If it ducks like a quack...

When I was starting up the Brighton Skeptics in the Pub, I invited MEP, Brighton MP candidate and Green Party leader Caroline Lucas to come and speak in defence of the party's ludicrous health policies. These policies included a glowing endorsement of all alternative medicines, and the promise to ensure that, in particular, homeopathy and herbal medicine would not be subjected to same regulation and evidential claims as other medicines.
Here's a few choice bits:

HE300 Health services must be effective, efficient, comprehensive, accountable and equally available to all. Effective health services will deploy a broad range of interventions, operative at many levels: pharmaceuticals, surgery, psychological therapies, complementary and alternative medicine, and community and social interventions will be used where appropriate. All services will be available without charge at the time of need. 

HE317 When assessing the degree of control required over the availability of medicines, a balance must be reached between the right of the individual to freedom of choice, and the duty of society to protect the individual from the consequences of unwise choices. We are concerned to protect users from unanticipated adverse effects of novel pharmaceutical compounds, some of which may not be evident until the drug has been in use for many years. The Green Party proposes the founding of a regulatory agency with responsibility for natural medicines, including nutritional supplements, medicinal plants and herbal remedies, essential oils and homeopathic remedies. This agency should be founded on the principles of:

1. Freedom of information and full labelling of ingredients.
2. High standards of safety in production methods.
3. No animal testing.
4. Strong encouragement towards organic production.
5. A ban on GM ingredients.

However when the drugs have been in use for many generations, as with many natural medicines, the need for statutory control is diminished. Measures will therefore be taken to protect the availability of established herbal and homeopathic remedies, subject to basic safeguards.

There's also some rubbish about amalgam fillings being evil, but we won't go into that here.

Lucas has also personally endorsed CAM on her blog. Again, in case google's cache expires, here's some choice pieces.

....the best treatment programmes probably dip into both conventional and alternative medicine (reliance on alternative alone would probably be unwise) the Green Party has been way ahead of the game for years in advocating this greater integration of complementary and alternative medicines into NHS services.

Here in Brighton we are lucky to be served by an excellent network of complementary and alternative medicine practicioners.(sic)
The Green Party would fully integrate their services and expertise into NHS treatment plans, not only improving patient choices but helping to boost this important sector of the local economy.
Complementary and alternative medicine may be written off by drug companies and other sceptics as "mumbo jumbo" medicine, but recent evidence strongly contradicts such claims.

Therapies offered included acupuncture, chiropractic, osteopathy, homeopathy, reflexology and aromatherapy administered by local practitioners. 

Leaving aside the truth or falsehood of these claims for a moment, except to say that there is no good evidence that most of the mentioned treatments are good for much at all, what is most interesting is that all these references are now expunged from the websites they were once on. The party as a whole seems to have had a bit of an about-face on the topic, as is evidenced by this post by a pro-evidence green party blogger. They have abandoned the idea that anything will be exempt from regulation, and that any treatments are above needing to have evidence for their efficacy. Now of course we know what some people regard as sufficient evidence (fuck-all in many cases) so while this is encouraging, it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. You see, I and a few of my sceptical friends, have strong sympathies with the Green Party's ethos, just not with certain specific policies. The problem really is that if they can't be trusted to seek out genuine evidence in the arena of medicine, it doesn't bode well for their ability to find proper scientific solutions to climate-change. I for one don't want to be betting the future of life on this planet on Chakras, chanting and dream-catchers.
However, this just wasn't concrete enough for me. I wanted some statement from the party, not just a quiet removal of some idiotic statements. I need something that says "The Green Party, due to an examination of the evidence, have abandoned their goals of promoting and integrating alternative medicine except where it can be proven to work in properly controlled trials conducted with the rigour expected in the field of evidence-based medicine" so I wrote to Dr Lucas again:

Hi Dr Lucas MEP,

You may remember that some months ago I invited you to speak on the  topic of the green party's policies on alternative "medicine" at the newly formed Brighton "Skeptics in the Pub" meeting. I notice that all traces of these leanings have been expunged from your blog, the  website and stated policies? Does this mark a change in the direction on this topic for the party? Or merely that you no longer wish to publicise these goals in light of the recent negative publicity toward Homeopathy and Chiropractic?  If this is a genuine change in direction, and you could provide me with a statement to this effect, I would be more than happy to spread  it around the "Skeptical" community, which I suspect may gain you a  significant number of votes, my own among them.

Cheers,
           T.McG.

