'Homeopathy Hope for Breast Cancer' still doing the rounds

I've been in an ongoing conversation on Voxy which started with the NZ Skeptics Inc press release to the NZ Council of Homeopaths inviting them to join in the effort to remove homeopathy from chemist shelves on the grounds that you don't get the specialised remedy following the consultation the NZCoH said is a required part of treatment. The conversation has mostly died out due to exhaustion and the utter pointlessness of sparing with someone that just doesn't have much of a grasp on logic, the scientific method or how to answer a question without trying to dodge it first (and second and third...).

However, we appear to have a new sparring partner. They've trotted out an article from a magazine (not a journal) as evidence supporting homeopathy. The article covers a paper that has been thoroughly dragged through the skeptical community and torn to shreds for the quality of the paper, the experiment, the methodology, etc.

Following is the original post and my response. Feel free to join the conversation on Voxy or on this forum.

Wed, 31/03/2010 - 20:51 — Dr J Priest (not verified)
The latest Healthy Options

The latest Healthy Options magazine, April edition, has an article on 'Homeopathy Hope for Breast Cancer'. The article refers to scientific research completed on the use of homeopathic remedies in breast cancer treatment. The findings showed the related remedies halted the progress of breast cancer and related it to the action of the drug Taxol, without the side-effects. The resultant research paper was published in Feb 2010 in the International Journal of Oncology.

So whilst one debates whether homeopathy works, research continues and the general populace continue to use it with confidence, and pharmacies continue to sell the products legally under the Pharmacy Acts. After all they were the original dispensors of homeopathy. Our pioneer apothecary chemists bought the homeopathic kits with them when they arrived into the country. Our Museum's have some of these original homeopathic box kits on display.

enjoy.

...and my reply...

Yeah... I'm familiar with that paper. It has been out for quite a while and has had a number of concerns raised about the methodology used and the data reported.

For your reference the pdf can be found here;
http://bit.ly/9acBZk

Feel free to google the filename (Cytotoxic-effects-of-homeopathic-remedies-on-breast-cancer-cells-2010.pdf) if you don't want to trust this source. The document is available easily enough.

I invite you to examine the article and consider the following points;

• The experiments were "conducted in triplicate and repeated at least twice in each case of remedy". This is extremely poor methodology. The experiments should have been repeated at least three times, as is the convention, to give the experiment more statistical validity.
• There are no statistics reported in the paper at all. Without statistical analysis of the results you can't make any statements about the differences between the different tests at all.
• Where is the data for the HPLC? There is none. How can they draw conclusions from it without the supporting data? Due to the nature of the paper, there is no good reason for excluding the data.
• Show me the chromatograms! This is kinda ridiculous as they claim the succussion did not cause chemical changes in the solvent. Isn't this the entire basis behind homeopathy? So really, this paper actually adds to the weight of evidence against the most popular "mechanism" used to explain homeopathy.
• Regarding cell death (the main point of the paper) they make a number of claims about the tests but without any statistics to back them up, they cannot, with any credibility, claim to have any actual results.
• Major fail here: "As shown in Fig. 1A, the solvent reduced the viability of all three cell types; the overall reduction in cells at different doses of solvent was about 30% for MCF-7, 20-30% for MDA-MB-231 and 20% for HMLE cells." - The solvent referred to here is the control. This should have had no effect on the cells at all. That's the purpose of the control. Given that the control was also the solvent used in the preparation of the remedies there is no way to tell if the remedies had any effect at all. Again, statistics would have helped...
• I've read criticisms about the FISH assays, Flow cytometry and Western Blots but these are over my head. From what I've read though, the authors got the Western Blots reasonably well resolved, however, with the control solvent killing off cells also there's not really much that can be gleaned from them.

To read the paper, this is something I would expect to read in a scientific magazine, not a respected, peer-reviewed journal. The lack of statistics is something that science writers specialise in. Taking scientific papers, understanding the statistics and results and boiling them down into articles that Jane Average on the street has a chance of understanding.

Unfortunately Science Writers/Journalists are thin on the ground and society is suffering for it.