It is not often that I publish a paper with a philosopher in a leading journal of philosophy. In fact, it is the first time, and I am rather proud of it – so much so that I must show my readers (the article is freely available via the link below and I encourage everyone to read the full text) the abstract of our article entitled WHY HOMOEOPATHY IS PSEUDOSCIENCE (Synthese (2022) 200:394):
Homoeopathy is commonly recognised as pseudoscience. However, there is, to date, no systematic discussion that seeks to establish this view. In this paper, we try to fill this gap. We explain the nature of homoeopathy, discuss the notion of pseudoscience, and provide illustrative examples from the literature indicating why homoeopathy fits the
bill. Our argument contains a conceptual and an empirical part.
In the conceptual part, we introduce the premise that a doctrine qualifies as a pseudoscience if, firstly, its proponents claim scientific standing for it and, secondly, if they produce bullshit to defend it, such that, unlike science, it cannot be viewed as the most reliable knowledge on its topic. In the empirical part, we provide evidence that homoeopathy fulfils both criteria. The first is quickly established since homoeopaths often explicitly claim scientificity.
To establish the second, we dive into the pseudo-academic literature on homoeopathy to provide evidence of bullshit in the arguments of homoeopaths. Specifically, we show that they make bizarre ontological claims incompatible with natural science, illegitimately shift the burden of proof to sceptics, and mischaracterise, cherry-pick, and misreport the evidence. Furthermore, we demonstrate that they reject essential parts of established scientific methodology and use epistemically unfair strategies to immunise their doctrine against recalcitrant evidence.
And here is our conclusion:
At the beginning of the paper, we noted that homoeopathy is commonly named one of the prototypical pseudosciences. However, there has been, to date, no comprehensive discussion as to what makes it a pseudoscience. Moreover, the problem is not trivial since the most well-known and influential demarcation criteria, such as Popper’s falsifiability criterion and Kuhn’s problem-solving criterion, cannot account for it, as we have shown. We have tried to fill this research gap using a novel bullshitology-based approach to the demarcation problem. Following this approach, we have argued that homoeopathy should be regarded as pseudoscience because its proponents claim scientific standing for it and produce argumentative bullshit to defend it, thus violating important epistemic standards central to science.
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How do homeopathic medicines work?
Some claim that there is no “scientific” proof of homeopathy..
“… meta-analyses can arrive at different conclusions despite being based on virtually the same material. They are not performed according to strict methodology and are, to a variable extent, guided by creativity, interpretation, and personal bias. This is why everyone can find arguments for and against homeopathy in the meta-analyses of the pooled clinical data.”
Dr Rober Hahn, MD, PhD, 2013 “Homeopathy: Meta-Analyses of Pooled Clinical Data”. Dr Hahn is not a homeopathic doctor.
Homeopathic medicines work the same way all medicines work. All drugs have a primary action on the vital force which is followed by a secondary reaction of the vital force against it as it wears off. Homeopathic medicines have primary action in the same direction as the disease on all levels – mental, physical and emotional. And the secondary reaction in the opposite direction by the vital force leads to healing. Like cures like.
We are all familiar with the primary and secondary action of coffee. The primary action is as a stimulant, an upper. When it wears off we “crash”; its a downer and we want that second cup of coffee for the lift. Without it we return to our normal pre-coffee state.
An example might be Coffea (homeopathic remedy made from coffee) healing a patient of insomnia. An individual on the mental level might have racing thoughts, emotionally they are hyper-excitable and physically they are somewhat jittery with an elevated heart rate. As a result they cannot sleep at night. These are all symptoms that coffee can cause in a healthy person. So when the patient takes homeopathic Coffea it gives their vital force a small push in the same direction on all levels. If the dose is too strong there will be a temporary aggravation or worsening of their symptoms at the beginning of the treatment. This would not happen with a placebo. The secondary reaction in the opposite direction cures on all levels.
