George Vithoulkas is considered to be one of the top intellectuals in the homeopathic world. Revered for his teachings and fundamentalist approach to the teachings of Hahnemann, he is probably one of the best known homeopaths alive today. His writings underpin much of the contemporary homeopathic opposition to modern medicine, vaccines and science. He thinks AIDS was caused by repeated use of antibiotics amongst homosexuals with venereal disease. You can find out more about him from the Google Knol he wrote about himself.

From his Greek lair, he has obviously been watching the collapse of homeopathy in the UK, and has decided to intervene with a challenge to the critics of his chosen art.

It is worth reprinting his challenge in full.

George Vithoulkas challenges the Sceptics! (22.2.2010)

As the sceptics have made a website calling it 10.23 http://www.1023.org.uk/ in order to degrade homeopathy, George Vithoulkas is suggesting to them the following proposal!

I challenge the Sceptics !

Several sceptics in 10:23 anti homeopathy campaign (swallowed in public each one a full bottle of different homeopathic remedies  just to show that there was nothing in them.

I propose to swallow the same content of about 60 tablets but in a different way:
Swallow one tablet every day.

I propose the remedy to be Alumina 200C ( a dilution far beyond the Avogadro number) and I promise them that in the end of 60 days a considerable number of them (up to 10% or more)  will be suffering with slight to severe constipation.

In homeopathy one bottle or one tablet is considered as one dose only. Most probably they knew this?

The first condition for the participants of  this experiment  will be to have a good general state of health and  a normal stool once a day.

The second to be brave enough to continue with the experiment till the end of 60 days and not stop with the first signs of constipation.

Tthe [sic] third, to be   honest enough to report the effect.

I promise you that this experiment will  settle the matter once for all.

You need to find 40 sceptics for this experiment.

As for the side effect? It will be over within a week or two after stopping the remedy.

If you are real sceptics dare to stay with your convictions and do the experiment publicly!

George Vithoulkas

The stupidity of this test really deserves no comment. But should any homeopath be reading this, I will spell it out for them.

Constipation is a normal condition in that any individual can expect to experience some mild (or more) form of this as part of the natural rhythms of our bodies. Anyone with a sufficiently varied diet and with a normal active lifestyle can expect their digestive process to show some variations. Only the dull are clockwork.

So, given any group of individuals, with normal stools on day 1, you can expect a small number of them to be suffering ‘slight to severe’ constipation at any arbitrary date in the future. Quite what number I would not like to say, but “up to 10% or more” is a pretty good guess as this covers a very large range of possibilities. George fails to say what would constitute a ‘slight constipation’. Would missing my ‘ten o’clock’ regular’ by two hours count as mild constipation?

Thus, without even taking the magic sugar pills, we should not be surprised at achieving Vithoulkas’s rather wide ranging blockage goals. George does not give us an expected baseline measure for what would constitute a failure of this test. Even better, he could have proposed that the trial was blinded and controlled so that we could compare taking the magic sugar pills with people who just take an identical placebo. We could then apply appropriate statistical tests to see if any result was significant. But no.

As such, any conceivable outcome of this test would be completely ambiguous and not allow any conclusion to be made. If George did, as no doubt he would, he would just be laughed at by anyone who used their brains to think rather than their bowels.

And this is supposed to be from homeopathy’s greatest mind. This test is from the man who appears to delight in proclaiming that James Randi bottled out of testing his homeopathic powers, when in reality Randi has asked Vilhoulkas to fill in the application form before going further.

But George appears to be above application forms.

If George is keen to demonstrate the powers of homeopathy, perhaps be would like to take my simple challenge – which is blinded and unambiguous. Given any six different bottles of homeopathic pills of his choosing, but with the labels removed, can he tell them apart using whatever method he wants and with as many helpers as he sees fit.

Nothing to stop you Georgie Boy. No annoying and demeaning application forms fill in. Just the regular guts to do it.

