a perfectly normal die? You know the answer, it's 1/36, or a bit less than 3%. So you say "I have 97% confidence this is not a normal die", and you drop it where you found it. Along comes another person, who rolls the die twice, and leaves it for the next person, etc. After 100 people do this, there will be about two others who have your experience, yes? That's all a p=0.03 means. You yourself still have a 97% confidence if you don't know about the other trials, but now let's imagine that someone else watched all 100 trials from the shadows, and decided to invite specifically you on their talk show to testify that you have a 97% confidence the die is not fair. Does this really mean the audience should accept this 97% confidence as well? Nope, because from their perspective, your 97% confidence is rendered meaningless by the fact that the talk-show host selected you on purpose to make their point. That's all Grant and I are saying, and our mathematics are correct, in that the host would be selecting 1 in 36 people, not whatever number your approach would divine.

[grant hutchison]

When p=0.05 it means that there is a 5% probability that the relationship is due to chance, and therefore a 95% probability that the relationship is genuine.I'm afraid you're the one who is mixed up.
The parameter p is calculated from a null hypothesis population: one in which there is assumed to be no difference between the study and placebo groups. You ask yourself: "If I were to repeatedly take two samples (of the same size as my real study samples) from such a uniform population, what percentage of the time would a difference as great as the difference I have found arise purely by chance?" The parameter p measures the likelihood that given a uniform population we mistakenly think we have discovered a real difference, just because of chance.
Ken and I are stipulating that the null-hypothesis is correct (we're assuming, for the sake of argument, there's no difference between homeopathy and placebo) and using the maths of the p-value to say that 1 in 20 studies will, by chance, show a difference significant at the 0.05 level.

Grant Hutchison

[grant hutchison]

"in every 20 replications of the experiment there would be one in which the relation between the variables in question would be equal or stronger than in ours."

Yes, but "equal or stronger than in ours" does not mean it is a statistically significant result.On revisiting this, it seems to me that this is the point where you're going wrong. "Equal or stronger than ours" has to mean a statistically significant result. As follows:

We have a result that is significant at the p=0.05 level.

This means, starting with a null hypothesis population, "in every 20 replications of the experiment there would be one in which the relation between the variables in question would be equal or stronger than in ours."

Now think of the guy who happens to get that 1:20 chance result "in which the relation between the variables in question would be equal or stronger than in ours." He's going to do the same statistical test as we did, using the same sample sizes (because he has replicated our experiment). Since the relationship he chanced upon is "equal or stronger than in ours", and he has otherwise replicated our experimental design, then he has to find a p-value equal to or less than ours. He has a significant result.

Grant Hutchison

[Ken G]

Yes, or another way to say it is, 95% confidences are wrong 5% of the time. So if you have 100 scientists applying this test to their own experiments, 5 unlucky ones will go around trumpeting a false result. This is corrected by other scientists, but unscrupulous con men can still latch onto that 5%.

[snarkophilus]

And it gets worse. There are well-proven distortions in the published literature from submission bias and publication bias: researchers are less likely to write up and submit studies that show no difference between treatment and placebo; and editors are less likely to publish such "no difference" studies if submitted.

I read a thing recently, I think in Nature, that contradicted that. I can't remember the findings exactly, but it said that although there was an idea that those studies aren't frequently written up, there was no visible bias on the publisher's end of things, and indeed there were a lot of published studies that showed null results. I've looked around but can't find a reference... did anyone else see this?


Forget a necessary medicine. By that logic, if you gave someone a homeopathic amount of something that everyone needs, say a vitamin, then you should be able to counter any positive effect from the vitamin. Or better yet, how come reverse osmosis water isn't acutely toxic? Sure it is not great for you because it screws up your electrolyte levels, but considering your diet needs some salt then water that has purposefully had all the salt forcibly extracted from it should counter all the electrolytes in your body and and kill you instantly as your nervous sytem, cardiac muscle, and respiratory system completely stop functioning.

Heh heh... well, I didn't say I actually believed it, now did I? If we were dealing with logic, we wouldn't even have homeopathy to discuss, now would we? :)

[grant hutchison]

I read a thing recently, I think in Nature, that contradicted thatI'd certainly be glad of the reference. My information may have become outdated.

Grant Hutchison

Edit: However, I'd bet the Nature survey didn't include specialist homeopathy journals, which have something of a special interest in positive results ...

