During the weekend of the 5th & 6th of February, an organisation called 10:23 will be staging various events in Britain and around the world. Their purpose is to demonstrate that homeopathy is a pseudoscience. The centrepiece of the weekend is a “mass overdose” stunt in which people are invited to swallow hundreds of homeopathic pills at once…supposedly to show they have no effect.  

However, these infantile mob actions add nothing to the public understanding of an important medical therapy, and indeed are an example of pseudoscience in their own right.  [see Note below]  That’s ironic, as 10:23 profess to speak in the name of science. 

But that’s not the only irony.

Irony 

1023’s hyperactive campaign is in marked contrast to the sober manner in which the homeopathic community is continuing its own scientific work. For example, it has recently established two on-line medical research databases. Last December, Britain’s Homeopathic Research Institute set up a database listing only ‘gold standard’ human research, i.e. placebo-controlled randomised clinical trials  – currently about 100 of them. (ref 1). Last month in Germany, Carsten-Stiftung set up another new database covering research on animals – mainly livestock (ref 2). Carsten-Stiftung already hosts a human research database listing over 650 studies – in fact, every single study on homeopathy ever published.(ref 3)  

Evidently, the vehemence with which 10:23 express their scepticism about homeopathy is in inverse proportion to their knowledge of the clinical data.

Taken together, the three databases overwhelmingly show beneficial clinical outcomes for homeopathy. However, a small percentage of the studies show little or no effect. 

Irony 

The homeopathic community’s open declaration of its ‘negative’ clinical findings is in marked contrast to the behaviour of sections of the international pharmaceutical industry, which has been repeatedly exposed as having a policy of ‘burying’ negative clinical trial data.(ref 4) 

Irony  

The 10:23 campaign is seeking donations to an organisation called Sense About Science, a lobby group set up ostensibly to promote ”good science and evidence for the public” (ref 5). A significant proportion of SAS’s funding has come from drug giants AstraZeneca, Glaxo Smith Kline and Pfizer (ref 6). However, far from exhibiting “good evidence” practices, all three companies have been found guilty of selectively publishing their clinical trial data.  (ref 7) 

Neither 1023 nor SAS have condemned these data-suppressing practices, despite the fact that withholding drug trial data may have been linked to serious morbidity in terms of major side-effects and substantial numbers of deaths (ref 8).  By contrast, homeopathy has killed no-one, and daily benefits thousands of people and animals world-wide, being used in 65 countries by over 400,000 doctors, vets and other health professionals.

NOTES

• What is Pseudoscience ? Pseudoscience has been defined as “a claim which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific methodology.” The 10:23 Organisation’s ‘mass overdose’ experiment is a classic example. It claims to ‘disprove’ homeopathy, but its experimental method is wholly contrary to the accepted rules of scientific practice, in that 10:23 are not testing any hypothesis claimed by homeopathy, whose mode of action does not rely on the quantity of chemically active molecules within its medications. More loosely, pseudoscience is also defined as claims “inaccurately or deceptively portrayed as science”, and hence could be a legitimate description of certain practices within the pharmaceutical industry. 

• Homeopathy is a 200 year-old medical system whose medicines have been shown in major scientific surveys to be both therapeutic and without side-effects. [Ref 9] It was originally developed to save patients from the highly toxic medications common in the 18th & 19th centuries. It has therefore always been seen as a threat to ‘establishment’ medicine - a ‘turf wars’ situation that persists to this day. 

 

Refs: 

1. www.homeoinst.org/database

2 www.carstens-stiftung.de/clinresvet/index.php

3. www.cam-quest.org/en/search/therapies/?l1=403

4. “Drug firms hiding negative research are unfit to experiment on people”

Goldacre B, Guardian, 14 Aug 2010

Nature 440, 270-272 (16 March 2006)

5. www.senseaboutscience.org.uk

6. UK Charity Commissioners

7. Pfizer: BMJ 2010 Oct 12; 341; c4737

‘Glaxo faces drug fraud lawsuit’, Guardian 3 June 2004

‘Astra Zeneca Seroquel Studies ‘Buried,’ Bloomberg, 27 Feb 2009

Avandia Maker Hid Risks for Years, Probe Finds - 

www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/13/health/main6673320.shtml

8. e.g, Vioxx (Merck) Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(21):1985-1987.

9. BMJ. 1991 Feb 9;302(6772):316-23

Lancet. 1997 Sep 20;350(9081):834-43 

Eur J Clin Pharmacol. 2000 Apr;56(1):27-33

Ann Intern Med. 2003 Mar 4;138(5):393-9