Bad Science by Ben Goldacre Read Free Book Online Page A

then by now all water must surely be a health-giving homeopathic dilution of all the molecules in the world. Water has been sloshing around the globe for a very long time after all, and the water in my very body as I sit here typing away in London has already been through plenty of other people’s bodies before mine. Maybe some of the water molecules sitting in my fingers as I type this sentence are currently in your eyeball. Maybe some of the water molecules fleshing out my neurons as I decide whether to write “wee” or “urine” in this sentence are now in the bladder of the queen of England (God bless her). Water is a great leveler; it gets about. Just look at clouds.
    How does a water molecule know to forget every other molecule it’s seen before? How does it know to treat my bruise with its memory of arnica, rather than a memory of Isaac Asimov’s feces? I wrote this in the newspaper once, and a homeopath complained to the Press Complaints Commission. It’s not about the dilution, he said; it’s the succussion. You have to bang the flask of water briskly ten times on a leather and horsehair surface, and that’s what makes the water remember a molecule. Because I did not mention this, he explained, I had deliberately made homeopaths sound stupid . This is another universe of foolishness.
    And for all homeopaths’ talk about the “memory of water,” we should remember that what you actually take, in general, is a little sugar pill, not a teaspoon of homeopathically diluted water, so they should start thinking about the memory of sugar too. The memory of sugar, which is remembering something that was being remembered by water (after a dilution greater than the number of atoms in the universe) but then got passed on to the sugar as it dried. I’m trying to be clear, because I don’t want any more complaints.
    Once this sugar, which has remembered something the water was remembering, gets into your body, it must have some kind of effect. What would that be? Nobody knows, but you need to take the pills regularly, apparently, in a dosing regime that is suspiciously similar to that for medical drugs (which are given at intervals spaced according to how fast they are broken down and excreted by your body).
    I Demand a Fair Trial
     
    These theoretical improbabilities are interesting, but they’re not going to win you any arguments: Sir John Forbes, physician to Queen Victoria, pointed out the dilution problem in the nineteenth century, and 150 years later the discussion has not moved on. The real question with homeopathy is very simple: Does it work? In fact, how do we know if any given treatment is working?
    Symptoms are a very subjective thing, so almost every conceivable way of establishing the benefits of any treatment must start with the individual and his or her experience, building from there. Let’s imagine we’re talking—maybe even arguing—with someone who thinks that homeopathy works, someone who feels it is a positive experience, and who feels he gets better, quicker, with homeopathy. They would say: “All I know is, I feel as if it works. I get better when I take homeopathy.” It seems obvious to them, and to an extent it is. This statement’s power, and its flaws, lie in its simplicity. Whatever happens, the statement stands as true.
    But you could pop up and say: “Well, perhaps that was the placebo effect.” Because the placebo effect is far more complex and interesting than most people suspect, going way beyond a mere sugar pill; it’s about the whole cultural experience of a treatment, your expectations beforehand, the consultation process you go through while receiving the treatment, and much more.
    We know that two sugar pills are a more effective treatment than one sugar pill, for example, and we know that saltwater injections are a more effective treatment for pain than sugar pills, not because saltwater injections have any biological action on the body, but because an injection