[Ken G]

But regardless of whether the bias comes from the practitioners or the journals, the presence of a significant bias to not advertise null results leads to a skewing of the statistical significance of the positive results. That is disturbing, but probably the greater problem is in not even reading the full literature anyway, but just choosing a particular study and blowing it all out of proportion (like that infamous original "memory of water" study that is so often used to justify the principles of homeopathic remedies in ultra-diluted solutions).

[grant hutchison]

But regardless of whether the bias comes from the practitioners or the journals, the presence of a significant bias to not advertise null results leads to a skewing of the statistical significance of the positive resultsAlso, lack of rigour in study design can introduces sources of bias, confounding and cointervention, all of which can lead to positive results for reasons other than a real difference between placebo and study drug.
It's a big problem for mainstream medicine generally, and the journal editors and their referees should be weeding out studies with poor design, so that they don't reach the literature. (In fact, medical research ethics committees are also taking a role, by refusing to allow patients to be enrolled in studies that are badly designed.) However, this doesn't happen perfectly, by any means: and there are particular issues with the scientific skills of both the researchers and the editors of journals dealing with "alternative medicine" themes.
So that's another reason that anyone who wishes to make a superficial case for homeopathy can find plenty of statistically significant results to point at.

Grant Hutchison

[Ken G]

Yeah, medical experiments are about the toughest of all to interpret. I often see reports that sound to me like "studies show that people who shoot themselves in the head with real bullets are up to three times more likely to die than those who use blanks". All you can take away are "bullets are dangerous", but how this translates into action items for the individual is never so clear! I find that doctors often have a good perspective on what are the things that matter, but perhaps their views can get skewed as well.

[John Dlugosz]

There are studies which appear to show homeopathy does work, published in reputable mainstream medical and scientific journals. Simply saying "no evidence" will immediately embroil you in a paper-by-paper running battle with homeopathy proponents. So while in no way disagreeing with your point that evidence of efficacy is very poor, I think arguments from the absence of a plausible mechanism (evolutionary, physical or chemical) are still valuable additions to our armamentarium.

Grant Hutchison

So hurry and send it to JREF for the million-dollar prize!

[John Dlugosz]

That's quite an interesting suggestion. Note that we do at present have a ritual-- I'm gonna guess it looks like a person in a bathroom with a handful of multicolored pills and a stark glass of water, throwing their head back. Choke, gurgle. Not exactly aromatherapy, is it?

A while back I saw a show where they were investigating effects of placebos, and found that something that sometimes worked would enhance the effect and express it in more people.

Many years ago I discovered that for myself. Eating a sandwich, I bit my cheek the likes of which I had never done before or since. Boy, did that hurt, and it hurt for weeks. I applied a topical agent for the pain, frequently. I discovered that after the effect began to fade, simply rubbing it without putting a drop on my finger first would have an effect, which was obviously due to re-distributing what was already there. But after a while I seemed to develop an ability to reduce the pain really by rubbing it alone, to some degree. Using the placebo effect allowed me to reduce the amount of pain medicine needed.

[grant hutchison]

So hurry and send it to JREF for the million-dollar prize!For all the reasons we've been discussing on this thread relating to study design, bias and lack of mechanism, there's no reason JREF would cough up the money.

But after a while I seemed to develop an ability to reduce the pain really by rubbing it alone, to some degree. Using the placebo effect allowed me to reduce the amount of pain medicine needed.That's not necessarily a placebo effect: it's more likely a real bit of neurology called "counter-irritation". Rubbing or heating sore areas does make them hurt less - it's the principle behind the use of TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) for the relief of pain.

Grant Hutchison

[Ken G]

Or rubbing your head after you bonk it. That works pretty well too!

[snarkophilus]

Or rubbing your head after you bonk it. That works pretty well too!

Or even having your mommy kiss it better. :)

[Ken G]

Now that's what I call a home-opathic remedy.

[JohnD]

All,
Strange reflection of Homeopathy today in New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg18925402.300.html

The 'heat' of a pepper is measured in 'Scoville Heat Units' (SHU). This means the number of times an original pepper solution must be diluted before its burning taste disappears. SHUs vary from about 3000 for a jalapeno to an Indian chilli, naga jolokia, at 580,000!

John

[Gillianren]

All,
Strange reflection of Homeopathy today in New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg18925402.300.html

The 'heat' of a pepper is measured in 'Scoville Heat Units' (SHU). This means the number of times an original pepper solution must be diluted before its burning taste disappears. SHUs vary from about 3000 for a jalapeno to an Indian chilli, naga jolokia, at 580,000!

Actually, the bell pepper (which is, yes, just a very large chile) has a SHU of 0. That's the lowest end of the scale.

