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.
Lots of people given the shelf space devoted to it.
that's what my mother would say.
They are placebos as well yet no one seems to want those banned?
Wrong way of comparing...
Medications have to be effective to be allowed, but not more effective than older cheaper medications.
And it's really easy to demonstrate that connecting your speakers with Monster cables produces way better sound than not connecting them at all ;-)
What's wrong with having placebos? Placebos work. They are quite effective treatments for a variety of health problems, especially things like mental health problems. Homeopathy is obviously ridiculous, but I don't see anything wrong with having some kind of government-sanctioned system of placebo sugar pills available. Use the profits to fund actual medical science. The fact that the pills are placebo doesn't even need to be secret - you can post directly on the label that it has no active drugs in it and that it is still an effective treatment (both facts are true). A lot of people would consider lack of 'active drugs' a plus. Most people wouldn't even read the labels anyway. The pills would sell quite well.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
I think it has something to do with advertising and fraud, not the contents.
What's wrong with having placebos? Placebos work.
No placebos do not work. They are the very definition of not working. There is a reason we use placebos as the control group when doing double blind tests. The placebo effect is real but the placebos by definition have no medicinal effect whatsoever.
Placebos do have their occasional use as a therapy but homeopathy is for all practical purposes a placebo sold at a huge markup to stupid people. Homeopathy is pure fraud for that reason. It astonishes me that it is legal to represent them in any way as something even vaguely medicinal.
Yes, things like homeopathy aren't useful, but they don't actively hurt either. So why have regulations?
It's because of the fraud involved. Bernie Madoff was clearly running a pyramid scheme, so there shouldn't be any regulations against it, right? It's okay for people selling products to straight up lie about what it is, as long as it's obvious to most people that it's a lie it's perfectly okay. Buyer beware, and all that.
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!
Hypochondriacs buy a lot of homeopathic cures, because it works well on their imaginary ailments. On the plus side, it probably doesn't hurt them either. Unfortunately, even hypochondriacs sometimes get real health problems and fail to get proper health care that could actually help them.
I have a friend who has a serious problem, but refuses to see a practitioner of allopathic medicine. She is trying one quack treatment after another and is not getting better. No amount of facts seem to interfere with her beliefs.
Ok, I don't believe in homeopathy, but I suspect the market is people with ongoing medical problems where they've been thru conventional medicine, the doctors haven't helped and have given up.
Sometimes. People do turn to witchcraft sometimes out of desperation. And make no mistake that homeopathy is witchcraft. It is a placebo sold at a huge markup to stupid and sometimes desperate people. Most people who buy into homeopathy however are rather stupid new-age granola types who lack critical reasoning ability. I'm particularly disappointed in places like Whole Foods that sell this snake oil even though they have no excuse for not knowing better.
If that happened to you, YOU would be willing to try homeopathy and pretty much anything else that might work, because you don't have an alternative.
No I wouldn't use homeopathy because I am not stupid enough to ever believe it would cure me of anything. I'm going to die someday and I'd rather do so with some dignity rather than paying money to some snake oil salesman for something that will do nothing.
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".
My wife bought home a $250 bottle of some homeopathic health remedy she'd bought for herself, that warned on the outside not to take more than 1 or 2 drops at a time due to its extreme potency. Downed it in one. Most expensive bottle of water I've ever had. She was pissed, until I made her go read up on what homeopathy was. What's scary is that she, an intelligent, 35 year old woman, simply didn't know. The fact it's allowed to be sold in pharmacies (at least, in my country) is a scary thing.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
The FDA should at least make sure that these preparations contains oil from a genuine ophidian species.
OK, they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer, but do you think banning these things will help?
Short answer? Yes. Selling "medicine" under false pretenses is 100% of the reason why the FDA exists. If these products were represented accurately then I guess I have no problem with them being sold as entertainment but they are NOT medicine. You know what they call alternative medicine that is proven to work? MEDICINE.
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.
I went to the chemist a while back to buy some ibprofen, the chemist suggested a homeopathic, insisting it was just as good. If I hadn't been educated about homeopathy, I would have probably bought the homeopathic crap.
Maybe you could try suggesting to your friend that she start journaling, if she isn't now. It has both utility and appeal, and will help her track how she feels, what treatments she has tried, and could help inform her future choices. Maybe she'll eventually see she should try a more mainstream approach. Perhaps you could ask her if she has ever seen an osteopath. Modern osteopaths are essentially the same as MDs, and licensed to practice medicine like them, but they do take a somewhat more holistic view of health. If your friend is in some way afraid of doctors the name osteopath might not raise the concerns that the word "doctor" would and yet she would still receive modern medical treatment. I wish her well.
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
If they do this simple and obvious thing, the homeopathic industry in the US will vanish over night,
Not really -- it will just be diluted until not a single homeopathy vendor remains, but the market will retain the essence of the original vendors and the effect will be even more potent.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Homeopathy was invented two centuries ago. Somehow, it's still around.
So now, for the next two centuries, we'll have to hear stories about how government is suppressing "natural" cures that they don't want people to have, because of big pharma (and Monsanto). Oh well.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why would you being hungry affect him?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Did she atleast turn in to Super Woman after taking that extremely potent elixir?
It's doubtful since he's the one that drank it. But you raise a good point, I'm sure he's glad that he didn't turn into Super Woman. :D
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
And if you are in pain, you might give $100 to someone to pray for you. I mean, at that point, what do you have to lose? $100?
