"Dr" Nancy Malik is spamming my blog again...

In the comments to a couple of old posts, homeopathic apologist and internet numpty extraordinaire Nancy Malik says the following:

Studies in support of Homeopathy published in reputed journals

1. Scientific World Journal
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17982565

2. Lancet
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9310601

3. Neuro Psycho Pharmacology
http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v27/n2/abs/1395862a.html // Bacopa Monnieri for memory

I thought I'd have a quick look and explain why they're nonsense. Unfortunately, this hasn't proven to afford much in the way of intellectual exercise.

The first paper is by Graunke et al., and concerns, I kid you not, the treatment of tadpoles with homeopathic thyroxin. This is a well-known bad homeopathy paper. The tadpoles in the treatment group were more developed than those in the control group at the start of the experiment, so it wasn't much of a surprise that they were more developed at the end too. There is more discussion of this dreadful rubbish here.

The second paper is the famed Linde et al. meta-analysis, published in 1997. While this paper does say "The results of our meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homeopathy are completely due to placebo", there are some other things to bear in mind:

1. The paper also says "However, we found insufficient evidence from these studies that homeopathy is clearly efficacious for any single clinical condition".

2. A 1999 paper by the same authors, using improved methodology and including new trials, states that "It seems...likely that our meta-analysis at least overestimated the effects of
homeopathic treatments".

3. A subsequent meta-analysis by Shang et al., published in the Lancet in 2005, using further improved methodology concluded that the results were compatible with homeopathy being a placebo.

Finally, the third study, by Roodenrys et al. in the journal Neuropsychopharmocology, is not about homeopathy at all, but rather about herbal medicine. In homeopathy, remedies are typically diluted such that it is very unlikely that they contain any of the original material: there is no active ingredient. In the Roodenrys study, what is being tested is brahmi, an Indian herb, of which the paper says:

Studies have shown that the herb contains many active constituents, including a number of alkaloids and saponins, however, the major constituents are the steroidal saponins, Bacosides A and B.

So it isn't entirely surprising that brahmi might have some effect.

From this fairly cursory glance at the studies provided by Nancy Malik, it's clear that she is from the Dana Ullman school of evaluating journal articles. This involves finding some papers that superficially appear to support your position, and then spamming them all over the internet. Luckily, for this approach there is no need to understand the articles, or even to read them. For people who think that magic water is medicine, that would be rather too much to expect.