Homeopathy

I feel kind of weird doing a post on homeopathy.  First of all, it’s a really charged issue, and I tend to try and stay away from those.  I don’t want to draw the haters.  Second, I really hate to ruin what, for many people, may be a really beneficial placebo effect.  But it drives me crazy when people talk about homeopathy as though it is the poor unfortunate soul of modern scientific medicine.  So this is an “info” post.  I’ve read a lot of blogs out there, and many of them attack homeopathy without explaining why they think it’s bunk, and many people defend homeopathy without knowing what it is they are defending. 

Homeopathy is a VERY touchy subject in the scientific community.  Almost everyone has an opinion, and opinions are very strong.  I managed to find only one article that I could say made an effort to be unbiased.  This article is actually a statement from the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education by Johnson et al in 2007, and it’s an article about homeopathy and how it should be covered by those in pharmaceutical practice.  So I’m relying pretty heavily on that one article, with other articles in equal amounts on both sides of the debate.  I do think most of this stuff is bunk, but I’m going to try very hard just to tell things as they are, what homeopathic remedies are, and how they are purported to work. 

Worthless grant review comments

We’ve all had that R21 or R03 come back with completely useless comments. Months and months of work, hours or weeks spent in the lab collecting that preliminary data (which is supposedly unnecessary for those R21s). More time spent waiting and waiting. Revisions. Resubmissions. The same useless comments back to you.
Come on. We all know it’s a racket. In a tight funding climate, nobody in charge of the purse strings wants to fund a competitor. But they gotta find a way to reject your grant in a way that is completely noncommittal. Hence, weasel words.
Here’s my favorite: “The proposed studies are not unique”. With this simple, vague statement, any hopes of funding a decent or important project are quashed. Think that study will fill in a crucial hole in the literature? Screw you. Your project isn’t unique enough.
“Unique” or “innovative”, or other similar words have pretty much whatever meaning the reviewer wants them to have. Or needs them to have. But what does uniqueness matter, really? Some of the most informative developmental neurobiology work, for example, still relies heavily on chick embryo limb bud removal; a technique developed about a century ago, requiring little more than a tungsten needle and a microscope. Apply some simple histochemical procedures (which date back even farther) and a few molecular biology techniques (which are about as ubiquitous as you can get), and you can potentially rewrite our understanding of the developing nervous system. Yet on the surface, standard fare. Sorry bud, your project just got pigeon-holed. I’ve seen some great grants go down in flames this way, grants that were either conceptual genius or exceedingly relevant to a health-related issue. The most egregious example I saw was an R01 dealing with the potential for soy phytoestrogens (as an unregulated dietary supplement) to affect behavior and pathology in a model of aging and dementia. This grant– beautifully designed to address a number of questions relevant to the health of postmenopausal women– scored right at the payline on the first review, just missing funding, but then subsequently triaged on both resubmissions. The payline shifted, the grant got rerouted to another, much more competitive study section, and suddenly the grant was “not innovative”.
The best part? You revise and resubmit according to the reviewer’s useless comments, and you get the exact same comments back again.
So what’s your favorite useless grant criticism?