Apathy Sketchpad

A few days ago, a reader sent me a link to this Channel Four report. It’s a five minute video, so here it is:

There are some scary quotes in there, but the stats are worse. From their own survey, 80% of 50 Muslim, Jewish and ‘accelerated Christian education’ schools taught Creationism as fact and ignore evolution. Of those, five were state-funded schools. That’s 74% of 19 Jewish schools, 100% of 21 Evangelical schools and 50% of 10 Islamic schools. None of these schools is breaking a law*, although of course Paul Kelley would have been had he been reckless enough to educate in a secular way. The law, as has been mentioned, is an ass.

Personally, I think the best argument for teaching evolution in schools is that it’s the only way I know that you can make biology into a passably interesting subject. I for one always found it crushingly dull — because it was mostly a list of information presented in a “here’s what happens; don’t ask why, just learn it” kind of a way. Throw in evolution and you can explain why these things happen. You can talk about DNA and all the weird ways genes try to get copied. You can tie biology in to all kinds of other subjects much more effectively. I’m sure you can teach vast tracts of biology without mentioning genes or evolution, but I defy you to make it interesting.

That aside, the best reason I know of not to teach Creationism is simply that it’s patently false. Of course, Creationists won’t accept that, so a better argument is that there is no evidence to support it (because it’s so false). The only argument in favour is the whole stupid “parents’ rights” thing. And I do accept that parents have a right to educate their children in whatever way they want — but I think they should be made to look up the word “educate” before they start paying someone to preach at them, because filling impressionable young minds with damaging lies to promote an ideology is nothing more or less than exploitation — and it’s not even for personal gain: we’re talking about exploitation for the sake of an abstract concept. And I think it’s utterly abhorrent that the government would fund this.

I blame the parents for this. They should be outraged if their kids are being taught such bullshit, and they should get something done. The government are also in the wrong, of course, but you can hardly expect the government to act if the people don’t care. (You know, because the government only ever does what the people want.) People listen to parents. God knows why.

I’m not against the ides of schools being different and parents having choice. I’m not against the idea that some of those differences might be based on a religion — a school aimed at Muslims that makes sure the textbooks don’t have illustrations in articles about Mohammed, or a school aimed at Jews that only serves kosher food, that’s fine. And hopefully the genuine followers of those religions would be able to get places in those schools, because since all schools would be required to teach the same curriculum non-religious parents presumably would just pick the nearest school, or the one the kid’s friends were going to. The moment you let them teach different things then the idea of “choice” becomes an illusion: when you’re presented with one good school and one bad school, you don’t have a choice. Everyone with a brain will try to get into the good school and then you’re back to pot luck (or selection, if it’s a faith school). It’s just the same as the ridiculous claim made by the Department of Health the other day, that “operation success rates help patients choose treatment”. Their theory is that by publishing statistics on survival rates at different hospitals, they give patients a choice. No, you don’t. You just make life difficult for everyone, and worry people who can’t get into the best one. The stats should be public, certainly, but not for that reason. I think that all schools and hospitals should be good enough that you don’t care which one you use, and I think that if they’re not then you should fix it rather than shifting the onus onto patients and parents to find an acceptable one.

More to the point, if it’s legal to teach Creationism, that must mean there is no requirement for schools to teach facts that are true.

But of course, I don’t get a say. Because I don’t live in Normanton. If I did, I’d be allowed to vote against Ed Balls’ continuing reign of lunacy over the Department of Children, Schools, Families and Kittens, or whatever they’re calling Education now. (Honestly, the system of government we have here is utterly mad if you look into it for any length of time.)

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* According to the video, anyway. My understanding is that the teaching of evolution is compulsory in publicly funded schools, but I don’t know where I can find an authoritative source of information.

This is the same thing as I did for the Telegraph, but for the Daily Mail. This one was harder because their search function is bad and their website unreliable. Also the dross between the formula stories was more depressing. But then, it did turn up the brilliant formula for the perfect horror film, so that’s something…

• The Perfect Day: O + NS + Cpm/T +He, except when it’s [W+(D-d)]xTQ MxNA
  As in the Telegraph, this was repeated year on year on year on year.
• The Perfect Christmas: PX = (8F * 4P +£23 * 8F + 3G + 2W + 2W:3C + 5T:1NR / 3D) / 3D
  As covered previously. Presumably even following this formula Christmas is still worse than June 20th.
• The Perfect Bacon Butty: N = C + (fb (cm) . fb (tc)) + fb (Ts) + fc . ta
  Apparently, “the experts at Leeds University tried 700 variations on the traditional bacon butty.” I did my undergraduate degree at Leeds and I can vouch that this is true, although I had no idea it was research. Dr Graham Clayton is to blame for this.

Out of interest, N = force in Newtons required to break the cooked bacon. C = Newtons required to break uncooked bacon, fb = function of the bacon type, cm = cooking method, tc = cooking time, Ts = serving temperature, fc = function of the condiment/filling effect and ta = time or duration of application of condiment/filling.

