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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.
I'm Cured
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I think I saw some research somewhere showing that the same people who believed this also bought thousand dollar specialty speaker cables, HDMI cables, and specially crafted wooden volume control knobs for their home stereos, 'because it improves sound quality'.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
LOL, I guess some men really do want to watch the world burn.
Products purporting to be medical treatments backed by zero evidence and pseudoscientific gobbeltygook theories don't work? Whodathunk!
Finding God in a Dog
Yeah, but aren't placebos effective? I thought even the FDA agreed ;-)
Expecting to find positive results at a dilution of 1/1800 is not the homeopathic way. Positive results are diluted by approximately 10^-12 amidst the null results.
...wait a minute...
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
In other news, water turns out to be wet.
Cue the crowds jumping in to say that "no better than placebo" means homeopathy is useless, while "works as placebo" means psychiatry is better than nothing.
and thirst.
...the Earth is not flat.
Table-ized A.I.
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
Many pharmaceutical drugs lose to placebos as well. So given a choice I'd chose the cheaper homeopathy "solutions".
Yes, that's why we do double blind drug testing so those pharmaceuticals aren't released. Why pay anything for something that doesn't work? It doesn't matter how cheap these scam pills are. On the other hand, most pharmaceuticals are very effective, even the very cheap ones you can get without a prescription.
Numerous homeopathic remedies can treat mild dehydration(though you have to watch your electroyte balance; because there isn't much there there). Take that, Big Pharma!
I'm fairly sure the Placebo Effect is effective. If it wasn't we wouldn't have an issue with it in medical studies. Who am I to take away someones perfectly functioning Placebo by convening them it's not actually doing anything? Also there are medications that are less effective than the placebo effect for some people. Some people are just far more susceptible to it. Good for them. They can feel better as long as they think they're doing something that'll make them feel better. Much harder to pull off that trick when you know where the man behind the curtain is. As long as we're not talking about the nuts who do Homeopathy in spite of an effective medical treatment being available.
I've been homeopathically poisoning the planetary water supply of this study's authors with sewage, every time I go to the bathroom.
... 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.
Relevant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
He offered $1,000,000 to anyone who could prove homeopathy works. Nobody won though some quack named George Vithoulkas, whose International Academy for Classical Homeopathy is based on an island in Greece, claims Randi backed out of a previous challenge issued early in the 21st Century; don't know about that and the new challenge was instated in 2011 and not a peep from George Vithoulkas as far as I'm aware.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
they didn't test the right medical condition.
... if symptoms persist, take one.
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?
<SARCASM>
It's clear that the Aussie researchers were paid off by Big Pharma®!!!
</SARCASM>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Is it safe? Imagine if someone drank absolutely pure water - wouldn't you overdose and die? Thank goodness for natural minerals and man made pollution in my water that saves my ass every day.
If they think Homeopathy doesn't work, they're just not using enough.
Or, wait, sorry, they're using too much.
The less homeopathy you use, the stronger it is.
The logical conclusion is that if you use none at all, you'll see the greatest improvement, especially financially.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
What's the matter, you don't want to take a pill that may cause anal bleeding or death when you want to treat a migraine? Live a little!
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Selling a "convincing" placebo to people might be a good idea if homeopathy confined itself to "treating" harmless conditions. But Homeopaths think they can treat real diseases for which we have medical treatments of known effectiveness.
Homeopaths think they can treat cancer, diabetes, hypertension, arrhythmia, allergies, viral illnesses of all sorts (from the common cold, to influenza and ebola), gout, parasites, etc.
If people believe that their homeopathic remedy "cured" them of insomnia, they might turn to it for a condition for which not doing something that actually works might be crippling or fatal. One of the first homeopathic "remedies" was for malaria, which can be quite fatal if you don't take ACTUAL drugs to treat it. (It's ironic because the a$$clown came up with this at the time when we actually HAD an effective treatment for malaria, so he killed some of his first patients with this "medicine". OTOH, he did, undoubtedly, "save" others, since many of the drugs he was replacing had things like arsenic and mercury in them.)
I have used it for a variety of ailments. The one that has brought me most benefit is histaminicum which lowers my histamines levels in my body when I use it. I am allergic to dairy and when I eat it, I get a histamine reaction. I just take this homeopathic and it goes away within a few minutes (this allergic reaction). I get allergic reactions such as ringing ears, anxiety, etc. and it goes away with just a few granules. I don't think this is something you can measure that much with science though. The second one that I have used to great benefit is cannibus indica homeopathic which I use when I get too stoned and can't handle it. It sobers me up pretty fast and kind of neutralizes my high. How would you measure this with science? Another one that has been amazing for me is juniperus communis which is a juniper root homeopathic. It helps your liver detox and I use it when I drink coffee or alcohol, neutralizes some of the bad effects of these drugs. How would you measure that? I also use a variety of them that help me sleep, works not as good as the others because I have chronic insomnia...results vary lol.
