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Science vs. Homeopathy
Mr. E writes "Ars Technica has an interesting look at pseudoscience as it applies to homeopathy. While most discussions about what science is get derailed by the larger controversies surrounding them, Ars chose a relatively uncontroversial pseudo-science to examine so that they could examine the factors which make homeopathy a psuedo-science: ignoring settled issues in science, misapplication of real science, rejection of scientific standards, claims of suppression, large gaps between the conclusion and evidence, and a focus only on the fringes of what we currently understand."
Homeopathy is when you don't care either way about the gays
Prepare for the Keith World Order
Homeopathy is controversial, in that some people actually believe it and loudly proclaim its wonders. That's like saying that evolution vs. intelligent design is settled just because science overwhelmingly supports the former, ignoring that many people still believe the latter.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Your tax money goes to fund an NHS homeopathy hospital in London, whilst other local health trusts are desperate for cash.
Which reminds me, that "Head On" junk advertised on TV is homeopathic. My advice is to use bottled water instead:
"Evian: apply it directly to the gullible"
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
and the suppression of homeopathy.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
James Randi has often spoke brilliantly on the topic of homeopathy, in this authors@google video he speaks on it, among other things. http://youtube.com/watch?v=MTPj9VlNzQ0
Homeopathy is a terrible scam and I know too many people that have been sucked in to it due to lack of education, and the ability for critical thought.
Free software, free thought, free society.
The more you rinse them, the stronger the soap becomes!
Enjoy your placebo effect, people.
You can't take the sky from me...
A friend of my cousin works in a homeopathic pharmacy (in Russia). She told a story that once in a while a client appears in the pharmacy with a prescription which literally says: "Placebo" (yes, an average Ivan is probably even less likely to be able to read a prescription than an average Joe, as Latin is not Cyrillic). The client gets the prescribed drug and pays a hefty sum for it. Supposedly, the more they pay, the more likely it is to work.
Honestly, as long as it doesn't interfere with other scientific endeavors, I see no problems with such things as homeopathy. They may even stumble across something that is heretofore unknown, actually contributing to science in the process. Even in this case, competent MDs certainly don't discount human willpower and mindset, especially in matters such as healing times and recovery from sickness or injury.
Sneer all you like folks, but even the fundamentalist creationist types have a chance (small as it may be) at accidentally discovering something along the way that "real science" may have ignored or discounted, or in asking a question (or posing a challenge) whose answer might lead to something useful in science itself -- if a scientist here or there takes the time to tackle them.
It's kind of how we've gotten as far as we have.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Yeah, many slashdotters are opposed to Homeopathy, Scientology, and many other varieties of fraud.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Homeopathy is controversial, in that some people actually believe it and loudly proclaim its wonders. That's like saying that evolution vs. intelligent design is settled just because science overwhelmingly supports the former, ignoring that many people still believe the latter.
You keep ignoring that word, I do think it means what you do not think it means.Homeopathy, relative to intelligent design, is uncontroversial. That's like saying that a rat, relative to a tiger, is harmless.
You can't take the sky from me...
I'm a doctor -- I could write an entire book on the relation of "scientific" or "evidence-based" medicine in relation to homeopathy.
:)
In general, homeopathy is essentially tolerated, and as the article humorously points out, it tends to not do much harm because things are dilute. From the Wikipedia article, which nicely summarizes it:
> any positive effects of homeopathic treatment are simply a placebo effect.
That has pretty much been my experience -- and it is difficult for an individual (even a doctor) to tell somebody to NOT do something that is not harmful, and (very, very unlikely) may be beneficial. Physicians joke about "homeopathic" doses of drugs when we think a drug is significantly under-dosed (usually when beginning somebody on a new medicine to see how they react to it.)
It is really funny the ritual surrounding this -- you wouldn't believe the people that adhere to homeopathic remedies and spend hundreds of dollars on these cure-alls, yet still "struggle" to afford the copay on the drugs that are actually keeping them alive. However, something that reinforces positive thought (which indeed can have an effect on your health) is good, and the placebo effect is undeniable.
Despite their benign nature, the aggressive marketing of these substances to vulnerable groups (the sick) disagrees with me. I mean, look at this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=homeopathic+remedy&btnG=Google+Search and some of the wild claims they make for cure. I can't make these outlandish claims for most of the drugs I prescribe, so how can an honest doc compete?
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Homeopathy is controversial, in that some people actually believe it and loudly proclaim its wonders.
"Some people" also claim the holocaust never happened, but I don't think anyone would seriously claim that the holocaust is controversial.
I'm sure if you looked hard enough, you could find someone that still believes in geo-centrism as well.
There's always a few nuts around that will believe crap. The existence of those nuts doesn't mean something is controversial. If anything I'd say it's the percentage of the nuts in the general populace. Even for homeopathy, I'd say that percentage is quite low.
AccountKiller
>
> "Evian: apply it directly to the gullible"
"Evian: apply directly to the naive."
Fixed it for ya. I always wondered if having your product be "Naive" spelled backwards was an inside joke on the part of some marketroid.
With that out of the way, my go-to site for debunking quack medicine is Quackwatch. Debunks all the health scams from homeopathy to ear candling to colloidal silver to chiropracty, all on one convinient page.
The writers picked the topic because of a relative lack of controversy. This is unsurprising to me, but not for a good reason. My experience - I would love to see some research, hopefully proving me wrong - has led me to believe that a majority of people accept the spurious claims of homeopathy advocates. I'm disheartened about this by the number of otherwise perfectly reasonable people who have insisted that I should pay money for a homeopathic dilution of zinc to fight a cold virus.
"My last cold only lasted three days, must have been the Zicam," is so wrong on multiple levels, and it's a sad commentary on the state of education that such thinking is so widespread, although it's only fair to note that such has always been the case with regards to medicine.
My favorite part of the article is this three-bong-load abuse of physics by Lionel Milgrom, a contributor to this very special journal edition, who proposes a theory (I shit you not) of quantum entanglement of humans:
Mr. Milgrom, you and I share the same perspective on the universe. Unfortunately for you, it's called religion, not science, and your attempts to dress it up as science for the purposes of promoting our generation's version of patent medicine are the worst sort of shameful mockery.
