Sapere aude, friends.

In 1955, an amateur astronomer named Morris Jessup published The Case for the UFO, in which he speculated about the physics that drove the propulsion systems of alien vessels. Shortly thereafter, Jessup received a letter from a man identifying himself as Carlos Miguel Allende at the start of the letter, and Carl M. Allen at the end. In it, he described an experiment by the military using physics similar to that being proposed by Jessup for interstellar travel, to make a ship invisible (I couldn’t make up the following if I tried):

“Results” of My friend Dr. Franklin Reno, Were used. These Were a complete Recheck of That Theory, With a View to any & Every Possible quick use of it, if feasable (sic) in a Very short time. There Were good Results, as far as a Group Math Re-Cheek AND as far as a good Physical “Result,” to Boot. YET THE NAVT FEARS TO USE THIS RESULT. The Result was & stands today as Proof that The Unified Field Theory to a certain extent is correct… The “result” was complete invisibility of a ship, Destroyer type, and all of its crew While at Sea. (Oct. 1943) … Why tell you Now? Very Simple; If You choose to go Mad, then you would reveal this information. Half of the officiers & the crew of that Ship are at Present, Mad as Hatters. A few, are even Yet, confined to certain areas where they May receive trained Scientific aid when they, either, “Go Blank” or Go Blank” & “Get Stuck”. Going-Bland IE an after effect of the Man having been within the field too Much, IS Not at all an unplesant experience too Healthily Curious Sailors. However it is when also, they “Get Stuck” that they call it “HELL” INCORPORATED” The Man thusly stricken can Not Move of his won volition unless tow or More of those who are within the field go & touch him, quickly, else he “Freezes”. 

In his letter, Allen does not mention the name of the ship, only identifying it as a Destroyer Class, and naming the ship from which he supposedly witnessed the events, the Andrew Furuseth. A few days later, he sent further notes, this time identifying the place as the Philadelphia Dock, and now additionally claiming that the ship disappeared from this dock and appeared in Norfolk, then back in Philadelphia moments later.

Jessup responded asking for more details. Allen wrote again, this time claiming that he would require hypnosis or sodium pentathol in order to reveal more. Jessup at this point assumed that the author of these letters was a complete fraud, and ceased correspondence. Despite having used the name Allende only once, and the name Allen four times, these missives became forever known as the Allende Letters.

Two years later, Jessup was contacted by individuals at the Office of Navy Research, claiming they had something that would be of interest to him. A package had been mailed to the office, labelled “Happy Easter”, and containing an annotated version of Jessup’s book. The handwritten scribblings in the book appeared to indicate that three men had passed the book between themselves, making comments that proclaimed a superior knowledge of UFOs and alien behaviour. Jessup identified one of the authors as Allen.

On the basis of this evidence (and why not?) Jessup began to believe that he had misjudged Allen. Equally convinced, the two ONR officers who had approached him, Captain Sidney Sherby and Commander George Hoover, also approached a military contractor at the time, Varo Manufacturing Company of Garland, TX. It appears that the company agreed to co-sponsor a printing of the annotated book, as well as the Allende Letters, either as one of many such favours granted to the military to retain profitable contracts, or out of personal interest by members of the company. Either way, what came to be known as the Varo Edition was typed up and printed, and the stuff of legends was born. You can read it in full detail here (PDF) – I sincerely suggest you take the time to look at it and scan down to the original letters themselves, so that you may fully understand the weight of my next sentence.

That is literally it. Essentially everything that has followed has been a result of contributions by others in a 53-year game of Chinese Whispers. Allen(de) remained elusive, once coming forward to retract his statement, and then again to retract his retraction. Jessup committed suicide after a series of personal tragedies. In 1965, the Varo Edition was mentioned in a book on sea mysteries, and then again in 1977 in a book about the Bermuda Triangle. In 1978 the story inspired a fictional novel, Thin Air. This was followed in 1979 by The Philadelphia Experiement: Project Invisibility, which is often touted as the authoritative version (despite having plagiarized heavily from the aforementioned work of fiction) because the author managed to locate Allen and supposedly wring further details from him (now 36 year after the alleged event). In 1984, Hollywood made a movie, and in 1993 there was a crappy sequel. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that Allen(de)’s “Experiment Ship” had to be the USS Eldridge, and since then it has always been assumed to be so.

