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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.
Ben Goldacre for stopping this lunacy. His weekly Bad Science column and website have been invaluable in combating woo.
Unless, of course, you count the vast array of herbs used through the ages that pharmaceuticals are now based on
Two different things. Modern pharmaceuticals use refined extracts or man-made replacements. Homeopathy is water with nothing of value added other than hope.
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Trolling is a art,
Herbal medicine (a.k.a. naturopathy ) is BY NO MEANS the same thing as homeopathy. You should really educate yourself before you start correcting people.
-Peter
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 This is not a decision and will not automatically result in the money being withdrawn.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.
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.
They should continue funding homeopathy. Just dilute the funding until there's less than a fraction of a penny per bill. According to homeopathy, this should be even better than receiving the full amount.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
This is wrong. An important distinction needs to be made: **HOMEOPATHY IS NOT HERBAL MEDICINE**. It's just water and sugar. It may have started out as some kind of herb or metal or whatever, but it's diluted past avogadro's number, making it just water. More information here: http://www.1023.org.uk/
Dara O'Briain said it best.
We tested all those vast arrays of herbs and treatments and the ones that worked we called "medicine". The ones that didn't we called "placebos".
Even better, Ben Goldacre in Bad Science talks about the dilution factor of homeopathic remedies, which are diluted so much that a sphere of water with a diameter equal to the distance between the Earth and the Sun would contain about 11 molecules of the original material, with the rest being water. Any benefit conferred by these diluted solutions, which are literally just water, are purely down to the placebo effect.
I can't remember the exact passage, and my copy of the book is on my bookshelf downstairs, but I'm sure it's online somewhere. Ah here we go, google to the rescue - from here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/nov/16/sciencenews.g2
Many people confuse homeopathy with herbalism and do not realise just how far homeopathic remedies are diluted. The typical dilution is called "30C": this means that the original substance has been diluted by 1 drop in 100, 30 times. On the Society of Homeopaths site, in their "What is homeopathy?" section, they say that "30C contains less than 1 part per million of the original substance."
This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in 10030, or rather 1 in 1060, which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes, or - let's be absolutely clear - a dilution of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.
To phrase that in the Society of Homeopaths' terms, we should say: "30C contains less than one part per million million million million million million million million million million of the original substance."
At a homeopathic dilution of 100C, which they sell routinely, and which homeopaths claim is even more powerful than 30C, the treating substance is diluted by more than the total number of atoms in the universe. Homeopathy was invented before we knew what atoms were, or how many there are, or how big they are. It has not changed its belief system in light of this information.
Homeopathic remedies are *literally* water - they have *no* medical benefit whatsoever apart from as placebos. (and placebos can be pretty powerful - but there is no magic - you could replace all those remedies with tap water and say it was a treatment and the effect would be the same).
*sighs*
That's not what he's being sued for.
He's being sued for suggesting that the chiropractors were willfully giving people treatments they knew to be be useless. Personally, I don't see think that's what he meant in his article and that's his argument, too, but the one thing he's *not* being sued for is saying chiropractic remedies are little more than horseshit - there's be no lawsuit if that was all he'd said.
There always seems to be a remarkable amount of bitching about the British libel system, but really all it boils down to is that if you publicly smear someone, you'd better be able to damn well prove it. Where exactly is the problem in that? From what I've seen of American media and politics, it'd be a hell of a lot better if there were some requirement for people to be able to back up their accusations...
-Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience-
Again, more uninformed bullshit. You have been corrected six ways from Sunday by dozens of informed posters, yet you still persist in spreading misinformation. We've even said things like, 'homeopathy is not naturopathy.' and 'homeopathy is not herbalism,' and 'homeopathy is founded on the principle that diluting something makes it have the opposite effect.' yet you STILL insist on conflating homeopathy with actual, useful medicine like herbalism. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
'It may have started out as some kind of herb or metal or whatever, but it's diluted past avogadro's number, making it just water.'
This is usually true, though in some cases preparations have been classified as 'homeopathic' while still containing significant concentrations of active (and potentially harmful) ingredients. Homeopathy seems to allow a very wide range of dilutions, from 1:10 all the way up to the well-known astronomical levels that make it (perhaps fortunately) extremely unlikely there's anything left of the original substance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_dilutions
Zicam, which apparently qualifies as 'homeopathic', and has been blamed for damaging the sense of smell in some users, reportedly contains 33mM zinc gluconate, a pharmacologically active concentration:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=530
It's been alleged that the company marketing this stuff simply used the lax rules governing homeopathic preparations in the US as a way of circumventing regulatory approval, which sounds like a rather worrying loophole.