Slashdot Mirror
Is the End of Government Acceptance of Homeopathy In Sight?
cold fjord writes: It looks like homeopathy is in for a rough stretch ahead as shown in a chart and noted by Steven Novella at NEUROLoOGICAblog, "Homeopathy is perhaps the most obviously absurd medical pseudoscience. It is also widely studied, and has been clearly shown to not work. Further, there is a huge gap in the public understanding of what homeopathy is; it therefore seems plausible that the popularity of homeopathy can take a huge hit just by telling the public what it actually is. ... In 2010 the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee completed a full report on homeopathy in which they concluded it is witchcraft – that it cannot work, it does not work, and support for homeopathy in the national health service should be completely eliminated. In 2015 the Australian government completed its own review, concluding that there is no evidence that homeopathy works for anything. Homeopathy is a placebo. ... The FDA and the FTC in the United States are now both receiving testimony, questioning their current regulation of homeopathy. ... There is even a possibility that the FDA will decide to do their actual job – require testing of homeopathic products to demonstrate efficacy before allowing them on the market. If they do this simple and obvious thing, the homeopathic industry in the US will vanish over night, because there is no evidence to support any homeopathic product for any indication." — More on the FDA hearings at Science-Based Medicine.
What's wrong with having placebos? Placebos work.
yeah, they worked great for Steve Jobs, as i recall.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The problem (in the USA, at least) is that companies sell "low dilution" (parse that carefully) treatments that can actually be dangerous as "homeopathic remedies". In this manner, they avoid meaningful regulation. Some of these "low dilution" remedies contain dangerous amounts of harmful ingredients.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
There's a lot of snake oil outside of traditional medicine, but there's a lot of it *within* traditional medicine as well.
One of the really obvious low-hanging fruit that I've seen is the Burzynski Clinic.
To summarize, Stanislaw Burzynski (a doctor in Texas) claims to have invented a new cancer treatment that's better than Chemo. Someone made a movie "Cancer is serious business" which shows lots and lots of case file evidence that this is true.
We have a claim, and we have evidence. Is this bunkum or a scientific breakthrough?
It's usually easy to figure this out: interview the patients, see if they were treated, if they got better (or not), and if they are happy with the treatment. Examine the evidence and see if it's consistent with the claims.
In most cases of "bunkum", you'll find that the patients feel they were cheated, the treatment had no effect, they were also on traditional treatments, and so on and so on. It's pretty easy to separate the wheat from the chaff by examining the evidence.
In the case of Stanislaw Burzynski, no one does this. Read up on the reports and find that no one addresses the evidence directly: it's all ad-hominem attacks ("he's not a real doctor, he's not a cancer researcher"), indirect rationalizations ("it can't work because it doesn't fit my model", he doesn't have an explanation for *why* it works, it must be bunkum because it's too good), administrative accusations, and so on and so on.
One particularly salient point, brought up by many, is that the treatment is "untested". His treatment doesn't work because there are no studies to confirm this.
No one addresses the evidence.
I think what medical science, and science at large, have to realize is that people are starting to wise up to these "absence of evidence" statements. Just having a doctor say "there are no studies showing it's effective" won't cut it any more - it's seen as a verbal hand-waving to support schools of thought. It's "absence of evidence is evidence of absence".
This is what happened with Homeopathy. People had a rationalization for *why* it works and there was some historical evidence. Add in some first-hand accounts, and suddenly you've got a miracle cure that science can't explain (but really works!).
Not every crazy theory needs a full-fledged study, but I suspect a lot of good could be done by taking the top "fad" populist beliefs and making simple, definitive studies. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if a doctor could say "we studied it and there's no effect" instead of "there's no evidence that this has any effect".
The prior shows a logical certainty, the latter is rationalization.
Why does it even matter?
Because it is fraud. It parts people from their money under false pretenses. It leads people to believe it has medicinal properties that it does not and they sometimes choose to not seek genuine medical care as a result.
I mean, these treatments are pretty much just water. If somebody wants to drink water that they think has special properties, why stop them?
