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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.
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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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
they didn't test the right medical condition.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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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...
In other news, water turns out to be wet.
And its wetness increases, the more you dilute it!
Wait...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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'm fairly sure the Placebo Effect is effective.
Well, then you'd simply be wrong.
You see, there isn't one "Placebo Effect". The effect is different for different ailments.
An example: you have a patient who is suffering from a migraine. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they say they feel somewhat better. That may be the "placebo effect".
A second patient comes in who has had a heart attack. They aren't breathing, and there is no pulse. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they're dead.
When constructing studies with placebos, you typically have to compare like with like. There isn't a universal Placebo Constant you just throw into your paper to compare against-- you have to compare outcomes between a population of patients with condition X taking the substance being tested, to the outcomes of a population of patients, also with condition X, who are taking placebos. The placebos may or may not have any effect -- that makes no difference. What is important is that the substance you're testing will ideally do better than placebos do, otherwise you might as well just use the cheaper placebos for the condition at hand, and head back to the drawing board.
(This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of how such studies are run and constructed -- it is provided for illustrative purposes only)
Yaz
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.
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?
As it happens, it works even when people know they're receiving a placebo. Weird, isn't it?
Even stranger, there are measurable physiological effects. It's not just patients reporting on their subjective experience.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
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.
Samuel Hahnemann was the sole inventor of homeopathy, "not one of the first". And apparently he built a time machine too, and travelled from the "invention" of homeopathy in 1807 to become "key to the development" of vaccination in 1796. Amazing! Later he theorized that all disease originates from coffee.
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