Dana Ullman

Career

Ullman received his MPH from the University of California at Berkeley, and co-taught a course on homeopathy at University of California at San Francisco for four years.

Ullman served as a member of the Advisory Council of the Alternative Medicine Center at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. In previous years he served as chairperson for the National Center for Homeopathy's Annual Conference, and has been a consultant to Harvard Medical School's Center to Assess Alternative Therapy for Chronic Illness. He has spoken at universities, medical schools, pharmacy schools, and hospitals.

Journalist John Stossel of ABC News described Ullman as "homeopathy's foremost spokesman." Anastasia Toufexis of Time Magazine described him as a "leading proselytizer of homeopathy".

He was called as an expert witness in a class action against a homeopathy vendor for misleading marketing claims. The judge said:

The Defendant presented the testimony of Gregory Dana Ullman who is a homeopathic practitioner. He outlined the theory of homeopathic treatment and presented his opinion as to the value and effectiveness of homeopathic remedies. The Court found Mr. Ullman’s testimony to be not credible. Mr. Ullman’s bias in favor of homeopathy and against conventional medicine was readily apparent from his testimony. He admitted that he was not an impartial expert but rather is a passionate advocate of homeopathy. He posted on Twitter that he views conventional medicine as witchcraft. He opined that conventional medical science cannot be trusted.
[...]
Mr. Ullman's testimony was unhelpful in understanding the purported efficacy of the ingredients of SnoreStop to reduce the symptoms of snoring. Although he is familiar with the theory of homeopathic treatment, his opinions regarding its effectiveness was unsupported and biased. The Court gave no weight to his testimony.

Views and controversies

Ullman was interviewed on the American Broadcasting Company program 20/20 in a segment about homeopathy (January 30, 2004). He claimed that homeopathic preparations of extremely high dilution, i.e. those likely to contain zero molecules of the original substance, are effective because, he said, "the water gets impregnated with the information or memory of the original substance." When asked to suggest a laboratory experiment that 20/20 could independently conduct as a way to test the legitimacy of homeopathy, Ullman recommended the Ennis experiment, a study that seemed to show that ultra-dilute solutions of histamine, diluted to the levels used in homeopathic remedies, could affect cells just as the controls did. The result of 20/20's experiment was negative; the homeopathic dilution failed to produce a measurable effect when compared to plain water. He claimed the test was flawed as it was not a direct replication of Ennis's work. However, this experiment and one run by the BBC were ruled to be valid by independent experts commissioned by the BBC. However, other experts considered this study seriously flawed. A review of this study that was published in New Scientist deemed that it was too small to give definitive results. Further, the producer of the Horizon show even acknowledged that there were problems with the counting methods used in this study. Additional problems include the fact that the BBC explicitly asserted that their experiment was a replication of Ennis's study, but Ennis herself discovered that there were major differences between the two studies. The TV Study was developed and conducted by a laboratory technician who didn’t hold a graduate degree and had never previously conducted and published a study on basophils.

In an editorial in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, editor-in-chief Gerald Weissmann criticized the scientific basis of homeopathy and included Dana Ullman in his criticism. Weissmann criticized Ullman for recommending, during the 2001 anthrax attacks in the USA, the use of the homeopathic preparation called Anthracinum to prevent infection.

Ullman claimed he recommended Anthracinium for people who are at high risk of infection and who decline ciprofloxacin because of concerns over its side effects. While Ullman expressed concern about vendors "taking advantage of people wrapped up in the fear of the situation", he said "It would be irresponsible for us not to provide something that might be helpful." There is no evidence for the efficacy of Anthracinum, which is derived from nosodes gathered from infected pigs, and then diluted to "a point where no molecules of the disease product remain." In a right-of-reply letter, Ullman depicted Weissmann's editorial as an "unscientific critique" of homeopathy and cited five peer-reviewed studies. Weissmann responded: "Mr. Ullman is clearly a devotee of his art, and I respect his opinions. I'm afraid that I view Mr. Ullman’s references to the efficacy of homeopathy as modern versions of those Dr Holmes distrusted," and went on to quote from a well-known critique of homeopathy by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: "...such cases deserve very little confidence. Yet they may sound well enough, one at a time, to those who are not fully aware of the fallacies of medical evidence."