The 10:23 campaign has now had loads of publicity and Boots have failed to address any of the central concerns: mainly, that homeopathy is a daft pseudoscience. Moreover, the pharmacy profession and the drugs regulator have remained silent.

In all likelihood, Boots will not withdraw their sugar pills and pharmacists will continue to take your money in exchange for pseudo-medicine. An immediate capitulation was never on the cards – the world does not work like that. But the Boots brand has been damaged as thousands of people have become aware of just what they are prepared to sell you in order to make money.

And let us also take on board the homeopaths argument that banning homeopathy would ‘restrict customer choice’. (Even though 10:23 did not seek to ‘ban’ homeopathy, only remove it from the pharmacy counter and, perhaps, into the health food shop next to the crystals.)

The campaign was really about making sure people understood what homeopathy is: it is not a herbal medicine, as herbs are often not used and any content gets diluted to the point where there is often nothing left. You are buying sugar pills that have had ritual magic performed on them.

As I have said, the villains here are the medicine regulators who allow deceptive labelling of these products. The MHRA say that they test the labels to make sure the public understand what they are buying. This is not true, as their recent submission to the House of Commons revealed. Nothing in their testing asked if customers understood they were buying pills that stated they contained an ingredient but that actually contained nothing, and that there was no reason to believe the pills did anything other than act as a placebo.

The legal blogger Jack of Kent has done a superb job of deconstructing the language on the labels.

Other industries have to battle with the problem with how to convey important information to the consumer that may affect buying considerations based on health: notably the food industry. In the last few years we have seen ‘traffic lights’ highlighting, for example the amount of salt in a ready meal.

Why shouldn’t the packaging of items in the pharmacy not be subject to the same clear labelling requirements?

As Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary medicine, has said,

My plea is simply for honesty. Let people buy what they want, but tell them the truth about what they are buying. These treatments are biologically implausible and the clinical tests have shown they don’t do anything at all in human beings. The argument that this information is not relevant or important for customers is quite simply ridiculous. If [pharmacists] are unable to stick to their ethical code, then they should change their code and be clear that it is alright to put profits before patients.

If we were expecting pharmacists to be honest, what would a typical homeopathic product label looks like? I suggest the following:

This quickly gets the key facts across that distinguish the product from others that might have survived some testing. After reading this, most people ought to be able to make an informed decision, and if you are the sort of person who uses crystals for deodorant then you still have your ‘right’ to buy this stuff. Everybody is happy.

Could we ever see such labelling? Somehow I doubt it, for a number of reasons.The government appears to be incapable of taking a position on pseudoscience. Indeed it has recently said that “The government does not find it helpful to define pseudoscience.”

I am sure the businesses behind the pharmacies would resist such a move fiercely as it might be difficult to see how any reasonable person would purchase a product labelled as such. The pharmacists would undoubtedly resist it as it would expose them as having being flogging worthless shit for years. Plus, their ranks appear to be filled with supporters of pseudomedicines. The recently departed president of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, the regulatory body of pharmacists, is now doing this. (Please empty your mouth of liquids before clicking link as otherwise your screen will get wet.)

Plus, and this is a big one, I would imagine that the majority of products for sale in a pharmacy such as Boots, homeopathic, complementary or regular, would be more likely to have red circles than green ones.

The fact that we could, in principle, have such a scheme and the distance we appear from being able to adopt something like this tells us how little our modern pharmacies have progressed from the quack’s apothecary of old.

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Update

Thanks to Richard’s suggestion in the comments that the homeopathy in Boots simply be moved to a section labelled ‘Placebos’.

Of course we get into a dilemma then when the professionals tell you they are giving you a placebo as is so well observed in the (hugely underrated) Smack the Pony sketch…

Related posts:

1. 10:23, Homeopathy and the Shame of the Pharmacy Profession This Saturday, hundreds of people, in many cities,  will be demonstrating outside Boots the Chemists about their selling of homeopathic remedies. Each volunteer will be taking a homeopathic ‘overdose’...
2. Boots Giving Away Worthless Therapies Thanks to Lee Warren, the Purple Magician, who saw this in King’s Cross, London. Trust Boots to be complete idiots. Double Idiots. ...
3. The Bleakest Day for Homeopathy The much anticipated House of Commons report into the Evidence Check on Homeopathy has now been published and it may well be the report that changes the face of...

