Now the principle of potentization, in which a homeopathic remedy gets more powerful the more it is diluted and succussed (aka whacked on a leatherbound book), would seem to present a problem for treating aquatic animals. One would think that a potentially helpful remedy diluted to, for example, 30C (meaning there is no conceivable chance of a single molecule of the original ingredient remaining) could become a devastating poison wiping out all life if dropped into the ocean and diluted so much more. However, there is no need to worry as homeopathic remedies are not only able to cure the true underlying cause of diseases modern medicine can’t touch, but they are completely safe as well. As the experts say,

Homoeopathy works with any living thing, so fish can also be successfully treated by it. Remedies can even be used preventatively for certain fish diseases.

Rather than trying to drop a pill down the mouth of a wriggling fish, though, there is an easier way – just medicate the water in which it swims.

There is a caution to bear in mind, however.

The only thing to remember is that your fish should not swim forever in the medicated water as they, just like us, can experience an aggravation.

To avoid this, make sure the water is exposed to sunlight as it weakens and eventually destroys the effects of homeopathic remedies.

Good to know. The magic memory of water is destroyed by ultraviolet rays. However, an “aggravation” does sound bad. I thought homeopathy wasn’t supposed to have side effects? Oh, here’s how the folks at Homeopathy Plus describe what to expect with homeopathic treatment.

Once you have taken your first dose of a homeopathic remedy, one of the following seven things will happen

• A curative response – your symptoms get better and go away.
• A similar aggravation – your symptoms first worsen and then improve.
• A dissimilar aggravation – new symptoms appear for a short time but your old ones stay the same.
• Accessory symptoms – your symptoms improve but in the process a new one appears for a short period.
• Return of old symptoms – your existing symptoms improve but in the process, old symptoms from the past return for a short period.
• A surrogate discharge or eruption appears for a short time.
• Absolutely nothing happens.

What do they mean? Plenty to a homeopath! Each response reveals whether or not the correct remedy has been prescribed and provides valuable information your homeopath will use to adjust your treatment and help return you to health.

Ok, so your symptoms can go away, get worse, be replaced by new ones, or not change in any way, and all of these are ok! In fact, for all of these responses, except new symptoms and no change, the homeopaths conclude that the correct remedy was applied. And it may have been the correct remedy even if nothing changes at all, but you might simply be “insensitive” to it. But no matter what happens, nothing is ever a sign of failure, since we know,

Homeopathy is an amazing system of medicine with all the necessary checks and balances to guide both patient and practitioner on their journey to improved health. Used with skill and wisdom, it triggers deep healing, strengthens vitality, creates immunity, and improves resistance to future disease. It is God’s gift to a suffering humanity, waiting for us to take advantage of it.

Made-up medicine works on made-up illnesses

ACUPUNCTURE has been shown to be extremely effective amongst people who have nothing wrong with them.

Experts stressed that acupuncture, like murder and lying, has existed for thousands of years and works on the fundamental Chinese principle that if it hurts it must be working.

Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: “To truly assess the efficacy of acupuncture a widespread double-blind test needs to be conducted over a series of years but to be honest it’s the equivalent of mapping the DNA of pixies or conducting a geological study of Narnia.”

Anti-Science Red Flags of Quackery

From comic blogger Sci-ence (sorry, can’t get the schwa character in there).

Japanese Eyeball Poking

Really, what else needs to be said?

I can’t actually recommend buying the calendar, though as a novelty item it is tempting, since the proceeds fund what looks, by the preview, to be an egregious misinformation campaign. But I do have to admire the creativity and communications savvy of the folks involved. I think it’s high time we had a Sexy Skeptics Calendar, don’t you!?

**A reader has already informed me that I’m late to the party, and that a Sexy SKeptics calendar to fund Skepticon 3 already exists. Enjoy!

http://skepticon.org/shop/

Sometimes, orientalism takes the form of obvious prejudice, such as reference to “ignorant savages” and the like. But more often, especially among the post-modern left wing intelligentsia which so often also advocates for alternative medical approaches as “equivalent ways of knowing” alongside science, the form orientalism takes is more sophisticated. It often involves an expression of admiration for the purity or simplicity of cultures not tainted by modern scientific or political ideas or other products of the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe. Non-Western cultures, and people, are sanitized and seen as exotic and not polluted by the moral or intellectual conflicts that decadent imperialist Western cultures suffer from.

