Don’t believe in miracles

28 October 2009

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Everyone likes to attack Western medicine, says Anthony Daniels, but we must ignore the siren song of hocus-pocus and respect rationality

Irrationality, without which life cannot be lived, is profoundly irritating, especially in others. It is at its worst when those who are guilty of it try to sue those who, like Simon Singh, try to expose it. Singh was sued by the British Chiropractic Association after he wrote a book debunking several alternative ‘therapies’. A few weeks ago, thankfully, he was given leave to appeal but the affair nearly spelled victory for irrationality. Irrationality is also very bad when displayed by someone close to you.

My late mother suddenly suffered from a non-life-threatening but disfiguring skin condition of her scalp that naturally enough caused her great distress. Old ladies in their eighties, worried about their appearance, are not high on the National Health Service’s list of priorities; and this, combined with a severe shortage of dermatologists in this country, meant that she could not be seen on the NHS for 18 months. In dermatology, at any rate, the Grim Reaper is used as an auxiliary in the government’s Waiting Time Initiative.

She went private, as my patients used to put it. Even the private dermatologist had a waiting list of nine months, however, so she chose another. He prescribed something that made her condition much worse. She consulted another, with the same unhappy result. Finally, in desperation, she sought out a homeopath and, to both my pleasure and my chagrin, his ministrations cured her. At least, she got better after them.

It was difficult in the circumstances to persuade her that homeopathy had no rational basis, quite the reverse, and that properly conducted scientific trials had demonstrated its inefficacy. She had personally undertaken the only trial that really interested her, namely on herself, and it was successful. What more could a patient ask?

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