Is there any disease which a member of the Society of Homeopaths won’t claim to be able to treat?

Oct 14, 2007 Alun Politics, Science No Comments Ethics, Medicine, Pseudoscience, Society of Homeopaths

I’m guess­ing scrofula. So far I haven’t found a homeo­path who will claim to cure scrofula. The Queen has noth­ing to fear. In fact she’s quids in if she catches AIDS because, you’ve guessed it, homeo­pathy can treat AIDS accord­ing to one mem­ber of the Soci­ety of Homeopaths.

I had five minutes so I thought I’d check my home county. It would at least be a com­fort­ing to know that uneth­ical homepaths weren’t on the prowl loc­ally. So I checked the SoH web­site for Derby­shire [Google Cache] [PDF Print]. The second web­site on the list was Helen Coles [Google Cache] [PDF Print]. I think she’s con­vinced me I was far too leni­ent in my pre­vi­ous post as she says:

People suf­fer­ing from all kinds of ill­nesses, from depres­sion to arth­ritis, migraine to ulcers and the more ‘mod­ern’ ill­nesses includ­ing AIDS and ME, can be helped by homeo­pathy to regain their health.

Now as last time I could argue ‘regain health’ means alle­vi­ate symp­toms rather than cure, so she’s not actu­ally say­ing she can cure AIDS. I may feel a revul­sion to the claim but, by itself, it doesn’t break the Society’s Code of Eth­ics. The next sen­tence reads:

Good homeo­pathy will not just drive away the symp­toms but help the patient deal with the cause of the ill­ness and regain good health.

Good homeo­pathy would deal with the cause of AIDS? Now again I could argue that she’s not claim­ing her­self to be a good homeo­path. She’s not said “I can cure AIDS and ME” in so many words. She just put the cure concept snugly up against AIDS and ME. On the other hand if you see someone in black clothes, with sin­is­ter organ music on their iPod and sharp pointy teeth from a joke shop, you have to accept they want to be seen as a bloodsucker.

I think the Soci­ety of Homeo­paths is at a cross­roads. It’s clear that some mem­bers are flout­ing the Code of Eth­ics. In each of the four counties sampled there has been at least one prob­lem with the mem­bers who have web­sites. How much faith should we have the Soci­ety of Homeo­paths stands for high qual­ity health­care? Accord­ing to their dis­claimer:

The Soci­ety of Homeo­paths makes no war­ranties, rep­res­ent­a­tions or under­tak­ings about:

(a) any of the con­tent of this web site (includ­ing, without lim­it­a­tion, the qual­ity, accur­acy, com­plete­ness or fit­ness for any par­tic­u­lar pur­pose of such con­tent), or

(b) any con­tent of any other web site referred to or accessed by hyper­text link through this web site (‘third party site’).

You should con­sult a suit­ably qual­i­fied per­son on any spe­cific prob­lem or mat­ter, which is covered by any inform­a­tion on this site before tak­ing any fur­ther action.

Does that mean none at all?

The Ethics of Homeopathy

Oct 13, 2007 Alun Politics, Science 6 Comments Ethics, Medicine, Pseudoscience, Society of Homeopaths

A homeopathic photo of Homeopaths. (Note to the Society of Homeopaths legal friends: The pixels containing photos of homeopaths have been been diluted and re-diluted into another photo, so that no detectable pixels from the original photo remains. Thus this is a much more potent photo of homeopaths than orthodox photography. You believe that right?) Undiluted photo Ducking Hell (cc) Gaetan Lee.

I read an interesting article on Respectful Insolence yesterday. It was actually from the Quackometer, but you can't see it on there at the moment. It’s a really good demon­stra­tion of one of the reas­ons why I don’t often blog on medicine.

If you don’t know about this story, here’s the con­densed ver­sion. Put your­self in the place of an hon­est homeo­pathic con­sult­ant. You know that your patients are likely to be very vul­ner­able. They’re ill and they’re prob­ably don’t feel that con­ven­tional treat­ment will help them. Maybe they’re bey­ond the help of sci­entific medi­cine. This makes your patients per­fect tar­gets for all sorts of con-artists and snake-oil mer­chants. This you feel, as a hon­est homeo­pathic con­sult­ant, is a danger. There­fore you’re likely to wel­come a code of eth­ics which states what you can­not do or claim, to ensure the patient is treated with respect.

The Soci­ety of Homeo­paths has such a Code of Eth­ics which you can down­load. Le Canard Noir (which I think is a pseud­onym) at the Quacko­meter did this and found two inter­est­ing clauses:

48: Advert­ise­ments, sta­tion­ery and name plates main­tain a high stand­ard of pro­pri­ety and integ­rity to enhance the repu­ta­tion of homeo­pathy.
• Advert­ising shall not con­tain claims of superi­or­ity.
• No advert­ising may be used which expressly or impli­citly claims to cure named dis­eases.
• Advert­ising shall not be false, fraud­u­lent, mis­lead­ing, decept­ive, extra­vag­ant or sensational.

72: [Homeo­paths are required] To avoid mak­ing claims (whether expli­cit or implied; orally or in writ­ing) imply­ing cure of any named disease.

His art­icle he said that he just checked a ran­dom homeo­path and found someone break­ing both clauses, includ­ing claims of treat­ing mal­aria, which explains why the art­icle title was The Gentle Art of Homeo­pathic Killing. LCN sug­ges­ted that the Soci­ety was not tak­ing its own Code of Eth­ics seriously.

Up went the art­icle. Pre­sum­ably someone at the Soci­ety read it, because the host­ing com­pany for the Quacko­meter received a com­plaint from the Society’s legal rep­res­ent­at­ives. The art­icle had to be pulled because the UK’s libel laws are strict and the host­ing com­pany wanted no part of a legal battle.

Oth­ers are talk­ing about the eth­ics of bul­ly­ing crit­ics through legal intim­id­a­tion rather than ques­tion­ing the facts. In con­trast I thought I’d check the story. Is it really that easy to go from the Soci­ety of Homeo­paths web­site to a site of someone break­ing their code of eth­ics?
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