Closing the books on homeopathy

There comes a point when there is absolutely no reason to continue investigating a claim for which there is no evidence (or significant evidence against).  Pursuing it beyond that point is a waste of money, time, and effort, and can only be explained by people's desperation not to have their pet idea proven wrong.

That point has been reached by homeopathy.  It is useless, unscientific horseshit.  Case closed.

But if by some chance you still were unconvinced, consider the paper that was withdrawn last week from the journal Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  The title of the journal itself makes me wince a little; to paraphrase Tim Minchin, when alternative medicine has the support of evidence, it is thereafter known as "medicine."  But setting that aside for a moment, the paper in question was written by father/son team Aradeep and Ashim Chatterjee, and claimed that the homeopathic remedy "psorinum" was effective in treating cancer.

Without even knowing what "psorinum" is, any claim that a homeopathic "remedy" can cure cancer is about as close to medical fraud as you can skate without committing an actual crime.  If you don't know how "remedies" are created, the quick explanation is that you take a substance of some kind and dilute it past the point where there is any of it left, and then use the resulting water to treat whatever condition has symptoms like the ones created by ingesting the original substance.

For example: the homeopathic sleep-aid "calms forté" is made by diluting caffeine.  I shit you not.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In the case of "psorinum," however, we have an additional level of "what the fuck?" to add; the "remedy" is made by diluting...

... wait for it...

... fluid from the blisters of someone who has scabies.

I feel obliged to say at this point that I am not making this up.  The site Homeopathy Plus, which is the source of the link above, says the following about "psorinum:"

Those who need Psorinum usually lack vitality and are prone to mental disturbances.  They catch infections easily, especially colds, and recover slowly.  Skin complaints are common and if unattended will be dirty and offensive but these days with frequent bathing and access to steroids, are less likely to be so.  The person is also likely to be anxious about health, work, poverty and the future which leads to depression, despair and sometimes, suicidal thoughts.

You read that right.  If you're depressed because you're poor, the treatment is to ingest serially-diluted scabies pus.

Anyhow, the Chatterjees wrote a paper suggesting that "psorinum" could treat cancer, and evidently that was too much even for Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  When it was found that (1) the "ethics board" that cleared the study the paper was based on was identical to the Board of Directors of a clinic the Chatterjees owned, and (2) both the father and the son were practicing medicine without a license, it was too much for the authorities, too, and the pair were arrested.

This, unfortunately, is not a unique occurrence.  Papers supporting homeopathy have, one and all, been shown to be cherry-picked, if not outright fraudulent.  100% of the controlled scientific studies of homeopathic claims have resulted in zero evidence in favor.

So enough people-hours and research grant money has been wasted on this.  Homeopathy was a ridiculous claim from the get-go, but it was only fair to test it.  The research community did so.  It failed.

Case closed.

Now, the next step is to get those useless sugar pills off the shelves at CVS and other pharmacies.  I know the principle of caveat emptor applies, and if you're choosing to waste your money on fake treatments, you deserve what you get.  But the companies that make this stuff are profiting off the general public's gullibility and ignorance, people are taking quack remedies for serious conditions instead of seeking out legitimate medical help, and the Food & Drug Administration needs to put a stop to it.

As far as the Chatterjees go -- to quote a friend of mine, "I hope they bring them some 'psorinum' sugar pills in jail to cure their 'anxiety about the future.'"  To which I can only add: "Would you like some highly-diluted skin lotion for that burn?"

I'm so blue

There comes a point when caveat emptor just isn't enough.

I know that my general take on spurious claims has been that if people can't be bothered to learn a little science, then they deserve to be hoodwinked by the unscrupulous.  Heartless as it may seem, we all have a responsibility to exercise caution and rationality with respect to our own decisions.

But dammit, when a doctor gets on the public airwaves, and recommends all kinds of sketchy shit, there should be a way to stop him.

And for once, I'm not talking about Dr. Oz.  This time the Very Alternative Medicine Award goes to Dr. Joel Wallach, who basically thinks every human disorder is caused by a mineral deficiency.

The topic comes up because I was listening to the phenomenally wacky radio broadcast Coast to Coast AM, hosted by George Noory, and Dr. Wallach was a guest.  Mostly it was the usual fare, with Noory asking questions about how unhealthy Americans are and about cancer rates and the incidence of heart disease, and Dr. Wallach responding with bogus-sounding stuff about mineral deficiencies.  And then Noory started taking callers, and a woman called in and asked for Dr. Wallach's advice about how to treat what sounded like a genital yeast infection.

And Dr. Wallach recommended soaking a tampon in colloidal silver, and inserting it into her vagina.

Well, that got my attention.  And I'm thinking, "Wasn't there that guy who took so much colloidal silver that he turned his skin blue?"  So I looked it up, and I found out that yes, there was a man named Paul Karason who became convinced that colloidal silver was the answer to all of life's ills, and took so much that he developed argyria, a permanent discoloration of the skin.

To put it more succinctly if less scientifically: he went from a basically normal human being to looking like the love child of Papa Smurf and a zombie.

Now, to be fair, it's unlikely that one application of colloidal silver would result in problems, even if it is applied to your tender bits.  But I myself wouldn't do anything of the kind, even if I had the tender bits in question, which I don't.  Because to say that Dr. Wallach's claims are suspect turns out to be a mammoth understatement.

The wonderful site Quackwatch did a stinging exposé of Wallach a couple of years ago, especially apropos of his stance that "Americans are slowly starving to death" and the way to reverse the problem is by taking lots of colloidal mineral supplements (which, to no one's particular surprise, you can purchase from Dr. Wallach's company Youngevity).

Here are a few of his specious claims (there is more information on each in the Quackwatch article linked above):

• He backed the useless apricot-pit derivative laetrile for treating cancer.  
• Hydrogen peroxide can be used to treat coronary artery disease.
• Cystic fibrosis is "100% curable in its early stages."
• Multiple sclerosis is caused by mercury poisoning from dental amalgam.
• There are cultures where people routinely live (in good health) to 140 years, and they do so because they drink glacial creek water saturated with pulverized minerals.
• Alzheimer's disease is preventable (guess how?) and that 50% of American 70-year-olds have it.
• Both gray hair and aneurysms are caused by a copper deficiency.
• Male pattern baldness is caused by a tin deficiency.
• Diabetes is caused by a vanadium deficiency.

Getting the picture here?  Add to this the fact that he has claimed to be the author of a medical textbook and over 70 peer-reviewed papers in medical journals (he isn't), and that in his training he did 20,500 human and animal autopsies (he didn't), and his veracity is definitely suspect.  (James Pontolillo, author of the Quackwatch piece, calculated that in order to perform that many autopsies, Wallach would have had to perform six a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year, for twelve years.)

So I think you can see that we're dealing with someone here whose recommendations are pretty much uniformly unsupported by the evidence.  Personally, I think that Wallach's level of reliability is such that if he said the sky was blue and the grass was green, I'd want to go outside to check for myself.

And lest you think that Pontolillo just has some kind of axe to grind, Wallach has also been excoriated in The Skeptic's Dictionary, received withering and exhaustive rebukes from nutritionists Stuart Adams and Stephen Cherniske, and was outright called a "liar" both at the skeptical site The Millennium Project and in a publication by the National Council Against Health Fraud.  

But the guy still has followers who revere him with near fanatical devotion.  Adams in particular has been attacked for his criticisms of Wallach -- he has stated that he is still getting hate mail for his exposé, which was released over ten years ago.

Which just goes to show how persuasive bullshit can be.  And it makes me wish there was some way to save people from their own gullibility.  I know you can't legislate against ignorance; but the fact that there are snake-oil salesmen out there who are taking advantage of people's fear about their health to rook them for millions of dollars is just not nice.  

I suppose I should draw some solace from the fact that Wallach's credibility is now so low that he's appearing on Coast to Coast AM.  It's not like most of the stuff on that show is the pinnacle of rationality, after all.  I mean, the piece after Wallach's spot had to do with the "akashic record" -- the idea that every person who has ever lived, and every event that has ever happened, is still accessible through a universal quantum energy frequency vibrational field, or something.  So it's to be hoped that any listeners who were still on the fence were left chortling and saying "Yeah, right" after the show was over.

And that few of them were tempted to insert mineral-soaked tampons into their naughty parts.