Annotated captions of Richard Dawkins vs Homeopathy in English

It's the hottest alternative health fad

It boasts an impressively vast and well stocked medical cabinet

It's endorsed by royalty and the stars

& it's doing a booming trade in high street pharmacies

500 million people worldwide claim to use it

What is it?

It's a system for dosing up on a dilute solution of

Water

Welcome to the bizarre world of homeopathy

Homeopathy was dreamed up in the late eighteenth century

as a way of boosting the bodies vital spirit

One of the central tenets handed on by it's founder

Samuel Hahnemann was that like cures like

Superficially this might sound faintly plausible

but unlike a vaccine that introduces a diminished form of a virus into the body

in order to provoke it's immune system

like cures like, makes the unfounded assumption

that what causes similar symptoms can cure those symptoms

In Hahnemann's world dilute poison ivy

cures skin rash because undiluted

it causes a rash if touched

By the same principle

red onion can alleviate streaming eyes

and snake venom stiffness

But amazingly

homeopathy gets even stranger still

Homeopaths claim that the

more you dilute an active ingredient in water

the stronger medicine it becomes

Most homeopathic remedies're marked 30C

What does that mean?

It means 1 part medicine to

100 to the power of 30 parts water

How much? A drop in a fish tank?

No. A fish tank is nowhere near big enough.

The swimming pool doesn't provide enough dilution

Not even a lake

What about the drop in the ocean?

But it turns out that even the sea isn't big enough

For the really approved homeopathic recipes

in order to get 1 molecule of the active substance

you need to embay all the atoms in the solar system

To science just doesn't make sense.

Even homeopaths acknowledge

that there is not a single molecule of active ingredient

in the bottle they sell you, it's just water

So how can it possibly work?

In an attempt to resolve the paradox

homeopathy boldly paddles further up the creek of pseudoscience

claiming that water somehow has a memory

of the now completely absent active ingredient

But wouldn't water also have memory

of other more common impurities

it's coming to contact with?

Salt, urine?

Scientists have calculated

that in each glass of water we drink

at least one molecule has passed

through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell

Incredibly you & I are paying for this

unproven industry through our taxes

despite the national health service's net

540 million £ deficit for 2006

the refurbishment of the royal homeopathic hospital

was part-founded by the NHS

to the tune of 10 million £

That's equivalent to 500 nurses salaries

Right here on the floor, here is a point wheeler straight

wooden floors. Very unusual in a modern health care

This hospital was only completed 18 months ago

So this is our main clinical area...

The homeopathic profession is unregulated

by government. You can call yourself

a homeopath without any qualification

training or even insurance, after all

all you are doing is dishing up water solution

But Peter Fischer, clinical Director

of the hospital, is a medically trained rheumatologist

I see Prince Charles over there

Yeah, ow yes, great friend of ours.

These are the homoepathic medicines

that are in daily use. This is one

you know? For instance it has quite a strong

evidence by it's Rhus radicans. It's

Poison ivy

Right, ok.

I want to know how someone highly qualified

in real medicine can make such a leap

of faith.

I agree there is a plausibility problem

You know & I pinch myself from time to time

I quite regularly pinch myself, you know

is this really happening, you now?

The fact is I couldn't stop what I do now

even if I wanted to

My patients wouldn't let me

They say it helps

So how are things? Well very much better

since I last saw you. No pain at all.

You know, if I'm aware of a symptom to

come start the pain

I start taking it again & I can feel

the improvement & get back to until I need it

again, you know. Good! Well that's

pretty straight forward just bash on the same

Don't we? Yeah. I'm still taking the remedies

but you said to me, ahm, you know, if you

get little reaction to just hold off taking the

remedies until they then subside

so therefore I've been doing that

so for example I haven't had a remedy

for a week now

& last time you said you were getting a bit

of an emotional sort of upset. Yeah.

The day after you took the medicine

It was the day after I took the medicine

I was impressed by the amount of time &

care Peter Fischer devotes to each patient

Far more than an ordinary doctor. Uhm

but in terms of the treatment

I would be, you know, reluctant to make a

big change. I think this is the right stuff

what we may need to fit around at it

Like a GP, Peter Fischer prescribes

medicine, but in this case the medicine is a

bit of a surprise. Thank you very much

Common salt, natrum muriaticum sodium

chloride, again in an .. dilution

I mean obviously, since it's common salt

I mean she is obviously taking in

a hell of a lot of common salt anyway. Yes

Ow sure. How does the one..? The truth is

nobody knows. I don't know

nor does anybody else. Yeah.

&, you know, the question is

Do you think that because we don't know,

because it seems implausible, it can't work?

& that may be where you & I differ

The most recent problem was your skin

Wasn't it? That's right, yeah my hands they

cleared up quite well & my scalp's a lot lot

better. While patients like these provide

positive anecdotes for homeopathy

subjective stories are not enough

for science

I want to pin down precisely what double

blind trials have been conducted

Over 100 have been done, some by me

On my whole were positive

& I have, you know, I worked hard on it, ahm

but in the face of great skepticism

in the face of many people who say well

we are not gonna found homeopathy

it's got to be a load of rubbish

Why do you think they say that if there really

are controlled trials which

I think you are much better place

to comment on because

you are the sort of person who says that

Well, because I have red studies which

have a meta-analysis on things

which suggest that, yes occasionally

there's a slight suggestion of something

maybe in a slight suggestion there

But if you take all the studies that have

been done it doesn't add up in the way that

Ow, I don't agree with that at all

Now if a double blind control trial

really does show that it works

then that suggests we're dealing

with an entirely new force of physics

something unknown to science

I think that's a slight exaggeration

I mean, there are various hypothesis

Remarkably nobody

knows what the structure of liquid water is

So there is room, you know,

for a phenomenon analogous

to, I'm not saying the same

but analogous to the storage

of information by a magnetic medium

by a floppy disk or video tape. Yes, if I were

a doctor, doing what you do, &

was convinced that it really worked

I would drop everything & really really try

to demonstrate that & win

the Nobel prize for physics

I mean it would be an

astonishing, totally astonishing finding

That's, to be honest, one

of the main reasons I got into it

Plain ambition got me into it in the first place

But I agree it would be nice to see

You know, a really serious program

of research done on it

Well we are saying it has been done &

Well no, I'm saying that quite lot of research

has been done

I don't claim it's conclusive.

Why not? I mean it sounds as though

Well because it's very diffuse

& of course it does depend what

question you're asking, you know. I use a

does it benefit people? Do people feel

better? & I think

actually there's no doubt about that

people who go to homeopathic hospitals

have a treatment do feel better but

of course you will say that it's all

because you are nice to them

This is all rather contradictory so let's be

clear about the latest evidence

In 2005 the medical journal The Lancet

surveyed all the meta-analysis

the analysis of the analysis

& failed to find any reliable effect

of homeopathy

Tellingly, for me, in the bigger trials,

less prone to chance anomalies

homeopathy was more likely to show

0 demonstrable effect