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NHS Should Stop Funding Homeopathy, Says Parliamentary Committee
An anonymous reader writes "Homeopathic remedies work no better than placebos, and so should no longer be paid for by the UK National Health Service, a committee of British members of parliament has concluded. In preparing its report, the committee, which scrutinizes the evidence behind government policies, took evidence from scientists and homeopaths, and reviewed numerous reports and scientific investigations into homeopathy. It found no evidence that such treatments work beyond providing a placebo effect." Updated 201025 19:40 GMT by timothy: This recommendation has some people up in arms.
Heomeopathy = Placebo so no surprise there . . .
The Brits seem to be on the forefront of pseudo-science debunking.
Good job, mates!
Ben Goldacre for stopping this lunacy. His weekly Bad Science column and website have been invaluable in combating woo.
This is frigging awesome. We shouldn't have to pay for stupid crap which idiots want to consume because they think it makes them feel better. Absolutely retarded to even start funding it in the first place.
Piss off, Homeopathy.
Let them do something like, oh, dispense only one-tenth as much for each prescription, then make the patient dilute it prior to use, like the US insurers that force people to get double-dose pills and split them.
Oh, that's right -- since diluting homeopathic remedies makes them stronger, they'd be putting everyone at risk of overdose. Never mind, then.
If the homeopathy is performing as well as placebo, but doctors offering placebo treatments do so at a risk of litigation, wouldn't the Homeopathy still be better than nothing?
Or is No Treatment = Placebo?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
It's worth noting that homeopathy != all natural remedies nor does it mean the only medication that works come from pharmaceutical companies and doctors.
Or maybe it's not worth noting. I had to look what homeopathy actually was though, since a lot of "natural" remedies get lumped into it as well. Even vitamins/minerals or probiotics tend to be looked on as non-traditional medicine and thus highly suspect.
Maybe. One of the things they do though is try to make sure that they spend money on treatments that do the most good, so it still might not make any sense to be paying for magic water for patient A instead of more pills for patient B.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Never underestimate the power of the placebo effect, it can do wonders! It can even make you drunk!
With that said, homepathy, like religion, although it can help people, technically it's still fraud.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
It's worth pointing out, for those who don't know much about the British parliamentary system, that the title of this post isn't true. One of the Parliamentary Select Committees has recommended that the NHS should stop funding homoeopathy. This is not a decision and will not automatically result in the money being withdrawn. This should be seen as the starting of a conversation on the issue in Parliament. In reality, the government has effective control over public spending and unless and until the Department of Health decides to change the way its money is spent then there will be no change in practice.
Homeopathy is pretending something will make you better. Placebos is pretending that nothing will make you better.
Administering placebos is considered bad practice, because people who are ill want to be given treatment to make them better. It's also why you don't tend to see drugs companies showing how much better their product works than a placebo. If you have to compare your new product with an inert sugar pill you might as well admit it's shit up front.
That's not to say that placebos don't work.
While I have no problem of people hemopathisizing themselves out of the gene pool... I can see a lot of parents out there choosing this for their children and killing them.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
From the fine article:
"Either we are governed by evidence and science, or by Prince Charles." --Edzard Ernst
Awesome.
-Peter
Unless, of course, you count the vast array of herbs used through the ages that pharmaceuticals are now based on.
For every herb that has real efficacy, there are hundreds that don't.
That's how the herbal or "natural" treatments or whatever you want to call them rip people off: they highlight the one herb that actually works, and then people just think that all work.
I understand that some actually do work. There' some intriguing evidence for some of them, like Omega-3 fatty acids and some potential for Kudzu extract for substance abuse. But the thing is, walk into any "health food" store to buy supplements (they're the only stores that sell multi-vitamins where you can get 'B' vitamins in equal doses) and the rows are broken down no by compounds, but by "ailments" and "conditions". For example: "sleep","back pain", "energy", etc.... and the things in those isles are just vitamins with herbs of questionable efficiency.
And some of the prices! I looked at St. John's Wort for depression and the price for them rivaled your typical pharmaceutical that's still under patent!
AND with herbs, there's no control for their manufacture. So one brand could be shit while another could actually be pretty good.
I wish the FDA or some other organization did real studies on these things to see what herbs are really effective and which ones are crap.
But combining this with a a earlier /. article about the placebo effect and modern drugs (http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/09/07/1526234/Placebos-Are-Getting-More-Effective)
You get that even if they only produce the placebo effect they will do as good as many popular current drugs for patients and without the horrible side effects that come with them.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Simon Singh is being currently driven to bankruptcy because of a libel suit in the UK, for saying exactly the same thing about Chiropractic remedies. I hope the homeopaths sue these MPs for libel, and just perhaps, that will make lawmakers think about reforming the ridiculous British libel laws.
Don't worry. You can still get generic Placebin Hcl in convenient 100 mg doses. There. Feel better now?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
As everyone knows the more you dilute a Homeopatheic reagent the more powerful it becomes. Diluting their funding will only make them stronger.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
99% of homeopathy is simply people using random herbs that are ineffective
99.999% of homeopathy is either water or sugar.
Deleted
The difference between a placebo and homeopathy is the doctor prescribing a placebo KNOWS there is no medicinal value in what they are giving to a patient, whereas the person using homeopathy CLAIMS there will be a medicinal benefit.
