Homeoquackery

Recently the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) correctly denounced blood human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) homeopathic weight-loss remedies as fraudulent. Strangely, today another quack company, Medshape Weight Loss Clinic, strangely jumped on the bandwagon by congratulating the FDA on its bold move.

Les Jenkins covers the initial move by the FDA. It seems that the products in question advised people to take them along with a 500-calorie-per-day diet, in short, starvation rations. (As he correctly points out, this dangerously low-energy diet and not the homeopathy would be responsible for any resulting weight loss.) What he seems to miss, or at least skirt over, is that HCG is not a recognized homeopathic compound anyways. This makes it false advertising and, says the FDA, illegal. Which is where the Medshape Weight Loss Clinic jumped in.

Medshape, it seems, is also a vendor of HCG — but it says that it sells “pharmaceutical-grade, full-strength” HCG, not the homeopathic knockoff. That, and a “proprietary blend of hCG” combined with some other, unnamed ingredients, taken under the tongue or by injection. What this ignores is that even at full strength, according to Stephen Barrett, the FDA still has yet to be shown any evidence that HCG is effective in the weight-loss setting. Indeed, Medshape also has an “HCG Diet,” and it’s a good bet that the Medshape diet will help you lose weight with or without HCG. Its diet gets as low as 1000 calories per day, says Medshape — and with or without HCG, an adult is going to lose weight when he or she eats 1000 calories per day.

It was quackery when it was homeopathic, but it’s still quackery at “full strength.” In fact, their splash page seems unable to point out any actual benefits for HCG at all. They have a “Fact/Myth” box to debunk the homeopathic HCG claims and the 500-calorie diet myth, but otherwise they actually acknowledge that the best-case scenario is that

hCG… maintains a slightly more active metabolism but does nothing with your body consuming its own body fat.

Oops again! Medshape says their diet involves a “proper balance… of fruits, vegetables, lean meats, eggs, complex carbs, dairy and fats” — in short, the same sort of diet already recommended by every other qualified nutritionist.

Interestingly, Health Canada not only approves indications for alternative medicines, including homeopathic remedies, but it assigns different standards of proof which candidate drugs must meet before being approved. Homeopathy has the lowest standard of proof.

I mention this because of the absurdity of a system in which the most theoretically implausible treatments also require the least amount of empirically supportive evidence before being stamped with the government seal of approval. If I wanted to advertise a drug as a conventional medicine I would need to submit evidence of new trails demonstrating both its safety and effectiveness. In contrast, a homeopathic remedy does not have to establish either through trials. Probably, this is because while homeopathic remedies are harmless, they are also little different than placebos and therefore would have great difficulty demonstrating efficacy.

Continue reading Homeopathy and Drug Approval in Canada

I don’t usually look to Israel for inspiring news, but this is a clear exception. The Israeli Health Ministry has banned television ads promoting homeopathic products.

According to an article in the Jerusalem Post, it seems that Israel has actually already put in place restrictions on alternative product advertisements for “serious” medical conditions. I’m not sure how that is defined, but it seems homeopathic medications in Israel also must carry an explicit warning that they lack an “approved medical indication” for any medical condition. This stands in marked contrast to the tragic regulations in my country, where Health Canada not only approves indications for homeopathic dilutions but does not even require empirical evidence of their effectiveness prior to handing out that indication. (I guess you could say they hand out indications like candy sugar pills.)

There are two ads which recently appeared on Israeli television. The Post contacted the Health Ministry, which thanked them for the report and apparently has said it will ban further ads from going on the air.

The products in question are Traumeel and RD 49. Traumeel is a pain relief placebo which has been approved in Canada for pain relief. Fascinatingly, according to the official website, Traumeel isn’t truly homeopathic. It contains a bewildering array of no less than 14 “active” ingredients, none of which are diluted anywhere close to Avogadro’s limit. This makes Traumeel a homeopathic pretender — a (potentially) real medicine pretending to be homeopathic. I doubt that actually makes it any better, since the ingredients in question are standard homeopathic fare, like belladonna and wolf’s bane. But it does make it a very unusual species of quackery, indeed.

