Thoughts on Science, Medicine And Sundry Things
This is the private homepage of Prof. Dr. Dr. Harald Walach →.
A complete overview of my publications can be found here →. One focus of content is my small Methodology for Beginners →, which now has 25 chapters.
In my personal blog, I chat about my everyday scientific life and share some thoughts on what I see and experience.
On Monday, Nov 6, 2023, an article appeared on FAZ.net, which addresses the retraction of the publication of our homeopathy ADHS meta-analysis. On the occasion of this incident, he also mentions the other two retractions (of the “Vaccines” study [1], which was republished in “Science, Public Health Policy and the Law” after a triple-blinded review [2] and the children’s mask study [3], which was republished in “Environmental Research” after an extensive review in its long version [4]).
The article is a very good example of how one can apparently work journalistically correctly, namely by not making any false statements or providing good evidence for one’s assertions, but still lying. Because there are two kinds of lies: Someone can lie by claiming something false. And someone can lie by omitting or concealing known, true and important facts. In this case, the second form of lie is endemic. It leads very easily to the presumably intended effect, namely the assassination of my character in the view of all those who don’t know me and who don’t have the time or inclination to take a closer look at the matter. This will probably lead to Wikipedia authors finding even more reason to make critical comments in the article about me, which means that the critical citation cat bites its own tail once more.
Feldwisch-Drentrup knows from me what he is hiding, or could easily have found out by doing more research. I had sent him a detailed email with details about this retraction and the meta-analysis, which are not mentioned in the article.
I then sent him the following letter and waited until Monday, Nov 13, 2023, the deadline, for a response. Having received none, I am publishing the letter. If I receive a reply later, I will of course also publish it.
Here is my letter:
We had rejoiced too soon. Last summer, I reported that we were able to publish a meta-analysis on homeopathy in ADHD, which showed a significant effect size of g = 0.6 [1]. It was recently retracted by the journal, not by us.
The background: We had made an extraction error, namely positively coding an effect size that should actually be negatively coded. This is one of the pitfalls in a meta-analysis that I have now stumbled across myself. Because you always have to ask yourself: Do the effects of a study point in the direction of the hypothesis, i.e. do they support the assumption that the difference speaks for the effectiveness of a treatment, or against it? In this case [2], the result was not only not significant in favor of homeopathy, but even pointed in the other direction. This should have been marked with a minus sign in the analysis, which I had simply overlooked. And my colleagues didn’t notice it either, so this very stupid mistake crept in.
Mistletoe therapy is popular among patients in German-speaking countries as an adjunct treatment for cancer. This is due to the fact that Ita Wegmann, an associate of Rudolf Steiner, had introduced mistletoe into medical cancer therapy at his suggestion. Steiner used, besides the knowledge of old European healing traditions, mainly his intuition and the mistletoe’s signature: mistletoe grows parasitically on trees and feeds on the host tree, which slowly but surely perishes. So according to the ancient signature theory and its phenomenology, mistletoe should also work on humans for a similar disease, namely cancer, which is also a parasitic growth in the body.
In the 1970s and 1980s, much basic research was done on mistletoe extracts. This showed that mistletoe contains an abundance of immunologically relevant substances, so-called lectins, which activate the immune system [1]. At that time, the first clinical studies began, in which physicians – especially those with an anthroposophical orientation – used mistletoe therapeutically in cancer patients. Initially, this was often done in rather severe cases with terminal cancer. Since then there has been a whole series of investigations. In 2020, my colleague Thomas Ostermann published in our journal Complementary Medicine Research a meta-analysis of all clinical trials in which a particular fermented mistletoe preparation, Iscador, had been used with all kinds of cancer types and in which survival was measured [2]. This publication was an update of a previously published study and included new studies, for a total of 32, both randomized and non-randomized comparative studies. The hazard ratio was 0.59, pretty much the same as in the earlier analysis.
The hazard ratio quantifies the difference between treatment group and control group (mostly normal treatment) over time. In this case, it means that patients treated with Iscador are 41% more likely to survive longer, meaning they live significantly longer. (It is not possible to estimate how long patients live longer overall in such analyses because observation durations vary widely. Therefore, one can only gain an estimate of the probability of living longer and a hedge on whether that probability is more than a random fluctuation.)
The truth behind RNA-based vaccine technology (Part 2)
From time to time, I publish contributions from other scientists and authors who seem to me to be appropriate to topics that are of current concern to me and on which I myself can provide less competent information. Prof. Klaus Steger is a molecular biologist and has published a three-part article on Covid-19 vaccines and the active principles of modRNA (nucleoside-modified mRNA) in the English version of “Epoch-Times”. I find these texts very informative.
Harald Walach
The truth behind RNA-based vaccine technology (Part 1)
From time to time, I publish contributions from other scientists and authors who seem to me to be appropriate to topics that are of current concern to me and on which I myself can provide less competent information. Prof. Klaus Steger is a molecular biologist and has published a three-part article on Covid-19 vaccines and the active principles of modRNA (nucleoside-modified mRNA) in the English version of “Epoch-Times”. I find these texts very informative.
Harald Walach