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In a thorough appraisal of the issues and evidence that will become required reading for any health official looking at the public funding and provision of homeopathy, the MPs conclude,

By providing homeopathy on the NHS and allowing MHRA licensing of products which subsequently appear on pharmacy shelves, the Government runs the risk of endorsing homeopathy as an efficacious system of medicine. To maintain patient trust, choice and safety, the Government should not endorse the use of placebo treatments, including homeopathy. Homeopathy should not be funded on the NHS and the MHRA should stop licensing homeopathic products.

Both areas have come under intense criticism from the MPs.  Of course, the central question of evidence into the policy concerning such areas must be the evidence of the effectiveness of homeopathic treatment. The evidence submitted by homeopaths was a complete ragbag, ranging from the selective, the misleading, the irrelevant to the bizarre.

As such, homeopathy will be under more pressure than it could have conceived possible. It may not be that this government acts on this report – elections are looming – but that is not important. Within PCTs, the NHS will start rethinking and no doubt start unwinding provision for it. There will be a ratchet effect. Bit by bit, funding will stop, never to return. West Kent PCT has done so. The likes of Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol and London will surely follow. The Medicines Regulator will be under strong pressure to review its stance as it is clearly complicit in misleading the public with how it allows homeopathic products to be labelled.

So, what does the report conclude?

It appears to be a very well thought out document. Firstly, it sets out what its expectations of government would be for making policy on homeopathy:

Our expectations of the evidence base relevant to government policies on the provision of homeopathy are straightforward. We would expect the Government to have a view on the efficacy of homeopathy so as to inform its policy on the NHS funding and provision of homeopathy. Such a view should be based on the best available evidence, that is, rigorous randomised controlled trials and meta-analyses and systematic reviews of RCTs. If the effects of homeopathy can be primarily attributed to the placebo effect, we would expect the Government to have a view on the ethics of prescribing placebos.

The absence of a requirement to show evidence of efficacy means that the MHRA’s current arrangements would allow a person to seek, for example, a licence for a confectionary product as long as he or she persuaded a number of people that it was a homeopathic product with therapeutic effects. Such a development would, rightly, bring the licensing arrangements into disrepute. We are concerned that the lack of rigour in the MHRA’s licensing processes by, for example, allowing the use of provings is allowing homeopathic products to build medical claims unsupported by any evidence. We conclude that the MHRA should seek evidence of efficacy to the same standard for all the products examined for licensing which make medical claims and we recommend that the MHRA remove all references to homeopathic provings from its guidance other than to make it clear that they are not evidence of efficacy.

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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’...
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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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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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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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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...
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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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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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Over the past twelve months, the People’s Medical Journal, the Daily Mail, has given us the following stories about coffee:

So, on balance, it looks as if his year coffee will have been doing us good as long as we are not trying for a baby, wanting to avoid wrecking our brain, reducing damage our baby’s DNA or not wanting to hallucinate wildly.

My nearest big town, Oxford, boasts a little coffee shop that dates back to 1650. It was one of the first places to brew coffee in the UK and is still going strong. Before long, Oxford saw coffee houses as centres of public scientific discussion and debate, with Robert Boyle taking part in the Oxford Chemical Club, which met in a coffee house, and would later become the Royal Society. (We now hold our Skeptics in the Pub, a little further up the High Street.)

It would look like concerns from coffee drinking did not first come from the problems of direct consumption but from the threat caused by radical thought and discussion taking place in the newly emerging coffee houses. The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford soon had to ban the perusal of pamphlets in the coffee houses that were critical of the University and the State. King Charles II tried to shut down the Oxford coffee shops for fear of fermenting rebellion – but the outcry was so huge, the order was soon rescinded.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, coffee was a ubiquitous drink. And health fears were sure to follow.

Enter Samuel Hahnemann, founder of the doctrines of homeopathy. Before Hahnemann had fully formed his ideas about shaken and diluted water as a panacea, he had quite different and conflicting views about what caused illness and what could cure it.

In 1803, he published an essay entitled, On the Effects of Coffee. This essay gives fascinating insights into the beliefs of the inventor of homeopathy and how they must have changed. He starts out by explaining that

In order to enjoy a healthy and long life, man requires foods which contain nutritious, but no irritating, medicinal parts.

