Fri, 08 Jun 2007
The Arp Effect
I like to think of myself as a scientific, rational person, and I think that's how others see me. So people sometimes wonder how I can believe in something as unscientific as homeopathy. That takes a little explaining. For scientists to accept a hypothesis as true, two things must be the case. First, there must be evidence to support the hypothesis. And second, the hypothesis must be congruent with the other theories that form the science. This is not a new idea with me. Thomas Kuhn talked about it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Homeopathy is attacked as unscientific, not because it fails the first test, but because it fails the second. No one can explain how infinitesimal dilutions can work with our current understanding of science, so homeopathy is ignored, no matter what the evidence of its effectiveness might be. It suffers from what I call the "Arp Effect." Arp is an astronomer who believes that the red shift of galaxies is not caused by the fact that they are receding from us, but for some other reason. To support his position he has measurements of galaxies that seem to be associated with each other that have greatly different red shifts. This evidence has no effect on astronomers at all, because no one has a plausible theory of how red shift could be caused by anything other than galaxies receding from us. So his evidence is explained away as coincidence, unassociated galaxies that merely lie in the same line of sight. But if some astrophysicist came up with an alternative theory for red shift tomorrow, the evidence that is now ignored would be hailed as proof.
Similarly, successful results from homeopathy are ignored as coincidence or the placebo effect -- an all purpose explanation for anything you wish to ignore. Positive studies are attacked as insufficient, flawed or the result of fraud. And the same is true of other theories, like cold fusion, the scientific establishment wishes to ignore.So if I use homeopathy, it's because I'm pragmatic and am only interested in the evidence that it works, which has been more than demonstrated to my satisfaction. How it works is not my problem.
