Free The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 by Elizabeth Finkel Page B

Homeopathy is based on the principles of ‘like cures like’ and ‘ultra-dilutions’. Which, in plain speaking, means you are treated with more of what’s making you sick, but in doses too small to have any possible impact. So it’s poison – which would be mad – but in microscopic quantities, so there’s no chance of you getting sick … or, for that matter, better.
    A 2010 evaluation of homeopathy by the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declared it ‘scientifically implausible’. Not surprising, when the journal Spectrum of Homeopathy cites the use of cheetah’s blood for multiple sclerosis and tiger’s blood for depression. If people want relaxation services, good luck to them, but when such ‘treatments’ risk displacing real medicine, it presents a serious problem for public health. There are countless tragic cases of people delaying or denying medical treatment in favour of quackery. Jobs is only a high-profile example of a growing problem.
    Several industry bodies have recommended tighter regulation. Choice has proposed an independent evaluation on an optin, cost-recovery basis where approved products could get a mark of approval similar to the National Heart Foundation’s ‘tick’ for healthy food.
    The National Prescribing Service has supported the tighter regulation of alternative therapies, saying in a media release: ‘All health professionals have a responsibility to ensure these products are used safely.’
    But the argument for greater regulation is flawed and dangerous. With public hospitals taking up about one-third of state government budgets, we do not have unlimited funds for public health.
    Each dollar diverted from efficacious, proven treatment intowhat can at best be called nutritional supplements is a dollar less for drugs that have been proven to extend life for people with serious conditions.
    Regulating products with no evidence base risks giving them a false credibility. Fifty-four per cent of people surveyed about alternative medicines think products listed by the TGA have been tested.
    The simpler, cheaper, more honest solution would be to discontinue listing and regulating these products and confirm under the Act that they are not medicine. Alternative medicine is an oxymoron; in the words of Australia’s leading sceptic pianist Tim Minchin, alternative medicines that have been proven to work are just called medicine.

    Pseudoscience
    Debate

A hero’s legend and a stolen skull rustle up a DNA drama
    Christine Kenneally
    Even with the best scientific techniques, you can’t always get what you want. But if you try, as the Rolling Stones put it, sometimes you get what you need.
    Consider the case of Ned Kelly’s skull.
    In Australia, Kelly needs no introduction; for Americans, it may help to think of him as Jesse James, Thomas Paine and John F. Kennedy rolled into one.
    Born about 1854 to an Irish convict exiled to Australia, Kelly became a folk hero as a very young man. He took up arms against a corrupt British constabulary, robbed banks and wrote an explosive manifesto. He was shot and arrested in a shootout in which he wore homemade metal armour, and in 1880 he was hanged by the Anglo-Irish establishment he despised.
    As with any semi-mythical hero, Kelly’s public has always hungered to get closer to the legend. His armour, cartridge bag, boots and a bloody sash became state treasures.
    But perhaps the most priceless among them is his missing skull – the subject of a tangled forensic drama that was finally resolved in September 2011, at least in part, after decades ofinvestigation, debate, tantalising leads, stalemates, false starts and what can only be called skulduggery.
    After his execution, Ned Kelly was buried in a mass grave at the Melbourne Gaol. There his remains might have quietly and invisibly decomposed but for a mistake by 19th century gravediggers: