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UK May Blacklist Homeopathy (bbc.co.uk)
New submitter Maritz writes: Vindication may be on the horizon for people who defer to reality in matters of health — UK ministers are considering whether homeopathy should be put on a blacklist of treatments GPs in England are banned from prescribing, the BBC has learned. The controversial practice is based on the principle that "like cures like," but critics say patients are being given useless sugar pills. The Faculty of Homeopathy said patients supported the therapy. A consultation is expected to take place in 2016. The total NHS bill for homeopathy, including homeopathic hospitals and GP prescriptions, is thought to be about £4m.
I can't figure out how this brand of witchcraft was ever seen suitable to refer patients to.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There's no need for believers in homeopathy to worry about this. They can just grind the remaining prescriptions for homeopathic remedies into dust, and present a grain of that dust to the pharmacist, who then gives them a glass of water. Problem solved.
The Faculty of Homeopathy seems to think it can medically support the efficacy of a drug by taking a poll.
My best pal and matey Mike Marshall, from the Good Thinking Society, was on BBC Breakfast news this morning along with homeopath-in-chief Peter Fisher.
The clip is not available at the BBC but it is on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Homeopathy or most medicine?
Provide facts please, because you wouldn't decide policy based on bias or false information now would you?
If you black list it, there might be less of it and that will only make it more potent. The homeopaths should love this plan.
... all homeopathy-related URLs would be added to a national "ISP blacklist" so they wouldn't be reachable by people in the UK without using a VPN or some such.
</panic mode>
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's not a sugar pill. Sugar pills aren't homeopathic because they contain sugar.
A homeopathic pill would be water.
I'd be leery of banning sugar water, that's too nanny-state for my blood; but if I were helping fund the NHS, I'd be damn sure that I wouldn't want some idiot's witch-doctor to be able to submit claims for having administered succussed eye of newt or whatnot.
If they want to do it in private practice; their efficacy claims had better be prepared to meet truth-in-advertising standards; but if they can find true believers, have at it.
If it is going on the tab of the real healthcare system; evidence or GTFO. 'The Faculty of Homeopathy said patients support the therapy' is not, exactly, 'evidence'. I bet that patients would also support an open bar in the waiting room; but that doesn't make it medically sound.
Note how sympathetic the BBC is to homeopathy, giving a soft ride to someone who makes money from punting it.
Apparently that's "balance".
Next week the BBC will run an article on the different viewpoints on the square root of 16, giving equal time to those who say it is 8.
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
Homeopathy has no place in the 21st century world, except as fuel for comedy.
Christian science belongs on this list too!
I have always wanted to ask a homeopathy practitioner, if you had an e-coli infection, would drinking toilet water cure you?
I also loved the joke about the leak in the homeopathy plant.. into the groundwater.. that was going to affect the entire universe.. that is if homeopathy is anything other than fake crap..
The placebo effect is real. Homeopathic cures do work, to that extent. But you can't tell the patient about the placebo. This is the role of homeopathy in modern medicine. The only issue is the ethics of GPs prescribing cures that are known to be ineffective, but hey, they do that with expensive drugs all the time anyway.
Placebos work, so why shouldn't GPs be allowed to prescribe them? I think it is much better for public health if GPs are allowed use placebos such as homeopathy, than if people are avoiding GPs and are using people that are not allowed to prescribe real medicine when beneficial. For minor illnesses without an effective evidence based treatment it is perfectly fine to prescribe a placebo. It is also fine to prescribe a placebo in addition to conventional treatment, if the conventional treatment is not effective enough.
Jan
I have had a fucked up back for almost three years, now. I was sleeping in a fucked up situation while my house was remodeled after buying it. Eventually, I woke up one day and was bent over. Couldn't stand straight up. Had to start using a cane. And even then, I had to put all my weight on it (as in, I needed something to physically hold me up). I still have this problem. I can barely make it across the room, much less the house or out and about in the world. I'm in my late thirties. Was about 35 when this started.
I thought I just needed to relax my back enough. Never fixed anything. Not in constant pain or anything. Sometimes a little bit, but not a ton. Just . . . can't stand.
