ECSO Skeptics Forum

Earlier this year, The Karl und Veronica Carstens-Stiftung paid a Million Euros to set up a Chair for Complementary Medicine with a heavy focus on homeopathy at the renowned Charité University Medical Center in Berlin. The respsonsible professor is Claudia Witt. An intersting English blog entry can be found here. Witt is expected "bridge the gap between the large demand for alternative therapies and current scientific knowledge". The Carstens-Stiftung is well-known for its support of quack medicine.

What will be particularly interesting is how far Witt and her mentor Stefan Willich will succeed in "changing the rules", which shows a close affinity to a similar demand on the side of parapsychologists, see the Journal of Scientific Exploration 22/2 explicitly titled "Change the Rules!" by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne. There are similar attempts from supporters of homeopathy. In an editorial titled Pluralismus der Medizin – Pluralismus der Therapieevaluation? in Z. ärztl Fortbildung Qual. Gesundh.wes 99, 261 – 262 (2005), Kiene, Ollenschläger and Stefan Willich call for a change in the rules. They claim that several parallel worlds may exist in mathematical and empirical sciences ("In mathematischen und empirischen Wissenschaften können demzufolge mehrere Parallelsysteme existieren"). Stefan Willich is Director of the Institute for Social Medicine, Epidemiology and Health Economics, Charité University Medical Center. It would be very helpful to alert the scientific community to this assault on science.

It is also interesting to note that Witt in fact acknowledged in her habilitation thesis that there is no proof that Homeopathy works (On page 14: "Ein eindeutiger Wirknachweis homöopathischer Arzneimittel und die Formulierung eines Wirkmechanismus der homöopathischen Potenzen liegen bis heute nicht vor"). Yet she believes she can find something, see this publication.

So far, there has been little criticism or even concerned comments from the big German medical organisations.

Although it is unlikely, the German organisation GWUP hopes that the Chair will stick to reliable scientific methods and avoid the temptation to adjust the methods until the desired outcome is achieved. As far as I know, as opposed to Willich, Witt herself has not explicitly called for a change in the rules.

I would like to thank Professor Martin Lambeck for some of the information mentioned here.

According to the Times (UK), 'The number of prescriptions for homoeopathic remedies issued by family doctors (in the UK) fell from 83,000 in 2005 to 49,300 last year, according to the Prescription Pricing Authority. Over the same period there was an increase in the overall number of prescriptions issued from 720 milliion to 796 million'.

Mike Heap