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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.
... 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.
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.
The problem is when the placebo effect is not powerfull enough to overcome a medical issue but real pharmaceuticals are and the people instead choose the placebo homeopathy because its natural and better when it really isn't. Or when the people selling the diluted sugar pills are charging equal or more that real effective pharmaceuticals.
Secondly the placebo effects also works when there are real medicines as well so you get two benefits (real and placebo). were homeopathy is just one(placebo).
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
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.
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 *
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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