• The Perfect Present Wrap: {(d+2h+w)2 2(w+h)2 — whatever that means
  Thanks to Dr Sara Santos at the University of Manchester, “we now know why we put everything in boxes”.
• The Perfect Sitcom: formula not properly explained
  As in the Telegraph. Repeated, presumably on Dave.
• Staying Awake At Work: CDA + CT + KF TMT
  Bear in mind that KF stands for “knacker factors”, so this is Maths. This comes from “experts at fatigue management consultancy Awake”.
• The Perfect Cheese Sandwich: W = (1 + bd/6.5 - s + (m-2c)/2 + (v+p)/7t) * (100+l)/100
  “Geoff Nute and his team” of “sensory analysts at Bristol University” produced this equation, which says that without a tangy sauce, you need infinite cheese. This was in the optimistically named “science and tech” section.
• The Perfect Penalty: (((X + Y + S) / 2) x ((T + I + 2B) / 4)) + (V/2) -1
  As in the Telegraph.
• The Perfect Breasts: the nipple should be 45% of the way down. Apparently.
  “Patrick Mallucci spent many hours poring over photos of topless models in lads magazines and tabloid newspapers to formulate his theory.” Enough said.
• The Perfect Teeth: no formula
  This isn’t strictly a formula. It’s really a set of rules about what makes a nice smile, of use to cosmetic dentists. I’ve seen at least one of them discussed in the British Dental Journal, but that was to debunk it. Hard to say what the truth is. Better at least than “the perfect cheese sandwich”, but still…
• How To Beat The Post-Holiday Blues: ((j+c) x (r+t) - (h+o))/b
  Professor David Holmes of Manchester Metropolitan University “carried out the research on behalf of Churchill Travel Insurance”, who will presumably use it as a basis for premiums on Post-Holiday Blues Insurance. As ever, all the variables are listed on wholly arbitrary 1-5 kind of scales. According to the Mail, b represents “whether gaps between holidays too long”. Yeah. Gaps too long. Also, verbs for losers.
• Will You Get Seasonal Affective Disorder?: X a x ((24-b) x (c+d+e) + f x (g+h+i))
  Here, we learn why you should always use the multiplication sign instead of the lower case ‘x’. Also why you should remember to include the equals sign. This was devised by “consultant psychiatrist Dr David Wheatley” and “commissioned by Kira St John’s Wort, makers of a herbal “happiness” supplement, as part of a study on depression”. It has to be said, the list of instructions is sufficiently varied and complex to give the whole thing an air of credibility. But still…
• How Beer Goggles Work: no formula supplied
  “Bausch & Lomb PureVision, one of the world’s biggest eyecare firms” got “Professor Nathan Efron, Professor of Clinical Optometry at the University of Manchester” to do this. I don’t know why it’s so often universities I’m at where this stuff happens; before I started at Leeds, Dr Clarke, who took our electronics lectures, was asked by some supermarket or other to work out an equation for how to flip a pancake, and I guess they were expecting him to wander off and make something up, but no, he built a huge red trebuchet-looking thing to flip a strange cardboard pancake. I was there for four years, and some of my friends worked on this for a brief period. Partway through my course he retired, an act which made him much easier to locate — his workload went from insane to average. To my knowledge, the only thing this project has ever achieved is to break countless platinum-iridium tips for the tunnelling microscope. I suppose that means that they at least have more credibility than the “oh, it’ll be b times a plus 4d over qpr” crowd, but still…
• When Heyfever Is Worst: 6.02pm on May 29; no formula supplied
  Stay indoors at that time, is my advice. “Dr Adrian Morris, allergy specialist for Boots Health Club, … created the hayfever formula”.
• The Perfect Horror Film: (es+u+cs+t)² +s+ (tl+f)/2 + (a+dr+fs)/n + sin x - 1
  Who says modern films are too formulaic? This is science! Look! It has a fucking sine function in it:

  The experts have taken blood and guts (Sin x) and subtracted it by the stereotypes (1), to make Sin x - 1, saying Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining turned into the total opposite of a protective father figure.

  See? That’s Science! Don’t say it isn’t! “Mathematician Anna Sigler, … a former graduate from King’s College, London” did this research. A former graduate, no less. Presumably her degree was revoked when they saw what she was doing with it. The Shining won, by the way. “The research was carried out for Sky Movies, which will be showing The Shining and other scary movies this weekend.” Coincidence.

• How To Wash Your Hair: formula not stated
  “Kerys Mullen, technical manager at Dove, said: “A lot of people ask us about the best way to wash their hair so we decided to work out the ideal formula.”"
• The Perfect Boiled Egg: formula not stated
  How to boil an egg, by several chefs. At the bottom, input from “Dr Charles Williams A physicist from Exeter University [sic]“, who “has worked out a formula for the perfect boiled egg based on the ‘heat-diffusion equation for spherical objects’”. Fair enough, but I for one will trust the chefs on that one.
• The Perfect Day To Change Your Life: M x O + Bh (H+R) x S; max. May 18
  This is the handiwork of Cliff Arnall, the same Cardiff University muppet responsible for the best/worst day formula the Mail and the Telegraph obligingly publish twice every year. If anything this is worse than that one: “Under the formula M stands for motivation and O for opportunity while Bh is bank holiday proximity. The H in the second half equals increasing hours of daylight, while R equals reflection time and S, simply success.” Yes. And..? Surely the aim is to maximise S? In which case, shouldn’t it be on the other side of the equals?
• The Secret of True Happiness, no less: P + (5xE) + (3xH)
  Thomson travel got “psychologist” Carol Rothwell and “sports scientist and ‘life coach’” Pete Cohen to “insist their equation is a useful guide to our levels of satisfaction with life”. Because just asking “are you happy” doesn’t work. Not enough maths, see.

A few days ago I corrected a Telegraph article about homeopathy, as part of Homeopathy Awareness Week. (That is of course not the official ‘week’ website but it is better.) Today, as the week ends (after eight days for some reason), I will apply much the same corrections to another homeopathy article, this time courtesy of Cancer Research UK, whose Cancer Help website carries a page of what I will generously term “information” about homeopathy. It is split into the following sections:

• What homeopathy is
• Why people with cancer use homeopathy

Strangely, the word “ignorant” does not appear in this section. It does say “Some people choose homeopathy because it offers a completely different type of treatment compared to conventional medicine.” Which is true, but it’s a bit like saying “some people choose spaghetti because it offers a completely different type of support compared to a conventional bungee cord”.

• Evidence on using homeopathy in cancer treatment
• What homeopathy involves
• Side effects
• Who shouldn’t use homeopathy

Ooh, I know! Is it “anyone who wants to get better or has a finite supply of money”?

• What homeopathy costs
• Finding a homeopath
• Homeopathic hospitals in the UK
• Homeopathy organisations

For context, this page sits in their “complementary and alternative therapies” section, (surely by definition all therapies are either complementary or an alternative?) which lists a huge number of options including the harmless, the spiritual and the quackerific. They’re all split into the same sections as the homeopathy page. They’re mostly good stuff:

• There is no evidence to suggest that acupuncture helps in any way with treating, preventing or curing cancer. Both the World Health Organisation and the Cochrane Library have published reviews on chemotherapy related sickness, concluding that acupuncture can help.
• There is no scientific evidence to prove that Aloe vera can help treat, prevent or cure cancer in people in any way.
• There is no scientific evidence to prove that aromatherapy can cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer.
• Many people say these therapies help them to cope better with cancer and its treatment. But there are treatments which are part of ayurvedic medicine such as special diets and herbal remedies that we don’t know enough about to support their use. These treatments could be harmful to your health or interfere with your conventional treatment.
• Some people have claimed that black cohosh may reduce your risk of getting breast cancer or prostate cancer. There is not enough evidence for this at the moment.

And so on, all the way down to

• There is no scientific evidence to prove that yoga can cure or prevent any type of cancer. But there are some studies to suggest that it might help people with cancer sleep better and cope with anxiety.

Yeah, it’s tiring is yoga.

I also like that they discuss the evidence in an adult way, rather than simply saying “this works; this doesn’t work”. The point is, though, that I can’t help think that the following text lends far too much weight to the insane fringe view that there is even the slightest possibility that homeopathic ‘medicine’ could cure cancer:

There are over 100 published clinical trials looking at how well homeopathy works in treating various illnesses and symptoms. None of these trials provide us with any scientific evidence to prove that homeopathy can cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer. Many individuals say that homeopathy has helped their symptoms. And some small trials have shown that homeopathy can have a positive effect. Two studies suggest that homeopathy may help women with breast cancer to cope with menopause symptoms. But these are small clinical trials and they don’t provide enough evidence to show if homeopathy really works, or how.

Remind me again why I should give you money, Cancer Research UK? This is sort of implying you’ll waste it.