I fully expected to be ignored, as I had been the first time, so much to my surprise after 5 days I received this:

Dear Tim,

Thank you for your email. The offices here are exceptionally busy, so this  reply is simply to acknowledge receipt of your message and let you know that a full response will be sent as soon as possible.

Kind regards,

Cath Miller
Constituency Coordinator and Researcher
Office of Dr Caroline Lucas
Green Party MEP for SE England

 Blimey, maybe I'd got her all wrong? Then, only 3 days later:

Dear Tim,

Thank you for your email, which Caroline has asked me to respond to on her  behalf.

Neither she nor I quite understand what you mean when you state that all mention of alternative medicine and therapies have been removed from Caroline's website. Her blog on the MEP site was suspended recently for practical reasons but all past entries are available via the search option. Also, the only changes to the Green Party's policy website will be those that reflect the result of conference votes by members. I can tell you that our General Election manifesto contains a commitment to ensure that complementary medicines that are cost-effective and have been shown to work are made available on the NHS. Our supporting policy documents say that appropriate methods of assessment will be developed for both synthetic pharmaceuticals and natural medicines, involving practitioners expert in their respective uses. We want to make sure this process is driven by clinical need rather than either political or commercial influence and will also regulate all alternative healthcare practitioners.
I hope that helps and thank you again for getting in touch.

Kind regards,
Cath.

Cath Miller
Constituency Coordinator and Researcher
Office of Dr Caroline Lucas
Green Party MEP for SE England

 So, we're left with a few possibilities; either:

1. Dr Lucas and her coordinator do not know that the blog article in question has been removed from her website, or that the quack policies have gone.
2. She is aware of the above and wants to cover it up, and was unaware that we could still read it on Google cache.

I don't really like either of these options. My trepidation is further compounded by the fact that their new policy says this:

H326 The safety and regulation of medicines will be controlled by a single agency. This agency will ensure that medicines meet minimum safety standards, provide clear labelling of both ingredients and side-effects. The agency will cover existing synthetic medicines as well as those considered as natural or alternative medicines.

HE327 We shall improve the protection provided under the law to users of medicines. Prescribed and over-the-counter medicines will be monitored more rigorously with regard to both efficacy and toxicity. Appropriate methods of assessment will be developed for both synthetic pharmaceuticals and natural medicines, involving practitioners expert in their respective uses. Assessment will not be dependent on commercial interest in production. All information gathered during the process of assessment and licensing shall be publicly available.

It is abundantly obvious that even "expert" CAM practitioners are in no position to judge the efficacy of their "remedies" or "therapies", since they believe that they work at all. This doesn't look like an about face; it looks like a cover-up.

WTF is Morality?

Matin's reply to my "WTF is desirism" is up here.

There's few terms I'm unfamiliar with in there and a ton of references, so I may be some time reading before I do another post on this topic.

WTF is desirism?

A little while ago on Facebook, fellow skeptic Martin Freedman posted a link to a quiz that was meant to tell you how "consistent" your moral philosophy is, based on a handful of trolleyology questions. We both came out as 100% consistent for different reasons. I killed the one man to save the many every time (note that the transplant dilemma was not one of the questions asked), as Martin pointed out "like a good utilitarian should", but mentioned that he himself did not as he favoured a philosophy called "Desirism" I hadn't heard the term before, and Wikipedia was no help. Martin helpfully provided references but most of if seemed to be to be too detailed or not pitched at the right level for me, so I struggled to get my head around the concepts.
After a round of comments on one of Martin's posts defending desirism from an attacker we decided that we'd have a public exchange about it, so that he could explain it to me, and perhaps in the process explain it to others.

Firstly we thought, by way of introduction, we should explain why we are interested in ethics and morality. Perhaps least importantly, and as should be obvious from my other posts, I utterly reject the idea that what is moral is dictated by some Deity and that it is handed down to us in a holy book, which may need interpretation by a priesthood. For hundreds of years the morality espoused by the big three Abrahamic religions has lagged behind that of the general population. Those books may have been relevant in their time, though I'm not even convinced of that, but they are an anachronism now. As Bertrand Russell said "the moral objection [to religion] is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow." Even now, most of the major religions count homophobia and misogyny among their many faults, though they perceive them as virtues, not to mention the one that seems to think condom use and abortion are worse sins than child-rape and its subsequent cover-up.

