This week's news on Homeopathy.
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"Plausibility bias"? Try "reality bias" when it comes to clinical trials. [Respectful Insolence]
14 MayScienceBlogs
Last week, I pointed out that, when referring to a therapy and considering whether it should be tested in clinical trials, plausibility does not mean knowing the mechanism. Today, I intend to elaborate a bit on that. As my jumping-off point, I couldn't ask for anything better (if you can call it that) than an article by homeopaths published last week online in Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy entitled Plausibility and evidence: the case of homeopathy. You'll get an idea of what it is that affected Orac like the proverbial matador waving his cape in front of a bull by reading this brief passage from the abstract:
Prior disbelief in homeopathy is rooted in the perceived implausibility of any conceivable mechanism of action. Using the 'crossword analogy', we demonstrate that plausibility bias impedes assessment of the clinical evidence. Sweeping statements about the scientific impossibility of homeopathy are themselves unscientific: scientific statements must be precise and testable.
Scientific. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Of course, his being a homeopath is about as close to a guarantee as I can think of that a person doesn't have the first clue what is and is not scientific. If he did, he wouldn't be a homeopath. Still, this particular line of attack is often effective, whether yielded by a homeopath or other CAM apologist. After all, why not test these therapies in human beings and see if they work? What's wrong with that? Isn't it "close-minded" to claim that scientific considerations of prior plausibility consign homeopathy to the eternal dustbin of pseudoscience?
Not at all. There's a difference between being open-minded and being so "open-minded" that your brains threaten to fall out. Guess which category homeopaths like Rutten fall into. But to hear them tell it, homeopathy is rejected because because we scientists have a "negative plausibility bias" towards it. At least, that's what Rutten and some other homeopaths have been trying to convince us. This article seems to be an attempt to put some meat on the bones of their initial trial balloon of this argument published last summer, which Steve Novella duly deconstructed.
Before I dig in, however, I think it's necessary for me to "confess" my bias and why I think it should be your bias too.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club
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Science Tales: short comic stories about science, skepticism, evidence and woo
11 MayBoing Boing
Darryl Cunningham's Science Tales is a fantastic nonfiction comic book about science, skepticism and denial. Divided into short chapters with simple layouts and graphics, Cunningham's book looks into belief in chiropractic and homeopathy; denial of moon landings, climate change and evolution, the anti-vaccination movement, and related subjects. It concludes with a tremendous piece on the forces that give rise to anti-scientific/anti-evidence movements, which Cunningham attributes to the deadly cocktail of cynical corporate media-manipulation and humanity's built-in cognitive blind-spots.Cunningham has a real gift for making complex subjects simple. If you're a Mythbusters fan, admire James Randi, enjoyed Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, and care about climate change, you'll enjoy this one. More to the point, if you're trying to discuss these subjects with smart but misguided friends and loved ones, this book might hold the key to real dialogue.
To get a taste of Science Tales, click through below for the first five pages of the MMR story, courtesy of publishers Myriad Editions.
