Category: quackery

Despite its uselessness, homeopathy persists

June 18, 2026 • 9:15 am

Homeopathy is one of the biggest scams I know of.  The products have no curative properties and yet people spend billions on them. And, as Dara O’Briiain says in the bit below, “It’s JUST WATER.” (h/t Andrew Petto:

First, the NIH describes its uselessness and the principles said to underlie it. Some products could even be dangerous!

What do we know about the effectiveness of homeopathy?

  • There’s little evidence to support homeopathy as an effective treatment for any specific health condition.

What do we know about the safety of homeopathic products?

  • Some products labeled as homeopathic may contain substantial amounts of active ingredients and could cause side effects and drug interactions.

What Is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy, also known as homeopathic medicine, is a medical system that was developed in Germany more than 200 years ago. It’s based on two unconventional theories:

  • “Like cures like”—the notion that a disease can be cured by a substance that produces similar symptoms in healthy people.
  • “Law of minimum dose”—the notion that the lower the dose of the medication, the greater its effectiveness. Many homeopathic products are so diluted that no molecules of the original substance remain.

Homeopathic products come from plants (such as red onion, arnica [mountain herb], poison ivy, belladonna [deadly nightshade], and stinging nettle), minerals (such as white arsenic), or animals (such as crushed whole bees). Homeopathic products are often made as sugar pellets to be placed under the tongue; they may also be in other forms, such as ointments, gels, drops, creams, and tablets. Treatments are “individualized” or tailored to each person—it’s common for different people with the same condition to receive different treatments. Homeopathy uses a different diagnostic system for assigning treatments to individuals and recognizes clinical patterns of signs and symptoms that are different from those of conventional medicine.

There is no empirical basis for either of these two “theories”, and many homeopathic products are basically water, since the “like” substance has been eliminated through multiple dilutions (see below), and in principle can have no curative properties.

According to Grok (data from S&S insider), billions are spent on this scam, and the market is growing as people buy into “natural” remedies:

 

The U.S. Homeopathy Market was valued at approximately USD 4.12 Billion in 2025 and is expected to reach approximately USD 13.38 Billion by 2035, growing at a CAGR of 12.50%.

The U.S. is the second largest market for homeopathic drugs globally in terms of revenues. OTC homeopathic remedies for symptoms such as cough, cold, pain, sleep aid, and pediatric use can be found at major retail outlets like CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart as well as natural food stores. Hyland’s Homeopathic and Boiron are the leading brands. The FDA regulation of homeopathic products under the OTC drug paradigm has been increasingly progressive. The FDA’s risk-based regulatory strategy enhanced product regulation without taking out commercialized products from store shelves.

The world market for homeopathic remedies is $12-15 billion per year, but Americans spend more on this scam than any other nationality (India is second with about $1 billion/year).  I’ve seen homeopathic remedies in most of the U.S. chains mentioned, and if you want to see the big array of homeopathic remedies in Whole Foods, go here.  (You can go to any of the chains and simply insert “homeopathic” into their search function.)

It would be nice if the quacks health experts in the Trump administration would denounce these products as useless, but you know that ain’t gonna happen.  In fact, people are still publishing papers touting homeopathic remedies, as recounted in the article below from the (usually) rational site Science Based Medicine (SBM). The author’s description shows he has cred:

The author is described in the article: “Mark Crislip, MD has been a practicing Infectious Disease specialist in Portland, Oregon, from 1990 to 2023. He has been voted a US News and World Report best US doctor, best ID doctor in Portland Magazine multiple times, has multiple teaching awards and, most importantly,  the ‘Attending Most Likely To Tell It Like It Is’ by the medical residents at his hospital.”

His Wikipedia page also says that Crislip is a co-founder of SBM.  Click headline to read:

It’s a bit of a strange article, disursive, and with the author bent on getting attachment to homeopathic remedies classified as a “delusional disorder.” It really is, but I doubt it would make the DSM given that many of us are subject to delusions like this. The problem is that this delusion involves not only a huge waste of money, but also potential damage to health. People should not be diagnosing themselves and buying nostrums when there are doctors around. And so Crislip reminds us again to stop using these fricking remedieds.

A few of the papers that Crislip mentions.

. . . . homeopathy continues to be inflicted on patients by homeopaths and naturopaths in lieu of useful therapy. Much to my ongoing wonder, research on the fiction continues with around 200 papers indexed on the PubMeds in the last year. Like my recent journey down the rat hole that is chiropractic, let’s see what those delusional homeopaths have been up to in the last year or so. Of course I am not going to discuss all 200 plus papers, just those of interest to me. You know, the crazy stuff.

And right of the chute, first reference, first paragraph, is gibberish in Homeopathy at a Turning Point [JAC: this is in the journal Homeopathy as a “letter to the editor” so it’s not a paper]:

In the Hippocratic conception, medicine is a synthesis of technique, philosophy and humanism, but in essence it is nothing more than the expression of the living being to counter predestination. Its foundation is the dose–response relationship that a living organism expresses when perturbed by an external agent. In practice, however, this interpretation is defined by the knowledge, thought, economic means, politics and religious sentiment of the community to which the organism belongs.

The author is out of Italy and perhaps this is the best translation ChatGPT could do, although the paper does not get much more coherent. For example, what to make of

These findings lead me to define a homeopathic remedy as a “clathrate of clathrates of gas molecules”, present as nanobubbles.

Well, I doubt that “peer review” in this journal means anything, though it looks as if the letter was reviewd, but the letter is long and typical of the word salad involved in defenses of homeopathy.

The Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine has a big summary of all the theoretical underpinnings of homeopathy:

Not everyone agrees that homeopathy is a “clathrate of clathrates of gas molecules”, present as nanobubbles and there have been numerous attempts to justify the delusion by a variety of mechanisms by which water could have a therapeutic effect. Some are summarized in Mapping the Theories and Models on the Mode of Action of Homeopathy: A Scoping Review and found 72 theoretical approaches to justify homeopathy but reduced them to 14 largely nonoverlapping frameworks. Those frameworks are water structures, general physics, nanostructures, mathematical models, chemistry, quantum physics, biochemistry, weak quantum theory, hormesis, quantum analogie, biophotons, complex systems, electrodynamics, and humanities.

Another tendentious paper from the journal Homeopathy. I quote the SBM article:

Why does homeopathy fail to show efficacy in clinical trials? Not because homeopathy doesn’t work, but that

In homeopathy, however, where treatment is individualised, past and present context-sensitive, and closely related to the therapeutic encounter, RCTs cannot readily capture the core principles of practice.

or so says in Improving the Relevance of Research in Homeopathy. It suggests other, less rigorous, more pragmatic, evaluations of the delusion, since

While it’s important for us to understand how homeopathy works, it’s equally important to demonstrate that homeopathy does work

This paper is a “special editorial”, and tries to dismiss randomized control trials as ways to test homeopathy. From the article (bolding is mine):

Reading these pages and having attended the recent congress of the Homeopathy Research Institute, I’ve been heartened to see an increasing quantity and quality of scientific research in homeopathy being conducted from around the world. While it’s important for us to understand how homeopathy works, it’s equally important to demonstrate that homeopathy does work and I would like to see more practice-related research submitted to Homeopathy.

As readers are well aware, clinical trials are regarded as the gold standard in medical evidence and randomised placebo-controlled trials (RCTs), in particular, are central to the concept of evidence-based medicine. In homeopathy, however, where treatment is individualised, past and present context-sensitive, and closely related to the therapeutic encounter, RCTs cannot readily capture the core principles of practice.

Indeed, the RCT model is built on assumptions that directly conflict with homeopathic principles, focusing on uniform interventions and outcomes, imposing strict eligibility criteria that exclude many potential beneficiaries, and minimising interaction between the patient and the practitioner. Such demands for homogeneity strip away the features that define homeopathy and create an artificial clinical environment for the sake of trial design,[1] a mismatch that helps explain why results from homeopathy RCTs are often equivocal or contradictory. Two systematic reviews led by this journal’s esteemed Editor found only limited convincing efficacy after methodological flaws were accounted for.[2] [3] Does this mean homeopathy is ineffective…or rather that the RCT method is an inadequate basis for forming such a conclusion?

Note the list of reasons why the “gold standard” of testing medicines cannot be used here (e.g., it “minimizes interaction between the patient and the practitioner”, which of course you want to do so there is no placebo effect).  Indeed, the author (Lee Kayne) says that homeopathy has its own methods of demonstrating efficacy (they suggest case studies and “long-term cohort studies”.  That, of course, is a red flag indicating quackery. From the paper:

Opponents argue the former and that, by virtue of our claim that homeopathy cannot be forced into a conventional trial framework that seeks to measure efficacy within tightly controlled parameters, we are admitting it does not work. Yet at the same time, they refuse to accept that alternative methods of investigation and reporting might better reflect the effectiveness of homeopathic practice and outcomes in the real world. So it’s not evidence unless it’s ‘their’ evidence? Except when their evidence does not produce the outcomes they desire – then they may fail to publish the results  or simply note that “many RCTs can render…results of little relevance to clinical practice”.

To be sure, the journal does publish failures of the method. From the SBM article:

. . . if you have a rigorous study, like Homeopathy for Chronic Non-specific Low Back Pain: Randomised, Double-Blind, Crossover, Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trial Investigating the Efficacy of rigorhe Biotherapic Lumbar Vertebra (BIOVERT Trial), you find

No specific effect of the Lumbar Vertebra LM2 biotherapic was demonstrated. Improvements are likely due to non-specific effects such as the therapeutic environment, patient expectations and placebo response.

Although I could not find what the standardized homeopathic biotherapic (Lumbar Vertebra, LM2 potency) was. I was curious what was used applying the so-called Law of Similars. How does one use, say, chopping wood (gives me low back pain) as a homeopathic remedy. Not out of the question for a delusion that can prescribe moonlight. And homeopaths want to be taken seriously.

Here’s one in which Crislip cites a paper in the Journal of Ayurveda and integrative Medicine. It’s a case study, of course:

I do not think homeopaths are intentionally funny, but you have to wonder with articles like

Cystic swelling and inflammation of MCL of knee joint managed with homeopathy; a case study with literature review and diagnostic pitfalls

Following a thorough case evaluation, the patient was prescribed Ruta graveolens 200CH, followed by Thuja occidentalis 200CH. The anti-inflammatory, anti-tumor, and anti-cancer properties of both these medicines have been thoroughly demonstrated via many scientific experiments.

One in vitro paper each, both evaluating actual chemicals, would be two, so technically many. And where is the like cures like in the treatment?

The paper above touts homeopathy as a cure for cancer, and I believe “200CH” means the “curative” substance is diluted 1:100, and this is done 200 times in succession. Nothing remains of the original “curative” substance. This is considered “high potency”!  Be sure to look at the dilution factor if you are foolish enough to buy homeopathic remedies. Also be sure to see what else is in there.

