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Australia Declares Homeopathy Nonsense, Urges Doctors to Inform Patients
jones_supa (887896) writes "Homeopathy is a 200-year-old form of alternative medicine based on the principle that substances that produce symptoms in a healthy person can be used to treat similar symptoms in a sick person. The National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia has officially declared that homeopathic remedies are useless for human health. The body today released a guide for doctors (PDF) on how to talk to their patients about the lack of evidence for many such therapies. Doctors will also be told to warn patients of possible interactions between alternative and conventional medicines. On top of that, the council has produced a 300-page draft report that reviews the evidence for homoeopathy in treating 68 clinical conditions. It concludes 'there is no reliable evidence that homoeopathy is effective for treating health conditions'.
Representing the opposite viewpoint, Australian Homeopathic Association spokesman Greg Cope said he was disappointed at the narrow evidence relied on by the NHMRC in its report. 'What they have looked at is systematic trials for named conditions when that is not how homeopathy works,' he said. Homeopathy worked on the principle of improving a person's overall health and wellness, and research such as a seven-year study conducted in Switzerland was a better measure of its usefulness, he added. There are about 10,000 complementary medicine products sold in Australia but most consumers are unaware they are not evaluated by the domestic medicines safety watchdog before they are allowed on the market."
Representing the opposite viewpoint, Australian Homeopathic Association spokesman Greg Cope said he was disappointed at the narrow evidence relied on by the NHMRC in its report. 'What they have looked at is systematic trials for named conditions when that is not how homeopathy works,' he said. Homeopathy worked on the principle of improving a person's overall health and wellness, and research such as a seven-year study conducted in Switzerland was a better measure of its usefulness, he added. There are about 10,000 complementary medicine products sold in Australia but most consumers are unaware they are not evaluated by the domestic medicines safety watchdog before they are allowed on the market."
"There are about 10,000 complementary medicine products sold in Australia but most consumers are unaware they are not evaluated by the domestic medicines safety watchdog before they are allowed on the market." Why on Earth would you ever submit a product to the medicines watchdog when it doesn't contain medicine? You might as well ask them to evaluate the effects of Heinz Tomato Soup as a medicinal recipe. It does bring feelings of well-being and contentment, you know.
"Is the Chief Priest an Offlian? Do dragons explode in the wood?"
It doesn't work by treating conditions. You're using it wrong. The first thing you need to do is stop expecting it to do anything.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
Says it all...
Curse you, actual scientists, with your "facts" and "data". Where we come from, we don't need no facts.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. I was recently afflicted by a non-systematic, unnamed condition, and drinking lots of water helped.
Hmm, now that I think about it, I may have been thirsty.
Research has shown that you can maximize the placebo effect by charging more money.
I visited a homeopath once. I had dreadful allergies and was quite desparate. So off I trundled to the homepaths tent in the festival I was attending. There they did some sort of reading and asked a few questions. They opened a huge old book and spent a few moments throughtfully reading through various passages. Then delivered the news that I needed arsenic. Only this poison could help me. They procused a small plastic bag containing small spherical white pills. I complained that I was not keen on taking arsenic in any shape of form. So they explained that they started with a huge vat of water with a little bit of arsenic in it. Took a tiny drop of that water and diluted it further, and once again until only the essense of asenic remained. There wasn't any arsenic in those pills. By this time I was laughing so hard I had completely forgotten about my allergies. I left with a big smile on my face and used the sugar pills in my coffee.
So sorry everyone, homeopathy works.
Yeah...because its Republicans who are into homeopathy, healing crystals and all that mystical unicorn feel-good hippy bullshit.
If it contains actual measurable quantities of something, it isn't homeopathy. Keep THAT in mind.
Mostly random stuff.
Surely I can pay for homeopathic medicine by simply rubbing money on the seller?
Mostly random stuff.
But won't telling the patient "the facts" diminish the placebo effect? What would maximize the placebo effect? Is using the placebo effect always bad practice?
My father was a village MD, and we talked at lenght about this, so here goes:
1. yes, and that's why the Placebo effect is largely ineffective on the medical professionals;
2.Sadly, increasing price is one of the things that correlates with placebo effects;
3. Emphatically no, but there is not a real need for specific "placebo"medicaments: lots of active principles help lower the symptoms, all the while not doing anything much, and they are mostly cheaper than "alternative" medicine.