Also, "instantaneously?" How can any two things be made instantaneous by a force that "transcends time?" You're as shitty a philosopher as you are a physicist, Mr. Milgrom.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Diluting something to the point that it is nothing and admistering it as medicine is not a great testament to Homeopathy in my mind. It is a testament against "western medicine". I think it is very true that often doing nothing is better than doing whatever western medicine says. Example: US has one of the most medicalized Birth process of any country, and one of the worst infant mortality rates of any modern world country. The US also feeds babies medicine(infant "formula") instead of food (breastmilk), cuts off functional parts of the male anatomy at birth out of tradition and ignorance.
All this unnecessary medicalization happens in the first few seconds of life a large percentage of US born babies. Setting that precident, imagine all the rediculious medicalization the "western world" faces and it is not hard to see why backing the *eff* off and using some kind of placebo voodoo water (assuming homeopathy is false) would be popular and even relieving to the bodies of people who have been abused by their own thirst for "medicine".
I am not saying western medicine gives us nothing, or that homeopathy gives us something, but I am saying that psychological response is perhaps more important than chemicals and surgery, and maybe a psudo science of placebo is a nice way to wean lemmings off of "just gimme an antibiotic so I can feel better".
Seeing as this is /. I'm in no way surprised that this was modded troll. Moderators hear seem to lack the funny gene. Still pretty damn funny though.
It is a good thing, when one is trying to heal, it is a good idea to know as much as possible about the treatment protocols involved. One of the reasons why acupuncture is being given an increased role in medicine around here is the serious amount of study that the Chinese government in particular has put into it over the last 50 years or so. Up until the middle of last century things were much more empirical than they are now.
Any legitimate medical treatment should go through great pains to at least do no harm. If it can't do that at least, then it isn't something which has any right to be considered legitimate. The next step is that it should help ease the symptoms or cure the disease outright. That's where things tend to get a bit more difficult.
The big issue I'm seeing with the article is stated in there, if one wishes for the result to be a specific result, then one really has to be careful about contaminating the study. There's a reason why, despite the inconvenience, that double blind studies are so common. Believe me they aren't doing them because they're fun, they do them to try and keep the observations normative.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Something few people seem to recognize is there are two separable elements to most of homeopathy. The first is the treatment itself, and the second is the explanation for how it works. For whatever reason people aren't satisfied to know that something works, they also need to know why it works. And unfortunately if there isn't a self-evident explanation one will be invented. And it doesn't end there, the invented rationale is then usually extended to develop other treatments (which don't work of course because what they are based on isn't true).
Take acupuncture. Twirling small needles in the top layer of the skin has a variety of benefits. But why? Traditions tell the story that it balances the energy flows, etc etc. A recent study examined three groups, one with no acupuncture, one with acupuncture in the traditionally prescribed locations, and one with acupuncture in random locations. Both of the latter two groups were better than the first (no treatment), but interestingly they weren't different from each other.
So yes acupuncture has some effect, but the traditional explanation has nothing to do with why it works.
So two of the big problems with homeopathy are first that most people get hung up on the far out explanations for why the treatments supposedly work and miss out on stuff that could actually help them. And second that lots of homeopathic treatments are developed that don't do anything to help because they are logical extensions of faulty premises.
Alternative medicine also suffers from the fact that once a treatment becomes well accepted and is supported by empirical research it magically leaves the realm of alternative medicine. So by definition alternative treatments will always be those that haven't yet been supported by scientific research, even though many of them do in fact work.
I've talked to a number of homeopaths and in my limited experience they seem to take it like an all or nothing religion, where you have to accept it all or none of it, and you have to accept the wacky explanations to the letter. It would be nice if they didn't feel so burned by the modern medical machine that they reject as a matter of principle empirically based testing.
I find it somewhat funny that they make fun of non-western style medicine because it is expensive and unnecessary. In my experience most of the treatments THEY prescribe are also expensive and unnecessary. The majority of ailments people suffer in the U.S. could easily be cured by getting the proper amount of sleep, using good hygiene, exercising daily, and eating whole foods in moderation. Instead they give their patients all kinds of drugs that cause just as many problems as they eliminate and at prices that bankrupt families and put a huge strain on the overall economy. Somewhat hypocritical don't you think?
Creative Demolition
That's what every Phase II drug trial ever done has tested: "Is this medicine more effective than a placebo?"
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
People may claim over and over about it being a fraud,
but we must not forget the study of Madeleine Ennis,
who initially wanted to disprove homeopathy, but ended up
reaching the conclusion that solutions, dilluted to the
point of not containing even a single molecule,
produced reactions just like the controls did.
I know her experiment was later "disproved", but then again,
they used a method that didn't match her own, with many
questionable practices.
I am not ruling out it being a total fraud, but I guess it
would be more accurate to say it's a fraud if compared
to our usual western medicine.
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
Read the wiki page? When the double blind test was conducted without experimenter bias, there was no effect.
Eight years without a cold or flu isn't a placebo.
I've been eight years without a cold or flu, and haven't taken a single so-called preventative -- placebo or not.
In other words -- have you considered the possibility that you are just lucky?
How lucky you are. Right there in France, we have a big lab called "Boiron" that's leader in homeopathy, makes regular mess in the media and have a *lot* of the population believe in its lies.
Eh, our nuts believe the earth is 6000 years old, and want to teach that crap in schools as science. If your nuts only make a stink in the media, I'd say you're the lucky ones.
AccountKiller
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I am amazed at how tolerant doctors are of alternative medicines. Years ago I had a letter published in the local newspaper where I protested their gullible coverage of an obviously bogus medical claim. I was surprized that my letter was the only one that appeared. This was in a big city - where were the letters from the medical doctors?
Why do so few doctors speak out? Where is their courage? Where is their integrity?
Some day we may have a public who is completely unable to differentiate between true medical doctors practising evidence-based medicine, and a vast array of charlatans and witch doctors, and the doctors will wonder what happened.
Your tepid and spineless response to alternative medicine is what happened.
One time, a buddy and I went into a homeopathy/herbal healing store and noticed the ear candles. When we asked the lady what they do she said "It's like smudging your insides!" We immediately left the store to relieve the uproarious laughter from such a nonsensical, yet enthusiastic response.
Quack cult people are a strange breed. How is the layman supposed to be able to decipher their inane technobabble?
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
If only we could combine the two. Then we could sell them Jesus Water and make a mint!