Hahnemann sees a clear distinction between medicine and food. However, he worries that many foods are more medicinal in their nature than nutritious,

Medicinal things are substances that do not nourish, but alter the healthy condition of the body.

Coffee is a purely medicinal substance.

We are told that the only foods that are are free from all medicinal properties are spring water and milk. All foods appear to have some degree of medicinal quality and so should be eaten with caution. If we want to flavour our food “the only substances that have been found to be harmless and suitable for the human body are kitchen salt, sugar and vinegar.”

All other accessaries, which we term spices, and all spirituous and fermented liquors, bear a greater or less resemblance to medicines in their nature. The nearer they resemble medicines, the more frequently and the more copiously they are taken into our bodies, the more objectionable are they, the more prejudicial to health and long life.

Hahnemann, in choosing his diet, is then left with a bit of a quandary, as he believes that medicines should only be used on the sick,

Used by themselves, and when no disease is present, they are absolutely hurtful tilings for health and normal life. Their frequent use as articles of diet deranges the harmonious concordance of our organs, undermines health and shortens life. A wholesome medicine for a healthy individual is a contradiction of terms.

Interestingly, Hahnemann tells us,

All medicines have, in strong doses, a noxious action on the sensations of the healthy individual.

At this point in time, it would appear that Hahnemann believed that a medicine’s effect is positively associated with its dose. His later homeopathic ideas would, illogically, reverse this point – a matter that has subjected homeopathy to continuous derision since its inception.

Hahnemann’s dislike of coffee appears to stem from what he believes is its unnatural bitter taste,

No one ever smoked tobacco for the first time in his life without disgust; no healthy person ever drank unsugared black coffee for the first time in his life with gusto—a hint given by nature to shun the first occasion for transgressing the laws of health, and not to trample so frivolously under our feet the warning instinct implanted in us for the preservation of our life.

However, Hahnemann did understand the benefits of coffee. Indeed, it is almost as if he knew me personally, and my general demeanour in the morning,

In the first moments or quarters of an hour after awaking, particularly when this takes place earlier than usual, every one who is not living completely in a state of rude nature, has a disagreeable feeling of not thoroughly awakened consciousness, of confusion, of laziness, and want of pliancy in the limbs ; it is difficult to move quickly, reflection is a labour.

But, see, coffee removes this natural disagreeable sensation, this discomfort of the mind and body, almost instantaneously; we suddenly become completely alive.

He also recognised the benefits of a post-prandial coffee. If you have overindulged during a meal, a coffee can put things right.

Coffee puts a sudden stop to this lassitude of mind and body, and removes the disagreeable sensation in the abdomen after a meal. The more refined gourmands drink it immediately after dinner—and they obtain this unnatural effect in a high degree. They become gay, and feel as light as though they had taken little or nothing into their stomach.

And, as an aphrodisiac,

Even the sexual desire, which in our age has been exalted into the chief of all pleasures, is excited by the primary action of coffee more than by any other artificial means. As quick as lightning there arise voluptuous images in the mind from very moderate exciting cause, and the excitation of the genitals to complete ecstacy become the work of a few seconds; the ejaculation of the semen is almost irrestrainable.

I wonder where Samuel Hahnemann got his coffee from? Maybe Mr Gold Blend turned out to be a bit of a disappointment after all.

Anyway.

So what is the problem, you might think? Well all of this Muslim roasted bean infusion imbibing is rather unnatural. And if you obtained some benefits from the coffee, then the payback was going to be worse than the gains,

When the first transient effect of coffee has departed after a few hours, there follows gradually the opposite state, the secondary action. The more striking the former was, so much the more observable and disagreeable is the latter.

The comedown from your caffeinated high caused all sorts of problems. Peter Morrell lists all the Hahnemannian problems associated with coffee drinking,

constipation, impotence, dental caries, abscesses in children, pulmonary mucus, blue rings around the eyes, leucorrhea, ulcers, general megrim, nervous affections, chronic diseases, insomnia, stammering of speech, lack of appetite for food, ophthalmias, rattling in the chest, etc.