We don’t really know whether the effects of homeopathy truly come from the homeopathic medicine or if they are simply a placebo effect.

…

Using homeopathic medicine is generally safe. Some homeopaths warn people that their symptoms could get slightly worse, before they settle down and improve.

Sort of like illnesses do on their own, then..?

But this does not happen very often. A Swiss meta-analysis of homeopathy trials in 2006 found homeopathy applied appropriately by a trained homeopath to be safe and with few side effects.

Yes, because it’s totally inert!

If you are having treatment for cancer it is important that you let your specialist doctors know if you are planning to use homeopathic medicine.

It’s a difficult thing to do, of course, because it’s important to say “look, here is the evidence, do you still think water is magic medicine?” rather than “it just doesn’t work, okay?” because it’s the only way any real progress will be made against the nonsense we’re all surrounded by. But equally, there really is no good evidence at all on the homeopaths’ side, so representing the evidence in a truly balanced way looks a lot like saying “it just doesn’t work”.

Ultimately, though, it’s the links sections at the bottom that annoy me. They link, for example, to the CORH, saying “look on their website for a list of the organisations who are members,” but the CORH are happy to link uncritically to the almost totally mental Society of Homeopaths, whose record on such things is pretty dismal (and it’s hard to over-state their satisfaction), and to the Faculty of Homeopathy, whose president I recently caught on television endorsing the Faculty while claiming to be an ordinary member. She said:

If people have a serious medical condition I would strongly advise them to approach [the Faculty of Homeopathy].

Homeopaths have a record of giving bad advice, mostly by recommending people avoid real medicine (or as above failing to recommend they seek it out), and I don’t think it’s appropriate for a cancer charity, or indeed anyone else, to endorse their organisations in this way without a large disclaimer saying “warning: many homeopaths are a bit mental and think their water is magical. If they tell you they can cure cancer or AIDS or that they can basically do anything at all apart perhaps from making you feel vaguely better, leave and report them to their governing body and Trading Standards”.

For all I know practitioners of the other alternative therapies are no better, but I’m aware of a lot more evil done in the name of homeopathy than in the name of acupuncture or yoga. Generally, homeopathy and ‘herbalism’ are the pseudosciences most likely, in my experience, to have delusions of efficacy beyond palliative care, and that makes them dangerous.

Just because the pill is harmless doesn’t change that.

Here is a list of “mathematical formulae” and “scientific equations” which detail every aspect of our day-to-day lives, all “calculated” or “devised” by “scientists”, “academics”, “economists” and “mathematicians” from various embarrassed universities. These are all taken from the Telegraph. Don’t imagine other newspapers are better…

• The Perfect Sitcom: quality = (rd+v)f÷a+s
  Dr Helen Pilcher, a neuroscientist (according to the Telegraph) whored her name to this ‘research’ which was commissioned by UKTV Gold to promote their endless repeating of that clip of Del Boy falling through the bar: f in the equation means “the amount someone falls over”. This is about the level of humour the Telegraph seems to like, because…
• The Perfect Joke: x = (fl + n^o)/p
  In this case, n represents “the amount someone falls over”, and is raised to the power of “the “Ouch” factor”. It won’t surprise you to learn that this is the work of the same Helen Pilcher, although this time helped by comedian Timandra Harkness. It should be some measure of Harkness’ fame that I wouldn’t like to guess what gender the name Timandra indicates. To their very limited credit, the telegraph article does include rants from Jimmy Carr, Bernard Manning and Ruby Wax explaining that the formula was stupid (in their own obnoxious ways). Also Nicholas Parsons, but he’s not obnoxious. Why was this in the news? “The Comedy Research Project, a live stage show featuring Helen Pilcher and Timandra Harkness, will be performed at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre on June 15 and 22 [2006].” I bet that was a fucking blast.
• The Perfect Day: quality = O + NS + Cpm÷T + He
  This was pulled out of the arse of Cliff Arnall (not Lou Reed), a psychologist and former tutor at Cardiff University, because Wall’s Ice Cream asked nicely. The Telegraph notes it “does not take into account the gloomy forecasts for the British economy, fears caused by falling house prices, rising inflation and stagnating pay rises, England not playing in the Euro 2008 and a damper than normal start to the summer”. All the factors in the formula are utterly subjective and the whole thing is worse than most. The comments on the Telegraph pages are fun. This is especially perverse because in 2006 the perfect day was three full days later. (The Telegraph really do obligingly report this, from either end, every time they’re asked.)
• The Perfect Bra: formula not supplied
  This one is actually real (albeit slightly over the top) research! It could genuinely improve your life (moreso if you are a woman). I know; I was as surprised as you are.
• The Perfect Rugby Kick: KP = CSP - s + w + r + yⁿ + cr + sc + mt + xⁿ + ctw
  This is just a shopping list of things that affect a rugby kick. And “y to the power of n represents other factors”. My word. This drivel comes to us no thanks to “Andrew Cushing and Prof Paul Robinson at University College Worcester for the research company QinetiQ”.
• The Price Of Cleaning: price = time × £6.16/hour
  This is a note that the average wage has increased, listed in terms of how much people lose out on by not being paid to brush their teeth (30p, although it doesn’t say how much they save by not having to get private dental treatment if they don’t brush). Barclaycard convinced Prof Ian Walker, an economist at Warwick University to endorse it.
• The Perfect Marriage: formula not supplied
  “Prof James Murray of the University of Washington” says this formula has a 94% success rate in predicting if a couple will divorce, although really I’d want to know sensitivity and specificity, otherwise you could conduct a survey of evangelical Christians and the terminally ill, say they’ll all stay together, and declare yourself the winner. They later ran a second article about how it was nonsense.
• The Perfect Chip: formula not ready at time of press
  That’s right, because Dr Gama Khan won’t just sign off on whatever nonsense Tesco ask — that, or Tesco asked for a big long experimental phase they can publicise for months. Khan says “The competition is intense because everyone wants to go down in history and finally crack the secret of the perfect frozen oven chip. I am looking at a lot of chips. Some days I’m testing them continuously from 9.30am to 4pm. It actually can get quite sickening, particularly when I always smell of chip fat.” And it’s true. Everyone wants a slice of the elusive Nobel Prize in Fast Food.
• The Perfect Football Penalty: odds of scoring = (X + Y + S)×(T + I + 2B)÷8 + V÷2 - 1 [simplified]
  This was commissioned by Ladbrokes, and is credited to “by scientists at John Moores University in Liverpool”, which quickly becomes “Dr David Lewis, a mathematician”. I think this quote tells you all you need to know about the mathematical ability of everyone involved in this report (emphasis mine):

Dr Lewis and his team found the six variables that influence a successful penalty kick are: V = velocity of ball once struck, T = time between placing ball on spot and striking the ball, S = number of steps in run-up to strike, I = time that the ball is struck after goalkeeper initiates his dive, Y = vertical placement of ball from ground, X = horizontal placement of ball from centre and B = striking position of boot.

