OddThinking

I am told it is World Homeopathy Awareness Week.

I can get behind that. I think we should be aware of homeopathy. It provides an important role in society. It acts a barometer… no, a better analogy is a low-tide marker.

Of all the various conflicting ideas that people believe, homeopathy is special, in that it is completely and throughly understood by science, by logic and reason, to be totally and utterly wrong.

There are no grey areas here. It doesn’t deserve the “unlikely and risky, but vaguely plausible” tag that herbal remedies get. It doesn’t deserve the “helps in some specific areas, but is being over-sold” tag of chiropracty. It doesn’t deserve the “insufficiently researched to comment” tag of new ideas. It doesn’t deserve the “experiments suggest it doesn’t work, but ultimately is unfalsifiable” tag of faith healing. It doesn’t even deserve the “you’d need to be an expert to understand the full arguments”, with a simple proof it doesn’t work that can be understood by a smart 12 year old.

We know enough about the world, and we know it rigorously enough, for us to say, without hesitation: homeopathic remedies do not work, although like other placebos, they sometimes appear to.

Homeopathic solutions are just water, and cannot cure anything except thirst. Homeopathic pills are just sugar pills, and cannot cure anything except hypoglycaemia (although, so do jelly beans, and they are cheaper and taste better.)

But, in 1996, 1.2% of Australians sought treatment exclusively from homeopathic practitioners, with 4.4% trying a homeopathic remedy. [Ref.] An estimated minimum of 300,000 homeopathic consultations were made in 2004. [Ref.]

So, belief in homeopathy gives us a baseline. At least 1.2% of the population will believe – seriously believe, where their health is at stake – in an absolute and complete nonsense with no redeeming features. We should expect other false beliefs to be able to garner those sort of figures with equivalent levels of advertising – and much more, if there are any reasons to be unable to swat the ideas down immediately. (Not surprisingly, the number of people who consume other alternatives to medicine is much higher – 31% of Australians regularly visiting a complementary medicine practitioner [reported in 2002, Ref.]).

We can use this as a baseline to see what sort and complexity of organisations, industries, lobby groups and advertising that can spring up based on lies and nonsense.

We can use this as a baseline to see how effective consumer protection laws can be – if they can’t protect us from fraudulent homeopaths making clearly unsustainable claims, what can they protect us from?

We can use this as a baseline to measure the effectiveness of scientific education – and not just the ability of people to critically think for themselves or to perform simple research for themselves, but also where they go for important information, such as health – which is related to how much they trust scientists.

We can use this as a baseline to understand that there will always be a number of people who will never accept the scientific consensus, making issues such as Climate Change even more likely to get stalled.

We can use this as an absolute upper baseline for how much we can trust the democratic process. A significant percentage of people – more than the difference in votes in many close elections – are incapable of determining the best choice in their own self-interest.

So, I think it is worthwhile being aware of homeopathy. It worthwhile being aware that people are dying from it unnecessarily, even in Australia, including, tragically, two young children in 2002. [Ref].

And it is worthwhile trying to use it to understand one of the biggest problems that the progress of science has – in getting the public to understand reality (or to at least trust the people who do), even over a century after it has been well-understood by scientists.