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Homeopathy Turns Out To Be Useless For Treating Medical Conditions
MightyMartian writes It should prove to be no surprise for most rational people, but a group of Australian researchers have determined that homeopathy is completely useless at treating medical conditions. Researchers sifted through 1,800 research papers on homeopathy and found no reliable report that showed homeopathic remedies had any better results than placebos.
Of course, anyone with compelling evidence to the contrary (or better yet, proof to the contrary) is encouraged to post links in the comments below.
Of course they found similar results when compared with placebo. Placebos can actually be effective. To infer that the treatment is useless is actually false. The treatment consists of tricking someone into thinking they're going to get better. Occasionally, this will psychosomatically heal them.
The placebo itself is not effective - it's the "lie" that is effective.
Just a few days ago I made the case why homeopathy or other "magical medicine" and the way it might be practiced today can offer at least one significant upside vis-a-vis regular medical treatment ... or should I say council?
That homeopathic substances probably offer no better remedy than placebos is not really news. However, they *do* offer cheap placebos, which also can be a good and useful thing. And placebos are effective, or at least have an effect, there are enough studies that prove that.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
... just have a small glass of water. You'll feed much better.
Incidentally, alternative medicine doesn't exist. There's medicine. And there's stuff that doesn't work.
No, we just don't have an objective system for measuring how someone "feels" so we have to use a placebo to establish the noise floor on people subjectively rating how they feel and how terribly inconsistent that system is.
I like to think of stuff like homeopathy as the chlorine in our gene pool. We've made the world so safe for stupid people that if they didn't have outlets like this, we'd be devolving into lawyers and politicians faster than we already are. You know the saying that's popular around here, "You can't cure stupid"? If there's one thing homeopathy might be able to cure, it's that. It'd just take a couple generations to do it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If Homeopathy confined itself to conditions that are not curable with medicine, are medically harmless, or amenable to the placebo effect, you might have a point of simply letting people indulge themselves.
But Homeopaths allege they can "treat" all sorts of harmful (and sometimes deadly) diseases for which we DO have rather effective medical interventions. (Cancer, diabetes, malaria (that was one of the first homeopathic "remedies" when even at the time we had an effective drug to treat it), influenza, manic-depression, hypertension, etc.)
If somebody eschews an effective remedy because they believe that homeopathy "cured" them of some inconsequential thing, then it does real harm to that patient.
It's not a "complex moral argument" at all here.
Double-blind randomized clinical trials are the "gold standard" for medical research, not necessarily placebos.
Sometimes the control in such a study is indeed a placebo. This is the case for which there is no treatment of overwhelming effectiveness and/or ones amenable to psychosomatic healing, like psychiatric illnesses or some forms of pain.
But for many other conditions, you could bring up a research up on criminal charges for using a placebo instead of the current standard treatment. We'd never do such a thing in, say, a study for curable cancers, diabetes, blood pressure, serious infections, heart attacks, or even a birth control pill.
In a study for a drug to treat, say, Type I diabetes, we'd NEVER use a placebo. The control group in such a study would be Insulin, since no treatment at all would be swiftly fatal.
1) If homeopathic remedies could lower histamines, this could be easily "measured with science".
2) Intoxication is a condition that easily lends itself to psychosomatic "cures". We could easily measure the actual effectiveness with science by giving patients water vs. Homeopathic "remedies" and comparing the two groups (reaction tests, blood draws, mood surveys, whatever.) It would not be a difficult study to design at all.
3) The very idea of "Liver Detox" is a crock. There are lots of different poisons, and the idea that a single remedy could the effects from alcohol AND caffeine (which aren't even remotely chemically related) is ridiculous. (Though no more ridiculous than Homeopathy itself, which to actually work would require completely throwing out a whole pile of rather well-settled parts of chemistry, physics, and biology.)
4) Insomnia is another heavily psychosomatic condition. (Indeed, therapy works better for insomnia than any other remedy.)