Cancer and tuberculosis? No problem for homeopathy.  The last quote from the SBM paper:

Some papers seem to be written to scare those attached to reality:

Integrating Traditional Medicine with Conventional Therapies to Combat Tuberculosis: A Comprehensive Review. Yeah. Let’s treat TB with homeopathy. That’s gonna work.

and

Exploring Holistic Healing of Cancer: German New Medicine (GNM) and Homeopathic Treatment Beyond Traditional Therapies And let’s treat cancer with homeopathy, since cancer is due to emotional trauma and amenable to homeopathic treatment. OH GOD, OH MAN, OH GOD, OH MAN.

And that’s what I could suffer through, er, I mean, found for homeopathy in 2025.

I get angry when I see homeopathic “remedies” sold in presumably reputable stores, and think about the waste of money involved when poor suckers (and I include the ignorant) buy the stuff.  And ignorance of science is no excuse, because it takes only a few minutes to find reputable sources online that tell you why homeopathy is worthless (e.g., here and here).

Biden administration lets Medicaid pay for Native American “traditional medicines”

November 5, 2024 • 10:00 am

Just yesterday I wrote about the drive in New Zealand to integrate indigenous medicine (Rongoā Māori, or RM) with modern (often called “Western”) medicine.  The problem is that RM not only uses  spiritual treatments (prayer, singing, dunking the sufferer in water) but also herbal remedies, and neither of these have been tested for efficacy using randomized, controlled, double-blind testing. This is the gold standard used in modern medicine to test the efficacy of drugs and (sometimes) surgery. Without such tests, we simply can’t say that a medical intervention actually works.

But the drive to sacralize indigenous “ways of knowing” is strong, and has spread from New Zealand across the Pacific, where it is growing in both Canada and the United States.  Although it’s one thing—and still a bad thing—to prevent scientists from examining bones and artifacts found on land claimed to be “owned” by indigenous people, it’s a different thing entirely to start treating people with indigenous medicine. Although everyone can decide whether or not they want to be treated with scientifically tried-and-true procedures versus quackery like homeopathy, or even seek religious “cures,” children can’t make such decisions. They are subject to the whims and faiths of their parents, and in Faith Versus Fact I document some horrible deaths of children  propagandized into religious healing by their parents.  (Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, are forbidden to receive blood transfusions because of a wonky interpretation of the Bible.) At least when you take your kids for their vaccinations, you can be almost certain that they’ll acquire immunity to infection.

As I said, this kind of harmful sacralization of medical “ways of knowing” is on our doorstep, and below is an op-ed from the WSJ (by the editorial board) reporting that the Biden Administration has approved funding for “traditional health care practices of Indigenous people.”  And it doesn’t seem to matter exactly what those healthcare practices are! It can be herbs, prayer, touch, chanting, and so on. The government will pay for it!

Click below to read the short piece, which I’ve reproduced almost in its entirety, or find it archived here.

The “housing” bit is tangential, reporting that “the Administration is letting states use federal Medicaid dollars to pay for low-income housing, mini-refrigerators and food. A Biden executive order last month gave states a green light to use Medicaid to pay for ‘gun violence prevention’ counseling.”  I don’t have such strong feelings about that, though it does seem a tad outisde the ambit of what Medicaid is for.

But main part of the article, given below, is about government funding for what seems like quackery.  And if you want to argue that this op-ed is “fake news” because it comes from the op-ed section of the paper (yes, that section leans right), you can find the same information in an NPR article from October 19 of this year.

A long excerpt (bolding is mine):

The Biden Administration is trying to woo Native Americans whose votes could be pivotal in Western states. One pre-election gambit is to let Medicaid pay for Native American “traditional medicine.”

The Health and Human Services Department last month approved requests by Arizona, California, New Mexico and Oregon to use federal Medicaid funds to cover “traditional health care practices” of indigenous people. “We are extending access to culturally appropriate, quality health care in Tribal communities,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.

HHS says the Medicaid approvals are “the latest action demonstrating the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to support and invest in Indigenous communities across the country.” In short, this looks like another income redistribution scheme.

HHS doesn’t plan to restrict the types of traditional medicine that Medicaid will cover, nor the types of “healers.” Each tribal “facility can tailor provider qualifications for their traditional health care practitioners,” HHS says.

An American Medical Association brief on the state Medicaid proposals says “traditional healers are often identified in their Tribal community by their innate gift of healing” and “typically work informally.” Their “healing services” could include sweat lodges, prayers, purification rituals, songs, dance, herbal remedies and shamanism.

One healer who advocated for Medicaid coverage told the Salt Lake Tribune in February that he sometimes prescribes a “special ceremony against the negative energy of diabetes.” Herbs, he said, are also a favorite remedy for chronic illnesses including cancer plus a “special expression of prayer to the deities that made those herbs.”

Herbal remedies may have their uses, but Medicaid is supposed to cover evidence-based treatments. HHS says “demonstration projects” can determine if traditional medicine improves health outcomes. But lack of access to modern medical care—not lack of traditional remedies—is why Native Americans suffer more disease and worse health outcomes.