This is not such a strange concept. All conventional drugs have as side effects the same symptoms that they are used to treat. A side effect of aspirin can be headaches in someone who is not taking it for headaches. The problem is that in conventional medicine they only prescribe drugs based on the limited number of symptoms for which it is indicated, not based on the entire mental, emotional and physical constellation of symptoms experienced by the patient. As a result the drug normally only temporarily suppresses/palliates those few symptoms and does not cure on all levels as a homeopathically prescribed drug matching on all levels would.
Dr Hahnemann, developer of homeopathy, was concerned about the safety of giving toxic substances to sick people. All drugs are toxic at some dosage. So he started diluting the medicines in a particular way, even to the point where he knew that none of the substance remained. He was a famous chemist in his day and knew Avogadro’s principle. AND YET the diluted medicines had an even stronger effect on his patients. He knew he was working with some as yet unknown energy in these medicines. So it doesnt contradict or invalidate any of the KNOWN physics, chemistry or biology. Modern science cant explain consciousness either. To this day we still dont know why, but we do know THAT these more diluted homeopathic remedies have a more powerful effect on living beings than less diluted or undiluted medicines.
This can be experienced by anyone interested, by participating in a homeopathic proving which is the basis of homeopathy. A proving is a process where relatively healthy volunteers take a homeopathically dilute remedy repeatedly over several days until they start experiencing new never-before experienced symptoms – mental, physical or emotional. They stop taking the remedy and carefully document the new symptoms that ensue until the remedy wears off in a week or few. The constellation of symptoms that are unique to a remedy made from a particular source are used to identify patients who can be cured by that remedy.
Thousands of provings using dilute homeopathic remedies have been done over the years and they consistently show, virtually 100%, that homeopathically dilute remedies are not placebo and have a strong effect on the being – mental, emotional and physical – of those who take them. For a sick person the remedy they take must correspond to their constellation of symptoms i.e. be homeopathic to their state of pathology on all levels, to see a strong healing response. Otherwise remedies must be taken repeatedly to see the new symptoms that they cause.
thanks Stan, for confirming this:
“”…homoeopathy should be regarded as pseudoscience because its proponents claim scientific standing for it and produce argumentative bullshit to defend it, thus violating important epistemic standards central to science” “
Much the same text as:
Answer to How do homoeopathic medicines work? by Stan Roderick, Quora
https://www.quora.com/How-do-homoeopathic-medicines-work/answer/Stan-Roderick-2?ch=15&oid=384621852&share=fed11aa3&target_type=answer
@Stan
In all your drivel, lies and insane rambling, the following still manages to stand out:
NO, homeopathic dilutions do NOT have ANY effects beyond placebo, that is the whole problem. There is NOT ONE scientific procedure or experiment or study that can reliably demonstrate what you claim here. NOT ONE.
If homeopathy would have significant and independently repeatable effects, then we would not even have this whole discussion. It would be embraced by real medicine, and actually help people – instead of deceive and defraud people like it does now, and has done for well over 200 years.
Odd how those consistent and reproducible effects in provings don’t appear when proper randomisation and controls are used.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014107689809101108
Strange, that.
Almost as if homeopathy is a load of fantastical nonsense and homeopaths are very good at indulging in acts of collective self-delusion.
Stan,
You clearly know very little about how conventional medicines work. The examples you have given, caffeine and aspirin, both have somewhat complex pharmacology as they each have several different pharmaceutical effects with varying mechanisms of action. None of them involve a “vital force”, however, whatever that is.
The data sheet of all drugs lists the indications for prescribing it. They are nearly always diagnoses, not symptoms. The symptoms of any medical condition can vary widely, and it is rare to see a textbook case of something.
I don’t know what drugs you have in mind here, but what you are describing sounds very different from what doctors actually do.
No, but that has very little to do with pharmacology, which is a well-established discipline.
A good introduction to the subject of pharmacology is D. R. Laurence’s book “Clinical Pharmacology”, which is a standard undergraduate textbook.
Samuel Hahnemann was born in 1755 and died in 1843. His first published paper describing homeopathy was in 1796, and the “Organon of the Rational Art of Healing” was first published in 1810.
