Allergy Relievers: Red Light Nonsense

Its just about coming into allergy season again, so today I am turning my attention to a product I’ve seen for sale in a few pharmacies I’ve locumed at of late: The Allergy Reliever Device. These things are sold under some pharmacy chain’s own names, or under brand names like Kinetik.

It’s yet another medical device. These things seem to be hitting the pharmacy shelves more and more often these days, giving them a level of respectability which personally I don’t think they deserve. At least this device makes it clear that it is a device though, unlike things like Prevalin which pretend to be real medicine.

According to Kinetik, it uses “red light therapy to suppress the cells that release histamine, thereby relieving the symptoms of hayfever and allergic rhinitis.”

So, essentially shoving some Christmas tree lights up your nose then. Well I must admit that’s a new one on me. It’s pretty hard to sniff out (geddit?) the theory behind this one too.  The manufacturers of these things don’t give any explanation as to why red light would suppress mast cells, and several Google searches later I’m none the wiser. I have managed to dig out one published paper in rats, where the authors seem to be suggesting that red light changes the redox state of cells, which might cause some changes within the cell. Even these others say that they’re not quite sure what’s happening though, and that further investigation is required.

Armed with a few unsuccessful Google Searches, I delved into the medical literature. I tried every which way I could think of to search for evidence that this thing works, but ended up drawing a total blank. I think this may well be the least successful search for evidence I’ve done so far, and that’s saying something. Even the manufacturers can’t be bothered with listing any sources instead they go wild with the clipart, giving us a Generic Smiley White Coated Person and Happy Photostock Chef alongside some very random recipes and general lifestyle advice.

And it looks like this thing really isn't very pleasant or practical to use. You're supposed to shove the probes up your schnozz as far as you comfortably can, then keep them there for three minutes. Not the most dignified of poses. And you're supposed to do this three or four times a day. That's a lot of inconvenience. Seems like prime Use Once Then Put In A Dark Cupboard territory for me, especially since taking a one a day antihistamine tablet is no hassle at all. 

In short, I wouldn’t waste your money. There’s no basis to these things, and it saddens me that they are not only being sold in pharmacies, but are being sold under pharmacy brand names. The more we associated our profession with such nonsense, the less trustworthy we become to other healthcare professionals and patients alike.

Hxxx

"I do my own research"

Something that I see a lot in on-line debates about alternative medicine is phrases like “I did my own research” or “people should be allowed to do their own research and make their own decisions”

However, I don’t think that the vast majority of people are able to do their own research. Now, that’s probably a pretty unpopular opinion. It’s patronising, paternalistic, and it flies in the face of patient choice. Who am I to question the intelligence and abilities of other people? Why do I think I'm so clever compared to anyone else out there? Allow me to explain myself.

I've been a pharmacist for a very long time now. From uni, through pre-reg, to my own revision at work, I've been taught critical appraisal skills. Yet to this day, it’s something that I actually find really hard work. It’s a skill that requires continual honing, and every time I use it I feel like I am fighting with my brain.

Even in the last two weeks, I've been revisiting my critical appraisal skills to make sure they are up to date. I've done some in-house work, three on-line courses, and a one to one training session. Yet I still find myself sat here at my desk for several hours, if not days, looking over the same study with a furrowed brow, desperately trying to make the numbers and statistics tell me their story.

There’s hazard ratios, odds ratios, confidence intervals, numbers needed to treat, event rates, absolute risks and other confuddling terms to deal with. I naturally struggle with numbers at the best of times; like most people, I much prefer narratives. That means that I have to constantly argue with myself to keep looking at the results page, rather than just flicking to the discussion. Becasue if I did that, I'd be relying on what the authors, with all of their possible biases and agendas, say their numbers say. Then, when I eventually manage to squeeze the swimming mass of figures into some sort of order in my head, I find out that these numbers aren't the full story, and I need to dig even deeper into other analyses of the same figures to find out what’s really going on.*  

A quick and very simplistic visualisation of all the layers of interpretation that might lead to information found on your common or garden health information website. That's a whole lot of bias. 

I am truly terrible at MS paint, but you get the idea. 

What a typical EMBASE search looks like. This is for a new drug with few synonyms so its a fairly straightforward one. Others can have forty odd lines of searches. 

It’s not a pleasant task by any stretch of the imagination. It really does feel like a mental marathon. I often question whether I am even up to the task- I can end up feeling stupid, and confused. But in order to really figure out whether or not a drug works I need to strip away all the levels of other peoples’ interpretation and start from scratch, with the cold, hard, impersonal numbers. That way I can build my own narrative, uninfluenced by what the study’s authors or sponsors want me to think, by what newspapers want me to believe, by what campaigners want me to know. The only way to know the truth is to start right at the bottom, in a dark dank pit of statistics, then to slowly start building yourself a ladder until you emerge, blinking, into the pleasant knowledge that you've worked out what on earth is going on.

This sort of raw data is not only extremely hard to deal with once it’s in front of you, but its also pretty difficult to come by. Finding it in the first place includes searching multiple medical databases- and these things aren't just a quick free text search like you would do on Google. Constructing a search can in itself take an hour or so, and then you have to trawl through the results to decide which are relevant to what you are specifically looking for. For me, most of the time, a question is structured like this:

What is the evidence that [drug/ group of drugs] works for [disease] in [patient group]?

                                                        

So, in my poorly drawn Venn diagram below, I need to find those holy grail papers that reside in the pink area:

Some of these papers might be pay-walled, so it’ll take me a week or so to get my hands on them. Some of them might initially look promising, but once you start to dig down into the figures you see that there might actually be problems with how they were undertaken or reported, or they might turn out to not quite fit in some way- perhaps the dose they used in the trial is different to the licensed dose in the UK, or the people enrolled into the trial don’t quite fit the population you want to know about, or perhaps the trial just didn't recruit enough people so any results from it are invalidated.

I've been doing this job for years, and I really do still struggle with all of this stuff. That’s not because I'm poor at my job, or because I'm stupid, or because I haven’t put the effort in to understand it. It’s because, when it comes down to it, this stuff is really bloody hard. It’s time-consuming, boring, and unintuitive.

People might well feel like they've done their own research. They might spend several hours digging about on the internet and feel empowered by any decisions that they make. But what they don’t realise is that what they've been researching isn't just the information- it’s the information with many, many layers of interpretation (and therefore bias) added. For a choice to be truly informed, you need to go right back to the start, to those terrifying tables of numbers and statistics. That’s simply not realistic for the majority of people.

Far better, then, to learn how to decide on whose interpretation you’re going to rely on. Will it be those that take the media reports at face value, or who have an agenda or a product to sell you? Or will you go with those that have years of training in how to pull apart complicated data and disseminate it in understandable ways?

Hxxx

*I thought I’d give you a quick real life example here, but I thought it best to asterisk it because I've probably bored you enough already. I'm currently looking at a drug called edoxaban and its use in reducing the risk of stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation. It’s the newest in a series of  novel oral anticoagulant drug- they’re supposedly like warfarin, but less faffy. So I find and look at the main trial, and spend days unpicking the stats. It looks like both strengths used in the trial are no worse than warfarin, and the higher dose might even be a little better. Great, right?

