a free business school lesson for homeopaths
Despite representing a multi-billion dollar industry, alt med practitioners don’t seem to understand the basic principles of business and management as they defend their remedies from skeptics asking them to provide clinical evidence for their claims. According to them, Big Pharma is unable to buy up patents to homeopathy or treatments made by other alt med disciplines and could never make a profit by reducing their R&D costs and yet, be able to buy rights to promising conventional treatments and aim to make their drug pipelines cheaper to maintain. It’s as if the principles of finance and strategic management cease to apply when pharmaceutical companies are even mentioned in the same sentence as homeopathic potions and alternative regimens…
The argument that Big Pharma is on the warpath against alternative medicine is trotted out on a regular basis by the faithful defenders of naturists, homeopaths and biomedical quacks who feel free to administer all sorts of highly speculative treatments without going through the proper clinical trials and approvals by the FDA. For the latest example, let’s consider an article by homeopath Amy Lansky, who tries to defend her craft against a pharmaceutical conspiracy by terrified corporations which want to suppress her mystical cures…
What if an expensive drug could be potentized to create billions of effective doses at essentially no cost? It would destroy big pharma entirely. Medicines that cost essentially nothing? Nontoxic ultra- diluted medicines that cause fewer side effects? How could [big pharma's coffers] be sustained? Forget about the Law of Similars. It’s potentization – the process of creating effective ultradilutions – that big pharma is scared of! No wonder Baum and Ernst got the word “potentization” wrong. This one word is the small stone that could take Goliath down.
Really? Medicines that cost essentially nothing would cripple the pharmaceutical industry? Big Pharma can’t buy the rights to mass produce homeopathic cures, then close down plants it would no longer need, saving a few billion dollars worth of expenses on an annual basis? If making products cheaper was the death knell for companues, big box retailers and electronics companies would’ve been dead in the water long ago. So what Lansky is basically telling us, is that cost cutting is the first step towards bankruptcy. If there was clinical proof that homeopathy works, Big Pharma would be buying their cures and saving countless billions in getting them to market. Far from being the stone that could take down a goliath, legitimate, empirically proven potentization would be a cash cow of epic proportions, eagerly embraced by CEOs and investors.
There’s also a question as to why medicine that costs essentially nothing to make retails at such a high price that over the counter cold medicine is a bargain compared to oscillococcinum. At my local pharmacy, a packet of cold pills sells for $4.99 while a package of oscillococcinum comes with a $10.99 price tag. If it’s so easy to produce a potent remedy with a virtually non-existent overhead, why do its makers charge over 120% more? Why not sell it for $2.99 and undercut the competition while still enjoying the kind of profit margins even Merck and GSK would envy? You might remember the recipe for oscillococcinum featured in the last edition of the Skeptics’ Circle and recall that’s basically water sprinkled on sugar pills. Why would you possibly charge so much for it? Even the duck hearts and livers, from which the hundreds of dilutions begin, aren’t all that hard to come by. And doesn’t the fact that it’s so much more expensive than your run of the mill cold meds run counter to Lansky’s claim that homeopathy could bring Big Pharma to its knees by undercutting it?
Finally, let’s go back to the last sentence of the quote. Lansky is talking about Michael Baum and Edzard Ernst, a duo of UK doctors who published a rebuke to alt med practitioners trying to hijack medicine by appeals to open-mindedness. In the article they misspelled potentization, promoting homeopaths to unleash the old and tired internet taunt of focusing on a typo and declaring that by failing to properly spell one term the authors are woefully ignorant about the topic, as they flood their replies with meaningless technobabble in the traditions of Charlene Werner and John Benneth. Now, to most of us, a typo is a typo. But for her conspiracy-mongering, Lansky is turning a simple typo in a general article into the word that Big Pharma dare not speak, kind of like a demonic invocation which summons a hellish creature made of fangs and claws. It it just me, or is that a little outlandish to put it mildly? Through to be fair, her entire argument hinges on apologetics which not only fail to take the basics of the pharmaceutical business into account, but also provide zero evidence that homeopathy actually works in any way, shape or form.
Unfortunately, if alt medicine was vulnerable to logic they would have died long ago. To anyone who believes in homeopathy these words are merely some big pharma conspiracy. At the end of the day however, there is a reason you don’t get motor oil diluted 10000000 times when you get a life threatening illness, even alt medicine people take real medicine when their lives are on the line.