Thanks to Stephen Law at the Centre of Inquiry for posting this video of myself and Simon Singh, just after our talks at Conway Hall.

The day started with a mass overdose of homeopathic pills (see report in the Telegraph; it’s also on the front page of the BBC web site) , followed by talks on the evidence for alternative medicines and his legal battles (from Simon), the reasons why homeopathy might survive and other forms of quackery die (from me) and the problems diet quacks pose for people’s understanding of good eating and the inadequacy of the law (from from Professor John Garrow, Founder of Healthwatch).

For the record, despite my continuous consumption of Lachesis, Belladonna and Sulphur for about 24 hours, I am in good health and about to have my dinner. My arms work work and all appears well.

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2. Hair Transmission Homeopathy Cut free from the tethers of evidence and reason, homeopathy, as a system of thought, is free to soar into lofty heights of wild fantasy. Unrestrained by the weight of...
3. Dutch Sceptics Have ‘Bogus’ Libel Decision Overturned On Human Rights Grounds. The Dutch sceptics group, Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij (VtdK – The Society against Quackery) have managed to overturn a important court ruling that was preventing them calling quacks quacks....

I expect to be quite alright because despite the labelling of these products, homeopathic pills are just sugar pills – there is nothing in them. They are inert and completely ineffective.

I am taking this overdose because Boots the Chemists sell these products as if they were real medicines. They make money by misleading the public that these pills can relieve them of various symptoms, from hay fever to infant teething pain. They do not, of course, and Boots know there is no evidence, but they sell them nonetheless. Hundreds of like minded people will be doing the same in cities throughout the UK as part of the 10:23 homeopathy campaign.

The Society of Homeopaths is condemning this protest as “an ill advised publicity stunt”. Why it should be ‘ill advised’ is not clear. They go on to say in their press release that they “would not therefore expect any reaction to the proposed ‘overdose’ by this group.”

Well we are all in agreement that nothing will happen then. And that is precisely the message that we want the public to take away – homeopathic remedies cannot have any effects because they contain no active substance – they are diluted to the point that no material remains. Homeopathy is a pseudo-medicine based on magical and pre-scientific belief systems that should have no place in a modern High Street pharmacy.

But, as usual, the Society of Homeopaths are not being straightforward with the public. For on another of their pages they repeat the homeopathic belief that their sugar pills can produce symptoms in healthy people. This is known as a homeopathic ‘proving’.

Volunteers or ‘provers’ take the new substance until they experience symptoms. All symptoms that result from taking the substance are recorded in detail.

Now of course this does not really happen. What homeopathic ‘provers’ experience are just random symptoms – there is no evidence that homeopathic pills can induce any consistent symptoms in people because they are just sugar pills. Such is the imagination.

If the Society of Homeopath believes this though, it is a mystery why they decline to warn the protesters about this.

The medical doctors who use homeopathy have come out strongly against this protest too. They say “The BHA regards the 10:23 stunt as grossly irresponsible”. Personally, I think that doctors misleading patients by telling them that a 19th Century pseudoscientific cultish quack medicine can help them is deeply irresponsible. I am amazed they are not struck off.

But to satisfy the homeopaths, in addition to downing by whole box of homeopathic sleeping pills, I have started taking the sulphur, belladonna and lachesis, 2 tabs of each at 2 hourly intervals. I started at 9pm last night and will continue until the tubs run out.

The lachesis is supposed to be particularly nasty. It is made from a snake venom (Bushmaster) and is supposed to induce horrific symptoms. Previous provers have reported paralysis of the arms and lots of pain. But because my pills do not actually contain any snake venom, I feel pretty confident I will be OK.

I am supposed to be giving a talk with Simon Singh and John Garrow in an hour, “Trick or Treatment: The Event.” If I am not there, you know why.

If you want to check I am alive, follow my twitter stream: http://www.twitter.com/lecanardnoir

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If you want to find out more about why I am doing this, read here.  And if you want to know why it is called the 10:23 campaign, you could do worse than read this.

