Here are two nice videos that constitute empirical tests of the efficacy of woo.
The Ouija board study, presented by National Geographic, is a nice example of how a simple experiment, using only blindfolds, can completely trash a widespread (but not very harmful) form of woo.
And from deadstate.org, we have a video in which “Scibabe” tests homeopathic claims:
The Science Babe, or “SciBabe” for short, wanted to expose this practice for the bullsh*t that it is — by gulping down 50 homeopathic sleeping pills. She’s also started a petition on Change.org calling for companies like CVS Health and Walgreens to take homeopathic medicine off their shelves.
“People will still buy products from your stores,” the petition states, “but instead they’ll buy products that actually work with proven claims.”
I’ll have more to say about the phenomenon of “science babes” tomorrow.
To be honest…before I did that, I’d first have one of the pills analyzed by a competent lab to make sure it really was just sugar. I wouldn’t trust these quacks to honestly label their pills. What better way to get an edge over the homeopathetic competition than by making sleeping pills that really do contain standard dosages of some soporific? Word on the street would quickly spread that this brand really does work, sales would boom….
b&
Well, Randi has been performing this stunt for years, and he too is still fine.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Z7KeNCi7g]
Yes, I have seen this. He is amazing. His efforts to get the drug store chains to stop selling these products has evidently failed, though. Appeals to integrity will not work, and I know of no legal means to stop them either.
Yes; if the pills actually are correctly labeled, it’s a perfectly harmless stunt. I just wouldn’t trust an obviously shameless con artist to accurately label the pills.
b&
Nor would I. This kind of stuff isn’t regulated and you have no idea what’s in there. Same reason many sports/athletic supplements are best avoided. It’s sad, but there are people running the companies that produce this stuff who are far more concerned about how their ingredients can make or save money than they are about the safety of their consumers.
Agree. The makers of homeopathic remedies have a long history of fudging the label and adding ingredients. It certainly hasn’t helped that many consumers think homeopathy has something to do with herbs.
Plus, as you’ve pointed out, we already know the manufacturers are clueless, dishonest, or a combination of both.
I’ve said before that I think the way to take down homeopathic medicines is over quality control. How do they test to make sure the “drug” is correctly labeled, and 2) the correct dosage? If the manugacturer cannot do that, then they should not be able to sell them.
Odd the keyboard doesn’t know what letters I want if my eyes are closed any more than the ouija board. Manugacturer, indeed.
Oooh…I like!
And I can even suggest a very simple protocol — one that the manufacturers themselves can carry out, but only under adequate supervision.
The manufacturers are supplied with (doubly blinded) samples of the nostrums, and all they have to do is consistently identify which is which. They don’t even have to specify concentration or purity or anything — just that this sample is the sleeping potion; that one is the love potion; and the other is the control.
Obviously, there would have to be a prohibition against using food dye or other markers — at least, not unless the markers themselves are also homeopathically prepared.
b&
My understanding is that this has been done, with results just as expected. Proponents dismiss these tests by insisting that the delicate method can only manifest through interaction with human sufferers. That’s one of the things which points to a supernatural component here.
It goes without saying that if the manufacturers did pass the test, they’d drop all the bullshit excuses.
Even that’s not that difficult to test, with a simple double blind patient trial. Which, of course, I’m sure has also been done with the expected results…though I’ve no clue what the cons’s excuse is for the failure. Probably something obvious in retrospect. “The patient wasn’t of a suitably receptive state of mind,” or some such.
b&
I think the push-back on this is, if you can’t prove it meets your claims in a lab — i.e., that it does contain arsenic or whatever their cure is — then you cannot sell it.
There has to be the political will to fight it, and so far there is not. Meanwhile this stuff is manufactured under guidelines by the HPUS mentioned in the video, which is the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the U.S. At their web site you can see that they are also regulated by the FDA, and are given approval. If I recall (I had looked into this once), the FDA is mainly concerned if this material is harmful and of course it is not harmful in the direct sense.
