Yesterday evening saw the Skeptics in the Pub (the skeptics being of London and the pub the Penderel’s Oak) to hear Martin J Robbins (twitter @mjrobbins), of layscience.net and the Guardian, talk on ‘the impossibility of debating homeopathy’.
Martin has kindly agreed to send me the slides from his presentation and I will post them here in due course.
A brief write-up of the evening follow after the fold and immediately below are Martin’s slides as a Flash presentation. You can also view them as a fullscreen presentation or download them as a PDF or PowerPoint.
Please note that these slides are copyright Martin J Robbins and not covered by the Creative Commons license of the rest of this blog.
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The intro came from the redoutable Simon Singh, who was, he said, delighted to be involved with the 1023 campaign and to be the warmup act for Carmen D’Cruz (twitter @carmenego) and MJ Robbins. He had become interested in homeopathy a few yhears ago when he heard about students travelling to areas with endemic malaria with homeopathic remedies instead of prophylactics that actually work. On the back of this, he staged a small experiment with a volunteer posing as a student going into ten homeopathic clinics with the backstory that they were travelling to West Africa (an area chosen because it has a high prevalance of a strain of malaria that can kill, untreated, within three days) and saying they didn’t like conventional medicine. All ten homeopaths offered treatments that would have been ineffective; only the BA travel clinic actually had a proper consultation that discussed a range of treatment options and other measures such as insect repellents and nets.
For me, this highlighted the dangerof homeopathy: not that it provides ineffective treatment, but that it stops people from accessing the treatments they actually need. Coupled with efforts a la Matthias Rath to extend homeopathy beyond South Africa in Africa, this is deeply disturbing.
Coming on the back of the 1023 campaign, this was a timely discussion of one of the major problems in skeptically analysing homeopathy: different homeopaths have different, and sometimes mutually exclusive, ideas of what homeopathy is. Part of this comes from the pseudoscientific nature of the – ahem – discipline, but it makes it hard to come up with counter-arguments to homeopathic beliefs.
Martin illustrated this rather nicely with an exchange he’d had with the British Homeopathic Association1. On the one hand, the BHA believe that double-blind testing on homeopathic remedies was very difficult as they should be individual, tailored treatments while on the other hand having no problem with Boots selling mass-produced homeopathic remedies that are as far from individualised as possible. More of this is available at the Lay Scientist – and it’s a fascinating read.
Robbins’ argument, as I understood it, was that while we should not drop our skeptical and rational perspective, we do need to present our arguments in a rational way. As the slides will be appearing here, I will not go into his talk at greater length.
Prior to Martin, Carmen D’Cruz, London co-ordinator for the 1023 campaign updated everyone on the mass homeopathic suicide. The initiative of the Merseyside Skeptical Society has had some concrete successes. Firstly, 1023 has raised public awareness of what homeopathy is (or precisely, isn’t); secondly, it has caused bodies like the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, and others, to start looking at the issue with more vigour; thirdly, it has caused Boots to remove a particularly egregious piece of content from their website; fourthly, it has emboldened similar movements overseas. Moreover, when you search for ‘homeopathy’ on something called Google, you find a Newsnight investigation or the 1023 site rather than quack sites.
A special shout-out has to go to the MC, Matt, who was at pains to make sure that any homeopathic practioners or patients were welcome to have their say and would be heard, and for reminding us that we are skeptics, not debunkers: given evidence, we would change our position on homeopathy. Lovely to see a few new faces, including none other than blogger extraordinaire Dave Osler.
xD.
Footnote: a brief grumble
I really like Skeptics in the Pub. It’s informative and entertaining. Covering a range of subjects of great social and political import in a popular hostelry, it is quite literally skepticism in a pub.
I do, though, have a complaint. The organisers, for whom I have a great deal of time and respect, need to remember that many people who attend have to travel some distance home and get back into work the next day. 1930 is about as late as the talks can start, but it’s usually around 2000 by the time we start. A twenty minute break becomes a forty minute break and very quickly there is no time at the end to socialise as we all have to disappear home.
Please, lovely uberskeptics in the pub, let us start on time, not have too many speakers and finish in time to have a drink with the other lovely skeptics before we have to leave.
Sounds like an entertaining evening. If readers want to learn more about homeopaths working abroad then the works of mr sherr and the soh are described in some detail on my blog.
I’d also disagree slightly with Martin in his strategy for dealing with homeopaths, as described in the presentation and your thoughts (I was not here). I think challenging them on evidence or theoretical grounds is mostly pointless (I’ll make exceptions when scientific journals publish research on homeopathy), it is very much a belief system and cargo cult science so perhaps the best way to deal with it is as you would with any religion. Prevent it from doing public harm by pointing out when their activities are unethical and dangerous and seek recognition in the profession of the limits of their ability. This of course is easier said than done.
Re: Gimpy
Actually that was more the point I was trying to get across. There is no coherent ‘homeopathy’, therefore arguing against it is fairly fruitless (other than as a fun intellectual exercise, and to publicly embarass the likes of Mathie).