In the former, the doctor is merely giving sugar pills (or something similar) in a controlled environment to test whether the person's condition is real or imagined, or is part of a study to see if a new medicine actually works.
In the latter, the person using homeopathy claims that by repeated dilutions of a mixture to the point there is no discernible ingredient other than water, that somehow, through some unknown conveyance, the water "remembers" what it was instilled with and thus, miraculously, can become effective at treating an ill.
So no, homeopathy is not better than nothing. If anything, it is more harmful because a) people with serious medical conditions do not seek out real medicine to alleviate what afflicts them, b) it sucks money from people without offering any evidence that what it claims to do actually takes place, c) it runs counter to every scientific principle of how things really work, thus dumbing down even further the public's understanding of how science is performed.
Granted, a and b aren't really that bad as it tends to cull the herd, but c is what exasperates those who use common sense by having to listen to such drivel.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
See how great government control of everything can be.
Except that
1. it took some actual evidence-medicine to separate the few that work from the thousands that don't work. There's a name for traditional medicine that actually worked: medicine. The whole alternative gang is the ones that don't.
2. That's irrelevant anyway, because that's not what homeopathy means. Homeopathy can be summarized like this:
A) You notice what herb or substance produces what symptoms. E.g., caffeine produces insomnia.
B) Like cures like. When someone comes to you complaining about insomnia, you give them something that causes insomnia. E.g., caffeine.
No, it's sadly not a joke. The ingredient in most real homeopathic sleeping pills is caffeine.
C) Except you don't really. You dillute it to the point where there's hardly even a mollecule of the original substance left. The dilutions used in homeopathy are all powers of 10. It goes like this:
1X = 1 part active substance in 10 parts water. But this is too concentrated. You don't give them this one.
2X = 1 part 1X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 1% active substance. Ditto.
3X = 1 part 2X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.1% active substance. Ditto.
4X = 1 part 3X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.01% active substance. Waay to concentrated still, you only use this one to make...
5X = 1 part 4X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.001% active substance. Still too concentrated.
Actual homeopathic remedies start can be anywhere between 10X and 100X. But there's the small problem of Avogadro's number. A 100X solution, you'd have to drink whole swimming pools of it, before an actual mollecule of caffeine actually entered your system to cure your insomnia.
D) But that's supposedly OK, because water somehow has "memory" and cures every symptom like a substance it ever encountered. (So I guess since a lot of water is more or less recycled, and so many people wank in the shower, tap water should be a bulletproof contraceptive.)
The whole thing is stupid on several levels. Not just the "like cures like" or "water memory" stupidity, but starting on the very fact that it focuses on "what causes the same _symptoms_?" instead of the actual pathogen or mechanism involved. If you went to a homeopath with a pain in the throat, he/she wouldn't look at whether you have a pharingitis or a thyroid cancer, but simply at what else causes a pain in the throat. And give you a dilluted version of that. But curing RL illnesses doesn't work that way. Imitating the symptoms doesn't cure a cancer, nor kill MRSA. It's what you get from a brand of "medicine" which appeared before microscopes and is based on little more than ignorance and wild guesses, and inability to distinguish between symptoms and cause of a disease.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I seem to recall an article about the testing of traditional medicines and their having the same issues of the placebo's having as good a desired effect as the medicine itself. Heck, the FDA has approved the prescription of placebos themselves as medical treatments! Perhaps we just need to throw all our pills in the trash...
Here you are unabashedly wrong. As someone who designs drug trials for a major pharmaceutical company, I can tell you we very often prefer to test our new drugs versus placebo, and we absolutely will report those results. Part of this is because you obviously have a much better chance of demonstrating effectiveness if your competitor is 'nothing,' whereas using an active comparator (product X) runs the risk of making you look no better than product X. This doesn't mean all products tested against placebo are "shit;" it simply means the company is minimizing the risk of a failed trial.
Of course, how well your new drug works compared to existing therapies is exactly what many healthcare providers and payers want to know, which is why regulators increasingly demand active comparator trials. In some countries reimbursement is explicitly linked to how well you fare against whatever the current standard of care is.
Placebos is pretending that nothing will make you better.
That would be more akin to the Nocebo effect. Placebo is when the patient's belief that the treatment will make them better, makes them better. Nocebo is when the patient's belief that the treatment will not make them better (or will make them worse in specific ways) causes them to not get better or to develop the conditions they fear.
it's also why you don't tend to see drugs companies showing how much better their product works than a placebo.
In the United States, in order to market a drug is has to get FDA approval. Part of the FDA approval process is a series of double blind studies where the treatment's outcomes are compared to placebo outcomes. Every drug company has to beat the placebo to get to market, and while placebo comparisons might not be all that common (I've heard a few in direct to consumer advertisements) they are clearly advertised in pharma funded continuing medical education conferences and brochures targeted to medical professionals.
Placebo and Nocebo effects have a huge impact on medical advances. It is a subject we are just starting to really research. Their effects are greatly effected by region and social atmosphere. And the placebo effect changes with us. Most of the major depression drugs that have become common names in the US are showing performance on par with placebo these days. The same drugs that 20 years ago beat the placebo effect with no problem, today would not have made it passed initial testing.