• The Perfect Sandcastle: 0.125S = OW
  This simply states the ideal ratio of sand to water. Personally, I would just use the pre-prepared wet sand b the beach, which must surely be about right because it does seem to work. “Prof Matthew Bennett, the head of environmental and geographic sciences, Dr Brian Astin, the head of the School of Conservation Sciences, and Rob Haslam, laboratory and technical services manager, then spent two days testing the samples for their suitability for sandcastle building. … Teletext Holidays, which commissioned the research, will be holding a sandcastle-building championship on July 24 [2004] in Great Yarmouth.” This work was replicated the following year by “an MIT team, led by Sarah Nowak and Arshad Kudrolli” who reached exactly the same conclusion (although they phrased it in a simpler way). This might be nearly useful to some engineers somewhere.
• How To Open Champagne: P = T÷4.5 + 1
  P and T are pressure and temperature. I think this is not made up, although not really that useful in real terms: essentially it says that if you cool the champagne it is less likely to explode on you. This comes from “Dr Steve Smith, a lecturer in wine studies at Coventry University”, who “was commissioned to develop the formula after a Marks & Spencer survey found that 50 per cent of women are too frightened to open a bottle of bubbly because they fear that the cork will fly out prematurely, hitting them or a precious ornament”.
• The Perfect Place To Shop: D=f(m,b,c)
  The function f is undefined. “Retail and consumer trends expert Tim Dennison has come up with a formula to help Yellow Pages calculate how diverse and lively high streets are.” It says little town streets are more diverse than city centre ones. Nobody is surprised.
• The Perfect Newspaper: no formula
  It’s the Telegraph. Shocking. I suspect this is bad self-congratulatory reporting of some tiny little statement the academics made, but then I work for Manchester University so I am biased (although I’m not certain which way).
• How To Pour Gravy: amount of gravy = (W - D÷S) ÷ D × 100
  According to “Dr Len Fisher, an independent food scientist at Bristol University… who was funded by the manufacturer Bisto”, this is important because “more than 150,000 gallons of gravy is left every week.” Hard to see what Bisto have to gain by this, except of course that they’re in a newspaper.
• The Perfect Book: formula not done at time of press
  …although it’s going to be Agatha Christie, says Dr Roland Kapferer.
• The Perfect Biscuit: formula deemed to complicated for Telegraph readers
  This was led by Professor Bronek Wedzicha of Leeds University and “half funded by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and half by United Biscuits.” The researchers insist that this is real research rather than a publicity stunt, and I see no reason not to believe that, especially since they spent £91,000 on it.
• The Perfect News Story: “never trust your own instincts” but rely on “tried and tested formulas, bland ingredients and using up old scraps and leftovers from the day before, particularly the choicest cuts from the Daily Mail - no matter how stale.”

Some time I might do this for other newspapers, although I’m not sure I could read the ones in the Daily Mail faster than their hacks can produce them, so perhaps I won’t.

It is Homeopathy Awareness Week. Has been since Saturday. That’s right, the week starts on a Saturday if you’re a homeopath. I am, as ever, happy to do my bit for this kind of cause, so here are a couple of articles I saw this week with misconceptions about homeopathy I’d like to clear up. The first is from the Telegraph, which contains this fantastic but only tangentially relevant passage:

A Government report yesterday called for “urgent” controls on herbalists, acupuncturists and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, amid fears over patient safety. Its recommendations, to be considered by ministers, include a proposal that new practitioners would have to study for a degree in their field before they could practise.

Yes, that will help a lot. Can’t have people doing acupuncture wrong, can we? (Answer to rhetorical question: yes.)

These are the homeopathy mistakes:

A £40 million industry in the UK, homoeopathic remedies claim to be able to prevent yellow fever, typhoid, polio and even leukaemia, as well as cure symptoms ranging from toothache to hearing loss. But there are growing concerns over whether the homoeopathic remedies have any effect.

No, there aren’t. There is a total consensus that homeopathic remedies are nothing more than placebo. (Obviously I’m aware that there are people who dispute this consensus, but those people are cranks, or ignorant, and in any case too few in number to count — remember, there are those who dispute the holocaust.)

Homoeopathists differ from herbalists, who use a variety of plants to combat diseases, because their treatments are heavily diluted. There can often be as little as one millionth of the original ingredient in a homoeopathic remedy.

Setting aside that this last sentence doesn’t actually mean anything, the fact is that most homeopathic remedies do not contain even one molecule of the original ingredient. None at all. That’s not the same as “heavily diluted” or “one millionth”. That’s the same as a nice glass of water.

Then the Telegraph invite readers to “Have Your Say: Do you believe in homeopathy?” Because what we need to settle this one isn’t evidence, my word no. It’s the ill-informed rants of internet cranks such as Mike Abrahams, who says (all links and emphasis in these are mine; I’m sure you’d have worked that out soon enough):

At the moment, “properly applied/prescribed” medical intervention “accidentally” kills over 250,000 people a year in the USA alone (Journal of American Medical Association)…

I didn’t know it was possible to commit libel using only punctuation marks.

…So let’s get a perspective on this. Just how many people are killed by homoeopathy - last year? - in the last 50 years? …

(Answer to rhetorical question: lots, and here are 8 that even Dave Hitt can’t argue with.)

…Even if Homoeopathy used just the placebo effect it is much safer than orthodox drug treatment.

…because it doesn’t do anything. Or Graham, who says:

i think that you can apply the one rule for all principle here, that is when doctors have their medicines and procedures, in all combinations tested with randomised control trials and they are proven to be safe, then perhaps other CAM therapies would do the same. … i thought the idea was to heal people, this homeopathy does with out a doubt, or it would have died out years ago. i gave my son a remedy for a croup attack when he was about 14 months old. within 30seconds he was calm and breathing normally, from being blue and gasping for breath. i don’t really give a flying fig how it worked, i just know that it did, its called imperical evidence its what doctors use when they give new mixes of medicines that have not been tested together. the difference is i saved a life doctors are often just trying to clear up their own drug induced side effects…

Or “Cured!”, who says:

Perhaps the medical profession is sceptical of hoemopathic remedies because they are not patented, can’t be licensed and can’t be used to derive monopoly profits.

No, but these would be the same homeopathic remedies that are made out of pure water and sell as a “£40 million industry in the UK” according to the article Cured! just commented on, yes? Yes. Yes, they would.