The last paragraph is correct in both assertions: Medicaid isn’t supposed to pay for quackery (seriously: “sweat lodges, songs, dance and shamanism”?) and Native Americans do lack sufficient access to modern health care.  The first bit is documented here:

Alternative treatments that haven’t been proven in scientific studies usually aren’t covered by Medicaid. Some procedures, such as chiropractic treatments and acupuncture, are sometimes covered. These treatments are more likely to be covered if they are recommended or prescribed by a doctor. Other alternative treatments that are occasionally covered include massage, pain treatments, and nutrition therapy. Some treatments, such as herbal and homeopathic therapies, are usually not approved for Medicaid payment.

Well, I’m not so sure that many chiropractic therapies, or any form of acupuncture, has been “proven in scientific studies”. But your tax dollars are paying for it! Now get ready for your tax dollars to pay for sweat lodges, songs, dances, and ceremonies. And you don’t even have to live in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Oregon to be dunned for quackery. The fund for Medicaid comes from all of us.

 

h/t: Frau Katze

The unscientific heterodoxy of Bret Weinstein

September 29, 2024 • 11:40 am

Bret Weinstein became famous because of the 2017 Evergreen  State brouhaha, and I was firmly on his side on that one. Eventually he became so demonized that he had to leave the College, and since then has found a niche as a heterodox podcaster. But it’s been heterodoxy of the wrong stripe, including pushing Ivermectin as an anti-covid preventive and cure, warning against covid-shots, and now lapsing into bizarre conspiracy theories.

The criticism of Weinstein’s new heterodoxy is detailed in, of all places, a McGill University post on the University’s “Office for Science and Society”, calling him a “would-be Galileo” (i.e., someone who thinks he’s discerned important truths about the world but hasn’t really done so).  I’ve followed Weinstein’s career a bit, a career that I see as inimical to rational thinking despite his popularity (he has 1.1 million followers on “X” and appeared on the Joe Rogan Show).

Jonathan Jarry agrees with me, and you can read his article on Weinstein site by clicking the headline below. The title is, even by my lights, a bit mean:

It turns out that, to my dismay, Weinstein is still pushing Ivermectin for covid and questioning the efficacy of other covid treatments, including vaccines. I’ll quote the article in indented sections:

Galileo has many heirs. I don’t mean biological descendants; rather, some intellectuals see Galileo’s face in the mirror staring back at them. Freed from the shackles of academia (or simply kicked out of their university), they find a lucrative niche for themselves, telling their enraptured fans that, just like Galileo, they have an Earth-shattering theory… and a mysterious “they”don’t want you to know about it.

Bret Weinstein is a name you might be familiar with. An evolutionary biologist, now self-titled “professor in exile,” he hosts The DarkHorse podcast with his wife, fellow evolutionary biologist Heather Heying. The podcast has nearly half a million subscribers on YouTube alone and has featured high-profile guests like Russell Brand, Sam Harris, and Vivek Ramaswamy. Weinstein has himself guested on The Joe Rogan Experience, seemingly the largest podcast in the world. And while his calm tone of voice may denote sound judgment, Weinstein has become an über-conspiracy theorist, to the point where he believes the Powers That Be are crafting fake conspiracies specifically to make him look stupid.

Being Galileo is hard, but someone has to do it.

The ivermectin stuff, which abides:

But what made Weinstein particularly relevant in the eyes of the average science news consumer was his appearance on an “emergency podcast” of The Joe Rogan Experience, which in terms of sheer viewership eclipses the so-called mainstream media. Sitting next to Dr. Pierre Kory, Weinstein explained to Rogan that ivermectin worked against COVID-19 and that the vaccines were dangerous. (This was the exact opposite of reality.) Importantly, Weinstein painted himself as part of a group of “heretics,” independent of the structures controlling others, hence free to analyze the data accurately and report on it without being muzzled. He became one of the leading figures of the pro-ivermectin contingent during the pandemic.

To this day, Weinstein still believes in the effectiveness of this anti-parasitic drug in preventing and treating COVID-19, despite the clear evidence that it does not do so. On the September 17th, 2024 episode of their DarkHorse podcast, Weinstein and Heying double down on their pseudoscientific perspective on the pandemic: ventilators were “very negative” and “not necessary” for COVID; ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are the “best drugs” against the virus; and it appears we are facing a “pandemic of the vaccinated.”

Jarry argues that Weinstein’s popularity rests largely not only on his conspiracy theories (see below), but on his calm demeanor and also on the fact that he often takes the “JAQ” (“just asking questions”) approach as a way of really pushing his own views.

More covid stuff along with HIV and polio:

Over years of pumping out incredibly long, weekly podcast episodes, Weinstein and Heying have “hypothesized” a number of truly staggering things, both in the sciences and outside of them.

Weinstein wonders if the alleged “noisiness” of COVID diagnostic tests might be a feature not a bug, as it allows someone to claim anything at any moment. He tells Joe Rogan that the evidence for the HIV virus not causing AIDS is “surprisingly compelling.” Similarly, the poliovirus might not cause polio but might simply be a “fellow traveller” in people who have the disease, which is actually caused by pesticides. Also, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might be Fidel Castro’s son (“the evidence seems kinda good,” says Heying before dismissing its relevance) and he is also gay (“this is now officially known,” says her husband).

This denialism of facts and reality can easily lead you into conspiracy territory: how else to explain that you are right but everyone around you is wrong?

Indeed, we must now confront the Goliath in the room.

“Goliath” is the name Weinstein gives to what he sees is a massive and nefarious worldwide conspiracy aimed at him in particular:

Some conspiracy theorists fret over an alleged “deep state.” For others, it’s the Bildenberg Group, or the World Economic Forum at Davos, or a Satanic cabal, or history’s classic villain: the Jews. For Weinstein, it’s Goliath.

