The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (15 page)

There are seven billion individual worlds living on the surface of this one. We are – all of us – lost inside our own personal realities, our own brain-generated models of how things
really
are. And if, after reading all of that, you still believe you are the exception, that you really are wise and objective and above the powers of bias, then you might as well not fight it. You are, after all, only human.

Over and over again, they told her that she was being silly. But Gemma was convinced that her doctors were mistaken. You just
know
, don’t you, when something is wrong, when the sensed systems inside your body nudge from their alignments. Strange shapes and colours would waft and form in her vision. She would fall asleep on the sofa and nobody could wake her. She was having difficulties in the office – her managers kept insisting they had told her what to do, but she had no memory whatsoever of them doing so. They had begun to treat her as if she was stupid. Gemma was not stupid. She had qualifications. A degree. But she didn’t feel very clever when she sat in that chair in her doctor’s surgery, desperate for him to listen. Every time she went, he would say the same thing.
There is nothing whatsoever to worry about. You’re just a young girl, being silly.

They found six small tumours, the size of thumbnails, on her brain.
Oh, it’s nothing too serious
, they said.
They’re benign. Some people live with these kinds of things for the whole of their lives without a problem
. But Gemma knew her own body. She knew her own mind. She knew that she was not the sort of person to sleep through her radio alarm clock, to courier files to the wrong office, to forget where she had parked her car.
You’re panicking, being silly
.

The tumours grew. They conducted a biopsy. They drilled into her head. It took eight weeks for the results to come. You can’t imagine the terror. Two months of it. Not knowing, wondering if you might die. When the results finally arrived, they said they were benign.
Harmless. Fine. Silly
.

They found new tumours – these ones on her spine. She was alone when they called her. She telephoned her parents, but nobody was home. Her boyfriend wasn’t picking up either. None of her friends were in. Evening had fallen before she was able to speak to anyone. All of those hours, alone with the news.

Chemotherapy made her sick. Over the course of a single weekend, all of her hair fell out. The tumours grew in size and threat. They gave her steroids. She gained four stones in one month. She had an extended stomach, a great big puffed-out moon face. She had to lift her eyelids with her finger if she wanted to see anything. Her bowels didn’t move for weeks. She had a wheelchair, a stick. Her sight became so bad that she couldn’t watch television or read. She had nothing to do but to lie there, terrified in her nauseous gloaming. She thought,
I’m only twenty-six. I’m the youngest of seven children. The youngest! It’s not my turn
. Early in the winter of 1995, the oncologist visited her hospital bed. He said something strange. ‘Okay, Gemma, these are your options. You can stay here, you can go to a hospice or you can go home.’

Gemma was groggy, confused. She reasoned, ‘Well, sick people go to hospital. Dying people go to a hospice. And home – that’s for fit people.’

She was delighted.

‘Home, please!’

‘Fine,’ said the doctor, kindly. ‘You’ve got those little pills and you’ve got him up there. Make sure you have a happy Christmas.’

What an odd thing to say.
Have a happy Christmas
? It was only October. It was some time before Gemma realised that this was her doctor’s way of telling her that they had been wrong all along. That her tumours were, in fact, malignant. That she had cancer and would be dead within four months.

She felt betrayed. She had done everything they had asked of her. Medicine was like a, b, c, wasn’t it? You got sick, they treated you and then you got better. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Despite her bleak prognosis and her new medication, which now only treated her symptoms, Gemma carried on taking the ‘little pills’ that her oncologist had mentioned with his gently knowing smile.
To her amazement, they seemed to work. By Christmas, her eyelids had opened up. Her bowels began to move. Her sight returned. And the more of the little pills that she took, the better she became. A year later, Gemma called her oncologist’s office and asked why they hadn’t been in touch. She was angry. She knew why – it was because they had assumed that she was dead. And who were they anyway?
They’re not God. They don’t decide when I’m going to die
. When her oncologist next examined her, he wrote in his notes, ‘Gemma has made a remarkable recovery. Her case will remain a mystery.’

‘But it’s not a mystery to you, is it?’ I say to Gemma, who has been telling me her story in the front room of her modest Sutton Coldfield home.

