I have to do something now that seems a little bit strange for a magician, but I'm going
to take some medication.
This is a full bottle of Calms Forte.
I will take enough of these... indeed, the whole container.
(Jesus Christ!).
That's nasty!
This is calms forte, 32 tablets of sleeping pills!
I forgot to tell you that.
(What!).
I just ingested six and a half days worth of sleeping pills.
(Eh… what!).
6 and a half days!
That certainly is a fatal dosage…
Says right on the back here, “In case of overdose contact your poison control centre
immediately”.
(Zzz Zzz).
Keep your seats – it’s going to okay, I don’t really need it, because I’ve been
doing this stunt for audiences all over the world for the last 8 or 10 years!
Taking fatal doses of homeopathic medicine sleeping pills.
Why don’t they affect me?
This, is Homeopathy – Debunked!
So let’s start by explaining exactly what homeopathy is.
Put simply, it’s an alternative medicine (do you know what they call alternative medicine
that works?
Medicine), that asserts that “illnesses can be treated with minute doses of substances
that in large doses would produce symptoms of the illness.
Or as the creator of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann put it, ‘like cures like'.
For example, Aconitum is an extremely poisonous plant that causes (among other symptoms) nausea,
headaches and diarrhoea, and so homeopathic advocates assert that because influenza causes
the same symptoms, a homeopathic remedy for influenza can be made from Aconitum.
Now on the surface this might seem similar to how vaccines work, but it’s not, and
it’s dangerous to think that it is.
To quote Richard Dawkins, “unlike a vaccine that introduces a diminished form of a virus
into the body in order to provoke its immune system, ‘like cures like’ makes the unfounded
assumption that what causes similar symptoms can cure those symptoms.”
Or in other words, vaccines prevent an illness by exposing the body to a small amount of
the illness, which causes the body to create antibodies and become resistant; while homeopathy
attempts to cure an illness by finding a substance that causes similar symptoms, and then giving
the body this substance in the smallest possible dose… yeah, you heard that right – homeopathy
asserts that the smaller the dose, the more ‘potent’ it is.
So with that said, you might be wondering, “How exactly is homeopathic ‘medicine’
made?”
Well, to create a homeopathic remedy for influenza, for example, a homeopathic ‘technician’
grinds Aconitum into a very coarse grain, mixes it with either water, alcohol or a combination
of the two, and then thoroughly shakes the solution.
From here, the ‘technician’ then mixes one part of this solution with ten parts water,
alcohol or a combination of the two, and then puts it through a process called ‘succession’,
which is a deliberately verbose way of saying ‘it’s shaken’.
And finally, this process (which is called ‘potentization’) is repeated until the
solution is as diluted as desired, which is normally 30 times, which, to put this into
perspective, means that you’d need to drink 8,000 gallons of the final solution to ingest
one molecule of the original solution – (which is more liquid than the average person drinks
in twenty years!).
So yeah… these may as well be caffeine!
Now I’d like to think that just knowing the principles behind homeopathy, how it’s
made, the fact that it deliberately uses obfuscating language, and the fact that it packages itself
as if it’s real medicine, would be enough to cause people to see it for the utter quackery
that it is, but, if you’re like me, you’ll want hard-science before you dismiss it entirely,
and so, brace yourself… peer-reviewed papers are coming!
And this, is just a handful of them.
In 2005, the medical journal, The Lancet, conducted a meta-analysis of over 110 studies
of homeopathy, and 110 studies of matched conventional-medical studies, and found that
“There was weak evidence for a specific effect of homoeopathic remedies", and that,
"This finding is compatible with the notion that the clinical effects of homoeopathy are
placebo effects.”
Or in other words, they found homeopathic treatment to be as effective as sugar pills!
Moving on, in 2006, the European Journal of Cancer (who would endorse any successful treatment
of cancer with open-arms) conducted a meta-analysis of 6 studies, and found "insufficient evidence
to support clinical efficacy of homeopathic therapy."
And in that same year, the sympathetic Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine,
conducted a double-blind randomized controlled trial of their own, and even they found homeopathy
to be no more effective than placebo…
And as if this wasn’t already enough, in 2015, Australia’s National Health and Medical
Research Council (which is one of the biggest medical authorities in the world) conducted
an extremely rigorous meta-analysis of an unbelievable 1,800 studies, and found that
homeopathy causes no greater health improvements than placebo!
Now fortunately, due to studies such as these, the NHMRC is not the only major medical authority
to publically denounce homeopathy… in fact, most do.
To name but two more examples, the British NHS has stated that, ‘There is no good-quality
evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition’, and
the American FTC has stated that “The FTC will hold efficacy and safety claims for over
the counter homeopathic drugs to the same standard as other products making similar
claims”, which has resulted in all homeopathic ‘medicine’ within America having to explicitly
state that it’s “Not accepted by most modern medical experts” and that “there
is no scientific evidence that the product works”… now I’ve got to say America,
that’s cool… good job!
As a Brit, I’m jealous… but then again, when it comes to religion…
Anyhow, now that we’ve established that homeopathy is pseudoscience, let’s ask perhaps
the most interesting question – why do so many people claim to benefit from it?