Lucy Puglia says:

MY DOG HAD SKIN CANCER ON HER PAW,IT WAS MALIGNANT,AFTER IT WAS REMOVED ,WE CHOSE TO GIVE HER VITAMINS AND HOMOEOPHATIC REMEDIES,SHE LIVED A FULL LIFE ,RUNNING AND HAPPY, … .HAD WE CHOSEN ANOTHER TREATMENT ,SHE WOULD HAVE SUFFERED SIDE EFFECTS.WE HAVE SEEN A HOMOEOPHATIC DOCTOR FOR OVER 20 YEARS,AND IT WORKS FOR MY FAMILY,INDIVIDUALS SHOULD HAVE A CHOICE,ON THE TREATMENT THEY WISH TO HAVE ,AFTER ALL DOCTORS ARE NOT ”GODS”,PEOPLE ARE DYING IN HOSPITAL FROM ALLERGIC REACTION TO DRUGS EVERYDAY,I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW MANY ARE DYING FROM ”HOMOEOPHATIC REMEDIES SIDE EFFECTS”.I AM ALLERGIC TO GRASS POLLEN,THERE IS NO MEDICATION THAT HELPS,IN 32 YEARS OF SUFFERING ,THE ONLY MEDICATION THAT HELP ME ,IS HOMEOPATIC,THE NOSESPRAY,EYEDROPS,DROPS TO KEEP MY NOSE CLEAR,PILLULE .I TOOK ANTIHISTAMIN TABLETS FOR YEARS,AND HAD 2 CAR ACCIDENTS ,BECOUSE OF THE SIDE EFFECTS,AND NEARLY FELL OFF THE BUS,MISSED THE STEP.WE SHOULD HAVE MORE HOMEOPHATIC HOSPITALS ,AND CHOICE,INSTEAD ,THE HOSPITALS ARE BEING CLOSED BY THE TRUSTS,LIVING PATIENTS WITH NO CHOICE…AFTER ALL THIS IS A DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY…LUCY,ISLINGTON..

How great is she!? Peter Walton says:

Homeopathy does work, which is exactly what the major pharmaceutical companies are fearful about. They put their money into supporting those who outwardly conduct research supposedly disproving the efficacy of homeopathy. Most of this research is based upon double blind tests which may have some value, were it not for the fact that homeopathic treatment, unlike allopathic, uses individualised remedies. …

(Double-blind trials can account for this. Many do. Homeopathy still doesn’t work.)

…The �researchers� carrying out double blind testing on homeopathic remedies of course must know this, and therefore one may conclude that they have alternative agendas.

One other point; arguments are put forward that there is no scientific evidence for homeopathy. May I suggest that science will one day be able to provide that evidence, it is for ever amending its theories to explain the observed, unlike homeopathy which has essentially remained unchanged for 200 years. There is no need to change that which is correct!

Let’s not mention the inconvenient advent of Avogadro and germ theory during those 200 years, though, eh? Or the countless other wrong ideas science has failed to eventually prove. Or…

G Payne says:

Just because, like all remedies, it is not and does not clainm to be a panacea, is not a reason for the attacks upon it by allopathic doctors and chemists - except for their inbuilt self interest. The point is, that the proof lies in the fact that, in so many instances - called “anecdotal” homoeopathy does work.

Steve Scrutton (which is a name I recognise from other homeopathy rants) says this:

It is remarkable that spokesmen for conventional medicinem, and ConMed drugs, like Ernst, can still believe that seeing a doctor, and taking ConMed drugs, is safer than seeing a homeopath. What they consistently deny is that ConMed is killing more people year on year, and that the more drugs we take, year on year, the greater the rise of disease epidemics (Alzheimer’s, Autism, et el) -

Can you have an epidemic of a non-infectious disease? I suspect you can’t.

- many of them diseases that were unknown prior to drug taking becoming ‘free’ on the NHS…

The prevalence of a disease which predominately affects the elderly rose sharply when medical care became free? Clearly medical care causes Alzheimer’s. There’s no other explanation!

…He also ignores another undeniable fact - that tens of thousands of people have been treated successfully by homeopath, many after failing to get better with ConMed. When they hear Ernst, and others telling them that homeopathy is ineffective, they yawn, wonder why he should consistently come out with such nonsence, ponder who is speaking for, and tell their friends.

The drug companies are under pressure as more of their drugs are being withdrawn, and they face an increasing number of law suits in the USA.

Keep your campaign going, Professor Ernst - perhaps one day you will actually be able to convince us that ConMed is safe too!

Jayney says:

I think these attacks on homeopathy are just providing a smoke screen to take the emphasis off the 40,000+ deaths that occur each year due to totally avoidable medical blunders (quoted in the BMJ.) Close to 1 million people are injured by conventional medicine too - every year. Agsin this is a matter of public record . There is only one record of a homeopath being linked to a person dying - this was a doctor who told her patient that she should stop takng her heart medication. This doctor is now being investigated by the GMC.

Shathejas says:

in my shortlife i saw various patients who got remedy by homoeo,while modern medicine said goodbye in such cases. many many examples can be given. but iam not a homoeopathistic.

No. No, you are not. And lastly, a homeopath speaks. Francis Treuherz says:

How do I prove that my work as a homeopath is successful? I suggest just as hard with my wrong remedy as my right one in almost 25 years of practice my patients know when they receive the right remedy…

Well, yes, because you define “the right remedy” as “whichever one you’re doling out when the patient happens to get better on their own”.

…The way we decide what makes a remedy is known as a proving. We test potential medicines on healthy humans and the symptoms and signs which appear are then used to inform treatment. I suggest that Professor Ernst, or any one else who does not think that homeopathy works, undertakes a proving of Aesculus hippocastanum and observes the effects. This is a remedy used in painful haemorrhoids.

This is a common brain-failure experienced by homeopaths: they refer to something as “a proving” and assume that therefore it proves something.

This was rather longer than I expected, because I hadn’t planned to do the comments, so I shall post the second article I want to criticise some other time. If I remember. Hopefully, I’ll get it out within the Awareness Week.

Also, look out for another bit of Homeopathy Awareness Week fun that I’ll show you when it’s finished.

A new report by the independent think tank Reform says that the number of maths graduates in Britain has fallen from 84,744 in 1989 to 60,093 in 2007. That’s a loss of 24,651 in only 18 years, or 43.4 microHertz. If this trend continues then we will have no mathematicians at all by the year 2,050.87952, and by 2,075 there will be -33,033 mathematics graduates. Since a mathematics graduate is expected to contribute an extra £3,080 per year to the economy, this will represent an annual cost of over one hundred megapounds per year. That level of spending would exhaust all the Earth’s money in only 30,000 years, meaning that the world’s economies will be at the mercy of the huge amount of negative mathematicians.

Something must be done.

Dr Briffa has updated his blog again. He says:

there are common (but lacking in substance) tactics that are used to discredit and refute my assertion that we don’t know if MMR causes autism or not.

Here, I think, are the main ones:

1. Claim that I should provide the evidence that MMR can cause autism (even when that it’s not my position that MMR causes autism).

His position is this (from the same post):

I maintain that with the state of the evidence as it is that we don’t know beyond reasonable doubt that MMR does not cause autism.