I can't imagine a world in which a placebo would cure cancer. But pain suppression, anxiety, depression, pretty much anything related to cognitive function can potentially be "cured" through the use of placebo.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This is where all our taxes have been going.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
I don't understand why people can't just be allowed to love one another regardless of gender without all the yelling and fingerpointing...What? Oh, sorry. Must get new glasses...
I've heard this a lot, if there's no risk then why bother? You have to consider that people who really need treatment sometimes go see an homeopath instead of a real doctor or won't go trough chemotherapy or some other kind of treatment because of these qwacks.
I love the placebo effect, only when used at the right time, on the right people. The fact that they are selling homeopathic products at the pharmacy here in Canada is, in my opinion, a perversion of the professional title that pharmacists hold.
The strongest "remedies" are diluted more than the total number of atoms in the universe.
But that makes them stronger! Oh yes!
I'd call it snake oil, but that would suggest there's some snake or some oil in that pure, diluted water.
You should try it for yourselves.
As someone who was rescued by homeopathic medicine as a child, where all traditional medicine was causing more damage through side effects, I am quite sad to see so much derision when nobody speaking has actually given it a shot.
Still works for me now... blame the placebo effect all you want... but give it a try too
okay, but they do have a placebo effect, so why not fund them? if people are taking them, they are getting some relief. many people that are relying on homeopathic remedies will just resort to using the much more expensive prescription options. will this really save them money?
i have tried many homeopathic remedies and have never got any effect from them. i attribute this to the fact that i'm generally a glass 1/2 empty person so i expect medecine not to work. no placebo effect for me. that being said, i understand that the placebo effect improves people's lives so i'd never knock them for pursuing homeopathic remedies.
Even if the government stops paying for homeopathic medicine, you can just take your last subsidized dosage and add it to a gallon of distilled water. Not only do you now have more of it, it's now phenomenally more powerful! And when you're almost out, you can do it again! And it only gets better!
Seriously, why ever pay for this stuff more than once?
The difference between a placebo and homeopathy is the doctor prescribing a placebo KNOWS there is no medicinal value in what they are giving to a patient, whereas the person using homeopathy CLAIMS there will be a medicinal benefit.
In the case of placebo, in order for it to "work", the patient must believe that they are being treated, thus the doctor must CLAIM there will be a medicinal benefit. If the doctor tells the patient they are getting a placebo, it would likely have a dramatic effect on the potency of the placebo.
In the former, the doctor is merely giving sugar pills (or something similar) in a controlled environment to test whether the person's condition is real or imagined, or is part of a study to see if a new medicine actually works.
That is a common usage at this time. But research is showing that the placebo effect may have a leveragable value. Using a patient's belief in the treatment as part of the treatment. There was an excellent article that came out a few weeks ago that was starting to touch on some of these topics.
In the latter, the person using homeopathy claims that by repeated dilutions of a mixture to the point there is no discernible ingredient other than water, that somehow, through some unknown conveyance, the water "remembers" what it was instilled with and thus, miraculously, can become effective at treating an ill.
Have you ever tried to explain the physics, chemistry, and biology that goes into how or why a certain drug works? Your average (American) patient would have just as good of understanding of that as the would "water remembering what is was instilled with". In either case, to most consumers, it is a black box, a magic pill, a piece of hope.
So no, homeopathy is not better than nothing. If anything, it is more harmful because a) people with serious medical conditions do not seek out real medicine to alleviate what afflicts them, b) it sucks money from people without offering any evidence that what it claims to do actually takes place, c) it runs counter to every scientific principle of how things really work
I'm not in favor of unregulated homeopathy. I would hope that most people would look to traditional services first. But if the homeopathy is performing as well as placebo in double blind studies, then I don't see why it isn't to be considered a viable option to trained medical professionals. Unless you are saying that no treatment is better than placebo?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_htqDCP-s
With that much actual material, you'd have to dilute them in the ocean to get the proper homeopathic dilution levels of "strength".
Also, thank the water gods that the British are coming to their senses. I wish we in the US could, but we're run by crackpots. Even the Huffington Post, the darling of the new media is run by and panders to the insane.
Perhaps too strongly, maybe you should take a pill.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
About 10 years ago, I read a very nice sequence of papers in La Recherche (the French equivalent of "Scientific American").
The conclusions were very instructive:
- there is no evidence of any kind of effect of homeopathic medicines by themselves
- however, even after accounting sample biases, there was mild evidence that people followed by homeopaths were in better health overall, and this at a fraction of the cost of "scientific" medicine.
The papers suggested that to propose a homeopathic cure, the doctor has to take the time to inquire a lot about the patient's medical history, their mood and minor health issues (do you have gases? how often? ...). As a result, the homeopath has a much more complete picture of the patient's symptoms. In most benign illnesses, traditional medicine is of very limited usefullness anyhow, not much more effective than placebo indeed, and most conditions cure themselves alone.
But when a serious condition occurs (early signs of cancers, hormonal imbalances...), the homeopath is much more inclined to detect the change and prescribe additional examinations, thus playing a major preventive role.
Adding to this that the actual costs of homeopathic cures is ridiculously low, the conclusion from La Recherche was that, even though the scientific basis for homeopathy was wrong, from a public health perspective, it was better to keep the system as is, keep teaching homeopathy in medical schools and refund homepathic cures.
about the guy who fatally overdosed on homeopathic medicine?
He forgot to take it.