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.
I was sick like all the time as a small child (constant sinus infections, often also in my ears and throat and lungs, it was awful). First stop was all kinds of doctors that put me on all kinds of medication, at the end of which I was even worse. Finally my mom tried taking me to an alternative place that turned out to be a homeopathic clinic, not that she actually believed in it, but she was about ready to try just about anything. She actually called the pills they gave her to give me "placebo pills", which being like 5 or 6 at the time, I didn't get why that was so funny until a couple years later, I just thought that's what the medicine was called.
Anyway, I got better! Not all the way better, but better than I'd been before, just because they told her the first step was to *stop* drowning my immune system in all kinds of antibiotics, which is what had been happening before.
Of course, I could've gotten the same effect, and saved my mom some money, by just not going *anywhere*, but still. ;)
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.
Those that believe the placebo effect or homeopathy works and have kidney disease should test their theory. Enter a medical experiment where they are given a choice of of this treatment or the medically approved treatment of dialysis followed by kidney transplant when a kidney is available or homeopathy and check the results. We all know pretty much what the results will be: death for the homeopathy treated patients and likely much longer life for the traditionally treated patients.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
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".
... on alternative "medicine" generally, especially homeopathy: Simon Singh, PhD and Edzard Ernst, MD, "Trick Or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine", Norton, 2009 (ISBN 0393337782)
licet differant, aequabitur
Except that "homeopathy is useless" is the null hypothesis. In the absence of evidence showing it to be effective*, the rational response is to default to assuming it isn't.
*Which has been the case 100% of the time
I wish the article was more than a link to a commercial news site that was itself a link to a press release. There's no direct information here, and I'd have liked to see if the review had included an analysis of any disclosures of funding or affiliations.
Personally, I'm in an annoying position in regards to Homeopathy. My ex got involved in homeopathy for things that conventional medicine didn't seem able to cure or ameliorate - before we divorced. It seemed to help her and it seemed to help our (young) kids when she used it to reduce the duration of a cold or reduce some pain or control nose-bleeds. She'd stick with conventional medicine for real injuries, etc. And because she said that my disbelief interfered with the treatments, and because this didn't interfere with conventional treatments - and because I needed peace in the family, I tried to go along.
But the whole anti-corporate, conspiracy driven, magical thinking defense was hard to accept (although it would make entertaining storytelling.)
Somehow, it seemed to work for her. That's easy to explain away as the "placebo affect", but there's also a social effect too that occurs when you have a community of people you can interact with who will take an interest in you, etc. It's really hard to self-administer a placebo - unless it's wrapped up like homeopathic treatments are. As for the cost of homeopathic treatments - well, they cost more than sugar pills and a kit of homeopathic medicines (with a handy-dandy guide for administration) will set you back a lot of money (especially if you're going through a divorce - ending with loosing your job in the Great Recession). But my (largely unused) kit has lasted me nearly 10 years now, sitting in the back of my linen closet underneath a pile of old towels.
If you can keep your wits about you about using homeopathic remedies only on things that conventional medicine doesn't treat AND which aren't chronic, etc. -- well you might be able to use it successfully. But you're on a dangerous edge. Still, it's better than self-medicating with alcohol or other intoxicating substances. And (potentially) about the same as just ignoring the aches, pains, etc. of life until they get so bad you can barely make it into urgent care.
Can't measure psychosomatic stuff man Have you ever tried homeopathics and/or do you have any health problems? I'm all messed up man and this stuff gets me better, got a ton of stuff that they can't diagnose via regular doctors. Ever lived with toxic mold to see what it does to you?
So given a choice I'd chose the cheaper homeopathy "solutions".
Given a choice I'd chose the even cheaper placebo "pills" ;^)
(unless of course actually spending money on your cure in a non-single-payer healthcare system is an integral part of the placebo effect)
Why would any rational person try bullshit non-therapies?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I saw this article first on IFLScience, and wowee... the comments were the equivalent of repeatedly thwacking multiple hornets nests with sticks. The sheer number of people up in arms about this study is jawdropping.
While not really surprising, it is depressing. Especially when you consider the fact that the majority of people who were outraged had no idea what homeopathy actually was. Countless comments about how willow bark, st. johns wort, etc worked for them and therefore the study was just a big conspiracy by big pharma, etc. They were completely oblivious to the fact that what they were talking about wasn't even homeopathy.
I'm torn between wanting to try to educate these people, or just declaring it a lost cause and troll them until they burst a blood vessel or something.
Cuz they like their own bad system and are suppressing others.
I agree that the majority of the "remedies" are full of it, but there is some utility to be had from a couple of the treatments. They put lemon and eucalyptus in cough drops all the time, yet we're mocking people for cutting out the sugar coating and using just the extracts? Just doing a causal search on pubmed with melaleuca return 345 peer reviewed articles in respected journals. These guys weren't looking that hard.