That’s wrong. If you replace the word “reasonable” with “all” then it’s true, but the phrase “reasonable doubt” was invented precisely to stop people claiming exactly this kind of nonsense. If he wants to suggest that there are reasonable grounds for doubt, then he should provide some, and given how many studies have failed to show any link between MMR and autism, I think those grounds will have to take the form of some studies that do. Essentially, evidence. Words aren’t going to cut it.

Meanwhile, he is arguing that ‘we’, as scientists who think that MMR is effectively vindicated with regard to autism, should provide further evidence to back up this claim, which was a near certainty even before the first study and is pretty-well unassailable now. He is using the very tactic he accuses us of.

2. Argue that because we don’t have evidence definitive evidence [sic] that MMR causes autism, then that MUST mean it doesn’t (this is illogical, but you’d be surprised how many times this card is played scientists who really ought to know better).

Well I think I’ve explained often enough already that nobody is doing this. (His response seems to be to find something I’ve said which, if cunningly misinterpreted and then fed through several steps of inference, appears to imply that I secretly think otherwise.) His basic accusation is that we say the evidence says something it doesn’t, but the fact of the matter is that he is saying we say something that we don’t. He is using the very tactic he accuses us of.

3. Misrepresent the strength of the science (this is actually the most common one, and my assertion is that the evidence used to vindicate MMR with respect to autism, from a scientific perspective, doesn’t amount to a hill of beans)

Dr Briffa says that

there’s a huge pile of anecdotal evidence and some experimental evidence too which supports the idea that MMR vaccination might cause autism.

There is “no credible evidence” to support this claim. He is using the very tactic he accuses us of.

4. Insult me (e.g. call me ‘wilfully ignorant’)

Dr Briffa told me

you have a very flimsy grasp of even the most simple logic, as well as the application of scientific principles and evidence in the real world. … you do not really know what you are talking about, and have no integrity either.

And he told a commenter on his blog

I suspect I won’t be the only person reading your assertion that the ball is red as an example of quite breathtaking stupidity.

“I’m a complete tool!”

Yes, and this comment appears to have come from an uncharacteristic moment of mental clarity for you. See, you can do rational thinking, after all.

…

If [you are] really not as bewilderingly stupid as I believe [you] to be, then [you] would have given the right answer - actually the ONLY answer one can honestly give.

…

Reading your last post caused a vision to flash through my mind. This is it:

A little boy told did a very stupid thing and needed to be corrected severely by his father. The boy, now upset, crying, snotty, red-faced with tears running down his cheeks then shouts at his father ‘I hate you!’. Where that came from is anyone’s guess…

…

“As my mother used to say ‘ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.”

Or, as I prefer to put it, ‘ask someone stupid a question, get a stupid answer.’

All of the above was collected from his own comments underneath the post where he said we insult him. Against one person. He is using the very tactic he accuses us of.

5. Say nothing

Dr Briffa says nothing. He just hides that fact by talking a lot. He is using the very tactic he accuses us of.

The more astute of you will have spotted a pattern.

The other day I posted about Dr John Briffa’s rant against p-values. He has since then posted some responses, in the form of several comments under the original post and a whole new rant. Er, I mean, blog entry, of course. Not “rant”!

His thesis remains much the same: no matter what anyone does, since science can’t prove a negative, we can’t be sure MMR doesn’t cause autism. Which is true, but of course can be applied to any stupid hypothesis you care to come up with. In his recent post, which is called “Why the MMR-autism ‘war’ is far from over”, he says

What I am saying though is that there’s a huge pile of anecdotal evidence and some experimental evidence too which supports the idea that MMR vaccination might cause autism.

This really isn’t true. The Cochrane Collaboration examined 139 studies about MMR (not all about MMR-autism) and concluded that

No credible evidence of an involvement of MMR with either autism or Crohn’s disease was found.

In any case, this always goes the same way. There’s a bad study done that “suggests” something, in this case that MMR might cause autism, and a load of people latch onto this for some personal reason, then when someone points out that the research is rubbish they deny it. Eventually the weight of evidence becomes so great that the course of least resistance is to drop that one tiny part of their stance: their position switches to “that study was bad, yes, we can see that, but our theory is still right”. If you ask them to show some non-bad research that supports their hypothesis then they’ll go and do a literature search vast (if not rigorous) enough to put any PhD student to shame, before coming up with some bizarre study about giving vaccinations to chimps or something, and I always look at those and think “hang on, where the fuck did that come from? You’ve been ranting about how bad MMR is for years, and this is the first time you’ve mentioned that study. In fact, you were ranting about MMR for years before it was published! How do you expect to convince me that that’s influenced your opinion in the slightest? I want to see the evidence on which you’ve based your opinions, if there is any.” Of course that doesn’t invalidate their chimp-based study, but it does show that they’re starting with a conclusion and then collecting evidence to support it, when they should be starting with evidence and basing the conclusion on that. Once you’ve established that, the last thing you should do is to criticise their evidence — it’s much quicker for them to find more shaky evidence than it is for you to dismantle it, so they’ll always be a couple of steps ahead if you let yourself get drawn into that fight.

The evidence used to persuade us of the safety with regard to autism is simply inadequate. The fact is, I don’t know whether MMR causes autism or not. But then again, it seems neither do those who insist it is safe.

He also says

Now, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that those of the pro-vaccine lobby will want to claim that this blog is scaremongering by making out that MMR vaccination causes autism.

I agree with jdc about that quote.

And while the reason that the debate rages on is usually put down to the likes of Dr Wakefield and the parents who believe their children were damaged by MMR, the real guilty parties here have been our Governments whose intransigence regarding proper, definitive research in the area has inevitably left a huge question-mark hanging over MMR.

That’s plain wrong. As I said in his blog comments (assuming that he hasn’t deleted them, although he’s been good to jdc’s, so I don’t want to imply that he will), it would be unethical to do that study: if the study group was large enough to show the effect (which even anti-MMR types claim is very rare, even when they’re demanding that all three of their children were hit by it) then you’re deliberately avoiding giving a potentially life-saving vaccination to at least hundreds of children, on the basis that a few ill-informed, untrained, tabloid-reading morons think there might be a risk. There’s no way that would ever get past an ethics committee.

You have to be a little bit detached and just accept that the so-called link between MMR and autism is, in fact, just made up. That doesn’t prove it’s false, but it puts its odds at much the same level as other made-up hypotheses, such as “cider causes shortness” or “MRI scans cause blindness”. (I just pulled those out of thin air.) Doing huge studies to attempt to disprove things you’ve made up would be a tremendous waste of time, and that doesn’t change just because they were made up a long time ago by someone else and then relentlessly repeated by bad journalists and angry but unqualified mothers.

I’ve just been pointed to a fantastically bad article about statistical significance on the blog of one Dr John Briffa, former natural health columnist for the Daily Mail, no less. He says:

This tells us, supposedly, whether there’s some real effect or change going on, or it’s merely something that’s most likely to be due to chance. Statistical significance in scientific studies is denoted by what is known as the P (or probability) value. A value of less than 0.05 is generally regarded as denoting ‘statistical significance’.