In 1980, Robert Goerman, a reporter who grew up in Pennsylvania (the location of the return address on the Allende Letters) was able to track down “Carlos Allende’s” family. It turned out he was Carl Meredith Allen, an unstable drifter, experienced prankster, and outcast by his own choice. Correspondence sent to his family quite clearly indicates that Allen was behind all three sets of annotations in the Varo Edition. It is interesting to read the original preface to the imprinting, in which the unnamed author actually notes that the style of all three comments is the same, and then attributes it to the possibility that all three men are Gypsies (they refer to their ‘Gypsy Brothers’ in the annotations) and so must have learned a similar ideosynchratic English. Frankly, this is a lovely display of confirmation bias, forever preserved in print. Anyone not starting out with the assumption that these three people are different can very easily see that all three annotations are written by the same person – the very same person who wrote the letters to Jessup.

So what motivated Allen to contact Jessup and weave this yarn? Some may say that he was just perpetuating a hoax, much as he once faked such a convincing heart attack that the doctor had to run three EKGs to be convinced he was fine. However, another possibility has been raised: Allen was actually in the Coast Guard, and may indeed have been in the Philadelphia/Norfolk region during the war. There, he would almost certainly have seen navy vessels undergoing a top secret outfitting to make them ‘invisible’ – that is, being fitted for degaussing to make them undetectable to the German magnetic mines. Perhaps this experience led him to genuinely believe he had seen something nefarious. Perhaps he even noticed a destroyer gone from the Philadelphia harbour one day, and back the next, and had a fellow seaman swear he saw the same ship in Norfolk that night – again, not unlikely as the Navy at the time had the use of the intercoastal Chesapeake-Delaware Canal, which cut travel time between the two harbours down to only a few hours, and which was not available to merchant ships.

However, any attempts to try to explain the supposed ‘events’ of that night in October 1943 are based on details that have constantly been inventing and reinventing themselves over the years, like any good myth or urban legend often does. Reading the original material, the Allende Letters and the Varo Edition, one has to admit that there is very little detail in these early missives. The filling-in was done by third parties who came after, trying to take the vague descriptions of Allen’s letters and force-fit them to known facts at the time. That many a ‘crew member’ has come forward in the intervening years to either support or deny the story is neither here nor there. Any hoax of this magnitude begins to create its own off-shoots, drawing in those who would seek fame or notoriety in the wake of another’s master deception. After all, those who believe it have so far shown enormous gullibility – why not stretch them just that little bit further, to see how far they’ll go before they snap?

Certainly, the Philadelphia Experiment is one of the greatest self-perpetuating hoaxes of all time. But there is an elegance to the simplicity of what Carl M. Allen started, and it serves as a lesson to all who would spin such a yarn in future: keep it vague, sprinkle it with just enough fact to anchor it, and then let the believers fill in the gaps for themselves. How better to leave them thinking that they have uncovered a great mystery, rather than simply giving an old mischief-maker something to crow about in his letters home?

The movie has worn many faces in its journey so far: it claims to be a documentary about how Big Science has been expelling its members should they show any inclination towards believing Intelligent Design. It ends up being a rabid anti-evolution propagana engine whose trump card involves blaming all evolutionary biologists for the Holocaust. But once upon a time, for as long as it was convenient to fool a few big names into giving interviews, it was masquerading as a little film called “Crossroads”, which was supposedy about investigating why creationists still cling to their beliefs about evolutionary theory in the face of overwhelming evidence. Mainstream critics think it is a poorly-made, amateurish attempt at filmmaking, scientists think it’s a pack of lies, and the christians think it’s Oscar material.

Ignoring all the deviations into fantasy, the core premise is basically this: they bring forward a number of people who have recently claimed to have been ‘expelled’ by Big Science because of their beliefs. What we really have is a volunteer editor who pulled a last-day-on-the-job fast one by slipping an ID paper past his journal’s review process, a sub-par astronomy professor who failed in his tenure application because his research output was not up to scratch, a teacher whose contract was not renewed after several students lodged complaints about her, a professor whose university wanted him to make some changes to his website before they would continue to provide him with free hosting for it, a journalist who suffered apparently nothing as result of her poorly-researched articles, and a pro-ID advocate who had some people say some mean things about him on the internet.