Homeopathy works, but the preservatives cause autism.
Everything you wanted to know is fully explained here: http://www.howdoeshomeopathywo...
And yet placebos have been shown to be pretty effective, and are steadily becoming more so when compared against the drugs being tested.
Or, perhaps...
The drugs are only marginally effective, and some of the maladies that affect us today are partly psychosomatic...
Yes, the mind can be a powerful tool. Unfortunately, it's not always on our side...
Placebo can have physiological effects.
"Physical changes are real. For example, studies on asthma patients show less constriction of the bronchial tubes in patients for whom a placebo drug works."
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
What a complete and utter bullshit title. It even says right in the summary, they're "no more" effective than placebos, which have been proven over and over and over to actually be somewhat effective. So I guess they have "an effect" unlike the title specifies.
... the placebo effect is real, and only works if people believe in the remedy.
Quinine, in any detectible concentration, is not homeopathy, by definition.
Well, anything which has any measurable concentration of anything other than water and benign compounds like sugar, is by definition, not homeopathy.
If symptoms persist, take one.
...
If symptoms persist, take one-half.
If symptoms persist, take one-quarter.
By the way, has anyone seen what dogs do with grass? Ok, it varies a bit by dog. Some eat grass (and throw it up later) while others simply bite at the grass (swallowing little or none and not throwing it up later).
The point is, why do they do it?
I postulate, with the second category of dog, that they are getting a hint, an "essence of grass", and using that as an intentional "almost at homeopathic levels" treatment.
Our dog memorizes where the grass patches are and will want to head down certain blocks just to get to that grass.
BTW, regular lawn grass doesn't work and they will shun it. The best grass is "weed" grass that grows wildly, is longer than lawn grass and the best of the best has a wide blade -- the grass is several times wider than lawn grass.
I come here for the love
In other news, scientists have discovered that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As someone who is resistant to 'alternative medicine', I assume that people will do the mainstream route first, and so receive mainstream care. Only if that has failed would I expect them to go off to more 'interesting' possibilities. But you're right, people don't follow that route, and it could be a serious problem. Thanks for making me think!
In Dr Goldacre's talk at nerdstock 2009, he mentions a study in which there were measurable physiological changes. Particularly in the non-placebo group those that were given a muscle relaxant had high muscle relaxant levels in their blood plasma than those who were given the muscle relaxant and were told it was a placebo.
I like James Randi's joke about the man who accidentally overdosed on homeopathic medicine when he forgot to take it.
I read something similar. Bill Joel's daughter decided to end it all, and overdosed on homeopathic medicine. Fortunately she survived that suicide attempt.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
The less you use, the more powerful the effects, so if you use none at all, you run the risk of dying from a MASSIVE overdose...
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
That's not homeopathy. That's a natural herbal remedy. There's a ton of evidence that various herbal remedies work, and various herbal remedies don't work. It's a different thing entirely from the "diluted" homeopathics.
Placebos have undoubtedly successfully treated more people than any medical procedure. [We can say this because treatments are rarely twice as effective as placebo. As such, placebo can be considered to be responsible for typically 50-100% of a treatment's effectiveness.]
There are many health issues where treatments don't outperform placebo by 10% eg mental health.
Now if you or your public health service is on a budget, a cheap placebo might well be the best option.
A couple more points:
- Many treatments are impossible to test against placebo eg osteopathy and the like. Homeopathy is perfect to test against placebo -- it is scientifically indistinguishable from water. Therefore we know with far more certainty than anything else that homeopathy doesn't outperform placebo. We could still be wrong but we can be surer of that than any other complementary treatment.
- Double blind is a necessity for testing against placebo. Single blind cannot give a positive result -- but a negative one means your treatment is pretty bad. But double blind methodologies are often flawed and should always be tested by asking the patient what they think they took. If > 55% guess correctly, you have a problem.
Whilst for us geeks it's 'obvious' that a healthy dose of scepticism and a demand for evidence is de rigeur, if you were never taught to think like that, then it's not entirely your fault that you fall for the latest internet fad. Blaming the victim of a well constructed scam for being deceived is usually unfair. And we do have to remember that 'science' has made some howling mistakes in the past, only to recant later.
homeopathic, in that they actually do contain actual measurable amounts of plant extracts.
Nobody with any sense disputes that some plants have beneficial medicinal applications. But you have to actually use the plants or their chemical constituents, not just take some water and milk sugar that is somehow "impregnated" with the vibrations of the plant by being shaken and mumbled over by some guru...
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
OK, I think all of us (or, most of us, anyway) are clear on the "It's just distilled water, and doesn't do anything that distilled water doesn't do" thing, but one thing has always bugged me.
