Hi Everyone. Happy New Year! A bit of a heavy article to start us off!
Anyway as many of you all know, in the current media landscape, the idea of “Fake News“. Fake News is a News Story that lacks truth, supporting documentation and is designed to support a particular worldview or agenda, usually shared via social media. It was incredibly successfully deployed in the recent American election, and this brought it to public consciousness for the first time in the English Speaking world, despite it’s long term prominence elsewhere in the world.
Rather than a phenomenon specifically emerging this year however, Fake news has been greatly appreciated as a widespread problem in all areas of Journalism. As this Article suggests that current trends in mainstream journalism, such as opinion based editorial content, slanted reporting, spin, and a lack of funding for long term investigation has degrades journalism to the extent where this kind of Fake News is possible.
If one investigates further, this trend of media manipulation can be seen to extend even beyond the circles of Journalism and the Media. As we can see from this article, media manipulation and group-think has pervaded even academia. Early work showing the health risks of Sugar was suppressed and has only in the present day come to light, the original thinker and researcher having been forgotten.
One area of Fake News however that has not been well investigated is the use of fake news style tactics by the “skeptical” movement. The skeptical movement has utilized tactics of this nature, specific threats against individuals promoting holistic medicine and Homeopathy, trolling, harassment and intimidation. Below I will detail two examples of this phenomenon.
In 2014 the NHMRC released a draft report on the body of research concerning Homeopathy. The report preliminarily found no evidence that Homeopathy can treat any condition. The report also opened itself to feedback and criticism over its methods. The Homeopathic community gave considerable feedback to the NHMRC, but the final report was released almost unaltered. Both releases triggered massive amounts of publicity, with articles such as the following being widely shared on social media, particularly by Skeptical movements.
This media frenzy however severely misrepresented the state of the research and the state of the NHMRC report. The report, as demonstrated by many researchers, was incredibly flawed. As elaborated by the Homeopathy Research Institute, The report did not distinguish between research methodologies (which is a huge issue in Homeopathy, see my previous blog post on this topic). Furthermore, the report, rather than compiling results and adding the entirety of the data together for analysis, simply subtracted negative studies from the positive, a procedure which is completely unprecedented in the medical literature, not to mention a highly inaccurate approach.
Furthermore, only trials in English were included, trials of less than 150 were dismissed (again without any basis in the medical literature, a cut off of ~35 is more universally accepted) and research not replicated independently was ignored. Furthermore some trials were excluded for no apparent reason, or due to the writers not understanding the, sensible and understandable to Homeopaths, methodologies used.
Even with all of this intellectual dishonesty, the conclusion of the NHMRC report was simply that there was insufficient evidence that Homeopathy can treat any condition. As we have seen above this conclusion, simply showing a lack of data by thier (unjustified) standards, was twisted in a Fake News style by the skeptical movement into evidence that Homeopathy was ineffective, harmful and even irresponsible.
A similar media frenzy followed the publication o the Shang Metanalysis in 2005. As detailed in this website by HRI, The analysis was also extremely sloppy. Shang preformed his analysis on 8 random selection of 21 homeopathic trials, out of 110 selected was used as the besis of this analysis, in defiance of proper procedure. Shang himself concealed which trials he used for his analysis for several months after the Fall release of this study, only releasing his list in December of 2005, after the media storm had occurred. Again, a number of skeptical publications twisted this conclusion and failed to report the serious issues in the analysis.
The latest example of this trend within the field of Homeopathy was the recent news story about Homeopathy labelling in the United States. In the United States, Homeopathy is regulated as a drug under a special set of regulations by the FDA which specifies manufacturing practices, selling, and labeling requirements. The FTC also has authority over the marketing of health claims.
In the course of the year, it had come to the attention of the FTC that some OTC Homeopathic products were making health claims that could not be justified from the scientific literature available. The FTC released a statement clarifying that unjustified health claims were not permitable, and that any unjustified claims must be identified as such. This was spun by the skeptical media as the FTC requiring ALL homeopathic products to carry labels that they have no evidence (when only unjustified health claims are required to be so labelled).Even normally moderate and respectable publications such as Scientific American reported this false line.
The bias shown both in the assumption of a lack of Homeopathic efficacy, and in the enforcement of trade laws was explored by Dana Ullman in the following article.
In these few examples, I have hoped to paint a picture of the kind of intellectual dishonesty that the skeptical movement has engaged in in order to fuel its agenda, which is supremacy of the allopathic medical model and entrenchment of it’s political power. This intellectual dishonesty has fueled a Fake News operation that rivals anything that the current populist movements can have.
If Homeopathy or any other therapy is to be honestly evaluated in an unbiased way, it must be done with all the rigor of the scientific method. Thankfully a few researchers are doing just this, and interestingly enough, they are finding positive and firm clinical evidence that Homeopathy works and has a greater than placebo effect, in high quality methodologically appropriate studies. Below is an example of a presentation by such a researcher.