Given that this content doesn’t exactly make for stirring stuff, it’s no wonder that the Expelled team had to jazz things up a bit. But let’s assume for just a minute that they didn’t have to lie and resort to hysterical theatrics to draw this pity party out into a feature-length film. Let’s assume for a moment that they could find even one, just one, person who had legitimately been fired from their job as a scientist or educator as a result of their pro-ID stance, and with an otherwise sterling and exemplary record. What I want to know is, even in that situation, would Big Science be wrong?

Seriously, let me put it a few different ways so that you can see what I mean. Would we be suprised at any of these headlines:

• Biology teacher fired for advocating Stork Theory
• NSF denies astronomer funding for Sun Sign Astrology research
• National Geographic editor ridiculed by colleagues after slipping pro-Flat Earth article into print
• Doctor ”shocked” by online response after blog post encouraging the medical establishment to study The Force
• Cambridge professor ordered to remove his Raelian Research Center page from the university website and return funding received from the Raelians
• Journalist’s integrity questioned after article claiming “There was no Holocaust”

Can you imagine your child coming home from school and telling you that their teacher was teaching them how to cast spells and hexes, and they needed a newt for homework? You’d be on the phone to the school in a jiffy. What would follow may be summarized by a brief animation of the becloacked hag being booted out of the school and her broomstick following swiftly after. No one would raise an eyebrow, except perhaps a few velvet-clad, Anne Rice-reading pagans protesting something about white magic. Certainly no one would make a movie about how advocates of Witchcraft are being expelled from schools across the country by Big Education, and it’s Salem all over again and the principal is personally responsible for the Inquisition (cleverly intercut with scenes from Joan of Arc, for which they are swiftly sued by Luc Besson).

The whole thing is ludicrous. Ben Stein may as well have made a movie about how second-rate hacks at the denoument of their careers are making fools of themselves in cinemas across the country, and being unjustly harrassed by Big Critics.

According to AFP, and parrotted around the world:

A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected Nasa’s estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with the Earth, a German newspaper reported on Tuesday, after spotting the boffins had miscalculated.

Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam to calculate that there is a one-in-450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported.

Nasa had previously estimated the chances at only one in 45 000, but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency, that the young whizz kid had got it right.

Here’s NASA’s press release refuting the stupid story. And here’s a blogger who actually bothered to contact NASA’s NEO department, and the German scientist mentioned in the article. Yet again, the international press leaps at your typical ‘man bites dog’ story with gay abandon and a wanton disregard for the facts. Since when did it become ‘journalism’ to simply take whatever Reuters or Associated Press or AFP spits out of their papermill and repeate it verbatim as if you actually did some work? And how does a journalistic giant like AFP spew out such a pile of garbage without checking the facts themselves? Not a single person along this sad, sad trail of journalistic failure bothered to contact anyone involved, until the blogosphere up and schooled them yet again. 

I just have two words for every paper that perpetuated this ridiculous piece: EPIC FAIL.

As a caveat, this is only an introduction, so I will merely be touching on some of the arguments. I would greatly encourage further reading on the topic.

Homeopathy works because I/my patients are satisfied that it does.

The most often used explanation, and the one you should trust the least, is the argument from personal experience. There are a host of reasons why the plural of anecdote is not evidence: subjectivity, the quirks of memory, cognitive dissonance and, most of all, the placebo effect. The majority of ailments that homeopathy (and indeed, most alternative medicine) treats so ‘successfully’ are either those that are highly subjective, cyclic or prone to the actions of the placebo effect – like pain or depression – or those that would clear up on their own – like the ‘flu. This leads to apparent relief that is incorrectly ascribed to whatever remedy happened to be taken at the time. Add to this the fact that both the patient and the doctor both have a vested interest in the remedy working, which is likely to blind them to all the previously listed effects, and you have a powerful recipe for false satisfaction. For more, read up on the placebo effect and the fallacies of false cause.

There have been many scientific studies published showing that homeopathy has a real clinical effect.

