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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 . . .
Ben Goldacre for stopping this lunacy. His weekly Bad Science column and website have been invaluable in combating woo.
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
The Brits seem to be on the forefront of pseudo-science debunking.
Seems to me to be the exact opposite. The fact that they were funding it up to this point is be a sign of backwardness.
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.
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 This is not a decision and will not automatically result in the money being withdrawn.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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
don't forget the "succussion". shaking is VERY IMPORTANT!!!
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...