WebMD is also strangely squishy about it. They merely mention that there sometimes (!) might be very little active drug, but that “There is some evidence to show that homeopathic medicines may have helpful effects.” (wtf)?? There are piles of controlled studies and all I have heard is that effects are consistent with placebo.
I always thought the FDA’s criteria were – safe and effective. Not just safe. What ever happened to effective?
By all means, obviously, but I hope it will not be dismissive. It’s worth keeping in mind that Yvette d’Entremont explicitly chose the moniker in parodic response to the atrocious ‘Food Babe’. See interview at http://www.popsci.com/qa-scibabe.
[http://www.scibabe.com/about-me/]
And unlike the ‘Food Babe’, who has no education on nutrition, Yvette actually has a few degrees relevant to what she’s talking about (B.S. chemistry, M.Sc. forensic science, according to the above).
As far as I understand “babes” is an allusion to “babies”!? It always makes me squirm when I hear it…
In common U.S. slang, a babe is an attractive female, usually adult, not a baby.
Hey, babe. Take a walk on the wild side.
And not exclusively feminine, either, as should be picked up from the context of the song.
b&
Went deep into the demimonde there, did’ncha?
Do. Do-do. Do-do. Do, do-do do. Do-do. Do-do. Do do-do do!
b&
You “colored girls” are the best at that.
Doesn’t WordPress have audio yet? I want audio.
Do. Do-do. Do-do. Do…
I so want a Greek chorus to follow me around everywhere, like in Little Shop of Horrors!
Doesn’t even have to be a bunch of beautiful women, though I sure wouldn’t object to that, too….
b&
And Candy came from way out on the island,
in the back rooms, she was every body’s darling…
One of my favorite songs of all time!
And not exclusively human either — Babe the Blue Ox, Babe the Pig, and … well, your guy Babe Ruth (who could make a beast of himself sometimes, too).
Science Babe and Chow Babe and Food Hunk… they’ve all done tremendously helpful work for Kevin Folta, the UF-Gainesville Prof who was subject to a FOIA request.
The shills of Big Organic are out of control…
Some years ago, when I was at a homeschooling park date, a woman’s toddler got stung by a wasp or something. She immediately gave the child a few small white pills. I was alarmed and asked what they were and if she was sure they were safe. She said the child could eat the entire bottleful and it wouldn’t hurt her, as she popped a few of the pills into her own mouth. If the child can eat the whole thing without harm, then there will be no help, either.
Homeopathic remedies are sold as either a vial of ‘liquid’, which is water, or as a sugar pill.
If sold as liquid I wonder if they add some food coloring and artificial flavor to cover up the fact that its’ water!!).
For the pill form they will add a drop of the water to a sugar pill and then the water is evaporated. Somehow the memory of the water remains after it evaporates (??)
As for the bee sting, one of the beliefs of homeopathy is that ‘like treats like’. So if something is painful they might use a diluted drug that causes pain. Actually, one of the drugs used for pain is called Apis. This is their name for bee venom (it is the genus name of the honey bee), so the girl may have been given a homeopathic version of bee venom. The drugs they use are, I think, often descended from naturopathic medicines rather than conventional Western meds. And then they give them these unfamiliar names to make them sound cool.
You obviously don’t understand the magical properties of these pills. Even their proponents concede that they operate outside of the known laws of nature.
I love the ouija board experiment. I put it on my FB to piss off my cousin who claimed to “speak to my dead grandparents” all the time and was sorry for me because I thought all that was BS.
Challenge him to a blind fold test, if you ever get the chance.
Spirits don’t speak with blindfolded people. Everyone knows that.
Yes and they especially won’t cooperate if they know you’re trying to trick them in any way.
Oh, those non-existent ghosts! They sure know how to act like they don’t exist right when it’s time to cause distress and doubt in their loved ones!
It strikes me that people who are blind might be good test subjects for a ouija board. Get one board in Braille and another with print.
There are actually people who believe in ouija boards??
“homeopatrhy” in the title of the piece, should it be homoeopathy?
It’s funny. I’ve done that SciBabe skit for years, using the exact same product. (I teach pharmacy students, who need to understand that it’s crap.) Only I wash ’em down in one shot using bottled water. Or, more accurately, homeopathic vodka.