How come the homeopathy people always discuss the components that aren't in their nostrums using Harry Potter Latin? They just stick a "um" or "ium" on the end of everything
(Actually Rowling's Latin was better than this...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Even some arguably intelligent people get it backwards...
http://gawker.com/5851835/stev...
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
?
So are you saying that homeopathy is simply water and sugar?
I thought homeopathy was:
"the treatment of disease by minute doses of natural substances that in a healthy person would produce symptoms of disease."
Quinine in a detectable dose that is large enough causes malarial like symptoms. That is the very definition of homeopathy.
Right right. One tends to think of the education system as "uniform." This despite the fact that I am keenly aware that my educational experience was highly unusual. Moving every 5 years shakes things up a bit. And I had books around the house that sent me down a scientifically inquisitive path as well. They need to add a class in not believing everything someone tells you to the common core.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You are incorrect.
You *can* prove that a treatment is ineffective (i.e. no statistically significant difference from a similarly administered placebo treatment). Many of these studies were set out to do just that. If the tests detected any changes in the patients, they would conclude that the treatment had an effect. If the tests detected no changes in the patients, they would conclude that the treatments had no effect. The research papers cited in this report overwhelmingly concluded the latter.
We are not trying to find out how homeopathy works, just whether it has any real effects in the world. It does not.
This is not an absence of evidence.
The reason that so many people believe that homeopathic medicines is that most of them actually WORK, because they are "contaminated" with actual medicine. For instance, there's this zinc-based nasal spray that is advertized as homeopathic, but in fact it contains a non-trivial amount of the active ingredient. It's advertized as homeopathic (a) as a marketing gimmick for those who buy into this stuff (note: people who believe in homeopathy don't read labels or even understand what's on those labels) and (b) probably some way to get around FDA regulations.
Ever heard of grapefruit seed extract? Supposedly it's this powerful antimicrobial agent. Except it's not. Often the product also contains an actual antimicrobial compound as an "inactive ingredient."
I have no idea how companies get away with this. I mean, if it works, that's fine, but to lie through their teeth about what does what in the product?
The harm done by homepathy is equal to the net benefit of the actual drug for which it is substituted, minus the difference in cost.
Quinine additionally has been an effective treatment for Malaria when not much else helped at all.
I first tried some Hylands runny nose pills on my daughter, who was already on medication from a doctor without success. They worked. I later used them with my son and I never had to resort to anything else.
If that's not enough for you, my wife just recently used some kind of homeopathic medication in our aged cat's drinking water that she had picked up from the pet store. The cat is around 18 years old and frequently gets a bladder infection which has never been stopped with anything but antibiotics. Using the homeopathic preparation resulted in her doing a complete turn-around within two days.
We've got a friend who opened an integrative medical practice (she is an MD), and utilizes homeopathy within it. As I said, I can't buy the bizarre explanation that accompanies the practice, but there does seem to be something to it, although I've never used it for myself. I can say that if it is valid for the reasons they state, we're all toast due to the amount of medication which ends up back in our water supply.
We have cigarettes for that.
We have used something called Whole Baby Salve for each of our infants.
It has been amazing in treating scalded skin from diaper rash to mastitis and other burn like symptoms.
This works mainly because it serves as a lubricant between the kid and whatever is causing the rash. But that is besides the point.
We know that a lot of common items have some form of medicinal properties, well proven in the lab but they aren't classified as drugs because they aren't that powerful. For example, the Aloe Vera plant is proven to be helpful with rashes and burns, so it ends up being used in a lot of over the counter things from sun burn cream to moisturiser. Because its used so casually does not make it ineffective and just because it's not dispensed by a pharmacists does not make it homoeopathic. There's often quite a bit of science behind remedies that also happen to be old wives tales.
But the article isn't talking about treating nappy rash, it's talking about people eschewing proven medical treatments for serious medical conditions with homoeopathic remedies which are proven not to work. In this case, homoeopathy isn't just useless, it's also quite dangerous.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Of course, anyone with compelling evidence to the contrary (or better yet, proof to the contrary)
Homeopathy that has been proven to work is called "medicine." That's how a lot of medicine gets invented; people use some tree bark and goat liver concoction to cure prickly heat, and lo-and-behold, it works! So researches come along and break it down to find the active ingredients, put it through proper testing, synthesize it, and get a patent if they can. Even if they can't lock down the active ingredient, they tweak the formula a bit, slap a trademark on it, and run a media blitz combined with distribution channel pressure to take market share. They make a shit-ton of money doing it, and they're not just letting the good answers sit there unexploited.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
ic medicine, a week without it.
Homeopathy is "also quite dangerous" is painting with rather a broad stroke it seems to me.
Like everything it depends. ...I will take this homeopathic remedy vs say a known cancer drug that is efficacious then I would agree.
If one is saying
That indeed is unwise and will result in early death.
If one is saying I will give my kid some Arnica ointment for swelling vs say using some anti-inflammatory like ibuprophen to ease the swelling then I couldn't agree less.
