10:23 – the hour of judgment approaches

In precisely 12 hours from the time this post should go up, several hundred people in groups around the UK will each pop a whole bottle of pills bought from a high street chemist.

The 10:23 event is nearly upon us.

Okay, fine, homeopaths are saying that you wouldn’t expect anything to happen in reaction to an overdose like this, because of some even weirder mechanism than the already bizarre way homeopathy is supposed to work.

Sure, whatever, they’re not doing a double-blinded placebo-controlled randomised clinical trial.

That’s not the point.

The campaigners have never claimed to be doing a scientific experiment here. What they’re doing is addressing the fact that many people don’t have sufficient information to make a reasonable, critical judgment of some of the remedies on offer on pharmacy shelves. Remedies with no proven benefits, and no active ingredients. A lot of people really don’t know what homeopathy is, and think it’s probably something herbal, or natural, or organic, or free of any of those nasty pharmaceutical chemicals. And, well, they’re kinda right on that last point. A standard homeopathic solution is free of all chemicals. At least, those that aren’t found naturally in any clean water.

So yes, it’s a stunt. It’s about grabbing attention, and making some noise through the media. And it’s working pretty well. There have been articles recently in the Telegraph, Independent, Guardian, Mail, and Times, and many more.

Now, this might sound like something that the skeptical movement has often criticised quacks and pseudo-scientists for in the past. And, well, it’s not far off. One of the hallmarks of pseudoscience is doing “science by press conference”, where discoveries or products are announced through an attention-grabbing media event, rather than going through the usual scientific channels of hypothesis testing, peer review, and all the rest. When someone gets a big media circus going to hype their promised free energy device, say, but hasn’t yet got the scientifically published evidence to back up what they’re claiming about it, they’re often taken to task by the same sort of people engaging in the 10:23 campaign tomorrow.

The difference is that that criticism is generally levelled at corporations or pseudo-scientists with a particular (often financial) incentive, who use glitzy spectacle and encourage people to roll up to witness their amazing breakthrough thingumabob instead of testing the thing and proving that they have a point before they start taking people’s money. The 10:23 campaign, on the other hand, is being organised by a group of concerned amateurs, with no financial incentive to do what they’re doing (and holy FSM am I ever tired of the phrase “pharma shill” from idiotic overuse by now), who are organising a big media event to supplement the science that’s already been done, not to replace it entirely.

There is no plausible way that homeopathy could be more effective than placebo. The proposed mechanism is completely at odds with just about everything else we think we know about how chemistry works. Repeated tests of homeopathy do not confirm that the knowledge accumulated from centuries of research across many different disciplines needs to be thrown out the window.

There’s nothing in it.

And despite what some of its detractors (and some perhaps poorly worded news headlines) are saying, the 10:23 campaign isn’t trying to prove this; it’s only trying to bring to people’s attention what’s already proven to science’s satisfaction.

A couple of days ago someone started a fun hashtag game on Twitter, coming up with new #homeopathyslogans. I’ll leave you with a few I came up with.

Homeopathy: Because water’s complicated enough.
Homeopathy: Safer than mainstream medicine, back when they used leeches and hacksaws.
Homeopathy: Do you love anyone enough to give them your last placebo?
Homeopathy: Does exactly what it says on a blank, unlabelled tin.
Homeopathy: It’s probably quantum.
Homeopathy: The theory with the hole.

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