‘Not to me,’ she smiles.

The ‘little pills’ Gemma Hoefkens had been taking were homeopathic. She believes that they not only saved her life, they also changed its direction forever. She is now a licensed homeopath who claims to have not seen a doctor for fourteen years.

The industry that Gemma works in is worth
four million pounds a year
in the UK and
billions in
Europe and the US.
Over fifteen thousand NHS prescriptions
are issued for it annually, it sells in high-street chemists and user-satisfaction ratings in Britain
score above 70 per cent
. And yet Gemma’s oncologist was not alone in his reservations over their efficacy. Throughout its defiant 230-year history, homeopathy has attracted the disbelieving fury of doubters from Richard Dawkins today all the way back to Charles Darwin, who wrote, ‘In homeopathy common sense and common observation come into play and both these must go to the dogs.’ Over the last few years, a campaign to stop the homeopaths has gathered into a truly damaging force.
Questions have been asked in Parliament
. In February 2010,
the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee recommended
the NHS cease funding the discipline.
Even ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair has become involved
, saying ‘My advice to the scientific community would be, I wouldn’t bother fighting a great battle over homeopathy.’ But they do and, at least in Britain, they are winning: between 2000 and 2011 there was
an eightfold drop in NHS prescriptions
. It now comprises
just 0.001 per cent of the NHS’s annual drug budget
.
And Gemma has suffered personally at the feet of reason’s furious armies.

In February 2010, she appeared on BBC Radio Five Live, to share the details of her recovery with the public. Afterwards, someone posted the interview on YouTube. On the video, every time Gemma speaks, a yellow rubber duck appears over her face with the word ‘
QUACK!
’ flashing out of its mouth. The video ends with a still photograph of Gemma herself. It is framed, in shocking pink letters, with the statement:
‘DO NOT BE FOOLED. HOMEOPATHY IS A CROCK OF SHIT’
. There is a blue speech bubble jutting from her mouth. It contains an additional single word rendered in bold yellow capitals. It says, ‘
QUACK!!
’

I unfold a printout of the yellow plastic duck and place it on the table in front of Gemma.

‘Have you seen this?’ I ask.

Her eyes flicker briefly towards it. She folds her arms.

‘Yes.’

‘How does it make you feel?’

She allows herself a moment to think.

‘It makes me feel – how professional are they? They’ve got “quack” there and a yellow plastic duck. And how un-professional is that? Who are these people who are so unprofessional? You know, who are they?’

I decided to find out.

*

In the upstairs bar of a dismal city-centre Manchester hotel, a pale platoon of anti-homeopaths is getting pleasantly drunk. These are members of the ‘Skeptic’ community, a large and swelling movement of activists and thinkers who campaign against people such as Gemma, and on behalf of science and reason. They meet in groups known as ‘Skeptics in the Pub’ and gather online to present podcasts, argue in chatrooms and compose outraged and unusually well-footnoted blogs.

They dress in comfortable jeans paired with strange polemical T-shirts (‘Stand back, I’m going to try science’, ‘I reject your reality and substitute my own’, ‘Over 1000 scientists named Steve agree’) or in dark-coloured knitwear, sleeves pushed up to elbows to regulate temperature. Huddling around low tables with pints of lager, they
peck at Twitter with self-conscious frowns of concentration. The elder Skeptics – one or two of whom I recognise as speakers at this event – stand in fidgety groups by the bar, rolling back on their heels with fingers crooked over chins, listening earnestly to their neighbours. Everywhere I look, there are beards and little ponytails and cables dangling out of rucksacks. At least three of them look exactly like Dave Gorman.

This weekend, the Skeptics have gathered for the ‘QED Conference’ that has been organised jointly by the Merseyside and the Greater Manchester cells of Skeptics in the Pub. It will culminate in a mass international homeopathic overdose – a stunt that will seek to demonstrate that, as the campaign’s marketing slogan has it, ‘There’s nothing in it’.