Amedeo Avogadro was born in 1776 and died in 1856. He developed the hypothesis that the relationship between the masses of similar volumes of different gases was in proportion to their relative molecular weights, and first published this in 1811, followed by a other papers on the same subject over the following decade. However, the importance of his work was not recognised until much later, and it wasn’t until after his death that apparent inconsistencies in experimental results were resolved.
I think it is unlikely that Hahnemann was aware of Avogadro’s principle, and even if he did become acquainted with it later in life, the dates mean that it couldn’t have informed his ideas on homeopathy. Nor was he a famous chemist, or indeed a chemist at all.
Can you supply any evidence to support these assertions?
JM-K wrote “I think it is unlikely that Hahnemann was aware of Avogadro’s principle, and even if he did become acquainted with it later in life, the dates mean that it couldn’t have informed his ideas on homeopathy.”
For the details see Hahnemann would have thought modern homeopaths were barmy by David Colquhoun:
http://www.dcscience.net/2008/08/08/hahnemann-would-have-thought-modern-homeopaths-were-barmy/
I’ve asked you previously how homeopathy can “cure” something uncurable like cardiomyopathy and you gave me some vague handy wavey answer; I went and looked up homeopathy and cardiomyopathy and found nothing that made any sense, to the point that it was not clear that those homeopaths were even dealing with cardiomyopathy and their suggested “treatments” would result in death, which might explain the rather short survival time one of them quoted.
Is there any chance of a proper answer or at least a link or 2 to some sources which provide back up to your claim?
Or just some more hand waving and mutuially contradictory statements (like in your post here).
Murmur, You’ve asked Stan about cardiomyopathy twice previously:
https://edzardernst.com/2022/07/the-market-for-homeopathics-is-predicted-to-grow-significantly/#comment-140101
https://edzardernst.com/2022/08/homeopathy-in-france-going-going-gone/#comment-140466
Yes, I have. And I still haven’t had a decent answer, which is why I asked again, especially as he’s still trotting out that line about conventional medicine is only for symptom relief and only homeopathy can cure…
It’s almost like he’s ignoring that red box which pops up at the top of the screen on this site, that bit about supporting claims with evidence.
I don’t think Stan will provide evidence to back his assertion that only homeopathy can cure… But he might be forgetful, so I suggest reminding him each time he comments.
Oh, Stan, so according to you, the laws of thermodynamics are NOT part of KNOWN physics…. ?
Wait for it:
‘YoU DoN’t UnDeRsTaND hOmEoPaThY!’
‘BuT wHaT aBoUt SiDe EfFeCtS!’
‘BuT BiG pHaRmA!’
I’m not sure there are any others. They’re so predictable.
Thank you for your work to improve the quality of life and keep people safe
The only snag with involving a philosopher, much as I agree with the conclusions, is that it’s too easy to point to some of the crackpot ideas espoused by philosophers over the centuries. As the article points out, science has developed ways of separating sense from nonsense. I’m not entirely sure philosophy has yet managed that.
It’s also worth mentioning that Kuhn has provided ammunition for the pseudoscience pedlars, not that it was his intention of course. His notion of the paradigm shift is constantly misused by SCAM promoters to argue that theirs is a different paradigm from the “narrow scientism” of the mainstream. The only thing worse than bullshit is bullshit dressed up with cod philosophy.
If, by chance, anyone is seriously interested in explanations for how homeopathic nanodoses can AND do have physiological effects, you’ll benefit from reading a more up-to-date review of this literature here:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15593258211022983?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed
It is typical of Ernst to quote articles that review CLINICAL research and then create a strawman argument by claiming that something has been said that suggests that we don’t know precisely how homeopathic medicines may work. Oh golly, you knocked down a strawman. Oh…how macho!
For the record, for a century (!), we didn’t know how aspirin worked…and yet, I don’t know a single medical doctor who refused to prescribe it for this reason. And double heck, we don’t know how many anaestresia drugs work either.
Hi Dana,
did you not want to apologize for calling me a liar the other day?
Oh dear, Dana
Linking to a piece of your own fanciful bullshit explaining how many angels are dancing on a pinhead is hardly a ringing endorsement. Has anyone taken any notice of it?