Goliath is the name he gives to the shadowy powers conspiring against the world and against Weinstein personally. The Israel-Palestine conflict unfurling now? That’s Goliath trying to bury the voices of the COVID dissidents like Weinstein under 24/7 news coverage of a world event. He has also hinted at Goliath trying to get him to die by suicide. One day, a browser window allegedly appeared on Weinstein’s phone with a DuckDuckGo search engine page with the search bar containing the word “suicide.” Weinstein believes this might have been a threat, because he and his wife have been “a sticky wicket” for Goliath.

Real conspiracy theories aren’t enough for Weinstein and Heying, however. They must be on their toes for fake conspiracy theories manufactured by Goliath to make them appear foolish. “Traps abound” as Weinstein likes to remind his listeners, and there are psy-ops (or psychological operations designed to influence the population’s attitudes) everywhere. That story about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio? “Very believable,” Weinstein comments, but if it turns out there is no merit to this story, it was an irresistible trap, possibly set by Goliath, to discredit the people who will believe in disinformation. Indeed, Goliath is apparently trying to drive a wedge between Weinstein and his friends, a secret strategy he calls the coalition slicer-dicer. “It could be next-level chess by Goliath,” he calmly states.

Still with me?

Throughout all of this, Weinstein believes his thinking is scientific in nature, but it is not. . .

The author notes several other off-the-rails assertions of Weinstein (e.g., lab mice can’t be used for drug testing because their telomeres are too long), and then goes into a critique of Weinstein’s equally famous brother, Eric, saying that Eric’s “scientific” theories are also criticized (e.g, covid was due to Earth’s shifting magnetic fields).  The article finishes up by listing some of the questionable sponsors of Bret Weinstein’s podcast (e.g., AMRA, which sells cow colostrum as a palliative for leaky gut syndrome).

There’s one final note:

No longer satisfied with pontificating about how everything can be seen through an evolutionary lens, Bret Weinstein is now the co-founder of the Star-Wars-inflected Rescue the Republic. This weekend, they are meeting in Washington, D.C.—peacefully, Weinstein reminds us on his podcast—to give voice to their various antiestablishment grievances. They will be joined by similarly minded contrarians, such as Jordan Peterson, Pierre Kory, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Well, I don’t know much about Eric Weinstein, though I know some readers here, do. I have followed Bret to some extent, though, and all i can say is this: don’t trust anything that comes out of his mouth, be it about Covid, Ivermectin, or Goliath. Caveat emptor. 

h/t: Ginger K.

Bret Weinstein denies that AIDS is caused by HIV

March 11, 2024 • 9:30 am

A high-up worker in the pharma industry sent me a video from last month  showing biologist Bret Weinstein apparently denying to Joe Rogan that AIDS is cause by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). (That claim starts about three minutes in, but watch the whole video below.)

Apparently Weinstein subscribes to Rogan’s “competing hypothesis” that AIDS is simply group of symptoms caused not by a virus, but by taking “party drugs” (3:53). Weinstein finds that explanation “surprisingly compelling.”  He also suggests darkly that Nobel laureate Kary Mullis—also an HIV denialist—died “strangely” (there were conspiracy theories about Mullis’s death).  Then the video stops, but you can hear the whole 3½-hour episode here.

The first several minutes of the video below, which you’ll have to scroll back to see, show Weinstein expressing doubt that a virus also causes Covid-19.

You may remember that Weinstein and his partner, biologist Heather Heying, touted the antiparasitic drug ivermectin as a treatment and preventive for the “syndrome” known as Covid-19, even though there was no evidence that the drug was effective (see also here).  In other words, Weinstein seems fond of heterodox and discredited causes of and treatments for diseases: he’s a medical conspiracy theorist.

The pharma guy who wrote me said this:

I don’t mean to obsess about BW, but after the Evergreen debacle and getting a modicum of credibility, he went crazy about COVID and the efficacy of ivermectin so much so that Sam Harris ripped him for conspiratorial thinking and now they’re enemies.  I was livid because people like him were giving horrible medical advice to the public as a biologist-who-claims-to-be-an-authority and may have really harmed people who were listening to his claptrap.  3 weeks ago, he was on Joe Rogan’s show (which I don’t watch but saw a link) wherein he’s now giving airtime to the ‘AIDS is not caused by HIV’ conspiracy theory.

As a member of Pharma industry who watched colleagues like myself craft thousands of molecules to become specific drugs tailored to fit and inhibit the active sites of HIV protease, reverse transcriptase, integrase, and to antagonize HIV binding to the chemokine receptor CCR5 that the virus uses to enter T-cells, I know for a fact that these drugs prevent AIDS by stopping HIV viral replication and entry.  All were approved in Phase 3 with data and are used in various combinations to make drugs like the Quad pill that have suppressed HIV to undetectable levels, allowing HIV-infected individuals to lead pretty normal lives.  Ergo, AIDS IS caused by HIV!  QED.

There were then some words not suitable for a family-friendly site, but among them were the claims that Weinstein is “a conspicuous troll who is hurting people.”

VICE News has a summary of Weinstein’s appearance on Rogan and on their shared and bogus theory of AIDS. An excerpt:

Weinstein’s “evidence,” he made clear, is partially drawn from reading about this theory as outlined by Robert F. Kennedy in his book The Real Anthony Fauci, published in 2021. (One review of the book noted that Kennedy managed to misrepresent numerous scientific studies he cites, which does not make a strong case for its scientific rigor; nor does the fact that it was written by Robert F. Kennedy.)