Well, that’s not quite the end of the story. Because it turns out- and this isn't reported in the trial at all, but instead is contained in the FDA’s briefing document- that in people with fully working kidneys, edoxaban is actually worse than plain old warfarin. In people whose kidney’s aren't quite at full capacity though, it might work better than warfarin. So the overall trial results are kind of skewed, and if we didn't dig deeper, we might have been giving a whole group of people a more expensive drug with worse outcomes than warfarin.

In memory of Rachel

I didn’t know Rachel at all. But I was told her story last night, and all of today I have been thinking about her. I don’t know how old she was, what her life was like, the colour of her hair, whether she spelt her name with just an 'e' or if there was an 'a' in there too. 

It sounded like Rachel was a nice person. It sounded like she was enthusiastic (I think she met the teller of her story whilst volunteering for something).

Rachel was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She was encouraged to try homeopathic treatment for it, and to stop her conventional medicines.

Several days after stopping her medicines, Rachel took her own life.

Many of you might remember that I blogged about a homeopath’s response to my good friend’s request for help for her own bipolar disorder. At the time, I theorised that, had my friend followed this homeopath’s advice, she would have destabilised and it would have killed her. 

I’m so, so sad that this happened to Rachel. I often get questioned about why I do what I do, why I rant on about homeopathy and alternative medicine so much. If other people want to use it, I’m told, then just leave them be. But how can I sit back and not do anything, when there are other people out there just like Rachel? If I can make any difference at all, even a tiny one, then I will do. If I can make even just a couple of people raise their eyebrows and wonder why homeopathy is still used in this day and age in place of effective treatments, then I’ll keep doing what I’m doing.

Sorry, Rachel. I’m really sorry that this happened to you. I didn’t know you, but I’m sorry that you went through all of that, and I’m sorry that your friends and family and the world lost you.

Hxxx

It's time to reclaim holism

Holistic. It's one of those words that's sure to set any skeptic’s teeth on edge. It's basically a codename for woo, bandied about by supporters and pushers of all sorts of magic, unicorn tears, and snake oil.

But should it be? Is it time for the medical profession to reclaim the label holistic as its own, and start shouting from the rooftops about how we are holistic practitioners? I think it is, and here’s why.

holistic

həʊˈlɪstɪk,hɒ-/

adjective

Philosophy

adjective: holistic

1. characterized by the belief that the parts of something are intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.

o    Medicine

characterized by the treatment of the whole person, taking into account mental and social factors, rather than just the symptoms of a disease.

There is a general perception, gleefully pushed by proponents of alternative healthcare,  that somehow conventional healthcare and holism are at odds with each other. The image of an uncaring, white-coated medical professionals hell-bent on simply treating that one particular symptom, with no regard for the fact that a patient is attached to that symptom seems pervasive.

We don’t help ourselves, I suppose. With a limited time on GP appointments, for example, its easy to feel like you’re being rushed through the system. Some surgeries ask that you book one appointment per ailment. Our health care professionals tend to specialise in one particular type of illness, and you can start to get the impression that they only care about that particular bit of your life, despite the fact that it’s very often all interconnected. You can feel passed from pillar to post, one day an appointment with a diabetes nurse, the next day an appointment with someone else for your arthritis, and two days later an appointment with a mental health specialist. So I do understand that it can seem like, as healthcare professional, we only care about your symptoms. 

But, even at the most basic level, it is impossible and really quite dangerous  to practice healthcare without looking at the patient as a whole. We’re all trained to do it, and its become so second nature to us that we have all sort of forgotten to be proud of it. As a result, we've lost control of the word holistic and we’re allowing unscrupulous charlatans to creep in to the public’s consciousness on the back of it. Of course, there are improvements to be made, but I think on the whole we do bloody well in the NHS, given the knowledge, funding and time constraints we’re lumbered with.

Now, in my day job as a medicines information pharmacist, I actually have no direct contact with patients. But I still, fundamentally, operate as a holistic practitioner. Here’s a basic example of what I mean:

GP: “Ah, hi there, I’m just wondering if there are any interactions between Champix and CellCept?”

In this sort of seemingly simple interaction enquiry, it is imperative that I look at the patient as a whole, rather than simply as two drugs out there on their own. 

• Champix®▼(varenicline) is a drug used to help patients stop smoking
• CellCept® (mycophenolate mofetil) is an immunosuppressive drug used to stop organ rejection in transplant patients. 

If I were to look at interactions of these two drugs,  I wouldn't find any,So fine, we’re good to go, right? I mean, I’ve answered the question, done my job, and all is well, yes? 

No, not at all. If I’m going to safely answer this question, I need to look at the patient as a whole. I need to acknowledge that they’re not simply a smoking machine that needs to stop but they’re a living, breathing complicated human.  I need to look at the patient holistically, not just as some isolated drugs.

So our patient is in his mid-forties, using the mycophenolate mofetil because he has previously had a heart transplant. He has a history of depression (understandable really, given how ill he has been in the past), and takes a couple of other medicines too (no major interactions on checking). He wants to stop smoking, which is great, a really positive step for him, but he’s failed a few attempts already whilst using nicotine replacement therapies. He's found these failed attempts frustrating in the past,which has then triggered bouts of depression. His liver and kidneys are working just fine.

So, looking at the patient as a whole, I need to think about how using varenicline will impact him as a person. Some of my thoughts go thus:

• Stopping smoking itself might affect some drugs, as there are chemicals in cigarette smoke which can affect the enzymes that metabolise some drugs. Is this the case with any of these drugs?
• Quitting smoking itself can be a trigger for depression or suicidal ideation. 
• There is also an association between varenicline and changes in behaviour and thinking, including depression and suicidal ideation. Given this patient’s history, this will need to be discussed with him and he’ll need to be monitored carefully.
• Certain cardiovascular events were reported more frequently with varenicline than placebo in trials: we need to bear that in mind and monitor him for any adverse reactions, especially given his heart transplant
• Not succeeding in giving up smoking has made him depressed in the past. Continuing to smoke increases his cardiovascular risks. A good old risk vs benefit decision needs to be made.

So I discuss all this with the Dr, and her response is:

“Ah that's great. Yep, I knew about the depression stuff but to be honest I hadn't really thought about the cardiovascular risks. I'll discuss it all with him, and I think we'll go ahead and prescribe it but I'll make sure to keep him closely monitored”

By looking at the patient holistically, his Dr and I have made sure that he will know to look out for any cardiac effects and to report it as soon as possible if he does experience any side effects. We can make sure that he's also prepared for the fact that his mood might change, and knows to report any of that too. He’s willing to take these risks for the sake of stopping smoking, so we’re helping him to take a really positive step in his life, aimed with all the information he needs to do it safely.