Indeed, Morrell suggests that “Hahnemann was tempted in 1803 to ascribe to Coffee a grand theory of chronic disease remarkably similar to that which he later, in 1827, ascribed to the Itch animal of Scabies”

In developing his theories of illness and homeopathy, Hahnemann came to realise that it was a mistake to ascribe all these bad effects to coffee. In his essay, Chronic Diseases, he says,

That the drinking of warm coffee and Chinese tea…has further augmented the tendency of this period to a multitude of chronic diseases and thus aided psora, I least of all can doubt, as I have made prominent, perhaps too prominent, the part which coffee takes with respect to the bodily and mental sufferings of humanity, in my little work on the ‘Effects of Coffee’. This perhaps undue prominence given was owing to the fact that I had not then as yet discovered the chief source of chronic disease in Psora.

The strange sounding psora became the new Cause of All Illness for his homeopathic theories. And no doubt, the comments section of an early 19th Century online edition of the Daily Mail would have been full of curses to ‘scientists’ not being able to make their mind up about anything.

Morrell, the historian of homeopathy, criticises Hahnemann for using selective evidence to come up with his coffee theories and jumping too quickly to extrapolated conclusions about his observations.

Being convinced in his mind of the certainty of the theory apparently impelled him to then find ‘evidence’ for it, no matter how ridiculous. That was my main point. Further, one might say, he showed a peculiar and recurrent tendency to create ‘grand theories’ upon what is arguably scant evidence.

It was a tendency and a mistake that Hahnemann was destined to repeat when he observed that the bark of Peruvian tree could cure malaria – from which he developed his new ‘grand theory’ of homeopathy,  like-cures-like. His life was then a continual search for any evidence, no matter how slight, to back up his over-reaching scheme. This being a grand tradition that homeopaths continue to this day.

And, I guess, this is what we see in these contradictory Daily Mail stories too. We feel guilty about the obvious pleasures of a coffee and intuitively believe that this must be doing us harm, but we also easily latch onto any evidence that suggests that we are right to continue with our habit. The newspaper columnists provide us with over interpreted views of small studies that have been extrapolated into possible dramatic interventions we can make in our lives to ensure we are free from disease. The stories miss all the subtleties, uncertainties and nuances that make definite recommendations impossible and so the reader is left with a confused impression of contradictory ideas about an every day, and almost certainly relatively harmless, little pleasure.

And it is, of course, the scientists who are blamed for this fog of nutritional confusion.

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The Society has long been committed to the highest standards for homeopathy, having run a voluntary regulatory system for the last 30 years and a course recognition process for the last 15 years. Further, it was the first homeopathy organisation to institute a Code of Ethics & Practice. Members must meet the stringent standards of competence for clinical and administrative practice set by the Society. Consequently our members are trained to very high academic and professional standards.

The government appears to be convinced that the public can be protected by ensuring that the practitioners of pseudomedical treatments have had proper, accredited training. Setting up the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (Ofquack) is predicated on that only people who have met standards of training can be registered.

I would suggest that the exact opposite is true. That training in irrational beliefs is likely to create a more dangerous practitioner.

To highlight my concerns, I want to discuss some course notes that arrived in my post. They were sent to me by a homeopath (let me call her P) who, after a great deal of reflection, had become quite concerned about what and how she had been taught.

The notes consist of a course outline, handouts and hand-written notes and describe a series of lectures on treating cancer with homeopathy. All the courses were given by the same lecturer, let’s call him homeopath H, at a college that was one of the first accredited by the Society.

First of all, it is quite a shock to see that a homeopathy college is giving lectures on treating cancer with homeopathy. Let us remember that homeopathy is just a chat and sugar pills. One would have thought that the best a homeopath can do is be supportive of their customer when going through difficult treatments – basic tea and sympathy. We would expect the homeopath to comply with the Society’s Code of Ethics and ensure that they have a “sound, open, co-operative and professional relationship” with their customer’s GP and act within “the bounds of their legal and ethical responsibilities and competencies”.

