Thanks for your comments – I haven’t read the letters yet but thanks for highlighting them to me. I have just grubbed out the issue from a pile of Vet Records in the lounge and I will take a gander later.

I wrote about twice as much in my first draft and I felt I could have dredged this paper for about 3 weeks and still been able to come up with ‘internal contradictions and inconsistencies’. It really was a shocker.

BTW Top effort by the BVVS – I noted Simon Singh namechecked you a few weeks ago in the nationals. Nice one – you deserve the recognition given the scale of the task when articles like this are waltzing into your peer-reviewed journal.

What the authors seemed to be doing was attempting to use that 12.5% in a manner analogous to p<0.05, which begs all manner of questions.

Most importantly, would they have done that calculation if they did not already know it would come out with the "right" answer? Unless it has been stated as a prior hypothesis, all a calculation like this does is show the danger of data dredging. Doing it post hoc is makes it in no way comparable to testing a prior hypothesis at p<0.05, and you don't even need to get all Bayesian to see this as being obvious.

While mentioning Bayes, what is very difficult to get across (because it sounds like sour grapes), is that frequentist statistical methods have essentially no applicability to hypotheses that have close to zero prior probability. This is where the appeal for "more research" is simply misplaced, especially in a field as small as veterinary medicine where it is impossible to tun a trial with adequate numbers to provide anything like enough statistical power. A great big heap of weak trial data lends no effective support to homeopathy. It all adds up to a picture of these trials simply being done for political ends, to give the appearance of playing the scientific gain.

As I said, though, the problem is that this can just sound like sour grapes especially to the statistically illiterate, so I try to refrain from using this argument, because there are only so many days left in one's life to try to teach statistics to those who do not want to learn. Much more efficiently fatal to homeopathy is to take their many claims at face value then highlight the internal contradictions and inconsistencies. As with so much fringe medicine, because they have no proper basis for any of their beliefs, their system becomes a chaotic accretion of all sorts of ideas. One I am focusing on at the moment is the use of nosodes instead of licensed vaccines in dogs. Many homeopaths might argue that nosodes are not 'orthodox' homeopathy. Many other homeopaths use them without a quibble. Their representative bodies have remained silent when asked for evidence of efficacy or to respond to examples where puppies left unprotected by the use of nosodes die of preventable disease.

Northern Doctor, you have no idea how hard it was to write letters about this abortion of a paper while trying to stay within shouting distance of the Vet Record’s word limits. When the barrel is as stuffed full of fish as this one, and you only have a limited number of shots, you can’t get them all….

And then of course the authors get the last word. The thing is farcical. It says more about the Vet Rec’s scrutineering standards than anything else, but I doubt if we’ll ever get Martin Alder to understand that.

Please have a look at the letters published last week, of one of which I am an author (while also being Vice-President of the British Veterinary Voodoo Society, so thanks for the namecheck).

http://veterinaryrecord.bvapublications.com/current.dtl

Letters:

George W. Tribe
Pilot study of the effect of homeopathy on pruritus associated with atopic dermatitis in dogs
Vet Rec. 2009 164: 634. [Full Text] [PDF]
Simon J. Baker and Gordon J. Baker
Pilot study of the effect of homeopathy on pruritus associated with atopic dermatitis in dogs
Vet Rec. 2009 164: 634-635. [Full Text] [PDF]
Morag G. Kerr, Christopher A. Hebbern, Paul Wilson, and Joseph J. Magrath
Pilot study of the effect of homeopathy on pruritus associated with atopic dermatitis in dogs
Vet Rec. 2009 164: 635. [Full Text] [PDF]
P. B. Hill, J. Hoare, and R.T. Mathie
Pilot study of the effect of homeopathy on pruritus associated with atopic dermatitis in dogs
Vet Rec. 2009 164: 635-636. [Full Text] [PDF]

To use crossover studies the condition really needs to be stable ie non-fluctuating. This simply isn’t the case with canine atopic dermatitis and it looks like it has been used as a mechanism to cope with tiny numbers rather than it being the best choice of methodology per se. It’s not like it is some super-rare condition and there is a shortage of canine atopic dermatitis is it?

Homeopaths for humans could claim (although inexplicably they tend not to) that they are providing some kind of psychosocial intervention for the benefit of patients. After all, as Bob Hoskins once said: it’s good to talk.

Indeed. I have, over the last couple of years, tried to popularize the term / description “stealth psychotherapy” for this aspect of homeopathy, though it doesn’t seem to have caught on.