The Farewell Tour II
That's called Wine. French people already sell it to us.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The claim is that if you dilute a substance X to the ratio of one part X to 10***120 parts pure water, you will then have no X left in the pure water, only the memory of X, and this will now cure whatever illness X caused in the first place.
Now ask yourself, where did you get the pure water for the dilution, since all water has the memory of all substances that it has ever been in contact with?
How do you remove the memory of X from water so the water can become pure again and suitable for another round of dilution with substance Y?
Infuriate left and right
There is first of all, no proof of water memory, which is what you'd be looking for. A positive indication, not trying to disprove something like this which flies in the face of all our scientific understanding. Why does water not remember all the other things that had been part of it, like urine, dirt, sand... Filtering wouldn't remove the memory of those things, as filters works of the basis of removing particles, not memory.
Free software, free thought, free society.
Did it produce "reactions" at a higher rate than those expected for a pure placebo?
If so, were the testing methods determined to be sound upon peer review and was it reproduced by others?
Unless you answered yes on all counts, passing it off as a valid treatment *is* fraud
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Those bastards! Well I've got a trick for them. I'm going to distill their wine in water and sell it back to them. One bottle of wine has got to be good for infinite bottles of Jesus's Homeopathic Patriot Water.
The Farewell Tour II
Well, I have to say that I've had good luck with a chiropractor for back pain, but I agree with you on their general theory of disease being cause by misalignment. Chiropractor as physical therapist? I'll buy that. Chiropractor for digestive ailments? No thanks.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Tell that to all the people on /. who keep saying that Global Warming is a settled question and that no more research on anything except profiting from the melting of the polar ice caps needs to be done.
The Farewell Tour II
"Uncontroversial" is vague and scope-bound. Do you mean uncontroversial among scientists? Uncontroversial among the educated public? Uncontroversial among the greater public at large? I think homeopathy is uncontroversial within at least two of these scopes.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
It's a shame that in most people's minds homeopathy has become mixed up with "natural remedies", some of which do contain useful compounds.
Herbalism and natural remedies aren't suitable for everything, but some of them can help and have been proven to. Some of them are the source of things like aspirin.
Homeopathy on the other hand is total quackery.
Uh, this is Slashdot. Everyone else here knows that the correct way to debunk pseudoscience is to post a link to a YouTube video of Penn & Teller making ad hominem attacks while shouting "Bullshit!" at the camera...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
If science was a car, people would never buy it. The basic fact of science is that, even though we learn a bunch of new things, and have ten thousand new ideas a day to better humanity, probably only one in a million of those new ideas actually WILL, so, as a risk management thing goes, you genuinely are better off ignoring most scientific breakthroughs - even if there is overwhelming evidence that the breakthrough is beneficial. Cell phones and plastic bottles suddenly come to mind.
But its more than that. Science as a brand is in trouble and on a many levels.
The public exposure to science is, in these days, filled with a bunch of bad news. It used to be that science would make peoples lives better, and now, the more we know, the worse our lives promise to get. Every time a scientist gets up on TV, its to say that we're screwing up the planet, we have to have less, use less, in essence, roll back a pretty good chunk of our wealth really, just to "share" with the emergent third world, and that sucks.
Every time a scientist gets on TV, you hear about wonder drugs that kill some small amount of people, so your grandmother can't get them, how you can't smoke, can't drink, can't even eat peanuts on the plane anymore. It's like, science used to be about human promise, and it's really, any more, just nickel and diming us into a life of total misery. Then, to top it all off, some scientist comes out with a supposed cure for cancer, but you can't afford it anyway, because, the truth is, the gov't and the insurance companies know that the country can't afford to spend 1 million bucks per citizen and medical costs and have a solvent nation.
Accompanying all of that doom and gloom is a remarkable lack of constitency and clarity. You get scientists that say claiming that there will be more hurricanes than ever for a year, and none show up. You have the government taking recommendations of scientists saying that people should eat cheese and peanut better one year and then the next year, eat celery and whole grains. Now, scientists claim to have your kids interests at heart, and all of a sudden we have the absurd primary school educational disasters of the 1980s, becuase, oops, we didn't learn until last year that boys brains really ARE wired differently from little girls brains, sorry, folks, that an entire generation of men got screwed despite the best intentions of the scientists in that field.
Now, compare all of that to a preacher, who reads out from the bible. He's not hawking a perfect system, but it is a system that has been field proven, and, at least in the context of christianity, coupled with some technology, that actually elevated europeans from the dark ages into world domination. You'd have big families, spread out, dominate. That's good stuff, and at the end of the day, you've got the promise of a woopass god that will smite your enemies when you die and shower you with goodies. That's cool.
What's science giving us instead, a life that sucks, a death that's permanent, and a universe that will wink out of existence in 100 billion years, or some other grizly fate. Even the existence of man is utterly pointless in the long run.
So yeah, while it may be factual and consitent and the religious types live in a fantasy land, it is a fantasy that gets your more goodies if you can win it, and finally,
Y o u d o n ' t n e e d t o b e l i e v e i n e v o l u t i o n t o
u s e a c e l l p h o n e...
When the dust all settles, its really no surprise. Science offers a shitty deal, and religion offers a good one, so only an idiot would really choose science, and so more and more people don't!
This is my sig.
Acupuncture is indeed far more accepted in the west today than it was a few decades ago, but it's effectiveness hasn't changed it has just been studied. I would propose that in many circumstances homeopathic remedies are as much as 75% as effective as prescription drugs. Mainly because of the placebo effect.
Now of course for a placebo to work, you have to expect it to work, so widely published careful studies could actually reduce the effectiveness of homeopathic "medicine". Now if you have a harmless sugar pill that works 75% as well as Prozac but cost 3% the price, why would that be a problem? Sugar pills have almost no bad side effects while:
From some viewpoints Homeopathic remedies could be superior to prescription drugs even if the effectiveness was closer to 20%, they are still affordable by pretty much everyone and cause less side effects than most prescriptions. Who cares if the only thing that they really do is make the person think and feel as though they are receiving a cure? Many times that is all it takes to actually fix the problem.
http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Labs-Calms-Homeopathic-pills/dp/B000F3Q72C http://www.pharmacychecker.com/Pricing.asp?DrugName=Prozac&DrugId=19219&DrugStrengthId=104989
We are all just people.
You aren't anal enough, which was the point.
