Brian Dunning dissects a press release from a woman selling a homeopathic aid for pets who suffer from anxiety during thunderstorms. Even a little bit of analysis shows that neither she nor her product are what she claims, but are as ridiculous as everything else from the world of homeopathy:
Her results should speak for themselves, so it doesn’t really matter who Dr. Kirsti Seskal is. But I was curious nevertheless, since she’s “internationally recognized”. If so, that would be quite a trick; for Google’s record of the entire Internet does not contain even a single reference to that name. But let’s see what she presented at the AVMA conference in St. Louis. The 2011 conference of the American Veterinary Medical Association was indeed in St. Louis (the 2012 conference in San Diego has not yet taken place as of this writing), and we can check the online notes for this conference. Unfortunately, neither the Search, the Table of Contents, the Sponsors, nor the Author Index contain any mention of Kirsti Seskal or HomeoPet. This is not an encouraging start to our evaluation of the press release. Perhaps she was merely an attendee walking around and handing out flyers, which I suppose could be described as “presenting the results of a study”.
Read Dunning’s entire piece here.