Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. From Mail Online:
Homeopathy could have cured Ebola if the World Health Organisation had not stepped in to prevent a trial, according to members of a group who travelled to Liberia hoping to try out remedies including rattlesnake venom and the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly.
The four doctors were the subject of widespread ridicule online after MailOnline revealed that they travelled to the West African country intent on using Ebola victims to put their controversial theories to the test.
But today the homeopaths dismissed their critics as ‘armchair intellectuals’ and insisted they made the ‘dramatic and traumatic trip’ to Liberia because they had a duty to try to help.
Now, to be fair to everyone’s favourite hard right-wing celebrity gossip website, we should pay at least some attention to those quote marks. Mail Online hasn’t quite claimed in its own words that homeopathy can cure ebola.
It has, nonetheless, run a headline beginning with the phrase “Homeopathy CAN cure Ebola”, in an attempt to get people to read the story. And its write up, which rather underplays the inconvenient lack of any real evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy as a medical treatment, is rather sympathetic to the homeopaths in question – who, it notes, are “all qualified medical doctors”.
The result is that there is a possibility, however remote, that somebody, somewhere, will glance at this story, and come away with the potentially fatal belief that sugar pills can protect them from a massively dangerous disease.
What could possibly go wrong?
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