It is true that many positive clinical trials of homeopathy have been published, but that’s not where the story ends. It is irresponsible to merely read the conclusion of a paper and not weigh up the quality of the study itself. Did the trial make use of placebo controls? Were there enough participants to draw any reasonable statistical conclusions? Did the trial report attrition rates and were they sufficiently low? Were both the practitioners and patients blinded as to which group was the control? Has a biostatitian weighed the results for statistical significance? Are the authors even qualified to conduct clinical trials¹? Have the authors made leaps in their conclusions that are not supported by the evidence… the list goes on and on. Add to that the publication bias towards positive results that affects all journals to some degree, but which apparently affects Complementary and Alternative Medicine journals even more so², and what you have is a minefield of potential false positives.

How is anyone supposed to tell which studies are worthwhile and which are not? To our rescue comes the concept of a systematic review, or meta-analysis – a process by which a large number of available trials are weighed and considered for a consensus. Good systematic reviews take all the above questions into account before reaching their conclusions. In the history of homeopathy, there have been many systematic reviews of the available papers. One of these did not sufficiently consider the methodological quality of the papers in question, came to a cautiously positive conclusion^3, but warned that further study would be required. A further six analyses were performed in response, all concluding that the original analysis had come to an erroneous conclusion by allowing poorly-controlled and -conducted trials to carry the same weight as good ones. The remainder of the analyses found no evidence for a homeopathic effect beyond the placebo effect, and this was all wrapped up very nicely by Ernst in his Systematic Review of Systematic Reviews of Homeopathy, which concluded

…there was no condition which responds convincingly better to homeopathic treatment than to placebo or other control interventions. Similarly, there was no homeopathic remedy that was demonstrated to yield clinical effects that are convincingly different from placebo.

For more, read R. Barker Bausell’s Snake Oil Science. Despite the pejorative title, this is a fair and thorough look at the clinical study of CAM treatments, including homeopathy. Bausell is a research methodologist and former researcher at the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine.

Homeopathy works because of the Law of Similars and the Law of Infinitisemals.

Given what we know of the history of homeopathy, thrusting forward its made-up laws should seem like a patently absurd argument. However, bear in mind that most fans of homeopathy are introduced to these laws much as we are first introduced to the law of gravity or the laws of motion – as immutable facts which our elders and betters have discovered and now pass down to us, with little context or history to validate why these laws should be so.

However, anyone with a basic science education should immediately be suspicious of such laws. The law of similars presents no chemical or biological reason why it should work, and in normal dilutions even a homeopath would admit this to be so. It is the law of infinitisemal dilution, they say, that changes a substance from harmful to helpful. Yet the law of infinitisemals itself does not stand up to scrutiny. For a start, the dose-response mechanism (by which we respond more strongly to stronger concentrations) is an established fact, based on solid science. We all know from experience that a higher concentration of alcohol in a drink hits us harder. We all know that if we want to really knock out a headache, we should take two aspirin instead of one. It’s basic chemistry. For homeopathy to establish a law of dilution – that less of the active ingredient creates a stronger effect – it would not only have to prove this to be so, but it would also have to posit why, up until now, every other substance ever introduced into our bodies has behaved in exactly the opposite manner.

But all of this is itself a moot point, given that the dilutions normally recommended are such that there cannot be a single molecule of the original substance left in the product. An average homeopathic dilution of 30X (1 in 10³⁰) is equivalent to a single drop of the active substance in a container 50 times the size of the earth – even without a calculator you should be able to figure that if you took a sip of the resultant mixture, your chances of getting anything but water are pretty slim. Oscillococcinum, the homeopathic remedy for influenza (made from duck’s liver), is usually prescribed at a concentration of 200C, which is 1 in 100²⁰⁰, or 1 in 10⁴⁰⁰. At a concentration of this kind, to be sure you had swallowed just one molecule of the active ingredient, you would have to drink more molecules of water than there are molecules of anything in the known universe.

The process of succussion imbues the dilutant with the power of the active ingredient, even after it is long gone.

