2010 may very well be the best year skeptics have ever had, and we’re only two months in!
Why, you ask? Because the Ministers of Parliament in the UK have decided that homeopathy is a waste of the National Health Service’s money.
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!!!
Homeopaths get taxpayer support in the UK to the tune of £4M per year (and probably more), money which goes to prescriptions and four homeopathic hospitals — hospitals which I assume are incredibly tiny, so that their cures are stronger.
Ha! See what I did there?
Anyway, the taxpayers’ money is being wasted because homeopathy is pseudoscientific nonsense. It’s water, pure (ha!) and simple, and has no efficacy beyond that of a placebo. Myriads of tests have shown this beyond any reasonable doubt. And, in fact, homeopathy is dangerous because it can divert people away from taking real medicine, which can have very serious repercussions.
I am thrilled with this news! Now, this does not mean homeopathy will promptly be defunded. It looks like there will be more reports and such, and the NHS will have a response to the MPs in a couple of months. But it’s a major step, and a good one.
I received a mysterious email recently, promoting what to me sounds like a great idea: a concerted effort in the UK to increase the public awareness that homeopathy is quackery, pure and simple. It’s called the 10:23 Campaign, and it’s being promoted by various skeptic groups in Britain. The website is a placeholder for now, but you can sign up there for updates.
Why do this? Well, as they say,
Homeopathy is an ancient, pre-scientific and absurd pseudoscience. Yet it persists today as an accepted complementary medicine, largely because people don’t know what it is.
The 10:23 Campaign aims to show the public what homeopathy is and explain how we know it doesn’t work. It will launch in early 2010.
Excellent. And why call it the 10:23 Campaign? Well, happily I have a mole who informs me of such things.
What do you get when you mix homeopathy with astrology?
This.
I should say that I have to give a kudo to the author for trying to set up a scientific experiment to see what would happen, but the experiment itself is so hopelessly flawed!
In fact it’s so wrong it’s hard to know where to start. The lack of double blinding. The single blinding still being able to influence the testers. The fact that all the testers were believers, and able to influence each other. The starting supposition that a) homeopathy works, and 2) astrology works (when neither does). A lack of clear results predicted so that conclusions (either negative or positive) could be drawn. The very subjective observations. And so on.
It’s clear from the article that the homeopath/astrologer means well, and is actually curious about all this. I wonder if there is any reliable way to take that curiosity, that well-meaning intention, and redirect it toward science? If there is — besides slowly and methodically banging the drum of reason — I’d love to know. A lot of people who believe in things like homeopathy and astrology and all that really are naturally curious, intelligent people, but somewhere down the line they strayed off the narrow path that winds its way through reality, and it would be nice to find a good way to nudge them back in the right direction.
Tip o’ the precessed vial of distilled water to Krelnik.
