Here is my letter. Vet Times copy-edited it to make a few of the sentences ungrammatical and distorted their meaning, though without shortening them at all. Go figure! Presumably they felt the need to earn their pay this month by showing they do alter the letters. They also removed my quotation marks around "innocently mistaken", which is a shame because it was a direct quote of the RCVS and their removal toned down the sarcasm.
I am grateful to Martin Whitehead for providing yet another patient explanation to the hard-of-understanding as to why subjective personal experience in the field of chronic medical conditions is as near to worthless as makes no odds in determining causal relationships between treatment and response and I shall leave aside my astonishment that any member of our profession could regard this as a matter for debate and pause only to say that when Michelle L’Oste-Brown agreed to attend a course on pharmacology and therapeutics on condition that we sceptics attend a course in homeopathy, as offered by various centres of excellence in creative fiction, it was to rather miss the point. It is not their lecture notes in pharmacology of which the homeopaths seem to have lost track, but their notes on the natural history of disease. A failure to appreciate the wide variations in the normal course of disease is the path to homeopathy.
However, for all Dr. Whitehead’s sterling efforts, I fear Francis Hunter may still feel that his specific question has not been addressed when he asked whether the opponents of homeopathy consider that the many people who use homeopathy “must all be wrong and that patients are all being hoodwinked and treated by charlatans”. Here below, Mr Hunter, is where your answer must lie.
Either homeopathy works or it does not (at least not beyond a placebo). There is no valid or useful evidence to say that it does and sufficient to say that it does not, such that we can conclude for all practical purposes that homeopathy is only a placebo. If homeopathy does not work, are its practitioners “charlatans” as Mr Hunter suggests the sceptic might think? There are only two possibilities. Either homeopaths are charlatans or, as the RCVS encourages me to hold, they are “innocently mistaken in their beliefs”.
Unfortunately, I dare not attempt to choose between my binary options and answer whether homeopaths are “innocently mistaken” persons or charlatans. I cannot know and experience suggests that members of the Supplementary Complementary and Alternative Medicine community are enthusiastically litigious in the face of anything that might denigrate their fine professional names (Google: “Legal Chill” + “alternative medicine”, e.g. tinyurl.com/ddy7fh, dcscience.net/?p=245, tinyurl.com/btokam) so I will refrain from speculating, though I am reminded of Richard Dawkins’ comment, "Offence is what people take when they can't take argument".
Instead, I will turn to a current area of concern. Two colleagues were recently confronted with the circumstance of a litter of puppies dying of parvovirus because their “innocently mistaken” owner believed that a homeopathic nosode was equivalent to a proper vaccination. But this is not the first time Vet Times readers have heard of such a thing. Homeopathic nosodes are widely available from various sources, one of which even claimed that the product was an “Alternative vaccination for Dogs, helps prevent Hepatitis, Leptospitosis [sic], Hard pad and distemper, Parvo virus and Kennel cough. Used for many years by thousands of dog owners”. Following a complaint to the VMD the wording was altered to describe it as a “Popular remedy for Dogs, used for many years by thousands of dog owners. Contains homeopathic potencies of Hepatitis. Leptospitosis [sic], Hard pad and distemper, Parvo virus and Kennel cough.” Presumably the previous wording was “innocently mistaken”.
What concerns me is that “innocently mistaken” owners being sold nosodes by an “innocently mistaken” company cause, through the neglect of proper vaccination, the unpleasant and unnecessary deaths of animals. I would like to know what the veterinary members of the Faculty of Homeopathy propose to do to end this affront to animal welfare. I think it is time for them to make clear their views on this subject.
While working on that, perhaps they might also try a thought experiment. If they would protect their own animals/children/selves from rabies or tetanus with a homeopathic nosode, I would be prepared to accept that they are “innocently mistaken”, though I could think of many other words to describe them and would raise again the matter of whether members of the RCVS who are so thoroughly “mistaken” should be allowed to practice veterinary medicine in the UK. If they would not use nosodes on their own family yet countenance and do nothing to resist their use on others then I really don’t know what word I would choose.