Ummm.. not sure where you're getting that from. They may not put it in their advertising, but the package insert for any scheduled drug includes information of effectiveness vs. placebo, in the clinical studies section (after all the adverse effects sections, where relevant information of incidence compared to placebo). Hell, I've even seen it in advertising (usually when they make a claim of effectiveness that is unproven, they include the no-better-than-a-placebo-in-controlled-trials disclaimer at the end of the ad in an overvoice or in small type (in print) so that people dismiss it.
For people who actually read the full package insert (and not just the black box warnings), the information is there -- it's required to be, by law.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Of course, testing with a placebo is also beneficial for minimizing the possibility of labeling your product with negative side-effects. The placebo effect works both ways; minor side-effects like "dry mouth", "itching", etc. are often reported just because they took a pill. If you don't test with a control group on placebos, you might show greater efficacy, but you'll also show more side-effects.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Homoeopathic remedies are so good I've had a special "dispenser" fitted to my house... ...as a secondary function, if you turn the controls the other way it even delivers hot water!
In eastern India, where it's common.
It does have one thing going for it - homoeopathic medicine is delicious! It's essentially little globules of sugar (except the liquid ones - which pretty much evaporate on your tongue anyway). Much more preferable to regular medicine : )
Some research does show certain molecules working in high dilutions. I'm not convinced, though intrigued, and the researchers are as clueless as anyone else (and good enough to admit it instead of making shit up).
J. Sainte-Laudy, N. Boujenaini and Ph. Belon. Confirmation of biological effects of high dilutions. Effects of submolecular concentrations of histamine and 1-, 3- and 4-methylhistamines on human basophil activation. Inflammation Research, Volume 57, Supplement 1 / April, 2008
Brown V, Ennis M. Flow-cytometric analysis of basophil activation: inhibition by histamine at conventional and homeopathic concentrations. Inflamm Res. 2001 Apr;50 Suppl 2:S47-8.
I think the Brits did the prudent thing by pulling the money until it was confirmed to work, but right now I'd label it [citation needed] instead of [outright wrong]. More research, m'lord?
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Richard Dawkins must be beaming.
All you'd need is a glass of water, and you'd never be found.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
... you are making sick people healthy, but not the way we want you to.
If there were a way to cure AIDS with the placebo effect, would we pass it by?
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Our family has been treated by homeopathy in several cases when our GP and the specialists of the field got to dead-end.
One of the most notable case was a back pain, which grew more and more intolerable during the months. The suspect after several examinations, X-Rays, RMIs was a deformed vertebrae. Eventually the only professional medical advice dispensed was a recommendation to start taking strong pain killer on a regular basis, "to prevent the brain to remember the pain, even if it is no longer there".
Homeopathy was tried at this stage to try to find if possible a more natural pain killer than the recommended pharma product, with a huge list of possible side effects, including addiction.
The quick diagnosis of the homeopathy provider was, that the pain has got nothing to do with the malformed vertebrae, instead, the lack of a certain mineral from the daily diet. A few days after taking the supplement the back pain went away.
Go figure. No matter how unscientific the homeopathy diagnosis was, it helped more than all the services of the medical profession, without any concrete health risk, knowingly associated with the approved medicine.
if they are ruling it out because it works no better then placebos then i guess the real drug companies should watch out http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all
So what if other people use homeopathic medicines, it's their choice. So what if it's a placebo? Placebos are actually more effective than certain chemical medications which has been funded.
Ok, so you need to believe it to work before the placebo effect takes place, and just because you don't believe does not mean others don't and they actually benefit from it.
What non-believers believe is irrelevant; truth is irrelevant. What is relevant is that this improves people's wellbeing. It gets the job done... ignorance *is* bliss.
Part of this is because you obviously have a much better chance of demonstrating effectiveness if your competitor is 'nothing,' whereas using an active comparator (product X) runs the risk of making you look no better than product X.
So do you/they run the active comparator test and not publish the results if they're not better than X, or do you/they not run the test at all because if they weren't better than X they'd be obligated to report it? Obviously if it performed much better than X they'd want to tell people, you're saying they don't always risk finding that out?
I was under the impression the most common dilution "30C", was something like 1/3000... But no, on further reading I discover it's 99.999999999999999999999999999999% water, as you say. i.e. even in a mass spectrometer we're not going to see any molecules of the original solution.
Deleted
The only reason that established science is not able to get homeopathy to work is because when they create their test samples they do not use un-tritiated water. As a result, when the tritium atom decays the released neutron disturbs the water memory via collisions rendering the sample useless.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
In the case of placebo, in order for it to "work", the patient must believe that they are being treated, thus the doctor must CLAIM there will be a medicinal benefit. If the doctor tells the patient they are getting a placebo, it would likely have a dramatic effect on the potency of the placebo.
Ah, but there is one extremely important difference: A doctor, faced with a patient with a condition treatable with real medication would prescribe the medication, *not* a placebo, in order to cure the patient. A homeopath, however, would give the patient their "cure", take their money, and then run away, leaving the person still suffering with their treatable condition, and without their hard-earned cash. Of course, this might not be so bad if the patient was suffering from, say, eczema. But imagine we're dealing with leukemia, and I think it's clear why homeopathy needs to be stopped.
Now explained for the first time!
