Category Archives: Science

Health, Medical, Research, Science

Homeopathy: ‘Evidence’ that could resolve its legitimacy?

HOMEOPATHIC REMEDIES

THERE were 2,700 prescriptions for homeopathic remedies issued by NHS GP practices between December 2016 and May 2017. Clearly, there are patients – and doctors – who believe there may be something to the therapy.

. See also Why is a medical body giving accreditation to homeopathic medicine? It’s unscientific…

And while patients’ stories are far from proof that homeopathy works, it begs the question: is it simply a placebo effect or is it something more?

Proponents argue that key evidence showing a genuine benefit is often left out of major studies that claim to review all the available evidence.

According to Dr Peter Fisher, a rheumatologist and clinical director of research at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine, there have been 43 summaries of homeopathic trials and 21 showed an effect greater than a placebo.

“This is a proportion very similar to what studies of conventional treatments find,” says Dr Fisher.

He is also critical of the way the trials now used as evidence that homeopathy doesn’t work were run.

One key study published in The Lancet in 2005 found “weak evidence for a specific effect of homoeopathic remedies” and implied they were no more than placebos. However, Dr Fisher describes the research as “failing to meet elementary standards of quality and transparency.”

The study analysed eight out of more than 100 randomised controlled trials – the “gold standard” for proving treatments are better than a placebo, where one group gets the real therapy and the other a “fake”.

“But the rules as to what studies could be included were changed half-way through,” claims Dr Fisher. “This excluded 93 per cent of available trials and skewed the results against homeopathy. When the study was re-analysed using the original rules, good evidence for homeopathy emerged.”

On the other side of the debate, Professor Edzard Ernst has said that the British Homeopathic Association has misrepresented studies that it claimed showed homeopathy differs from a placebo. While the two sides are poles apart on what the evidence shows, all agree the principle behind homeopathy – super dilution – is a problem, flying in the face of science.

Compared with standard drug treatments, once a homeopathic remedy has been diluted thousands of times, there should be nothing left but water. But what if it could be shown that something clearly physical is going on?

Dr Steven Cartwright, a research biochemist formerly of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University and now employed at Diagnox, a commercial lab, is looking at precisely that. He trained as a homeopath after a single dose “cured” the hayfever he’d had for years – “I was curious to find out more.”

Using a group of dyes that have some unusual properties, he believes he’s discovered a clue as to what is going on. The dyes change colour depending on the liquid they’re put into. In water, one might show up as red, but blue in alcohol.

Exactly why is not clear, but Dr Cartwright believes it could be because they respond to electrical and magnetic fields. When he mixed some regular shop-bought homeopathic remedies with the dyes they produced different colours. “You couldn’t see them with the naked eye but they showed up when looked at through a standard bit of lab equipment, a spectrophotometer,” he says.

He believes something in the remedy was affecting the dye. “I think it was probably picking up an electric or magnetic charge, possibly the result of the vigorous shaking that goes on during dilution,” he says.

What’s more, the effect was stronger the more diluted the remedy, and different remedies produced different colours.

“It’s too early to make any claims,” says Dr Cartwright. “There is a group in Brazil working to replicate it.

“We might have discovered a radical new medical mechanism. But let’s see.”

The NHS view remains as previously stated: that there is no robust evidence to support homeopathy.

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Government, Health, Medical, Science, Society

Cannabis: Drug closely linked to psychosis

CANNABIS DEBATE

As debate in Britain is renewed over the legalising of cannabis, a leading academic has claimed that the drug is linked to psychosis.

THERE has been renewed debate in Britain over the legislation of cannabis. Last week, for the first time ever, the NHS prescribed cannabis oil for 12-year-old Billy Caldwell to treat his epilepsy.

But a psychiatric expert, Professor Robin Murray, an authority on schizophrenia at King’s College London, has claimed that one in six people with psychosis in the UK would never have developed it if they had not smoked the drug. The leading academic said about 50,000 people were now diagnosed as psychotic solely because they used the substance while teenagers. Many had no family history of psychosis and would have had no risk of developing the disease if they had not smoked ‘high-strength cannabis’, he claimed.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists has also spoken out to warn that cannabis use ‘doubles the risk’ of someone becoming psychotic. The warning was given following comments made by former Tory leader William Hague who said the drug should be decriminalised for recreational use.