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1. We would be the Sceptics answer to Jedward, if I had any Hair.   Thanks to Stephen Law at the Centre of Inquiry for posting this video of myself and Simon Singh, just after our talks at Conway Hall. The day started with...
2. 10:23, Homeopathy and the Shame of the Pharmacy Profession This Saturday, hundreds of people, in many cities,  will be demonstrating outside Boots the Chemists about their selling of homeopathic remedies. Each volunteer will be taking a homeopathic ‘overdose’...
3. The MHRA and the Labeling of Homeopathic Products Further documents have been published after the House of Commons held its enquiry into the evidence base for government policy on homeopathy. There are some real treats in there,...

Out of all the volunteer ‘overdosers’ and their supporters in the 10:23 campaign, there may well be many reasons for taking part. The homeopaths think this is a conspiracy by Big Pharma and that the demonstration proves nothing. They are entirely missing the point. But the main point, and the one I would emphasise, is that this mass overdose is designed to embarrass the pharmacists who sell these pills to the public in the full knowledge that they are useless.

The pharmacy profession has been granted statutory privileges to dispense medicines to the public.

They do so under a code of practice that insists they do act with ‘honesty and integrity’, that they do not ‘exploit the vulnerability or lack of knowledge of others’, and that they “provide accurate and impartial information to ensure that [they] you do not mislead others or make claims that cannot be justified”

When pharmacists on the high street accept cash for homeopathic pseudo-medicines that promise to relieve their customers of hay fever symptoms, help insomnia, or sooth a baby’s teething pain, they appear to be ignoring their professional standards in the pursuit of profits.

The pharmacists have evolved from the ancient protected trade of apothecaries. Since the middle ages, the state has afforded certain privileges to apothecaries to formulate and dispense medicines. Historically, these privileges have been seen as a restraint on trade by outsiders wishing to cash in on people’s desires for medicine, and as a necessary state by their supporters against rogues, quacks and charlatans.

Indeed, Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy had a very unhappy relationship with apothecaries. He felt he was being persecuted by them for allowing people to dispense their own cures. But deeper than that, his philosophy of homeopathy made it impossible for a person to simply walk into a high street store, select a remedy they required and ask an apothecary to make it up for them. Homeopathy had to be ‘individualised’ to the patient, and this was something only a skilled homeopath could do – and not some mere dispenser of medicines.

Indeed, in an exam paper that Hahnemann set for a doctor who wanted to practice Homeopathy, the tenth question, in leading terms, made this quite clear,

10. Why can the homoeopathic medicines never be dispensed by the apothecary without injury to the public?

Any true homeopathic practitioner should object strongly to the idea of a mere dispensing chemist handing out homeopathic cures.

But his objections also recognised the direct conflict between both the financial needs of the apothecary and the nature of their beliefs and training.

In a letter to a friend, Hahnemann wrote,

I do not wish to go to the town of Altenburg itself, to be in the way of you, dearest friend, and of your colleagues. I only wish to be able to settle in some country town or market village, where the post may facilitate my connexion with distant parts, and where I may not be annoyed by the pretensions of any apothecary, because, as you know, the pure practice of this art can only employ such minute weapons, such small doses of medicine, that no apothecary could supply them profitably, and owing to the mode in which he has learnt and has always carried on his business, he could not help viewing the whole affair as something ludicrous, and consequently turning the public and the patients into ridicule.

For these and other reasons it would be impossible to derive any assistance from an apothecary in the practice of homoeopathy.

As is often the case, Samuel Hahnemann is spectacularly wrong in the most interesting ways.

Firstly, Hahnemann appears to believe that you can only sell a medicinal product in proportion to the amount of substance you are vending. Indeed, as the amount of substance is proportionate to its effects, then this would be a common sense view. However, the absurdity of homeopathy is that it subverts the obvious. Hahnemann postulated that the more dilute a substance, the greater the effects. (A claim never substantiated, of course).

However, Boots the Chemist, and other modern day apothecaries understand that what it is in the pill is irrelevant. What the pharmacists in Boots are selling is not the substance of the pills (as there is quite simply nothing in homeopathic remedies bar the sugar), but a promise based on both the trusted brand of Boots and the professional standing of pharmacists.