That’s just a small example of how I practice holistic medicine in my daily life. All over the NHS, at every level, other healthcare professionals are doing the same thing in their practice. We don’t declare ourselves to be holistic, because its such second nature that we don’t even realise we’re doing it. Maybe its time to start reminding people-and ourselves- that conventional medicine does, fundamentally, mean holistic medicine. 

Hxxx

Evidence-Based Ambridge

Ahh. Sunday mornings. They can mean only one thing: bacon.
Okay, two things: bacon and tea
Whoops, no let's make that three things: bacon, tea, and The Archers omnibus. 

So welcome to the first instalment of an occasional series (probably so occasional that this is the only one), in which I critically examine the treatment choices of the fictional residents of Ambridge. 

In today's omnibus, Hell-on's child falls over. There is much hysterical panic, and much bewailing the fact that she wasn't watching him properly. Apparently its hard to look after a child and gaze lovingly off into the distance in the direction of Rob Titchener's house. Who knew. 

But never fear, Hell-on's mother, Pat (who doesn't appear to have noticed that her husband has been kidnapped and replaced by an interloper), is on hand to reassure her that she has done her best with the arnica. 

Arguably, I'd say arnica is one of the most accepted forms of woo in the UK. Arnica cream is a standard item in many pharmacies, and I would say that many people know that it is supposed to be useful for bruises. I wonder just how many first aid boxes have a tube of arnica languishing in them, but I reckon it is quite a few.

Its also a poster boy for the sort of confusion that reigns between the public perception of homeopathy and herbal medicine. herbal arnica cream often sits side by side homeopathic versions with no explanation of the difference. 

Even Nelson's seem rather confused about which modality to use, with both herbal and homeopathic arnica sitting in their "Arnicare" range of products. I can't quite get my head around this to be honest. Imagine going into an off-license and seeing two bottles of Smirnoff, one of which contains vodka and one of which contains water, though the only difference on the label is that one says Smirnoff Vodka 30C. Hmm.

Does the distinction matter? Yes, I think it does. I think its pure, outright deception to sell a homeopathic product to someone expecting a herbal medicine. One has arnica in, one doesn't. 

Anyway, all of this is by the by. Obviously there is no evidence that homeopathic arnica works for bruising. It's homeopathy. It has nothing in it. 

And as for herbal arnica? there's also no evidence that it works, although there is a little bit of prior plausibility, in that some of the chemicals in the arnica plant have an anti-inflammatory and anti-platelet action. There is, however, no information on how clinically significant these actions are, and whether rubbing a bit of cream into an area would get these potentially useful chemicals to the right place in any meaningful amounts.
Let's not forget that bruises are self-limiting. They go away of their own accord (and probably at the same pace), regardless of whether or not you rub some gunk into them. herbal arnica isn't risk free: the cream can cause  contact itchiness, dry skin, and rash. Orally, arnica can be pretty nasty stuff, even causing coma and death in extreme cases. 

So, my evidence-based advice to Helen would be: kiss it better, and leave it be. Henry is a small child, and falling over is pretty common in that age group. Don't apply an ineffective treatment which could rarely lead to side effects, and save your money. 

Postscript: Homeopathic Harms 3.1: C's Story

Imagine you're twelve years old.

You're on the cusp of adolescence, a time where you start to move away from the comfort and protection of your family and begin to forge your own way in life. Friendships become increasingly important, and you're in a constant process of trying to make new ones, maintaining old ones, and falling out with others. The world seems confusing, terrifying, and wonderful in varying measures, and you spend a lot of your time watching those around you and drinking in how they act, what works and what doesn't, deciding how to act yourself to fit in and be accepted. This is the time when, though the ground is constantly shifting beneath your feet. you start to put down little social foundations and try to make sense of the world.


There is a wealth of evidence that suggests many benefits of connecting with people of your own age during adolescence. At such a crucial, tumultuous time of life, being socially isolated from your peers can have long lasting and harmful effects.


What's this got to do with homeopathy?

I've written before about how poor advice from homeopaths can potentially cause a lot of damage, and through our Homeopathic Harms series of blog posts, Nancy (of the Evidence Based Skepticism blog) and I have hopefully managed to convey to you an idea of how it can sometimes be the seemingly innocuous and difficult to quantify harms that can be most worrying.

I received an e-mail the other day that I have since been thinking a lot about and which I wanted to share with you. Its a real-life example of just how much harm poor advice from a homeopath can cause. The chap who sent me the email has very kindly allowed me to share his story with you, but of course I am going to respect his anonymity and refer to him as C.

C's story

C. had delayed puberty. Now this is something that is fairly common, happening in about 3% of cases, and which can be caused by a number of factors, but the most common type is Constitutional delay in growth and puberty (CDGP). This is basically a technical way of saying 'Just one of those things, which might be caused a whole load of stuff or possibly just chance.'

Conventional medicine would manage CDGP by... well, usually just by waiting, really. Monitoring, and reassurance are often all that is required. Otherwise, short courses of sex hormones should be enough to do the trick. If the delay in puberty is caused by something, then ideally the underlying cause would be appropriately treated. You can see some good, reliable guidance on management here.

Note, by the way, that the definition of delayed puberty according to patient.co.uk specifies '...in boys beyond 14 years old'.  Now, I have no way of saying what the definition of delayed puberty was at the time that we join C's story, but his experiences began when he was 12- well below the point where we would diagnose delayed puberty nowadays.

C's mother consulted a homeopath. He was given some homeopathic pills, which on account of just being made out of sugar, had no beneficial effects, but also no harmful effects. However, the homeopath also appears to have given C's mum some advice, the goal of which seems to have been isolating him from his peers between the ages

C was:

• not allowed to stay at school for lunchtime, but instead had to go home.
• not allowed to stay at school after the school day had finished.
• not allowed to cross the local footbridge over the motorway, which cut him off from the majority of his peers.
• not allowed to go down the street of the one classmate who lived on his side of the motorway.
• allowed and encouraged to socialise with one boy who was two years his junior.

The first question is why. Why on earth would a homeopath give such advice? We can only speculate that the homeopath in question thought- apropos of nothing- that since C was a late developer he should be kept away from people his own age and instead only socialise with younger children. I've had a look around some homeopathic websites on the internet, and found nothing that looks similar to this sort of advice. [I did, however, find this website, which amused me no end due to its impressive reference list. No, really, go and look at the link and scroll to the bottom, if you want a good laugh]. In fact, I couldn't find anything at all suggesting that enforced social isolation is good for anyone or for treating anything, really.

C's case would appear to be one of a homeopath acting outside of their competence and providing bizarre and very harmful advice. In C's case, homeopathic treatment was certainly not safe, although this had nothing to do with the sugar pills themselves.

The result of this set of rules on C were, in his own words:

"a boy who was immature, shy and lacking in self-confidence. When it came to puberty I had significant mental health problems (starting with OCD due to high levels of anxiety) which have had an impact throughout my life....I didn't regain a sense of normality (in terms of socialising properly) until the age of 25-26."