I eventually got in touch with a doctor (do you know how fucking hard it is to find a doctor who will come to your home?! It took me more than TWO YEARS to find one).
Well, the doctor didn't actually come. They sent their nurse practitioner. The following day, *they* had a physical therapist come out and treat me. What was the treatment? A fancy version of accupuncture. That's right, a little thing running on double-A batteries that had a little metal pin on it that they pushed against certain areas of the body (the lower back, the foot, etc) while it made a little beeping noise that got louder until it made a constant sound and then they put it somewhere else.
That was it.
That was months ago.
I still can't stand and walk without aid. And even then, only with extreme difficulty.
Their solution. The MEDICAL FUCKING SOLUTION to my problem was . . . to send me a physical therapist with a fucking voodoo accupuncture bullshit machine.
Fucking fuck all that bullshit. I pay $500/mo for medical insurance on top of another $500+ that my employer pays for me and after twenty years of almost never using my medical insurance.. for fucking *anything*... the only thing I get is a fucking retarded new-age bullshit "treatment".
The Faculty of Homeopathy said patients supported the therapy.
Who cares what the patients "support"? Patients for the most part demonstrably have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to medical treatments. We have highly trained medical professionals and we rely on treatments that can objectively be shown to work better than placebo for a reason.
Demonstrate to me that homeopathy is more effective than a placebo and I'm fine with it. Until that happens it is nothing but snake oil and anyone who supports it is harming people with fake treatments.
Russia May Blacklist Tea
Japan May Blacklist Donuts
U.S. May Blacklist Green Party
Australia May Blacklist Monuments
That would end 'medicinal marijuana' which is a good thing.
This is not a flamebait question: Isn't this the natural course of socialized medicine? Seriously, when I control your health care, how can you be free to choose the treatment you see best, especially if that "best treatment" is a placebo in the form of meditation and sugar pills? How can anyone expect any other outcome?
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
It's no different than prescribing a placebo, which does have a proven effect
Placebos by definition have no effect. The "placebo effect" doesn't mean placebos themselves have an actual chemical effect. Placebos are designed such that they cannot have a chemical effect that is relevant in treating the condition. Placebos are the measuring stick for whether a treatment actually works.
Selling treatments for cash as if they are actual medicine without proof of efficacy is fraud. Anyone selling homeopathy and representing as a cure for a specific condition is committing a crime.
This law is a terrible idea. And, why it is a terrible idea has nothing to do with your opinion on Homoeopathy.
This is a case of politicians making medical decisions. Medical decisions should be made by doctors not politicians. It should be doctors and medical boards who decide whether or not a particular prescription is effective.
Banning a drug because public opinion does not like it is bad health policy.
First they came for vaccines. But I did not care, because I am not interested in vaccines.
Then they came for homeopathy. But I did not care, because I was relatively healthy and I never used homeopathy.
I grew old and got a rare disease "X". At the age of 70, I was told that medication for disease "X" costs $500 thousand, and your age is an obstacle to be approved for the treatment. And there was nobody to care for me, when I needed.
It is often claimed that mains tap water in many cities [all over the world] has already passed through 4 or 5 other people's kidneys first.
If true then this shows the tremendous value of underrated techniques in waste treatment and purification but it also poses a big challenge for homeopaths:
Surely by now there'd be no illness at all as everyone has had the benefit of sharing "water memory" of all the major diseases. If not why not?
As a corollary, how can you ensure that the 'patient' responds to the right water memory and not to fond recollections of someone else's urethra?
Like cures like. Taxing people into poverty will eliminate poverty. Taking away everyone's freedom will make people more free. The Demoncrap party is really just the political wing of homeopathy. Do you know any god-fearing conservative homeopaths? I think not. Only the "mind" of a liberal could conceive of such a childish, illogical, and pitiable idea as that. Look at their other ideas if you don't believe me - all the same.
Donald Trump! ladies and gentleman!
How much are they going to spend on that consultation and how many years of £4m savings will be required to recover that cost
Homeopathic medicines are chemicals (helpful or poisonous) that have been diluted so much that there’s basically none of the original substance left. So basically you’re getting a placebo. And wasting your money.
