Month: August 2009

Got a broken leg? Hepatitis? Chapped lips? Have you tried some nice medicine?

A pharmacy supplying homeopathic remedies to the Royal Family…, Ainsworths, has been accused of “quackery” for supplying bottles of pills labelled as “Swine Flu Formula” for people suffering from the disease…Ainsworths has been granted a Royal Warrant by the Queen and Prince Charles, who are both said to be supporters of homeopathy…Its treatment is in the form of small “sugar pills”, which dissolve under the tongue. It is sold in £7 bottles, containing 50 pills, which can be bought on the company’s website or over the counter of its central London store. The label on the bottles reads: “SFF (Swine Flu Formula). Treatment: One to be dissolved in the mouth three times a day until improved.”

£7 for fifty little sugar pills! What is the other £6.95 for? Overhead? Malpractice insurance? A day in Brighton?

A Telegraph reporter got a ‘pharmacist’ at Ainsworths to sell him some. She said ‘the pills would help the body “overcome the symptoms” of the virus.’

David Colquhoun and others pointed out that this is dangerous bullshit. Tony Pinkus, the director of Ainsworths, on the other hand, said something rather different.

“At Ainsworths we cater for our many homeopathic customers who have requested a remedy to alleviate the symptoms of swine flu. Most of our customers are people who routinely use homeopathy and find it a satisfactory alternative to allopathic or conventional medicine and are exercising their freedom of choice.”

They ‘cater for’ their customers who have asked for a remedy to alleviate the symptoms of swine flu by giving them a very expensive bottle of sugar pills? That’s a funny kind of ‘catering for.’ At that rate I could go to a restaurant and request a remedy to alleviate my hunger, and be given a brick, or a hank of magenta cashmere, or a hand-painted Breton soup bowl. And the bit about freedom of choice is very patriotic and nice, of course, but it’s a damn cynical way to defend quackery. I’m free to choose a hank of magenta cashmere for breakfast lunch and dinner, too, but if I keep it up I will either starve or die of wool-poisoning, so people who peddle me the stuff are being…unhelpful.

“The remedy is available on request and we do not advertise or encourage people to buy it. We also make it clear that homeopathy can be used in conjunction with conventional medicines and do not feel we are ignoring or going against any governmental guidelines.”

Now that’s interesting. They’re in the business, but they do not advertise or encourage people to buy it. Well why not? Because it doesn’t work? Because it doesn’t do anything? Because it’s just common or garden sugar? And yet they do put a label saying ‘SFF (Swine Flu Formula) Treatment’ on the bottle.

Dr Catherine Zollman, a Fellow of the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health and a GP in Bristol, said she uses homeopathy in her every day care of patients. “Homeopathic treatment can be helpful where conventional medicine doesn’t have much to offer and there are ongoing symptoms in the patient which are causing distress. But it does have to be used with care and good assessment where serious progressive illness or disease has been ruled out.”

Helpful in what sense? Consoling for chronic pain or other misery when ‘conventional’ medicine isn’t working? ‘Helpful’ could mean anything or nothing. But even this Fellow of the prince’s whatsit is careful to warn against using it for anything real and treatable.

I would say more, but mindful of Simon Singh and the British Chiropractic Association, I will let you work it out for yourselves.

I mentioned that a commenter at The Intersection said I was lying. Tim Broderick, he is; here’s the central part of what he said:

When Ophelia Benson claims through her “questions” that Chris and Sheril have no evidence she is not telling the truth. It’s one thing for people who haven’t read the book to assert this – she has the book. So let me say that again and more emphatically: She is lying.

Here is the question from her own site: “How do you know overt atheism causes people to be hostile to science? How does that work? What is your evidence?”

From page 173 to page 185 there are detailed endnotes with citations to back up the assertions in Chapter 8…Benson doesn’t just disagree. She lies and asserts that they have nothing to back up their assertions.

Asking questions is not asserting, but never mind. He’s wrong on the substance too. This bit of chapter 8 for instance:

If the goal is to create an America more friendly toward science and reason, the combativeness of the New Atheists is strongly counterproductive. If anything, they work in ironic combination with their dire enemies, the anti-science conservative Christians who populate the creation science and intelligent design movements, to ensure we’ll continue to be polarized over subjects llike the teaching of evolution when we don’t have to be. America is a very religious nation, and if forced to choose between faith and science, vast numbers of Americans will select the former. The New Atheists err in insisting that such a choice needs to be made. Atheism is not the logical outcome of scientific reasoning, any more than intelligent design is a necessary corollary of religious faith. A great many scientists believe in God with no sense of internal contradiction, just as many religious believers accept evolution as the correct theory to explain the development, diversity, and inter-relatedness of life on Earth. The New Atheists, like the fundamentalists they so despise, are setting up a false dichotomy that can only damage the cause of scientific literacy for generations to come. [pp 97-8]

I would like to rip into the argument there, but won’t. (See Jason Rosenhouse on the subject.) But what I will do is point out that there is no endnote for that paragraph. None. Zero. You can easily check – the notes are on page 174. They go from one related to a passage on page 97 before that paragraph begins, to one on a passage on page 98 after that paragraph ends. That whole paragraph is note-free. So Tim Broderick was wrong.

