Skeptics on Homeopathy

[R]

from an Article "Where Do We Go From Here" in 2007:

Wait, it gets even worse!

Leaving these Gallup findings aside, it's painfully clear
that certain other paranormal beliefs — "Intelligent
Design" creationism and homeopathy, for example — have
enjoyed explosive, stratospheric growth on our watch.

Homeopathy is my favorite example. I'm just 32 years
old, yet I can personally remember when homeopathy
was (quite rightly) an obscure, fringe notion. Yet, if you
were to ask a busload of people today whether they
thought there was probably something to homeopathy,
I bet almost every hand would go up. It's everywhere
now, an accepted commonplace. My veterinarian sells
homeopathic preparations with a straight face, as
do the pharmacies in my neighborhood. My midwife
recommended a homeopathic product to my wife
to induce labor. (Now, other mothers and parenting
magazines constantly recommend homeopathic
potions for teething and similar complaints.)

How on Earth did that load of magic hogwash
become accepted so universally, from suburban
homes to news networks, from corporate
boardrooms to the halls of Congress?

For all that it's been branded otherwise, homeopathy is
an utterly magical, literally "paranormal" claim. Further,
it fails miserably to do what it promises. And, on top
of it all, its central claims are flat-out hilarious on
their face. Homeopathy is made up of Bizarro World
notions (such as the idea that halving the dose doubles
the potency) that would seem silly even to a child.
How did something so high on with the preposterousness
scale achieve such wide cultural acceptance, such (and
this is more to the point) deep market penetration? That's
a major loss of ground for skeptics since the 1970s, a
loss of ground even since the dawn of the 21st Century.

The answer is simple: homeopathy, packaged along
with the other "alternative medicine" modalities,
out-marketed its critics. I'd like to suggest that this
explosive success necessarily means we skeptics screwed
up. An organized paranormal lobby, a magical marketing
machine, utterly kicked our collective asses. Of course,
they had much more money than we did. But I think
it is true by definition that we should have been paying
much more attention to homeopathy — not less.

There remains a huge public need for skeptics to tackle
homeopathy and keep tackling it. Think what just that
one paranormal idea costs our society. It drains huge
resources, entirely pointlessly, from state-run health
care; it further increases the cost of private health
care; it strains yet more the resources of the sick and
the poor. And it has literally deadly implications. For
example, during recent undercover research in the
UK, 100 percent of homeopaths were willing to provide
at-risk travelers with a worthless homeopathic remedy
as an "alternative" to effective malaria prevention drugs.
That's ethically loathsome: the sale of nothing at all,
presented as efficacious medicine. It makes my skin crawl.

Clearly, that one passé topic remains a huge deal
all by itself. Just homeopathy alone deserves a
focused, fully engaged activist watchdog group.
There are dozens, even hundreds of paranormal
and pseudoscientific topics each deserve vigilant
watchdogs of their own.

And like it or not, we're all we've got.

[Tanya Marquette]

From where did you copy this?
tanya

[R]

http://www.skeptic.com/downloads/WhereD ... omHere.pdf

--- In minutus@yahoogroups.com, "tamarque@..." wrote: