Homoeopathy article from Penn State

[Mojo]

Probing Question: Does homeopathy work?

Plenty of the usual canards, kicking off with a list of celebs.

"I don’t know if it works," says Kelly Karpa, associate professor of pharmacology in the Penn State College of Medicine, "The whole basis of homeopathy is counterintuitive to everything pharmacologists have learned about drug actions. I won’t say that I buy into it 100 percent, but I won’t say that I think it’s quackery either. Having never used it myself, I try to keep an open mind. Some patients are convinced that it has helped them. Perhaps the greatest parallel between homeopathy and conventional medicine is the practice of immunization, which also relies on the principle that small amounts of a substance may protect from disease."

(my emphasis)

Appeal to personal experience, followed by appeal to popularity.

And, of course, it has nothing to do with immunization.

Then we get the implication that remedies are made from substances that in material doses would produce similar symptoms: "if a substance causes a disease in large amounts, then it was theorized that the same substance in really small amounts could heal or protect from the disease" (see also the comments about onion and poison ivy); not the case, as "provings" are carried out using potentised remedies. Then we have it described as a "natural alternative", and a splendid opportunity for the reader to confuse homoeopathy and herbal medicine: "Many homeopathic products are based on diluted plant parts."

Later we have a subtle attack on conventional medicine (homoeopathy is described as a "nontoxic alternative"), followed by an appeal to authority, finishing off with an appeal to "where's the harm".

At least there is a paragraph about the actual evidence, I suppose, even if it is tucked in two from the end.

Interestingly, the same story seems to have been removed from here, at least for the time being: "[the article is retracted for investigation, please check back later]".

 

[T.A.M.]

show me the Double Blind Randomized Control Trial showing it treats ANYTHING with a better success rate than placebo, with an "n" of more than 500, or I don't even want to discuss the quackery.

TAM

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Same old **** ****.

But "Kelly J. Karpa, Ph.D.,R.Ph., is associate professor of pharmacology in the Penn State College of Medicine"?

And thinks:

"My thinking is that if people who are using them think they’re getting a benefit and it’s not causing them any harm, then why stop it?"

Because it's a waste of money? Because using Homeocrapy instead of real medicine means you might die?

Any one even attempting to support this nonsense might just start out with a little proof of the "The Law of Similars" aka known as sympathetic magic.

 

[RationalVetMed]

"I don’t know if it works," says Kelly Karpa, associate professor of pharmacology in the Penn State College of Medicine.

Wouldn't it have been nice if the whole article had finished just there, it's about the only honest bit in the whole paragraph.

Yuri

 

[spacediver]

don't see anything wrong with her statement. She's being a true scientist and keeping an open mind. There may be something useful to extract from the practice of homeopathy once we filter out through the garbage.

For example the ridiculous dilutions are very unlikely to have an effect, but the concept of like treating like may have some validity to it.

She seemed to display the exact open mindedness that should be required of critical thinkers.

criticizing her on appeal to personal experience and to popularity is a tad reflexive, imo.

 

[geni]

don't see anything wrong with her statement. She's being a true scientist and keeping an open mind.

Actualy most versions of the scientific method require you to reject theories that there is a significant amount of evidence against. The plumb pudding model of the atom for example.

There may be something useful to extract from the practice of homeopathy once we filter out through the garbage.

We've had over a century to find it. Theres some stuff related to client contact time but we know that already.

For example the ridiculous dilutions are very unlikely to have an effect, but the concept of like treating like may have some validity to it.

Not remotely. Apart from anything else I can come up with a fair number of ways to kill you by following that principle. There is simply no reason to think that that is the case and a very large number of counter examples.

 

[T.A.M.]

She seemed to display the exact open mindedness that should be required of critical thinkers.

please see my first post in this thread. My response to the above quote is the same.

TAM

 

[pgwenthold]

don't see anything wrong with her statement.

In addition to geni's comments, I would add that she is, in fact, completely wrong in her comparison to vaccines. Vaccines are not in any way, shape, or form similar to homeopathy in practice or in concept.

While "evaluating the evidence" is scientific, "not knowing what you are talking about" is not a very rigorous approach.

 

[FramerDave]

From her LinkedIn page: Associate Professor, Dept of Pharmacology; Director of Pharmacology Medical Instruction at Penn State College of Medicine

I think it's pretty disturbing that someone in her position would not have a basic understanding of how immunizations work.

 

[spacediver]

I've not done a rigorous investigation into homeopathy, so perhaps it is very unlikely that there's any value, beyond placebo, to be found in its methods.

I'm curious, would you all have the same reaction if someone made the same comments about naturopathy?

(i'm not equating the two, just trying to get a sense of your attitudes here)

 

[spacediver]

From her LinkedIn page: Associate Professor, Dept of Pharmacology; Director of Pharmacology Medical Instruction at Penn State College of Medicine

I think it's pretty disturbing that someone in her position would not have a basic understanding of how immunizations work.

my lay understanding of immunizations is that small amounts of a pathogen (sometimes inactive pathogens) can inspire the body to produce countermeasures to that pathogen without suffering the ill effects of the pathogen.

This could be construed, crudely, as an example of like "treating" like.

 

[geni]

This could be construed, crudely, as an example of like "treating" like.

Vaccines for the most part don't treat since they are meant to be administered well before the desease hits.

Secondly the mechanisms of vaccine action have nothing to do with homeopathy's principle of like treating like.

 

[Mojo]

She's being a true scientist and keeping an open mind.

She doesn't need to use it herself to come to a conclusion about its effectiveness (she could try pubmed for a start). In fact, relying on the evidence she would get from using it would be a highly unreliable way of drawing any conclusion.