Limitations

C's story is, of course, merely one anecdote, and as good skeptics we of course have to realise the limitations of it. There's nothing to say that, if C hadn't have followed these rules, he wouldn't have gone on to develop any mental health problems, and indeed delayed puberty itself is not without an increased risk of psychological problems.

Given our very human need to fit in, it may be the case that children with delayed puberty have a preference for younger friends, as they stand out less. This is entirely understandable, but in C's case it is clear that his situation was enforced upon him.

 But given the established link between social isolation in adolescence with mental health issues, I think we can pretty safely say that this is a case where at the very least homeopathy worsened his situation. His quality of life was undoubtedly affected when he had to obey the rules.

Thankyou to C

Many, many thanks to C for sharing his story with me. I think its so important to hear these stories, as they might help to raise awareness of the less obvious, nebulous harms that can arise from treatment by unregulated, alternative practitioners. Unfortunately, its really difficult to quantify these sorts of harms into cold hard evidence, and that's why I, and many others like me, keep banging on as loudly as we can about them. If you have any examples of potential harm caused by homeopathy, it goes without saying that I would love to hear from you.


H xxx

Nelsons- suggesting kids need mood stabilisers from 2 years+

You know of Rescue Remedy, right? You probably had an aunt who would constantly swig a drop for her nerves, or might have even taken some before a driving test or exam.

Rescue Remedy has become a pretty well known brand- so well known, in fact, that most people don't bother finding out whats in it, or what principles its based on. You wouldn't want to know the recipe of Coca-Cola before you take a refreshing swig- you'd just assume that because its a well known brand, its probably going to work.

Rescue Remedy is, however, a whole load of woo nonsense. Sorry, but there's no other way of putting it. Some dude called Edward Bach decided- apropos of nothing- a good few years ago that some flowers, if left out in the sun and dissolved in alcohol,  will be able to balance physical and emotional distress. This is interesting, really, given that its taken the entire fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology many, many years to get to a point where there are still a vast amount of unknowns regarding mood disorders.

Science is getting there- slowly- when it comes to understanding things like depression. It's a vastly complicated subject. There's no perfect cure-all drug out there for treating such things- mainly because we don't yet understand it that well yet. So forgive me if I am skeptical that some random guy years ago has just randomly (without any basis in science) decided that, for example, mustard flower:

 "is the remedy for deep gloom and depression that descends for no apparent reason out of a clear blue sky. People in this state often list all the reasons they have to feel happy and contented, but still everything looks black and hopeless to them. The remedy helps to dispel the clouds so that we can once again appreciate the joy and peace in our lives."

Rescue Remedy is a blend of some of Dr Bach's made up flower remedies, diluted in brandy. You're supposed to reach for it in times of anxiety, as a soother. Funnily enough, brandy, being alcohol and all, it might make you feel a little bit better, but similarly to homeopathic remedies, they are dilutes such that very little or no levels of active ingredient are likely to remain. So even if Dr Bach were right about the flowers (despite evidence and science suggesting otherwise), there wouldnt be enough flower-stuff in a drop of it anyway to make a difference.

I can't quite get away from the fact that this is a cynical product which Dr Bach made up in an attempt to target wealthy women ("ooh! pretty flowers!") in the days where women were considered "hysterical" and many were labelled as having "problems with their nerves" based entirely on their sex.

Anyway, why am I on about Nelsons, and why am I on about children? Well, because the Bach Rescue Remedy brand- in all of its many, varying, and just-as-cynically money-grabbing-as-Big-Pharma- forms- is sold via Nelson's homeopathic brand. That's Nelson's who the FDA discovered weren't putting magic woo water in all of their magic woo water pills, but were happy enough to put particles of glass in there. That's Nelson's who are all "ooh, we care about you and your healthcare unlike those big meanie pharmaceutical companies who only care about money" all the time.

Well, I happened to stumble across this product of theirs today. Rescue Remedy Gummy Stars- aimed at children from 2 years and onwards. According to Nelsons:

"The first day back at school is a big day so parents should have a secret weapon against tiny tears on standby in the school run bag. RESCUE® Gummy stars - The latest addition to the RESCUE brand come in fun star shapes to help turn a frown upside down at the school gates and each Gummy Star contains four drops of RESCUE, the famous soothing combination of five flower essences."

What's wrong with that? The fact the Nelsons are attempting to medicalise a perfectly normal part of childhood purely for their profit, that's what. Being nervous on your first day of school is entirely normal, especially for a little one. What they need to do is to develop normal coping mechanisms to deal with their anxiety. What they don't need to feel is that their anxiety is abnormal and something which only a medicine can fix.

When encountering the world of complementary or alternative medicine, I often like to stop for a moment and replace the names of the companies with those of Big Pharma. It gives a good indication of whether or not there really is a difference in practices between the two camps, and whether people's reactions would be different

"The first day back at school is a big day so parents should have a secret weapon against tiny tears on standby in the school run bag. PROZAC® Gummy stars - The latest addition to the PROZAC brand come in fun star shapes to help turn a frown upside down at the school gates and each Gummy Star contains 10mg of PROZAC, the famous soothing antidepressant fluoxetine."

Icky, right?

Hxxx

The Society of Homeopaths and what passes for Evidence.

So today has seen some great news for rationality, science, and above all patients. The ASA has announced this ruling, leading to the Society of Homepaths taking down a rather large chunk of their website- the bit about what homeopathy can be used for.

However, using their search function, you can still find some of the nonsense they are promoting. I stumbled across this article, for example, entitled "Homeopathy Offers Alternative Relief for hay fever sufferers". I'd be very surprised if this article doesn't get taken down soon also, to be honest. It really should, given part of the ASA's ruling relates to their claims over the efficacy of homeopathy for hay fever.

That use of the word alternative (as opposed to complementary) is interesting. That in itself suggests that the Society of Homeopaths are advocating patients not using conventional medicines in favour of their homeopathic products.

One thing that I have learnt about homeopaths is that, despite the fact that they often claim that randomised controlled trials (and indeed science in general) can't explain their wondrous treatment because of its individualised nature and quantum nanoparticles blah blah all the other words that they're clinging onto, they like to cite trials. A lot.

Homeopaths will often spout names of trials and provide links to PubMed abstracts with abandon, even when the trials say little about the clinical use of homeopathy in humans. In vitro or animal trials are favourites, and on the odd occasion where I have been sent a human trial, the result usually show that homeopathy is no better than placebo, and in some cases actually worse than placebo. At best, I'm guessing this is just ignorance- maybe they have misread the results of the trial? At worst (and more realistically), its a pretty obvious and petty method of obfuscation, and a pretty rubbish one at that. Presumably they think I will be so vowed by the fact that a trial exists that I wont bother to check the actual results of what the trial is saying.

This hayfever page overs a great example of this:

"A number of research trials have shown that homeopathic treatment can produce a significant improvement in hay fever symptoms,(4-7) but what does this involve?"

 Let's have a look at the "number of research trials", shall we? 