Well, why doesn’t Big Pharma make homeopathic medicines, or buy up a company that already makes them? It can’t be ethical scruples, because recent events show they have none. I conclude that Amy Lansky must be correct and they have more profitable areas to invest their funds. Also, homeopathic medicines don’t “cost nothing.” There’s the cost of preparation, packaging, transportation, and marketing. If you don’t believe these costs are real, check the price of bottled water next time you are in the supermarket.
“Big Pharma can’t buy the rights to mass produce homeopathic cures, then close down plants it would no longer need, saving a few billion dollars worth of expenses on an annual basis? ”
Buy the rights from whom? No, they can’t. And what the game is about to them, is having something to patent and sell at ridiculous prices. The point is that homeopathic remedies would not be patentable and thus not as exploitable as some synthetic. It’s why they avoid researching herbs, too.
“At my local pharmacy, a packet of cold pills sells for $4.99 while a package of oscillococcinum comes with a $10.99 price tag. If it’s so easy to produce a potent remedy with a virtually non-existent overhead, why do its makers charge over 120% more? ”
Because of economies of scale. They do not have giant factories to produce the remedies, and thus cannot produce them as cheaply as a corporation.
“homeopathic medicines don’t ‘cost nothing.’”
Please see the quote from Amy Lansky. She’s the one who says that homeopathic pills cost essentially nothing thanks to the power of potentization, not me.
“Buy the rights from whom? No, they can’t.”
Sure they can. They could buy whoever makes the formulas which show the most promise and patent the process. This is what they do with oncology drugs all the time. The reason why they don’t is because they know there’s no way homeopathic pills will pass a set of required double-blind clinical studies. Most real medicine doesn’t pass, much less sugar pills with magic water.
“It’s why they avoid researching herbs, too.”
That’s patently false. Big Pharma researches herbs all the time. Penty drugs are made from extracts of herbs, tree bark, white tea leaves and animal venoms, like those of snakes, spiders and toxic frogs. Haven’t you ever had aspirin for instance?
In fact there’s an entire pharmacological discipline set up to study the medicinal properties of plants and animals known as pharmocognosy.
The one thing that I think gets lost in the search for truth is the fact that homeopathy works for some people. Yes obviously this is only the Placebo Effect in play but who cares? If it works for someone and it’s not doing them any harm then who cares. Personally I would like to see it recognised as the Placebo Effect officially and then replaced. That way real doctors could prescribe cheap Placebos when they might be useful. I’m not talking about false hope for cancer victims. I mean if someone has a problem with stress or depression and the doctor thinks a Placebo could have a positive effect then maybe this is a void homeopathy could legitimately fill.
Could somebody please explain to me just how diluting something is supposed to make it stronger? Because that just goes against all known science, not to mention logic and common sense.
Why buy a homeopathic placebo for an extortionate amount from some random company who’s marketing campaign is to spread wrong thinking? I’d rather have a plain placebo prescribed by an NHS doctor, who’s externally-verified expertise provides me with more belief in their prescriptions than the BS marketing handwaving of homeopaths, for free or where my money will fund actual medical needs (or, of course, a spiralling failure of a computer system). In fact, I may already have taken such placebos, since the point of the effect is that one doesn’t know it’s a placebo.
The placebo effect is an experimentally verified phenomenon, which makes it medicine. The point of “alternative medicine” is that it’s pulled straight out of someone’s bowels, if it had any evidence in favour of it then it wouldn’t be “alternative”. There’s just as much conspiracy involved as there is positive evidence: ie. none.
“Yes obviously this is only the Placebo Effect in play but who cares? If it works for someone and it’s not doing them any harm then who cares.”
See, that’s the kind of argument that gets homeopaths and their patients in trouble. Sure, we know that there’s a placebo effect and it can be very significant. However, the way it works is kind of like cold medicine. It takes reduces your symptoms while your body fights whatever it is that’s ailing you. For cold and many flu strains, that could work, though you’ll probably be sicker longer than someone who sees a real doctor and gets some actual medication.
However, when conditions become serious and the patient is looking at tuberculosis or a type of cancer, the placebo effect is useless against the actual disease while the body can’t fight it. So to go around and make yourself feel good with hopeful thinking and a flood of soothing hormones while you’re dying isn’t a good treatment strategy. In fact, a great example of this is the Orange Man attended by surgeon Dave Gorski. He was all about alt med to cure his cancer and almost died as a result, doing a whole lot of damage to his body in the process.
The important take-away is this. The placebo effect is not an effective medication. If you rely on it to cure a cold and your body suppresses the symptoms while fighting off a rhinovirus, you have to be very aware that potentially terminal diseases will eat you alive while you drink homeopathic water and think happy thoughts. This is why it’s unethical to use the placebo effect as a medication and to market it as superior to normal, science-based medicine.