Sounds fine so far. Except, I do feel compelled to point out that the choice of 0.05 as a cut-off is utterly arbitrary. It’s a value that the scientific community agree on. It’s a consensus – it’s not carved in stone like some irrefutable scientific truth. If the scientific community decided that 0.01 was going to be a cut-off, then less things would be ‘statistically significant’. If the limit was set at 0.1 then many more things would be deemed significant. When we understand this, we begin to see just how arbitrary a lot of scientific ‘findings’ really are.

And that’s all true, although the fact that p<0.05 is a totally arbitrary choice isn’t exactly a secret. We all know it. Often, people will demand p<0.001. That’s why we quote p values rather than just printing “yes” or “no”. It’s a bit like saying “People over 6′2″ are considered ‘tall’. Except, I do feel compelled to point out that the choice of 6′2″ as a cut-off is utterly arbitrary” and then saying that therefore tallness isn’t a useful concept in real life.

One commenter said

yes totally agree
“science”.. statistics.. are black and white
life is grey, a vague misty kind of grey

so it’s clear that his plan is working. Medical science is anything but “black and white”. It’s all about measuring and weighing risks and benefits. About p-values and error bars. Confidence intervals and placebo effects.

There ends Briffa’s explanation of p-values. He hasn’t bothered to explain what they are and doesn’t plan to. (In fact, a p-value is roughly defined as the odds of getting a result that good if the hypothesis you’re testing is false: if you get a high p-value then there’s really no reason to think your hypothesis is true.) Instead, he charges straight into a badly thought out analogy:

Let’s imagine someone decided to do a big study on road safety. Let’s say they counted up the number of times someone, somewhere, crossed the road. And now, let’s imagine, they also count up the number of times someone gets run over (and hurt or killed) as a result of crossing the road. Now, I’m writing this on a plane and can’t even check if these statistics exist. But I think it’s reasonable to assume, that compared to the total number of road crossings, the number of people being knocked down is likely to be very small indeed.

Now imagine we applied some statistical ‘wizardry’ to this (with that arbitrary P value, remember) It’s not too difficult to imagine that one would turn up a result which shows: ‘crossing the road is not associated with a statistically significant increased risk of getting run over.’ Now, many doctors and scientists would interpret this finding as evidence that crossing the road is ‘safe’. However, we all know that while most of the time it is, sometimes it’s not.

He seems to be trying to implicitly conflate probability of an event occurring with statistical significance. He’s implying that because accidents are rare, the results of a study will be statistically insignificant. In fact, if a prospective study looked at people crossing the road (the tests), and the same number of other people sitting at home for the same length of time (the controls) then if even six of the test subjects got run over, your p value would be less than 0.05 (assuming the controls all survived). If eleven of the test group were hit by cars then you’d get p<0.001 level significance. You can test for very unlikely events and get good p-values; you just need a large sample space. In this case, you need to look at enough people that six die. That’s probably a much bigger number than is at all feasible, so in fact, you’d do a retrospective case-control study. You’d locate a group of people who were killed by being hit by cars, find out how many of them were crossing the road at the time, and compare that to the proportion of the general population crossing the road at any given time. I suspect you’d find a big (and statistically significant) difference there. That’s how we test for rare events. His analogy proves nothing at all.

That said, he’s right that one could do a study that shows no link. That’s pretty easy: we all know that crossing the road actually is very safe considering how many times most people do it. The point is that that study would not say “crossing the road isn’t linked to death by car accident”; it would say “we have not found a link between crossing the road and death in car accidents”. It certainly wouldn’t prove that no such link exists, and no competent scientist would ever claim it did.

The point that he is attempting to prove by this is as follows:

An example of where statistical significance appears to have got in the way of a constructive debate on the subject is vaccination. Our Government here in the UK, most doctors (I suspect) and many commentators would have us believe that vaccination, including the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination (MMR) is ‘safe’. Many will not even entertain the thought that there may be a problem with MMR.

That’s totally untrue. Of course injecting pathogens into people has associated risks. Nobody with any relevant knowledge is claiming otherwise. The claim is simply that the risks are tiny compared to the benefits, and that autism isn’t one of the risks.

Science hasn’t proven that there’s no risk. Science can’t do that: you can’t prove a negative. It’s possible that there’s exactly one person in the world whose body is set up in such a way that the MMR jab would cause them to become autistic. In that case, there would be a risk, but it would be impossible to detect it unless (indeed, even if) your study contained that one person (in which case the risk would go away when the study was done anyway). So we’re stuck? No, not really.

We know that all the ‘evidence’ that MMR causes autism is, for want of a better word, shit. It’s rubbish. It is insignificant. We also know that a number of better studies have found no risk at all. So yes, it’s still theoretically possibly, but why should it be true? Crossing the road causes car accidents? That figures. We don’t need epidemiology to convince ourselves that that’s pretty likely. But “MMR causes autism”? Why not “MMR causes tallness” or “MMR causes hair loss” or “hats cause kidney stones”? None of those have been absolutely disproven either. There’s absolutely no reason for it to be true, except that many people irrationally believe it to be true, and their beliefs can all be traced back to a load of scary stories published together in a right-wing, anti-scientific propaganda tome. And in Dr Briffa, it even has people standing up for it by harping on about “the limitations of science”. (He has form on this.)

What we have here, then, is a religion. Classic case.

I’ve just read a post about “what prayer is” on Why Don’t You, which was inspired by a post about “prayer in schools” on GodBeGone. Heather sees prayer as “special pleading” to God, which seems pretty reasonable to me. Obviously it depends on what you hope to achieve by the prayer, but many people seem to want to effect a direct change in the material world purely by praying. My basis for this is mostly Christianity, as I’ve seen most of it and they mostly pray in English. Almost every Christian prayer I’ve ever heard has made specific requests of the recipient: deliver us from evil, say, or strangely, from the Hail Mary, that she prays for the person praying to her. (Presumably this is the Catholic equivalent of having ‘contacts’.) There are loads of studies of prayer used as a medical intervention (all of the properly done ones reporting that prayer doesn’t help, and that telling someone they’re being prayed for makes things worse). And then there’s this, from the Telegraph:

An 11-year-old girl died from diabetes after her parents prayed for her recovery rather than calling for medical assistance.

…

[Local police chief] Mr Vergin said the couple, who run a coffee shop in Wausau, had blamed her death on their lack of faith.

There’s a picture in the article of the parents and the girl, and the caption is just brilliant:

Dale and Leilani Neumann say they are not ‘crazy religious people’.
But after Madeline died, they prayed that she might be resurrected

There are churches which routinely endorse this kind of thing, and they (like Madeline’s parents) are protected by specific “healing by prayer” legislation. The whole thing is covered in more detail (and it somehow manages to get worse) at Pharyngula.

