Quacks in Haiti

Peter Lipson has an interesting post about the unsurprising failures that naturopathic peddlers have faced in the wake of the Haitian catastrophe. Apparently, people wallowing in the aftermath of a natural disaster tend to be unimpressed by the results of cure-all vitamin C injections and are audacious enough to reject magic beans homeopathy in favor of actual medicine -- though Lipson notes that homeopathic water, which will likely contain "fewer fecal coliforms than the local water," will probably do no harm so long as no one expects it to resolve any illness.

Then again, it's less than clear that homeopaths even know how to use water properly. As this story explains, a group styling itself "Homeopaths Without Borders" recently sent a troupe of faith healers to Haiti, where they laid hands upon the afflicted.

The group set up shop in two tents next to a clinic and hospital, and treated more than 2,000 patients in three days. Much of the treatments were for itchy eyes and itchy scalps, probably brought about by the dust generated by the quake. There were also problems with itchy skin and upset stomachs.

The more serious injuries went into the clinic or hospital. And many of the gravest cases, such as amputees, were at the main base of relief operations some five miles away at the airport. The mission of the homeopaths was to deal with what [Nancy] Eos called the walking wounded.

Perhaps I'm being ungenerous by wondering if these well-meaning featherbrains actually offered sugar pills and tinctures in lieu of eye flushes and showers, but I'm glad to see they were sensible enough to pass along the amputees to a proper hospital -- an approach that nevertheless seems not to be widely shared among a community that believes homeopathy is more effective at treating malaria than amodiaquine and mosquito nets. Then again -- lest we understate the irrational insertion of quack medicine into a disaster zone -- we need only to remember that if the producers of homeopathic "remedies" actually followed the production steps necessary to generate 25ml of a 200C dilution, they would actually dump roughly 500 liters of water. I'm sure the people of Haiti would appreciate homeopathy even more if its practitioners would simply ship them all the water they waste to make the tiny bottles of water they tote with them.

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Yogurt Enemas, Rolfing and Astral Healing for All!

It's hardly news that the Huffington Post publishes a lot of garbage, but the site's affectionate regard for alternative medicine is really hard to take. Yesterday, someone named Andrea Sullivan gobbled bandwidth by arguing that naturopathy -- your one-stop superstore for medical quackery -- should receive serious attention from policymakers who are interested in improving health care in the US. Evidently, Sullivan recently wasted everyone's time on a conference call with the White House Office of Public Engagement, who were asked if people who don't believe in the germ theory naturopaths weren't ideally suited to deliver all of the President's health care goals. From the sounds of it, OPE reps gently dismissed her question by suggesting the obvious -- which is that naturopathy has exactly zero basis in science -- but Sullivan isn't giving up.

Here's what policymakers need to know. All naturopathic physicians have earned four-year postgraduate degrees from accredited institutions. We are trained as primary care physicians to treat patients with safe and gentle disciplines such as homeopathic and botanical medicine, nutrition, massage, hydrotherapy, and acupuncture. We treat whole people--body, mind, and spirit--and not just diseases. Our fundamental beliefs are that disease happens to an entire body, not just one area of it, and that the body has an innate ability to heal itself and prevent disease if given proper support.

All of which is, of course, absolute nonsense. Naturopathic colleges, for instance, are "accredited" in much the same way that the market for credit default swaps was "regulated." The Council on Naturopathic Medical Education exists not to verify that naturopaths are trained in methods that actually work, but that schools are actually delivering the classes they claim to deliver and that they faithfully promote the field's unsupportable philosophy that diseases are caused by a disturbance in the body's "vital force." The CNME lost its accrediting recognition from the Department of Education in 2001 after fourteen years of demonstrated malfeasance; Bush's education secretary Rod Paige renewed the body's accrediting authority in 2003.

Even so, the fact that naturopathic colleges are "accedited" means nothing, given that naturopathy itself is nothing more than a pig's breakfast of scam remedies that derive from debunked, pre-modern fairy tales about the origins and cure of disease. In one hilarious article from the alt-med field, for instance, it was suggested that naturopaths "may have significant problems in relating to the idea of [evidence-based medicine]." Yeah. I'd imagine so.

As the great quack-hunter Morris Fishbein pointed out nearly 70 years ago, "Whereas most cults embrace a single conception as to the cause and healing of disease, naturopathy embraces everything in nature." Sullivan mentions a few of the more harmless-sounding naturopathic practices -- including herbal medicine, acupuncture, and massage -- but naturopaths embrace without prejudice a full complement of goofiness, including ozone therapy, chelation therapy, hair analysis, coffee enemas, iridology, color therapy, and so on and so forth. (If "therapeutic touch" hadn't been debunked by a fourth-grader, they'd still be advocating for that as well.) It doesn't matter that each of these "therapies" rely on completely different and usually incompatible explanations for why people get sick in the first place, nor does it matter that supporting clinical evidence is nowhere to be found for anything that naturopaths recommend (aside from eating a nutritious diet, drinking lots of water and getting an adequate amount of sleep each night.) As a big, moronic tent, naturopathy embraces it all -- not because it's effective, but because it's profitable. Indeed, Sullivan's only real "defense" of field rests on the fact that Americans are apparently gullible enough to spend "$27 billion of their own money on naturopathic healing." It's no surprise, then, that naturopaths like Sullivan have joined other crazy people in trying to hijack the cause of health care reform -- by legitimizing practices that have no proven benefit (and may in fact cause harm and drive up health care costs overall), such "reform" would serve as an ongoing jobs program for medical grifters.

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Like Grape Nuts, "Christian Scientists" are neither

This is a terrible idea:

The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments -- which substitute for or supplement medical treatments -- on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against "religious and spiritual healthcare."

It would have a minor effect on the overall cost of the bill -- Christian Science is a small church, and the prayer treatments can cost as little as $20 a day. But it has nevertheless stirred an intense controversy over the constitutional separation of church and state, and the possibility that other churches might seek reimbursements for so-called spiritual healing.

Phil Davis, a senior Christian Science Church official, said prayer treatment was an effective alternative to conventional healthcare.

Except, of course, that it's not. Holy shit. These are people who do not believe in germ theory and whose utterly deranged views on science and medicine actually produce demonstrably higher rates of mortality within their cohort. There are no epidemiological, clinical, or meta-analytic studies that support the efficacy of prayer as an alternative form of "therapy." The two studies that prayer advocates usually cite -- one from South Korea (2001) and one from Columbia University (2004) -- represent legendarily awful science. The former study has more or less been withdrawn from the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, and both featured a co-author with a degree in parapsychology who has claimed elsewhere that amputated salamander limbs can be regrown by faith healers who wave their hands over the lonely stumps.

Regardless of the constitutional questions -- which I think the LA Times article focuses on to an unnecessary degree -- the protection of medical quackery flies in the face of what the goals of health care reform should be: (a) delivering access to the most effective methods of disease prevention and treatment; and (b) reducing health care costs across the board. I suppose "fully prying American health care from the embrace of medieval superstition" would be a reaonable goal as well, but with people like Tom Harkin in the Senate, I'm not holding my breath.

(Via Kevin Drum)

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Homeopathy is Crap, vol. MMCVIV

This video has been making lots of people laugh and/or seccuss their heads against the wall on the science and med blogs this week. It's almost too painful to watch -- the jaw-dropping butchery of physics is only the beginning -- but there's so much great dope in here, you really have to endure at least through the 6:32 mark -- at which point she finishes explaining that homeopathy works more or less like a bomb you toss at your neighbor's house after he lets his dog shit on your lawn. No, really.

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