Which is why I wouldn't do that. I would lose $100 and not gain anything by it. The alleged benefit would have to be plausible to me. I'm just not large enough a market to scam.
You perhaps have not been in quite enough pain. They didn't give soldiers with blown off limbs morpine for the euphoria.
Ever hear a badly injured person screaming from the pain? It's a weird high pitched and very disturbing keen. They might give you a hundred dollars just to knock them unconscious.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
As a longtime user of homeopathy, I have watched with amusement a scientific studies have been published recently purporting to prove that homeopathy does not work. I know from my direct experience that it works, so if science is finding something different, there must be something wrong with its premises.
As a longtime user of a tiger-repelling rock, I have watched with amusement a[s] scientific studies have been published recently purporting to prove that tiger-repelling rocks do not work. I know from my direct experience that it works, so if science is finding something different, there must be something wrong with its premises.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
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.
That makes no sense at all. The over the counter painkillers are NSAIDs, and they're also proven effective for that purpose (being anti-inflamatory.)
Granted they aren't going to work if you just cut your thumb off and it hurts really bad, but they'll absolutely help for mild pain like headaches, arthritis, etc, and that is NOT placebo, in fact it's even measurable.
That's just the thing actually, medical science could have done very well for him. When his physicians first found he had liver cancer, they thought for sure it would be untreatable. However he lucked out and got a rare form that grows very slowly and is easily removed with surgery.
So you know what he did? He went straight to a naturopathic "doctor" who recommended a juicing to fix it.
Needless to say, that didn't work, and by the time he actually decided to do anything about it (which was years later) it had already metastasized, and also destroying his liver in the process. Not much more details are known to the public other than that he went to something like 9 separate liver transplant centers in order to increase his chance of receiving a graft quickly (something that most people can't do because you have to be able to physically get to the clinic within an hour of them finding a donor, but he could anyways because he owned a private jet.)
Apparently he got his liver (hence when his health was declining he didn't have any visible signs of jaundice) but still died anyways, my guess is that the cancer had already spread to too many other places. We do know however that he admitted to a few people that not going with the surgery all those years later was a huge mistake.
Anyways it's funny to read naturopathic and homeopathic websites and forums who defend their beliefs in spite of this (Jobs was a well known "natural medicine" and "natural food" fanatic) by saying he didn't properly follow one of their stupid religious rules (which one he supposedly didn't follow varies from site to site.)
"The prior shows a logical certainty, the latter [absence of evidence] is rationalization."
No, the latter is not mere rationalization; it is a logical use of limited resources (like time and money).
People can come up with a billion crazy theories or stories. We don't have time to test all of them or start using all of them by default. Hence, the responsibility falls upon the story-teller or seller to do the test and present evidence before anyone else gives them attention, time, or money in return. That's not rationalization -- it's simply rational.
As I say in my statistics classes: "The null hypothesis gets the benefit of the doubt; the alternative hypothesis has the burden of proof". (Or as Wikipedia puts it: "Rejecting or disproving the null hypothesis... is a central task in the modern practice of science, and gives a precise sense in which a claim is capable of being proven false. The null hypothesis is generally assumed to be true until evidence indicates otherwise.").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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
Short excerpt from a large word salad, but I'm not seeing the words "peer-reviewed research" or "clinical trials" anywhere.
I think it has something to do with advertising and fraud, not the contents.
Apart from fraud and charging people large amounts of money for something they are not getting, it is dangerous . Not because the product is actually dangerous, but because in many cases it's taken in lieu of actual medicine. For most situations - colds, minor aches an pains, etc - it's not a big deal, but for real health problems it is.
I'll just reply with this post, by some poster called Frosty Piss:
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They put aceteminophen in Tylenol on purpose to kill you if you try to get high on Tylenol. They don't need junkies messing up their reputation.
erm.. excuse me but Tylenol is but a trademarked name.. the generic name of it is...Acetaminophen....
http://www.rxlist.com/tylenol-...
so the fact that it's got Acetaminophen isn't surprising..... as that's what it is!
The first study doesn't deal directly with pain, and should never have been published, IMO, it is appallingly bad science. Some (probably not all) of the flaws:
as I said, I'm surprised it was published, but given that BioMed Central recently retracted 43 papers for fake peer review, perhaps I shouldn't be.
The second paper is not about homeopathy but about acupuncture, which is (a) naturopathy and (b) an actual physical process involving sticking needles into specific parts of the body (AFAIK nerve clusters).
But for the most part those people who buy Armani suites don't go around telling everyone that they should ware one too. Or bitch and complain when they go to a place where it would be inconvenient to wear an Armani suite.
The natural food (vegetarians/vegans) freaks, are just as bad as any religious zealot. They think that their way is the only way for all people, and work hard to convert them. Not realizing, caring or dismissing evidence that there isn't any major benefit, or the fact that some bodies and lifestyles such a diet doesn't work unless there is the same degree of zealotry towards your diet.
Places like whole food while expensive is still cheap enough that we will have to deal with these people on a daily basis.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I took a homeopathic medicine for dehydration and got better.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
I have a couple of questions:
a) How do they erase the memory of dinosaur poop from the water molecules in the pills? Dinosaur poop can't be good for me.
b) Why can't they just throw half a pound of homeopaths in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and cure everybody's illnesses all at once, for free?
No sig today...