The Jesus Crime: Thou Shalt Not Cure

I keep thinking that one blog ought to be a set up for another and that’s not how I like to think, but its come to the point where I have to forego the luxury of random access thinking, the thought pattern of what hey have labelled as attention deficiency disorder and deliver some sequential material. Critical mass has developed and now its time for a chain reaction.

In my last blog I threw out some rhetorical questions regarding The Economist magazine’s use of a debunked debunking of homeopathy, having already figured what the answer is.

One tragedy follows another. The Economist’s attack on homeopathy for its unidentifiable ingredient is nothing new. Hahnemann was chased out of Konigslutter over two hundred years ago because he too could not chemically identify what the active ingredient of the medicine was that he used in the Scarlatina epidemic there, other than to say that it was water tinged with Belladonna, and subsequently he was in such a hurry to leave town that his overloaded wagon overturned on a bridge, killing one of his children.

I know I’m a little hard on people sometimes, and before I wake up I counsel myself into thinking right rules over kindness, which is bunk, of course, but I have seen it take its course, and The Economist is neither right nor kind in their attack on homeopathy, it’s a solicitation of malice and an interference with trade, but I suppose after seeing James Randi and his ilk get away with it at TED lectures and the sort, they think its okay to characterize we homeopaths as fools and charlatans.

One thing I’ve found that homeopathy has done for me is having made me a little more circumspect about people, even those who are after my hide. There is a tremendous motivation behind the attacks on homeopathy, and the absence of traditional science, like chemistry and physics, is really nothing more than a letter of marque for the opposition to carry, 007 license to kill the doctrine..

WHAT IS IT?

Well, doctors are a jealous bunch. Like most poor fessionals, academics and vampires, they are envious of one another, especially the square footage of one another’s private gaols, the number of victims he has on leashes, his literary acclaim, and the money he makes from dope dealing.

Doctor means teacher, and as soon as he teaches he depletes his store of an easily replicable commodity; if he cures somebody they go away and never return; if he lets the cat out of the bag it threatens a chain reaction, which is exactly what the nuclear physics of the homeopathic remedy is, a chain reaction. And so it is understandable that he and Them, his pharmaceutical handlers are intent on preventing critical mass from accumulating, and the patent medical industry serves him well in preventing it, by sending out Pharisees to work the crowd into a snarling mob, through the media and various institutions, sometimes nakedly so.

Working for Them he can get out of the poverty of the teaching business and move on to the bonanza of taking hostages, made possible by Them. Predators need a constant supply of victims, and this is now what the health scare industry hath wrought, an unending spat line of miserable souls slouching over tests, sliding injto MRI’s, spreading for speculums, taking time, making trouble and lots and lots of money from a never ending supply of victims that now constitutes the single greatest chunk of the modern Pax American economy, hence the concern by The Economist and Wikipedia, magicians and foils, to block, sabotage or crush any attempt to thwart Them.

Comes now this cheeky little doctrine of curative medicine. The very gall, can you imagine it? How dare they violate the Golden Rule of Medicine? It’s the Jesus Crime, Thou Shalt Not Cure.

Like a union shop, some young buck comes on the floor and starts actually doing some real work, making everyone else look bad and lazy . . and doing it for free!

Crucify him!

And the license for it is it is unexplainable, that there is no logic, rhyme or reason . . there is no Technogogue, no Science god to back it up!

It’s voodoo!

Well, it’s not voodoo, and the government is playing along with this not-so-little hoax, like everyone else in the health scare business, when the government, as holder of standards and measures, should be the first to stand up and say what it is, explain the physics of cure.

Are we supposed to really buy into this explanation that there is no explanation for the action we’ve seen of these materials on human and non human subjects for over 200 years? Is that supposed to stop us, because Jommy Wales, James Randi and The Economist don’t know and probably won’t ever know how the magic works?

But it doesn’t, the government doesn’t really investigate: The US Department of Health’s website for the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine under the National Institutes of Health(NIH)  states, “A number of the key concepts of homeopathy are not consistent with fundamental concepts of chemistry and physics. For example, it is not possible to explain in scientific terms how a remedy containing little or no active ingredient can have any effect.”

What is ironic about the NIH is that a former director of he NIH, Wayne Jonas, M.D. demonstrated at Walter Reed in a test for the Department of Defense that a homeopathic dilution of Tularemia could inoculate mice against rabbit fever. And this is not idiopathic, there are thousands of examples of the effects of diluents on human and non-human subjects. When he died, Hahnemann alone reportedly left behind 100,000 case notes. And with hundreds of years experience with it, all the thousands of books about homeopathy, schools dedicated to teaching physicians how to use it, and the M.D.’s who do, we’re supposed to still believe that it’s a hoax?

