Homeopaths don't give up

Russian supporters of homeopathy have published an article in a western peer-reviewed journal

A number of media outlets have already rushed to say that the new work "confirmed the mechanism of action of Ergoferon," but in reality this is extremely doubtful, however, as is the work as a whole. It is highly likely that the article will be removed from publication in the near future, but the very fact of this kind indicates the vulnerability of scientific journals for employees of Russian commercial companies trying to promote homeopathic and related ideas.

American peer-reviewed scientific journal The Journal of Immunology (a fairly authoritative publication in its field) published an article by a group of authors led by Sergey Tarasov and Oleg Epstein from the Russian company Materia Medica. The article tries to explain the mechanism of action of "drugs" such as "Ergoferon".

In the paper, the authors note that one of the problems of antibody-based drugs is their high price and frequent side effects. To overcome these problems, they offer an extremely strong dilution of drugs containing antibodies. In the summary of the article available to the public, the degree of dilution is not reported, which is why at first glance it seems that everything is fine with it. Perhaps it is for this reason that "The Tape.ru" unsubscribed it as an ordinary scientific news.

But when reading the full text, it becomes obvious that the average degree of dilution of the drug described in the work on page 2 is at least a septillion times (one with 24 zeros or a trillion trillion times). However, there were less than a septillion active units in the initial preparation. That is, most doses of the "final product" do not contain any active ingredients at all. Such an approach in the scientific literature is considered homeopathic and fundamentally unworkable.

The authors themselves use rather vague explanations to justify the supposed performance of such a drug, talking about some "self-organizing" systems at the "nanoscale" level. However, they do not deny the absence of the active ingredients themselves in the alleged drug obtained by dilution a septillion times.

Unfortunately, the topic of "repeatedly diluted solutions", which is a verbal disguise of conventional homeopathy, has been voiced in the Russian scientific community for quite a long time, although it is usually done by people who are far from pharmaceuticals and medicine by education and occupation. They often manage to make their way to the stands of the Russian Academy of Sciences or to the Russian media. For example, in 2019, "Gazeta.ru" published a material where she stated the position of such a point of view in the RAS as follows:

"It can be considered established that with a certain number of dilutions, the linear relationship between the number of dilutions and the impurity concentration is lost," the conference participants noted, "namely, after a certain number of dilutions, the concentration of certain substances can not only remain unchanged, but even increase during dilution. All this indicates that, despite repeated dilutions, such aqueous solutions contain quite material objects, which should be the subject of comprehensive study."

The new work was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal with a good reputation, which, undoubtedly, remains The Journal of Immunology. Obviously, after the publication and letters of scientists who noticed the fact that the article talks about a drug diluted a septillion times, the article is likely to be withdrawn, although this process may be lengthy.

But something else is more important. In the case of accumulation of a certain mass of publications in peer-reviewed journals, these drugs may begin to be purchased by the state health system or, at least, they are necessarily recommended by it to a wide range of people, which can hardly be considered desirable.

This is not the first scandal of this kind. In 2019, Epstein's group has already managed to publish two papers in the journal Antiviral Research. They, as well as several other similar ones, were withdrawn, and the journal explained that it was doing this because the publications essentially described homeopathic preparations, and "homeopathy is an outdated form of therapy, is not recognized by modern medicine and is rejected by modern science." In 2018, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, within the framework of the award "For Loyalty to Science", awarded the anti-award "for the most harmful pseudoscientific project" to the scientific and production company "Materia Medica Holding", headed by Oleg Epstein.

In a comment for Naked Science, Alexander Panchin, a Russian biologist and popularizer of science, explaining the reasons why such publications sometimes end up in peer-reviewed journals, noted: "We have been following the publications of these authors for a long time. They very skillfully take advantage of the inattention of reviewers. They do not focus on the fact that there is no active substance in their preparations. In one previous case, we contacted the reviewer, and he was surprised when he found out about it. They also often use "noisy" methods that give distortions in the final results. But the reasons for this "noise", which sometimes only narrow specialists know about, may not be among the reviewers."

Panchin notes that he spoke with experts on nuclear magnetic resonance, one of the methods used in the work. They found inaccuracies there and noted that such a thing would not have passed in the profile journal, where they are well familiar with the NMR method. But immunologists may not know the specifics of some methods, such as the dependence of measurement results on small changes in pH. Also, in the new work, incorrect borrowing of images from previous works was found without specifying the sources.

The biologist notes that the drugs affected in the new work were previously mentioned in the memoranda of the RAS Commission on Combating Pseudoscience. This, in principle, should interfere with new publications of this kind, although reviewers may not always be fully aware of this situation. "But the most correct way to respond to such cases is to write to the editors of the scientific journals themselves and inform them what they have published. Today, five similar articles have already been withdrawn by this method," he adds.

Punchin also notes that although scientific journals can "mess up" by publishing such articles, but most often it is a mistake, and not a real belief in homeopathy. "I wouldn't be surprised if this article is eventually withdrawn. However, the company will already have time to advertise itself," he sums up.

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