And with that trust in the Boots brand and the authority of the pharmacist nearby behind the counter, you can charge quite a lot for worthless sugar pills. Boots homeopathic Teething Pain Relief powders contain less than 1 part in a trillion of active ingredient (and there is not even any evidence that the active ingredient does anything). They sell for nearly £5. This pseudo-medicine will do nothing for a distressed baby apart from make the parent think they are doing something and make Boots shareholders a little richer.

The professional code of ethics of a pharmacists would suggest that they are required to provide the customer with all the “necessary and relevant information”. It is surely necessary to inform someone that they are buying a worthless product that cannot work as described and there is no reason to suppose it does. Pharmacists must fall into two camps here: those that believe that homeopathic preparations do work as described, in which case they are simply incompetent, and those that shut up for fear of their jobs and for an easy life.

As David Colquhoun noted some time ago, the real villains here are the regulators of the pharmacy trade, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. They issue advice to their members about how to interpret their code of ethics when selling homeopathic quackery (under the ironic heading ‘Pharmacists – the scientists in the high street’), and what advice to give to the public. Nowhere does it suggest that you ought to tell the customer that they are buying magic pseudo-medicine.

To add to the rogues’ gallery we must also add the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (the MHRA) who grant licenses to homeopathic sellers to make claims for their products that cannot be justified by any form of evidence or rationale. They preside over a regime that has allowed the pseudo-apothecaries, such as Neal’s Yard Remedies to sell homeopathic pills for the prevention of malaria. Their light touch on the issue appears to almost offer a wink to the sellers that they can get away with anything.

The 10:23 campaign will almost certainly not stop Boots selling this quackery. There is too much money in it. Perhaps the biggest effect of the demonstration will be to raise some awareness of what your local ‘scientist on the high street’ is prepared to sell you. This should make you angry that your trust is being abused. If you cannot trust them to tell the simple truth about such obvious nonsense as homeopathy, why should you trust them on more important matters, such as the side effects of real medicines?

I shall leave my last words to repeat those Samuel Hahnemann, who showed some unusual insight when he said that,

he [the pharmacist] could not help viewing the whole affair [homeopathy] as something ludicrous, and consequently turning the public and the patients into ridicule.

And that is the pharmacists’ shame: using their trusted position to make fools of the public.

Related posts:

1. Dispensing with Homeopathy: A Proposal Let’s run with an idea and see where it goes. The 10:23 campaign has now had loads of publicity and Boots have failed to address any of the central...
2. 10:23. My Personal Homeopathic Overdose Right now, if the homeopaths are correct, I should have paralysed arms, be in severe pain, have convulsions, delirium, skin itching all over and be unable to stand. That...
3. Boots the Quack I have recently been accused of working for the ‘drug industry’ and just picking on the ‘little guys’ who are using gentle, more human, and less capitalist healing methods. Well,...

It goes without saying that homeopaths will be doubting that such a sophisticated and hard hitting campaign could be set up by a bunch of feckless, workshy scousers who sit around all day drinking in Liverpool pubs and discussing their nerdish obsession with ghosts and UFOs. Surely, Big Pharma is behind this?

Indeed, it does appear unlikely that such a move could be set up by dole-cheating scallies and alcoholic cynics. So, who is really behind all of this? The clues are in the name of the campaign.

What do the numbers 10 and 23 mean for this organisation? To understand the significance of these numbers, you need to know not just where to look, but how to look. The Sceptics themselves show that they hold the numbers to be significant by holding a mass homeopathic overdose by 300 sceptics at exactly 10:23 in the morning in a few days time.

The numbers 10 and 23 were deeply significant to the founder of homeopathy. Samuel Hahnemann was born on the 10th of April in 1755. He became a doctor on the 10th of August in 1779 and his groundbreaking book, The Organon, was first published in 1810. Hahnemann studied medicine in Vienna (German, Wien W = 23rd letter of the alphabet) for 10 months. He died in July 1843, signified by the number 23 (7 + 1 + 8 + 4 + 3). The name of the campaign would look to be a reference to the death of homeopathy – a stated campaign aim.