As for the Article...
"The reviewers sum up their report by saying that homeopathy should not be used to treat any health conditions that are chronic or that have the potential to become serious."
This also has a rather broad stroke approach. There are many who suffer from chronic things for which there are not really any great treatments or for which the treatments themselves have many side effects and long term problems. I see no problem with people seeking out alternate therapies which ultimately may not help, but do not have other life impactful consequences.
I think we can agree that for things with effective treatments it is folly attempt to substitute things which don't work for things that do work. For the bulk of medical conditions, this means standard evidence based therapy and medications.
--
Calling someone "hater" can actually be an apt description of someone with no argument, but pure bile in their discourse.
Homeopathy is not useless in treating medical conditions if there's a placebo effect. Sometimes the placebo effect can be greater than other intended effects.
Example: The 3rd Reich wanted an alternative to the medical establishment, since thy did not like it as there where "philosophical" differences. So they evaluated Homeopathy. This was a complete bust, the rates of people being cured and/or surviving in the evaluated homeopathic "Hospitals", was comparable to untreated people and far below conventional medicine. And remember that conventional medicine was not all that great at the time.
Now, Nazi medical research was utterly unethical and repulsive, but they did not falsify results as they needed the results for their war-machine.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
This isn't about logic or the evolution of medicine or science. It's not about rational progression. Thus your observations have no bearing on anything, (which is a shame, because they are both accurate and profound in their simplicity).
The whole debate over homeopathy and similar is pinned to something else entirely. Obedience.
People have been trained from birth to obey their authorities; teachers, parents or government officers. The training program is immersive, comprehensive, multi-disciplinary experience designed to create docility and strip away imagination and incompatible personal goals.
With many people, the training program works.., with others, it doesn't work as well. In some few others, it fails altogether.
Those who have been successfully trained have as part of their installed "operating system" an instinctive need to attack those around them who they observe as failing to be sufficiently obedient. It's part of the system's built-in self regulation.
Facts, logic, science, research, etc., are for the well-trained little more than props and devices paid lip service to, but actually only used in earnest when doing so cannot threaten the official stance of the favored authority. Truth, like people, is expected to be obedient, and will be tortured into the correct posture should it fail to obey the demands of the authorities. This behavior is automatic.
This is why nobody will ever 'win' a debate with an Authoritarian; they are interested in only two things: 1) Following the strongest leader, and 2) justifying this in their minds as Right and Proper through any means possible.
It actually hurts when their subjective beliefs appear to fall apart. The brain registers pain. When they successfully spin the cognitive dial to re-arrange some facts, ignore others, (and generally bullshit themselves) into believing once more that their authorities are Right and Proper, the reward centers are activated, not just activating a calming sensation, but an actual pleasure rush.
Truth hurts, lies feel good.
This is why debate with authoritarians is pointless. We have different objectives. One side is trying to isolate Truth, (which can often be a painful job), while the other side is merely seeking pleasure while avoiding pain. The best you can hope to see in an authoritarian is a dauntless display of cognitive contortion.
But I'm guessing you probably know that. I'm just feeling expository at the moment, pointing it out for the incidental reader.
True homeopaths (properly trained ones) don't just give you pills and expect a cure. It doesn't work that way. The patient undergoes extensive interviews and if properly done, interviews with close family/acquaintances until a picture emerges of the patient's symptomology. This includes the mental state as well as well defined physical internal and external bodily locations places, times and processes. This picture is compared with thousands of possible remedies until the closest match is found. The progression of a cure isn't a 1 pill treatment but can be over a period of months using different remedies.
The prescribed regimen of taking a selected pill, it's concentration and form is complex as well. There are certain foods that can't be taken because they will negate the effects of the remedy.
The other aspects are also significant being:
A 'proven' homeopathic remedy is just what it says. It's been known to work. Many remedies (especially from manufacturers) aren't proven and consequently you will find that homeopaths make their own if mother tinctures or specific sources can be found and used. Some manufacturers are very good at making certain types of remedies but weak with others.
A true homeopathic practitioner has documented successes and will continue to practice. Others I have known have given up because their methodology was poor, took shortcuts and failed or didn't have enough successful treatments.
Hahnemann http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... is worth a read if you can get a copy of his original work.
In the end, he has a point and that is under the right conditions, the action of 'like cures like' does work. Not for everything though but when it does work it is miraculous in speed and effect.
I don't particularly care what modern allopathic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... doctors and/or researchers come to conclusions about homeopathy because I've experienced cures on myself (whilst under training) and treated patients who had given up. To say it is a placebo becomes a bit nonsensical as there is little to distinguish that from a homeopathic cure. In other words "Hey I'm cured! I don't give a crap if you think it's placebo."
Homeopathic remedies are extremely weak and can lose their strength totally if exposed incorrectly.
