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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!
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.
At least leeches actually *do* have genuine and well-demonstrated medical applications.
Homeopathy doesn't.
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."
Homeopathy doesn't.
Sure it does. And I'm no fan of homeopathy. The areas listed in the "Mote Prime" article are areas strongly influenced by the placebo effect (pain, fatigue, depression, anxiety, etc.). I assume that Homeopathy would have the same influence as any other placebo in treating those problems.
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"?
Mummy's kisses fixes my toddler's owies. All better!
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no sig for you. come back one year.
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.
In that case, I have a million other ideas, all differing to some extent, and each with the same profound properties that a placebo provides. Each one has an inventive story and reason for why it works behind it (I haven't tested most of them admittedly, but I DO think they're all great). The government should allow these million other methods on the market too, and make me a millionaire.
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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.
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.
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.
Homeopathy doesn't.
It's a perfectly valid treatment for dehydration :P
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face