Part of the reason why some people think it works is that there are companies that marked real medicines as “homeopathic.”
Why? Because many people (my family included, but I’m not an idiot about medicine) have been failed by the medical establishment who dismiss real illnesses as psychosomatic or just push patients out the door when they don’t have a clue what the cause is (rather than referring them to a proper specialist, because they’re too clueless to know what kind of specialist to refer to). In the US, a lot of this is caused by so-called “family doctors” or “primary care physicians” who in many places are really just PAs and NPs, rather than real MDs who might have a bit more of a clue about how to diagnose illness.
A lot of auto-immune illnesses are like this. Many medical professionals are trained that if a patient comes in with a “constellation of symptoms” and (in particular) “has their symptoms written down,” that means it’s all in their heads. Hashimoto’s disease, for instance, comes with a “constellation of symptoms”, and patients suffer from brain fog, which means they feel inclined to write down things they think are important to talk about. You see the problem here. My wife had to diagnose her own Hashi’s (which was subsequently verified by an antibody test, when we finally found an internal medicine doctor who would listen).
So, when people are failed by the “medical establishment,” they turn to alternatives. Dieticians, nutritionists, naturopaths, and a number of other auxiliary medical communities are almost universally more willing to listen. But they also have weird beliefs about alternative medicine. A lot of the alternative medicine is actual real medicine in alternative form. For instance, you can get dessicated porcine thyroid gland in pill form, which is just as effective as Levothyroxine (or more so), in equivalent doses. Some “herbal medicines” also have beneficial effects. And then there are “alternative treatments” that amount to figuring out that someone has a nutrient deficiency and adding a proper supplement, and nutrtion is something that MDs are universally clueless about. (For instance, if you have an MTHRF defect, you have to switch from folic acid to methylfolate.)
But a lot of alternative medicine is total quackery, so it all gets a bad rap.
If homeopathic medicine becomes deprecated through law, then those companies making real medicines under the “homeopathic” moniker will simply remove that from the labeling and keep going. The stuff that is homeopathic will still have to be labeled this way, and people who want to waste their money will have to pay out of pocket.
Speaking of paying out of pocket, I live in the southern tier of upstate New York, which is kindof a backward place. Low populations and limited resources run headlong into weird state laws, and people here have trouble getting some kinds of medical treatment. We had to go to PA to get some kinds of tests done because they’re illegal in NY. Lourdes in Binghamton, NY and Guthrie in Sayre, PA are actually really good facilities, but you have to travel. Ithaca has some good resources, and of course Syracuse has SUNY Upstate Medical. But for the weird diseases, the appropriate doctors are few and far between.
There’s one in Sayre and one in Ithaca that specialize in hard to diagnose cases. What’s interesting about them is that they’ve so overwhelmed with patients that their waiting lists make you wait months to see them. They’ve also both stopped taking insurance. Dealing with insurance takes too much time away from seeing patients, so they
Please excuse my ignorance, but how is homeopathy different, say, than the flu vaccine?
Flu vaccine has proven effect (against the specific flu strains it targets, obviously).
I think the NHS should give homeopathy all of its funding.
Of course, we should apply a homeopathic approach to this funding.
UKP96bn diluted to 1% would be the approach, but the gold standard for homeopathy is 30C, so we need to repeat that dilution another 29 times.
I'm feeling generous so lets round that UKP10E-50 up not down. Where would the British homeopathists like me to send their penny?
9/10 homoeopaths will prescribe homoeopathic malaria "cures" to travellers, instead of, rather than as well as, the real treatments. The same problems can be seen for cancer and HIV, albeit at lower levels.... every time we legitimise them we increase their power to kill though their delusions.
Because one triggers a proven response in the human immune system. By introducing neutered viruses that are easy for the immune system to kill, but are similar enough to the "live" virus to trigger the immune system to attack the real thing. The other says you should consume wasp stings diluted to the point where there are no wasp stings because water is magic and has a memory and this will cure you of pain. because reasons. Also "quantum".