The numbers also have deep occult meaning. In tarot, the number 10 is highly significant, being the end of the pip sequence and indicating that ‘the cycle has ended and a new one is beginning.’ In astrology, the number ten is associated with ‘intelligence and integrity’, an obvious conceit on the part of Merseyside sceptics. It is also associated with great rises and falls, and also is the number of the Sun. Although Boots appears to be the target right now, perhaps the homeopathic pharmacy Helios (the sun personified) is their real target. Whatever the target, the number ten has been chosen to signify the end of one era and the heralding of a new beginning.

The number 23 is an even more powerful occult number and is also very important for scientists. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859 (1+8+5+9 = 23). The Hiroshima bomb was dropped at 8.15am (8+15= 23). It has more terribly auspicious associations: Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times. The terrorist attacks on New York happened on 9/11 2001 (9+11+2+0+0+1=23).

The number 1023 would also appear to contain a little joke from the sceptics who believe that homeopathy is nothing but magical thinking as, according to Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin, 1023 was the year that all fairy tales happened. It is also worth noting that Oliver Wendell Holmes was the early arch nemesis of homeopathy and first completely debunked the practice in a lecture given in 1842 entitled Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions. His initials, OH, add up to 23 (O=15, H=8) and his middle initial is the 23rd letter of the alphabet.

Given the significance of this number, could the 10:23 campaign have bigger aims? Although targeting homeopathy right now, it is worth looking at the other targets of these sceptic groups. One of the most significant set-backs to the so-called sceptic movement was when chiropractors won a historic suit against the American Medical Association and stopped AMA campaigning against chiropractic and calling it quackery.

That court decision was now exactly 23 years ago.

It would appear to be an extraordinary coincidence that 23 years later the chiropractors are back in court. On the 23rd of next month in the 10th year of the millennium, Simon Singh will be in court to appeal in his case against the British Chiropractic Association.

This hearing will be highly unusual in that the presiding judges will include the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales and also the Master of the Rolls. These are two of the most powerful judges in Britain. Why would they be presiding over a relatively minor appeal court that is only hearing an appeal about a preliminary decision on meaning and not even the full case?

We need to look a little deeper and go back to Liverpool, the home of the campaign. Indeed, we find the number 23 has deep ties with Merseyside. Liverpool art school student William Ernest Drummond set up the mysterious group known as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (23 letters), sometimes known as the KLF or K-Foundation. He once wrote the line “23 years is a mighty long time”. They famously presented an award for the ‘worst artist’ to Rachel Whiteread on 23rd of November 1993 and burnt a million pounds on the 23rd of August 1994. More worryingly, Drummond was involved in the Liverpool production of the Illuminatus!, a musical story of conspiracy theories about the hidden rulers of the world. It opened on the 23rd of November 1976 (1+9+7+6=23) and the show consisted of five acts (2+3=5), each 23 minutes in length, with 23 actors on stage.

Robert Anton Wilson once claimed in a 1988 interview that “23 is a part of the cosmic code. It’s connected with so many synchronicities and weird coincidences.” Given that the number 23 is so significant, could the Secret Rulers of the World be somehow behind the 10:23 campaign? Could they be using their minions, the CEOs of the pharmaceutical companies, and their minions, the skeptics in the pub drones, to direct this attack against alternative medicine?

One clue comes from the Merseyside Sceptics statement that they want to have 300 people in the campaign taking homeopathic overdoses. Surely, it will be very hard to get exactly 300 people to do this? This is quite likely to be a code for the real intelligence behind what is going on: The Committee of 300.

The Committee of 300 is a secret society formed in Britain in the 18th Century, and is also known as the ‘Hidden Hand’. An MI5 officer once wrote a book exposing their antics and they are thought to be in charge of the banking system, judiciary (hence the Singh case) and the media (which explains why sceptics find it so easy to publish their denouncements of alternative medicine). The Committee is thought to be even higher up in the Illuminati than the Bilderberg Group.

One surprise is that the campaign was not launched on the 23rd of October (10/23). Indeed, this date is known to many scientists as International Mole Day (http://www.moleday.org/) and is celebrated annually on this date from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m. It is a strange celebration that seeks to enrol children in a strictly materialistic view of the world. In rituals that mirror the ceremonies of the satanic, Illuminati group, the Bohemian Club, who worship a giant owl, they do not have a flag to salute, but instead ask new members to bow their heads towards the ground (where the moles are) and repeat the scientistic pledge of allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the mole, to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, and to the atomic mass for which it stands, one number, most divisible, with atoms and molecules for all.” A chant which would be anathema to all homeopaths.