So with religion out of the equation what do we have left? How do we make moral decisions? Some religious persons will tell you that without a god there is no reason for atheists to be good. Well, it appears that natural selection has built at least a rudimentary grasp of morality into us. Compassion and empathy of a sort manifest at a very young age, and are also present in some of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. These tendencies are strongly influenced by society as we grow, but the building blocks of our morality are apparently innate. The problem here is that the rules that evolution has given us were "designed" by that blind watchmaker to cope with the tribal life of early hominids, and have not kept pace well with the acceleration of change in the way we live our lives that has happened over the last ten thousand years or so. Rules of thumb that helped us propagate our genes by giving aid to those who are likely to share them do not scale up well to the global economy; they barely scale up to the complex nature of our own local social interactions. How can we tell if banning burkhas is a bad thing? If homophobic B&B owners have the right to refuse services to homosexuals? If starting a war against an oppressive and mass-murdering regime in a foreign country is the right thing to do? Our intuition, borne of evolution and coloured by our culture, no longer serves us well. How do we know if our instincts are "right"? Especially since many other people's instincts are different? Just because something is some way in human-nature, does not mean that this is how things ought to be, that is the naturalistic fallacy at work. Just how do we resolve these dilemmas?

I've read a little of what various philosophers and other thinkers have to say on the subject of morality, and currently favour a variety of modified utilitarianism. Utilitarianism asserts that the moral worth of an action is determined by its utility, which is to say how much the results of that action increase the sum of happiness among all sentient beings.
My reason for adopting a utilitarian view essentially goes something like this:

• I know that I can suffer.
• I assume that others are also capable of suffering (it certainly appears that they are).
• The (apparent) suffering of others causes me suffering. 
• I would prefer that others do not inflict suffering on me.
• Others are less likely to inflict suffering on me, or on others who may subsequently inflict suffering on me, if I do not do so to them.
• It therefore works in my favour, and everyone else's, for me to try to minimise the suffering of as many others as possible.

In summary, it makes me feel good to be good, and what constitutes "good" is minimising suffering, and thereby maximising the pleasure/happiness/wellbeing of as many sentient beings as possible. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that gets the main point across. Some, particularly the religious, might say that this a selfish way of looking at morality, and to an extent they may be right, but Darwin and Dawkins have taught us that selfishness is in the root of our morality, in reciprocal altruism (you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours) and kin-selection (advanced-nepotism). And in any case, someone who is only good because of the promise of eternity in paradise or threat of eternity in torment is in no position to criticise.

This still leaves me with a problem. How do I, in a world where the information available to me is often incomplete and imperfect, and all the results of my actions cannot be accurately predicted, decide which actions will minimise the suffering for the most sentient beings? Well, largely, like most people, I wing it. I make decisions based on the best information I have; if I don't think I have enough I seek more until I either have all that's available or I think I have enough, or the effort I would have to expend to get more goes beyond what I'm prepared to invest. I guess you could call it "guided intuition". Several people have tried to propose mathematical models for calculating or approximating the balance of  suffering/happiness, but they are all so far (IMHO) flawed.

So then I hear of Desirism, apparently also sometimes called "Desire Utilitarianism" which, if I've understood it correctly, seems to want to offer an answer to this problem by approximating a method of minimising suffering and maximising wellbeing, with a rule of thumb that says we should foster behaviours that will, in most situations, fulfil the desires of the maximum number of people. Therefore we don't have to do complicated maths or reasoning every time we want to make a decision, we just have to do it for a set of given hypothetical situations, and then run our life by those rules, re-evaluating them as new evidence comes along.

I have my doubts about it, which may simply be down to my lack of grasp of the theory, but before I express them, I'll hand over to Martin to tell me what Desirism is in his own words.

Letter to Celia re: EDM 908

David Tredinnick MP, he of the appeal to fund research into Medical Astrology (I shit you not) has created Early Day Motion 908 in which he calls on MPs to offer their support for homeopathy against the recent parliamentary select committee report that called for its withdrawal.
My MP signed it, so I wrote her a little letter. I encourage you to do similar if your MP's name should appear on the list.


Dear Ms Barlow MP,
I am writing to express my disappointment that you have signed this early day motion in support of homeopathy.

I believe a quick dissection of the EDM is in order.