This, of course, is ignorant and patronizing and merely another form of racism which ignores the fundamental commonalities of human beings and human cultures as well as the complexities and conflicts that characterize non-Western societies as much as our own. But it is difficult to convince the dedicated orientalist of this since their sense of admiration for the exotic seems to them like respect rather than simple patronizing psychological projection.

Cracked.com has an entertaining, but oddly sobering piece up today on the subject which pretty much says it all:

5 Examples of Americans Thinking Foreign People are Magic

But think about the possibilities! The principle of homeopathy is that whatever causes a given symptom in a proving on a healthy subject will, when diluted and shaken properly, alleviate that symptom in an ill patient. What better source of compounds that cause every imaginable symptom could there be but conventional pharmaceuticals!

Take prednisone, a much maligned steroid. At therapeutic doses in the short term, it can cause an increase in appetite, urination, and drinking. Chronic use can cause thinning of skin, muscle wasting, and infections. So dilute it, shake it and Bingo: Treats the increased urination of chronic kidney failure! Suppresses appetite for weight loss! Builds muscle strength for agility competition! Can even treat infections!

Or how about morphine? Therapeutic doses are very effective for pain but can cause nausea. So homeopathic morphine would treat nausea, but unfortunately anything over about 30C would probably cause unbearable pain!

At last, the solution to all my patients’ problems, and my student loans.

Even the homeopaths don’t claim there’s anything but water in most of their nostrums, but they believe the water has some “memory” of what used to be in it (but only what they put in it, not the animal poo or whatever else was in it before they got hold of it). This is often “explained” with reference to quantum physics, since almost no one really understands quantum physics well enough to recognize this as BS, and besides it sounds better than calling it “magic.”

But I recently ran across a bit of advice from the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association that deserve a little mockery. Here is their handout on Care and Use of Homeopathic Remedies:

Care and use of homeopathic remedies 

• Fill bottle with spring water if not already diluted
• Store in refrigerator unless otherwise labeled 
• Tap bottle 10-20X against palm of hand before administering .This mixes the remedies, but also increases their effectiveness  
• Wipe off tip of dropper when done to minimize contamination. In dogs, you can squirt the remedy into the cheek pouch  
• Do not mix in food or water if possible. (the water bowl is a possibility for single pet, difficult-to-medicate pets).Just let Dr. Lund know that you are using the remedy this way
• Your bottle will last ~6-8 weeks, and then often start to grow a bit of mold. Pets on long term therapy will need a recheck by then anyway, and the next set of remedies is usually different

So let’s get this straight. First, you dilute the water with spring water, unless it’s already been diluted. Then store the water in the refrigerator, presumably to prevent it from spoiling. Shake the water before administering to mix it with itself and make it an even stronger medicine. Be very careful not to mix the water with any food or water, except the water you originally mixed the water with (presumably too much water would make the water dangerously strong). And don’t worry if the water grows mold despite being refrigerated, since by the time this happens it will probably be necessary to have another visit with the doctor and change to a different kind of water anyway.

Obviously, I’m not smart enough to practice this kind of medicine.

Today marks the first anniversary of this blog. Not a momentous event for the world at large, but yet another reminder of the fleeting nature of time for me. Apparently, in the last year I have put up 135 posts and the site has been visited 7468 times. I’ve certainly learned a great deal, about medicine and about writing, and I’ve met a number of interesting people. I hope it has been interesting and useful to at least a few of you.

As an anniversary post, I thought I’d put up something I started on near the beginning but never actually posted.

Last summer, I spent a week at Lark Camp, a folk music workshop/festival/party in the Mendocino Woodlands. I tend to refer to it, affectionately, as Hippie Drum Camp, mostly because I went with the idea of learning to play the bodhran (hence the “drum” part; the “hippie” part should be self-evident). Apart from a brief and agonizing (for me and everyone around me) flirtation with the clarinet in grade school, I have never played an instrument. But I’ve always gone to Celtic cultural events (and pubs) and I know all the songs, so I wanted to learn more about the music. It was a fantastic experience, and I’ve spent the last year trying to learn a couple of instruments so I can go back this summer and participate more fully.

One of the folks I met there was a fiddle player who shared a song he had written called The Placebo Effect. We had a very interesting conversation about his experiences with managing his own diabetes and trying to avoid medication, and about all of the things he had investigated or tried as part of this experience. I had just started this blog, and I thought the song offered some eloquent and funny insight into the issue of placebo effects and unproven or alternative therapies from the perspective of an intelligent, educated non-scientist. At the time, I wasn’t certain he would welcome my making the lyrics public, but I recently found he did so some time ago on his own blog so hopefully he won’t mind.

