Tomfoolery Blog

Archive for June, 2010

I sent this email to Fair Deal Homeopathy today. Think I’ll get anywhere with it?

Dear Sir / Madam,

I am interested in building my own repository of homeopathic medication for my own personal use. I believe 100 of your homeopathic products will cover every known ailment.

As your homeopathic products are £4.99 each, 100 products would cost £500 (rounded up). However, I wish to pay for these products homeopathically. Therefore, I wish to pay with a 2C version of £500, which is 5 pence. According to the law of infinitesimals, 5 pence is far stronger than the original £500 pounds. In addition to this, I will succuss my cheque book against a leather Bible.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

Thanks to the British Medical Association’s slaughtering of homeopathy, that very subject was discussed on BBC Radio Leeds today. Presenter Liz Green did well to introduce homeopathy as being unscientific and costing the NHS approximately £10 million per year, but she was quickly inundated by the “it worked for my dog” brigade.

Thankfully, Merseyside Skeptic’s Society co-founder Michael Marshall was bought in towards the end of the discussion to give the skeptic’s point of view. In the limited time available, I thought Marsh did very well, especially to introduce the “secondary placebo” effect to explain the effect of homeopathy on dogs.

From a personal perspective, I thought it was good to hear my own email broadcast. (I’m such a media whore wannabe). I gave three reasons why people may feel better after taking homeopathy:

1. They were going to get better anyway.
2. They were experiencing the placebo effect (or a secondary placebo effect in the case of dogs).
3. If they were taking homeopathy as a ‘complementary’ medicine, the conventional medicine may have been working.

There is also one aspect of the homeopathy argument that really bugs me: homeopathy supporters claim that the estimated £10 million per year the NHS spends on homeopathy “isn’t that much”. Well, if that’s the case, could I have £10 million from the NHS budget every year? If it’s not that much…

The whole BBC Radio Leeds Liz Green program is available here (homeopathy discussed towards the end of the show, Michael Marshall’s appearance and my email from about 1 hour 30 minutes onwards).

In the last parliament, you may remember that the House of Commons Science and Technology committee produced an evidence check on homeopathy, concluding that it should no longer be funded on the NHS. Following this, quack-supporting MP David Tredinnick wrote Early Day Motion (EMD) 908, criticising the report and supporting homeopathy. This EDM became a nice little reference, because MPs could demonstrate their scientific inabilities by signing it.

Now that the dust has settled on this new parliament, David Tredinnick is back to his old tricks in a big way. Not content with EDM 908, he has tabled an additional four (yes, four) EDMs. Each one offers a smidgen of support to homeopathy:

EDM 284 expresses concern about the British Medical Association’s recent motions concerning homeopathy. EDM 285 welcomes the publication of a paper in the Journal of Oncology, which appears to show that some cancer cells can be killed by homeopathic preparations (which of course, isn’t the case). EDM 286 similarly welcomes a Brazilian study on homeopathic antidepressants, while EDM 287 welcomes yet another study, this time from South Africa on homeopathic insomnia treatments.

Of course, each EDM from David Tredinnick contains factual inaccuracies and references to poorly controlled studies. To point these errors out, step forward Dr Julian Huppert MP of the Liberal Democrats  (who else?). Julian has tabled an amendment for each of Tredinnick’s EDMs, correcting each of David Tredinnick’s mistakes.

So now we have another tool for quickly judging the scientific competency of our MPs. With EDM 908 it was simple: if they signed it, they were an idiot. Now, if your MP signs EDMs 284-287 in their original forms then they are an idiot, but if they sign the amended forms then they are showing some respect for science and evidence based policy.

I would advise you to write to your MP to ask them to sign EDM 284A1-287A1. They can be found and contacted via the site www.theyworkforyou.com, and the Merseyside Skeptic Society have written a template to make things a little easier. Hopefully together we can put a stop to David Tredinnick’s quackery nonsense.