I've heard some Homeopathy believers suggest quantum entanglement as the mechanism. It actually sounds somewhat plausible to anyone who knows just enough about quantum theory to know that it does 'really weird things', but doesn't know enough to have a sense of the limits of that weirdness.
Yep, if there's a positive effect then perhaps they should fund placebos. Homeopathy involves a lot of fuss diluting and diluting and so on, but a placebo could be a simple sugar pill.
Trouble is the psychological factor, I don't think you can give someone a sugar pill saying, "here, have a nice placebo" and still have it be effective, but if you can get them to believe a story about the essence of a substance left after repeated dilution being efficacious, then you get your placebo effect. Essentially, they're already funding it.
If there's a problem it would be with professional ethics (I'm not sure you can say "truth is irrelevant") and credibility of medicine. It might be better to leave faith based effects to the spirtual institutions, even though that's kind of unfair to secular materialists. Though if desperate enough, even a secular materialist humanist might be able to convince himself of something irrational. I knew one who believed he could come up with winning lottery numbers through dream analysis.
Loose lips lose spit.
The most common argument I've heard is about how these herbal remedies have been used for years/centuries and have been "proven" more effective than modern medicine. Pointing out that modern medicine is largely based on examining these ancient herbal remedies to isolate exactly what/if/why they are effective and then recreating it deflates that pretty nicely.
In a similar vein, there is little need to legalize medicinal marijuana joints when we can create synthetic THC that is identical to natural sources.
He forgot to take his medication.
I don't know where you're getting that, but they aren't allowed to make claims for effects that aren't any better than a placebo.
When they talk about placebos in disclaimers, they're usually talking about side effects that are not, or are not, much worse than placebos.
I'm not sure why they have to do that...surely if 5% of the people using my new drug in the trial got a headache, and 5% of the people taking the placebo also got a headache, we should assume that 5% of people just get headaches, and we shouldn't have to mention it. Likewise, if only 4% got one from the placebo, we should assume the drug I'm testing has a 1% chance of causing a headache, so have to mention 'In rare cases, drug x might cause headaches...' or whatever the phrasing is.
But, anyway, the only time I've heard them talk about placebos is in regard to side effects, not actual deliberate effects. If you can't demonstrate that your drug beats a placebo for a specific effect, you can't market it as treating that effect at all, not even with a disclaimer.
Which is, as others point out, causing some weird issues as some of the older antidepression drugs are currently no better than a placebo, although they were much better when first tested. There's not actually a process to pull drugs off the market for magically becoming 'less efficient' like that, and no one knows how that's happening. You can really only pull them off if the testing was fraudulent, or if there are later side effects discovered, or something like that, not 'placebos inexplicably got better'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
.. but then again, placebos have become more powerful more powerful and are catching up with non homeopathic drugs as well.
Arguably placebos DO have medicinal value since they do indeed alleviate symptoms. It's not patients imagining that they do it. If you don't believe me read about placebos for stomach ulcers. Furthermore, you can potentiate the effect of real drugs by delivering them to the patient in more "impressive" ways. This has a real and measurable effect on drug efficacy.
Antidepressants have been shown to work no better than a placebo... are they going to stop funding them as well? Or just stop funding them for mildly or moderately depressed patients?
Personally, I take a placebo every day, because scientists have conclusively proven it has a somewhat beneficial effect for more different conditions than any other medication known to mankind!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Perhaps now the non-medical solutions will fund double blind studies to prove the effects they've been illegally claiming for years? Perhaps?
If you're going to fund, as a matter of public policy, one set of delusions (homeopathy) associated with "cures", then you should also fund others: Scientology audits, "laying on of hands", reliquaries and trips to Lourdes, animist totem pouches, ad nauseum. Otherwise, it is government support of a particular set of religious beliefs
Oh! Wait! This is Great Britain. Never mind.
What is needed is a big public information campaign on the benefits of placebo medicine. Official NHS sugar pills could be manufactured and advertised. There would be no reason to be dishonest. Simply list all the benefits that placebo medicine has been shown to have, but make it clear that this is all psychosomatic.
People would expect their placebo pills to be effective, and so they would be effective, and so people would continue to expect them to be effective. . If we could perpetuate the circular logic necessary for this to work it could be a very useful treatment. I think adverts with colorful dancing placebo pills would help.
This is really good news!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Someone read the entire Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia into the Congressional Record thus making it "approved" by the government. Right!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
You know the one, DHMO
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
This just in. Apparently, Britain has been funding homeopathy...
But when a serious condition occurs (early signs of cancers, hormonal imbalances...), the homeopath is much more inclined to detect the change and prescribe additional examinations, thus playing a major preventive role.
Adding to this that the actual costs of homeopathic cures is ridiculously low, the conclusion from La Recherche was that, even though the scientific basis for homeopathy was wrong, from a public health perspective, it was better to keep the system as is, keep teaching homeopathy in medical schools and refund homepathic cures.
What a bullshit conclusion.
What they actually found is that improved attentiveness to changing health conditions improves detection and prevention of actual maladies. That's great. It has nothing, specifically, to do with homeopathy. The proper response to this is to encourage doctors/nurses to take more interest in their patient's general health, and to promote social awareness about health issues so that people will be informed and attentive to their own bodies.
NOT to keep on acting like a bullshit non-science is actually worth something when it isn't.