You say it's tested against a placebo (double blind test, I presume), but I said "THIS placebo" for a reason: this appeals to somebody's faith in alternative medicine. The double blind placebo doesn't. Whether it makes a difference is another matter.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ennis's work appears to be identical to that of Jacques Benveniste. Benveniste also showed positive results for ultra-dilute solutions - until James Randi adjusted the experimental protocol to exclude confirmation bias, whereupon the results disappeared.
As the Wikipedia article states, when Ennis's tests are repeated with a proper protocol in place, the results likewise disappear. The conclusion is straightforward: Ennis is a sloppy experimenter - probably honest, but incompetent.
It does not work. I'm tried quite a few of them, to be sure.
But there is one exception - and amazingly it works great. Arnica Montana is amazing stuff. All it does is stop compression-type injuries from swelling.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Homeopathic results never survive independent verification.
Yes, but that's not what homeopathy means. No doctor claims that natural, so-called alternative medicines don't work. Modern medicine acknowledges that aspirin came from willow bark, for example. The term "homeopathy" implies more than just herbal cures; read the rest of the thread for info.
Breakfast served all day!
Placebo effect is very important, especially in things like depression, anxiety, and agitation (its a real clinical status, look it up!) where behavioral therapy may improve symptoms. I'll let it slide that homeopathy for these things is hard to justify, what with the "like cures like" and all (can we get a 100000x dilution of sad juice?), and stick to the placebo effect which I think is your main point.
..So, if you wake up and feel tired (who does that??), you are experiencing possible drug-related fatigue..
Also, we can pretty much write off Prozac because it has become the Ritalin of middle-age. By that I mean that a wide array of causes, behavioral, social, or chemical, are causing a problem, and instead of resolving it (through behavioral therapy or psychological analysis) the doc is just writing for the same treatment. Bobby is loud, give him Adderall. Bobby is sad, give him Prozac. Some people really need the chemically altering action of Prozac to be happy- some people just want to buy a month's worth of 10mg Problem Solver from CVS... i digress..
When administering or justifying a placebo as a treatment, take care not disregard the importance of real medicine. Placebo effect is significantly less present with things like hypertension, electrolyte imbalance, heart problems, diabetes, kidney and liver diseases, obesity, hypercholesterolemia, and other more corporal diseases. There is no "I think this will resolve my congestive heart failure" placebo effect that stands on its own.
As far as "sugar pills have no side effects" is concerned, look at and drug study that reports side effect profiles - placebos can have many of the same adverse effects as the "medicine" medicine. People will report dry mouth, sweating, fatigue, headaches, sleeping problems, and even sexual problems because ordinary people will have all of these things randomly on a day to day basis. The only thing thats different is that the FDA makes them report every single thing as a "possible side effect" if it occurs during a trial.
If you wanted to market sugar pills as an FDA approved drug, your drug monograph would be as bleak as that of any other drug with regard to side effects. I'm not trying to say that pharmaceutical compounds dont have side effects, but the same effect that makes people feel better regardless of drug action can also make them feel worse.
Homeopathic drugs will never be superior to prescriptions because they are just water. Literally, in some formulations there is actually NO drug - just the solvent, because they have diluted it to such a degree that you could have an entire lot without a single molecule of the effective chemical. It would be nice if all of our healthcare issues could be resolved by just "thinking and feeling as though one is receiving a cure," but almost every time, this is not the case. People who have needs for medicinal intervention can not afford to be distracted by things like this at a cost of delaying real medicine. Real medicine and real doctors and real pharmacists who make people better through real science.
Conventional medicine still prescribes things like antibiotics for influenza.
Yeah. Kill those bacteria. That'll teach them stupid virii!
I've seen a relative done damage by colloidal silver. I've seen a sister almost killed by antibiotics.
Pot, meet kettle.
Which reminds me, that "Head On" junk advertised on TV is homeopathic.
Wait! You mean those irritating ads are for something that isn't even real medicine? That's it! I no longer have any reason not to burn down their company for those awful ads.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
Ar-son. Apply directly to the headquarters.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It's always nice to hear a positive story from a chiropractic patient on a forum such as this. And yeah, for the most part, I agree that there is something to the theory of disease being able to be caused by misalignment.
I generally have excellent success with back pain/neck pain/headaches/knees. I have decent success with hips/shoulders/ankles. Everything else, I'm happy to make an attempt at. Do I tell people with Crohn's disease that I can help them? No. I do occasionally have good results with minor digestive issues though. There are few things more satisfying than making a patient with chronic constipation sprint for the bathroom.
Quackwatch? ha. I appreciate the concept and I agree with a lot of the skepticism shown there about different topics, but Stephen Barrett seems to have an old-school AMA hate for chiropractors, which I think is humorous. But it also taints his opinions on the rest of the site, in my mind.
Colloidal Silver? Probably not a good idea.
Magnetic Healing? Probably something to it. Many types of electromagnetism have different effects on the body. I could see it working, but that doesn't validate the $15 magnetic bracelet at the counter at Walgreens.
Acupuncture? Definitely does something, but I don't think we know exactly what. Hopefully the Chinese will figure it out and let us know.
Homeopathy? I've never been to a practitioner, but I'm honestly not too confident in the concepts. Water memory? I believe that water memory could possibly be true. If you take a volume of pure water and let it approach equilibrium, I assume that the whole mass will oscillate/vibrate/move at some frequency. If you introduce copper atoms(for example) into the water, they probably would have some effect on the water's previous vibrational state, by introducing a vibrational state of its own. Now, remove the copper. Does the water immediately go back to its original state, or does the water retain some of the effects of the copper addition? I don't know, to be honest with you. IANAB(iophysicist). But I would not say that it is impossible. And if water memory has even a bit of truth to it, then I'd believe that homeopathy could also have a bit of truth though. But we currently have no good proof of either.
I can understand the doubting attitude towards a lot of 'alternative medicine' but I really have a hard time feeling that chiropractic belongs in that category anymore. Your family practitioner isn't going to be able to do much for that back pain you've got.
Homeopathy though? I continue to doubt.
The consensus is that breastfeeding is good, and circumcision isn't beneficial.
Actually, there's no consensus on the latter. First, circumcision is actually beneficial in helping to prevent HIV by removing tissue that acts as an easy point of entry. Second, a small (40 person) study was performed that showed that strongly suggests that sensitivity is not significantly impaired in circumcised men despite commonly held beliefs to the contrary.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That is indeed about the closest you can get to "double blind": There just has to be a mechanism in place to tell the acufakers when to target the "proper" area and when to stick the "wrong" area.