“I came to understand later, after I looked at what Luke Montagnier had said and I read Bobby Kennedy’s book on Fauci, was that actually the argument against HIV being causal was a lot higher quality than I had understood, right?” Weinstein told Rogan. “That it being a real virus, a fellow traveler of a disease that was chemically triggered, that is at least a highly plausible hypothesis. And with Anthony Fauci playing his role, that was inconvenient for what he was trying to accomplish.”

. . .The conversation generated substantial outcry from scientists and public health researchers on Twitter; David Gorski, an oncologist who frequently writes about the anti-vaccine world and pseudoscience, identified the conversation as an example of “crank magnetism,” writing, “Once you go down the rabbit hole of pseudoscience, quackery, and conspiracy theories in one area (e.g., #COVID19), it is nearly inevitable that you will embrace fractal wrongness in the form of multiple kinds of pseudoscience (e.g., antivax, AIDS denial, etc.).”

And this is, of course, indisputably part of a larger pattern. Rogan and Weinstein regularly repeat discredited scientific ideas, mainly around their promotion of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID and Rogan’s constant promotion of anti-vaccine ideas. The AIDS conversation makes clear that COVID denialists are branching out, using their forms of pseudo-inquiry to draw other bad ideas back into the public discussion.

And from Wikipedia:

Appearing on a Joe Rogan podcast in February 2024, Weinstein erroneously stated that some people with AIDS were not infected with HIV and that he found the idea that AIDS was caused by a gay lifestyle, rather than the HIV virus, “surprisingly compelling”. The American Foundation for AIDS Research reacted to the podcast, saying “It is disappointing to see platforms being used to spout old, baseless theories about HIV. … The fact is that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), untreated, causes AIDS. … Mr. Rogan and Mr. Weinstein do their listeners a disservice in disseminating false information …”.

As for Weinstein’s implication that Karry Mullis’s death may have involved his “maverick” view that HIV didn’t cause AIDs (shades of Karen Silkwood!), Michael Shermer responded on February 16 with a tweet:

I’m especially distressed by this kind of quackery, which in the end can cost lives, by a man who started out in my own field, evolutionary biology.  Now, having left Evergreen State far behind him, Weinstein appears to be trying to make a name for himself by being medically heterodox. It’s fine to question untested theories, but the evidence is now very, very strong that HIV causes AIDs and that Covid-19 is caused by a coronavirus.

People often say that “pseudoscience” isn’t that harmful. After all, what’s the danger in reading the astrology column or tarot cards? But that’s just the thin edge of the wedge that opens up medical pseudoscience like that given above. And that can kill people.

King Charles, cancer, and homeopathy

February 6, 2024 • 11:00 am

This morning I received an email from a colleague that said this about the New York Times‘s article on King Charles’s cancer diagnosis:

In the NY Times report there is one sentence mentioning that he is using homeopathy as part of his suite of treatments.

UPDATE: My colleague, who is reliable, swears he saw this in the NYT yesterday, and is baffled that the sentence is gone today.  Readers with a bent for sleuthing might try finding the original article at an archived site.

Well, I can’t find that sentence in the NYT article this morning, nor in the archived version posted right after midnight. Yet we know the King is an advocate of homeopathy. The Guardian of December 17 last year noted that the King had appointed an advocated of woo, including homeopathy, as head of the “royal medical household”:

Yet last week we heard that the head of the royal medical household is an advocate of homeopathy. Dr Michael Dixon has championed such things as “thought field therapy”, “Christian healing” and an Indian herbal cure “ultra-diluted” with alcohol, which claims to kill breast cancer cells. Methods like these might be “unfashionable”, he once wrote in an article submitted to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, but they should not be ignored.

The link above goes to an earlier Guardian article, noting that the head of the royal medical household is not the same thing as thje king’s doctor:

Dr Michael Dixon, who has championed faith healing and herbalism in his work as a GP, has quietly held the senior position for the last year, the Sunday Times reported.

While Dixon, 71, is head of the royal medical household, for the first time the role is not combined with being the monarch’s physician. Duties include having overall responsibility for the health of the king and the wider royal family – and even representing them in talks with government.

There are a lot of people online who are somewhat gleeful about this diagnosis, saying that they’re hoping that King Charles puts the rubber to the road and uses alternative therapies, like homeopathy, but the Daily Fail and other sites note that even Dixon doesn’t think that homeopathy can cure cancer:

[Dixon]  thrown his support behind offering treatments such as aromatherapy and reflexology on the NHS.

In one paper he authored, he referenced an experiment suggesting Indian herbal remedies which had been ‘ultra-diluted’ with alcohol might be able to cure cancer, although Buckingham Palace has staunchly denied Dr Dixon himself believes this can work.

A statement from the palace at the time of his appointment read: ‘Dr Dixon does not believe homeopathy can cure cancer.

‘His position is that complementary therapies can sit alongside conventional treatments, provided they are safe, appropriate and evidence based.’

Dr Dixon, who has reportedly prescribed plants to patients such as devil’s claw and horny goat weed, has also written papers suggesting Christian healers may be able to help people who are chronically ill.

He has a kindred spirit and staunch supporter in the shape of King Charles, who has himself been outspoken on how he believes alternative medicine can help people with illnesses, and was appointed patron of the Faculty of Homeopathy in 2017.