EDM: That this House expresses concern at the conclusions of the Science and Technology Committee's Report, Evidence Check on Homeopathy; notes that the Committee took only oral evidence from a limited number of witnesses, including known critics of homeopathy Tracy Brown, the Managing Director of Sense About Science, and journalist Dr Ben Goldacre, who have no expertise in the subject;

Response: This is untrue. Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor who works for the NHS and is fully conversant with what is required for medicines to be considered effective, and Tracy Brown heads the Sense About Science organisation and has considerable knowledge of the legislation in this area and the science surrounding the issue. It should be noted that one does not need to be an expert in the behaviour of fairies to know that fairies do not exist; the absence of evidence for fairies should be enough. Additionally, evidence was heard from many other parties including representatives of pro-homeopathy groups such as the head of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, and a representative from the association of homeopathic manufacturers, all of  whom failed to offer any credible evidence. The Society of Homeopaths were not asked to give verbal evidence because the written report they submitted did not contain any written evidence, merely an appeal that homeopathy should not be subject to the same evidential criteria as conventional medicine. Additionally professor Edzard Ernst, formerly a practitioner of homeopathic "medicine" and a current professor of complementary medicine, presented his evidence that demonstrates conclusively that homeopathy has no effect beyond the placebo.

EDM: believes that evidence should have been heard from primary care trusts that commission homeopathy, doctors who use it in a primary care setting, and other relevant organisations, such as the Society of Homeopaths, to provide balance;

Response: Evidence was taken from the only PCT to have investigated this area. West Kent determined that there was little or no evidence to support its funding and has therefore withdrawn it. Additionally, anecdotal evidence from anyone, including doctors, is no substitute for properly controlled trials which the homeopaths have completely failed to produce. Even ten-thousand people claiming to have cured people with it would be insufficient. "The plural of anecdote is not data."

EDM: observes that the Committee did not consider evidence from abroad from countries such as France and Germany, where provision of homeopathy is far more widespread than in the UK, or from India, where it is part of the health service;

Response: that France, Germany and India have failed to adequately investigate the evidence for homeopathy, or failed to act appropriately on said evidence is neither here nor there. If genuine evidence was available from any country, the homeopaths surely would have provided it in their written submissions?

EDM: regrets that the Committee ignored the 74 randomised controlled trials comparing homeopathy with placebo, of which 63 showed homeopathic treatments were effective, and that the Committee recommends no further research;

Response: This is quite simply untrue. Meta analysis and systematic review of ALL of the studies available were considered. The data shows that studies that are methodologically flawed (improperly blinded or randomised etc.) do tend to show some effect for homeopathy, but those that are properly controlled show none beyond the placebo. There is a clear correlation between properly methodologically conducted trials and the inefficacy of homeopathy. Given the extent of the evidence against it, further research in this area would be a waste of public money.

EDM: further notes that 206 hon. Members signed Early Day Motion No. 1240 in support of NHS homeopathic hospitals in Session 2006-07;

Response: That 206 MPs were hoodwinked 4 years ago, before the evidence was presented, should have no bearing here.

EDM: and calls on the Government to maintain its policy of allowing decision-making on individual clinical interventions, including homeopathy, to remain in the hands of local NHS service providers and practitioners who are best placed to know their community's needs.

Response: The evidence is in; homeopathy does not work, it's continued provision must be viewed as either ignorance or deception. Local NHS services should not need to conduct these investigations themselves at further cost to the nation. It is high time this quackery was removed from the NHS list of services, if not banned altogether. Much is made of patient "Choice" on the NHS, however an uninformed choice is no choice at all. In order to provide adequate choice, patients must be informed of the inefficacy of homeopathy before they are offered it. Since homeopathy "works" by placebo only, this would negate any point providing such a service. Either homeopathy works (it doesn't) or it can be knowingly provided as a placebo, thus lying to patients, or it should be removed. Homeopaths are steeped in pseudo-science and unproven principles (like-cures-like, dilution and succussion increases potency, etc.) and are therefore inadequately equipped to deliver evidence-based medical care. If placebo treatments must be offered on the NHS for certain conditions that do not respond well to conventional treatments, and in opposition to the principle of informed choice, they should at least be done so knowingly by persons medically trained. This would at least ensure that conditions requiring genuine medical care do not go untreated. It would also allow the placebos to be prescribed in a way that does not give undue credibility to unsatisfactorily regulated quacks who discourage patients from seeking genuine medical care when it is required, as many homeopaths have been shown to do. Of course most persons medically trained would view it as a violation of their ethics to practice the deception required prescribe placebos to their patients. Some doctors it seems, while unable to prescribe placebo themselves, are happy to refer patients to homeopaths who will unwittingly do their dirty work for them. In my opinion this should not be allowed to continue.

It should also be noted that the proposer of the EDM, David Tredinnick, recently expressed his opinion in the house that funding should be given to "medical astrology". If that wasn't enough to ring alarm-bells about his ability to form cogent opinions on the topic of medicine, I don't know what is. In my opinion it ought to be enough to have him removed from his position on grounds of insanity.