Reilly DT, Taylor MA, McSharry C, Aitchison T. Is homeopathy a placebo response?
Controlled trial of homeopathic potency, with pollen in hayfever as a model. Lancet,1986;2: 881-6.
This is a trial from 1986. Really, that's the best they can do, in 2013? The abstract of this trial appears impressive: "The homoeopathically treated patients showed a significant reduction in patient and doctor assessed symptom scores", but neglects to mention the most important part of a study like this: blinding. How can we assess the placebo effect in a study that isn't blinded? especially when the results rely on only reported outcomes. We can tick this one off the list as being a pretty rubbish effort at a trial. Must try harder.

 Kleijnen J, Knipschild P, ter Riet G. Clinical trials of Homeopathy. Br Med J, 1991; 302:316-22.
Ahh, the early nineties. We're getting thoroughly modern and hip now, eh? This is a meta-analysis. hay fever isn't mentioned in the abstract at all, and the conclusion of the paper is that studies performed in homeopathy are rubbish, and better ones need to be done. Hardly a conclusive statement that homeopathy works for hay fever. We can tick this one off the list too.

We're now left with two trials to back up that statement above. To me, two trials is not "a number" of trials, even at this point. Even if these two trials were massive, robust, good quality randomised controlled trials, I still wouldn't be entirely convinced: I'd want to see the result replicated in as many different trials as possible. Anyway, we shalll soldier on, in the hopes of being dazzled by the brilliance of these two references.


Launsø L, Kimby CK, Henningsen I, Fønnebø V. An exploratory retrospective study of people suffering from hypersensitivity illness who attend medical or classical homeopathic treatment. Homeopathy, 2006; 95: 73-80.
Oh dear. A retrospective study. So not a controlled trial at all then? The results? "The two groups of patients were similar in respect of their health at the start of the treatment, 57% of the patients who consulted a CH experienced an improvement of their state of health compared to 24% of the GP patients." well, that's all very well and good, but there is no blinding here whatsoever, and only 88 patients completed the study. means nothing at all, except for- as even the authors put it- as an exploratory study, maybe to try to find ways of how to conduct as more robust actual trial in the future.

That's it, down to the final trial. I'm expecting great things. 


Kim LS, Riedlinger JE, Baldwin CM, Hilli L, Khalsa SV, Messer SA, Waters RF. Treatment of Seasonal Allergic Rhinitis Using Homeopathic Preparation of Common Allergens in the Southwest Region of the US: A Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trial. Ann Pharmacother, 2005; 39(4): 617-24.
HURRAH!!! It's double-blind! We've gotten there! We've gotten some good, robust evidence tha- oh hang on, its only got 40 participants in it.IT's just a wee ickle little study that's far too small to draw any conclusions from.

So there you have it. This page is still up there on their website, using crappy references that don't back up their claims. The Society of Homeopaths- and quacks in general- need to realise that, no matter how hard they try, just trying to shoehorn poor excuses for studies in wherever they like isn't good enough.

Here's how it should go: you look at the evidence, you evaluate the evidence, and you make your claim on the basis of that evidence. Not: "I shall claim this, then try desperately to find something that vaguely looks like it backs me up, and I'll just hope for the best that no-one else bothers reading it. It seems the Society of Homeopaths are going in for the latter, and good on the ASA for pulling them up on it.

"We told the Society of Homeopaths not to discourage essential treatment for conditions for which medical supervision should be sought, including offering specific advice on or treatment for such conditions. We also told them not to make health claims for homeopathy unless they held sufficiently robust evidence of efficacy." -ASA ruling

Hxxx

The Not-So-Wise Owls

You might have noticed that Holland and Barrett, the high street's most proliferative purveyor of pointless supplements, homeopathic, and herbal medicines are in the midst of a rather odd marketing campaign, called #AskOurOwls.

*Gratuitous Fluffy Animal Pic* Meet Willow. Willow is a fully grown, 10 year old south African Owl who lives in Kielder Forest. Willow does not purport to be an expert in complementary and alternative medicines, but he does have very soft feathers. Willow would like to make it known that he does not condone the actions of Holland and Barrett owls.

#AskOurOwls means you can ask any question about a Holland and Barrett product, and if their staff can't answer your question, you get 20% off in store. This is accompanied by a kawaii cute animated advert featuring bunnies, hedgehog, and other adorable woodland creatures. Because natural remedies are always totally cute, safe and innocuous, right? And presumably because everyone who works there is in actual fact a shape-shifting owl cavorting as a human. Its like David Icke stuff, but with more feathers.

In the words of the ad agency who designed it:

"The campaign aims to demonstrate Holland & Barrett’s USP of considerable staff expertise, endorsing the fact that every Holland & Barrett store within the UK has had an officially qualified associate to give advice on all own label supplements, vitamins, healthy foods and weight management products"

Now, I've lost count of the number of enquiries I've dealt with because of Holland and Barrett. These enquiries are usually along the lines of "My patient has bought <insert Holland and Barrett product> and wants to know if they're safe to use with their other medicines." In some of these cases, patients have presented with over £40 worth of herbal medicines etc, and have then been told that no, they can't take it, either because it will interact with their medicines, or because it isn't suitable to be taken by someone with their medical problems.

I have no idea what the Holland and Barrett in-house staff training consists of, but I'm not sure what part of it would allow someone to buy multiple, expensive remedies before they know if they are safe for them to use. Its not only a dangerous strategy, but its really very poor customer service, and doesn't do much to 'demonstrate considerable staff expertise'.

Anecdotally, I have heard that in some areas, Holland and Barrett employees have been known to send patients to a nearby pharmacy to ask if they are able to take a product. Whilst this at least demonstrates an awareness of their knowledge limitations, its also pretty inconvenient for the customer to have to traipse in and out of different shops, and i should imagine pretty irritating for the pharmacist, who is having to do H&B's work for them. And believe me, these sorts of enquiries aren't always easy to do, and can be very time consuming.


So that's not all that encouraging for their #AskOurOwls scheme, is it? And it is a really quite bizarre strategy. If I ask a question about whether a product is safe for me to take, and they can't answer it, I can't really see how offering me a discount on something that I don't know is safe or not would help.

Of course the skeptical community understandably used this opportunity to Ask Some Owls some reasonable questions about where the evidence is for many of the products they sell, why they sell homeopathy when there is literally nothing in it, why they promote detox products when there is no scientific evidence for detox, why they sell high dose vitamins when there is some evidence that they may increase cancer risk etc. And no answers flowed in at all. I ask three questions, and got no response, then sent a Tweet about how I had gotten no response. This did attract a -very curt and actually pretty damn rude- reply from Holland and Barrett demanding to know if it was a question or not.

Funnily enough, after being bombarded with questions about their selling of quackery, the terms and conditions now read that the offer does not apply to questions asked via Facebook or Twitter. I have no idea at all whether these terms were the same at the start of the campaign (do let me know if you know), but it would seem very strange indeed if they have launched a campaign centred around a hashtag but which is not for use on social media. It would sort of suggest that they was actually being rather misleading, or just very careless in the original advertising campaign. Or, of course, that they hadn't quite thought through the consequences of encouraging people to ask questions about remedies that have no basis in science or evidence. Presumably they think that us mean skeptic-types will be so overwhelmed by their wondrous array of snake oil remedies that we will turn to mush and be unable to think of a question in store.