As for me, I have no beef with King Charles, and my first thought when I heard he had cancer was that it was a shame, as he’d waited so long to become King and if he died from this, it would have been a long wait for a short reign. I hope he gets well. What kind of person would want the King to die because he advocates medical woo?

But he should never have promoted that woo, and I’m sure he won’t be using it in his new course of treatment.

A Burmese dinner in Davis

January 19, 2024 • 8:45 am

Last night I took my host out for Burmese food, since there’s a fairly new Burmese restaurant in Davis called “My Burma“. And of course since neither of us had had Burmese food (there isn’t a single Burmese restaurant in Chicago, though there’s one in the suburbs), we had to go.

It turns out that Burmese food resembles a hybrid between Indian and southeast Asian food, with some unique items like tea leaf salad. We had a largish meal, and I’ll show it below. (The menu is here.). It’s a modest restaurant but the food is excellent. Here’s the interior:

The appetizer: Platha and coconut chicken curry dip, described as “handmade multilayered bread served with coconut chicken curry.” With a couple of good beers, this was an excellent start.  You can either dip the bread into the chicken curry or pour the curry over the bread and eat it with a fork. I oped to use my hands.

The restaurant’s most famous dish is the tea leaf salad, described as “fermented tea leaf dressing, lettuce or cabbage, peanut, fried garlic, tomato, sunflower seeds, fried yellow chickpeas, jalapenos, sesame seed, and lemon.  They bring it to the table looking like this, with the green tea leaves on top (picture from the website)

. . . and then mix it thoroughly until it looks like what’s below (I would have preferred to sample it unmixed).  Our version seemed to lack the tomatoes and jalapenos.

It was very good, with a melange of flavors, but the flavor of the tea leaves wasn’t evident, which was disappointing.

Then two main dishes, the first being chili lamb, described as “diced lamb tossed with chili sauce, garlic, onion, basil, jalapenos, and chili flakes.” The server asked us how hot we wanted it on a scale of 1 (mild) to 5 (fiery), and I said “3.2”.  It turned out to be a tasty dish but not very hot, with the scale probably ratcheted down for the American palate:

Second main: Burmese eggplant curry, described as “Burmese curry made with garlic, onion, tomato, and tender eggplant.” It was very good, and yes, the eggplant, while keeping its form, was tender and delicious, in a lovely sauce.

With it I ordered Basmati rice. Rice should really come with the meal rather than requiring a separate order, and I eat a LOT of rice with a dinner like this. Sadly, we got only a small dish that was grossly insufficient. It was good rice, but I needed a HUGE bowl of white rice to sop up all the sauce.

All in all, it’s a good restaurant, especially considering that Davis, for a college town, has a dearth of decent places to eat. If you go, see if you can get a huge portion of white rice, and eat Chinese style, putting the ingredients atop a bowl of the rice. (They don’t use chopsticks, and I guess they don’t in Burma, but I would have preferred them.)

After dinner we went to the David Food Coop, a hippie-ish grocery store that’s been going her since 1972. Like Austin, Davis is an island of Sixties-ness surrounded by a desert of agriculture, and many old hippies are still to be found shambling along the streets of town. (There are also a fair number of homeless people, something I haven’t seen here before.)

And in this cool town, heavily invested in recycling and other green efforts, the Food Coop is the epicenter. It has pretty much everything you want, from loose grains to Dr. Bronner’s soaps, although prices are high because most stuff is organic, and the coolness surely exacts a surcharge.  Here are three characteristic items.

In a place like the Food Coop, sugar is demonized. When I did my postdoc here and my parents came to visit (this was probably about 1980), I took them for brunch to a hippy-ish organic restaurant, now defunct, called the Blue Mango. My father ordered coffee with cream, and noticed that there was no sugar on the table. He asked for some. The waiter looked at him with a stinkeye and said, in all seriousness, “Sorry, we don’t have White Death. But we might be able to dig up some honey in the kitchen.” My father, an old-school Army guy, took a pass on the honey.

At the food coop, the Satanic nature of sugar is clear. All items in bins have a four-number numerical code, but it used to be just three numbers. At that time, white sugar was given the Devil’s Number: 666. Now that they have to use four numbers, they simply expanded it, keeping its Satanic qualities:

And they also had this. WTF? What was it recycled from?

One thing that’s always bothered me about the food coop, which prides itself on selling healthy and organic food, is that it also has a whole aisle of homeopathic products, which of course is pure quackery: high-priced water containing not a molecule of the “curative” substance. They should stop selling this useless stuff. Here, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, is a big scam:

But we took a pass on the fraudulent cures because we were there for dessert, and bought bean-curd-filled mochi covered with sesame seeds. They were great (no photo attached).

Intercessionary prayer fails again, this time with covid recovery

December 5, 2023 • 11:30 am

This is the third study I know of in which intercessory prayer (prayer by strangers for the afflicted) has failed to show results.  The first two papers, whose titles are below (click to read) showed that such prayer failed to help patients with heart disease.  I’ve discussed these before, and you can see for yourself that if God exists, listens to prayer, and sometimes responds, He clearly was not listening in these two experiments.

I give the conclusions of each of the first two studies below. Notice that the second study was funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, which clearly hoped for a positive result!

First, a study from 22 years ago:

Conclusion: The study found no evidence of an effect of intercessory prayer on the primary outcome of mortality or on the secondary outcomes of hospitalization time, ICU time, and mechanical ventilation time.

Second, a study from 17 years ago:

Sadly, no gods with any power to respond to prayer did anything. Note as well that, in fact, intercessory prayer increased (nonsignificantly) the percentage of  bad outcomes (bolding is mine). Perhaps god doesn’t like intercessory prayer!