Even Hahnemann realized that there was a problem with the concentrations he was suggesting, and argued that it was the shaking between each step of dilution that inferred a spirit-like quality to the dilutant (potentized it), thus allowing the power of the active ingredient to be transferred without needing any actual particles of the ingredient to remain in the solution. He obviously explained this with reference to the magical vitalist forces used to explain just about everything at the time. Today, homeopaths make exactly the same argument, but now refer to the ‘memory of water’ or assure us it’s all got to do with ‘quantum mechanics’. Same argument, different magic.

Let’s talk about quantum mechanics first. Despite what you may have heard, quantum mechanics has not proven homeopathy, nor could it even if it tried. Quantum mechanical effects do not assert themselves at classical scales i.e. at the scale of you, me and a vial of water. The only way to get a homeopathic solution to exhibit quantum mechanical behaviour of any kind would be to cool it to a few nanokelvin above absolute zero, or possibly to accelerate it to near the speed of light and smash it violently into something. Simple ‘shaking’ is not going to cut it.

Similarly, any claims that water has been proven to have a memory are absolutely false. But you do not need to understand advanced physics to see the holes in the ‘memory of water’ argument. All you need is a little common sense. A common response is this: if all that shaking about imbues the water with the essence of the ingredients it is in contact with, why is it not also imbued with the essence of the glass vial, the breath of the homeopath, or the variety of other impurities that are absolutely present in water? After all, even the purest of pure water contains foreign molecules at homeopathic solutions!

But an even more powerful common sense argument is this: if it’s all about the magical properties of water, this wonder-molecule that makes up most of our bodies, covers most of the earth, ‘resonates’ with our biofield, and is capable of altering its structure to mimic that of any substance… why then are so many homeopathic solutions dropped onto a sugar pill and allowed to evaporate before being bottled and sold? Even if the water does hold the matrix of the active ingredient, how does it transfer this to the simple sugar? And even more telling, if it’s all about the power of water, why then are some homeopathic solutions diluted in alchohol?

What’s the harm?

Even with all we know of homeopathy, we may still think to ourselves that perhaps it is not a bad thing for such a sham treatment to exist. The patients feel as though they are being treated, they are less of a burden on our already over-burdened health system, and homeopathic doctors on the whole are more attentive than regular GPs. Maybe it’s all make believe, but is it dangerous?

The answer is yes, when it comes to a certain range of homeopathic substances: vaccines and prophylactics. While it may be fine for the Queen Mother to dose herself with a homeopathic remedy when she gets a cold, it is not fine for a small child to be vaccinated against polio with water, or for tourists on their way to Africa to be prescribed same to protect them against malaria. And how about when it’s used to treat conditions much less innocuous than the common cold, such as when homeopathic solutions of infected blood are administered to AIDS sufferers?

Worse, homeopathy is not only administered to consenting adults, but also to small children and pets. Since the placebo effect is largely one of conditioning, it cannot be expected to work on babies and animals. In fact, it works on the parent or owner, leading them to convince themselves that the patient is doing better, when in fact they continue their mute suffering regardless.

Further reading

There are of course many other arguments made, ranging from ‘Homeopathy is a victim of Big Pharma Propaganda’ to ‘You can’t possibly criticise homeopathy if you haven’t studied it yourself’, but I have neither the time nor the patience to try to address these obviously absurd statements. Others such as James Randi, Ben Goldacre and Stephen Barrett have done this for me already. They are known for taking strong stances against homeopathy and, to the uninitiated, their attitudes may seem unfairly scornful. However, I hope that after this brief introduction, you can at least understand why someone might be so very upset by the proliferation of such a thing. All I can do now is encourage you to read further - Quackwatch’s sister site, Homeowatch, is an excellent resource. 

¹Keep in mind that a medical doctor is not a scientific researcher by default, and alternative medicine practitioners even less so.
²Despite the authors’ backward conclusion, which itself supports the argument for postive bias in CAM publications.
³Linde K. et al., Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects? A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials. Lancet 1997; 350: 834-43. Naturally this is the only meta-analysis trusted by homeopaths, despite its thorough debunking. Many homeopathy sites not only misrepresent the findings of this paper, but also ignore all the other reviews that came after it.

Thanks to a strong effort by the provincial health department, the death toll is down from an average of 24 over the last three years. But it’s not just death that youths have to worry about: every year a number of boys end up having their penises amputated after botched circumcisions, and an unknown number will contract AIDS when the same blade is used on one boy after another. All so that they may be considered to be adults, a state which the mere passing of time bequeaths upon the rest of us in due course and without the prerequisite of genital mutilation.

