A children's treasury of Labour MPs backing homeopathy

So I got inspired by Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn's defiant, proud even, support for the royal favourite that is homeopathy. And also by the idea that water 'retains a memory' - stop laughing at the back or I'll get out the ruler again - and I dredged the memory (geddit?) banks of the Parliament website ..

Golly.

This is the list of Labour MPs who have at one time or another backed a homeopathy Early Day Motion (EDM). There are plenty of others, of course, LibDems and Tories and ... Ian Paisley, and ... Alex Salmond. But for the purposes of purely laughing at comrades (as well as for this poor comrade channeling Princes Leia), let's stick to Labour.

Abbott, Diane
Anderson, Janet
Bailey, Adrian
Banks, Tony
Barlow, Celia
Barnes, Harry
Battle, John
Bayley, Hugh
Benton, Joe
Berger, Luciana
Best, Harold
Bradley, Keith
Brennan, Kevin
Buck, Karen
Burgon, Colin
Campbell, Ronnie 
Clapham, Michael
Clarke, Tony
Cohen, Harry
Coleman, Iain
Cook, Frank
Corston, Jean
Corbyn, Jeremy
Cryer, Ann
Cummings, John
Cunliffe, Lawrence
Cunningham, Jim
Dalyell, Tam
Davis, Terry
Dean, Janet
Dismore, Andrew
Dobbin, Jim
Docherty, Thomas
Dowd, Jim
Drew, David
Eagle, Angela
Edwards, Huw
Elliott, Julie
Etherington, Bill 
Field, Frank
Flynn, Paul
Follett, Barbara
Gapes, Mike
Griffiths, Win
Hall, Mike
Hall, Patrick
Hamilton, David
Hamilton, Fabian
Hepburn, Stephen
Hodge, Margaret
Hopkins, Kelvin
Howarth, George
Jackson, Glenda
Jones, Barry
Jones, Lynne
Kennedy, Jane
Kilfoyle, Peter
Kumar, Ashok
Lazarowicz, Mark
Lewis, Terry
Linton, Martin
Livingstone, Ken
Mahon, Alice
Marsden, Gordon
Marshall-Andrews, Robert
McAllion, John
McCafferty, Chris
McDonnell, John
McGuire, Anne
Meale, Alan
Michie, Bill
Naysmith, Doug
O'Hara, Edward
Pickthall, Colin
Pike, Peter L
Plaskitt, James
Pope, Greg
Pound, Stephen
Prentice, Bridget 
Primarolo, Dawn
Quin, Joyce
Robertson, John
Ross, Ernie
Roy, Lindsay
Russell, Christine
Sarwar, Mohammad
Sawford, Phil
Sharma, Virendra
Sheridan, Jim
Simpson, Alan
Skinner, Dennis
Smith, Geraldine
Stringer, Graham
Taylor, Dari
Taylor, David 
Wareing, Robert N
Vaz, Keith
Vis, Rudi
Walley, Joan
White, Brian
Wyatt, Derek

[NB: You can unsign EDMs.]

• For more detailed info, and about other parties MPs, see Skeptical Voter

A respectful disagreement with Ben Goldacre (and Jack Pickard)

Image via Wikipedia

A post by my friend Jack Pickard calling alternative therapies mere placebos, echoing Ben Goldacre's arguments, has prompted me to write about a painful part of my past.

I should say first that I admire Goldacre, author of Bad Science, for his work on nailing down tricksters who sell stuff which doesn't do anything and has no science to back it up. In particular his posts about the media-driven hysteria around MMR.

Back in the 90s I worked with a therapist friend on testing whether any alternative therapies would help relieve AIDS symptoms. I could see that some of them did help and this makes sense as much conventional medicine is derived from nature: this is why drug companies send people out to indigenous peoples to find new therapies from amongst their traditional medicines, a process known as bioprospecting.

My generation of gay men, until the first effective medicine started to appear in the mid 90s, faced multiple funerals and would look at anything which might help.

When the efficacious medicines started to appear I witnessed something close to the sort of desperation I could imagine occurring in an Ethiopian refuge camp as the emaciated fight for the last scraps of food and water.

Two things in particular stick in my memory and my throat.

I had friends who literally were making choices between medicine, rent and food - they were poor. They did not have boyfriends or family to support them, they were isolated. Some were literally growing their own food. The largely middle-class and highly educated people living with HIV/AIDS who ran the decision making bodies and sat on government advisory panels only cared about drug trials, they refused to see that before those breakthroughs they were waiting for others would die from such situations and the stress they engendered.

When the drug trials really took a turn towards what would eventually become the therapies which keep people alive today the drug companies decided who lived and who died. Amongst those who couldn't get on them were women, 'because they might become pregnant'. It didn't matter if they were lesbian, as a friend of mine was, to protect themselves and maybe for scientific reasons, women had to be turned down.

The biggest problem myself and my friend faced in trying to produce science on alternative therapy was the impossibility of getting funding or any support to test them.

The system for 'proving' the efficacy of a substance is radically bent against the ability of alternative therapies to do that as it is so expensive, even simple blood tests - we had to do this by cheating or with the help of a few sympathetic doctors.

Unfortunately the experiment came to an end with the premature death of my friend. But I know others around the world at this time who were trying similar experiments and - much as the use of marijuana has been shown to be effective against glaucoma - despite all the odds there is scientific proof that some alternative therapies do work to relieve AIDS symptoms.

So it is a plain fact that alternative therapies are not all placebos.