P.S.: as to point 2, there is a solution: putting a reasonably big price tag on the box and telling the patient that 90% of it is borne by the insurance, since it's so effective.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
How about letting people choose what methods of healing they want to use?
That's fine.
Selling little bottles of very expensive water with labels that very carefully imply that they do, indeed, cure diseases (while legally not saying anything of the sort) to people who don't know any better is what gets people up in arms.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Presumably chemicals in our drugs are often extracted from nature. why wouldn't the same chemicals in their natural form have the same potential to work?
True - but nothing to do with homeopathy. You are describing herbal medicine which certainly certainly works sometimes - though there are dangers from unknown potencies and interactions with other medicines. Homeopathic medicines are based on something that causes the symptoms they are intended to cure - but diluted so far that not a single atom of the original substance remains. It is sort of an analogy with inoculation - by giving someone a killed or weakened version of a dangerous virus, you protect against the full-blown version of the virus. But we know what is happening in this case - we are pre-loading the immune system. The mechanisms by which we prepare wakened virus are well understood. Homeopathy has a theory that, by means unknown, dilution beyond non-existence somehow infuses the water with a potency to counteract symptoms similar to those caused by the diluted substance. Unfortunately,there is no theoretical or (importantly) experimental backing for this.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I use meta-placebo effect instead of medicines.
I know that the placebo effect exists and is effective, so believing something can heal me will indeed heal me.
Therefore, I juste have to believe that just believing that believing will heal me will heal me, and it heals me.
The problem is you're confusing herbal medicine, holostic medicine, drug descovery and homeopathy.
No one sane denys the existence of herbal medicine: many drugs were originally dervied from plants, and many others are known to have a whole variety of different effects.
Holostic medicine is not unreasonable: no point curing one ailment at the expense of creating others even worse than the original.
For drug descovery, some are stumbled upon by pure chance (Viagra), and for many, especially brain related ones, the mechanism is poorly understood, and they only work on some people. Nevertheless they have been tested and it's reasonably well known roughly what proportion they do work on, the likely side effects and interactions with other common drugs. So, the knowledge is incomplete, but nor worthless.
Homeopathy is by contrast utter crap.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
A while back I was prescribed an anti-depressant. The doctor said he didn't know if it would work for me. He said it wasn't even well understood *how* it worked.
You had a bad and uninformed doctor. A good doctor should have at least a general idea of how the medication works, and he certainly shouldn't be prescribing drugs without knowing if they'd work or how!
That confused me because presumably whatever was in the pill was added for a reason, but clearly there's a lot of trial and error. And clearly there are extremely nasty side effects from many drugs.
So many pharmaceuticals' effectiveness may be overrated, as may be their safety. I'm not sure some medicinal plants are necessarily less effective or less safe.
Presumably chemicals in our drugs are often extracted from nature. why wouldn't the same chemicals in their natural form have the same potential to work? For example, willow bark has salicin (from whence aspirin came), and has been used medicinally since the time of Hippocrates.
There may be side effects from pharmaceutical drugs, but they are well understood as a result of the extensive testing they are required to go through, and a lot of effort is made to minimize those side effects. Medicinal plants have the same range of side effects. The difference is herbal medicine doesn't go through scientific testing, it's side effects are not required to be labeled and are not as well understood. Drugs that are isolated from medicinal herbs will typically try to isolate the active ingredient, reducing the chances of side effects from other plant ingredients that may have unwanted pharmacological properties and refining the dosage to the minimum necessary.
The idea of treating the whole person instead of just the symptom is a growing concern in western medicine. This has always been the defining characteristic of homeopathy's holistic approach.
So many homeopathic treatments are almost certainly bunk, but throwing out all homeopathy may be short sighted, just as throwing out all of western medicine would be.
The defining characteristic of homeopathy is the "like cures like" approach, with medicine prepared from repeated dilution. This has been repeatedly proven to be bunk and without merit. If the core fundamentals of their medical approach is false, having been consistently disproven, why shouldn't the whole field be throw out as discredited and without merit?
Placebo's have an effect on things the human mind can control.
Medication has an effect on things the human mind can AND cannot control.
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I spent my youth on homeopathy w/o any major issues, and now that i'm sick, neither homeopathy nor commercial medicine are much help
For most people their youth is generally spent without major health issues. Attributing that to homeopathy is rather unnecessary.
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