Murder by Woo
In Arizona, licensed homeopaths are allowed to perform minor surgery; the definition of "minor" is apparently open to some interpretation. The end result is that a woman recently died after receiving liposuction on her thighs from a licensed homeopath.
Homeopathic doctor suspended; tied to lipo death
Performed liposuction July 3 at Anthem office
A homeopathic doctor was suspended Tuesday for his role in a botched liposuction operation earlier this month that resulted in the death of the patient.
A state regulatory board deemed Dr. Greg Page a "clear and present danger to the public."
Page performed the liposuction procedure on July 3 at the Anthem office of Dr. Peter J. Normann, whose practice was restricted by the state in May after two other liposuction patients suffered cardiac arrest on the operating table and died...
Page's suspension by the Arizona Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners followed a half-hour executive session and an hour of questioning...
The patient that Page treated who died, identified only as LR, was a 250-pound woman who was having liposuction done on her thighs...
Page, a licensed homeopath since 2005, told the homeopathic board he considered the patient fine when he left.
"She was in a condition where I would have discharged her to her ride," he said.
Page said he has done about 100 liposuctions and hundreds more similar procedures...
...Page said there was nothing out of the ordinary, but acknowledged that he did not know whether the patient had taken pre-surgical vitamins and minerals...
No one on the homeopathic board asked whether liposuctions fall within the range of procedures that a homeopath is licensed to do. Chris Springer, executive director of the board, declined to comment on the matter because she is not a doctor...
Under state law, homeopaths may do "minor surgery,"...
It's unclear from the article whether or not patient LR knew that the man performing liposuction on her wasn't a real doctor. Clearly, she must have gone to her licensed physician (who had himself already had two patients die during the procedure) and he brought the quack in to perform the procedure under the pretense of a physician referral.
According to Orac, a surgeon who writes the Respectful Insolence blog, where I first heard about this incident yesterday, the mortality rate among patients receiving liposuction is 20 to 100 per 10,000 procedures. That doesn't sound much like "minor surgery" to me, although it apparently did to the Mad Doctor Normann and his homeopathic Igor, Page. This shouldn't come as much surprise; any doctor who gives credence to the notion that a malady can be cured by some magical energy preserved in water that used to contain an unproven active ingredient, the basis of all homeopathy, is himself unfit to practice medicine in that they don't have a clue how it actually works. Without knowledge of the basic facts of chemistry and physics, a surgeon shouldn't be allowed to practice, period.
So what does homeopathy maintain as its central theorem? According to the National Center for Homeopathy, a "professional organization" for homeopaths which has existed since 1877, homeopathy is
... a system of medicine that is based on the Law of Similars. The truth of this law has been verified experimentally and clinically for the last 200 years...
Samuel Hahnemann described this principle by using a Latin phrase: Similia Similibus Curentur, which translates: "Let likes cure likes." It is a principle that has been known for centuries. Hahnemann developed the principle into a system of medicine called homeopathy, and it has been used successfully for the last 200 years. (Source)
I am unaware of any remotely reputable scientific research which has proven the law of "like attracts like" or "like cures like" or any of this, and I would defy that someone point to an article in a refereed journal outside of homeopathy that demonstrates this "law" functioning in the realm of chemistry, biology, and physics... any field, in fact, outside of the Great Mass of Woo, in which this "law" has been shown to function as a general principle rather than in a single instance. Certainly from a microbiological point of view, for example, "let like cure like" is a bit like saying the best way to treat tuberculosis is to cause the patient to contract Hansen's disease. After all, Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium tuberculosis are very much alike. Of course, homeopathic remedies themselves rely on a principle of dilution; rather than giving a patient actual drugs as treatment, one dilutes some ingredient until none of it is actually present in the solution (the so-called "Law of Minimum" and "Law of Least Action"). The compound that used to be in the solution then leaves some kind of magical imprint (which nobody can measure) on the solvent. It's worth noting that solutes used in homeopathic medicine include metals and stones which are insoluble themselves in any solvent which can be safely consumed by a human being. In other words, homeopathic remedies are nothing.
