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The UK's New Minister For Magic
An anonymous reader sends this depressing excerpt from New Scientist:
"A serious blow to science-based medical practices has been dealt in the UK with the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as Health Secretary. The fortunes of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) are about to be transformed with the help of the magical waters of homeopathic medicine. Top marks to The Telegraph's science writer Tom Chivers for quickly picking up on talk that the UK's new health minister, Jeremy Hunt – who replaced Andrew Lansley yesterday in a government reshuffle – thinks that homeopathy works, and should be provided at public expense by the NHS."
The NHS should begin a program of providing him with a homeopathic salary. The less they pay him, the more motivated he will become!
Hold still, I have to place the leech in just the right spot to suck the evil spirit out.
Rupert Murdoch is best buddies with Hunt, and all of his actions are "guided" by what News Corps wants, so as long as Sky doesn't believe in homeopathy then we'll be fine.
There is zero scientific evidence homeopathy works. Absolutely none.
I can only assume this guy is either a moron who believes in homeopathy, or, more likely, he is receiving bribes from companies that make homeopathic products. If the NHS were to pay for homeopathic medicine there would be a huge amount of profit to be made.
What he is doing is a disservice to all the UK citizens who will need real medical care in their lives and may be misdirected to rely on homeopathy, which cannot ever heal or cure them in any way.
It's like having government-funded exorcisms or voodoo rituals to cleanse the bad mojo out of a person. Sounds crazy, right?
And this is why all centralized power is dangerous. Eventually an idiot WILL be put in charge. If it were one hospital, insurance provider, pharma company, whatever it is bad but survivable. But when it is a government with a virtual monopoly on something important like medicine and a real monopoly on the use of force to back it up, shit gets serious.
Democrat delenda est
No need to buy thousands of doses of penicillin or heart medication. Just buy one dose and it'll serve the entire population.
That is not how it works.
They must prove it actually does work.
The placebo effect is well known and that they why they must test their magic water against a control group given normal water in a well controlled double blind trial. The problem with that is ethical. Since there is no evidence that homeopathy works testing it on sick people would not survive any ethical review if it interfered with real treatment.
Please don't think I'm trying to suggest a sample size of one is sufficient, but as an illustrative example I give you Steven Paul Jobs, who famously tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with a whole host of homeopathic remedies until it had progressed so far as to be inoperable. The placebo effect is well-demonstrated and reliable, so you would expect homeopathic remedies to show some benefits, as you allude to. It's when people forego useful medical treatment in favor of homeopathic fairy tales that the real dangers of homeopathy are apparent.
If you read Jeremy Hunt's response letter, what he actually says is that some PATIENTS want and/or believe in homeopathic medicine, so we should let them have it. Basically he's saying that the NHS should agree to pay for any treatment that the general populous wants, since it is a "patient-focused" organization. This argument is also significantly easier to defend if it's a treatment that they are already paying for, and it sounds like they are.
In short, Jeremy Hunt is a politician. He made a calculated determination that people who like homeopathic treatments are more likely to be supportive of him due to this decision than others are to be against him for deciding the other way. I can see why, since most scientists will think of him as a "typical stupid politician" (not much of an insult for an actual politician) while most homeopathic believers will see him as a "defender of their cause."
The homeopathc process activates placebetrinos in dihydrogen monoxide. Ordinary DHO can be deadly, but in the proper hands it works wonders. The placebetrino hasn't actually been observed, but future upgrades to the LHC are expected to run with high enough energies to reveal it as well as the anti-placebetrino.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
it is well known that a good, strong and colorful sugar pill administered with a tall glass of water can go a long way to curing many reported medical conditions.
Yep. Hypoglycemia for one.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The placebo effect works, and homeopathy should be a tremendously inexpensive way to induce it. The placebo effect does not mean that people do not get better--it is that people get better even when you give them something inert! How better to generate something inert that feels like it should help than to take something that should help and dilute it? Granted, the effects of placebo are limited, but if you only need something limited anyway, why not give them a microcent's worth of water in a 20-cent vial, sold for $2, to make the patient feel as much relief as they can generate from their own beliefs? (How different is this from bottled water, anyway? The tap water in most places affluent enough to afford bottled water is perfectly safe.)
I'm only partly joking.
(Blasted democracies, requiring informed citizenry and spoiling all our plans to dupe them into thinking they're fine!)
Wow I had warts for years and I did nothing at all and one day they were gone too! Doing nothing it all is as good as homeopathy, and far cheaper.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Careful with that - several churches might get upset with you infringing on their business model. Next thing you'll be handing out wafers too.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I was flipping through some book of Eastern medicine, and wanted to read the section on type 1 diabetes (since I have it), and it was hilarious. Everything else could be cured or treated with various things, but for this they recommended seeing a doctor.