Results: In the 2 groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not (relative risk 1.02, 95% CI 0.92-1.15). Complications occurred in 59% (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% (315/604) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer (relative risk 1.14, 95% CI 1.02-1.28). Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups.

Conclusions: Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.

And look at the acknowledgements:

This study was supported by the John Templeton Foundation. The Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation supported the Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation site only.

And here’s the latest study, published in a weird journal, but one that is peer-reviewed: Heliyon. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

Heliyon is a monthly peer-reviewed mega journal covering research in all areas of science, the social sciences and humanities, and the arts. It was established in 2015 and is published by Cell Press. The journal is divided into numerous sections, each with its own editorial team.

Click the title to read, or you might find it more convenient to download the entire pdf here. The reference is at the bottom of the page.

The experiment was done in Brazil, and I don’t think I need to reprise the methods and results since the summary below gives all the essential information. I’ve highlighted the lack of positive results by bolding part of this summary:

Between September 2020 and December 2020, a total of 199 participants (out of 244 that were screened) were randomly assigned to either the Intervention group (n = 100) or the control group (n = 99, Fig. 1). Baseline characteristics, presented in Table 1, were well balanced between the two groups. The study population consisted of 34 % women, with a mean age of 61 years. Additionally, 44 % of participants had hypertension, and 6 % had obesity. At the end of the study, no significant difference in the primary outcome of mortality was observed between the intervention and control groups. Among the 99 subjects in the control group, there were 8 deaths, and the same number of deaths [8] occurred in the intervention group (HR 0.86, 95 % CI 0.32 to 2.31; p = 0.76). Similarly, there were no statistically significant differences in the secondary outcomes between the two groups. The need for ICU admission (p = 0.471), length of stay in the ICU (mean difference 􀀀 0.77, 95 % CI -4.13 to 3.20; p = 0.70), need for mechanical ventilation (p = 0.457), duration of mechanical ventilation (mean difference 3.89 days, 95 % CI -7.09 to 14.71; p = 0.54), and length of hospital stay (mean difference 1.96, 95 % CI -2.78 to 7.85; p = 0.45) were all similar between the two groups, as shown in Table 2. Due to the necessary change in participant identification during the study, we also evaluated the outcomes among participants who were identified by initials and received direct prayers (Table 3) and among participants who were identified by the number of the hospital beds (Table 4). Similarly, we did not observe any changes in the primary or secondary outcome. 

Other aspects of the study worth knowing about include the fact that subjects were admitted to intensive care or clinical inpatient facilities with a PCR-confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19. All patients were older than 18, and were used regardless of their religion or lack thereof. The study was double blind with a control group of patients; patients didn’t know whether they were being prayed for (half were; half were not) and the pray-ers didn’t know the names of the patients, who were identified and prayed for only by their initials and, later, by the number of their hospital bed (God presumably knows all this stuff).

The pray-ers were “Protestant religious leaders” who were able to pray daily for one of the patients. And the prayer devoted to each patient was INTENSIVE, as detailed below:

Each intercessor prayed from their own homes or workplaces, dedicating a total of 240 min per day, divided into three shifts of 80 min each (morning, afternoon, and night). The content of each prayer was not specifically assigned, but it was required to include the following topics: 1) preservation of the patient’s life, 2) avoidance of orotracheal intubation or mechanical ventilation for those not yet intubated, 3) shorter duration of intubation and mechanical ventilation for those already in that state, 4) reduced length of stay in the ICU, and 5) reduced total length of hospital stay.

Now that is what I call prayer. Nevertheless, there was no difference in the outcomes of the experimental (prayed-for) and the control (not-prayed-for) group). The authors do give some caveats, including the small sample size and the fact that the method of identifying patients changed mid-study from initials to hospital bed number (Brazilian law was invoked), but if there is an omniscient God, He should know these things.

This is three out of three studies that haven’t worked.  The possible explanations include these:

1.) There is no God to hear the prayers.

2.) There.is a God, but he can’t hear the prayers.

3.) There is a God who hears the prayers, but he pays no attention to them.

4.) God doesn’t want to be tested, and so ignored the whole experiment. But note that God was effectively tested in a Bible passage (1 Kings 18) in which sacrifices were offered to a false god versus the real God simultaneously, and only the sacrifices to Yahweh worked. This was a controlled experiment!

5.) Protestant prayers are less effective than prayers of other denominations.

Inventive readers can think of other explanations.

Of course as an atheist I think that #1 is the right answer. As the late Victor Stenger said, “The absence of evidence [for God] is indeed evidence of absence if the evidence should be there.”

Naturally this study won’t make a dent in the belief of the godly, for they will simply discount it on one ground or another—probably #4 above.  All we can say is that three sincere attempts to see if prayers work showed that they don’t.

And did I mention that although Lourdes is full of discarded crutches and wheelchairs, there are no false eyeballs or prosthetic limbs on display? Apparently God can cure lots of stuff, but is impotent before blindness and amputation.

________________

Soubihe Junior NV, Bersch-Ferreira ÂC, Tokunaga SM, Lopes LA, Cavalcanti AB, Bernadez-Pereira S. 2023. The remote intercessory prayer, during the clinical evolution of patients with COVID -19, randomized double-blind clinical trial. Heliyon. 2023 Nov 17;9(11):e22411.

doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e22411. PMID: 38045114; PMCID: PMC10689938.