And wait a minute, WHAT FUCKING MEDICAL SCHOOL IS TEACHING HOMEOPATHY?! I mean, outside of a lecture that also covers demonic possession and hexes and other things that were a product of times when medicine was founded on unscientific ignorance.
The enemies of Democracy are
Homeopathy is about diluting some substance in water until it is so dilute it is impossible to detect in the final solution.
1. How to you get water that has nothing diluted in it beforehand? If you use tap water, it probably has numerous substances already diluted in it, and any attempt at purifying it will make it even more dilute (eg. stronger under the homeopathic rules).
2. Aren't there going to be harmful solutions too? You pick something that causes similar problems to cure it, so if you use something beneficial to start with, shouldn't it create a deadly substance? Since it is so dilute, you wouldn't be able to test for it chemically. Shouldn't you be able to cause someone to starve to death by diluting something like sugar? Do you have to be careful that you don't drop a single grain of sugar into the vat?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Quite literally, really. The memory of caffeine is anti-caffeine, somehow. Don't ask.
Ok, I lied, not really. They're not countering specific chemicals, they're countering _symptoms_. Told you it's dumb. If your insomnia was caused by some completely other substance, that acts nothing like the caffeine mollecule, e.g., by a sugar rush, the memory of caffeine would still counter it.
It's magical thinking at its finest, really.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Anonymous Coward here.
Is it possible that 'real' medicines also have no more than the placebo effect?
Unless you persuade 40m poor souls to go 'homeopathic.'
Grow up.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/26/mentalhealth.medicalresearch
This is another anecdote, but this story leads me to advise others to look into Homeopathy once contemporary options have run out.
A young woman I worked with in her early 20s started getting this crazy itching in her scalp. It felt like it was coming from inside her skull, and scratching would not alleviate the itch. It was driving her crazy, and she quit her job and just stayed home. It got so bad that she could no longer sleep.
She went through several specialists and 10's of thousands of dollars in tests. Nothing they gave her helped, and they deemed the problem inoperable. After months of no REM sleep her body started to shut down, her organs failing, and the doctors gave her only two weeks to live.
As a last ditch effort she went to a Homeopathic doctor. After a 30 minute consult he diagnosed her with a brain parasite, and gave her something to take (liquid copper if I recall correctly) for $50 and told her within two days she would feel better. He was spot on, the itching went away the very next day.
I talked to her mother a year later and she was still perfectly healthy.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
On the whole, I agree with you. Most supplements do nothing useful, and may have serious side effects if misused. My favorite one to bitch about is "it boosts your immune system." Folks, what would happen if it really "boosted" your immune system in any significant way? A few diseases leap to mind... Psoriasis. Rheumatoid Arthritis. Asthma. Anaphyactic shock. If you could really "boost your immune system" you would be D-E-A-D.
However, from time to time there's an herbal remedy that turns out to be scientifically well-grounded. For example, Alpha Lipoic Acid has a real (and measurable--I've tested) effect on my blood sugar. Melatonic definitely really does make me sleepy. And there's so much evidence for the usefulness of Vitamin D supplementation it's not funny. And fish-oil is quite effective in lowering heart disease risk. All validated by scientific data in well-reviewed journals. As is always the case, it's better to go to specifics. In many cases, you're right--the "medicalized" versions are better. However, in other cases, they're just better advertised. And in still other cases, they're worse.
The most important skill is that of managing your own health by monitoring your own health. The time when we could trust doctors and the "health industry" to care for us is long over. The smart doctors know this and appreciate it when they see that you know it too. The ones who don't like it... you didn't want to deal with them anyway, did you?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
> WHAT FUCKING MEDICAL SCHOOL IS TEACHING HOMEOPATHY?! I
In France, Spain, Italy, Brasil and perhaps a few other countries, you can not call yourself homeopath if you're not a certified general practionner with an additional specialization, complete with a university diploma.
As for encouraging doctors/nurses to take more interest in their patients: If they're any good, conventional doctors/nurses certainly have a lot of interest in the well being of their patient. That still does not equip them with the proper interviewing techniques to keep the needed level of attention.
There are more urgent issues in healthcare than eliminating homeopathy and greater scandals in medecine than correcting a fringe of innocuous homeopathy believers.
The collusion between big laboratories, World Health Organisation and western governments on the orchestration of the AH1N1 flu vaccination campaign, and various other "big medecine" abuses are far more detrimental (and costly) to public healthcare.
A company is bound to report side effects that come to light in trial, and also whether or not it affects the condition it's intended to alleviate.
Whether it's better or not than another active ingredient, they don't have to publish in the public domain. If it turns out that it is, they're perfectly at liberty to publish that, though not required.
What you'll also see is independant people perform efficacy tests of various brands of treatment to determine just how effective each one is versus the other. Having sat on a Research Ethics committee, I've seen those experiments pass through reasonably frequently to obtain ethical approval.
We have now gotten the message of what homeopathy is not. There is is in all caps about 6 times above. So what the hell is it?
-- QED
The difference between a placebo and homeopathy is the doctor prescribing a placebo KNOWS there is no medicinal value in what they are giving to a patient, whereas the person using homeopathy CLAIMS there will be a medicinal benefit.
