Nancy Malik
DOCTOR Nancy Malik is a homeopathy shill, fact-blind delusional crank and serial comment spammer. According to Nancy, "Evidence-based modern homeopathy is a nano-medicine bringing big results for everyone" — which may be a record for the number of terms used in the precise opposite of their actual meaning in a single sentence: "evidence-based", "modern", "nano" and "medicine" do not mean what Nancy thinks they mean. Her trademark copy-and-paste comment "Real is scientific homeopathy. It cures even when Conventional Allopathic Medicine (CAM) fails" scores over 7,000 hits on a certain search engine beginning with G.
According to her profile at no-reality-permitted hpathy.com, "Dr. Nancy Malik is a Homeopath Physician. She is Bachelor of Homoeopathic Medicine and Surgery from ‘Homoeopathic Medical College and Hospital’, Chandigarh in Jan 2003. Dr. Nancy is leading credentialed Medical Professional with a national clientele and a practice spanning over nine years in the medical health care industry. She has worked in 'Homeopathic Medical College and Hospital' in the capacity of Medical Officer. She has a rich clinical experience as a House Physician under Dr. J B D Castro, a nationally renowned homeopath from Chandigarh. She has a wide experience of treating large variety of medical disorders, both acute and chronic. Her patient care emphasis is on prevention and empowerment through lifestyle modification and self-care. She has rendered service to the poor by organising medical camps through Helping hand trust, a non-governmental voluntary organization working at grass root level in the field of Health. She has been nominated for ‘Bharatiya Chikitsak Ratan Award 2009’ by Centre for Educational Development & Research, Pune. She lives and practices in Sector-23, Gurgaon."[1]
This is actually frightening. The idea of a homeopathic surgeon is truly scary, and the fact that India allows pretend doctors to treat acute medical cases may go some way to explaining their poor life expectancy compared with the West.
And that Bharatiya Chikitsak Ratan Award, it's a biggie. Well, sort of: according to Google the only references to it are in respect of Nancy Malik, posted by Nancy Malik.
Her blog is called "science based homeopathy", and the fact that it is not empty inherently proves that it is ironically titled. Her obsessive use of the title "Dr" (actually an Indian equivalent of an ND) marks her out as a quack, of course.
Malik is basically a less intelligent and less persuasive version of Dana Ullman. Yes, I did say less.
Linde et al.
A 1999 paper by Linde et al. states that:[2]
“”The evidence of bias [in the primary studies] weakens the findings of our original meta-analysis. Since we completed our literature search in 1995, a considerable number of new homeopathy trials have been published. The fact that a number of the new high-quality trials… have negative results, and a recent update of our review for the most "original" subtype of homeopathy (classical or individualized homeopathy), seem to confirm the finding that more rigorous trials have less-promising results. It seems, therefore, likely that our meta-analysis at least overestimated the effects of homeopathic treatments |
| —Linde et al., 1999 |
Among Nancy Malik's more prized bits of wibble is the argument that this paper does not, in fact, mean that Linde et al. overestimated the efficacy of homeopathy in their earlier study — because "our review", which is cited in the article and explicitly identified as Linde et al., Lancet, 1997, is in not fact Linde et al., Lancet, 1997. Because of Reasons.
References
- Homeopathy for Everyone: Nancy Malik
- Are the clinical effects of homeopathy placebo effects? A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials by K. Linde et al. (1997) Lancet1997 Sep 20;350(9081):834-43