If people want to believe in bullshit, they're welcome to it. The problem arrives when these poor, ignorant people have real medical crises and are going to their local homeoquack, chiroputz or acufaker instead of getting therapy that has undergone (or is undergoing, in the case of experimental treatments) scientific testing. If one of my family members looks to be falling into that trap, I'll be dragging them to medical doctors and force-feeding them real meds if I have to.
Those are all very good things for the human body. They lead to relaxation, reduced stress, reduced physical tension.
Which are further very good things for the human body. All together and individually, these actions and effects are known to be good for you, promote wellness and improve health.
The rest is mostly innocent quackery. Except for "adjusting" infants. That's dangerous quackery.Dangerous quackery.Probably something that can be sold for a profit. Fraudulent but harmless quackery.It pokes holes in you and irritates tissues normally protected by your skin. Other than that, lots of nearly untestable placebo effect.The word you're searching for is "bullshit". Homeopathic medicine has lots of well-diluted bullshit and will be more than happy to sell you not-really tainted water at a price that makes bottled water vendors blush.That's a great start. Keep it up. Skepticism can be tiring, but is incredibly rewarding.
Regards,
Ross
Vibration. You assume the whole mass would oscillate/vibrate at some frequency. I'm extremely curious as to why you would believe that. Are you under the impression that typical molecules vibrate in funny patterns?
Physically, water molecules in the liquid form experience Brownian motion, true, random motion due to heat. It's chaotic, though, certainly not regular, doesn't really have a measurable frequency (an intensity, sure, in Temperature). Furthermore, supposing there was a regular vibration of some physical sort in water, and the energy of such vibration were somehow to remain in the water instead of dissipating like most vibrations do (try ringing a bell and then putting it down on a table, eh?) it would be readily disturbed and dwarfed when someone sloshed it around or drank it. It certainly could not be expected to persist in the body beyond the esophagus and, if it did somehow maintain this vibrational quality after that, it is sufficiently weakly-interacting that it oughtn't have any effect on the body. (There are plenty of little quantum states which one could maybe possibly call "vibration" if you were feeling poetic, but they're largely irrelevant at super-atomic scales, or else - like magnetism and electron spins - pretty trivial in effect compared to the effects of fields orders of magnitude more intense.)
If there's any sort of "vibration" left, it's a metaphysical pseudospiritual "vibration".
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
You don't need double blind tests to know that 2 + 2 is not 5.
You don't need double blind tests to know that air breathing animals won't survive in a vacuum.
You don't need double blind tests to know that jumping off a tall bridge is going to hurt.
You don't need double blind tests to know that homeopathy has an internal inconsistency: pure water is required but by definition can't exist.
Some things are just provably wrong and don't need experimentation.
Infuriate left and right
This is actually a source near Suisse/France. That it spell naive backward is absolute random incident.
sorry this is in french but about evian les bains.
and a SNOPES article on Evian/Naive
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Also, the term "natural" doesn't really have much meaning in this situation. At one end of the spectrum, you could say that everything is natural, since it's made from atoms that were found here on earth. At the other end, you could say it's only natural if you're taking a bite out of a plant or animal that you found in the wild, without even cooking it or washing off the natural dirt and bacteria. Most people draw an arbitrary line somewhere in the middle: some amount of processing is OK, but any more than that and it's suddenly "unnatural".
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Authors@Google:James Randi, in the Q&A he talks about a friend who runs a government supported acupuncture clinic in China. (41:50 into the movie (Incidentally I didn't know until now that you can now jump straight to any point in a YouTube video, how handy. Anyway..))
The person knew it was a placebo but says that it's used for people who have small, partly psychological problems, but they turn away people who need real medical treatment.
I think homeopathy is just a Western equivalent; as long as the person giving it understands that it's bunk, and takes care to ensure that real medicine wouldn't be more effective, it doesn't seem too outrageous to use it.
The problem happens when people make money off pushing homeopathy where real medicine is needed. (Or when Prince Charles spends money studying whether homeopathy is real, and gives homeopathic medicine to animals who presumably don't get the same placebo benefits.)
If it's not exploitative or dangerous, and the people taking it are too ignorant to understand that it's bunk, I don't see the harm. (But I admit there are ethical issues with using placebos.)
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
"Also, we can pretty much write off Prozac because it has become the Ritalin of middle-age. By that I mean that a wide array of causes, behavioral, social, or chemical, are causing a problem, and instead of resolving it (through behavioral therapy or psychological analysis) the doc is just writing for the same treatment. Bobby is loud, give him Adderall. Bobby is sad, give him Prozac. Some people really need the chemically altering action of Prozac to be happy- some people just want to buy a month's worth of 10mg Problem Solver from CVS... i digress."
How exactly does behavioral therapy or physiological analysis "resolve" a problem? If your wife left you, will therapy bring her back? No, only the way you feel can be addressed. The fundamental problem will never be resolved. I would be thoughtful before taking a drug like Prozac, but I'm not swayed by the unscientific protestant-ethic-based theory that solving a problem should be hard or time-consuming.
Is that everyone I know who believes in homeopathy also believes that the climate is getting warmer and humans are the cause of that. When asked why they believe in global warming the answer is, invariably, "Because science has proven it." More questioning leads to the point that the consensus of scientists is that global warming is real, and human caused. Fair enough, they lack the education and/or will to investigate it themselves, so they rely on the prevailing expert opinion.
However you then confront them that the prevailing expert opinion is that homeopathy is junk and they start twisting things, calling up studies of dissenters, distrusting scientists, and so on.
In other words, they like the "scientific consensus" explanation when it supports their views, but don't when it doesn't. Unfortunately, I think this is extremely common with most people. They just buy whatever explains their world view, they don't apply the rigor they sometimes like to pretend.
Acupuncture is stress-relieving because it stimulates the release of endorphins, which is a quaint way of saying it gets you high. Less stress is, incidentally, better for your health. But it's nothing special about acupuncture. It's something special about stress-relieving activity. You could spend an hour sitting in a peaceful place reading a good book and get the same benefit.
IAALS.
--And I've also searched far and wide, and talked to a lot of people and experienced a lot of things which orthodox science must stretch to such lengths to explain as to sound utterly ridiculous.