Let's see what that ad agency says again, shall we?

"The brand strategy extends to social media, where customers can engage with Holland& Barrett staff via Twitter to answer relevant health questions. By using the hashtag, #askourowls, customers are directed back to the brand."

Suspicious, non? And lets just think about this strategy for a moment. They are encouraging people to ask them health questions in less than 140 characters. Given that people are complex, and may have multiple health issues and be on many different medicines, this seems a somewhat cavalier strategy.

Then again, Holland and Barrett are home to some other really quite bizarre offers as well. What on earth is going on with that buy one, get the other for 1p thing? Save everyone the bother of having to faff about with change and just do a plain old BOGOF, for goodness sake. Or, even better, how about not encouraging pointless polypharmacy with multi-buy offers in an area where they are clinically inappropriate and potentially even dangerous? 

So, next time you're passing a Holland and Barrett store, take a moment or two to drop in, and ask them for the evidence. If they can't provide you with any, then enjoy your 20% off- you should be able to find something to buy there- they do sell Bombay mix after all, which is approximately 50% more baked than their #AskOurOwls campaign ever was. Do let me know how you got on, if you do get a chance to ask a question.


You can read some more about how the #AskOurOwls campaign went wrong for H&B but right for skeptics here, and the sort of non-answer Slipp Digby got here. 

Hxxx

UPDATE: interestingly, a mere few hours after I published this post, I got an @reply from Holland and Barrett on Twitter, promising me that someone was looking into my enquiry about acai and i would hear from a nutritionist soon. At the same time, they were merrily sending out requests for follows so that they could DM answers to many other people who had asked similar questions. However, I've never heard anything since, or been asked to follow them to get a DM response-this is now 3 days after they told me someone would contact me.

Putting aside all the other problems with this campaign, this is just utterly terrible customer service. My job involves me dealing with often very complex enquiries, and it would maybe take me three days maximum to do a complex enquiry involving a full research strategy, medical literature searches, critical appraisal of multiple papers, and to compose an answer. I would, of course, acknowledge the enquiry immediately and let the enquirer know of any delays- its common courtesy.

I can't help but notice that on their Twitter feed they do appear to be answering other questions about their products using their Timeline. So why are they using DMs to answer any which question the efficacy of their products? 

I've decided to give them another chance, however, and have just asked them another, very specific question, which would take a pharmacist maybe 30mins-1 hour to answer fully:

We'll see how long that takes to get a response, shall we?

Making Clinical Trials Sexy

If you're buying a new TV, how do you go about it? My guess is that you probably have a look around the shops or internet, find a model you like, then get online to find some reviews of it and decide whether or not to buy based on what you've read. You may well scroll down to the reviews if you're buying something on Amazon, before you click the "Buy" button. If you book a holiday, you're probably straight on Trip Advisor to see what other people- humans just like yourself- have got to say about the hotel.

It is perfectly reasonable behaviour. We understand and respond to the personal experiences of other people- its part of our nature, stitched into our being. Each review is a little story, and humans love stories, especially when they are about other humans.

Its therefore a hugely unfortunate problem that, when it comes to healthcare, stories just aren't good enough. When peoples' lives are hanging in the balance, reviews and testimonials just aren't up to scratch. Here's why:

I have guttate psoriasis. Imagine I go on holiday (alas this is merely a pipedream this year, thanks to what feels like millions of large unexpected bills that seem to keep turning up in my life) and lo and behold, when I return, my psoriasis has cleared up. I conclude that it is definitely the sunshine that has cured it, and proceed to proclaim that I have found the ultimate 100% effective cure for psoriasis.

Is it reasonable that I have come to that conclusion, based only on my own experience? No, not at all. Why have I focused on the sunshine aspect alone? Maybe a week spent relaxing is what has actually cured it. Maybe its because I've changed my diet on holiday and have been eating lots of lovely fresh fruit and vegetables and fish?  Maybe it is because there is a magic ingredient in Sangria which miraculously beats rogue skin cells into submission. What if chlorine in swimming pool water is my skin superhero? Maybe-just maybe- its because guttate psoriasis can be self-limiting, and it has just faded away of its own accord. With just my experience to go on, there is no way I will ever be able to know what it is that has made my condition improve.

What I would need to do to be able to decide is to scale things up. Get as many people as possible with guttate psoriasis, and divide them into at least two groups- one exposed to sunlight, one not. I'd have to try to control the peoples' behaviour as best as I could for the other factors like diet, chlorine exposure, sangria intake, stress etc. Whilst I could never completely control for everything, if the group exposed to sunshine experience a significantly better improvement in their psoriasis, then I could say with more certainty that it is the sunshine that did it rather than anything else.

This is the beauty and elegance of a clinical trial. They are simply the best, slickest, most reliable way we have of teasing out whether a treatment actually does make a difference. They're like an anthology of stories, carefully selected and analysed by researchers in a bid to start finding an answer to a treatment question. Whilst they're not 100% perfect, they're certainly the best sort of information we have at the moment on which to base any decisions about which treatment to choose for which disease, and for which patient.

This is, however, very easy to forget when you actually have to read one. I do not have a mathematically inclined brain, and when faced with tables full of numbers, p values, confidence intervals, hazard ratios, relative and absolute risks etc, my grey matter is usually to be found quivering and wimpering in the corner of my skull. I have to really try hard to focus on the stats and results when reading a clinical trial- its a constant fight to wrench my thoughts back onto the page, when they keep merrily skipping away to think about kittens or bunnies or *that* picture of a minipig wearing red wellies. And I say this as a geeky pharmacist who has undertaken a decent amount of training in how to read a clinical trial. What hope then, does an individual patient or regular joe have of understanding trial data?

A quick glance at pretty much any website selling an 'alternative medicine' and you'll notice there is usually a "Testimonials" page on there. Many other types of healthcare sites also use testimonials to prove their treatment works. They're easy to read, often full of personality, and can really seem to speak to you as a reader. They may seem convincing, but as you've (hopefully) seen from my example above, they simply can't be used to decide if a product works or not. A glossy celebrity story endorsing a product in a magazine is infinitely more sexy than ten pages full of stats and graphs in a medical journal.

Testimonials and reviews are, at first glance, more attractive and more seductive than the more dowdy clinical trial. So what can we do to help the clinical trial apply a bit of lippy, spray some perfume on itself, and don its heels to get out on the town and make people weak at the knees? My short answer is I don't know. Campaigns like International Clinical Trials Day help of course, but at the moment it feels like we're swimming against the tide somewhat. My ultimate dream would be a primetime TV series, fronted by a hunky Brian Cox type. If he can make physics sexy enough to be at the forefront of our entertainment, surely there is some way that we can do the same for one of the best inventions in healthcare? I'd like to get to a place were it's second nature for everyone, whether they be a patients, pharmacist, healthcare professional or general geek, instinctively bypasses testimonials to look for clinical trial evidence instead.