However, my previous investigations of homeopathy in the UK would suggest the exact opposite is true; that the Code of Ethics is a mere unenforced fig leaf and that homeopaths are trained to have a huge antipathy towards real medical practitioners. Furthermore, what homeopaths say to the outside world is quite different from what they say to each other.

These course notes are a horrifying example of this. Breathtaking in their stupidity, arrogance and cruelty.

At the centre of the lectures is a detailed case history and video of the treatment of a patient with cancer. Patient J appears to be refusing to speak to his GP anymore and H starts off by advising the patient to eat organic brown rice and drink spring water “to detox as quickly as possible”. Right from the word go, the homeopath puts their customer on a very restrictive diet for nonsensical reasons.

It gets much worse.

The lectures describe the homeopath’s responses to the progression of J’s illness and why different sugar pills are selected. And it is worth remembering this as you read the notes. No matter what justifications are given for each pill selection, J will have been given just plain sugar pills: the only difference being what might have been written on the labels.

A word of warning is given to the students on the course:

It is illegal to treat cancer. Treat patients who happen to have cancer

So, the lecturer understands that as homeopaths, advertising and offering to treat cancer would be breaking the law. Never mind. Use some weasel words in a shallow attempt to circumvent such inconveniences. Now, before I go on, I would say that I fully understand and could support genuine complementary therapies helping people with cancer cope with the emotional trauma of their disease and treatments. This is not what we see here though. We see nothing complementing a patient’s treatment and nothing about just happening to treat people who may have cancer. These notes describe a direct attempt to rid J of their cancer, no matter what word trickery H tries to pull.

Indeed, the antipathy to real treatments is clear in the notes. It is even suggested that it might be the chemotherapy (Rx) that kills patients:

It is the Rx that kills them. When people choose only to be treated homeopathically – have to have strength of character to see it through – pressure from allopaths and family.

It is not clear who has to have the ‘strength of character’. No doubt the patient must have their beliefs reinforced that homeopathy will save them, but also that the homeopaths must not buckle and allow the patient to return to real treatment.

Doctors are described as ‘allopaths’, the derogatory term used by the creator of homeopathy for those that did not adhere to his methods. From its inception, homeopath was never intended to be a complementary medicine to anything. It was designed as a complete system of medicine in its own right – suitable for everything and everyone. (The Society of Homeopaths still describes its methods as such on its home page.) Worse, Samuel Hahnemann saw the cause of many diseases as being due to treatments from ‘allopaths’. These beliefs obviously continue into current courses.

The students are told that,

Cancer in unvaccinated people tends to be in older people.

Another, near universal dogma amongst homeopaths are that vaccinations are ineffective and are actually the cause of many illness. Most see a conspiracy amongst ‘allopaths’ to keep us ill and in need of their drugs. The implication in these notes is that unvaccinated people are healthier and do not get cancer until later in life. These cancers, we are told, are slower growing and due to ‘psora’ (mythical homeopathic causes of illness), not vaccines, and these types of cancer ‘don’t kill them’.

If homeopathy is so good, then homeopaths are going to need good excuses for why their treatments fail. Homeopathy has had two hundred years to come up with good excuses. Again, allopathic drugs can destroy a patients ‘vitality’. H tells his students,

Not everyone has the vitality to deal with tumours – some people reabsorb – some people form calcification around it.

For those patients who kill themselves, “most people who commit suicide have been on antidepressants.”

The lecture notes are full of details about what homeopathic remedy can be used with what cancer symptoms. You can see similar sorts of nonsense on popular homeopathy web sites, such as hpathy. Along with these remedies, there are lots of unevidenced and irrational assertions about the nature of cancer, such as,

Breasts are the seat of mothering and there is usually a mothering issue in breast cancer.

When pain continues it is usually because we are denying something. When we deal with issue, pain goes away.

These ‘emotional’ issues are important for homeopaths as they see this as being ‘holistic’. We must not think that in describing these emotional states homeopaths are attempting to treat specifically these states – no, treating these emotions is indistinguishable from treating the disease. The direct implication is if that a sugar pill remedy can counter ‘mother issues’, the breast cancer will go away.