Not quite correct. A lot of research into the placebo effect has shown that placebos do what they are purported to do ( and a lot of doctors are aware of this research ):
"A placebo described as a muscle relaxant will cause muscle relaxation and if described as the opposite, muscle tension.[36] A placebo presented as a stimulant will have this effect on heart rhythm, and blood pressure, but when administered as a depressant, the opposite effect.[37] The consumption of caffeine has been reported to cause similar effects even when decaffeinated coffee is consumed, although a 2003 study found only limited support for this.[38] Alcohol placebos can cause intoxication[39] and sensimotor impairment.[40] Perceived ergogenic substances can increase endurance[41] and weight-lifting ability,[42] leading to the question of whether placebos should be allowed in sport competition.[43] Placebos can help smokers quit.[44] Perceived allergens which are not truly allergenic can cause allergies.[45] Inventions such as psychotherapy can have placebo effects.[46]pp 164-173 Swimsuits have even been thought to increase swimmer speed.[47] The effect has been observed in the transplantation of human embryonic neurons into the brains of those with advanced Parkinson's disease.[48]"
In short, if a placebo is meant to harm someone, it will harm them. If it is meant to help them, it will help them. My personal interpretation is that we're a social animal, and if we feel that we're being taken care of by the group, then know we are worthy and should get better. If the group doesn't want us around anymore, we'll just curl up and die. But it's not just belief ( "I believe this will work, so it does" ) -- it's a practice. You actually have to *do* something -- administer some treatment, perform some procedure, etc. If you don't *do* it, the brain doesn't perceive that anything has been effected.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
In France, Spain, Italy, Brasil and perhaps a few other countries, you can not call yourself homeopath if you're not a certified general practionner with an additional specialization, complete with a university diploma.
So they require you to be a doctor to call yourself a doctor. That's good to know. But I didn't ask about them teaching real medicine to people who want to be homeopaths. I asked about teaching homeopathy. Google so far has turned up a list showing one university in France. Got any links?
That still does not equip them with the proper interviewing techniques to keep the needed level of attention.
Well it should be a lot easier to teach just that than to teach that plus the menagerie of bullshit remedies that comprise homeopathy.
Though with this "who cares that it doesn't work, it's good for public health anyway" mentality, I guess all you'd really need to teach them is how to pour a glass of tapwater and make up an impressive Latin-sounding name for it.
Or we could just forgo the bullshit that is homeopathy altogether. Seriously. If there's a medical benefit to the diagnosis technique, then let's use that. Accepting the most important part of homeopathy, the ridiculous "like cures like" and "dilution makes more potent" axioms, is completely unnecessary.
There are more urgent issues in healthcare than eliminating homeopathy and greater scandals in medecine than correcting a fringe of innocuous homeopathy believers.
Of course because there are more urgent issues, we can't or shouldn't do anything about this one. That's a great false dichotomy.
And I really don't see them as innocuous. Yes their concoctions have the benefit of usually being completely harmless (because they're water), but there's more to it than that.
The collusion between big laboratories, World Health Organisation and western governments on the orchestration of the AH1N1 flu vaccination campaign, and various other "big medecine" abuses are far more detrimental (and costly) to public healthcare.
Those are serious issues. However I think that ignorance, and rejection or even contempt for science is also a serious issue for public health.
Homeopaths are purveyors of ignorance. Every person they convince is another person who rejects scientific evidence-based thinking for mystical hand-wavy stories that make them feel good. In this they are bosom buddies with the ones who refuse to vaccinate their children because vaccines cause autism, or people in Africa who think that fucking a virgin will cure AIDS. Hey, sex often causes AIDS and "like cures like" right? Yeah I think homeopathy would appeal greatly to them. And these are not separate groups -- believers in "alternative" (where alternative means no scientific evidence) medicine are the same ones accusing big pharma of causing autism.
When diseases that are nearly forgotten come roaring back (as they've already started to) because we're losing herd immunity, I call that a problem. When people reject proper scientific treatments for thoroughly shaken bottles of water, I call that a problem.
We cannot tolerate ignorance and deliberate rejection of reason like this. Certainly, if you want to fix the problems caused by WHO and pharma corporations, then you aren't going to fix them by encouraging ignorance! Or at least, if you don't want to "fix" those problems by causing greater ones.
The enemies of Democracy are
Homeopathy is in fact a scientifically proven, absolutely reliable 100% successful treatment for any problem you may have. Assuming of course that by 'any problem' you mean 'dehydration'. The only other effect of homeopathy is to line the pockets of dishonest swindlers with money from the gullible.
But placebos work better under double-blind conditions, and even better when both the doctor and the patient are convinced that it's medicine. So they should invent a new Greek name for those sugar pills and make up some studies, so they can keep giving them out. Oh, they probably are.
I've noticed so many arguments and debates over whether or not Homepathy works, and to those who support it, I say Kudos!!
Do you happen to take over-the-counter meds such as Tylenol or Advil?
How about any prescription drugs?
You know those aren't very dilute, therefore you owe it to yourself to perform the Homeopathic dilution.
You're only toxifying yourself with something far too concentrated to work, so it's best you crush that pill into a fine powder, and start the 10x diltuion process.
Once the solution is properly mixed, make sure you separte out 10% of it and continue to dilute that portion sufficently.
I don't know how dilute the original is, but may I suggest trying for at least a dilution of no less than 10C?
If you come back with amazing results (I'm sure you shall), please be sure to post your findings so that the rest of the community can be witness to the true, awesome power of Homepathy.