And, yes, I trusted from the beginning that it was harmless, that the manufacturer was following “proper” practice.
I don’t suppose if your pharmaceutical classes included any sort of assay techniques? I know even high school level chemistry classes include assignments along the line of, “Here’s a mystery substance; identify it.” Is that part of the curriculum, or is that another branch of medicine…?
…anyway, if so, I’d obviously first do an “identify the mystery drug” exercise, and then follow it up with downing the handful.
But maybe I’m just overly paranoid….
b&
I’m not a chemist, but I’d expect lactose.
Sucrose, more likely. A positive test for such sugars is the simple Benedict’s test. But I do not know of a test for, say, barbituates.
Is there much price discrepancy between the homeopathic vodka used in well drinks and your top-shelf homeopathic vodkas, say, Stoli or Grey Goose or Kettle One?
Only the best. It’s incredible how many ill-informed hipsters extol DEPC-treated. Embarrassing, really.
Not very harmful? I have a vague recollection of that poor little girl Regan, in the William Peter Blatty novel “The Exorcist,” being set upon the path of demonic perdition over a Ouija board…
It made Regan so sick she took to projectile vomiting and twisting her head around. Nice party tricks but not particularly healthy!
The ouija board takedown is brilliant in its simplicity. I am sure defenders will say something like the spirits only see through our eyes.
It’s virtually guaranteed that not only do many people believe in “contact with the spirit world,” but when it comes to the methods almost anything will be granted a benign pass for Other People. It’s good to believe. Besides, Other People are often Little People. Leave them alone, they need the comfort.
The usual response to this sort of thing is to claim that *I* don’t buy into it — but hey, what’s the harm?
I do have friends who believe in this stuff, however, and they like to float the idea that the ghosts or spirits/Spirit refuses to be tested. They are very, very hurt now and need to sulk. This suspiciously convenient excuse sound reasonable to them partly I think because they all pull the same tactic. “I don’t have anything to prove; I know who I am and won’t accept challenges from people trying to make me doubt myself ” and so forth.
I have very kindly agreed that this makes perfect sense to me, because if I believed what they believe for the reasons they believe it, I too would be making a fetish out of avoiding all criticism and a great big song and dance about trying not to be “confrontational” as none of these beliefs could stand up under examination. Much easier to pretend it’s all about *you* — and ignore the claim. Yes indeed.
True Believers would have smelled a rat the minute the blindfold came out and refused because the skeptic is an atheist, or being mean, or some other well worn means of shifting the focus.
Perhaps not without coincidence, the true cons would have, too. At least, the even borderline competent ones. And would have an instant excuse handy — such as the one somewhere else in the thread of the spirits needing to borrow our eyes to see.
That, of course, is why nobody’s taken Randi up on his challenge. He knows enough of the tricks of the trade to be able to spot where the misdirection is coming from, and how to clear the stage of even damned hard to spot props.
b&
Actually lots and lots of people have taken Randi up on his challenge. The hard part is getting these true believers to come up with something testable. They hem and haw and wave their hands around vaguely on the assumption that they’re saying something with enough substance and content to be tested, but they really don’t understand the concept of controlled conditions and an endpoint which can be falsified.
Hmmm…I had remembered that lots of people had applied but none had made it past the mutual arbitration phase of agreeing upon a protocol. I now see that there have been a number of official tests, including several at TAM.
None have succeeded, of course….
It does occur to me, though. Do enough such tests and, eventually, the statistics will catch up with you. It actually is possible to flip a fair coin as heads ten times a row, even if the odds against are a thousand to one. But, if you have a thousand people give it a go, you wouldn’t be surprised if somebody did it.
The way the tests are structured…well, taking Randi’s test is a much better investment than buying a lottery ticket.
b&
“Perhaps not without coincidence, the true cons would have, too. ”
And they’d have an easy out, too. They’d just say the spirits need to see through their channeler’s eyes to perform, because the spirits are in the spirit world…or something.