And it’s just not true that it can’t be explained, it is possible to explain in scientific terms how an aqueous solution containing little or no active ingredient can have an effect on an organism, in scientific terms as well as unscientific terms that anyone can understand, what the physico-chemistry of homeopathy is. And however arrogant this may seem, with a little help from existing science and my friends, I intend to do so . .

Advertisement

The Homeopathic Cure of Wikipedia

Wikipedia falsifies the placebo claim for homeopathy . . again, shilling  for pharma

Wikipedia has been caught for a third time frantically producing false information about homeopathy on  a shifting footnote intended to support a hypothesis that homeopathic medicine is a “placebo.” A placebo is defined by Wikipedia as a sham treatment intended to deceive recipients.

The problem is that reviews of clinical tests of homeopathy, published in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet, among others, have all shown that the collective weight of clinical trials shows that the ionized pharmaceuticals used in homeopathic medicine are not placebos.

Wikipedia has therefore had to misrepresent the literature,  pretending to quote (1) a systematic review by a defrocked  professor of complementary medicine who garnered a reputation as the world’s leading homeopathy antagonist (2) a US government website that says nothing about placebos and (3) currently, at the time of this writing, the leading meta analysis of clinical trials that actually concludes homeopathics are not placebos.

The Wikipedia article says: “Homeopathic remedies are found to be no more effective than a placebo,[2] defining placebo as “a simulated or otherwise medically ineffectual treatment for a disease or other medical condition intended to deceive the recipient.”

The article is locked down, preventing a rewrite neutral to the facts. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has voiced vituperative opposition to homeopathy, calling it the work of charlatans. The talk session of the article is a jumble of opinions by trolls trying to figure out how to reconcile contradicting conclusions in meta analyses, looking for evidence to support the placebo hypothesis in credible publications, and not finding it.

The  scuttlebutt is that whoever wrote the article was hired to keep it in flux by pharmaceutical industry interests, like the Geneva based International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations, (IFPMA) for which Wikipedia admittedly provides advertising space. The use of ionized pharmaceuticals, as used in homoeopathy, could break the strangle hold current conventional pharmaceuticals have on modern medicine, and so must be suppresed.

Footnote number two in the WIkipedia homeopathy article seems to prove it. Prior to the current footnote, footnote  number two, which traditionally has been the footnote supporting its placebo accusation,  led to an article by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) that says nothing about homeopathics being placebos. The NCCAM article is entitled Homeopathy: An Introduction (click here and read it for yourself if you don’t believe it).

This changed within the last few hours of publication of this article, as if they’re watching my keystrokes. Now it leads to the 1997 Linde meta analysis published in the Lancet, what homeopathy antagonist Edzard Ernst called “technically superb.” Linde is considered to be the best review of he literature, but is now 17 years old. Linde stated their results were incompatible with the placebo hypothesis, the opposite of what Wikipedia says it said. .

If you’re familiar with Wikipedia’s pseudoscience and fake academic “research” by hired shills for the pharmaceutical industry trying to take attention off their culpability in spawning breasts on boys and two headed girls, then you can imagine pornmeister Jimmy Wales standing in front of a table full of geeks saying something like, “just use any old article, nobody reads the footnotes, I mean you could link it to Bomis and the wikisuckers still won’t check it out.”

The U.S.’s  NCCAM article refused to say what Wikipedia wanted them to say, so the Wiki editors probaly had to switch back to Linde, which addresses the placebo hypothesis directly, but contradicts their undying  insistence that homeopathic remedies are no more effective than placebos.

Perhaps one of the editors actually read the NCCAM article and then hurriedly kicked some cat litter over it and nervously went back to something more sustainable, to make the placebo claim. Give the appearance of attribution and people will think it is.

But when Linde’s 1997 results are read they say:

“The results of our meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homoeopathy are completely due to placebo.”

The reason Wikipedia likes Linde is because in a susequent addendum Linde moderated their results by saying that more rigorous trials revealed less positive results. But Linde never recanted their basic statement that homeopathic remedies are not placebos.

Linde is not the only meta analysis that blows up in the face of those who are desperate to disprove homeopathy.

