The combination of New Fundamentalism with some science writers’ natural desire to inform and educate the public can provoke in them a crusading zeal to rid the world of unreason, thoughtless belief, and anything that cannot readily be proved and explained by “black and white” deterministic science (e.g., homeopathy/CAMs). Unfortunately, such an attitude does not accommodate “gray” very well, so it defaults to black in order to establish “the truth.”
Take, for example, that “gold standard” of research quality, the double-blind, randomized controlled trial (DBRCT). Against placebo, it provides at best only equivocal evidence of homeopathy’s efficacy, with some trials proving positive, while others return negative results. To a New Fundamentalist, such inconclusiveness is intolerable (especially because homeopathy appears to contradict the biomolecular paradigm of conventional medicine); the negative trial data are taken as “true,” positive trial data are discounted, and so homeopathy is considered as being no better than placebo (i.e., it does not work). Yet around the world, millions of people have benefited, and continue to benefit from homeopathy. This is usually discounted as mass delusion, the workings of the placebo effect, or self-hypnosis.
The assumption here is that the DBRCT is the best research tool with which to establish the evidence base of any therapy. Indeed, it could be argued that the DBRCT is predicated more on Popperian principles of falsifiability than on naïve inductivism. However, deconstructing the DBRCT’s rationale reveals that it imposes on any therapeutic procedure an implicit and simplistic division of therapy from context. This turns out to be nothing more than an arithmetic convenience that allows the measurements made, statistics gathered, and inferences drawn from a trial ultimately to have significance within a deterministic framework.
It has been demonstrated and explained (by analogy with quantum theory’s notion of wave-function collapse during observation) that this separation can seriously interfere with homeopathy/CAMs’ therapeutic effects. However, such an explanation of the inconclusiveness of DBRCTs of homeopathy/CAMs has recently been dismissed by New Fundamentalists as “quantum mysticism.”
What tends to be forgotten by those who promote an overzealous adherence to the DBRCT as the “gold standard” for testing any therapy’s efficacy is that no therapeutic modality, conventional medicine included, is ever practiced in real life according to the DBRCT’s procedural separation of therapy and context. As a result, the evidence-based movement’s increasing hold on the health sciences is now being challenged (even from within conventional medicine), for its exclusion of alternative therapeutic discourses.
Explanations of how homeopathic remedies might work (e.g., the Memory of Water effect) are similarly discounted, regardless of mounting evidence suggesting that memory effects may indeed exist. They can be explained in materials science terms, as homeopathy’s succussive dilution process inducing observable alterations to the dynamic supramolecular structure of liquid water. Yet, cancer physician Stephen Sagar, for example, has dismissed the Memory of Water hypothesis as a “belief in undetected sub atomic [my italics] fields.” Far from delivering the intended coup de grace to the Memory of Water and homeopathy, the use of the term “subatomic” might be seen as inappropriate when describing what is in essence current research in molecular physics, materials science, and chemistry.
This attitude could partly explain why there is so little published research on how cellular water memory effects might lead to cure of the whole patient : it would require much closer collaboration and understanding between biomedical and physical scientists than currently exists, assuming it ever were to achieve proper levels of funding.
By Lionel Milogram, Ph.D., F.R.S.C., M.A.R.H.
