Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Homeopathy & Malaria


Hey, check it out, two posts under a month apart (just).

There has been a little bit of a scandal over some homeopaths pushing their diluted pills as a prophylactic for malaria.
Newsnight, on the BBC, had an undercover reporter go and speak to some homeopaths around London about what the homeopathic options were for anti-malarials.
I had always been led to believe that malaria was caused by a parasitic invasion of Plasmodium in your liver cells, passed on to you by another host of the parasite: a mosquito. However, it seems to be caused by you having a malaria-shaped hole in your energy that the malarial mosquitos can come along and fill.

Ben Goldacre has a video from Newsnight of some woman from some homeopath's club defending it. She has to resort to saying "ooo, but yeah right, homeopathy has been around for aaaaages, so it must work". I may be paraphrasing.

All very scary. "When alternative medicine goes bad", it should be a series on channel 5.

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