Do you have any ideas? Have you had any really good experiences of explaining clinical trials to patients? Are there any techniques we can use to simplify the stats and make trials more accessible to all? My friend Nancy had a great idea of including a Plain English summary as part of an abstract for every trial. Is there anything else we could do? Let me know, however outlandish your idea, either by commenting, tweeting me (@SparkleWildfire), or dropping me an e-mail at my new shiny sparkly e-mail address healthydoseofskepticism@gmail.com

Hxxx

The Magic Blankie

When its cold and dark outside, I like nothing more than snuggling on the sofa under my blanket with a good book or a film. Some would even say its medicinal. No, really, they would. They'd go on to claim that its excellent for treating chronic diseases and that everyone should have a Magic Blankie of their very own at home.

Enter the healing blanket TMB-01, which stands for Treatment Multilayer Blanket. I prefer The Magic Blankie, though to be honest. Or Truly Mad Bollocks, that would also work. I love how they think also assigning it a number will make it more scientific sounding. Mind you, coming from SCENAR (Self-Controlled Energo Neuro Adaptive Regulation), we can be fairly confident that they have a robust, experienced Department Of Shoehorning Random And Sceince-y Words Into Acronyms (DoSRASWIA) on the case.

NO Kermit! Don't you know that by saying bye bye blankie you are denying yourself the health benefits of Magic Russian Technology?!

They're all the rage in Russia apparently. And I suppose, given how cold their winters are, it's only natural that every household would have a cosy blanket lying around. At only $325 a pop, why wouldn't you?

So what can the healing blanket actually heal? Lets see what Scenar have to say about it:

"The healing blanket TMB-01 can be combined with other therapies for a treatment of a wide range of diseases as well as stand alone independent treatment for psycho-emotional regulation, insomnia, stress and reduction of muscular spasm. The TMB blanket also helps to regulate psychosomatic conditions, relieves constant tiredness, and improves feelings of well being."

Insomnia, stress, tiredness, psycho-emotional stuff. Well we all have problems with those, don't we. Lets have a look at how we should use the blanket: 

"Maximum effects are achieved when the patient is wrapped completely and sleeps... One procedure takes around 40 minutes and could be repeated 2 – 3 times a day. The course of treatment is between 15 – 20 days 9 up to 1 – 3 procedures a day)".

Right, so to make yourself feel less sleepy, or to stop insomnia, what you should do is get cosy in your Blankie and sleep. Yep, seems perfectly plausible to me that the effects on conditions caused by lack of sleep are purely down to the blanket itself and nothing to do with sleeping, or just having a bit of a relax. Although frankly, having a 40 minute nap three times a day for 20 days is unlikely to help my stress levels as I'd have time to get sod all done in the rest of the day. 

How is The Magic Blankie supposed to work? Similarly to a tin foil hat, it would seem. It's made of layers of metal, which apparently shields the body from all external electromagnetic fields and radiation. Except, presumably, your head, which you'd probably not be covering with the blanket to avoid the minor inconvenience of suffocating. Its a reverse tin foil hat, I suppose.

"No, no its fine. We don't care if any electromagnetic evil rays of death  get into their angelic little heads,. It's not like there's any useful organs in there that might need protection. What's a brain ever done for us?"- SCENAR Department of Making Excuses (DoME) Spokesperson. Probably. 

Physicists, forgive me if I'm wrong here, but aren't there some forms of electromagnetic radiation that even several feet of lead won't stop? But those clever Russians have found a way to stop all of it. Makes you wonder why X-ray departments aren't simply tents made of these blankets held up with curtain poles. They could be renamed X-ray dens.  

Anyway, what about evidence? There is some, of course. It's just been blown away by the electromagnetic fields of reality.

Hxxx

P.S.I hope the sarcasm is clear enough in this post. Don't want to end up with quotes being used as testimonials or anything. "AT $325 A POP, WHY WOULDN'T YOU?"- H-Jo, Skeptic Pharmacist 

Homeopathic Harms Vol 7.1: Professional Ethics

In February 2013, my friend Nancy and I delivered a Newcastle Skeptics in the Pub talk entitled Homeopathy: Where's The Harm? As a follow up to this, we've decided to write a series of blog posts about a number of points we covered in the talk:  

"Ethics is the science of morals, or moral philosophy. The principles, written or unwritten, that are accepted in any profession as the basis for proper behaviour are the ethics of the profession" -Dale and Appelbe's Pharmacy Law and Ethics

As you'll know by now, I'm a pharmacist. And as such, I have to be registered with the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) to practice in the UK. I'm therefore governed by the GPhC, and in particular their code of conduct, ethics and performance, which has seven main points:

1. Make patients your first concern
2. Use your professional judgement in the interests of patients and the public
3. Show respect for others
4. Encourage patients and the public to participate in decisions about their care
5. Develop your professional knowledge and competence
6. Be honest and trustworthy
7. Take responsibility for your working practices.

If I-or any of my colleagues- were to act against this code of ethics, we could be held to account by our regulator and reprimanded accordingly. Other healthcare professionals- Doctors, nurses etc- all have similar codes of conduct produced by their regulatory bodies. They all have one thing in common- that the patient is central to everything you do, and if a member steps outside this code of conduct, there is a clear and organized route through which complaints or concerns can be raised. This is as it should be: healthcare professionals have the lives of patients in their hands, and need to be held to account if anything goes wrong. As I've written before in this series, homeopaths don't have to register with a regulatory body and anyone can set themselves up as a homeopath with no training whatsoever. Whilst some 'professional' bodies exist in the UK, they have no regulatory powers so are unable to reprimand anyone if they receive a complaint.

Health care professionals who also practice homeopathy still have a duty to ensure that they abide by their regulatory body's code of ethics. In my opinion, however, it is very difficult to reconcile some of the clear guidance with homeopathic principles. Let's take a look at what I mean, using some selected points from the  the first two standards of the  GPhC's Code of Ethics July 2012 as a guide. (I'll cover the rest of the points in another post)

1. Make Patients Your First Concern
Under this heading, the GPhC states that we must "Make sure the services you provide are safe and of acceptable quality". Given the lack of high quality information that homeopathy works, we are unable to guarantee that such a service is of acceptable quality. You'll also know if you've read the rest of this series of blog posts that there is a lack of evidence regarding the harms- both direct and indirect- of homeopathy- so how could we guarantee that it is safe?

2. Use Your Professional Judgement In the Interests of Patients and The Public
There are a couple of relevant points here. firstly we are told that we need to make sure that professional judgement is not affected by personal or organizational interests or incentives. If you're going to charge for a homeopathic service on the side of your usual practice, then there is already a clear personal incentive to promote homeopathy.  We can minimize the possibility of such things affecting our professional judgement by making sure that we use evidence to guide treatment decisions wherever we can: evidence-based medicine is not perfect, but its the most objective method we have at the moment. And, as you'll know, there is no good evidence at all that homeopathy works.