The remedy selection also contains advice for how to treat patients who have refused to go it alone with homeopathy and are also being treated in a hospital. There are remedies to ‘strengthen the kidneys’ after chemotherapy and bizarrely,

Potentised MRI can be used after scans.

Quite what this means is at first a little difficult to fathom. However, homeopathy is not just about diluted herbs. This is an example of an one of the more bizarre remedies where an ‘intangible’ essence is captured, usually by holding some vial in the vicinity of what you wish to make a remedy from, and then carrying out your magic dilution. You can find remedies made from ‘mobile phone’, the ‘light from venus’ and ‘antimatter’. Here, the MRI scan has been capture to counteract the bad effects (whatever they are) from an MRI scan.

It gets much worse.

At some point during the treatment of J, it became clear that he had TB and that this was being treated by a dreaded ‘allopath’ with their poisonous cocktail of drugs.

The lecture notes describe the drug regime that J was on. H makes it clear that TB is a notifiable disease.

Now has TB – TB notifiable disease.

So have to have Rx by law – or can be sectioned.

TB is notifiable because it is contagious and dangerous, killing about half of untreated infected people. Very effective treatments now exist, but it takes a long time on a cocktail of drugs which can have side effects.

In the notes, H appears to conspire with the patient to only take rifampicin, which can colour urine red, and another drug which may show up in a urine test, to convince the doctors that the treatment regime was being adhered to. In place of the real therapy, J is given more homeopathy and vitamin pills. (H, the lecturer, also runs an online vitamin store.)

P’s notes simply say, “This was illegal – [H]’s conscience dictated what he did.”

You may be shocked by this and quite rightly. Taking only part of the drug regime can lead to very bad complications, such as drug resistance. Such actions stand a high chance of killing someone with TB. But, even within the world of homeopathy, such actions are explicitly forbidden by the code of ethics. We can only ask, just what does this code mean when a homeopaths ‘conscience’ so easily overrides it?

J did not get better, as you might have guessed. The case study documents the terrible pain, fear and inevitable deterioration experienced by someone essentially untreated for cancer. Eventually, J declines further homeopathic help and dies some time later.

Now, all I have here is one student’s notes from a lecture series that happened over a decade ago. The college that this took place in has since changed hands. The lecturer is now running another accredited college and has since been made a Fellow of his registration body for services to homeopathy.

But this is not the only evidence to suggest that serious disconnects are manifest between the stated code of ethics of homeopaths and the actual practice of homeopaths in their training. Blogger ‘land tim forgot’ has documented his concerns about the Allen College of Homeopathy and their approach to cancer. Again, shocking stuff. Edzard Ernst has been reported in the BMJ talking about how the Society of Homeopaths appear to break their own code of ethics on their web site by posting “speculative,” “misleading,” and “deceptive” statements.

Can we really trust homeopaths to police themselves? The answer is a resounding ‘no’. They have failed to stop the extremes in their trade that threaten lives. They refused to condemn the homeopaths caught out handing out sugar pills to prevent malaria. When the WHO issued a statement saying homeopathy should not be used for the treatment of HIV/Aids, they resorted to misleading bluster. And it appears to be not just a fringe that have dangerous views. Fundamentalist approaches to homeopathy are taught as mainstream. In discussions with P, she tells me homeopathy in the UK has become dominated with a dogmatic approach to issues and that those that might question lecturers are bullied into silence.

Homeopathy in the UK has become a pseudomedical cult where the novitiates are quickly taught not to question, where conspiracy theories about Big Pharma are used to ensure external criticism is ignored and where irresponsible practices are taught as heroic actions.

All homeopaths need is blind and ignorant faith. One line in the cancer notes chillingly stood out,

If you do not understand what is going on – trust and wait. Homeopathy is the ability to trust and wait.

And in the meantime, their patients are being denied life saving treatments. Their fears about medicine are being turned into a distrust of doctors. Their autonomy is being replaced with false hope. Their chances for a longer life are being replaced by conspiratorial fantasy. This is not complementary medicine. It is the despair of our capacity for irrationality and delusion.

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