Homeopathy is a a bizarre belief and much of its success – in my view – stems from the fact that many of the people buying into homeopathy don’t realise just how silly it is.
So I am grateful to the Mad Art Lab for Putting Homeopathy Into Perspective.
From Sci-ənce! by way of Mad Art Lab. Click on the image for the full size version and accompanying write-up.
See also, What Is – And What Isn’t – A Chemical
The email address associated with Pulpmovies.com is published on that website and has been for the past ten years. Looking at the volume of spam that is fired at that particular inbox, I acknowledge that publishing this email address in a bot-readable manner was a mistake. I also think that it’s now too late to remove it from the site and too much hassle to change it. Consequently, I now push all my Pulpmovies email through Gmail and leave it to Google to stop the spam.
Normally the Chocolate Factory does an excellent job but the occasional oddity does get through. Like the one that turned up today.
But first, some background.
Earlier this month, CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta sat down with Bill Gates who was at the World Economic Forum in Davos to push his mission of eradicating polio by 2012. Gates, through his foundation, also pledged $10 billion to provide vaccinations to children around the world within a decade. When Gupta asked Gates about alleged autism-vaccine connection, the billionaire philanthropist’s remarks were both outspoken and accurate.
Well, Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it’s an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn’t have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts — you know, they, they kill children. It’s a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.
You can watch the complete interview here.
So to the spam that made it through the filter. Anti-vaccination groups are outraged that Bill Gates has had the temerity to point out that spreading FUD and telling outright lies to concerned parents kills babies.
At the time of writing, the Jenny McCarthy Body Count has identified 74899 vaccine preventable illnesses and 656 vaccine preventable death that have occued in the US since Jenny McCarthy (a particularly loud and dim spokeswoman for the anti-vaccination movement) started spreading bogus claims.
If the numbers don’t move you then Dana McCaffery‘s story will. Go read it.
There is no link between vaccination and autism. People, such as Dr. Wakefield, who use fraudulent data to try and claim otherwise in order to profit from parents’ fears are despicable.
Anti-vaccination campaigners kill children.
Google Scholar claims to provide a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. I had assumed that this meant that it indexes content only from scholarly literature – peer reviewed journals and the like.
One of the justifications rolled out by supporters of alternative pretend medicines, once their claims of effectiveness have been shown to be nonsense, is “what’s the harm?”
The entirety of science is built on transparency, giving your evidence, and engaging with legitimate criticism. If you hear of a company refusing to hand over the evidence they say supports their claims, whether they are a drug company or some dismal cosmetics firm, all you know is that you are being deprived of information, and that vital parts of the picture are missing. If you hear someone is threatening to sue their critics, again, all you know is that people will be intimidated from raising legitimate concerns, and again, you are being deprived of information.
- Ben Goldacre on the news that Rodial Limited is trying to sue anyone who asks them to justify their claims.
The solution is to make it socially unacceptable to accept silly, unjustified arguments.
- Sabermetric research on human gullibility
This reads like something out of Brass Eye, but it isn’t:
What did the Select Committee on Science and Technology conclude?
The Select Committee on Science and Technology concluded that:
- There is no evidence that homeopathy works beyond the placebo effect, which is a position that the Government agrees with.
- By providing homeopathy on the NHS, the Government runs the risk of appearing to endorse it as a working system of medicine. There is also the danger that when doctors prescribe placebos, they risk damaging the trust that exists between them and their patients.
- Given that the existing scientific literature shows no good evidence of efficacy, further clinical trials of homeopathy are not justified.
What was the Government’s response?
The Government has decided to continue funding homeopathic hospitals and treatments on the NHS
If satire wasn’t dead before, it is now.
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