When New Motherhood Meets Quackery

I hate being wrong.  Even more than that, I hate admitting when I'm wrong.  Not only do I hate the admission, I'm terrible at it and will avoid it whenever possible.  (Just ask my husband.)  So I hope you will appreciate my discomfort as I write this confession...

When my son was a few months old, he began teething.  It happened suddenly, and it appeared to cause him intolerable pain.  He wouldn't nurse and couldn't be comforted for more than a few minutes at a time, a heartbreaking situation for any parent.  Desperate to find relief for him, I picked up a bottle of Hyland's Homeopathic Teething Tablets.  As soon as Mikey would start to cry, I'd shove a few tablets into his mouth.  It seemed like magic - he would immediately stop crying.  Even better?  You can't overdose on homeopathy!  I could safely give him as many tablets as it took to soothe his pain!  At ten bucks per bottle, we must have gone through more than a dozen bottles during the course of his teething.  We had them in every bag, car, room, and sometimes our pants pockets.  I would attest to anyone who asked that this stuff worked.

My understanding of homeopathy at that point was limited.  In fact, I didn't understand it at all.  Now that I do, I shake my head in embarrassment at my behavior during those months.  I'll chalk it up to being a hormonal new mom, but in reality, it was entirely my failure to study something that I desperately wanted to be real.

Just in case you don't know, here's a rundown of homeopathy:

In 1796, German physician Samual Hahnemann came up with the "law of similars," on which homeopathy is based.  At the time, cinchona bark was used to treat malaria.  Hahnemann noted that cinchona bark tended to produce the same symptoms as malaria.  Homeopathy is founded on this observation.  It uses the principle of "like cures like."  For example, cayenne may be used as a treatment for fever, since cayenne and fever both cause sweating.  Pause and absorb that little tidbit of absurdity before we move on.

A homeopath will assess the patient's symptoms, and decide which "remedy" is appropriate.  The next step is to prepare the remedy.  During this process, a tiny amount of the "active" ingredient is placed into a comparatively huge amount of water.  This tincture is shaken in a very special way, including ten sharp whacks against an elastic substance, a process known as succussion.  After it is succussed, they take a tiny amount of the tincture and dilute it again into a large amount of water, then succuss again.  Then they do it again.  And again.  And again and again and again until all that remains is water.  Let me reiterate: all that remains is water.  It's JUST WATER.

Homeopathic remedies have been tested repeatedly, and have been found to contain NONE of the original "active ingredient."  When testing became available to prove this, the homeopaths formulated a response: Water has memory.  It can remember that long-lost drop of belladonna it used to contain.  Somehow, though, it manages to forget all the fecal matter it has carried.

If they are preparing a tablet, here are the additional steps: Pack together a bunch of little lactose tablets (sugar pills).  Take your homeopathic tincture and place a drop on each tablet.  Let it dry.  Tah-dah!  Homeopathic pills.  Even if water had magical memory and like actually did cure like, they have let all the magical water evaporate from the pills!  I haven't yet heard anyone say that lactose has memory.

To clarify the dilutions: If you look at the back of a package of homeopathic preparation, you will see a number followed by the letters C or X.  Hahnemann's C scale means diluting a substance to a factor of 100 at each stage.  A 2C dilution means diluting something to 1:100, then taking some of that diluted substance and diluting it to 1:100.  This works out to be one part of the diluted substance in 10,000 parts of diluent.  Hahnemann believed that a substance gets stronger the more it is diluted.  Most homeopathic remedies are diluted to 30C.  

At 30C, you would have to consume 10^34 gallons of water, or 10 billion times the volume of the Earth, to consume a single molecule of the original substance.

Oh, and that Oscillococcinum you can buy at CVS, right next to the real medicines as a cold remedy?  Duck liver diluted to 200C.  You do the math.