Because it doesn't have special properties and can be shown to lack the special properties claimed. When you sell a product you are required by law (or should be) to represent the product accurately. You should not be allowed to claim health benefits unless there is evidence to support that claim.
It's not even like drugs, where there can be severe harm to the users and others in the vicinity.
It fraudulently separates people from their money. It also at times keeps people from seeking genuine medical care when they need it.
Some of it works. A medipot lets you dump water up one nostril and out the other.
And this brings us back to the problem addressed in the summary: "Further, there is a huge gap in the public understanding of what homeopathy is; it therefore seems plausible that the popularity of homeopathy can take a huge hit just by telling the public what it actually is." The Neti Pot may be popular among alternative medicine types, but it's not homeopathy.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
I use a Netipot, only for clearing sinus congestion. No homoeopathy involved, straightforward flushing.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That only makes it worse. Homeopathy is based on pseudoscience that is just plain stupid, if people use that name for other things, and there are examples of things that DO WORK (even if they aren't based on the same principles that make homeopathy impossible to work), they will use them as examples that homeopathy DOES work, which will only help misinform people.
Actually, I think I read that they observed people getting a benefit from taking a placebo pill, even if they know it's placebo. Not nearly as much as people believing it works, but that'd give it more than null effectiveness.
Pretty sure you are referring to someone who had PANCREATIC cancer, not prostate.
Good-bye
E.g. at Whole Foods, which IMO that store is a huge ripoff to begin with, not even counting the homeopathic medicine section. For starters, they have a "bad foods" blacklist that doesn't even make any sense, and worse is that they sell a crapload of junk food. Meanwhile the hippies that shop there, and pay two to three times what the food should cost, just blindly assume that everything there is healthy.
And make no mistake that homeopathy is witchcraft.
Nonsense. There is overwhelming evidence that homeopathy is ineffective. There is far less evidence that witchcraft is ineffective. Homeopathy is based on the falsifiable theory that water has a memory of substances that were dissolved in it. Witchcraft is based on the non-falsifiable theory that there are supernatural forces that can be summoned to intervene in the human world. Those are entirely different things.
It is a placebo sold at a huge markup to stupid and sometimes desperate people.
That is an accurate description of homeopathy. That is not at all an accurate description of witchcraft.
That's ridiculous. The Form of cancer he had was treatable. Had he been treated he likely would have survived because most patients with that type of cancer survive.
But because he delayed treatment he didn't get treatment when it likely would have worked.
If you wish to be ignorant, fine, but he had no chance of survival with the treatment he opted for versus a good chance with real treatment
http://gawker.com/5849543/harvard-cancer-expert-steve-jobs-probably-doomed-himself-with-alternative-medicine
No, you don't. At best you skipped over some very inconvenient parts of the text for your view, and that is assuming you bothered to read it at all.
The "dog in this race" that I have is a preference for facts and truth to occasionally show up in the discussions of the supposedly intelligent people here. I know, it's mostly a forlorn hope, but still .... And I'll add to that I find pitiable the habit of so many here on Slashdot that apparently live such cloistered lives with such narrow and stunted views that the only reason that they can summon to mind for someone having a different view from them is either personal gain or they are on someone's payroll.
I've extracted and highlighted some bits you may have skipped over.
University of Maryland Medical Center - Osteopathy
Today, D.O.s get the same basic training as medical doctors (M.D.s), but they also learn manipulation (hands on adjustments of muscles, bones, and ligaments) and use this along with more conventional medical treatments. Most D.O.s are primary care practitioners, specializing in family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics/gynecology, or pediatrics.
D.O.s practice in all specialties of medicine ranging from emergency medicine and cardiovascular surgery to psychiatry and geriatrics. D.O.s trained in various specialty areas take a whole patient (holistic) approach.
According to the American Osteopathic Association, more than 64,000 osteopathic physicians practice in the United States today. Although osteopathic manipulations were once used to treat all forms of disease, now they are considered useful mostly for musculoskeletal conditions (such as back pain).
Now if you want to present a case that the University of Maryland's Medical Center is a hotbed of quackery or simply wrong, I'd be happy to examine your evidence.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell