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Doctors skewer sCAMmers

Listening at the moment. I wish Prof Baum didn't keep sniffing so loudly on air. Should have taken some marvellous homeopathy.
 
It's on Radio 4's 'Today' right now.

Staunch defence of the scientific method. The pro-homeopathy guy is tying himself in verbal knots.

From the sensible scientist chap:

"If it WORKS, it ceases to be alternative medicine!"

He wants all complementary therapies to jump through the same regulatory hoops as conventional medicines. He does mention that acupuncture is the exception; effective for pain relief, and not for the nonsense reasons mentioned by CAM practitioners.

Well worth a listen, once the Beeb get it online (doesn't take them long).
 
Dragon said:
Seconded - just seen our Les on BBC Breakfast.
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Damn - missed that one. Some of us have to work in the real world you know - no time to swan about watching telly all morning!

3 cheers for Asolepius, David Colquhoun et al!
:wave1
 
Deetee said:
Damn - missed that one. Some of us have to work in the real world you know - no time to swan about watching telly all morning!

3 cheers for Asolepius, David Colquhoun et al!
:wave1
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Sat up in bed, actually. But I am working 1pm to 11pm today. :p
I feel another letter to my MP coming on.
 
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I heard the Today interview. Do you think it was Prof. Baum sniffing? I thought so, but then I wondered if it was just someone passing a sheet of paper too close to the microphone.

Peter Fisher pretty much admitted (once again) that it's placebo. And somebody who emailed in said that you keep hearing that it can't be placebo because it works on animals, but in fact it's just that the placebo effect works on the owners. Not a name I recognised.

It's not going to stop the "but it works for me and my friends" mob, but it was a good start.

I just wish Prof. Baum had been a fraction more robust about the "there's nothing in it" part. Still, he didn't let Peter Fisher entirely get away with the water memory claim (so it's placebo, so it's water memory, come on, make up your mind), and at least nobody mentioned quantum entanglement.

I know Peter Fisher was lying about the aggregate results of the trials. And he kept doing it, too. I wonder if he was lying about his budget for the homoeopathic hospital? I wouldn't put it past him.

I wish they could take this further and debate the ethics of lying to patients by pretending an inert substance will help them.

Rolfe.
 
Lying is a strong term, Rolfe. Misinformation, mistake or misdirection, maybe?

For the benefit of those who have not/cannot/will not listen to the piece, Peter Fisher suggested that last year's widely reported Lancet metastudy was carefully rounded off at 8 studies, where the net result was a negative for homeopathy, whereas restricted to 7 or upped to 9, the result would have been a win.

If effect, he's calling into question the methods used to compile the study. Any evidence for this? I haven't heard it before.

This, in his opinion, is part of an organised conspiracy by scientists against complementary medicine, a notion utterly dismissed by Prof. Baum of course.
 
pmckean said:
If effect, he's calling into question the methods used to compile the study. Any evidence for this? I haven't heard it before.
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More obfuscation I would suspect, and every other quality trial & meta-analysis was dismissed completely with the suggestion that they were all positive for homoeopathy with just this recent, Lancet trial that's come up negative. I would say this was certainly being "economial with the actualite".

Yuri
 
Yuri Nalyssus said:
More obfuscation I would suspect, and every other quality trial & meta-analysis was dismissed completely with the suggestion that they were all positive for homoeopathy with just this recent, Lancet trial that's come up negative. I would say this was certainly being "economial with the actualite".
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That's exactly what I meant. He repeatedly said that the aggregate of all the studies was positive, and it was just the Shang et al. paper which disagrees. This is not true, and he knows it's not true. Summary of meta-analyses.

I suspect that the crossed fingers behind his back indicate that he is including in his data the "patient satisfaction surveys" put out at regular intervals by the homoeopathic hospitals. We discussed the most recent one when it came out, suspiciously timed to try to de-fang the effects of Shang et al. In effect, all these do is have the nice friendly homoeopath ask the patients if perhaps they might be feeling a bit better now than they were when they first came to see them. No controls, no blinding. The only surprising thing about that is that they actually don't do as well as I'd expect from such an approach, given the self-selecting study group and people's natural politeness and so on!

I don't care if it's not polite, Peter Fisher was lying.

Rolfe.
 
I loved the section in the Today programme where a delightful elderly lady reckoned that because she was alive at 93 then homoeopathy must work - what more proof do we need!

Yuri
 
Rolfe said:
I don't care if it's not polite, Peter Fisher was lying.
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Lying or not, he certainly seems to be a hypocrite:
[Fisher:] This suggestion amounts to a form of medical apartheid: any therapy that cannot trace its origins to the bio-medical model should be excluded from the NHS.
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"A form of medical apartheid" is precisely what advocates of sCAM want: they don't want their "therapies" held to the same standard of proof as proper medicine.

On the other hand what the signatories of the letter are suggesting is that treatments should only be provided at public expense if they can be demonstrated to work, with the same standard applied whatever the origin of the treatment.
 
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