Arstechnica's understanding of understanding of Homeopathy is limited in the common way. --They were trying to understand Homeopathy using conventional theory, and shamefully enough, the various editors of the homeopathy essays which they were knocking down like so many straw men, were doing the same thing and of course, were getting nowhere.
Strangely, in Ars' multi-page screed, the one theory they did not attack, or even deign to recognize although it is not an uncommon idea, is based on Energy. --As in Chi, (the major component of 3000 years of Chinese understanding of the universe. Surely they've heard of it. I know everybody here has.)
Energy is is the functional force behind acupuncture, reiki, various forms of kung fu, auras and numerous other phenomenon which are hotly discounted by scientists who haven't bothered to explore any direct experiences with the medium which binds the entire universe together. Essentially, with regard to homeopathy, all matter has an energetic signature and vibrates accordingly. --And we're not talking about classic atomic vibration. It's another quality altogether, although from my observations, it is linked closely to electromagnetism.
I'd love to see Energy quantified, and I strongly suspect that it has been in the darker recesses of some black-budget lab deep under a mountain someplace. --The vibration of one object or being can affect the matter around it so that it is passed on and emulated. If you put intention into water of a certain energetic flavor, then the water can take on that same energetic quality. It cannot be measured in terms of dissolved particulate matter, nor through molecular configuration, nor through misbegotten theories of quantum entanglement, (all theories which were put forth and appropriately knocked down in the article). Energy is it's own thing.
Further, energy is the medium from which consciousness is made. --My understanding is that the soul is a highly complex energetic expression which settles into the brains of these human mammals we walk around in, and directs that animal's activities. When the body dies, the soul moves on. This explains everything; all the out of body experiences, the light at the end of the tunnel, phantom limbs, ghosts, Auras, possession and why things like Reiki and Homeopathy work.
For anybody who is interested in this, Reiki is an interesting subject. --I was exploring Reiki, trying to get something happening, (and had been getting only the most subtle feelings which I wasn't sure were anything), until that one time when my friend was suffering from a headache. I asked if I might try Reiki with her, and she said, sure. So I began. My hands were over her head and I was going through the motions, trying to clear my own intentions out of the way to channel the correct energies as I envisioned them, and unlike all the other times, this time I got whammied with a sudden feeling of extreme heat. It was like somebody had blasted my palms with air from a paint stripper gun. It jolted both me and my friend so that she immediately looked at me with wide eyes. "Wow! I felt that! What did you do?"
"Heck if I know." --They don't teach this stuff in highschool science. Almost nobody understands this stuff properly, and those who do can't explain it very well. --The best we mundane folk have are a bunch of Chinese metaphors and Castaneda stories.
Anyhow, my friend's headache didn't go away, and I went home feeling really sick and promptly threw up. I felt much better after that. --I found out the next day that my friend had thrown up as well shortly after I left, and also went to bed feeling much better. And no, there were no drugs or alcohol involved and the only food we'd eaten was whatever we'd each had before I'd arrived that evening. --In any case, I'm
If your wife left you, that is no longer a problem.
The way you feel about it is the problem. The way you act because of that is the problem.
Whatever problems you had before she left you are gone.
Well, you're probably still broke, or even more broke because she also took all your money when she left, and have probably lost a friend or a gardener as well, but I digress.
Anyway, therapy (which I consider only a substitute for friends who'll talk to you - and, more importantly, listen to you; I've had both and friends are both better and cheaper) resolves a problem by first showing you it is not the immediate problem at all.
"Fundamental" problems tend to occupy your attention, so you don't see the real, immediate problems. Problem is (I'm using that word way too much now), if suddenly your fundamental problem was resolved, i.e. your wife came back, your immediate problems would seem to have disappeared altogether. However, whatever led to her leaving in the first place remains unresolved, and your new feelings for her would never be the same anyway.
Basically, save for foing back in time and preventing certain things to happen, there is no solving those fundamental problems.
There's just dealing with the consequences.
Problems are only solved in maths. In life, they are dealt with.
Ignore this signature. By order.
you science-nazis
Oh, this should be good..
Only once something can be clearly dismissed is it okay to see it as a fraud.
That's why we call Homeopathy a fraud. It never had any plausibility in the first place.
Also did you know that the pill can kill (yes, kill. Not lessen, fucking KILL) a womens sex drive? My wife had this problem.
Is that what she told you?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
No doctor in their right mind would call the Rhythm Method (what you are referring to) a fraud. It just isn't nearly as effective as the pill, or virtually any other common method of contraception. All published statistics on birth control effectiveness refer to the liklihood of a woman getting pregnant over the course of a year - your anecdotal story doesn't even provide a single year - and it's a single data point - which is to say, it's completely worthless for the purposes of evaluation of effectiveness.
All hormonal birth control methods are outrageously more effective than all non-hormonal methods (leaving out abstinance for the purposes of this discussion). This includes the pill, implants, vaginal rings, shots, and some IUDs. They also have very real side effects (bad: blood clots, mood swings, good: prevents cervical cancer, prevents ovarian cysts), though different dosages, delivery mechanisms and drug combinations impact this. Do what works for you, but don't try to sell the rest of the world about how "the pill is unnecessary" or "natural birth control is just as good" because that's a load of crap.
Just a heads up: After you do have a child and are trying to prevent another immediately your wife (a hypochondriac perhaps?) will likely tell you about how breast feeding for a long duration (multiple years) can be an effective form of birth control. It is in fact documented to be 'effective' in the third world, and can be effective here.
There are also side effects to this, the regularity of feeding required to maintain the necessary hormone levels will impact her sex drive - and for many people is completely impractical in the first world (if, for example, she works for a living.) There's that and the fact that 'effective' in this case still means less effective than every 'normal' form of birth control available.
Now, on the general issue of 'natural medecine'. There are TONS of natural medicines that work REALLY well. We identify them, purify them, and they become drugs, at which point some people decide they are no longer 'natural'. (what, because we know why they work?). The rest of the commonly known herbal remedies you can buy today have not become drugs because they don't work.
However, the Society of Homeopaths refused to sanction the people giving this dangerous advice, presumably out of solidarity with their colleagues or whatever. This is just evidence that, if you accept homeopathy, you are validating all the loons as well as anyone who may take part in the dubious placebo-peddling approach (something I pretty thoroughly disapprove of, but which is significantly less bad than the massive levels of delusion which lets people really, truly believe in these things.