Vaccines are based on a well documented and studied physiological response by your immune system to the proteins used to identify whatever pathogen the vaccine is meant to protect against.
Homeopathy is basically the belief in the magical theory of contagion. (i.e. a microscopic amount of the remedy diluted in a large volume of water will magically spread it's supposed benefits to the entire volume of water at full strength). No actual medicine involved, no identifiable physical or biological process at work.
Just wishful thinking and the placebo effect.
Homeopathic Emergency Room
Vaccines contain biologically active substances in specific, measurable quantities that cause a measurable biologic effect.
Homeopathic preparations contain no biologically active substances in any measurable quantities and cause no measurable biologic effect.
Mitchell and Webb Homeopathic ER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
A vaccine exposes your body to weakened virus, ideally allowing your body to create antibodies capable of fighting the actual virus so you don't get sick. Homeopathy gives you ordinary water, supposedly exposed to whatever made you sick.
If you mixed up vaccine labels, it would be possible to determine what disease each is for by checking out the viruses under a microscope.
If you mixed up a bunch of homeopathy treatments you wouldn't be able to tell which is which because they're all water.
One has a mechanism that is proven via science to work and the other is unproven hand-waving (and that's being generous - it's probably actually been proven to not work at all).
The flu vaccine takes bits of killed flu virus and puts them in your body. Your immune system sees these bits as invaders and mounts a defense. This way, when the real flu invades, your body knows how to fight it off. The rewards are protection against the flu. The risk is low because these bits of dead flu virus can't multiply and give you the flu. (Them being dead bits and all.) At worst, the flu virus constitutes a guessing game. We need to predict ahead of time which flu strains will be prevalent so we can put those bits in the vaccine. If we guess wrong, the vaccine won't protect us as well. At its core, though, the flu vaccine works the same as any other vaccine - which in general have drastically reduced the diseases they protect against.
As far as homeopathic medicine goes, the theory is that 1) like cures like and 2) water has memory. So if your illness involves you getting nauseous, you would find some other compound that makes people nauseous. You would mix that into some water and then dilute to the point that statistically there isn't even a molecule of the stuff left per dose. But "water has memory" so the cure not only works, but is stronger. Or so say the homeopaths... In reality, you can't cure illnesses by giving someone something that causes the same symptoms and water doesn't have any memory. It can hold compounds, but it won't magically retain a "memory" of those compounds if they aren't in the water anymore. Neither does any effect of a diluted compound increase the more it is diluted. If this were the case, all water on Earth would have a strong "dinosaur pee" taste (having been diluted for millions of years).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There are active ingredients in the flu vaccine (which make your body build up antibodies for the real flu virus). In a homeopathic remedy there is just sugar and water - the "like" that started out in the potion is no longer there, as the successive dilations have very likely removed every single atom of it from the resulting water.
If homeopaths could demonstrate their remedies work better than placebos, they would be used. As they can't (after decades of trying), people are quite obviously fed up with their nonsense and the money wasted on said nonsense.
You're really hung up on descriptions. It doesn't matter that some ignorant fools describe vaccines as treating "like" with "like". What matters is that they work. Please read on how vaccines were invented, and what problems they were initially used to solve. The major difference between vaccines and homeopathy is that homeopaths had a crazy idea that was never shown to work. The vaccines, on the other hand, were a solution to real-life problems and were invented as a real fix for a real problem. TL;DR: They literally saved entire families livelihoods when they were a new thing. They still do, although people don't appreciate it as much anymore.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The most common placebo is antibiotics prescribed for viral infections. Homeopathy is certainly better than that, since at least it is harmless (since there is nothing in it).
Let's say you are a doctor and you prescribe antibiotics for what you believe is actually a viral disease. In many cases they don't actually know for 100% certain that it is viral and cannot because they did not do any test to confirm that thesis. In some percent of the cases the disease will turn out to be bacterial. In most cases the antibiotics will have little to no short term negative consequences for the patient. It's not a placebo because it isn't actually clear that it won't treat the disease and we know for a fact that it has an actual medicinal effect. We know for a fact that homeopathy does not and indeed cannot have a medicinal effect because there is no chemical reaction.