This is why Randi makes psychic prize claimants state what they can do up front, and agree, in advanced after preliminary discussions, that they will be able to perform under the test conditions. Pulling a fast one like this, while fun, would not qualify.
Of course they would have smelled a rat. It is a well-known scientific fact that the presence of a skeptic disturbs their morphic resonance fields. Duh!
It’s our negative energy.
And there are people who want to be “Little People”. A case in point is my cousin who believes in all sorts of woo. When I point out the science behind it, she accuses me of trying to take away her “comfort” and of course does so in an ad hom way: “I’m glad I’m not as smart as you because then I wouldn’t have my comforts.”
Sheesh.
Though I think what often happens is that people try to think of intelligence and wisdom as mutually exclusive. It’s rare for anyone to come right out and admit that their beliefs are wrong and they’re playacting.
I thinkin this case she was also playing the victim. “I’m a poor under educated person who needs my comforts and you educated science-y people are taking it away.” That way I look like I’m evil and she looks innocent and put on.
That’s not a very nice thing of her to say to you — she’s basically telling you that you’re without comfort, which I’m pretty sure isn’t the case.
b&
She was using the typically Christian ad homs – feel sorry for you, you have no comfort, you’re not creative or imaginative.
Are the ‘little people’ comforted by the logic which says that if ‘spirits’ are able to offer predictions and advice then the ‘spirits’ must be able to observe the real world? They see you in the bathroom, they see your antics in bed – and you can’t stop this ‘spiritual’ spying.
A similar drawback to the omniscient god(s). They see into your ‘heart’, they watch you in the bathroom.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of being a Little Person is an inability/exemption from thinking too hard about things. That way lies skepticism.
SciBabe has also taken on homeopathic remedies for pets, which may contain suspiciously high quantities of “inactive” ingredients.
My dog isn’t smart enough to believe in fake medicine. Hell, she thinks real medicine is a treat (takes it right out of my hand).
“Nurse, 50 units of No-Fucking-Medicine, stat!”
Obligatory link to “Homeopathic A&E”:
youtu.be/HMGIbOGu8q0
(Hopefully taking off the https will keep the link from embedding.)
That’s a riot! Thanks for the link.
“Two more homeopathic lagers please.”
“Whoa, that’s strong stuff.”
Logically 50 units of NFM is less diluted than 1 unit (in the body). The real daring Science Babe would have taken one 50th of a tablet and dropped into an immediate coma (not).
Quick! Someone tell the leader of the British Labour Party and his number two, the Shadow Chancellor: they both believe in homeopathy. The lunatics have taken over the sanatorium.
Which is worse? Ronnie Reagan’s astrology or Jeremy Corbyn’s medical woo?
Chuffin’ Ada, this is my Labour Party. x
“Chuffin’ Ada”? Bloody hell, mates, we’ve been invaded by the North Country. 🙂
The Tories must think all their Christmases have come at once.
Yeah, TJR, Tories till 2025 if JC doesn’t get crucified by the Parliamentary Labour Party in the meantime. Since 1974 Labour has had 1 leader who has won elections. Who would think it could be that hard? OT, so I’ll stop…x
As a kid I had warts on my hand. After taking homeopathic Thuja for a few months, they disappeared. I don’t believe in homeopathy anymore, but I still don’t have a satisfactory explanation for this experience. Some reviews online show the same experience with Thuja 30c. That is a level of dilution which, according to Wikipedia, “would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient”. I realize that anecdotal evidence and online reviews do not constitute a rigorous study, but at the same time I understand very well how convincing these experiences can be. To a believer, seeing someone ingest a whole bottle will not invalidate their own positive experience.
Have you considered spontaneous remission?
It’s as likely you acquired the warts through excessive masturbation as cured them through homeopathy. 🙂
I did consider that, but the timing was just so striking. I wonder if warts are receptive to placebos.
Yes, I think there’s more than a little Special Snowflake Syndrome behind the heavy weight placed on the significance of personal experience. It’s as if people can grudgingly admit and respect scientific evidence in general, but somehow one’s own self is exempt from the ordinary laws of the universe.