The problem I have with scientific examination of pseudo-science, is that they lump everybody who does under the same umbrella and when doing research just pick the first best weirdo who says he knows the stuff. The reason pseudo-science is under such low regard is that most of the people doing are just schucks who want to make money without any education. But the reputation for the art comes from real masters who number just a few in the whole world. In Russia homeopathy is very widespread, but only a few are actually regarded specialists who know what they are talking about. Same with acupuncture. Most people doing it are just what you say, stress-relievers (sp?) and such. But there are a very few who actually know how the stuff works. The reason I'm convinced is that my brother was actually saved by one such "pseudo-doctor" from china when he was little. He was dying from a brain-condition and none of the ordinary doctors could do anything, but this guy could. Sounds freaky, but he could tell what was wrong with you just by looking at you. Quite different from the usual acupuncterists he never used more than 2-3 needles under 15-20 min. He had to sons and to his dismay one of the sons who had "the gift" didn't want to be a doctor and the other one didn't have it at all. I was 6-7 at the time so I definetely remember it all myself (no 'my moms uncle's friend told me'). Scientists are keen on disproving such things cause it's something they really don't understand and when something they don't understand works better than their own stuff it's not funny anymore. But I think it's great that they disprove the ordinary schucks who just try to make money out of it.
Warning: I am extremely biased against Chiropractory and believe it should be shut down. Any arguing with me on it will be pointless. I am sure you are a nice person and so is your chiro but I look at it as snake oil. I am not going to try to convince you not to go but I will give you some facts. Maybe talk to your "doctor" about it but if you decide to continue seeing one, that is your choice and I hope it works out for you...
I can agree with the parent comment. My wife was given a neck adjustment on Dec 28 2003 and on the 2nd of 2004 had a mild (thankfully) stroke. It appears what happened was when the chiro torqued her neck one of her vertebrae moved. Of course a little while later the muscles pushed it back in place which they will do. At the same time a blood vessel was pinched off to her brain causing her left eye to not track quite as well as her right. She is fine but she still gets a bit of vertigo. Talked to a lawyer about it and they said unless we were willing to go through years of heartache and stress her time would be more worthwhile spent telling people her story. Her GP informed her that she has another patient who is middle age who's right arm is now useless due to a bad chiro adjustment.
My wife was 30 at the time of the stroke, in perfect health as she was an avid runner even doing a half-marathon, doesn't drink, never smoked, so not even close to being someone classified as a normal risk for strokes.
My wife isn't bitter, I am I admit as I had to look her in the eyes when she was terrified as we didn't know what was happening and whether or not this was the beginning of something bigger. She thinks the big problem was that the chiro glossed over the risks, she doesn't even recall ever being told about them. She had been a semiregular patient for 5 years for lower back pain (which visits to a physical therapist fixed in a couple months after she stopped going to the chiro). I agree with the person up the thread that Chiros should stay away from the neck area and as well they should drop the whole "latent intelligence" BS that moving bones makes your organs work better.
An interesting read (albeit definitely not an unbiased view on the world of chiropractory is book called Spin Doctors, which you can order on Amazon or Chapters .
I'm sure you can find any number of normally healthy people who had a stroke and died unexpectedly. It happens every day. Far more people visit a chiropractor receive and adjustment and get on with their lives. Ever heard "correlation is not causation"?
For years I lived with neck and shoulder pain that doctors could do nothing about, short of surgery to fuse two vertebrae. Eventually I also developed a numbness that reached down into my arm. After I finally broke down and visited a chiropractor, at the suggestion of my doctor, I was on the road to a pain free life. Now I visit one every now and then when the pain starts returning.
Can they cure disease? No, and a decent one will never make such claims. Are they providing a valuable needed treatment? YES.
The fact that you mentioned a lawyer without ever mentioning any sort of PROOF is telling. You know, my dad died of a heart attack after having used a scuba tank for years, maybe I should sue the makers of scuba tanks.
My oldest son is 11 months to the day younger than my oldest daughter. "Breast feeding as birth control" advocates can kiss my counter-anecdotal butt.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It starts with the premise that homeopathy is a fraud and that it cannot work. and goes on from there.
All the "science" goes into proving that homeopathy can't work. It doesn't start with a clean, unbiased slate and investigate; It starts with a conclusion and simply works to only prove that conclusion. Their foundation allows them to automatically discount any evidence of workability as anecdotal, lies or placebo effect.
Maybe homeopathy works or maybe it doesn't (and I'm not claiming it does), but that whole investigation isn't science and doesn't use scientific method.
I not only find that disturbing, but the fact that no one noticed that is even more disturbing.
We accept bad "science" if it supports our opinions, and I think that's dangerous.
A little knowledge is dangerous.
I used to be a Homeopathic Practitioner. Really I was. I was a Traditional Homeopathic Practitioner. There is a huge difference between 'modern' homeopathy and traditional. The split happened in the late 60s and both forms have diverged significantly since.
The modern approach is inclusive of as many therapies as you can shake a stick at, while the die-hard traditional won't adopt anything else.
So what is it?
- Homeopathy is based on the concept of "Like Cures Like" - So the best thing you can do for a hangover is to take a spoonful of brandy the next morning.
- Homeopathy works. Why do you take Quinine tablets for malaria? Because taking quinine causes similar symptoms to malaria.
Ever had eczema or skin issues? Ever taken coal byproducts for it? That's a Sulphur based product - Another homeopathic remedy.
Have a bruise? Want to get rid of it? Get some Arnica cream. Bitten by a mosquito? Try Urtica cream. Want an effective disinfectant? Try Calendula. All of these are proven homeopathic creams that work. No faith required. Sure, nowadays there's alternative remedies for general conditions like this, but there is no reason to discount alternative and older remedies.
- All of what we term 'immunization' is Homeopathy in its traditional form. You ingest a serum made from the very substance that causes the disease.
- Quackery was just that. Real doctors in the 1800's and beyond (especially in the US) used Homeopathic remedies whilst the quacks used opium, alcohol and wild herbs as a panacea.
- Homeopathy has a rating system. All remedies ending with an 'X' are dilutions eg 1 part per 10. All those ending in 'C' are 1 part per 100 and so on - following the roman numeric system.