So let's say you prescribe homeopathy instead of antibiotics and the disease progresses and the patient gets very ill or dies. Now you are guilty of malpractice because you prescribed something you knew to be snake oil. You would have been better off either prescribing the antibiotics or even doing nothing. When you get dragged into court the first thing the lawyer is going to do is ask you why you didn't prescribe an actual medicine.
It seems silly to ban homeopathy while overprescription of antibiotics is still rampant.
Those are separate problems and homeopathy is NOT the solution to over prescription of antibiotics. Let's not conflate two issues and give homeopathy credibility when it deserves none.
A big industry evolved around this placebo called 'Homeopathy'.
Lots of advertisment and misinformation is spread, resulting in lots of people who 'believe' in Homeopathy.
Thus, even if its a placebo physically, it really isn't psychologically as people that believe in some medicine demonstrably heal themselves better than people that don't believe in their medical treatment.
The hard part is that doctors need to decide whether the current treatment needs real medicine, or whether the patient is able to heal himself.
The good side-effect is, that tons of people treat themselves with not dangerous Homeopathic medicine instead of taking real pills with real side-effects.
Dangerous part is when doctors try to heal diseases with Homeopathy that really would need academic medicine.
Neither can I. I have one particularly annoying friend who is always trying to suggest bullshit "remedies" that have no basis in science or fact.
You know what they call alternative medicine that is proven to work? Medicine!
To expand a little bit, a vaccine contains a substance, often a specific protein, a viral capsid, or k illed/attenuated bacteria, which the human body recognizes as a pathogen. The immune system then mounts a response by creating antibodies and memory immune cells, which primes the system to appropriately and effectively mount a rapid immune response to eliminate the pathogen when it comes for real.
We can observe and measure the effects of a vaccine in the body. We can, and do, test for antibody production. I had some titers last year to verify that I had antibodies for measles, mumps, varicella, tetanus, etc. I didn't have any antibodies to mumps, so I had to get another MMR vaccine, and afterwards I had the antibodies. I was not immune to mumps, then I got a vaccine and now I am.
By contrast, homeopathic preparations contain literally no substances other than the dilutant (typically sugar, water, or alcohol). Homeopathic preparers take nonstandardized substances, such as a plant extract containing unknown and undstandardized quantities of who knows what, and serially dilutes them in water etc. After 10-100 dilutions, the final preparation typically contains none of the original substance at all.
Homeopathic preparations have no known or even theoretical mechanism of possible action. Indeed, the entire idea of homeopathy is directly contradictory to everything we know about biology, pharmacology, and physics.
Note that this is in contrast to herbal or natural remedies, which, while unstandardized and often not thoroughly tested, are biologically plausible.
I read a quote once where a purveyor of homeopathic treatments said that science simply hasn't "caught up" enough to detect their treatments. Let's assume this is true for a second and that homeopathy actually works. How would we keep sellers of homeopathic remedies honest? How do we know that their "cure for disease A" isn't just tap water instead of the actual cure they claim it is? If a drug company replaced their pills with sugar pills, it would be easy to detect this and show they were committing fraud. However, the homeopathic peddler essentially admitted that there's no way to show he/she isn't committing fraud and we should just trust that the pills are what they claim to be.
So even if we assumed that homeopathy works (a HUGE if), it still wouldn't beat out regular medicine because there would be no protection against companies selling fraudulent homeopathic products.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Wrong Placebo is usually more effective than no treatment.
Placebos have NO effect. They cannot have a relevant effect or they would not be a placebo. A placebo is BY DEFINITION an ineffectual treatment. The placebo effect is real but the placebos themselves have no chemical effect.
They don't push for "things better than a placebo". They push for things better than "best possible current treatment".
If it's not better than placebo then it is NOT a treatment. If it is worse than placebo then it is actually harmful. If it is equal in efficacy to placebo then it IS a placebo.
Homoeopathy is based on the idea that things *causing the same symptoms* put though special forms of successive dilution gain the ability to *treat the illness directly* as the dilution level increases so does the "strength", water apparently has special *memory which cannot be measured by "normal" means*.
Vaccines are based on the idea that outside components of pathogens an be used to prime the immune system *against that specific pathogen* such that when they are encountered for real *the body has a set of immune cells on hand pre optimised to fight*, in order to work *vaccines must contain relatively large quantities of the pathogen(or derived materials)*, in order to reduce the quantity immune stimulating materials are also often included.
Compare the star highlighted bits, same seeming effect vs same cause, unknown direct treatment vs indirect but understood method, physics defying magic water memory vs measurable contents.
To make a homoeopathic dilution
1 dissolve some thing casing the same symptoms
2. From the current flask take one drop
3. add this to a new flask of distilled water water
4. throw away the old flask
4. "agitate" by banging on a special leather covered board
5. repeat from step two until you reach the point where 1 molecule of the original materiel would be expected to exist in each moon sized quantity of water consumed
We own our own health and should be allowed to have whatever treatment we want. The argument for or against homeopathy (the players involved are religious about their point of view) will never be won and we should not even try.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
The flu vaccine introduces a weakened/dead version of influenza, so you body will manufacture antibodies in reaction to it.
Homeopathy is handing you a sugar pill. Let's take Oscilloccinum as an example. You start with a 1 liter bottle, you add 35 grams of duck liver, 15 grams of duck heart and you top with water. After 40 days, it is a goo. You take 1 percent of that goo, set it in another 1 liter vessel and fill up with pure water. That cycle is called a Korsakov dilution. Oscilloccinum is indicated as a 200 Korsakov dilutions. That means that there is 1 molecule in 100^200 molecules coming from the active ingredient, if you assume that you got a uniform distribution in the vessel. 1 molecule in 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. You'd need to ingest a dose several orders of magnitude larger than the universe to get a chance to ingest one molecule of the active ingredient. Note that there is no evidence whatsoever that duck liver and duck heart would actually do anything for the flu in the first place.
Do you see a difference?
The answer lies in the pathology of how vaccines work, namely by putting a weakened or dead virus in your body. When your immune system sees this, it learns how to defeat it, and then when you get the virus at full strength, your body recognizes the virus and reacts quickly enough that you don't feel the effects of the virus. It's like Chuck Norris is in there fighting the flu.
Homeopathy on the other hand claims to dilute chemicals or other cures to the point that they cannot be measured, then introduces it into your body through your stomach. It fails to answer the question of pathology and physiology, namely, how does a diluted substance actually affect the illness being treated, can it actually be absorbed through the intestinal tract, etcetera, etcetera. Homeopathy can't answer the question of how the cure functions, it can't be independently verified by an outside group, and it can't tell you where Chuck Norris is.
The reason people are so vehemently against homeopathy, is that it's an imitation game. We see a specific pattern here: Homeopathy adopts medical sounding language, and tries to sound intelligent by mimicking actual medical practice. By doing this, it makes their story very convincing, because it sounds familiar to the people that listen to it. But the reasoning behind what they do is economic: I can sell you a glass of water that contains $0.0000001 worth of "compound-x" and I can charge you $100 for it. Frankly if they used bottled water, then the water would cost them more than the compound. That's why it's snake oil: Big promises, small results, and when someone realizes the scam, they abscond with the money. Need a refresher, go watch Pete's Dragon.
Can't help thinking about the information about George Boole that I was reading recently.
Despite being the father of swathes of logic, he died in the most illogical way possible.
He walked through the rain for miles, and lectured while still dripping wet for hours. He got ill. He laid up in bed. And his wife thought that the best cure for him was the same thing that made him ill. So she kept throwing buckets of water over him. Which made him worse. So she kept throwing more water over him. Until he died.
I just couldn't help laughing and wondering if he consented to such "treatment".
Because here it's diluted by a factor of 1:99 at least 6x and more usually 30x...
0.01^6 = 0.000000000001
0.01^30 = 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000......000000000001
The standard 30x concoction has precisely zero molecules of the "like" you are using to "cure" the "like"
"then those companies making real medicines under the “homeopathic” moniker"
One of those things is not like the other.