Yet another point to raise when people ask you “what’s the harm?”

Homeopathy is a product of an unusual quirk of fate. In 1790, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann was feeling deeply dissatisfied with the medical theory of his time. He was absolutely correct in believing that the medicine of his day did more harm than good - the orthodox treatments of the 18th centry are hardly what we would consider ‘medicine’ today. So disillusioned was Hahnemann that he gave up his practice entirely and retreated to the world of medical writing. It was while translating Scottish chemist William Cullen’s Materia Medica into German that Hahnemann came across an explanation he just couldn’t stomach. In line with the medical theory at the time, Cullen theorised that the success of Cinchona Bark in the treatment of intermittent fever (malaria) was as a result of a balancing of the humors - chinchona’s bitter qualities marked it as a ‘hot’ substance, which balanced fever, a known result of an overabundance of ‘cold’ temperament. Hahnemann correctly identified this as utter rubbish but not for the right reasons… today we know that it is the quinine in the bark which disrupts an enzyme in the malaria parasite, causing a lethal buildup of toxins in the invading organism that kills it, ending the symptoms of the infection. But there was no way Hahnemann could have known this, so instead he did a fateful thing in his efforts to understand how cinchona really worked – he dosed himself with the stuff to see what would happen. The results were interesting: Hahnemann began to experience languor, weakness, palpitations, fever, headache, tremors and coldness in his extremities. After ceasing the dosing, these symptoms abated. The symptoms are superficially similar to those of malaria, and thus Hahnemann’s conclusion was that quinine had produced in a healthy person the symptoms of the disease it cured. The dose that Hahnemann took was the equivalent of a normal therapeutic dose today, which only results in such drastic responses in the case of a severe allergic reaction to quinine - precisely what he appears to have experienced. Think about it: quinine and other anti-malarials is habitually used as a preventitive measure by healthy people about to enter malaria country, and the practice of tempering the bitter taste with alcohol led to the gin and tonic becoming a popular drink even outside of the colonies. So if Hahnemann’s reaction was typical, my english grandmother should have been diagnosed with malaria years ago given her penchant for a good G&T, and people departing for african holidays should be struck down with fever before they ever leave. This discrepency does not appear to have occured to Hahnemann.

Thus, from a single atypical reaction, was the theory of homeopathy born. Hahnemann coined the law of similars from this single incident. Like cures like: that which causes a symptom in a healthy individual, cures the same symptom in a sick one. This means that in homeopathic terms, caffeine cures insomnia, emetics cure vomiting, and HIV-infected blood cures AIDS.

The idea of ‘like cures like’ was in direct opposition to the reigning theory of the time, which involved balancing the four humors and temperaments with their opposite – a theory that Hahnemann referred to as ‘allopathy’ to further separate the two schools of thought (homeo = the same; allo = the opposite). Today, homeopaths incorrectly use the term to describe modern, conventional or orthodox medicine, unaware that this only makes them look ignorant of their own history.

But Hahnemann wasn’t done there. As with any theory, it’s not just enough to state that a thing happens – one must also explain why. Hahnemann ascribed the homeopathic effect to a stimulation of the vitalist energy that animated all human beings, allowing it to more strongly fight off the evil influences causing the sickness. Basically, he attributed it to the Force. You may want to laugh at Hahnemann for this, but it’s important to remember that this was before the discovery of bacteria, viruses, biochemistry and genetics. At the time, vitalism was a completely accepted means for explaining disease and cures. When it becomes silly is when people continue to use it as an explanation even after the invention of the microscope.

Hahnemann’s vitalist theories also allowed him to formulate the second law of homeopathy – that higher dilutions would be just as effective at stimulating the vital force, if not more so. This was an important leap for the apparent success of homeopathy, because most items which cause any kind of symptom in a healthy human do so because they are bad for you. A normal dose of say, arsenic, would certainly not be good for patients, so it’s a good thing that the Force can sense arsenic at even the tiniest doses. Thus, the law of dilutions was born. Hahnemann also added succussion (tapping and shaking) between each step of dilution, which woke the vital forces in the substance (he felt this step was so important for strengthening the solution that he advised his patients to avoid walking around with their remedies in their pockets in case they inadvertently potentized them to the point of toxicity). The result was a medication diluted to the point where no molecules of the original substance could possibly exist – important for patient safety, but a point which escaped Hahnemann’s notice because this was before people like Avogadro shed light on exactly what happens when you dilute things.