No.
And, yes, we don’t know how most general anaesthetics work.
But what we do know is that they DO work. That they do is conclusive and unarguable.
Unlike homeopathy, which remains the heap of valueless bunk it has been since Mad Sam first pulled the idea out of his arse 200 years ago.
That you are unable to recognise this is your problem, Dana, not one for science to worry about.
This is why you remain, as ever, a bloviating, pathetic, irrelevant object of ridicule.
@Dana
The article you refer to is a wonderful example of exactly the pseudoscience that Edzard describes in his paper: full of assumptions, conjectures, untruths and fallacies, all neatly presented in the form of a lot of sciencey
bubblebabble and continuously referring to science, without itself ever being supported by real science. You may even succeed in fooling some of your fellow believers into thinking that it is actual science. Well done!Not again this nano-nonsense, which is supposed to show that homeopathy works. It has long been disproved, just like the quantum effects or the water memory.
Dana is riding a dead horse. As he has done before.
Yes, Mr Ullman, we read your paper and we discussed it here:
https://edzardernst.com/2021/07/dana-ullman-has-just-published-two-papers-in-real-science-journals/
The very post on which you wrote:
‘In any case, no one, except liars and fools, can now say that homeopathic water is “the same” as “water.”‘
I suggest that you reread the post, and all the comments.
Not a single specific fact or study mentioned in my article has been proven to be inaccurate. Instead, it is more than ironic that people here prefer to use ad homs and vague assertions. How embarrassing, indeed.
As for “nano-nonesense,” well, our hormones and cell-signaling agents operate at a nanodose level. It is so strange that people here don’t know these simple facts…but then again, the fools and liars here have their own axe to grind…and they love to maintain ignorance about subjects with which they disagree. How convenient.
Here’s an article from the mainstream medical press that highlights the nanodoses our body uses every moment.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10510983/
Dana,
what has unquestionably been proven to be inaccurate is your recent claim (not made lightly) that I have lied.
Isn’t it time for an apology?
Anyone who says that there are no explanations drawn from the newest research in material sciences and the physics of water for how homeopathic nanodoses can have effects on living organisms is either lying or is misinforming others.
It is now time for an apology from you on this matter.
… and I had thought that essentially you were an honest man.
@Edzard
I’d almost be inclined to demolish this dung beetle feast that he calls ‘paper’, and make the journal retract it. I haven’t got the time right now (important deadline looming), but maybe it’s something to spend a couple of rainy afternoons on next year …
Dana Ullman wrote “Not a single specific fact or study mentioned in my article has been proven to be inaccurate.”
For the same reason that not a single specific fact or study mentioned in Lorem ipsum has been proven to be inaccurate.
They’ve not been shown to be inaccurate because clinicians and scientists have better things to do with their time than further disproving previously disproven nonsense.
At what point will you realise that your petulant flailing and sputtering is achieving nothing?
Your farcical nanomedicine claims remain ignored, your friends Sandra and Benneth have gone to early graves despite or possibly because of their faith in magic shaken water and yet you still yammer and wave.
You, Dana, are the embarrassment. Your hubris will never recognise this. But, really, we don’t care. You are utterly insignificant.
You can, of course, prove me wrong if you wish to. We’ll wait.
Oh, Dana, you will never realise that a discussion about a mechanism of action is idle as long as there is no valid proof of an effect. And you still can’t conjure that up.
This is topped by the nanoparticle nonsense, which can only be espoused by those who know nothing more about nanoparticles than their name and that they are somehow small.
Just one topic from much more against the nanoparticle hypothesis:
There is no answer to the objection that in order to be effective via nanoparticles, the original substance itself must first form nanoparticles in the solution. This is precisely what substances that are soluble in solvents do not do. Just some of the most universally applicable homeopathic remedies, sodium chloratum, potassium carbonicum and arsenic album, are salts that form differently electrically charged particles (“ions”) in the solution, but no nanoparticles.
