Contrary to your hypothesis she got better a few months later, after I had made her pregnant (and married her of course, I am a gentleman). But think about it, pregnancy is a gradual, no taking days off, fitness program.

And I was worried about her, but I didn’t do things like go with her to the doctor and harangue him. I did cheer her up afterwards though.

You write down words on pieces of paper, happy words and negative words. You throw the pieces of paper with the nagative words on it away and carry the ones with the happy words around with you. Now this might seem like your average psycho-placebo bollocks, but it is so much more. You see, the water in your body reacts when it is around happy words and happy music, the molecules change into beautiful snowflake shapes (some of you might remember one of the Bad Science columns from a few years ago talking about a “study” similar to this, well, Mickel therapy is based on it. Here’s the BS link http://www.badscience.net/2005/05/literate-molecules/ ). Snowflakes are happy shapes and happy shapes make you healthy, and your body is mostly water, you see. You do wonder if it’s water and it’s in the shape of a snowflake then maybe it IS a snowflake and Dr Mickel wants to turn us all into an army of snowman warriors or something.

I’ve had ME for 7 years and you would not believe the cures that people suggest on ME forums I visit. Being incurable ME seems very susceptible to these kinds of charlatans, who know exactly how desperate we are to get better. I’ve seen garlic tablets, asthma-controlling breathing techniques, pills that cure AIDS and the menopause along with ME, bizarre hypnotherapy things that cut its patients off from everyone else in a cult-like way, practices that will “retrain your hypothalamus so that you only produce the good sort of adrenaline”, pills with 900% RDA of certain vitamins, and no end of vague treatments like Mickel Therapy and Eaton Therapy and Reverse Therapy and L1ghtn1ng Pr0c3ss that turn out to be completely nuts once you find out what they really are. And I’m usually on my own trying to persuade people (young people who have usually been too ill with ME to go to school and learn basic science) why these things might not work as well as the website suggests they do. And it breaks my heart to see so many people pay thousands on these things (Mickel Therapy costs 100 quid a session and lasts 8 sessions, all done by a completely non-accredited medical “professional”), which often tire them out so much it takes them months to get back to their normal level of illness.

“Results: All the non-atopic participants completed all 3 testing sessions (810 individual tests); 774 (95.5%) of the individual tests conducted on the atopic participants complied with the testing protocol. The results of the electrodermal tests did not correlate with those of the skin prick tests. Electrodermal testing could not distinguish between atopic and non-atopic participants. No operator of the Vegatest device was better than any other, and no single participant’s atopic status was consistently correctly diagnosed.
Conclusion: Electrodermal testing cannot be used to diagnose environmental allergies.”

I think most doctors who deal in long-term chronic disease involving medications with possible side effects have to deal patients keen to use CAM, and simply to condemn patients for entertaining unproven therapies doesn’t seem to work very well. For example, one of my sisters has Lupus, a nasty disease though thankfully (due to improved medications!) no longer the dread diagnosis it once was. Her variant behaves like rheumatoid arthritis and earlier this year she was put on methotrexate as the milder medications were not controlling the disease. Not a step her rheumatologist took lightly (a second opinion was obtained) and my sister could really have done without ‘helpful’ people warning her of the possible terrible side effects she was risking and urging her to try god knows what. She has of course discussed CAM with her doctor, whose attitude is: “if you want to pursue an unorthodox treatment, I can’t stop you, but please inform me and above all don’t abandon conventional treatment”.

“…8.33.We recommend that robust research into the use of complementary diagnostic tests and treatments for allergy should examine the holistic needs of the patient, assessing not only the clinical improvement of allergy symptoms, but also analysing the impact of these methods upon patient wellbeing. Such trials should have clear hypotheses, validated outcome measures, risk-benefit and cost-effectiveness comparisons made with conventional treatments. Allergy centres (para 9.40) will allow the collection of information about any indirect consequences of misdiagnoses or delayed treatment…”

CAM ceaslessly and enthusiastically advertises itself for allergic disease and asthma and there are estimates that between 50-70% of such patients use some form, mostly (one hopes)alongside conventional treatments. As the House of Lords report highlighted, there is a well documented deficiency in provision of specialist clincal allergy care in the NHS. Something many promoters of CAM seem keen to exploit, e.g the unintentionally hilarious press release from SoH after the publication of the HoL 6th report (which seems no longer to be available on their website).

Incidentally, the academic “Godfather” in the UK of the arguments that placebo trials are “inappropriate” for examining homeopathy is George Lewith, see e.g. here.

Lewith often pops up in the British Medical Journal defending CAM and homeopathy, e.g. this week (Nov 10th),and is an old adversary of David Colquhoun’s. Lewith is a GP and runs a “Complementary Medicine Research Unit” at the Univ of Southampton. He also works as a private homeopathic doctor at a London clinic. If you see something medical academic-y looking excusing homeopathy’s failure in a blinded trial, it is usually penned by Lewith.

Placebos (super or not) have limits, and while they may have significant effects for ME, homeopaths make much stronger claims than this. If WJ wants to come clean and say it is a placebo, then great. But I don’t think she will.

If the homoeopathic remedy itself has a positive effect, then patients on real homoeopathy come along to the next consultation having got a bit better and the practitioner says ‘it’s all going well, carry on.’ Those on placebo turn up not so much better and the doc says ‘hmmm, this is a tricky one, let’s think a bit harder and try this instead.’

If the character of the latter type of consultation leads to more effective psychological-placebo-type recovery, then the effect of the remedy itself is confounded to some extent. Yes this would also be a problem with conventional medicine, but trials there tend to be in the format of single consultation + course of medication rather than the ‘keep trying until we think we’ve cracked it’ model.

It’s hard to see how to address this (other than by throwing up one’s hands and saying ‘Gah!!!’) You could put homoeopathy head-to-head with conventional medicine in the same format, but then it wouldn’t be blind – which leads to all kinds of problems for a condition like ME. One has to think though that if homoeopathy were SO great, the effects would be big enough to outweigh this kind of second-order stuff…

Mickel therapy…a treasure trove of bad puns!