It is difficult to ignore the significance of the chosen numbers. The Knights Templar had 23 Grand Masters. William Shakespeare was born on the 23rd of the month and died on the 23rd. Adam and Eve were supposed to have 23 daughters. Princess Leia was held in detention block AA23 on the Death Star (AA = 1 + 1 which equals 10 in binary arithmetic, look it up on Wookieepedia). John Nash, Nobel Prize winning mathematician was obsessed with the number 23. He wrote exactly 23 papers. It is one of only two numbers that need nine cubes to represent it . (The other being 239.)

(Incidentally, 23 was the date of death of a Wilhelm Hahnemann. Hahnemann was noted for playing exactly 23 games for the Austrian football team, 23 games for the German national team and scoring exactly 23 goals for his club to become the league’s top scorer. He once achieved a remarkable double (2) hat-trick (3) whilst playing for Germany. Of the 46 (23+23) caps he won, his teams won 23 of these matches. )

Portentous stuff. So soon, in many cities we are going to see many demonstrations against Boots selling homeopathy. My advice to homeopaths on the their day of reckoning would have to come from Matthew Chapter 10, verse 23: “But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another”. One day though, you are going to run out of cities.

The homeopaths may well think this is just a nerdish group showing off a bit. My analysis would suggest there are much darker forces at work here.

Remember: 10:23. There’s nothing in it.

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1. George Vithoulkas Makes a Fool of Himself This is a minor one but it is worth a brief post: George Vithoulkas is considered to be one of the top intellectuals in the homeopathic world. Revered for...
2. 10:23, Homeopathy and the Shame of the Pharmacy Profession This Saturday, hundreds of people, in many cities,  will be demonstrating outside Boots the Chemists about their selling of homeopathic remedies. Each volunteer will be taking a homeopathic ‘overdose’...
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The new document was submitted to the enquiry after Professor Kent Woods (pictured) was challenged over how the regulator allows homeopathic products to make claims on their labels when it is known that these claims are false. The concern is that a customer could walk into Boots the Chemist and see two products for, say, hayfever and be unaware that the homeopathic product has no active ingredient, is just a sugar pill and will not help the relief of any symptoms. Clearly, this is a very unsatisfactory situation, where the medicines regulator is charged with ensuring medicines are safe and do what they claim but appears to wave homeopathic products through without regard to these principles. The public are being badly misled by the people charged with protecting them.

In the enquiry, Evan Harris MP asked a very pertinent question of Professor Woods,

Do you think that people reading that will think that it works for symptomatic relief of those minor conditions, or do you think that label that you have read out – and please feel free to read it out again – would make the average person think, which is the truth, as far as you are concerned, that there is no evidence of efficacy backing it up. Which of those two do you think is most likely, for the average person?

At is issue is the question of how far the MHRA go to ensure that the public are not being misled by the labeling they authorize on homeopathic products.

Professor Woods response was,

Well, fortunately, by law all packaging and patient information leaflets are subjected to user testing to ensure that they are comprehensible to the man in the street, and indeed that seems to be a very straightforward statement of the reality. This is a homeopathic medicinal product used within the homeopathic tradition for the symptomatic relief of sprains, muscular aches and bruising or swelling after contusions. That is what it says and the user testing is part of the approval of that leaflet, has the labeling been tested on the average man in the street.

This did not satisfy the MP, Dr Harris,

Sadly my question was not “What does it say? Has it been tested?” My question is, and maybe it is the result of this testing and you need to tell me, does the average person think that that label suggests that it is going to be useful for the symptomatic relief of those indications?

This is an important question. Does the MHRA care if the public are misled by homeopathic labeling or not? What do people make of the labels?

The new documents posted on the House of Commons web site shed light on this question.