[01101001]

Found a fun table that lists not just hot chillis:

100,000 Thai Pepper
200,000 Jamaican Hot Pepper
325,000 Scotch Bonnet Pepper
350,000 Habanero Pepper
580,000 Red Savina Habanero
855,000 Naga Jolokia
2,000,000 Common Pepper Spray
5,300,000 Police-Grade Pepper Spray
16,000,000 Pure Capsaicin

[Relmuis]

That shows that a D6, C3 or M2 dilution can (in this case at least) even have an allopathic effect, which suggests that even more diluted preparations might still have a homeopathic effect.

[Laguna]

I have proof for the effectiveness of homeopathic pharmaceuticals.
My health insurance pays them. :D

[grant hutchison]

That shows that a D6, C3 or M2 dilution can (in this case at least) even have an allopathic effect, which suggests that even more diluted preparations might still have a homeopathic effect.Unless you believe that "homeopathic effect" is an oxymoron, of course. :)

Grant Hutchison

[JohnD]

Your health insurance pays for homeopathic treatment, laguna?
That's nothing! The NHS has just authorised magnets for treating varicose ulcers. Our wonderful, cost effective NHS. I give up.
See: http://www.badscience.net/?p=221

John

[John Dlugosz]

All,
Strange reflection of Homeopathy today in New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg18925402.300.html

The 'heat' of a pepper is measured in 'Scoville Heat Units' (SHU). This means the number of times an original pepper solution must be diluted before its burning taste disappears. SHUs vary from about 3000 for a jalapeno to an Indian chilli, naga jolokia, at 580,000!

John

That is nowhere near homeopathic dilutions. Pure capsaicin would read 15-16 mega Scoville units. 15 units is 1 part per million. That means if you prepare a homeopathic solution of capsaicin to "X4" (4 successive dilutions of 10:1) or "C2" (2 dilutions of 100:1) you will be in the same ballpark as Jalapeño. 200ppm is certainly a normal useful concentration of a medical substance.

--John

[Relmuis]

One part in 580.000 is nearly D6, C3 or M2.

[John Dlugosz]

One part in 580.000 is nearly D6, C3 or M2.
True, but "1 part in 580000" is not the same as 580000 Scoville units. The latter is one part in 26 or 27.

[Relmuis]

...'Scoville Heat Units' (SHU). This means the number of times an original pepper solution must be diluted before its burning taste disappears....
John

What is a Scoville Heat Unit then? Isn't X Scovile units a dilution by X parts?

[John Dlugosz]

What is a Scoville Heat Unit then? Isn't X Scovile units a dilution by X parts?

No, it means you have to dilute it by X to make it disappear.

[Gillianren]

A Quick Summary of the Scoville Scale's Inception

See, Scoville got a bunch of volunteers--students, I believe--to taste mashed-up peppers. He then recorded how many squirts of sugar water it took before the burning sensation went away. One squirt=one SHU. Bell peppers aren't that spicy, so it took zero squirts. Hence, a bell pepper is at 0 SHU. I imagine they went through quite a lot of squirt bottles on the hotter chilis.

[Relmuis]

So somebody received 540,000 squirts of water? In that case, I find it a suspiciously round number.

[grant hutchison]

So somebody received 540,000 squirts of water? In that case, I find it a suspiciously round number.I think Gillianren may be going astray, here. At one squirt a second, it would take several days to perform this experiment!
Scoville used a dilution scale, with 1.5 Scoville units corresponded to one part per million of ground chillies. 580,000 units is therefore the equivalent of 390,000 parts per million of ground chillies. Pure capsaicin scores 15,000,000 Scoville units, which converts to a ludicrous 10,000,000 parts per million: indicating that raw capsaicin is 10 times more intense than the raw chilli powder Scoville used. So 580,000 Scoville units is equivalent to 39,000 parts per million of capsaicin, or a 1:26 dilution, which is where I think John Dlugosz is getting his figure.
All this would imply that capsaicin is detectable down to about a 1:10,000,000 dilution: about 10 &#181;g/dl, which is within the usual range for mainstream drugs and hormones.

The round numbers arise because Scoville units come in mutiples of 100, and not all chillies and people are alike, so greater precision is spurious.

Grant Hutchison

[Gillianren]

Hey, I'm just citing Alton Brown, here. The chili (with an "i") episode. Any details I get wrong I do because he did. (He probably simplified for a TV audience.)

[Chuck]

http://www.ntskeptics.org/cartoons/homeopathy.gif