Needless to say, the scientific community regards homeopathy as supernatural quackery.40 It is based on holist, vitalist, and essentialist beliefs. Yet it is an alternative approach to health that is increasingly popular. In 2007 the United Kingdom’s Times Higher Education Supplement reported a one-in-three increase in applications to study alternative medicine at alternative educational institutes and a corresponding decline in applications to study anatomy, physiology, and pathology at traditional universities.41 Homeopathy is available through the National Health Service, and even Bristol is home to one of five NHS homeopathic hospitals, despite the fact that the evidence for the efficacy of homeopathic treatments is at best equivocal. Boots, the United Kingdom’s largest chain of pharmacies, once rejected homeopathy but today sells a range of homeopathic remedies. It also includes a full online educational course to teach children about homeopathy, holistic healing, vital forces, and why diluted honey is good for bee stings.
What is it about modern medicine that leads people to prefer to put their faith and the care of their bodies into supernatural remedies? For one, homeopathy actually works. It works because patients believe it will. On average, one in three sick patients will improve if they believe they are receiving an effective treatment. This is the so-called placebo effect. The placebo effect is the remarkable finding that people get better if they think that they are taking a medicine or undergoing some therapy even if it has no direct active ingredient. Every drug that is regulated in the United Kingdom has to pass clinical trials that prove it is more effective than the results achieved by placebo alone. No such ruling exists for homeopathic treatments. For example, in the United States, Nicorette, a chewing gum that helps smokers give up smoking, had to pass stringent clinical evaluation before its maker gained a license to sell it. But in the same drugstore you can buy CigArrest, the homeopathic equivalent that did not have to pass any such evaluation. It would appear that the regulatory authorities are more concerned about the potential side effects of drugs with active components than treatments that are not distinguishable from pure water. Anyway, how could you prove that any homeopathic remedy did not have the appropriate active ingredient? You couldn’t find it if you looked for it!
The placebo effect is very real, and if belief improves health, then should we be concerned by supernaturalism in our health care? After all, homeopathic remedies are just water, and most practitioners refer to them as complementary medicine meant to be used in conjunction with clinically evaluated treatments. If this enhances the placebo effect, so be it. The problem occurs when complementary treatments are believed to be equally effective alternatives. This was revealed in a scandal made public last year about homeopathic anti-malarial treatments. The London School of Tropical Medicine was increasingly alarmed at travellers returning with malaria because they had not taken conventional prophylaxis. They found that of ten randomly selected homeopaths operating in London, all of them recommended taking homeopathic preventive treatments alone.42 This was despite the recommendation of the United Kingdom’s Society of Homeopaths, which concedes that there is no known effective homeopathic anti-malarial treatment.
There must be other reasons why people reject proven modern treatments in preference for supernatural cures. Over the past decades, there has been a change in attitudes toward modern medicine. For one thing, holistic treatments consider the whole of the person, and in doing so alternative therapists spend much more time listening to the patients and their problems in comparison to doctors working to a time-sensitive regime. Patient satisfaction and significant improvement in health are directly related to the amount of time the doctor listens to the patient’s problems.43 Not only is a problem shared a problem halved, but the sharing often leads to significant improvement in health.
Another reason for the rise in the popularity of alternative medicine is that we are increasingly concerned about the advances in science and treatments that seem unnatural. Have you noticed how common the word ‘natural’ is in advertising today? In our so-called ‘postmodern’ era, we hanker for a return to a simpler time, and a preference for natural products reflects this changing attitude and anxiety about modern science. But what exactly is a natural cure, and is it less dangerous than modern medical treatments? It turns out that nature has many more natural toxins than those synthesized by man. In fact, much of homeopathy works on the principle of a tiny bit of bad is good for you. So just because a substance is naturally occurring doesn’t make it safe.
DISGUSTING RESEARCHERS
The supernatural basis of alternative medicine sounds like the sort of mumbo-jumbo confined to the unenlightened dark ages of prescientific societies. But we should not be so quick to mock those who seek such treatments. The same laws of sympathetic magic are arguably part of daily life for all of us today, and no more so than in the peculiar human experience of disgust and our fears of contamination. Our contamination fears reflect our reluctance to come into physical contact with things that we find disgusting. We may be able to fight the urge and overcome our disgust, but it can operate at a gut level, making it difficult to control through reason.
Some things automatically trigger disgust and don’t have to be learned. Hydrogen sulphide, methane, cadaverine, and putrescine are four of the most revolting smells to the human nose. They can be found in various bodily excretions but are most concentrated in a decomposing corpse. When I trod on the stomach of that dead cat as a ten-year-old, it was this chemical cocktail that assaulted my senses. Everyone feels disgusted by the smell of putrefying bodies. However, other triggers of disgust are not so hardwired into our biology, and that is why disgust is so interesting to psychologists: sometimes it can be triggered by belief alone.
When we met Paul Rozin earlier, it was in the context of the killer’s cardigan, but this research stems from his work on the origins and development of human disgust. Rozin is one of the most disgusting researchers in the world. After reading about his studies, you would be very wary about stopping over for dinner at his place.44 For example, he measures how adults respond to various challenges that trigger the ‘yuck’ response. Could you drink out of a glass after it has been touched with a sterilized cockroach? Could you eat a delicious piece of chocolate fudge shaped like a dog turd? Would you slurp your favourite soup after it had been stirred with a brand-new fly swatter? Why does spitting on your own food make it disgusting despite the fact that you need saliva for digestion? As you would expect, people are disgusted at the prospect of most of these challenges, even though the actual risk of contamination is minimal or nonexistent in each situation.
And then there are cultural variations. Many of us could quite happily tuck into a bacon sandwich (apparently one of the most difficult things for former meat-eaters to give up when they become vegetarian), whereas a devout Arab or Jew would consider it disgusting. In the West, we are appalled at the ease with which insects, penises, gall bladders, snakes, cats, dogs, and monkeys are consumed in the Far East. Clearly some forms of disgust are culturally determined. How can this be?
ESSENTIAL CONTAMINATION
Cultural variations prove that some triggers for disgust must be learned. When we watch others turning up their noses at particular foods or retching at certain sights, we can copy their responses. But disgust and the accompanying fear of contamination do not follow simple learning rules in the normal way. For a start, we are wired to respond automatically to others’ disgust. Simply watching someone pull a disgusted expression is sufficient to induce our own feelings of disgust. For example, if you watch somebody pull a face after sniffing a drink, this activates the insula, the same region of your brain that normally fires when you yourself smell something offensive.45 It’s one-trial learning. That’s how rapid and infectious disgust emotions can be.