Viewers of Channel 4′s excellent series “Derren Brown Investigates” will be familiar with Joe Power. He is a psychic medium who has the uncanny knack of knowing things about his sister’s next door neighbor and television actresses who he parks next to. However, Richard Wiseman took us through the techniques of cold reading that Joe was “allegedly” using, and when Joe was tested to read the mind of a believer who wanted to contact her deceased friend, he failed miserably.

Recently I found that Michael Marshall (aka ‘Marsh’) of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, host of the Righteous Indignation and Skeptics With A K podcasts, has a history with Joe Power. When Marsh challenged Joe Power to the James Randi million dollar challenge, Power went on the offensive, comparing all skeptics to paedophiles.

Well, it seems that Joe Power is now making frivolous complaints to the police about Marsh, based on so-called “threats” on the MSS Facebook group.  In response, Marsh has written a very nice history of Joe Power, including his shameful involvements in the cases of Madeline McCann and Shannon Mathews. Enjoy.

Sometimes Facebook can provide some beautifully unintentional statements. Here is disgraced Andrew Wakefield showing what he really thinks about “callous disregard”:

Acupuncture: the ancient Chinese art of sticking pins in the body in an attempt to cure all ailments. Unsurprisingly, acupuncture is a target for skeptics, as there is little evidence for it’s efficacy, and any benefits appear to be due to the placebo effect.

So, imagine my surprise when I heard of a peer-reviewed paper supporting acupuncture appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The paper, entitled “Adenosine A1 receptors mediate local anti-nociceptive effects of acupuncture”, is the work of Nanna Goldman, Maiken Nedergaard et al, and it comes out of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester. At first glance, it would appear to be a cohesive piece of literature that supports the practice of acupuncture. But does it stand up to closer inspection?

Well, no. As others have already pointed out, the methodology does not support the conclusion. In this study, the authors follow the levels of adenosine nucleotides (ATP, ADP and AMP) after acupuncture is applied to mice. They find the levels peak after 30 minutes, returning to pre-acupuncture levels after about 90 minutes (see Figure 1 of the paper). What can be drawn from this? We can certainly say that this is evidence that acupuncture leads to an increase in adenosine nucleotides, but is this a mechanism for acupuncture, or is this just what happens when a mouse has a needle stuck in it’s leg?

This is my main problem with this study: a lack of controls. The authors appear to induce pain with acupuncture, rather than use acupuncture as a method for treating pain. This first experiment should have been repeated with a non-acupuncture method of causing pain, or they should have put the needle somewhere other than the ‘Zusanli point’, supposedly the most effective acupuncture point on the body.

So, in my mind the authors have not established a mechanism for acupunture, they have merely shown what happens in terms of adenosine levels when acupuncture is applied to a mouse. Their summary of the evidence for the efficacy for acupuncture is also rather worrying. They don’t cite any actual studies, but use the positions of various organisations to justify acupuncture. According to the authors, the tax status of the treatment (recognised by the IRS) is “most telling”.

Let’s look at the bigger picture. What do we know about the authors? To be honest, I expected hundreds of adverts for acupuncture clinics to pop up from a quick Google search of the authors. That didn’t happen, but I did notice something fairly unusual: the two most important contributors, Maiken Nedergaard and Nanna Goldman (the first and last contributers are always the most important) are mother and daughter. Although it’s not uncommon for parents and their children to be involved in academia together, my suspicions were raised. I then learned that Maiken Nedergaard and her husband Steven Goldman’s eldest child was 19 in 2009. This means that Nanna Goldman is at most 20 years old, which is very young to be publishing in a Nature journal. Added to this, Steven Goldman is currently Chairman of the Department of Neurology at the University of Rochester, and he works together with his wife as co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine, also at the University of Rochester.

So, this paper is the work of a 20-year old researcher, with her mother as a supervisor, and her father as joint head of department. Now, I really don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I would love to know who the anonymous reviewers for this paper were. Time will tell on this, but I really don’t think this supports acupuncture at all.