Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Readers interested in more about the misuse of modern physics to support various paranormal claims will enjoy Stenger’s (1990) “Physics and Psychics.” For a nontechnical description of quantum mechanics and why it is “strange but not as strange as you think,” Lindley’s Where Does the Weirdness Go ? (1996) is excellent. Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985) nicely describes some of the strange phenomena in one area of quantum physics.

Until the last ten or fifteen years, homeopathy or homeopathic medicine was essentially a European phenomenon very little seen on this side of the Atlantic. But with the recent explosion of interest in “alternative” medicine, homeopathy has gained a strong following in the United States. Homeopathy was developed in the eighteenth century by German physician Samuel Hahnemann. It became popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an “alternative” to what was then considered traditional medicine. The basic idea behind homeopathic medicine is straightforward: A patient can be cured of what ails him by giving him extraordinarily diluted solutions of a drug or substance that would, if given in higher doses, cause the symptoms from which the patient is suffering. Thus, if a patient is having seizures, the homeopathic treatment would be to give a very, very, very diluted solution of a substance that induces seizures. If this seems implausible, it is. But when homeopathy was developed, such treatments had a great advantage over the treatments administered by nonhomeopathic physicians: They didn’t do any real harm. Such could not be said of some of the most common nonhomeopathic treatments, which included bleeding, in which varying quantities of blood were removed from the patient, and the administration of drugs that contained high levels of the poison arsenic. Homeopathically treated patients were basically given water to drink and otherwise left alone so that their immune systems and other natural restorative mechanisms could fight off their maladies. Had anyone at the time thought to do a controlled study of the survival rates of patients treated homeopathically versus those treated with nonhomeopathic methods, it is very likely that the former would have shown a higher survival rate.

As scientific medicine progressed in the twentieth century, it became possible to do more than simple leave the patient alone to heal himself. One could directly target the disease progress, or pathology, thus greatly increasing the rate of cure of hundreds of diseases. In this context, the “do-nothing” approach of homeopathy made less and less sense. And yet, as noted, homeopathy has become more and more popular recently. This is certainly due to the factors noted above that convince people that ineffective treatments really work.

Proponents of homeopathy, of course, argue that their approach really does work. As was noted above, the active substance is diluted, usually in water or alcohol. It is often diluted to such an extent that there is not a single molecule of the original substance left in the solution that the patient actually takes. How, then, is the original substance supposed to have any effect? According to homeopaths, as the dilution process progresses, the water (or alcohol) “remembers” the properties of the original substance which is being diluted. It is this “memory” that accounts for the curative properties of the homeopathic medicine.

The idea that water could remember substances that it used to contain received much publicity in 1988. Researchers (Davenas et al. 1988) at a French laboratory reported in the prestigious scientific journal Nature experiments that they claimed proved that water that used to have particular antibodies in it still had a strong immunological effect even after the original solution had been diluted so that only one part in 10 20of the original remained. In practice, this meant that not a single molecule of the original substance remained in the solution. Nature published the paper, in spite of serious reservations about its scientific merit, because the journal’s editors considered the topic of such great interest. However, they took the extraordinary step of publishing along with the paper a critique based on the findings of a team of investigators sent to the laboratory to check the methods used. This is very reminiscent of Wood visiting Blondlot’s laboratory to check on N rays back in 1904 (chapter 1). And, like Wood, the Nature investigating team, which included Nature editor John Maddox and magician and psychic investigator James Randi, found serious problems in the lab. To assess the immunological effect of the diluted antibodies (of which, it will be recalled, none in fact remained due to the degree of dilution), a visual judgment, made by looking through a microscope, about the color of portions of cells called basophils was made. This subjective judgment was apparently done by one scientist who performed all the assessments in an unblinded fashion. The team found that, as Randi (1988–89) puts it, the laboratory “had omitted much negative data from their lab records because some mitigating circumstance had suddenly become apparent after it was discovered that a particular experiment gave negative results” (p. 144). In other words, negative results were explained away, after the fact, by one excuse or another, but positive results were retained. The Nature team tried to replicate the original findings. Working in the same laboratory and using the same equipment, but putting in place proper experimental controls, no positive results were found. Gardner (1988–89) has provided a lengthier discussion of this matter.

The director of the laboratory in which the experiments discussed above were carried out was Jacques Benveniste, who reacted strongly to the criticism of his laboratory’s methods (Benveniste 1988). But his reply did not really address the specific issues of shoddy methodology that were raised by the critique; rather, it consisted largely of insults aimed at the Nature investigating team. Benveniste continued his interest in homeopathic treatments and in 1997 announced a finding even more momentous than his 1988 claim. He had discovered, he said, that homeopathic treatment effects could be transmitted over telephone lines and even sent by e-mail! (Sheaffer 1998).

Regardless of how weird the proposed mechanism of a treatment is, the treatment should be subjected to objective tests to see whether or not it is effective. Even if there is very little a priori chance that a treatment will be effective, tests showing that it does not, in fact, work can be very valuable in showing the public that money, time, and effort should not be wasted using it. Homeopathy has been subjected to numerous tests of its effectiveness and has consistently been found to be wanting in this regard. Two reviews (Hill and Doyon 1990; Kleinjen, Knipschild, and ter Riet 1991) covered more than one hundred different studies of homeopathic treatments for numerous different conditions ranging from stroke and hypertension to arthritis and bowel problems after surgery.

Hill and Doyon (1990) limited their review to studies that used randomized clinical trials to compare homeopathic treatments to either no treatment, a placebo, or standard treatment. They concluded that “the results do not provide acceptable evidence that homeopathic treatments are effective” (p. 139). Kleijnen, Knipschild, and ter Riet (1991) reviewed 107 studies of homeopathic effectiveness. Their conclusion was a cautious one, to the effect that the results of the studies reviewed were “positive but not sufficient to draw definitive conclusions because most trials are of low methodological quality and because of the unknown role of publication bias” (p. 316). In effect, this is a nice way of restating the maxim that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. And homeopathy, at the time of this review, had not met that requirement. The authors did make an important point toward the end of their paper, where they noted that several earlier studies had suggested that homeopathic treatments did have a positive effect on bowel movements after surgery to the abdomen. But a later, well-controlled study using a large number of subjects failed to find any such effect. This is a common pattern in the study of any therapeutic approach. Early studies, often done with fewer subjects than should have been used and suffering from various methodological problems, turn up what looks like positive evidence for the treatment. Later, better-controlled studies do not.