Homeopathy has been run down consistently since the advent of Sulfa drugs and anti-biotics.
Homeopathy is very popular in 3rd world countries because they are cheap to produce.
If you go to a naturopath who also practices homeopathy, then my first thoughts is to just accept their naturopathic diagnoses. You really need a good homeopath who just does that. Mixed holistic practitioners are ok, but not when homeopathics are involved unless their primary skill is homeopathy itself.
If you need to know some of my case histories, then reply here.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
No, that's not homeopathy. At all. You're describing naturopathy.
Homeopathy only has 1 compound. Water that once upon a time had something else in it and was diluted until there was nothing left of the original. Generally speaking, if there's anything but trace amount (if that) of the original compound, you're not done diluting yet. An homeopathic compound, scientifically, is pretty much always pure water.
Seems like several people are confusing the two in this thread. Homeopathy is not "natural products". It is something very specific (the above compound diluted so much there's only water left, along with some patient/practitioner relationship and near-rituals).
As people mentioned already, that's not homeopathic. There's actually an active ingredient in there. Anything that isn't virtually distilled water is NOT homeopathy, and is generally naturopahy. If I can take your homeopathic remedy, analyze it, and easily find something that isn't pure H2O, then its simply not homeopathy at all. BY _DEFINITION_
You are not only confused, but also being duped. The only kind that would be considered homeopathic are the "highly diluted" ones. And by highly diluted, it means potentially thousands of times (ie: there is virtually no trace amount of the original ingredient in). That is the definition of homeopathy.
Homeopathy is when you take an active ingredient, put it in water, then dilute hundreds or even thousands of times until all the active ingredient is gone. Then by using a concept often referred to as the "memory of water", the nearly distilled water left is supposed to be more powerful than the original compound that contained the active ingredient.
If you have a non-trivial amount of active ingredient, then its naturopathy or even just "medicine". Those are often mislabeled on purpose, so that the real homeopathic treatments (which, being water, are impossibly cheap to produce), get traction.
Of course homeopathy is useless for treating medical conditions. But that doesn't mean it's fake or worthless. How many of the conditions that people take medicines for are in fact spiritual or emotional or attitudinal conditions that can only be acknowledged physically- AKA "psychosomatic"? The vast majority of them! AND, despite the common assumption that Western medicine cures everything it's applied to, it does not- just ask any nurse in a family practice clinic. What a vast pool of maladies that leaves that are susceptible to Homeopathy. No wonder it keeps "working", when the only thing people actually need from it is reassurance or the chance to believe that things can be better. And then there's the everpresent danger of medical science claiming that it knows all there is to know about how the body works.... let's not go there.
When a treatment is effective, both people who support homeopathy and people who oppose homeopathy stop calling it homeopathic.
You *can* prove that a treatment is ineffective
Not really. All you can do is fail to find an effect, which is why you don't see papers claiming that they've "proven" X was ineffective.
This is pretty basic stuff that I'd expect a high-schooler to be able to explain.
Required reading for internet skeptics
One of the first "homeopaths", cited extensively by modern practicioners, was Samuel Hanneman. And Samuel did _research_ in medicine. Rather than merely citing from leaned tracts, he investigated local practicioners and conducted experimented. Many of his his claims have turned to be misguided, such has his "law of similars". But his dedication to actual experimentation and verification of treatment was exceptional in his time. He was not, perhaps, a _great_ scientiest. But his claims about modest doses of dangerous substances being used to treat related illness was key to the development of vaccination for infectious diseases, and to desensitization for treating allergies. And his study of "miasms" was surprisingly close to the later discovered theories of infectious diseases: he lacked the microscopes and later, more sophisticated chemical tools to research it much further.
So please do give credit to the originator of the field, much as one gives credit to religious prophets whose ideas have been perverted. Perhaps much like one can give credit to Isaac Newton's early work in mathematics and optics and ignore most of his later, confused work in alchemy. If only the very followers of his work would understand the beginnings of scientific testing and methodology in his work and carry on from that, they might be much more helpful to their clients.
We should be fair to homeopathy. There is exactly one medical condition it really can cure: dehydration.
Researchers sifted through 1,800 research papers on homeopathy and found no reliable report that showed homeopathic remedies had any better results than placebos.
To which the knee-jerk response is: absence of proof is not the same as proof of absence.
Oh wait, wrong topic to trot that argument out on. Please ignore the above ramblings of my mind.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I was explicitly referring to the diabetes itself, not it's side-effects. But you, AC, obviously just want to be pedantic.
And I ALSO obviously wasn't talking about animal studies. Obviously the rules there are much different, because you don't care if your control group is going to die.
The problem is, when homeopathic remedies are created, there is no dose of the natural substance left, just water. When that water is used to "dose" sugar pills, those pills are just sugar. So yes, homeopathy is just sugar and water.