Here in the U.S. we have more than our fair share of new-age dimwits and vaccine fear mongers. I have no such room to throw stones.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Unfortunately herbal remedies and Homeopathy tends to get lumped together. I know first hand many herbal remedies work and some legit doctors have been prescribing them for decades. Athletes use Arnica for muscle strain and I found it works pretty well on migrains for lessening the symptoms. Cinnamon has been found to be at least as effective as most of the diabetes medicines used for controlling blood sugar peaks and it's also recognized as a stimulant. There are hundreds of medically proven herbs that are cheap and effective with potentially thousands more untested that are in traditional medicines. Homeopathy on the other hand to me is mostly snake oil. Things like diluting a compound and having it still be effective is just plain silly. I'd consider most of it placebos. The problem is there's no clear line between herbal and homeopathy. For back aches I call Tiger Balm, Arnica and ice packs the holly trinity. To me they are herbal remedies but you find them in the homeopathic section of health food stores and some drug stores. Herbal remedies should be government funded because they are inherently cheaper than factory drugs and with fewer side effects. The problem is there's been so little testing since the drug companies don't stand to get rich or get exclusive rights to them so it's hard to make rules as to which are truly effective. There's things like Goat Weed that is a herbal Viagra that is effective but then again people still take ground up Rhino horn which is expensive snake oil. With all the hundreds of billions a year that are spent on drugs there should be government testing on herbal remedies if for no other reason than saving money. The problem comes in the form of resistance from drug companies. Cheaper solutions threaten profits so don't expect government standardized testing of most herbs any time soon if ever.
Does it strike anyone else as odd that you can go from Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport to Secretary of State for Health in a day, or from Transport to Defence? Do any of these people have any actual experience or qualification in the departments they get dumped on? It's all just a load of old bollocks, isn't it?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
A basic precept of science is that you can't prove a negative.
Can we please stop circulating this little bit of folk "wisdom" now?
Proofs of non-existence by reductio ad absurdum are common. Euler's proof of the non-existance of a largest prime number is one notable example.
More discussion here.
If the illness is not too severe, it's not terribly unethical to test ineffective treatments.* And some such studies have been done. Here's one on warts, and another on migraines. Needless to say, there was no statistically significant effect.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The latter is more correctly categorized as "naturopathy". For some ailments, it can work as well as traditional medicine because plants do have various chemicals that can cure disease.
Now there's the issue of those chemicals not being "clean" (i.e., mixed with other undesirable substances), not knowing the dosage (because the amount of the useful chemical varies from plant to plant), and, of course, misidentification of plants (which can lead to one ingesting the wrong chemical). And though all of the issues mentioned can arise when a chemical (which, in this usage, is referred to as a drug) in pill, elixer, injection, or suppository form is prescribed by a physician and used as directed by the patient, the likelihood of an undesired outcome is lowered considerably when the forces of science and modern manufacturing technology are brought to bear.
Of course, feel free to chew on a willow branch instead of taking an aspirin for your dose of acetylsalicylic acid - I certainly won't stop you. But when you end up with your muscles still aching because your jaw muscles and teeth gave out before the pain was gone, don't come crying to me.
That is all.
I have to call BS on this one. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but from what you said, it sounds like that you are claiming something like: Take two people each with an acute appendix. For one, do an appendectomy, for the other, put him out, wake him up, and tell him he had an appendectomy. And the surgery is no more effective than lying to the guy. Sorry, but there is no way in hell that can be true.
If the hospital sticks a pretty label on a bottle of tap water and utilises the placebo effect then it's a worthwhile treatment and will add benefit.
If the hospital prescribes a branded bottle of tap water that costs the NHS £480 a bottle then it's fraudulent and I'd be looking for links between the "manufacturer" and Jeremy Cunt*
*Yes, that's the name used to introduce him on BBC Radio 4
My mother used to work as a home health aid, she said that she worked with an older couple where the senile husband would demand pills from his wife; rather than argue or tell him no the wife would hand him is ww pills that came in red blue yellow brown and green, she told him that they were candy coated to hide the bad flavor and that he would need to swallow them quickly. It worked every time
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
People will die much more quickly saving National Health billions of pounds.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
If you read the Early Day Motion he signed in 2007, he says is that he "believes that complementary medicine has the potential to offer clinically-effective and cost-effective solutions to common health problems faced by NHS patients" (emphasis mine). To be fair, he was only one of 206 MPs (including such luminaries as Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister) who signed the motion. That's almost a third of British MPs who believe the NHS should be spending upwards of £4 million* per year treating sick people with something that works no better than a sugar pill.
* This is from the £12 million 2005-2008 expenditure figures for homeopathy obtained by Channel 4, which apparently doesn't include the running costs of the NHS homeopathic hospitals that the Early Day Motion is supporting.