Homeopathy, part 5
NARRATOR: Maddox set about assembling his team of investigators and his choices revealed his true suspicions. First, he chose Walter Stewart, a scientist and fraud-buster, but his next choice would really cause a stir: James Randi.
JACQUES BENVENISTE: I looked in my books and I said who are, who is Randi and couldn't find any scientist called Randi.
NARRATOR: That was because the amazing Randi isn't a scientist, he's a magician, but he's no ordinary conjuror. He's also an arch sceptic, a fierce opponent of all things supernatural.
JACQUES BENVENISTE: I called John Maddox and I said what, what is this? I mean I thought you were coming with, with scientists to discuss science.
NARRATOR: But Randi felt he was just the man for the job. On one occasion he had fooled even experienced scientists with his spoon bending tricks.
JAMES RANDI: Scientists don't always think rationally and in a direct fashion. They're human beings like anyone else. They can fool themselves.
NARRATOR: So Randi became the second investigator.
JAMES RANDI: Astonishing.
NARRATOR: On 4th July 1988 the investigative team arrived in Paris ready for the final showdown.
SIR JOHN MADDOX: The first thing we did was to sit round the table in Benveniste's lab. Benveniste himself struck us all as looking very much like a film star.
JAMES RANDI: I found him to be a charming, very continental gentleman. He's a great personality. He was very much in control.
JACQUES BENVENISTE: We were quite relaxed because there was no reason why things should not go right.
NARRATOR: The first step was for Benveniste and his team to perform their experiment under Randi's watchful gaze. They had to prepare two sets of tubes containing homeopathic water and ordinary water. If the homeopathic water was having a real effect different from ordinary water then homeopathy would be vindicated.
NARRATOR: As they plotted the results it was clear the experiment had worked.
JAMES RANDI: There were huge peaks coming up out of it and that was very active results, I mean very, very positive results.
WALTER STEWART: The astonishing thing about these results is that they repeated the claim, they demonstrated the claim that a homeopathic dilution, a dilution where there were no molecules, could actually have some sort of an effect.
Homeopathy, part 6
NARRATOR: But Maddox had seen that the experimenters knew which tubes contained the homeopathic water and which contained the ordinary water, so perhaps unconsciously, this might have influenced the results, so he asked them to repeat the experiment. This time the tubes would be relabelled with a secret code so that no-one knew which tube was which.
JAMES RANDI: We went into a sealed room and we actually taped newspapers over the windows to the room that were accessible to the hall.
WALTER STEWART: We recorded in handwriting which tube was which and we put this into an envelope and sealed it so that nobody could open it or change it.
NARRATOR: At this point the investigation took a turn for the surreal as they went to extraordinary lengths to keep the code secret.
JAMES RANDI: Walter and I got up on the stepladder and stuck it to the ceiling of the lab.
WALTER STEWART: There it was taped above us as all of this work went on.
NARRATOR: With the codes out of reach the final experiment could begin. By now Benveniste had lost control of events.
JACQUES BENVENISTE: It was a madhouse. Randi was doing magician tricks.
JAMES RANDI: Yes I was doing perhaps a little bit of sleight-of-hand with an object or something like that, just to lighten the atmosphere.
Homeopathy, part 7
NARRATOR: Soon the analysis was complete. It was time to break the code to see if the experiment had worked. Benveniste felt sure that the results would support homeopathy and that he would be vindicated.
JAMES RANDI: That didn't happen. It was just a total failure.
SIR JOHN MADDOX: We said well nothing here is there?
NARRATOR: The team wrote a report accusing Benveniste of doing bad science and branding the claims for the memory of water a delusion. Benveniste's scientific reputation was ruined. For now the memory of water was forgotten. Science declared homeopathy impossible once more, but strangely that didn't cause homeopathy to disappear. Despite the scepticism of science millions of people use it. If homeopathy is scientific nonsense then why are so many people apparently being cured by it? The answer may lie in the strange and powerful placebo effect. The placebo effect is one of the most peculiar phenomena in all science. Doctors have long known that some patients can be cured with pills that contain no active ingredient at all, just plain sugar, what they call the placebo, and they've noticed an even great puzzle: that larger placebo pills work better than small ones, coloured pills work better than white pills.
Homeopathy, part 8
NARRATOR: The key is simply believing that the pill will help you. This releases the powers in our minds that reduce stress and that alone can improve your health.
BOB PARK: Stress hormones make you feel terribly uncomfortable. The minute you relieve the anxiety, relieve the stress hormones people do feel better, but that's a true physiological effect.
NARRATOR: Scientists believe the mere act of taking a homeopathic remedy can make people feel better and homeopathy has other ways of reducing stress.
LIONEL MILGROM: And is there any particular time of day that you will, you'll, you'll have that feeling?
PATIENT: No.
NARRATOR: A crucial part of homeopathic care is the consultation.
LIONEL MILGROM: The stress that you have at work, is that, are those around issues that make you feel quite emotional?
PATIENT: No.
LIONEL MILGROM: The main thing about a homeopathic interview is that we do spend a lot of time talking and listening to the patient. We would ask questions of how they eat, how they sleep, how much worry and tension there is in their lives, hopefully give them some advice about how to actually ease problems of stress.
PATIENT I just feel I want to have something more natural.
LIONEL MILGROM: Yeah...
NARRATOR: So most scientists believe that when homeopathy works it must be because of the placebo effect.
BOB PARK: As far as I know it's the only thing that is really guaranteed to be a perfect placebo. There is no medicine in the medicine at all.
NARRATOR: It seems like a perfect explanation, except that homeopathy appears to work when a placebo shouldn't - when the patient doesn't even know they're taking a medicine. All over the country animals are being treated with homeopathic medicines. Pregnant cows are given dilute cuttlefish ink, sheep receive homeopathic silver to treat eye infections, piglets get sulphur to fatten them up. A growing number of vets believe it's the medicine of the future, like Mark Elliot who's used homeopathy his whole career, on all sorts of animals.
MARK ELLIOT (Homeopathic Vet): Primarily it's dogs and horses, but we also treat cats, small rodents, rabbits, guinea pigs, even reptiles, but I have treated an elephant with arthritis and I've heard of colleagues recently who treated giraffes. It works on any species exactly the same as in the human field.
Homeopathy, part 9
NARRATOR: Mark made it his mission to prove that homeopathy works. He decided to study horses with cushing’s, a disease caused by cancer. He treated them all with the same homeopathic remedy. The results were impressive.
MARK ELLIOT: We achieved an overall 80% success rate, which is great because that is comparable with modern medical drugs.
NARRATOR: To Mark, this was clear proof that homeopathy can’t be the placebo effect.
MARK ELLIOT: You can’t explain to this animal why the treatment it’s being given is going to benefit it, or how it’s potentially going to benefit it and as a result, when you see a positive result in a horse or a dog that to me is the ultimate proof that homeopathy is not placebo, homeopathy works.
NARRATOR: But Mark’s small trial doesn’t convince the sceptics. They need far more evidence before they’ll believe that homeopathic medicines are anything more than plain water. In science the best evidence there can be is a vigorous trial comparing a medicine against the placebo. And in in recent years such trials have been done with homeopathy. David Reilly is a conventionally trained doctor who became intrigued by the claims of the homeopaths. He wanted to put homeopathy to the test and decided to look at hay fever.