The final step involved dosing healthy volunteers with every available substance and checking for any resulting symptoms in order to compile a list of homeopathic remedies, in a process referred to as a ‘proving’. Hahnemann would dose someone and then require that they kept a diary for months afterward, recording all relevant health details, from which he would deduce what symptoms the substance caused. Yes, I said months, which means that pretty much all provings conducted using Hahnemann’s methods may as well be tossed out because they don’t control in any way for the possibility that recorded symptoms were caused by anything else that may have occured during these months, which the patient may have failed to mention. His only control for accuracy of the volunteer’s self-reporting of symptoms? He made them swear they had told the truth, an obviously infallible system. That said, some of the concepts introduced by Hahnemann during his provings gave rise to clinical trials as we know them today, so he at least sowed the seeds for better medical practice, even if he didn’t reap them himself.

So, given that Hahnemann invented homeopathy from whole cloth after experiencing what was likely an allergic reaction, then embellished the theory with vitalist nonsense and poorly controlled tests, how did it ever gain a foothold? Again, you need to put this all in the context of its times. In the 18th century, medicine pretty much killed you. People didn’t know anything about germs or hygiene, so even the simplest medical procedure was almost guaranteed to cause fatal infection. No one understood cancer, heart disease, cholesterol or hypertension, and the closest they got to understanding high blood pressure was inducing dangerously low blood pressure for almost any ailment. Common tonics and medications contained anything from heroin and cocaine to sulphur and mercury. Most people were better off doing absolutely nothing and leaving the immune system to do its thing. Bring onto this scene a doctor who gives his patients glorified water and tells them with all certainty that it will cure them, and you combine the power of the placebo effect with a treatment that didn’t actually harm you. On top of this, Hahneman was also a man ahead of his time in that he also encouraged his patients to eat well, live hygienically, and get moderate exercise. It is beyond doubt that his encouragement of a healthy lifestyle, while also not infecting and killing his patients, led to an apparent success that was remarkable in comparison to the failings of medicine at the time.

So it’s no wonder that homeopathy took off in the early 19th century. What is a wonder is that after all we have discovered in the fields of chemistry, biology and medicine since, some people still think it works. But we’ll save further exploration of the current-day silliness of homeopathy for Part II.

Those in the Northern Hemisphere who wish to ignore the religious hijacking of this holiday and instead celebrate the life-affirmation of the coming spring, with such symbols of fertility as hares and eggs, may easily do so. Not so easily the Southern Hemisphere, where I live. For us, March brings with it the promise of Autumn, and the coming cold. Easter seems an empty parroting of Northern customs… the chocolate egg is indeed hollow for us secular southerners.

One wonders… are there any redeeming qualities of this festival worthy of celebration for the antipodean atheist?

The original article appeared in the Afrikaans-language Rapport, and the SA Skeptics forum have provided a translation here. In it, Danie supposedly is able to differentiate vials of blood containing cancer from those that do not. Since the ‘tests’ were performed in the office of a local internist, and then by the journos at the Rapport, I hardly think we can consider the results reliable. Perhaps now that Danie has voyaged into the realm of medicine, he will consider submitting his device to a double-blind, controlled trial? Yeah, you’re right, probably not.

To start with, I find it telling that after his spectacular failure in finding Madeleine McCann, and the subsequent pummeling he took in the internation press, Danie has moved away from body-finding and into cancer-sniffing. Allow me to remind you that Danie claimed to know where Madeleine McCann was buried, and yet there has been no digging whatsoever in the area he has marked out. Does this not strike anyone as odd, considering how ingenious Danie was at obtaining digging equipment, able bodies and cameras to upturn an area the size of two football fields, on a similar hunch about the Van Rooyen victims? Frankly, if I knew where that little girl was buried, and no one would listen to me, I would have set to digging that beach up with my bare hands to prove it to them. But not Danie. He slinks back to South Africa, stays quiet for a few months, then suddenly appears with a new shiny silver case containing yet another ‘invention’.