Why we make allowances for this kind of nonsense in a world in which we do understand the principles by which medicines work, wherein we have detailed knowledge of biochemistry, is beyond me. I suspect it's because we have taken the concept of caveat emptor to a ridiculous extreme and so make allowances for people who want to believe in this gibberish to do so, up to and including being convinced to receive legitimate treatment under the influence of false pretense and bad advice... just like the late LR in Arizona. It's all well and good to let the buyer beware if the buyer can be reasonably expected to understand what it is she's buying and why she's buying it in the first place, but medicine is a discipline to which practitioners are expected to devote a significant proportion of their lives before they ever lay their hands on patients precisely because the amount of understanding is so great and the domain of knowledge so broad. The average person is prone to being defrauded, which is why medical review boards and the legal concept of malpractice exist — to insure that people with expertise oversee those who are reasonably expected to be experts themselves. That the director on Arizona's homeopathic board of review isn't a doctor himself speaks shrieking volumes about what's really expected of homeopaths. In the world of legitimate medicine, practitioners are held to objective ethical and professional standards. The standards to which homeopaths are held should be every bit as rigorous but for the fact that there would be no such thing as a "licensed homeopath" if they were.
Homeopathy belongs in the same category of practices as psychic surgery and fortune telling. Of course, allowances are made for these things, too, in the name of allowing people to believe whatever they want. In the latter article, for example, one finds the following points:
..."There has to be criteria or you're going to get garbage coming here," Barbara Szafranski, the owner of Angelica of the Angels, predicted. "Everybody here is a legitimate person who's worked for years and years. ... When you do a reading, you hold a person's life right in your hands. We have people come to us who are willing to commit suicide, who won't go to a psychiatrist, so they come to us."...
..."Every reader in this room is legitimate," said Doug Johnson, a psychic at Pyramid Books who wants candidates to show their experience and training before becoming licensed. "But there are nuts out there - people that are not mentally there."...
...One woman paid more than $2,000 for readings at a Salem shop, where she was told she had a black aura around her, according to Szafranski.
"Then one day she came into my shop crying," Szafranski told city councilors. "I said, 'You don't have a black aura. Sit down and I'll show you your aura on my machine.' And it was blue and wonderful."...
In other words, there is a difference between a "legitimate" psychic and a scam artist. Somehow, it's acceptable to charge someone $20 to pretend to tell them about their aura, but it's not acceptable to charge them $2000 for doing so, even though there's nothing any more objective about the latter instance than the former.
So why is all of this garbage, from psychic mumbo-jumbo to homeopathy, given a place of privilege (insofar as people are allowed to charge real fees for it) when we know it's all fake, when years of investigation and veritable mountains of empirical data demonstrate clearly that none of it is real? Simple; because if we were to start doing what should be done, then we as a culture would start bumping up against people's religious beliefs. After all, can religions demonstrate empirically that those who follow them derive any real benefit? Is your local church any more justified in collecting donations than a homeopath is in charging fees? All of these things are equally matters of faith; there's no more objective data indicating that Catholics go to heaven than there is that people who have a psychic look at their aura or read their palm fare better in life than those who don't. All of this stuff is just belief, and many people are prone to believe in things regardless of evidence about them. Evidence can always be ignored or rejected, and in a free society people have the right to do that.
But if you think this stuff is harmless, ask Arizona liposuction patient LR's family what they think of that homeopath. Ask the woman with the "black aura" how she feels about being parted from her $2000 (and what action do you think was taken against the black-aura psychic that wouldn't be equally applicable to the blue-aura psychic?) This junk, this fraud, this stealing go on every day, from the most famous televangelist down to the meanest palm reader. This is the fruit of unreason and belief in that which cannot be seen (e.g., faith). I wish that it could all be cleaned up by legal means, but that's probably not realistic. Our best hope is education and the advancement of reason, and part of that is to stop allowing homeopaths and psychic surgeons to call themselves doctors. These fraudulent professionals should never be given the air of legitimacy through licensing them. Perhaps if there were enough episodes like the one in Arizona, people would finally get the message: "alternative medicine" is only "alternative" insomuch as it's an alternative to something founded on sound principles. It's woo that kills, and "Dr." Page and "Dr." Normann have committed murder by woo.