Apart from the internal merit of the wit and humor, the song illustrates how someone can come to look at the complex relationship between individual experience and scientific knowledge. It is always difficult to argue with someone who feels better after using a therapy, even if the facts are pretty clear that the therapy doesn’t work. Feeling better is real whether or not it means what the person thinks it does or has any relationship to actual physical health.

In trying to promote science-based medicine, my ultimate goal is always to steer people toward what will truly help them or their pets and to steer them away from false hope and the harm that comes from mistaken ideas about cause and effect. But I try always to remember that CAM is popular because it meets a need. It provides hope, even false hope, and it addresses the psychological dimensions of illness in ways that mainstream medicine doesn’t always (though I think this is less true in veterinary medicine for a variety of reasons). I think we can have the best of both worlds–effective science-based medicine and humane, affirming care. But to do this we have to try and understand what appeals to people about CAM and what about scientific medicine pushes them away even when it is the more likely to help them.

This song touches on the issues of uncertainty in medicine, on the fact that general data can’t always predict what will help or harm the individual, and that the slow process of scientific progress, though it is far more likely to reach the right answer in the end, is often too slow to help those who are suffering right now. None of this justifies unproven or outright bogus medicine, but it does explain a bit why even ineffective therapies can be popular, and it reminds us of some of the limitations to scientific medicine that we have to deal with in the effort to guide people towards the best, real therapies available. It also reminds us that CAM is not the sole province of the ignorant, gullible, or stupid. I don’t necessarily agree with the writer’s take on science and knowledge, but from our conversation and his blog I have no doubt he is smart and well-informed. We must be careful not to make the mistake of caricaturing or patronizing those who don’t see the issues around CAM the way we think they are best seen. This blog is as much about learning for me as it is about trying to teach others, and from this fellow and his song I think I have learned a few valuable things.

Oh, and did I mention it’s funny?

In the woods on a sunny day late in July,
all the air was abuzz with mosquito and fly.
In an effort to cope I was spraying some DEET
on my arms, elbows, shoulders,
legs, ankles, and feet,
when a fiddler came by and said
“Don’t waste your time –
there’s no evidence that that stuff
works worth a dime”.
I explained to him I wouldn’t
care if there was,
’cause it helps me so long as
I think that it does.

Chorus:
I would never reject any fake remedy;
the placebo effect is what works best on me.

If I take enough fish oil, I
need not grow old,
if I take echinacea I won’t
catch a cold.
And if I should come down with a
cold anyway,
a few doses of zinc will soon
make it okay.
Now as far as I know there’s no
clinical study
showing zinc really makes you feel
one bit less cruddy.
So it might not be true, yet
I’ve heard that it’s so.
In such matters as this there is
no way to know.

I would never reject any fake remedy;
the placebo effect is what works best on me.

If you can’t afford insulin,
I have heard tell
that ground cinnamon does the job
perfectly well.
There are herbs with strange nicknames
in English and Latin
which I’ve heard are as useful
as Pfizer’s new statin.
I suppose that some day we will
know for a fact
how a body exposed to such
cures will react.
By the time that these answers are
finally found,
I’m afraid I’ll already be
under the ground.

I would never reject any fake remedy;
the placebo effect is what works best on me.

All this week in a tent, yet my
back feels just fine
I assume all that yoga
protected my spine.
And it seems my blood pressure has
come down a bit;
I conclude making music can
help me stay fit.
These are only assumptions, they
may not be true,
and if I wanted proof, well,
my options are few.
For, to test your health habits, there’s
one thing to try:
life your life over different
and see if you die.

I would never reject any fake remedy;
the placebo effect is what works best on me.

And it really is not just good
health that’s at stake,
for the thoughts that we live by
are most of ‘em fake,
and we get through each day by
accepting as right
every half-assed conception
we dreamed up last night.
If I master this dance, then it
means I’m no fool,
if I wear the right clothes it will
mean that I’m cool,
and if I could play well every
tune on this list,
it would prove to me I have a
right to exist.

I would never reject any fake remedy;
the placebo effect is what works best on me.

Though to say it out loud here takes
plenty of gall,
I think music’s the greatest
placebo of all.
For as long as we’re playing we
think life is fine
and the wide world around us is
not run by swine.
Through a skeptic might ask what
this fake joy is worth,
at least fake joy’s the kind you can
have here on earth.
So that moral that I would leave
with you is this:
do not seek tragic wisdom
where bullshit is bliss!

I would never reject any fake remedy;
the placebo effect is what works best on me.