Well time I got round to looking at a piece of psuedoscience. First up is an article on the website http://www.articlebase.com/ called Antibiotics? Heck No! Homeopathy is the alternative, The full article can be found bt searching for "Antibiotics heck no" in Google. The aim of the article is to get people to stop using antibiotics and buy homeopathic remedies instead, surely such an article will be full of accurate science and factual information, we shall see.
The article starts
"The media and modern medicine are beginning to catch up to what homeopathy has known for centuries: antibiotics are dangerous drugs and any decision to use them ought to be well weighed."
I am not entirely sure about what the authors trying to convey here, are they saying that homeopaths are all extrodinairy scientists that know more about pharmacology that the rest of the world? Maybe they are and that is why they 'know' that water has a memory (albeit it seems a selective one) when the rest of the worlds scientists can find nothing in water that would allow it to 'remember' a substance when it is baged against a leather covered plank of wood that has been stuffed with horse hair.
Another possibility is that they are trying to lift the opinion of the media to that of modern medicine by mentioning them together like that.
The third option is simply to start the piece by telling the reader that antibiotics are evil and dangerous and that modern medicine uses drugs on a whim and never considers the consequences of a drug before it is allowed to be used.
Maybe they are being really clever and intending all of these messages to be implanted in the readers mind. Obviously the opinion of the media is not equal to the opinion of scientists that have studied a field (The daily mails coverage of vaccines demonstrates this point very nicely). Drugs used by modern medicine need to pass clinical trials before they are accepted and used (homeopathic remedies do not).
There is also one other minor problem with this statement that I have not covered yet and that is the claim that Homeopaths have known for CENTURIES that antibiotics are dangerous drugs - but the first real antibiotic was Penicillin discovered by Alexander Flemming in 1928. Apparently Homeopaths are so far ahead of science they knew that antibiotics were dangerous drugs atleast 119 years before they were invented as they have only been around for 89 years so far.
So the opening statement is a great mood setter for the author to get the reader in the right frame of anti antibiotic thinking but it is complete tosh!. Lets see whats next.
The next paragraph could be why the author wanted us to see the media as an authority figure to be trusted
"A case in point in making such a decision ought to include the following study: “A first-of-its-kind studies of more that 10,000 Washington State women concluded that women who used the most antibiotics had DOUBLE (my emphasis) the chances of being struck by breast cancer and that the association was consistent for all forms of antibiotics. The study also concluded that the risk went up with the number of prescriptions, a powerful indication that the link was real”."
So the user points us not to an article in a peer reviewed medical journal but a newspaper. Note that the author does not provide us with a link to the study or any further details about it. It took me a little while but I found the study to be one published by the Journal of the American Medical Association here
The conclusion of the study states "Use of antibiotics is associated with increased risk of incident and fatal breast cancer. It cannot be determined from this study whether antibiotic use is causally related to breast cancer, or whether indication for use, overall weakened immune function, or other factors are pertinent underlying exposures. Although further studies are needed, these findings reinforce the need for prudent long-term use of antibiotics." Something I find telling about this conclusion is that it clearly says that it cannot be determined that antibiotics have a causal link to breast cancer. Basically the study admits that it is not evidence that breast cancer is caused by taking antibiotics and that it could simply be that people who have conditions that require treatment with antibiotics are at higher risk (even if they didnt take the antibiotics).
That is not the only case that the author brings up to show us that authority figures condem antibiotics though. She tells us that in Country Living Magazine 1/04 the CDC and FDA paid for a full rigt hand page advert saying "Snort. Sniffle. Sneeze. No Antibiotics Please. Treat the Colds And Flu With Care." The author then helpfully points out that what they want is for people to stop asking for antibiotics. Presumably this is supposed to make us believe that the CDC and FDA are saying that antibiotics are completely useless (along with the dangers that the homeopaths have known of for centuries). The reason that authorities try to stop people pestering thier doctor for antibiotics when they have a cold and flu is that both are viral infections and antibiotics do not treat viral infection they treat bacterial infections. When we use antibiotics for a cold and flu we simply build up an immunity to the antibiotic without it being of any use for the current ailment.
The article goes on to say that homeopathy is of course the replacement to antibiotics and explaining some of the ways homeopathy works which I am not going to argue against in this blog as I have waffled enough already.
To those who bother to read this thank you for your time and please leave comments to help me improve my writing and thinking. Not sure what the next topic will be or when the next post will be but I will try to keep them fairly regularly.
