Homeopathy

There was a report published by NHMRC Australia that found, "Based on the assessment of the evidence of effectiveness of homeopathy, NHMRC concludes that there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective. People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness."

It is surprising to believe that in this day and age that people flock to this pseudoscience but then people have always been enamored by snake oil salesmen with their panaceas. It is shocking though that some in the medical research community, *cough* my father *cough cough*, continue to defend practices such as homeopathy. Let me reassure you, dear reader, that I have no skin in this game. I am not paid by big pharma and if there is a global conspiracy to discredit homeopathy, I haven't been receiving their newsletters. 

There are two ways to approach the problem of effectiveness of a health system; the social sciences approach and the scientific way. The social sciences approach is simply to ask people who have used a medical treatment if they thought it was effective in curing them.  One of the pillars of the argument for homeopathy seems to be based on this "It worked for so and so". Clearly this is a tempting proposition. But fraught with danger. For one, it will almost entirely miss the "Didn't do a damn thing to me" demography. That is, if we are predisposed to believe in a treatment, we'll remember all the people who claimed that it worked and don't count the people who have had partial or no success with this approach. Call it confirmation bias. This works just as well for the opposite view. Say I am skeptical about a particular medicine, then I am bound to remember the negative reviews than the positive ones. 

Researchers can work to control this bias in their studies. If a questionnaire was sent to a hundred people asking what they thought of kittens, you can bet that the people who take the time to respond will be predominantly cat-lovers. This selection bias can be accounted for in a study but the layperson who says that they heard from their sister that her friend's mom had a colleague whose niece suffered from asthma which was miraculously cured when they went to a homeopath.... not so much.

The scientific method would be to look at the theory behind the medicine and try to understand the mechanisms by which they cure the disease. For instance, to say that chemical compound A has effect X on organ Y which releases a secretion of  Z which results in reduction of a particular symptom. The problem that scientists have with homeopathy is because this particular line of enquiry yields terrible results. Homeopaths make claims about "water memory" or "super-dilution" that have been tested and the results show that the active ingredient in the "medicine" is so minuscule that it cannot actually effect change in the human body. That is, there is no difference between a sugar pill with no trace of active ingredient and a real pill with a one-thousandth trace of the active ingredient. 

(Side note: western medicine has a similar problem sometimes, when scientists are not able to trace all the causal links and have to say that they don't know which reaction causes particular symptom to vanish but it does. Yes, we don't know everything but the body of knowledge is growing and we are understanding things that we didn't before)

So, why does homeopathy seem to work? It could just be the placebo effect or it could be more complex than that. Many complimentary medical treatments talk about holistic medicine and demand changes in the lifestyle choices of the patient. For instance, the homeopath may demand that you give up meat during the treatment. Or to go on early morning walks. Or breathing exercises. These may allow the natural immunity of the body to fight back and get better. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this. 

It is important to note that the claim that a homeopathic medicine works (it does not and from what we know about chemistry, it cannot) is debunked but they may still have value as lifestyle gurus. Governments and medical institutions have an obligation to call them out for what they are, so that the unsuspecting public may make informed decisions. The NHMRC report is a step in the right direction.

The blind leading the blind

What do you make of Chetan Bhagat, considering he's often credited to have gotten more and more Indians to read through his books?

I don't know. Is it that you write third rate books and people can't do much better than to read those third rate books? Is it really an achievement? What is the achievement exactly?

We can't count Chetan Bhagat as an airport novelist. He's not an airport novelist -- he apparently writes about important, relevant things. In other countries when they are having kind of a moment in which they are writing about significant things, you see some great literature come out. Chetan Bhagat is not great literature. 

...

Chetan Bhagat doesn't find an audience because no one outside India can read him. He might just be a symptom of the fact that in English, India is basically a semi-literate country and Chetan Bhagat is the best it can do.

It doesn't seem to me that we need to look for a deeper explanation.

- Aatish Taseer

Human engineering

Read this awful article on a magazine called NewPhilosopher, where the author, Clive Hamilton, scoffed at the idea of human engineering. His article was a rebuttal of sorts to a paper by three bio-ethicists who published a paper titled, "Human engineering and climate change", where they discuss possibilities such as genetic engineering. One of the methods they discuss is genetic modification to obtain night vision (like cats) which would absolve the need for street lights. (I personally think that is an inspired idea)

I can't believe that the NewPhilosopher outright scoffed at the idea going so far as to calling it bizzare and laughable.  They write "Why not genetically modify people to make them white in order to cool the Earth by increasing its reflectivity?" - It's like they haven't even heard of reductio ad absurdum

He writes, "...the question of why anyone who is unwilling to buy a smaller car or switch to green power would be willing to genetically engineer their children".

Why is human engineering so absurd? Because it wouldn't work. So are a lot of plans of reducing emissions, but you wouldn't laugh at a guy who proposes smaller cars.

Of course some bio ethicists are going to write a paper saying what if the choice is between total annihilation and reinventing ourselves as a species . We know that in the past when threatened with extinction, various species have adapted by growing big, growing small, getting a hard shell, etc. One of evolutions tricks is that the size of humans will decrease over several generations if there is a resource drought.The problem is that humans may not have the luxury of waiting for hundreds of thousands of years to develop gills or something to adapt to new earth. So, perhaps human engineering and gene manipulation will not be optional. We will come to a time when changing a lightbulb is not going to be enough to save the human species and drastic changes, including some forms of human engineering will be necessary. You don't wait until after it becomes a reality to talk about the ethics of it. What can we do, what should we not. These discussions should happen now. And in magazines that call themselves NewPhilosopher. (What kind of a magazine are they, really?)

If Clive Hamilton can do nothing to contribute to this conversation but point fingers and sneer, maybe he should be sent to the naughty corner. No cat eyes for you.