Remember, your audience is a rather skeptical bunch, so I think it's best you give to them all the Earth-shattering proof you'll undoubtedly obtain.
That'll stick a potato in their tailpipes!
the mining communities of the Rockies in Colorado. The miners would come to him with various ailments and would get pissed if he didn't give them anything. He maintained there wasn't anything wrong with them. So he mixed up colored sugar water in the kitchen, poured it in medicinal looking bottles for consumption, and they went away happy and 'cured.' Of course, he couldn't do that today, but in the 1920's? What the hey?
He graduatred from medeical college in 1895. In those days getting an MD meant attending what amounted to a junior college right out of high school.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
99.999% of homeopathy is either water or sugar.
Don't forget paraffin wax. And then apply to the forehead.
Apply to the forehead.
Apply to the forehead.
Apply to the forehead.
Ad naseum. (Pun intended.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
A placebo works better when the doctor believes it is the real thing. That's why studies are double-blind: so the administrator doesn't have knowledge that would increase or decrease a placebo effect if the patient picked up on it.
So the people who are being helped by the placebo effect of homeopathic products -- where are they going to get an equally effective (and harmless) placebo?
bemusedoutsider.livejournal here
Having one caffeine molecule in 1 x 10^100 means that you have 1.6 x 10^76 moles of water. This has a mass of 2.88 x 10^77 grams, and thus a volume (at STP) of 2.88 x 10^77 cubic centimeters. This is the volume of a cube having sides of 3 x 10^25 centimeters, which is 3 x 10^19 kilometers. As a light year is a little less than 1 x 10^13 kilometers, this would be 3 million light years. This is much more than the diameter of the solar system.
Good. Great news.
I'm sure to be modded to purgatory for this post, but I can't help it.
Here's my (only) experience with homeopathic stuff.
My older son, almost 12, has had a problem with bed wetting. From all the research we've done, its a genetic thing (not stress or psychological as most earlier child psych folks thought). His mother had the same problem late into childhood.
We've been to the Dr, tried the meds they gave us. Nothing helped. We didn't really stress about it, we figure that few people go to college still wetting their bed, that he'd get over it eventually. Still, my son is embarrassed by it, wishes it wasn't an issue. So we figure "what the hell" there happens to be a homeopathic thing for bedwetting, its only $5, give it a shot.
So I give him the pills, joking about it while I do "here, take these sugar pills, they won't do anything, but they probably taste good". We joked about it a lot. I told my son all about homeopathy and how it was BS etc etc.
Except.... yes. He stopped wetting the bed.
*sigh*
Placebo? Dunno. If so, why didn't the other "real" meds the doctor gave us work? You'd think they would have the same effect.
Hell, I'm as skeptical as the next guy, more so than most, the only thing I know is that we don't have to wash his sheets twice a week anymore.
If I have to pay $5 for sugar pills for that, I'm all for it.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
The cube root of 2.88 x 10^77 is 6.6 x 10^25, so it would be 6.6 million light years on each side, which is 66 times the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy and long enough to reach the Andromeda Galaxy.
Read online editions of New England Journal, Lancet, JAMA, etc. There are *plenty* of placebo controlled trials being done all the time by major pharma companies in almost every disease area. I don't know why you wouldn't think there aren't. I've worked on several major ones in the last 5 years.
Well holy crap, finally Rebecca will have something positive to say on next week's podcast of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.
It causes inanition.
"In some countries reimbursement is explicitly linked to how well you fare against whatever the current standard of care is"
I think that is because the state (which will refund part of the treatment price) doesn't want to spend possibly
more money to a new drug that isn't any better than existing ones, which may have been used for years,
and are better known.
I am always worried that drinking a small amount of alcohol may have a deleterious effect
upon me, and through the marvels of homoeopathy, might make me terribly drunk, and cloud my judgment.
Indeed, just think if there were no alcohol molecules at ALL in the
"mix"; just a "memory" or a "vibration" of alcohol! (shudder)
So I try to drink as much alcoholic beverages as I can, so that I will stay reasonably sober and thoughtful.
And you know... it seems to work!
.
- aqk
F U
And wait a minute, WHAT FUCKING MEDICAL SCHOOL IS TEACHING HOMEOPATHY?!
You'd be surprised. My health insurance (in Gemany) pays for all homeopathic treatments up to the age of 12, and only for specific treatments after that. The caveat is that the treatment is only paid when prescribed by a certified physician which has had additional training in homeopathy.
Treatments from "natural healers" without medical schooling or certification are not allowed.
Reputedly, Winston Churchill loved Homeopathic martinis
He'd fill a glass with gin and glance at the bottle of vermouth on the sideboard.
Unfortunately, US law permits the sale of modified versions of existing drugs with only a trial to indicate that they aren't killing people. You don't have to prove that they are even as efficacious as the drug they are replacing, let alone moreso. This is the regular practice to deprecate desire for generic versions of drugs, and it stinks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
From some points of view, it may be better than nothing, but there are other problems with that. See Ben Goldacre himself explaining that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsFTgirKXHk
...and I'm sure he's happy with the news: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U
Actually since this is about NHS funding for homoeopathy, b is bad because it is tax-payers money being wasted, which should be spent on more effective treatments.
This finding deeply troubles me. Watered down all that vodka for nothing :-(