“You put that down solely to the homeopathic remedy?
I do, definitely.
Which cured his cancer?
Yes!”
“It worked for me… and I would say to other people, if you have problems, don’t
knock it.
Try it.”
Well, to explain this, here’s the fantastic YouTuber, Genetically Modified Skeptic: There
are several factors to the illusion of homeopathy's legitimacy to the unknowledgeable potential
consumer.
One is the intuitive and overly simplistic reasoning of common explanatory phrases such
as "like cures like."
Such lines of reasoning pander to the lowest common denominator, making the supposed mechanisms
behind homeopathy seem so obvious that they must be a reality.
Another factor is the scientific sounding descriptors homeopaths use for their various
practices.
This one is rather straight forward.
Those marketing homeopathy use complex and technical sounding terms in order to give
the impression that homeopathy is sophisticated enough of a practice to warrant such terms.
Still, another is the fact that homeopathic substances are very often sold in pharmacies,
right next to evidence-based over the counter medications.
All of these things together afford homeopathy an air of legitimacy.
But still, I'm not convinced that there is a factor that legitimizes this nonsense in
the minds of most users more than personal experience.
Just like with religious people, you'd be hard pressed to find a believer in homeopathy
that holds their belief on separate grounds from their own personal experience.
Those who proclaim the benefits of homeopathy do so because they have, more often than not,
perceived benefits of its use in their own lives.
"I guess like a lot of people I fell in love with homeopathy because it rescued me in my finest hour."
"I had a very interesting personal story that really cemented for me the value of homeopathy."
"What I experienced with homeopathy was absolutely incredible!"
But if homeopathy has been demonstrated not to work, how could so many have perceived
its benefits?
Likely the most common reason is the unchecked experience of the placebo effect.
It's well known in the real medical community that the expectation of a symptom or a symptom's
relief can actually create that symptom or its relief to a limited extent.
This phenomenon is so common that in clinical trials of any given medication, researchers
must compare the effects of the medication to the effects of placebo to ensure that the
medication's effects are more pronounced than those of simple expectation.
By the means I've mentioned here, homeopathic substances and their purveyors create a powerful
expectation in the mind of the user.
This way, the user may perceive benefits of homeopathy even though it totes not a single
effect in its own right.
Another phenomenon that may explain the perception of benefit is the misinterpretation of a correlation
between homeopathic treatment and the relief of symptoms or disease.
Someone guilty of such misinterpretation might think something like the following: "I had
a headache.
I used a homeopathic treatment.
My headache went away.
Therefore, my headache must've subsided because of the homeopathic treatment."
But, as the scientifically literate know, correlation does not imply causation.
And again, the medical community is so aware of the issue of conflating the two, that certain
controls are implemented in all clinical trials in order to ensure that the effects observed
are definitely a result of the treatment being tested.
Personal experiences do not have such controls, and prove unreliable in accurately reflecting
the effects of any single factor involved.
Most simply put, a person might have the flu, use a homeopathic treatment, get better, and
then cite the miraculous effects of homeopathy, when really, what cured them was their unaided
immune system.
These two possibilities are a huge part of the reason why personal anecdotes are not
and should not be excepted as evidence for any medical treatment.
However, upon closer examination of the culture surrounding much of alternative medicine,
it is apparent that people are encouraged, just as in religious circles, to cite their
personal experiences as evidence of their treatments of choice.
Not to engage in too much tinfoil hattery, but it does prove a shrewd marketing tactic
to encourage your customers to embrace and tell others of their personal experiences
with your product when your business is not allowed to make medicinal claims.
And, mostly unrelated to my bit of speculation there, it does prove next to impossible to
invalidate an emotion-packed personal experience to the one who holds it.
Because of this, personal experience, although demonstrably unreliable, is fiercely defended
as a means to prove the efficacy of homeopathy.
Cheers Drew, I truly appreciate your input, and I’m sure that you’ve intrigued my
audience enough to check out your excellent content (to which there are links below)!
Please guys, do check him out – it would be really cool if we could bump him to 3.5k
subs!
Anyhow, to recap, ‘homeopathy is quacktastic pseudoscientific nonsense’, and like all
alternative medicine, it’s dangerous, because it encourages decent but ignorant people to
take non-evidence based products over evidence-based medicine, and the result is often (and needlessly)
catastrophic!
As always, thank you kindly for the view, thank you Drew for taking the time to join
me in this video, and of course, an extra special thank to my kind patrons – you are,
as always, awesome-incarnate!
Oh, and on that note, the winner of this month’s Patron of the Month is Russell TJ.
You’ve won the book ‘Logically Fallacious’ by Bo Bennett – Congrats!
I’ll PM you through the back-end of Patreon with details.
And finally, I’m going to leave you with a quote from Dara O'Briain, “The great thing
about homeopathy is that you can’t overdose on it… but you can fucking drown!
I’m sorry, it seems harsh, and I used to be much more generous about it, but right
now I would take homeopaths and I’d put them in a big sack with psychics, astrologers
and priests, and I’d hit them all with sticks!
And I really wouldn’t worry about who got the worse of the belt of the stick!”