Where does one begin with this awesome lot of rhetoric from the Dawk! A few comments:
1) Proven science has been wrong about the eating of beef - it is quite ok, no possibility of getting the human form of mad cow disease, CJD. So why should be believe government assurances that are science based? Politics has a nasty habit of twisting science to political ends. Why didn't Dawkins address this?
2) If the government was that concerned about measles, they would not have blocked access to single vaccines. Clearly health was not the main priority so much as perhaps cost. Why didn't Dawkins raise these issues?
3) Medical science is safe and tested - perhaps Dawkins would like to visit the people who nearly lost their lives in a drug trial last year?
4) One alternative practitioner said he used "quantum" as a metaphor, which Dawkins seized upon eagerly. What about Dawkinons on "selfish" as in "The Selfish gene" (which occurs in the same paragraph as a sentence "we are born selfish")? Not only is that a metaphor, it is mixed with normal common use of the term.
5) It cannot be seen, it is a mystery as to how it works, but it does. New age healing, according to Dawkins, or Dawkin's idea of Memes, which share pretty well all the same characteristics. Can we expect some controlled trials on meme propogation in the near future?
6) We may as well go back to leeches (as an example of poor medicine). It may have escaped Dawkin's attention that while leeches are not good for everything, they are very good at some things, and have come back into modern medicine (http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2003/july/leech.htm). Doesn't he research anything anymore?
7) "It is the placebo effect". Wonderful. Not only is this not as easy as Dawkin's believes (see Cimetidine and stomach ulcers (1983) for details of how mistakes can be made), and also look at the FDA for problems in using placebo in cancer trials, it is a term which describes a mysterious and unknown way in which the body can be stimulated to heal itself. New Scientist, 2005, comments: "Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know" (see below). Dawkins gives some evolutionary style rhetoric which is little more than a veneer of science sounding mumbo jumbo to explain it. But wasn't that his problem with alternative medicine?
8) I wish he'd listened to his friend Douglas Adams on Feng Shui (http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/), where Adams questions the nonsensical sounding ideas of Feng Shuihe but notes that: "my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it's worth remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it's worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there."
9) Science as neutral - if he'd seen what Eysenck says about the impartiality of scientitists with respect to astrology (not the zodiac stuff, the real data driven work of Michel Gauquelin on the "mars effect"), he might think twice! Eysenck studied the data, and the comments, and concluded that the dismissal and rhetorical put downs by the scientific community did it no credit at all (see http://www.planetos.info/eysenck.html). Of course, astrologers do not like the fact that Gauquelin virtually disproved any Zodiac effect, but scientitists are equally dismissive in the face of the positive results. Why can't we live with mystery sometimes?
That's enough for now!
Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.
We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.
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