Quinine is not homeopathic.
So no help with our subluxations from that side, Dr. Bob.
"Homeopathy Turns Out To Be Useless For Treating Medical Conditions"
But it does wonders for the wallet conditions of its practitioners.
Should it be considered a scam?
Except that many homeopathic treatments are actually water that has no active ingredients dropped onto sugar pills then dried. So no, not even dehydration. Just hypoglycaemia.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Can't measure psychosomatic stuff man
Oh man is your mind going to be blown when you find out there's an entire field of medicine that does exactly that.
Placebos do NOT work on my migraines. Hell, over the counter pharmaceuticals don't either. For that matter, the other types only half assed work, except for some I'm rather scared of so my doctor won't prescribe them in the first place. (Yes, I have been asked, and said, I'd rather not, even if it was only to avoid getting mugged for my meds.)
Does EM Sensitivity come to mind for anyone? :P
Interesting.
So there are definitional issue really. What homeopathy has become is not the same as what it was originally about.
[sarc]I didn't see this one coming.[/sarc]
Homeopathy can not be shown to have a positive effect beyond that create by belief, aka the placebo effect.
This has been extensively tested numerous times.
Medicine that has no effect, is in fact, useless. Just like that cure for cancer in a small capsule current in orbit about Barnards Star that will self destruct in 3 minutes. It will never help anyone, thus it has no real value, and so it is utterly useless, though you are free to curse whatever bastards out there decided to tease us like that.
Well, actually it is worse than useless, it causes harm since it deprives it's users of resources and opportunity that could otherwise be used for actual medical assistance that would help.
Don't be silly. Conventional medicine doesn't work for everything. Homeopathy doesn't work for everything either.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Toxic mold causes real symptoms that cannot be treated with water. If you're living with toxic mold you'd probably better move away.
You're confusing having a slick web site with having medical knowledge.
Why are they still in business? Because maintaining a web site is very inexpensive, and maybe they host the site and operate in a country where the authorities leave them alone.
Why do they have an "education" wing? To get people like you to think they are a legitimate operation.
Why are people against...? Because it is not based on science and has been demonstrated many times to be essentially worthless.
Look around you. Your phone, TV, the internet, your car, everything you have is the result of applying science. None of it is based on magic or wishful thinking, or prayer. It's based on people figuring out what works and what doesn't and leaving behind the things that don't, including homeopathy.
How is homeopathy any different from traditional medicine in that regard? Yet people still use it, and on their kids. I immediately thought if this recent news story up here in Canada... sad.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/aborigi...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicin...
http://news.nationalpost.com/2...
remedy for any condition?
Let's say I'm a competitor who wants to produce a homeopathic medicine for which I do not have the original substances that need to be diluted. All I do is buy one dose of the competitor's product and dilute it further and repackage it with my label. The more it is diluted the better, so my diluted stuff is better than the original.
Now multiply that by thousands of people who would like to be in the homeopathic remedy business. Why would anyone "research" and look for new "active ingredients" (or should I say activum ingredientium to confer the scientific sound that latin sounding names lend this sort of magic)?
What about rain? Rain hits just about everything and ends up in our drinking water supply, so drinking water is an extremely dilute form of virtually every "active" homeopathic agent. Why buy any sort of homeopathic remedy when all you have to do is drink water and you'll get them all?
Human stupidity expands without limit.
But making a living out of selling only placebos should be considered a fraud. And I am not talking about producing placebos for randomized trials, but about the profession of homeopath.
Homeopathic medicine often had an advantage with respect to iatrogenic medicines. Many diseases are self limited and may clear themselves or at least stabilize. Many medical treatments were outright injurious (e.g. mercury, arsenic, war gas based based) and homeopathy could actually produce head-to-head better results. Even now many mainstream cancer treatments and last ditch medical treatments will have fearsome adverse effects that people have to decide when doing nothing **IS** better.
for instance: i found this high end solid silver, gold plated, diamond encrusted ethernet cable greatly improved the quality of audio that i recieved from my super fast 28k fibrous broadband modem. I know all those nay-sayers... those common people with their primitive untrained ears, who don't encode their vinyl at 5.6448 MHz sampling rate because of that unproven "nyquist shannon sampling theorem", say the ethernet frame check sequence, CRC-32 and ultimately transport layer protocols mean that data transmission loss at the physical layer is completely invisible before it gets anywhere near the DAC.
Now i don't claim to know what all that stuff means, but i Dooo know that electrons are electrons, and electrons are like water and water has memory, and those other electrons know they are clones, and my ears can tell those electrons are not the original electrons from my 28k modem that's downloading my 5.6448 MHz encoded flac files over a TOR network to my $1 a year shared server located in some kitchen in Russia on top of which somone is making toast... you know how i can tell? i can smell the toast when i use my new high end solid silver, gold plated, diamond encrusted ethernet cable, that's how good it is, it acutally induces a state of synaesthesia.
high end solid silver, gold plated, diamond encrusted ethernet cable: better than crack cocaine.