I call on you to withdraw your support for this motion. If the brief summary I have given here is insufficient to convince you, I am happy elaborate further. I would recommend reading "Trick or Treatment" by professor Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh. Dr Singh will be speaking in Brighton on July 11th at a meeting of the local "Skeptics in the Pub" group on the topic of alternative medicine. This event is sold out, but if you wish to attend please let me know and I will arrange it.

Yours Sincerely,
Mr T. McGregor BSc (hons) CEng MBCS CITP

P.S. on previous occasions I have written asking you to give your support to early day motions and you have indicated that were unable to do so due to your role in government. I assume this situation has now changed?

And on the 7th day, he blogged.

It's late, so I'm only doing three today.

3. Of course the religious have a clearer moral code than secularists.
Like fuck! It might be clearer, but clearer != better. A.C Grayling annihilates Cherie Blair and her apologists.

2. Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine Kills
Woman's treatment for spots causes kidney failure and cancer. But apparently herbal medicine can't hurt you, becuase it's "natural"

1. Anne Widdicombe talks shite about the 10 commandments.
This program is so embarrassing I almost can't believe she allowed it to go on the air. When I watched it, they showed an advert for solutions to erectile dysfunction before the program. After 45 minutes looking at that harridan, I ordered some.
The Heresiarch pulls it apart

The week in bullshit?

Brooker's already got "The Week in Bullshit" as a regular slot on his show, so I need a new name. Anyone got any ideas? "Weekly wank-round?" Also need theme music. So everyone hum Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love in TOTP style while you're reading.

Anyway, here's my favourite idiocy-related stories from this week:

5. UK taxpayer to pay £200 million for visit of homophobic, misogynistic bigot who thinks our equality laws fly in the face of some non-existant "natural law".
He's a cunt, vote against him here.
Laugh at some parodies here and here.

4. Cherie Blair let's a guy off jail sentence because he's religious
Apparently being religious means violence is OK. Daily Mash strike back.

3. Tories given ticking off about their bullshit violent-crime statistics
Here's the original article explaining why they're bullshit

2. MMR scare doctor found to have acted dishonestly and irresponsibly.
Like we didn't know that already. He'll likely be found guilty of serious professional misconduct too. The Lancet finally fully withdraws the bullshit paper he was probably paid to produce, and yet still some parents would still rather risk the death or blindness of their babies than give them a proven vaccine, despite there being no genuine evidence against it.

1. Scientologists practice "Touch-Healing" in Haiti before going home in disgrace.
Fuckwits.

We've got no poison; we've got a "remedy"