So let’s examine some of the details of this new article. Apparently Danie has ‘loaded’ his device with various forms of cancer already. Immediately this makes me wonder where he got it from. I don’t know about you guys, but samples of cancer are not something I come across in everyday life. Either Danie has been dumpster-diving in medical waste, or someone is supplying him – the man obviously has an accomplice in the medical community. All eyes should at this point be swivelling towards the internist who assisted him in testing the device. I would suspect that Danie did not just walk into this person’s office and claim he was looking for an objective witness with a medical degree, but rather that this is the culmination of a carefully planned scheme. Either that, or Danie is lying about the device being loaded with cancer samples.

There are also some distinct differences between this device and the last. Danie’s previous Matter Orientation Device, which worked on the same apparent principle of like communicating with like, was so sensitive that given any sample it would only detect the source of that sample, and not any other similar source. Given a sample of hair, it would react only to the person from whom that hair was taken, and not just to any hair (or poorly made wig) that happened to be in the vacinity. So I would wonder how it is that Danie’s current device is so much less precise? It apparently goes off in the presence of any cancer. However, cancer as we all know is genetically specific material, so I would expect that Danie’s technology would only register in the presence of the rest of the tumour from which the sample was taken (we look pointedly at the internist again), or perhaps in the presence of the person from which the sample was taken. Unless Danie’s lying again.

And now, this device is only able to detect cancer within 4m, whereas his previous device could find its match anywhere on the entire planet. Again, the device seems somehow weaker than the last… the claims, somewhat toned down. But then again, the case also seems smaller, so perhaps he’s using fewer fairies this time.

All I can say is that I’m looking forward to seeing how this new ruse of Danie’s pans out.

May I remind everyone again that this woman supposedly has a medical qualification? That she is a medical doctor? And yet here she stands, blatantly claiming special privilege for african medicine, referring to clinical trials as ‘western’… and then goes on to warn against “charlatans tarnishing the image of this sector … who promise our desperate help-seeking people all sorts of things that are not practically possible to deliver”. So…. all of them, then?

And then, the coup de grace of evidential reasoning, she quantifies why african medicine is so special that it does not need to be tested… because it has been used for thousands of years. Wow. Really? Under that logic, perhaps we should revert to slavery, forced marriage, human sacrifice and colonialism… all practices with thousands of years of tradition behind them. Perhaps we should go back to other traditional forms of healing: bloodletting, amputation, trepannin and electroshock therapy? Perhaps we should throw out the whole court system and bring back trial by combat? And perhaps we should bring back that wonderful old-time tradition of women not being allowed to hold public office?

Get a few things straight, Manto: traditional does not mean right. There is no such thing as ‘western’ clinical trials, there are only clinical trials, performed everywhere in the world. And there is no such thing as western medicine, chinese medicine or african medicine: there is only medicine, which is the stuff that has been tested objectively and found to work, and all the other stuff that people claim is medicine, which is the stuff that may well be helpful, harmful or placebo, but which we don’t know until we test it.

And then the Doctors for Life International group responded with one of the worst press releases ever, using as their primary argument for testing of traditional medicine, the possibility that we won’t know if it contains human body parts or not if we don’t test it. Oh, and it’s the biggest culprit in fatal poisoning in the country. Nicely done guys. While both your points are 100% accurate, all you serve to do is give her more ammunition to claim that you are only villianizing her precious african medicine and that you don’t understand it.

What needs to be addressed here is the fundamental racism that causes her to refer to all scientific advancements as ‘western’, the reverse of which is that she is basically calling africa an unscientific backwater that rejects all modern understanding of chemistry, biology and medicine. Get it straight: we are all human beings, we all have the same biochemistry, what works on a western person works on an african person works on a chinese person. We are all prone to the placebo effect, we all deserve medicine that works, and we all deserve not to be taking something that doesn’t. We all deserve for you to subject anything you suspect might be useful to clinical trials, so that if it is medicine it can be manufactured and distributed to help the world. And if it’s not, it can be outlawed, to protect the world. The only people you hurt by not doing this, is the africans already taking it.