The closest thing to a note for the overarching claim comes much later, for a passage on page 104 – and it’s worthless.

In fact, education researchers have found that defusing the tension over science and religion facilitates learning about evolution. “I submit that anti-religious rehtoric is counter-productive. It actually hampers science education,” a biologist at Davis and Elkins College in West Virgina. In Stover’s view, students who feel that evolution is a threat to their beliefs will not “want to learn,” and only reconiliatory discussion can open them up to evolution. (p. 183)

That’s just someone saying something, in the same way they are saying something. It doesn’t count as evidence. It could illustrate, or amplify, or clarify, but it can’t support.

So – are we clear? I wasn’t lying. M&K don’t provide support for all of their assertions, and some of what they purport to offer is actually worthless.

Austin Dacey, in The Secular Conscience.

“In the United States, secular and liberal have become dirty words…Best sellers allege that liberalism is a dogmatic faith, a critique popularized by evangelical leaders in the 1980s…When a rare few secularists push back against religious belief in print, they are branded – often by fellow seculars and liberal religionists – ‘dogmatic,’ ‘evangelical,’ ‘militant’ and ‘fundamentalist’ atheists. [examples in an endnote] Their scandalous premise is that religion is an urgent topic of conversation and therefore subject to the intellectual and moral standards of all serious conversation.” [p 11]

One thing that’s interesting about this is that Austin Dacey was one participant in something called ScienceDebate2008. Lawrence Krauss was another. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum were two others, and the experience was, they say, ‘the central inspiration’ for their book [UA p x]. It’s interesting that Austin Dacey says things – many things – that are just the kind of thing that Mooney and Kirshenbaum consider The Enemy and attack in every mass media outlet that will have them, which is most of them. He could be describing M&K themselves in that passage above.

Or there’s this, in which Dacey quotes Nicholas Kristof talking about the ‘dismal consequences’ of religious influence and then rebuking ‘a sneering tone about religious Christianity itself.’ Dacey says

“Secular liberals are being asked to perform an act of cognitive contortionism, to object to the ‘consequences’ of conservative religion without objecting to the moral precepts that cause them.” [p 13]

Or this:

“Secular liberals must lift the gag order on ethics, values, and religion in public debate. We can no longer insist on precluding controversial moral and religious claims from public conversation…This means understanding and avoiding the Liberty Fallacy. Susceptibility to public criticism is the price of admission to public debate. Religious conscience does not get in free. Many secular liberals have convinced themselves that freedom of belief entails respect for all religions, and that respect means refraining from criticism. But that is not respect; it’s just blanket acceptance, even disregard.” [p 18]

Mooney and Kirshenbaum please note.

Thought for the day, from Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul (no, he doesn’t think there is such a thing as the soul).

“As for my ironist friends who think that science is no more objective than any other way of thinking, I have observed in most of them a fairly deep ignorance about science. Being around intellectuals who know almost nothing about science does not particularly bother me, except when they pronounce on the nature of science. My view is that if you are going to claim that all forms of discourse are equally subjective, you better have real familiarity with all the forms of discourse you aim to level.” p. 54

Now sometimes a cunning plan turns out to be not so cunning after all. Mooney’s cunning plan of banning me from commenting on his blog so that my unkind questions and objections would no longer appear there is going to turn out to be a mistake, because it means I will post them here instead. This is penny wise and pound foolish. A comment on his blog would just get lost in the clutter of kwokkery and other nonsense there, and would not be on the main page in any case. A post here is on the main page for a month. So you see…he should have just settled for letting me ask questions there. The morally bankrupt path Does Not Pay.

They have yet another article, this time a long feature in The Nation. The first part of it is actually good – but at the end, oblivious to the many warnings and shouts of ‘Watch out! Danger!’, they return to their petty childish feud with PZ Myers yet again. They make fools of themselves yet again.

Accurate science and the most stunning misinformation thrive side by side–anti-vaccine advocates, anti-evolutionists and global warming deniers all have highly popular websites and blogs, and there is no reason to think good scientific information is somehow beating them back.

This problem was on full display in the 2008 Weblog Awards, a popularity contest that featured a tight race for Best Science Blog. The two leading contestants: PZ Myers’s Pharyngula, the online clearinghouse for confrontational atheism, and Watts Up With That, written by former TV meteorologist Anthony Watts, a skeptic of the scientific conclusion that human activities have caused global warming. Both sites are polemical: one assaults religious faith; the other constantly attacks mainstream understanding of climate change.

In the end, Watts Up With That defeated Pharyngula, 14,150 votes to 12,238. The “science” contest came down to the religion-basher versus the misinformation-machine, and the misinformation-machine won. That speaks volumes about the form science commentary takes on the Internet.

No it doesn’t. It says almost nothing about the form science commentary takes on the Internet. Furthermore, PZ is not just a ‘religion-basher’; as not-yet-banned commenters pointed out, he does science too. Furthermore again, M&K omitted to mention that he told readers not to vote for Pharyngula because of the inclusion of pseudo-science in the contest. This is all too typical of their incomplete malicious distorted ‘reporting’ on people they don’t like.

Now that’s going to sit here festering for all of August. Such a pity.