On Sat 30th Jan 2010, I led the small but perfectly formed Brighton 10²³ : Homoeopathic "overdose" event. We only had a few people as I only had a couple of weeks to put it together while the other groups had been planning for months. But we made the video and had a few laughs before and in the pub after.
Before that, at the previously unheard of hour of 8 O'clock on a Saturday morning, I had a brief appearance on BBC Radio Sussex. In the interests of the much vaunted BBC "balance", they had arranged for a practising water-wizard (and graduate microbiologist!) Trevor Gunn to come and oppose me.
Here's the link on Listen Again if you're interested, although I don't know how long those things stay up. I'm on at around 2:14.45
Firstly let me say that Trevor seemed like a very nice guy, as many homoeopaths are; a pleasant persona really helps the placebo effect along nicely. Plus they usually genuinely care about the health and wellbeing of the people under their misguided care. So I'm not intending this as a character assassination on Trevor, but some criticism is inevitable. Also props to him for keeping his cool since I was essentially suggesting that his whole profession is built on lies and/or idiocy.
One point he made, which had also been stated by several other homoeopaths in the press this week, was that the "overdose" wouldn't prove anything because homoeopathy is a very individual thing and it was likely that none of us would be susceptible, or somesuch trite weaselly nonsense. Trevor made an analogy with teasing a room full of people with a peanut allergy by eating handfuls of peanuts and saying "look it doesn't do anything to me!". Unfortunately this analogy is flawed and the argument as a whole even flies in the face of one of the things that homoeopaths themselves claim about the mechanism of action for their "remedies"
When Samuel Hahnemann pulled the idea for homoeopathy out of his arse in the late 18th century, he did so on the basis that taking a substance that would cause a symptom in a healthy subject, would also cure that symptom in an ill subject, and vice versa. This is of course completely unproven and without any basis in science, but nonetheless it's what they claim. In fact, the very mechanism that these dilution-druids use to establish what each remedy is useful for is based on this principle. Hahnemann came to this "realisation" after he consumed doses of of cinchona bark (a source of quinine, and treatment for malaria) and then experienced some of the symptoms of malaria. Here we see our old favourite fallacy "post hoc ergo propter hoc" come visiting again, along with a spectacular "Illicit Conversion". Coincidentally, the symptoms Hahnemann experienced after taking his cinchona could also be interpreted as the symptoms of stress and anxiety; draw from that what you will.
The inaptly named "provings" (from the German "Prüfung" meaning "test" or "exam") is a method where a homoeopathic "remedy" is given to healthy subjects, Hahnemann having had a rare moment of clarity and realised that symptoms of other diseases could confound the results, and their health is monitored to note any symptoms that might occur. Hahnemann recommended the use of a 30c* "potency" in "provings", the same "potency" used by everyone taking part in the 1023 event, and these ultra-dilutions are still most commonly used in "provings" today. Interestingly "provings" do often include a control group, and sometimes today the tests are even "double-blinded". Blinding is where the person concerned is unaware of whether the treatment being given is a placebo or not. In single blinding, the patient does not know; in double-blinding the therapists do not know either, thus preventing them from giving clues, unconscious or otherwise, to the patient which may cause them to respond differently to the treatment. So this at least is a step in the right direction, but of course with homoeopathy both groups are actually receiving only placebo.
Unfortunately there remains one problem with this method, and it is that the symptoms under examination are decided upon after the testing is complete. Note that this is not just that statistical analysis is performed after the results are in, as in genuine clinical trials, but that what is being looked for isn't decided until after the data is available. In genuine clinical trials it is regarded as suspect if a proposed medicine is tested for a particular condition and after the fact the statistics show that it seemed to have an effect on some other condition that was not the original focus of the trial. In these circumstances there is a good chance that the apparent pattern is simply down to chance or over-interpretation of the results. As is beautifully demonstrated by the Bible Code nonsense (check this out, for Simon Singh's amusing debunking of the Bible Codes), if you look at a large enough dataset for long enough, seemingly meaningful, but ultimately meaningless, patterns seem to emerge. Erroneous results of this kind have caused some physicians to call for all trials to declare their aims and describe their protocol before the trial begins. This would also assist with eliminating another confounding factor in medical trials called Publication Bias. It is true that some medicines have been found to be effective for other conditions because of these apparent anomalies, but the effectiveness for that condition can only be determined after further studies looking specifically for that effect, thus eliminating the possibility that the original result was down to chance alone. Essentially what happens here is that whatever symptoms the treatment group coincidentally experience in greater amounts than the control group is assumed to be what that treatment will be effective for. Of course which statistics the experimenters pick from the data will be guided by all the cognitive biases that the genuine clinical trials are designed to guard against.
Bottom line is, "provings" are bunk-science, spectacular examples of Post Hoc reasoning, and have about about as much relation to real science as the mock landing-strips of the cargo cultists have to real military airfields. This exercise in hydromancy proves nothing. Homoeopaths also claim that dilution and succussion** increase the potency of the substance. If provings were any kind of proof, then you would expect a significant portion of last Saturday's "Overdosers" to fall ill with the symptoms of arsenic poisoning. It's been two days now and as far as I know everyone is still fine.

P.S. this first post in a year or so, resurrecting this blog marks a slight change in direction away from criticism of religion alone, and a turn towards my thoughts on all kinds of bullshit. Religion is unlikely to get off lightly, but it's no longer going to be the sole focus of the blog.

*A 30c "potency" let's not forget is about the same a one molecule of active ingredient in a sphere of water with the same diameter as the distance from the earth to the sun. There is a statistically negligible chance that there is even a single molecule of the active ingredient in a given "remedy". Homoeopaths claim that the water somehow retains a memory of the substance it once contained and that this memory is enough to effect a cure. There is no credible evidence for either of these leaps of faulty reasoning. It's also worth remembering that with the pillules as sold by Boots, a drop of this water is applied to some sugar pills, and then allowed to dry out, so the water is not even present anymore. So, now we are relying on the power of sugar to remember the power of water to remember some substance that causes the same symptoms we are trying to cure. I would say that you just can't make this shit up; except of course that someone did.
**Banging the bottles of water on a pad made of leather and horsehair to simulate the "effect" of Hahnemann's transportation of his remedies on horseback. I shit you not!