It is worth reporoducing the test questions that are used to establish what people make of the labeling on a homeopathic product:

Three rounds of user testings were carried out with ten participants in each testing. Twelve questions relating to the key safety messages were asked and were designed to assess whether the respondent was able to find the information, understand it and use the information. The questions asked were as follows:

1. Can you tell me the name of this medicine?

2. What does the label say that this medicine is for?

3. If you take too much of this product (overdose) what does the label tell you to do?

4. Is there any advice on the label for women who are pregnant or breast feeding?

5. What does the label say is the active ingredient in this medicine?

6. If you have missed a dose of this medicine, what does the label tell you to do?

7. Once you have opened your medicine, how does the leaflet tell you that you should store it?

8. This medicine contains Arnica Montana 30C. What are the other ingredients in this medicine?

9. How many pillules are there in the Clikpak container?

10. This medicine contains lactose and sucrose which are types of sugar. If you have an intolerance to some sugars, what does the pack tell you to do before taking this product?

11. How many pillules does the pack say that you should take in a dose and how many times a day should you take them?

12. The pillules in this medicine are contained in a plastic Clikpak to help protect them. What instructions does the label give you as to how to dispense the pillules from the Clikpak?

These questions fail to address the central concern that labeling homeopathic products for the relief of specific symptoms is going to mislead patients into thinking that there is reason to believe this is true and that there is evidence to back up the stated claims. In my opinion, the MHRA is complicit in supporting a fraud on the public.

Question 2 is quite insidious in my view. It tests to see if the subject understands the medicine is targeted at specific conditions, when there is no evidence to suggest that the medicine can help. What would the answer to the question mean? Question 5 implies there is an active ingredient in the pill. If the test subject answered ‘Arnica’ would the MHRA conclude that the patient has been deceived by the packaging or has just read the label and concluded that it is telling the truth?

Question 8 explicitly states that the pill contains “Arnica Montana 30C”. Only someone with a good understanding of the nonsensical production methods of homeopathy would appreciate that this means that the pill does not contain any Arnica (it has all been diluted away). What would the average customer on the street conclude? In the original hearing, Professor Woods states that the labeling is designed for people who believe in homeopathy,

To begin with the fact that this is a homeopathic remedy, we are making provision for a group of people who believe in homeopathic remedies and, therefore, the first thing to establish is that this particular remedy is recognised by homeopathic practitioners as a homeopathic remedy. That is the essence of what we are trying to prove.

This is simple nonsense, as the products are likely to end up on the shelves of Boots where people may simply misread ‘homeopathic’ as ‘natural’ rather than ‘batshit magic pseudo-medicine’, the wording that ought to be on the label.

The MHRA appear to completely miss the point over homeopathy. As I have written before, they fail twice over. Firstly, they endorse misleading labels on homeopathic products and fail in their primary mission to “ensure that medicines and medical devices work.” Secondly, they appear to be blind to the blatant abuses that do go on in the creation of homeopathic medicines where claims are made explicitly and implicitly without even seeking MHRA approval.

The mistake that all regulatory efforts from this government has made is to attempt to regulate alternative medicines as if they were medicines. They are not: they are pseudo-medicines and need a different style of thinking. Trading Standards should take a more leading role in prosecuting misleading claims as they would with any other consumer product. The MHRA need to stop feeling they need to treat homeopathy as if it were medicine and give special dispensations in the claims that they can make. As with any other medicine, homeopathy should only be allowed to make claims if they can back them up with sound evidence.

I understand that there are some efforts within the MHRA to look into the issues I have raised with them. It has been several months since I last heard from the investigating officer involved. My first enquiry took 17 months for a response. In the meantime, I hope the the upcoming publication of the House of Commons Evidence Check report into homeopathy will be severely critical of them for presiding over a regulatory regime that endorses the homeopathic trade in misleading the public.

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1. The MHRA and their Double Failure over Homeopathy The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) have been heavily criticised in recent years for abandoning their core mission by allowing homeopathic sugar pills to contain statements about...
2. Skinny Homeopathic Grande Cappuccino To Go Please Yes, sometimes I do get filled with self-doubts, usually in the night. It soon passes. But you see, there is just so much quackery out there that any rational and...
3. Neal’s Yard Remedies ‘rapped by medicines regulator’ In a recent post, I described how Neal’s Yard Remedies had withdrawn their Malaria homeopathy pills. Their press release said, as this is obviously a contentious issue which is causing...