A 1991 systematic review of clinical trials, published in the British Medical Journal stated:

“The amount of positive evidence even among the best studies came as a surprise to us. Based on this evidence we would be ready to accept that homoeopathy can be efficacious, if only the mechanism of action were more plausible . .  “The evidence presented in this review would probably be sufficient for establishing homoeopathy as a regular treatment for certain indications. There is no reason to believe that the influence of publication bias, data massage, bad methodology, and so on is much less in conventional medicine, and the financial interests for regular pharmaceutical companies are many times greater. Are the results of randomised double blind trials convincing only if there is a plausible mechanism of action? Are review articles of the clinical evidence only convincing if there is a plausible mechanism of action? Or is this a special case because the mechanisms are unknown or implausible?” Kleijnen J, Knipschild P, ter Riet G. Clinical trials of homoeopathy, British Medical Journal, 1991; 302: 316–323. tinyurl com/kleijnen

If it’s saying what you  want it to say, or, if you know it isn’t true, and you’re motivated to expose the lie, if you have the conviction of your beliefs, it’ll be your red meat, or fakin’ bacon if you’re vegan.

So now who’s administering placebos?

The word “placebo” does not even appear in the NCCAM article, the article that up to a few hours ago Wikipedia listed as its validaiton for the placebo claim. The NCCAM article does not describe homeopathic treatment to be ineffectual or intended to deceive, as Wikipedia suggested it would.

The word “homeopathy” refers to the phenomenon of like cures like, as is seen in the use of vaccines. In an effort to maintain equilibrium, organisms can react intensively to small doses of toxins, especially when dissociated. Hahnemann’s word homoeopathy (meaning same suffering) or the putative word homeopathy (meaning similar suffering) do not refer to the material phase of a pharmacuetical’s content as solid, liquid, gaseous or plasma (ionized). Any phase of matter can induce a homoeopathic reaction. Homeopathic medicines are noted for their use of the ionized pharmaceuticals, created by molecular dissociation when serially diluted in water, but the homeopathic application is not limited to ionized materials.

In the U.S., homeopathic remedies are regulated by the Federal Drug Administration. The original rules covering the use of homeopathics were a part of the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act sponsored by Senator Royal S. Copeland, M.D. (D-NY), a homeopath.

That’s right. Your eyes are not deceiving you, you are not hallucinating.

The Godfather of the FDA was a homeopath.

Like the current reference to Linde, the NCCAM article implies the opposite of what Wikipedia claimed it said. The NCCAM article states,

“While many homeopathic remedies are highly diluted, some products sold or labeled as homeopathic may not be highly diluted; they can contain substantial amounts of active ingredients. Like any drug or dietary supplement that contains chemical ingredients, these homeopathic products may cause side effects or drug interactions. Negative health effects from homeopathic products of this type have been reported.”

The NCCAM article was not the first time Wikipedia was caught falsifying the placebo claim. This blog made note of the same charge in its entry on January 29^th, 2012. (Wikipedia and the Case Against Homeopathy)

At that time the Wikipedia article on Homeopathy read, “The collective weight of scientific evidence has found homeopathy to be no more effective than a placebo.[2][3][4][5][6]”

BACK TO LINDE

As you can see, WIkipedia is caught in a crossfire of its own references. Like a ping pong match, once again, tracing back to footnote number two we found, at the end of the rainbow, Edzard Ernst’s Systematic Review of Systematic Reviews of Homeopathy, which stated,

“The existence of contradicting evidence is not unusual in therapeutics. One solution to resolve such contradictions is to conduct systematic reviews and meta-analyses of rigorous studies. In 1997, Linde et al did just that. The conclusions of this technically superb meta-analysis expressed the notion that homeopathic medicines are more than mere placebos.”

Not one major meta analysis has been able to effectively conclude that the action of homeopathic remedies is due solely to the placebo effect. Not even Shang, the most popular homeopathy meta analysis among skeptics, was able to clearly conclude that the effect was from chance, iatrogenesis or “placebo,” admitting “a weak effect.” A review of the data by independent analysis of Shang determined that even in this most damning meta of homeopathy, ”Homeopathy had a significant effect beyond placebo.” Ludtke Rutten

The literature for the homeopathic placebo simply doesn’t exist. The urban legend was a badly executed deception popularized by James Randi 14 years ago to support his phony offer of one million dollars ($1,000,000) to prove homeopathy, an offer that his supporters, which includes the pharmaceutical drug industry, are still desperately hanging onto as proof that homeopathy is unprovable.

The question remains, who wrote the Homeopathy article for Wikipedia, and how much were they paid, out of whose pocket?