 

[RationalVetMed]

my lay understanding of immunizations is that small amounts of a pathogen (sometimes inactive pathogens) can inspire the body to produce countermeasures to that pathogen without suffering the ill effects of the pathogen.

This could be construed, crudely, as an example of like "treating" like.

That's pretty close, vaccines 'prevent' like by treating like - give a dog an inactivated parvo-virus injection and you prime its immune system to protect it when a virulent, wild virus comes along. This has nothing at all in common with homeopathy though, the remedies of the homeopath have been diluted to such an extreme extent that they literally contain nothing of their original ingredient, most homeopaths acknowledge this. Homeopathic remedies cannot be distinguished one from another by any possible means, they are chemically and physically identical. This is why sceptics are so sceptical, with no medicine in the medicine it is impossible for homeopathic remedies to have any effect.

Additionally there have been very many trials done comparing homeopathic remedies to conventional medicines and placebos and when they are looked at as a whole it is found that the better the methodology of the trial the less likely it is to show any effect from using homeopathic remedies.

The type of comments and points you read on threads like this aren't 'reflexive', or knee jerk, it's just that the contributors have seen the same types of claim made so many times that it becomes a bit of a wheeze teasing out the different classes of fallacy used by CAM apologists when talking about the subject. Every semantic and liguistic trick is employed to bamboozle the casual reader dipping into the subject for the first time. The thing that is consistently absent however is real, hard evidence.

Yuri

 

[Mojo]

Additionally there have been very many trials done comparing homeopathic remedies to conventional medicines and placebos and when they are looked at as a whole it is found that the better the methodology of the trial the less likely it is to show any effect from using homeopathic remedies.

A nice study here, in which a simple improvement in methodology caused the apparent effects of a homoeopathic preparation (but not those of a real drug) to vanish.

 

[fls]

don't see anything wrong with her statement. She's being a true scientist and keeping an open mind.

Only if by "open mind" you mean "ignorant", I'm afraid. It should mean something like a critical appraisal of all the information and a recognition of the reliability of various conclusions, but in this case, she simply seems unaware of the principles of homeopathy and of the research that has been performed on homeopathy.

There may be something useful to extract from the practice of homeopathy once we filter out through the garbage.

We have filtered through the garbage already.

For example the ridiculous dilutions are very unlikely to have an effect, but the concept of like treating like may have some validity to it.

Unfortunately, that part has been more thoroughly demonstrated to be invalid than the dilution part. Or maybe they're equivalently invalid.

She seemed to display the exact open mindedness that should be required of critical thinkers.

I really, really, really wish people would stop pointing to ignorance as an example of open-mindedness. It has reached the point where the term can almost be taken as an insult.

criticizing her on appeal to personal experience and to popularity is a tad reflexive, imo.

Well, they are unreliable ways to form conclusions, and you did mention critical thinking which is about forming reliable conclusions.

Linda

 

[fls]

my lay understanding of immunizations is that small amounts of a pathogen (sometimes inactive pathogens) can inspire the body to produce countermeasures to that pathogen without suffering the ill effects of the pathogen.

This could be construed, crudely, as an example of like "treating" like.

That has nothing to do with the 'like treating like' of homeopathy, though.

Linda

 

[Mojo]

my lay understanding of immunizations is that small amounts of a pathogen (sometimes inactive pathogens) can inspire the body to produce countermeasures to that pathogen without suffering the ill effects of the pathogen.

This could be construed, crudely, as an example of like "treating" like.

To elaborate on what's already been posted:

Vaccination prevents infections by sensitizing the immune system to antigens specific to the infectious agent to be protected against, as you say by introduction of antigens from the pathogen. It does not attempt to induce symptoms.

Homoeopathy attempts to treat illness by administration of remedies that will duplicate and reinforce the totality of symptoms exhibited by the patient, on the basis that intensifying the symptoms will help the body to heal. The remedy administered will almost certainly not be anything to do with the actual cause of the illness.

These are totally different ideas.

 

[Rolfe]

I really, really try to keep an open mind on whether or not insulin might be a useful treatment for diabetes.

After all, that's how a true scientist should think.

Don't be so bloody ridiculous. Do you keep an open mind on whether smoking causes cancer? On whether eating too much makes you put on weight? Or whether it's going to get light in the morning?

"Keeping an open mind" on something about which there is an enormous amount of evidence isn't clever, or scientific, it's just lazy.

Rolfe.

 

[blutoski]

I've not done a rigorous investigation into homeopathy, so perhaps it is very unlikely that there's any value, beyond placebo, to be found in its methods.

I'm curious, would you all have the same reaction if someone made the same comments about naturopathy?

(i'm not equating the two, just trying to get a sense of your attitudes here)

Well... homeopathy is a type of naturopathy, although I suspect not a lot of NDs use homeopathy (my ND friend does, though).

Naturopathy too vague a 'field' to generalize about, since it pretty much includes any modality that has ever been thought of. Naturopathy includes everything from medically validated dietary modification at the plausible end, to human energy field manipulation at the not-so-plausible end.

What I'm saying is that I don't think I would accept a dismissal of naturopathy's entire collection of modalities, because some of it is actually scientific medicine. I would accept a dismissal of the profession, because they allow and encourage their members to charge for things proven not to work, which I believe is blatant fraud.


Homeopathy, on the other hand, is completely ridiculous in concept, and furthermore, the bulk of the scientific evidence strongly shows it does not work. Advocates either are unaware of the scientific body of literature, or are aware of it but dismiss it because they don't agree with it. Both of these responses are unscientific.