Personally, I see this as just one part of a much larger problem: people genuinely seem to think that praying will achieve something. This is one of the most dangerous aspects of Christianity, and it’s also one of the stupidest. Let’s be ridiculously generous, and grant these people the irrational and bizarre assumption that there is an almighty god who watches us and has little else to do but interfere with our lives. So what kind of a god is he?

The conventional Christian wisdom (and I use the word “wisdom” somewhat figuratively) is that he is all-loving. In which case, it would seem to me, he would simply cure these people without being asked — at least, if he thought that was the right thing to do. The idea that he is omnipotent but has no initiative somehow doesn’t ring true to me. He did, we’re led to believe, create the universe, after all. I can’t imagine who would have suggested that. (I’m not completely sure it was a wise move, in hindsight.)

It’s also fairly well accepted by those who think he exists at all that he has a Divine Plan. Usually the plan is held to be ineffable — that is, that no human ever can or will understand it. Let’s again be ridiculously generous and grant them the assumption that it is possible for something to be Beyond Human Understanding — that is, simultaneously impossible to understand and true. I would have said when something can’t be understood, it’s probably because it’s bollocks, but let’s assume for now that that isn’t true. So now the theory is that God, who is all-loving and omnipotent, has devised a Divine Plan, which presumably therefore represents the very best course of history that the human race could possibly take. We’re left to assume that things like the holocaust were strictly necessary for some unimaginably greater good further down the line, or perhaps for avoiding some even more terrible event which has now been averted. If so, thankyou God, although I don’t really see how it was your call. If all of the above is true, then it would seem to me that God would be an idiot to mess about with his Plan just because a load of humans who don’t understand it in the first place ask him to. (It would also suggest that God isn’t going to let a little thing like “free will” interfere with the Plan, so now all forms of action become pointless. Why take the girl to the doctor if God’s already decided how this ends? It also implies that murderers shouldn’t really be punished because anything and everything they do is sanctioned in God’s Plan. This is a really dangerous train of thought to stay on too long.)

And as if all of the above was somehow insufficiently absurd, when one prayer doesn’t work, they start getting more people to join in. People genuinely organise huge gatherings for prayer, and the Pope not so long ago tried to instigate a 24-hour “shift” prayer to rid the church of corruption. I ask you — if God is all powerful, then surely he can take a suggestion once, evaluate it, and implement it or not without having thousands of other people pester him about it as well? He’s not your MP, and even if he was, I’d like to think he was smart enough to realise that almost all petitions are a moronic waste of time. The merit of an idea isn’t a function of how many people support it (nor is the reverse true) and in any case God has never been known for his commitment to democracy. He tends, at least in the literature, to prefer a kind of auto-theocracy, where he rules all and anyone who doesn’t follow his rules is burned horribly or drowned or turned to condiment or something.

It’s moronic. And the problem is, that nobody in this story did anything but try to help. Her parents genuinely thought that if they sat at home and didn’t call the doctor for long enough, Madeline would get better. Then she died, and they genuinely thought that if they sat around the body and wanted it hard enough that Madeline would come back to life. (There is a sentence which can apply to multiple news stories.) In real life, their actions are unjustifiable. They were negligent and they imposed their ideology on a vulnerable young girl who trusted them and was too young to understand what was happening to her. The same is true of Jehovah’s Witnesses who apply their religious rules to their children, and the child dies where a blood transfusion would have saved them. It also applies to Daily Mail readers who think that vaccinations are harmful and their children — and other people’s — die of preventable diseases. I nearly added “worse still” before “other people’s” but I thought better of that. “Your” children aren’t yours. They’re theirs. They’re no more “yours” than “your” friends or “your” parents are. It’s an indicator of relationship, not possession, and anybody other than yourself, regardless of relationship, mustn’t be subjected to your delusions if that puts them at risk. But if you believe it, like this guy does, they absolutely did the right thing.

This article, from the universally accepted standard source for anti-vaccination nutjobs that is The Daily Mail, has quotes like this:

I’ve done a lot of research, mainly on the internet, and I’m doing what I think is the right thing for her.

You’re wrong. The world is complicated and nobody is expected to understand the whole lot. That’s why governments have advisers. Delegate this decision to someone more qualified.

Or this:

I’ve been called selfish by doctors and health visitors. In fact, I’m more vigilant than most parents - I’ve chosen to educate myself about immunity and how to deal with diseases, rather than blindly hand over responsibility to the State or doctors.

You are selfish and slightly moronic to boot. Do the smart thing and trust medical experts on medical matters. You can answer all their questions about your area of expertise, which is probably the lives of Katie And Peter.

Or this:

If Max did get measles I’d give him a boost with Vitamin C and Vitamin A from cod liver oil. If we have a second child, there will be no vaccinations at all.

You are negligent parents and should not have children — you’re literally no different to the Neumanns, except with fish oil substituted for prayer.

The problem is that even the best of intentions are worthless if you’re too ignorant to make the right decision. Some people say there are two kinds of truth: “scientific” truth, and “religious truth”. The former, they say, affects the world we live in, and the latter guides us in spiritual matters. Usually these people are either trying to protect their religious convictions from proper scrutiny, or else are trying to distance themselves from people like Madeline’s parents. The problem is that you end up saying “religious things can’t be understood, and aren’t a useful basis for real-world decisions, but they are nevertheless true“. To my mind, you are by that point using the word “true” in such a weak sense that it loses all meaning.

I prefer an approach that says “you go ahead and believe in your god, but only if you recognise that it’s irrational and don’t inflict it on anyone else”. I think about the universe, of course I do. Life is incredibly strange compared to everything else we know about science, and it seems to require a special origin to explain it. Personally, I tend to assume that “life” is a property of the universe which operates on some tiny level (say, the quantum randomness) and consciousness is an emergent phenomenon which appears when this ‘control’ is placed in a system as complex as a living human brain. It seems plausible to me, and it appeals to my kind of mind. (I like emergent complexity. It’s elegant and the neatest way to explain the existence of complexity at all. I’d hate to have the kind of mind that prefers to substitute God for a difficult question.) But since I’ve no evidence, I don’t put too much stock in that hypothesis, not that I can think of a situation it would affect anyway. That is a healthy and reasonable approach to take. If people said “I think there’s a god, and I think he’s against it, but I can’t be sure so you’d best get that transfusion anyway” then that would be reasonable.

Free speech is important, but I think we badly need a new crime of causing death by misinformation. Deaths from measles rose by infinity percent between 2005 and 2006 after the whole stupid autism “controversy” kicked off, and it’s in no small part because people like the Daily Mail publishing stories like this one. In principle, this would mean a lot of churches would be liable too, but really it would just mean that they’d have to be careful about what they preached — which I think would be a good thing.

It could save lives, and in so many more ways than by simply preventing deaths.