Professor Murray said: ‘If you smoke heavy, high-potency cannabis, your risk of psychosis increases about five times.

‘A quarter of cases of psychosis we see in south London would not have happened without use of high-potency cannabis. It is more prevalent in that area, but the figure for Britain would be one in six – or approximately 50,000 people.’

Cannabis can make users feel paranoid, experience panic attacks and hallucinations, and it is also linked to depression and anxiety. Many experts claim it is only people who are predisposed to psychosis who develop it after smoking cannabis. However, Professor Murray added: ‘It is true there are some people with a family history of it who are pushed into psychosis more easily by smoking cannabis. But most have no family history, there is no evidence they are predisposed to schizophrenia or psychosis. The problems start only when they are 14 and 15 and start using cannabis.’

It is believed the drug disrupts dopamine, a brain chemical which helps people predict what is going to happen and respond rationally. In developing brains, cannabis can skew this so that people become paranoid and deluded.

Dr Adrian James, Registrar at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: ‘As mental health doctors, we can say with absolute certainty that cannabis carries severe risks. The average cannabis user is around twice as likely as a non-user to develop a psychotic disorder.’

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Science

Questions of Science: Plant poser

Q: Did all the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere come from photosynthesising plants? If not, where did it come from?

WITHIN the Earth’s crust, oxygen combines with all the most common atoms to form water, rock, organic compounds and almost everything else around us. Spontaneous free oxygen is about as likely as finding round rocks perched on steep slopes. Such rocks would imply that something had pushed them uphill more strongly than they could roll downhill.

Similarly, any free oxygen about us has been torn from its compounds with more than its bonding force. And that is a lot of force that only a few things are able to produce. Ionising radiation, such as X-rays, can do it, but there is little of that about. Visible light does it laboriously, step-by-step through photosynthesis, the only process that could release the level of oxygen that we see about us. That amount is calculated to be in region of 10¹⁵ tonnes.

How much oxygen plants actually produce is another matter entirely. The chloroplasts used by plants to photosynthesise are thought to have originated as symbiotic cyanobacteria. So, in effect, all our oxygen came from photosynthesising bacteria. Hence, practically all the atmospheric oxygen is of biological origin – and is not from plants but cyanobacteria.

These single-cell organisms, which were present on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago and pre-date plants, were initially responsible for all oxygen production and are still responsible for more than 60 per cent of current oxygen production.

Cyanobacteria come in many varieties and are sometimes called blue-green algae, although they are not really algae. A species of cyanobacteria present in the ocean, Prochlorococcus marinus, is both the smallest photosynthetic organism known and the most abundant of any photosynthetic species on the planet. It was only discovered in 1988.

Previously Questions of Science: Free the atoms

Science-in-motion: a series of short articles following topics in science.

. Biodiversity

This measures how much variety there is between all the different species of life on Earth, from single-celled bacteria through insects to blue whales, the largest known animal ever to have existed. Biodiversity also describes the genetic diversity within a single species, or even the diversity of ecosystems like wetlands and forests.

Around 1.75 million species of living organisms have been identified on Earth so far, mostly small ones like bacteria and insects, and estimates suggest the true number could be as high as 100 million. But in recent centuries, there has been a rapid increase in the rate of species extinctions due to human activities such as habitat destruction for farming.

Between 1500 and 2009, international organisations documented more than 800 species becoming extinct, including the Javan tiger that died out completely in the 1980s, but the vast majority of disappearances probably go unnoticed. Conservationists grade the vulnerability of species according to a continuum scale that runs from ‘extinct’ to ‘least concern’.

Biodiversity is of huge significance. The development of new medicines, for example, is inhibited during rainforest destruction, of which many tiny organisms are either destroyed or not even previously discovered.

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