We are also advised to:

 "Be prepared to challenge the judgement of your colleagues and other professionals if you have reason to believe that their decisions could affect the safety or care of others"

I myself-and other pharmacists-have done this: I've spoken out about Tony Pinkus, for example, a pharmacist who endangers patients' lives by promoting unlicensed homeopathic vaccines or sugar pills to prevent malaria. In Nancy's latest blog post, she covered some of this, and I know Adam at Dianthus Med has also been discussing this point on twitter and his blog lately. Its clear-from our own professional guidance-that where patient safety is in danger, we do not protect our own- we need to report, speak out, and denounce those amongst our colleagues who let the profession down.

Homeopaths, on the other hand, seem to have no such obligation. We've been struggling to think of one single example of where homeopaths have spoken out against other homeopaths where patient safety has been endangered. In a conversation on twitter, for example, no homeopath would say that it was inappropriate for a homeopath to have said that a homeopathic remedy could have saved someone who died due to injuries sustained in a horrific gang-rape and disembowelment.  I recently asked some homeopaths on Twitter whether they would speak out against a colleague who put patients in danger. The answer I received from one was shocking:

"When its so easy 2 wink at 1's own sins, seems impossible 2 find judge orjury before whom 2arraign the 1st law breaker. KENT" (sic)- @22VenkateshN

Admittedly this particular homeopath that responded (he was the only one) has a reputation for obfuscation, but this reply seems to suggest that no, he wouldn't report, in case someone did similar to him. I tried to clarify : "so to clarify: you wouldn't speak out in case someone else did the same to you? A yes or no would suffice, thank you". The reply:

"some questions can't be replied with a simple 'yes or no'. for example_ 'are you still mad ?'"- @22VenkateshN

I'm not sure what he is trying to imply by asking about being mad, but we'll give him the benefit of the doubt and ignore any insinuations he might have been trying to make. What is staggering is the reluctance to admit that he would put patient care first and report a fellow homeopath in a situation. As a health care professional-and a good person- the code of ethics  becomes deeply ingrained in your being. Its second nature- and pretty obvious- that you would put the needs of a patient first. I persisted further,  trying to make it easy for him to agree that you would report a colleague: "It's very easy, if you work under clear ethical guidance. homeopaths do have that, right?: patient safety comes first: therefore yes, you would report and denounce a colleague who endangered it." Again, the reply astounds:

"Its not that easy, every one accusing everyone else would result. That's why I tweeted the appropriate observations of Kent"- @22VenkateshN

Wow. So it would seem- on the basis of this sort of conversation and the complete radio silence from any other homeopaths- that no, they wouldn't report or denounce a fellow homeopath because some sort of petty slanging match would ensue. Instead of a clear referral process to deal with complaints, accusations would be flying all over the shop- and one very, very important aspect gets forgotten: patient safety.

I'd love to be proved wrong here. I'd love to think that medical homeopaths or pharmacists who also practice homeopathy would do otherwise, in accordance with their code of ethics. But I'm currently deafened by their silence. If I were one of the more professional, caring homeopaths who really did want to do the best for their patients, I would be utterly horrified and disgusted by some of the claims and actions of others, and I'd want to-nay I'd feel obliged to- speak out against them for the good of my own practice. I'd be embarrassed to be associated with them.

So here's your chance, homeopaths. Speak up against bad practice and drown out the previous deafening silence. Go right ahead: I'm listening intently. And while you're at it, please do take a few minutes out to respond to Adam's Challenge to the Society of Homeopaths too

To be continued...

Some thoughts on quality and quantity.

The sad news about Iain Banks has gotten me thinking today.

I'll be honest here and say I've never read any of his books (so many books in the world, so little time!). I know nothing at all about him. Yet when I read his statement at work this afternoon, I had tears in my eyes. His words were so dignified, so stoical, and so noble that they really touched my heart. The ability to have humour at such a time is something I admire hugely.

I'm sure his words are the tip of the iceberg. I really can't even begin to understand what a lengthy, horrific process it must be to come to terms with such news. But what struck me most of all was his plans to spend his remaining time with his family, friends and loved ones. Isn't that, when it comes down to it, what we would all want? And yet it seems to me that cases such as his appear to be in the minority of those that are reported in the media.

Many moons ago, at university, I went to a lecture by Sir Michael Rawlins. He discussed the thorny issue of how NICE assess drugs, and he touched upon quality of life measures. I remember being utterly shocked when he said that the majority of terminal patients choose longevity over quality of life. That's always stuck with me, as it seems so starkly counter-intuitive to me that I genuinely can't get my head around it. I also know that's very easy for me to say, and that I have absolutely no idea what it must be like to have to face such decisions. A few years ago I did my Diploma in Therapeutics, and we had to try out some of the quality of life rating scales that are used at NICE. Believe me, this really gets you thinking about how difficult these sorts of choices are. I also remember a really brilliant workshop with Claud Regnard, a palliative care consultant and author of some highly-esteemed books in the field. I remember being bowled over by how positive and creative such a potentially depressing subject could be.

We're a nation (and potentially a planet) that are very medicalised. We hunt for a cure for everything, and a miracle pill to make us cleverer, slimmer, healthier. When given the choice between taking a tablet and changing our lifestyles, I think it's safe to say that most of us would rather opt for the former. This is fuelled by any number of things, but I think the media has a lot to do with it: there's always a story about how some new drug is going to cure Alzheimer's, or obesity, or heart disease, and there's story after story of families desperately searching for a cure or treatment that can cure their love ones.

And here's what I've been thinking about: when all the options have been explored, and there is no cure, practitioners of conventional medicine (by which I mean medicine which is proven to work) will usually tell you so.

At this point, the quest for something else, perfectly understandably, kicks in. Of course you would grasp at any straws, any vestige of hope. And so, right at the time where people should be spending their days doing what they love with the people they love, as Iain Banks is doing, some of them turn to alternatives.

It could be weird diets, it could be homeopathy, it could be a certain well-known quack's clinic in Texas, it doesn't matter. What all of these things do is sell hope when all else has failed. They're a very seductive prospect, and it may well seem perfectly logical that you'd spend every penny in trying them, and you'd leave no stone unturned trying to find the perfect treatment for you, or your loved one.

Just at the time when you should be kicking back and enjoying your time as much as you can, you end up on a plane across the world, which is stressful enough for anyone at the best of times. Or you might end up on a strict diet regime, having to deprive yourself of the foods you love just when you should be enjoying them more than ever. You might end up a slave to a complex regime of megadose vitamins, enemas, pills and injections when you should be being made as comfortable as possible with palliative care.

These people who sell false hope rob patients not only of their money, but of their precious time as well. And that, in my opinion, is the most evil and unforgivable of sins.

I hope that, eventually, we get to a place where a quality life and death become the most important thing to anyone with a terminal illness.

This is yet another blogpost where I feel the need to write "hope this all makes sense" at the end. I probably should just plan posts better, but I've always found I'm usually better at just writing as I think at times. My humble apologies also for any typos... I'm absolutely rubbish at touch screen typing


Hxxx