I want a T-shirt!

And a poster.

Just brilliant!

Woo-woo

The Wright Stuff, a daily discussion program in the UK, has really surpassed itself today. An assertion, meant to be humorous, that the heaviest bobsleigh team should always win because they fall faster merely shows a basic misunderstanding of physics. An assertion that thinking good thoughts makes good things happen and that this is a "real science not something I just made up" shows that quasi-religious superstitious beliefs are alive and well.
However the main thing was a discussion of that old favourite, homoeopathy, and specifically of whether or not it should be available funded by the NHS.
This started with what I find a rather startling statistical claim, that 80% of GPs believe it shouldn't be funded. Only 80%. Who are these other 20% who believe it should be? I want to know if my GP is one of them so that I can change to another, more rational, GP, if he is.
Following on from this the panel are happily promoting this nonsense, with streams of anecdotal evidence. There are occasional nods towards rationality with references to "if people believe it works" but on the whole it's a whole program of "my grandmother's asthma was cured by homoeopathy". It's dispiriting stuff.
Caller after caller is promoting alternate therapies and suggesting that far from having less money spent on it we should divert a far higher proportion of the NHS budget to it. The old canard of "evil pharmaceutical companies" versus "natural remedies" is trotted out regularly.
The current caller wants to scrap all the hospitals because "they are not there to heal people, they are there to make money". She wants to replace them with "holistic health centres" because everything, even cancer, will "cure itself" if people just believe and lead a spiritual life.
Every single caller and every member of the panel has had a "homoeopathy has helped me/ my grandmother/ my nephew/ my cat" tale to tell.
The only critical thing at all was from the host himself who referred to a friend who contracted malaria because he was taking homoeopathic anti-malarial pills instead of ones that actually do anything. But even the host has insisted throughout as referring to it as "taking very small amounts" of a drug. He isn't a stupid man so he must know that "very small amounts" here means "none", that the dilution levels go billions of times past the Avogadro limit and so leave no molecules at all of the original substance.
Another panellist has trotted out the "science doesn't know everything" line. They have consistently referred to the treatments as "not proven to work" rather than the more accurate "proven not to work". One of them has actually, in the same week that we have had this story , happily promoted Chinese medicine as being as valid as western medicine.

This stream of uncritical belief in fairy tales is depressing.
And now I'm so depressed I think I'll go away and take a homoeopathic suicide pill. Much good may it do me.

Packaging and expectations

Jack of Kent has a nice blog post about the packaging used on the homeopathic pills.

We rarely stop to think about how easy it is to manipulate our thoughts and opinions by means of cleverly chosen words and cunning presentation. Maybe the world would be a better place for everyone if we all stopped to apply a little more critical thinking to the things people tell us.

The very essence of true belief

So the 20:23 event took place then.
You didn't know? Of course you didn't. Apart from having a name that would mean nothing to the anyone who isn't a molecular chemist, it received very little media coverage. It wouldn't have mattered if it had though. As I said some time ago, things like homoeopathy aren't really sciences, or even pseudo-sciences, they are far more like religions. You cannot convince a religious believer of the falsehood of his position with evidence and logic. Evidence and logic simply reinforce his view that he is right because religions are by definition, belief without proof. In among the bits of reporting that the event did get a spokesman for Boots said that they support calls for more research into this "treatment". Why not just read the studies already done?

Actually there's a simple answer to that last question. It would be the same answer if a thousand studies had been done, or a million. The results of the studies don't give the answer they want so they would like the studies to be done again (and again and again) until they do give the answer they want. A thousand overwhelmingly negative studies can be ignored as soon as there is one that by pure chance shows the slightest positive result. If I start selling patent medicine remedies under the brand name of "Bob's Old Quackery Pills" it won't matter if ninety-nine percent of my customers report no effect. It won't even matter if some of them get worse. As long as I can point to one who got better I can claim it as proof that my system works.
This is the problem. We can go on proving it's rubbish forever and true believers won't take a bit of notice of us.
That's the very essence of true belief.

Sacrificing a Goat

I have recently finished reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst's Trick or Treatment, two books that cover largely similar ground. Goldacre’s book is lighter and more humorous, while Singh and Ernst’s is more focussed and more specific but both go heavily into the concepts of evidence based medicine and into why there is little or no evidence that alternate therapies such as chiropracty, homeopathy or acupuncture actually work, indeed there is evidence that they may actually be harmful. (On the whole there is no evidence that they work because they don’t, but that’s not what I’m writing about here.)
Both books include sections on why clever people believe stupid things.
However I think that there is a reason that clever people believe stupid things that is missing in both cases and it’s missing because the starting point for the argument is that people treat homeopathy and so on as if they were sciences and behave accordingly. People give the same credence to nonsense such as crystal healing as they do to antibiotics. To some extent this is true but I’d argue that most of these pseudo-sciences are, to all intents and purposes, much more like religions than sciences. They are filled with strange rituals and arcane language. They are administered by initiates to the inner mysteries. Above all they are based on faith. And that’s where the authors have missed something important.
Faith is, by definition, belief without proof. People don’t buy into the myths of Acupuncture or Chinese Herbal Medicines in spite of a lack of proof, they buy into them because of a lack of proof. The more you, as a rational scientist, come along with evidence that these therapies are all mumbo jumbo and that you might as well hang iron over your doorway to keep out the evil spirits or sacrifice a goat on the third Tuesday of every month to propitiate the gods, then the more they are vindicated in their faith. You are the heathen, the unbeliever. Your views count only inasmuch as by opposing them you are confirming that their faith is the true faith.
Conversely, if there was sudden, undeniable proof that homeopathy worked, it would become mainstream. It would cease to be faith and start to be truth. People would walk away from it in droves in search of something else they can believe in without being troubled by truth or facts, without worrying about the lack of any evidence whatsoever.
This need for faith is culturally programmed into humanity. Most people feel a need to have something that they can trust in unquestioningly, blindly, absolutely. GK Chesterton is supposed to have suggested that when people cease to believe in God rather than believing nothing, they will believe anything.* That’s precisely what is happening with alternative medicine. People are searching not for medical cures for a malaise of the body but for spiritual cures for a malaise of the soul.
I agree with virtually everything in either book. But I don’t think it will do any good. Telling, showing, proving that these so-called therapies are all rubbish will convince only those who want to be convinced. The true believers won’t take any notice at all. It’s like arguing with a Jehovah’s Witness on the doorstep. They believe what they believe and no amount of evidence to contrary can possibly change that. I confidently predict that twenty years, a hundred years, a thousand years from now people will still be putting their trust in quacks and crackpots, no matter what the state of medical science is at the time.

(*According to Wikiquote, this is a misattribution and comes from Emile Cammaert’s "The Laughing Prophets" where he is talking about Chesterton. It doesn’t alter the point though.)