Even skeptics feel the temptation. The difference is that we do consider it a temptation. To hear alties talk, it’s science and rationality which are the temptations, and being biased something which takes a lot of hard discipline to stand behind.
I suppose it might be confession time….
I’ve been known to talk to cars. Tell them my grand plans for renovation or restoration or the like, apologize for a poorly executed shift, thank them for a job well done and a fun ride when I get home.
I’m fully aware that the cars themselves have no consciousness…but, frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck.
Am I a bad atheist for anthropomorphizing a mobile mass of metal? Do I care?
b&
Trouble comes when your car starts talking back — just ask Dick Van Dyke’s brother what it did for his career.
Or David Hasselhof
Wait — David Hasselhof has a brother, too?
b&
Dick Van Dyke had a brother? Who knew?
b&
He gave up show business to become an assistant football coach — well, he became a coach anyway.
I talk to my car quite often. I apologise to it if I hit a bump, and if I miss a gearchange. And I always remember to pat it when I park it for the night.
After all, I have a closer relationship with my car than any other entity other than my wife and daughter…
cr
“To hear alties talk, it’s science and rationality which are the temptations, and being biased something which takes a lot of hard discipline to stand behind.”
That’s certainly how I felt with faith when I was still religious. Science just made so much sense, but the entire church culture surrounding me touted faith as a virtue, so despite the cognitive dissonance, or even because of it, I thought I was being so good by remaining faithful. I wouldn’t be surprised if some in the alt med community saw their faith to alt med in the same way.
Of course it didn’t work. If you take more of the pills, the less effective it will be.
Stephen, you beat me to it! The commenters here don’t understand the science of homeopathy.
The sleeping pills are carefully calibrated to the individual and taking fifty just stops them working. The specially trained supplier at Walgreens will have chosen them for her. Science babe wouldn’t dare take just one and drive or operate machinery.
Exactly right. It’s the whole difference between that mysterious, wonderful homeopathic medicine and that lousy, crummy, Western, allopathic, ptooey medicine that sometimes seems to work, but only treats symptoms and not their underlying causes — because it relies on opposites to treat opposites.
It’s all quite simple to understand, really.
Are homeopathic and/or placebo “sugar pills” really sugar? I’ve never tried one, but sugar makes me chuck so they probably wouldn’t be harmless in my case.
YouTuber CoolHardLogic has produced, and animated a series of excellent videos on all sorts of woo, which he calls “Testing X” (where X is replaced with what he’s testing, Geocentrism, Doomsday, the Überwoo of “Spirit Science” or Homeopathy).
He takes these inane propositions and uses their claims to show what we know, how we know it, and sometimes even how it was discovered. People here might appreciate that his presentation is bit more in-depth and advanced than usual edutainment.
Here is the homeopathy series, in four parts:
CoolHardLogic — Testing Homeopathy (YouTube Playlist)
My grandfather was a doctor, trained at Hahnemann University in Philadelphia when it was the last remaining homeopathic medical school in the US. He was a medical officer in the army in WWI, where he learned and used regular medicine such as sulfa drugs. Nevertheless, when I was a kid, I had my share of sugar pills — he explicitly called them that — for colds and minor ills.
When penicillin was developed, he used that for infections. When I was older and read about Hahnemann and homeopathy I asked him why he used sulfa drugs and penicillin despite his original training. His reply: “because they work.”
best anti-homeopathy cartoon ever:
http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m78/aarrgghhv2/B0FMGFpCMAAeEwP_zpsmojsc11m.jpg
i like to call it “WHY PAY MORE?”
why indeed …
Obviously the “jk” is the Ouija board video is the spirit saying he is just kidding around by not sending his date of death. He’s pulling a fast one on the skeptics. If he wasn’t, how else would he know what “jk” means in Web jargon? Logic people!
No; I think “JK” is a reference to Ms. Rowling, and an indication that the whole thing really is magic!
b&
And of course the blanks would indicate a nod to He Who Must Not Be Named.
No…that would be “CJ” rather than “KJ.”
b&