Friday, December 18, 2009

The 10:23 Anti-Homeopathy Campaign

Bad Homeopathy is hosting a campaign directed at the UK to educate the public about the pseudo-science of homeopathy. Details are a bit sketchy right now, but it's planned for early 2010.

From the Bad Homeopathy site:
Homeopathy is an ancient, pre-scientific and absurd pseudoscience. Yet it persists today as an accepted complementary medicine, largely because people don't know what it is.

The 10:23 Campaign aims to show the public what homeopathy is and explain how we know it doesn't work. It will launch in early 2010.

You can read more about thee campaign here: :http://www.badhomeopathy.co.uk/modules/news/article.php?storyid=94

If you live in the UK and frequent any pubs or hubs, please consider participating.

If you are unfamiliar with homeopathy, Richard Dawkins explains what it is in the video below.



EDIT: I found the full episode of the video above. Give it a watch if you have some extra time. It is from a documentary series, The Enemies of Reason. The episode below explores alternative medicine.

8 comments:

  1. I'm sure it works as well as accupunture, prayer, and placebos. Is it harmful?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, that depends on how you define harmful. Homeopathy is mostly about giving patients water and calling it a cure. So in that sense, it's harmless. However, when someone forgoes medical treatment in favor of homeopathy, it becomes quite dangerous.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, from the video I would say it's also an issue in nations with socialized medicine. I guess that's a major problem, but I imagine elective use of the "therapy" will always exist (unless water becomes as scarce as we dread).

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oddly enough this is a subject I am sick of hearing about as a friend of mine is an MP on the Select Committee debating this issue. The general feeling seems to be that the National Health Service (NHS) (I presume ‘socialised medicine’ refers to this service?) shouldn’t fund homeopathy. I think, in the end, it will go as a state provided ‘medicine’ – and a good thing too. The problem is our blessed Royal Family are big fans of homeopathy and royal patronage tends to mean there is a greater difficulty in axing something from public funding than if this were not the case. The fact that, Queen Lizzy, Prince Charlie Boy or the other tokens of monarchy will never have to wait in line to receive health care means they don’t really understand what it is like for the rest of us – nor that there are finite resources.

    I say good riddance to homeopathy - sure people can access it if they want to do, but they can pay for their quack cure!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks for publicising the campaign! Just to clarify, although BadHomeopathy are supporters of the campaign, it's actually being run by a wider group of UK skeptics, including we Merseyside Skeptics. You can get more information on the project and the various activities that will be involved in it by signing up to the official website:
    http://www.1023.org.uk/

    Cheers
    Marsh
    Merseyside Skeptics Society
    10:23

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi,
    I am The editor/writer with medicine-worldwide.net. I really liked your site and i am interested in building a relationship with your site. We want to spread public awareness. I hope you can help me out. Your site is a very useful resource.

    Please email me back with your URL in subject line to take a step ahead and also to avoid spam.

    Thank you,
    Maria Jones
    maria.medicineworld@gmail.com
    www.medicine-worldwide.net

    ReplyDelete
  7. why is only homeopathy being targeted by you guys out of all alternative therapies???
    is this d most harmful treatment out of all available therapies??
    NO.
    ITS ONLY BECAUSE THE CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE IS AFRAID OF ITS GROWING POPULARITY AND EFFECTIVENESS which is beyond their scope of understanding.
    its rightly said history repeats itself...when galileo mentioned about sun being the centre of universe he was condemned by the church in d same manner...but now v all know how true he was......hence not always wat d majority and the superiority considers right is wise.

    may u grow out of the dark
    dr neha

    ReplyDelete
  8. I was looking for information on The 10:23 Anti-Homeopathy Campaignand before ending in your blog I watched like 10 sites about buy viagra, the web is full with that topic. But anyways the info on your site help me very much, thanks for the post and have a nice day.

    ReplyDelete