ABC News' 20/20, Junk Science, and Homeopathy In these days of reality television, bringing science to TV sounds
like a great idea. However, if TV lowers the standards that are commonly
used in scientific inquiry, such reality television becomes junk science and
junk television.
ABC News' 20/20 program with their reporter John Stossel is presently
scheduled to air a segment on homeopathy on Friday January 30th. This
report will include a seemingly legitimate laboratory experiment that seeks
to prove or disprove the effects of homeopathic medicines. However, it was
recently discovered that the experiment that was conducted had no chance of
being successful.
Dana Ullman, MPH, author of 8 books on homeopathy, was interviewed for this
segment and asserts, "John Stossel has previously popularized the term 'junk
science' in his reporting on 20/20. It is therefore more than a tad ironic
that this journalist will now stand behind a study that ABC News has
sponsored that itself is a classic example of real junk science."
The experiment that 20/20 produced was supposed to be a replication
of an experiment that had been conducted numerous times in the past and had
been published in scientific journals. This study used extremely small
doses of histamine to reduce the number of basophils, a type of white blood
cell that increases in numbers during allergy symptoms. This study was even
conducted successfully several times by Dr. Madeleine Ennis who is a
professor of biochemistry and a former skeptic of homeopathy. The last time
this study was published was in 1999 when it was replicated in FOUR
laboratories, including the Department of Clinical Biochemistry at Queen's
University in Belfast and the Department of Molecular Biology at the
University of Utrecht (The Netherlands).
Dana Ullman, MPH agreed to be interviewed by 20/20 as long as they
agreed to use Professor Ennis as a consultant to make certain that the study
was properly conducted. Wayne Turnbull, the experimenter at Guys Hospital
in London who 20/20 hired, agreed to consult with Professor Ennis, but when
she alerted him that his protocol was completely different than hers or any
other study ever performed in homeopathy, he refused to change the
experiment. Shockingly, Turnbull used a chemical, Ammonium chloride, in
this experiment which is widely known to kill basophils, making the study
impossible to any homeopathic medicine or any drug to have any effects.
Ironically, Wayne Turnbull has gone on record asserting that "consensus
between all parties is essential when performing this experiment," and yet,
when he sought to get Ennis' support for this protocol, he was flatly turned
down. Turnbull has further asserted, the "protocol that we use was never
portrayed as a replication of Dr Ennis's methodology."
It should be noted that the 20/20 producer for this segment, Mark Golden,
did not initially know that there was a difference in the TV experiment and
the real one until the experiment had already begun. But before the
experiment was completed, he was informed that there were serious flaws in
their experiment, that it should be stopped immediately, and the results
should be ignored.
This is a story of science friction, and it is a story of ABC News using
"junk science" to discredit homeopathic medicine. Although ABC News is
trying to put homeopathy on trial, this segment may instead be an
opportunity to put ABC News on trial.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THIS 20/20 SEGMENT AND ON HOMEOPATHY, go to:
<http://www.homeopathic.com>