As for RD 49, I have no idea what that is. I can’t find a reference to it outside of the coverage in Israel. It might be a typo for R49, a congestion medication that “contains” such yummy, healthy ingredients as arsenic, mercury, cuttlefish ink, and sulfur.

I have to say I’m intrigued by these new combination homeopathy pills. Do you suppose the cutting-edge researchers in this field have done much research yet about the potential for dangerous drug interactions in their water?

The CBC special on homeopathy is having surprisingly broad ramifications. Homeopathy giant Boiron has gone to the extent of posting an irritating automatic popup box on their web page, as a “response” to the Marketplace special. Let’s have a look. By the way, Boiron addresses it to me (and you) as a “valued consumer,” although I’m neither a consumer of homeopathic products nor, I imagine, very valued to Boiron. Here’s their first glitch: Continue reading Boiron Responds to CBC Special

As Health Canada approves homeopathic remedies and Ontario lurches toward certifying homeopaths as health professionals, it seems that Kenya, of all places, is a more skeptical audience for old Western medicines like homeopathy. (Make no mistake, homeopathy is a Western medicine; German, to be precise.) Business Daily reports that “Kenyan patients yet to embrace homeopathy,” as though that is in fact a bad thing and that the backwards Kenyans will make progress on this in due course. I hope they never do. I don’t know what distilled water sells for in Africa, but with a GDP per capita of about $1600, I think they probably have more urgent priorities.

The article is a completely uncritical profile of Kenyan homeopathy. The Kenya Pharmaceutical Society chairman is brought in to opine that homeopathy might be useful for “psychomatic conditions.” If that’s a subtle reference to the fact that homeopathy has only a placebo effect, then in my opinion it’s too subtle. After my own conversation with a pharmacist about homeopathy (more on that in a couple of weeks), I am more convinced than ever that pharmacists, who are health professionals and trusted sources of medical information, need to be forthright.

Karanja also says that homeopathic drugs “are diluted to very little medicinal substances,” which is also factually incorrect. At standard dilutions, homeopathic drugs are so thin that it is statistically unlikely that a single molecule of the original substance is present in any given pill.

Perhaps the lowest point in the article, which as I’ve said is entirely uncritical (you can add the media to my list of professions that have grossly abdicated their responsibilities with regard to informing and educating the public) comes close to the end, when it implies that homeopathic medicines are dangerous when taken incorrectly:

Parents are lured into believing that homeopathy is a more natural form of treatment with minimal side effects, ignoring conventional medicines in the process. As a result, children have died while others have experienced severe side effects such as constipation, malnutrition, infections and vomiting.

It’s not scientifically possible to have a severe reaction to homeopathic medicine that includes the above. All of those things, including death, are probably the consequence of not properly treating whatever the initial disease was.

I’m creating this website because it’s something I find interesting enough to write about, but mainly because of my surprise while following reactions to CBC’s recent piece on homeopathy. That piece was rightly critical of this strange alternative medicine practice. Yet hundreds of my fellow Canadians angrily wrote in, denouncing the CBC’s decision to side with Big Pharma against “natural cures.”

We could dismiss this as a minor online spat except for the fact that the province where I live, Ontario, is currently in the middle of regulating homeopathy as a medical profession. There are several things wrong with this, but the main one is that homeopathy, as such, doesn’t work. Ever. Like cures like is a primitive, pre-germ theory bit of hokum. There is no such thing as the power of dilution. The fact that conventional “allopathic” medicine isn’t perfect doesn’t mean homeopathy is a valid alternative — it just means that our knowledge of our own bodies is frustratingly, shockingly, inevitably limited.

Making homeopathy a regulated health profession, then, moves us in a very strange discussion. Doing so implies that the government has approved of a type of medical practice, implying that it is both (a) at least moderately effective, and (b) potentially dangerous enough when used inappropriately that we have to stamp out clinical practice by unqualified homeopaths. Of course, in the case of homeopathy neither is true. Homeopathy is nothing more than sugar pills and distilled water.

So here I am. I have no financial stake in this. This site is not receiving any cheques from a pharmaceutical organization, or from anyone else for that matter.