When homeopaths refer to physiological effects of nanoparticles, they are treading on more than shaky ground with regard to their healing method. On the one hand, the research on this (the non-homeopathic research, of course) is far from complete and on the other hand, it refers first and foremost to possible toxic effects of ingesting nanoparticles. Accordingly, it would be most strange to associate the presence of nanoparticles with Hahnemann’s supposed healing powers.
Moreover, the nanoparticle hypothesis assumes an “accumulation” or “retention” of nanoparticles during dilution. Why then the potentisation process? Surely one could simply introduce appropriate quantities of nanoparticles into the solvent and be done with it?
And where is the connection, the “scientific causal chain”, to the alleged specific healing effect of homeopathics on human diseases? It does not exist. Between the nanoparticle hypothesis and Hahnemann’s healing promise of the “elimination of diseases” there is a gap the size of the distance between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Nebula. At least.
Nanoparticles as a hypothesis of the mode of action of homeopathic remedies are no less nonsense than the “water memory”. Q.e.d.
QUOTE
The truth may be puzzling or counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held beliefs. Experiment Is how we get a handle on it.
At a dinner many decades ago, the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to the toast, “To physics and metaphysics.” By “metaphysics,” people then meant something like philosophy, or truths you could recognize just by thinking about them. They could also have included pseudoscience. Wood answered along these lines:
‘The physicist has an idea. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it seems to make. He consults the scientific literature. The more he reads, the more promising the idea becomes. Thus prepared, he goes to the laboratory and devises an experiment to test it. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are checked. The accuracy of measurement is refined, the error bars reduced. He lets the chips fall where they may. He is devoted only to what the experiment teaches. At the end of all this work, through careful experimentation, the idea is found to be worthless. So the physicist discards it, frees his mind from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.’
The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.
END OF QUOTE
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Can say that your new paper it is a disaster. You were trying to prove that homeopathy is a “pseudoscience” based on “cherry picking”, but you end up proving that many of the demarcation criteria typically used by your friends are useless and are quackery. More than, they say that homeopathy is based on cherry picking, but in your article you have made that supposedly support your point. For example, in the case of the application of quantum mechanics to homeopathy, you clearly admit that Lionel Milgrom uses quantum concepts in a metaphorical sense. One of the others, as is the work of Mahata and Maity, you just disqualify him without further ado. You don’t explain to me why the model of the Del Giudice is “quantum woo”.
Even worse, in your criticism of Frass et al’s review you claim that he dismissed several negative reviews such as Hawke’s and Doehring’s, when in fact these are cited by Frass et al. Or when you quote Gartlehner’s work confirming that publication bias rates are not much different than “conventional” medicine papers, you conveniently don’t quote that paragraph.
There is not even an explanation why you decided to omit the thousands of experimental studies and hundreds of clinical trials, you only limited yourself to quoting a few popular books such as Shelton or Dawkins, who said that “there were no clinical trials” (the same thing that you, Ernst, contradict in your books). It is ridiculous that you will only talk about the Benveniste case citing only two critical opinion sources (Ball and the out dated and cherry picked Maddox report), and not the replications of Ennis and others that are consistent with Benveniste’s results. In fact, you don’t quote them in your books either!
The only thing you have proved is that you have confirmed with Oreskes, that homeopathy is systematic and there is a group of scientists who apply the scientific method.
So Ernst and Mukerji decided by act of faith to do a cherry picking? At least there is something important and funny about all this, when they recognize that the argument that homeopathy is “pseudoscience because of its alchemical origins” does not make sense because all disciplines come from religious magical elements. And the other is that they also recognize that Popper’s criterion does not work, how many skeptical charlatans in the 60s to 2000s sold Popper’s criterion as an “antidote” against homeopathy? Because Ernst, I can assure you that many of your friends’ old books are full of praises of Popper using his criteria to “prove that homeopathy is not falsifiable”.
Similarly, homoeopaths tend to dismiss evidence from RCTs (Mathie et al., 2014).”Ernst, explain in which paragraph and page Mathie states that.