Anyone who takes a moment to understand the basic tenets of homeopathy can surely see the absurdity here.  Unfortunately, so few of us take that moment.  Our society is currently scrambling toward anything labeled as "natural," "organic," or "chemical-free."  Unfortunately, this has made us easy prey for charlatans, quacks, and crooks.  I was so desperate to find some relief for my son that I turned to something that is patantly ridiculous, and I believed that it worked.  In retrospect, of course it made him stop crying.  I was shoving pure sugar into his mouth.  It always makes me happy to have sugar in my mouth.  In fact, if I learned that making a certain noise would cause people to put sugar in my mouth, I'd probably make it a point to make that noise more often.  

No, I probably didn't cause him any harm with my actions.  I just wasted some money and made myself into somewhat of a fool.  But I am not okay with being foolish.  I live in a world in which a healthy dose of skepticism can be quite confrontational.  I think I have permanent bite marks on my tongue from all the time I spend trying not to offend people.  I understand that we must respect others' choices and beliefs, but the fact is that sometimes people believe things that are patently wrong.  I certainly did for a time.

This is not progress.

Originally posted on my Facebook page May 19, 2011:

There is a curious thing happening to the American view of health.  We have stopped looking at health as merely the absence or modulation of disease, and have started paying attention to lifestyle habits that promote wellness.  This is a wonderful change, with the potential to save billions in health care costs, not to mention untold amounts of suffering from disease.

There is a drawback, though.  This acknowledgement that we play an important role in the wellness and maintenance of our own bodies has opened our minds to all sorts of new ideas.  Some of them are great - for example, we now have a much better understanding of the chemical makeup of our foods, and how that affects our bodies.  However, many of the ideas being hyped to American consumers to promote health are utter bunk, complete ridiculousness.  The negative extension of our desire to do something positive for our bodies is that people are suddenly much more receptive to snake oil salesmen.  The number of unproven supplements, products, and treatments claiming to be the magical key to health and longevity is staggering - Americans spent $33.9 billion on them in 2009.

Compounding the problem are people like Dr. Mehmet Oz, the strapping young TV physician of Oprah's making, who has now completed his slow drift into the ether and planted his flag firmly in the camp of woo.  Proponents of alternative medicine have done an extraordinary job of reclaiming ideas that Western medicine has been pushing for decades - healthy diet, exercise, avoidance of destructive behaviors - and rebranding them as components of unscientific concepts.  Not only does this lend some idea of effectiveness to whatever supplement or plan they're selling, but it allows them to throw stones at the medical community for not thinking of it first. 

Here's a great example: "I lost 20 pounds in a month on the hCG diet!"  Well, of course you did.  They made you cut back to 500 calories per day before they would inject you with hCG, a hormone that has been proven in well-controlled clinical trials to have no effect at all on weight loss.  You lost weight because you barely ate anything, not because they injected you with magic.  And yet, proponants of this plan will harpoon the medical community and Big Pharma (a favorite scary-word for the alties) for refusing to back it.

The relationship between science and alternative medicine is fascinating.  Many purveyors of these therapies disregard science (the "your science can't test my woo" notion), instead preferring anecdotal "evidence".  On the other hand, they simlutaneously crave the legitimacy that science can lend, as evidenced by the trumped-up and discredited studies performed by professional kooks like Andrew Wakefield, the notorious enemy of childhood vaccines.

The fact that we are taking ownership of our health is fantastic progress.  But the inclination to buy into ideas that are prescientific, pseudoscientific, discarded, or just plain delusional is just plain scary.  The dangers of these kinds of therapies are far worse than just draining your wallet.  Ten years ago, most parents would have scoffed at the notion of treating their child's infection with homeopathy (read: expensive water) instead of antibiotics.  Now, though, there are voices ringing in parents' ears: Antibiotics are evil!  Superbugsuperbugsuperbug!  Most parents are not scientists; they're just trying to do the best they can for their kids.  That can be difficult with this much mud in the water.

The beauty of science is that it is always learning.  It adjusts its views based on what is observed.  To disregard the scientific system in hopes that an unproven treatment will do the job is beyond silly.  It's dangerous.  How have we forgotten all the good that Western medicine, with its drugs and its sterile surgeries, has done for us?  Has it escaped our notice that we will get to live twice as long as our great-great-great-great grandparents because of those advancements?

I like the idea of magic as much as the next person, but let's leave it at Hogwarts.