I also heard on the pedoaudio forum that they are going to release a limited edition version that is made from conductible water with 10e-1073741824 percent gold aparently this makes it a billion times more conductive than pure gold and will sell for twice the price, with a limited edition of made from water blessed by the Pope.
Placebos are just that, lies... so the question is what the net positive impact of a particular placebo is. I guess homoeopathy has a net negative impact for the world...
Placebos administered by a professional are the least adulterated form of lie, you are told it is real medicine and it is not (nothing more). The potential negative impact is loss of trust in the person or organisation who administered it.
Placebos from a pseudo-science background on the other hand have a greater potential for weighing on the harmful side because they come with a huge back story that attempts to create a false sense of trust in place of reality. This has the potential to greatly mislead and confuse people.
i feel very strongly that homeopaths should be allowed to marry.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Any article or ad or product which uses the word detox I immediately automatically dismiss. Also the word toxin, unless it's in the specifically scientifically correct denotation of the word. Also cleanse. Stepping back, all these and similar concepts show an odd view of the world, that our bodies are these pure temples that are polluted by such impure things as coffee or gluten or staying up all night doing drugs. That's not how it works, honest. Might as well go detox your car by doing a muffler cleanse after you've build up toxins from using low budget gasoline.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Depending on the severity and frequency, you might want to look into holistic approaches. Everyone's body is different, but if you try enough things you might find the magic combo that works in your case.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
So given a choice I'd chose the cheaper homeopathy "solutions".
but the drugs that lose to placebos don't get approved by the FDA.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
For chipping away at this pernicious BS. Thanks to everyone who yet again steps up to slowly and patiently demonstrate that, yes, AGW is real, yes, vaccines are fine.
A placebo is, by definition, a "sham" treatment, whether it be a drug, surgery, meditation technique, whatever.
Using the currently-accepted treatment is not, by definition, a placebo. I don't know how you can say it "isn't substantially different".
Control-groups MAY use a placebo, but there are many other ways of creating a control group. (Using the currently accepted treatment, drawing on statistics from a sample population, etc.)
And it would STILL be unethical to use homeopathy in ANY study in which there is a current accepted treatment, and total non-treatment could be medically harmful to the patient.
I don't know much about homeopathy, but I can attest to the effectiveness of essential oils. (a little off topic, I know)
For example, lavender helps with skin issues such as dry skin; peppermint oil fragrance is very uplifting; peppermint oil is effective at warding off mice; cinnamon oil wards off ants; clove bud oil for toothaches, lemon oil for cleaning; to name a few.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Medicine is a political practice.
Ibuprofen puts a dent in mine, but the only thing that really works is sleep. It's not as if I'd be getting any quality thinking in, so I may as well rest.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Wilbur stood on the corner with a jar of rabbit shit. Freddie came by," hey man what you got there?"
"It's smart pills, try some."
Chewing up a large handful, Freddie exclaimed" this tastes like shit!"
"See you're getting smarter already."
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Funny I got aTroll Moderation for this. Doesn't take much be considered a Troll Apparently. The standards have slackened!
hehehehehehe.
Starvation. A dilutant frequently used in homeopathy is sugar. Several tablespoons of any such homeopathic medicine will help cure starvation.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Prior to the understanding of proteins as little machines, it was theorized that enzymes worked by somehow changing the structure of water so that the reaction being catalyzed was accelerated; the prevailing model was the colloid, where the properties of the suspension are due to its bulk properties, rather than quasimechanical activity of the individual molecules.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
This is why we need to stop letting stupid ideas rule the universe like it's a right. Generally the type of people who being in Homepathy also believe in Gods, Spirits, Ghosts, Magic and all manor of bat shit crazy. Didn't science fix this problem century's ago? If you can't repeat the test with verified results then it doesn't work, what ever happened to teaching this line of reasoning?
You can moderate me down, but I don't take that back. Science is selective and it is elitist. Science just as economy is a new religion. Imagination is besides what is commonly accepted. Homeopathy and other fringe practices are besides the accepted. Point proven.
Homeopathy is extremely pure, distilled water. Anybody thinking it has any effect is a complete moron.
Quinine is the original homeopathic medicine and the exception that proves the rule. Because the term homeopathy, when based on the quinine remedy for malaria, actually meant same symptom (homeo-pathy, same pathology). Quinine made people cough, like malaria, but treated malaria quite effectively. Somebody got the idea that giving someone a substance that caused the same symptoms as the disease would cure the disease, which is insane, because they generalized from a special case. Then someone else started this whole "dilution" bullshit.
You're not confused...you're actually looking at things rationally and getting screwed up by the asinine terminology of the charlatans who take advantage of people who DON'T check for reviewed studies.