“Milgrom argues “that no therapeutic modality, conventional medicine included, is ever practiced in real life according to the DBRCT’s [i.e. the double-blind randomized controlled trial’s] procedural separation of therapy and context”. Milgrom is just saying that skeptics apply a double standard, didn’t you read his article and only cut what suits you?
“secondly, empirical evidence suggesting that homoeopathy matches that criterion, which we have provided in this section”. But not the “eminent Ioannidis” has just shown that 80% of the trials of homeopathy are positive and with effect sizes similar to those of several common medicines! Then who is right? the data or banal speculations based on the opinions of skeptics?
“As we have argued, homoeopaths egregiously violate important epistemic standards by advocating a doctrine that is incongruent with our best theories of the natural world.”. How can it violate epistemic standards if Ioannidis himself contradicts you?
“homoeopaths mischaracterise and mishandle the evidence, reject RCTs, and immunise their theories against recalcitrant findings. Their methodology, in other words, is highly deficient, making their defence of homoeopathy bullshit.”But what I see is that skeptics are what immunize their claims, didn’t they say before that “there were no studies”? I have hundreds of quotes from your friends contradicting each other, have any of them apologized or retracted? No!
“For a research field to count as progressive, it must make bold new predictions that are actually confirmed by the data. As we have seen, however, homoeopathy does not do that. Instead, its proponents constantly try to explain away its implausibility and recalcitrant evidence by resorting to grotesque and epistemically irresponsible arguments”. This is very funny Ernst, your question would have been answered if only you had bothered to cite the reviews that contradict you and prove that predictions have indeed been made with data and rigorous studies.
“They make bizarre ontological claims or resort to quantum woo woo. They also illegitimately shift the burden of proof, mischaracterise, cherry-pick, and misreport the evidence, reject important parts of the scientific method, and seek to immunise their doctrine against recalcitrant evidence”. So a doctor and a philosopher with no knowledge of basic physics had the idea to call the work of Chandra Mahata, emeritus professor of solid state electronics and Weingärtner doctor in experimental physics, “woo”!
I’ve never read something so funny from you, Ernst. Now I want to know what your minions will answer.
Boudry (2022) argues that pseudoscience does not arise out of nowhere: “They are culturally shared beliefs and representations that have been developed by particular people in a certain social and historical context.” Pseudoscience can be characterized as closed, non-testable, without laws (or with fictitious laws), opposed to logical-mathematical thinking, isolated, without method, improbable and, of course, without verifiable evidence (Iglesias, 2012). Religion, superstition (the religion of others) and pseudoscience have something in common: they believe without proof. Or better, as Mooney (2011) points out, “pseudoscience is what certain individuals want it to be.” Fasce and Picó (2019) highlight four points that characterize pseudoscience: they are presented as scientific knowledge, they refer to at least one field considered outside the domains of science, they use procedures that do not correspond to the scientific method, and they are not supported by evidence. Orsi (2021), quoting Popper, highlights what all pseudoscience have in common: the universal claim of existence, which consists in affirming that something exists, but without specifying where, how or in what form. For his part, Rossel (2023) observes that pseudoscience makes use of the fallacy of authority frequently, always misrepresenting scientific claims in its favor.
Boudry, Mooney, Fasce and Picó, Orsel and Rossi only wrote self-contradictory pedantry, none of their criteria has been empirically validated (except for Fasce and Picó who rely on questionnaires of dubious generability). The theorists of the “demarcation of pseudoscience” and who claim that “homeopathy is pseudoscience” are ironically pseudoscientists who base their “arguments” on fallacies of authority citing philosophers of science who never evaluated the evidence for homeopathy. None of the philosophers you cite support their arguments against homeopathy, other than cherry-picking. And for Ernst and Mukerji to base their disastrous essay on that is much worse.
“is pseudoscience”, the best joke of this blog!
Extensive reviews, both “skeptics and proponents”, confirmed specific effects of homeopathic medicines over placebo:
-Linde et al, Kleijnen et al, Cucheat et al.
-Shang et al -> Pooled analysis in 8 URTI clinical trials without evidence of bias.
-Mathie et al (2014).
-Frass et al (2020) review.
-Sgurdison et al.
-Hamre et al.