The idea of a Double-Blind Clinical trial is not hard to grasp. When a homeopath tells you that somehow their remedies "can't be measured" with such a trial, they are simply moving the goalposts. If they are actually "cures" for anything, then that will show up in a trial. Period. End of story. To think otherwise is nothing more than irrational "magical thinking".
It's fucking bullshit. Jesus Christ, I can't believe the lengths people will go to justify witch doctor quackery.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Everything you wanted to know is fully explained here: http://www.howdoeshomeopathywo...
Most rational people agree that placebos have their place, the effect is a valuable part of treatment and current medical establishment ought to be adjusted to maximise it's benefits.
But charlatans selling nothing else and claiming to be selling medicine end up killing LOTS of people every year.
The thing is - real medicine gets you the placebo effect ANYWAY - and ALSO gets you actual TREATMENT.
We can possibly increase the placebo effect if we copy a few things from the charlatan's playbook - like making appointments one-hour and actually connecting with patients, getting to know them, helping them feel emotionally better.
They are experts at that, the trouble is - that's ALL they are experts at and they LIE about offering anything more - which kills people, lots of people, every year.
I read an article recently by an oncologist about the serious difficulties they face because so many cancer patients are ALSO on supposedly alternative treatments which has no medical value but CAN severely interact with the treatments they ARE on (like chemo) and make those less effective. Interestingly she points out how those alternative providers never request files from them, never contact them to discuss a patient - never talk to them.
Any real medical professional you go see while on something like chemo would PHONE your oncologist and discuss his planned treatments whatever they may be to make sure there is no unintended cross reaction. A real doctor wouldn't remove an ingrown toenail from a cancer patient without first talking to the oncologist in case the local anaesthetic can cross-react with the chemo.
The alternative lot never do that, because they know the real doctors will tell them NOT to do anything. So instead of not doing something potentially VERY harmful or even deadly, they do it in secret and leave the oncologists to clean up the mess.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It could actually be a lot worse - a lot of alternative practitioners do not have a positive opinion about conventional medicine and share this with their patients. As a result many of these patients are much more apprehensive of their medical treatment and or less compliant and or have a negative opinion about their treatment. A placebo effect in reverse. If the alternative treatment isn't helping the attitude could well be harming. I have seen how well people do with conventional medicine when they embrace the treatment - they can take double or triple the duration of chemotherapy treatments with many fewer side effects. Imagine what it would be like when you expect the worst.
The problem with only using "how I feel" as a measurement while ignoring scientific measurements of the effects is that human senses are pretty horrible and are often wrong.
Back in my day this was taught and demonstrated in public education (seems not to be the case anymore) and can be proven with a very simple experiment: the old warm and cold bowl of water trick.
Line up three bowls on the counter. Fill one half way with cold water and another half way with hot (to the touch, not burning) water. Put one hand in each for a few minutes.
Then mix the two bowls of water together in the last bowl to get warm water, and put both your hands together in that bowl.
The hand previously in the cold water will feel hot, and the hand previously in the hot water will feel cold, both at the same time and in the same bowl of water.
Your senses are completely lying to you. One bowl of water can't be two different temperatures at the same time.
Only our intellect is capable of recognizing the contradiction in the data from your senses to indicate neither can't be correct.
Only impartial scientific measurement can give you accurate data that is correct, combined again with our intellect to let us override data from our senses with measured data.
This isn't to say our senses aren't important or don't matter at all, only that our senses are just the first step in obtaining knowledge. All three (senses, intellect, and measurements) are required.
Please don't rely on one without the others, as that only serves to make your knowledge dubious, and draw into question any and all future knowledge based on that one incorrect fact.
That claim is horse shit. The meaning of the word "homeopathy" implies its major tenant, which is that problems can be cured by diluting things that cause symptoms similar to what a person is experiencing. If it was preventative, then there would be no symptoms for the homeopathy to be paired with. Instead, homeopathy is NEVER preventative and is ALWAYS reactive. If your woo doctor says otherwise, it is because they are selling you bullshit for problems you don't even have.
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