- Homeopathy works from the general to the specific. Never the other way around. There is a huge difference in the efficacy of super-high dilutions 'M' for example and 'X'. A practitioner worth their salt would never give an 'M' first off. Very high dilutions are only used once a particular condition has been aggravated and only rarely.'X' and 'C' have measurable concentrations of whatever remedy is used. It is not water.
- Remedies are 'proven'. That means that a statistical sample of people are given 'X' doses of a remedy and observed closely as in all drug trials, looking for symptomatology. If the remedy gives consistent results then it is tested with patients who exhibit similar symptoms.
- Remedies come as creams, powders, solutions, pills, sprays, inhalations and injection (hypodermic).
- Homeopathy has a pharmacopoeia of thousands of proven remedies.
- Homeopathy ONLY WORKS if a condition is diagnosed properly. As proper diagnosis involves checking for a myriad of 'symptoms', it becomes a challenge to arrive at the right diagnosis. Get it wrong and the remedy doesn't work. There are a few pitfalls like that. I say that because if you've been given a remedy and it didn't work, then that's probably why.
Modern Homeopathy however has really gone astray. That's why I got out of it. Modern homeopathy considers that effective remedies can be made by shining a light through a slide that purportedly has the same 'vibrations' as the remedy is supposed to represent. And this is supposed to work? That sort of stuff goes against the grain of traditional practice and I would have to agree with many of the placebo comments made here.
I know I won't convince many, but when you see it working properly, all doubts fade.
Just keep an open mind. One day you may need it.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Like does cure like.
That's the way it works with alcohol.
But because of the circumstances, I doubt most scientists would risk their careers investigating "cold fusion" or homeopathy, or even be able to get funding to do so in the first place.
Plenty of people investigated cold fusion. Some people found something. Most people didn't. The people who found something couldn't reliably replicate their results. Research continues.
What's clear, though, is that some well-meaning people ended up doing bad science because they fell for the hype and let it influence their results. That is an entirely justified black eye for them, as guarding against that is pretty much the point of science.
I think we shouldn't dismiss her (or the entire field of homeopathy) just because of that experiment.
A homeless guy in my neighborhood is convinced that there is a sinister, far-reaching conspiracy against him, orchestrated by his estranged and abusive father. Now sure, it could be true. We probably shouldn't dismiss him or his theories just because he sounds like every other paranoid lunatic and has no proof. But let's just say I'm not rushing to investigate, either.
Hmm - proof that anything can get modded up on /. :)
Uh, the whole point of the double-blind random clinical trial is that it is the only known way to distinguish between drug effects and placebo effects.
What other way would you propose? Tell people to try it and ask them how they feel? The plural of anecdote isn't data. They do precisely that in double-blind trials and guess what - quite a few people report feeling better when in fact they were given only sugar pills...
And the objection isn't to the concept that less dose administered = greater effect. The objection is to the concept that you can take a preparation that is unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but solvent and have it have any effect at all. If the does contains nothing but water, by what mechanism could it convey any effect at all?
If somebody wanted to rely on the prayers of a minister instead of taking a drug I'd not complain about the minister's actions. He would be completely up-front about the fact that he believes that what he is doing is completely supernatural and is not anything that can be relied on to have any particular outcome beyond whatever some deity intends to have happen.
The problem with homeopathy is that it masquerades as science by asserting that a particular concoction can with some degree of certainty promote a cure for a malady, and it asserts that the effect is somehow natural.
If an effect is natural then it is subject to the laws of nature. It must therefore be testable, and the fact that no effects have been found in suitable experiments forces us to conclude that it has no effect.
Nonetheless, you seem to believe that our current understanding of science is sufficient to reject homeopathy; I don't.
Here's some further food for thought from that wikipedia article on homeopathy (emphasis is mine):
- Hahnemann pioneered and always favored the centesimal or "C scale", diluting a substance 1 part in a 100 of diluent. Some homeopaths developed a decimal scale (D or X) diluting the substance 1 part in 10 of diluent. Hahnemann never used this scale but it was very popular throughout the 19th century and still is in Europe.
- It should be noted however that not all homeopaths advocated extremely high potencies. Many of the early homeopaths were originally doctors and generally tended to use lower potencies such as "3x" or "6x", rarely going beyond "12x". A good example of this approach is that of Dr. Richard Hughes, who dismissed the extremely high potencies as unnecessary. This was the dominant pattern in Europe throughout the 1820s to 1930s, but in America many practitioners developed and preferred the higher dilutions. This trend became especially exemplified by James Tyler Kent and dominated US homeopathy from the 1850s until its demise in the 1940s. The split between lower and higher dilutions also followed ideological lines with the former stressing pathology and a strong link to conventional medicine, while the latter emphasized vital force, miasms and a spiritual take on sickness.[34][35]
- Homeopathy has also been integrated into the national health care systems of numerous countries including India, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom. (...) Some homeopathic treatment is covered by the national insurance coverage of several European countries, including France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Luxembourg. (...) Homeopathy is currently integrated into the national health care system of Mexico and in 1985, a presidential decree established the first homeopathic school as well as regulations specifiying training requirements for homeopathic doctors.[102] (...) Homeopathy has been regulated in other South American countries, such as Columbia, since the beginning of the 20th century. In Brazil, Homeopathy is included in the national health system and since 1991, physicians who want to practice homeopathy must complete 2,300 hours of education prior to receiving the proper licenses.
Now whether you believe the "water memory" thesis or not, you have to admit that homeopathy is not synonymous with those high dillutions, and most practitioners use dillutions lower than what we give sharks credit for. Furthermore, America is where the highest dillutions were used and also where homeopathy has had the least success. (It's also the country where the [A]M[edical]A[ssociation] had the most success in eliminating competition to conventional medicine, but that's a different story.)Last but not least, a very often overlooked reason why homeopathy is so successful where it is allowed to flourish and where crooks are weeded out is the correctly applied interview, which provides a full picture of a patient's health and seeks to resolve most negative symptoms. Contrast this with the crook who tends to either rush through or dispense with the interview altogether and prescribe a highly dilluted remedy for the most troublesome symptom.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
If your sensitivity to these toxins is low enough that you'll chock their side effects up to the disease you're fighting, you won't notice the difference, but if, like me, aspartame makes you fucking sick by itself, then the natural option is now the only option.
You can't take the sky from me...