I am curious about the Skeptics because, from an outsider’s point of view, their main hobby seems to be not believing in things. Psychics, homeopathy, chiropractors, ghosts, God – they don’t believe a word of it and that is one of their favourite things to do. The fallibility of human belief is the base upon which the Skeptics build their activism. As bracingly incredible as it was to me, it is highly likely that the ordinary Skeptic would have discovered nothing new in the chapter that precedes this one. Confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, unconscious ego-bolstering and the many illusions of vision are their foundational texts, their Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Skeptics rely on the findings of science, rather than the dubious anecdotes of individuals, to inform them about the world. They are knights of hard intellect whose ultimate goal is a world free of superstitious thinking. Do not make the mistake of doubting how seriously some take this task. Later in this event, an editor of the US’s
Skeptic
magazine will note their responsibility as ‘safe-guarders of the truth.’ Another speaker will darkly threaten that, without their ever-watchful work, ‘Nonsense will be allowed to reign.’

Much to the irritation of the Skeptics, homeopathy has been ‘reigning’, now for more than two centuries. Its development,
which began in 1790
, is credited to German physician Samuel Hahnemann – who, just like Gemma, had grown disillusioned with conventional medicine. The theory says that illnesses can be cured by taking minute
portions of substances which cause similar symptoms to those which ail you. So, if the bark of a toxic Peruvian tree causes symptoms similar to malaria, say, then a tiny dose of that can cure malaria. In Gemma’s case, her many dramatic maladies were, she believes, cured by causticum. When I enquired as to what causticum was, she replied somewhat reluctantly, ‘Er, you put it down drains.’

But Gemma was never in danger of being poisoned. The amount of causticum in one of her pills is really quite unbelievably small. In fact, if you buy a standard ‘30C’ dose of any homeopathic treatment, it means the active ingredient has been diluted thirty times, by a factor of 100. That might not sound like too much, until you realise that your chance of getting even
one molecule
of the original substance in your pill is one in a billion billion billion billion. In his influential book
Bad Science
, Skeptic superstar Dr Ben Goldacre explained that you would have to drink
a sphere of water that stretches from the earth to the sun
just to get just one solitary, pointless molecule of it.

This is why their campaign’s slogan insists that ‘There’s nothing in it’. Because there really is nothing in it. Homeopaths deny this, however, saying that when they dilute the substance, they first shake it (or ‘succuss’ it) which ‘potentises’ the water, causing it to somehow remember the active substance. The Skeptics reply that this is ‘woo-woo’, which is the word they use for nonsense.

I am quite comfortable in predicting that there is not a brain in this bar that would have been surprised to discover what happened when I broached the problem of empirical proof with Gemma. I began by asking about her practice as a homeopath, and whether the process of assessing which remedy to recommend to a patient was instinctive, or an exact science. She replied, ‘It’s an exact science. But it’s something that the scientists don’t understand yet.’

‘I read that a sphere of water a hundred and fifty million kilometres in diameter would only contain one molecule of active ingredient,’ I said.

‘I’m not the best person to talk to about that.’

‘What would your response be to a Skeptic who says it’s diluted to such an extent that there’s actually nothing in it?’

‘I’d say go and look it up.’

‘Look it up?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you ever read any scientific studies that have looked at the efficacy of homeopathy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Don’t ask me that question.’

As I said, nobody in this bar would be surprised to hear any of that – and that is the central and unavoidable truth about the Skeptics. They are never wrong. Indeed, that is the whole point of them. And, as one of them volunteers, being right all the time comes with its own peculiar risks. When software engineer Bryan tells me that scepticism is the philosophy by which he lives life, he feels it necessary to make an unprompted addendum: ‘It’s not about calling people stupid.’

‘Is that a common accusation?’ I ask.

‘You can come across as arrogant,’ he says. ‘Especially when you’re in this type of environment, where people tend to be into the scientific literature.’

My next conversation is with a couple of not-that-friendly-looking-to-be-honest Skeptics named Bendt and Simon. Bendt, a bearded Swede in a leather trench coat, tells me that he came to the movement via loneliness and atheism. ‘I was doing my PhD in Vancouver and looking for a social circle so I looked for atheists. From there, I went to scepticism.’