"But a lot of alternative medicine is total quackery, so it all gets a bad rap."
Because if it actually worked it would be called "medicine" and could lose the "alternative" moniker.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Which raises the question.......what moron doctors are out there prescribing this stuff??
Who says they are morons? Water is really cheap and it can be sold for a ridiculous markup. This is nothing more than profiteering off the gullible in 99.99% of cases. There are a few doctors who actually buy into this nonsense but most of them are just trying to get rich.
All they#re doing is banning GPs prescribing it as part of the health service, which is partly funded by government, and whose practices are open to having things banned or enforced because without those, you have no medical practices, you only have chaos.
NOBODY is banning sugar water.
Just the right to prescribe it as a health professional.
At the very least, this is right because an ACTUAL health professional would not prescribe sugar water.
If they sell it to you, even at a penny a pill, they're ripping you off, so it would be right in stopping FRAUD.
If you want sugar water, get some sugar (freely available at your market, absolutely not banned) and some water (get it straight from the tap!), and mix them. Drink away.
For less than a penny a pill!
Because DuPont wanted hemp production removed since it was killing their nylon synthetic.
There was an article on Ars yesterday that a single course of antibiotics can disrupt the flora in the gut for a whole year.
That's not a credible argument in favor of homeopathy. Yes it is a problem but homeopathy is in no way, shape or form a solution to that particular problem.
Do THEY get whatever treatment THEY want? So instead of cough mixture for their cold, they get to stay in bed, eat sugary breakfast cereals and watch TV until better?
If not, then why the hell do YOU get to tell others what they must have when YOU demand to be free to do so?
Hypocritical much?
Placebos have no active ingredient.
And as a result they have ZERO biological effect on the patient. Without an active ingredient there cannot be any chemical activity from the administration of a treatment.
They can have an effect, it even has a name, it's called the "placebo effect".
Placebos are BY DEFINITION ineffectual. There is a reason that researchers call it the placebo response instead of placebo effect because people like you conflate the fact that the placebo response is real even though the placebo has no chemical effect itself. "Placebo effect" != placebos having an effect. If the placebo itself had an effect then it is not a placebo. Any curative effect has nothing to do with the contents of the placebo.
Because for those of us that are not an idiot anti-vaxer like you are, vaccines actually do something.
I think your script may be broken, you should make sure that the indexing is correct as this is the second time you have missed some of the posts.
Oh, and whatever happened to this post:
Thanks for more ammo for "Coren22's 'Greatest Hits Fails' vs. me" 1-5 for your next upmodded post so everyone can see it - can't wait, lol!
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Are we lying now APK, as the majority of your copy/pastes have been to non upmodded posts?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
*** SMACK*** is the sound of dave420 going down eating his words getting bitchslapped by apk http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Why does water apparently remember all the special care treatment it receives when being used in the creation of homeopathy "medicine", where a single molecule of $whatever is "remembered" through dozens of turns of dilution and that makes it incredibly potent but it seems that the water you drink from the tap can't remember that it was used before to transport the fragrant turd that I dumped into the porcelain and used that water to transport it over to the sewage treating plant where it was diluted, I mean, potentized, before it then comes out of your tap.
I wouldn't drink that. By the way my shit was diluted and shaken and mixed, what you drink when you fill a glass from the tap is powerful shit!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My placebos! I need an authoratative figure like a doctor to prescribe them to me, otherwise they won't work!
Go die in a fire.
Based on the common definitions of "alternative medicine", your statement is false. There are many herbs with well-known beneficial properties, and there are things like the desiccated porcine thyroid gland that are all "medicine" in the sense that they have well-known and scientifically tested effects, but they are not pharmaceutical products and therefore commonly referred to as "alternative" treatments. Some people would refer to them as "alternative medicine," while others would just call them "medicine."
However, you missed my point that "homeopathic" is often a meaningless term used more as a marketing gimmick than anything else. Plenty of OTC drugs with actual, real active ingredients are labeled "homeopathic" because there is a segment of the population who has bought into the religion and will therefore buy that stuff. One example is this "Zicam" zinc nasal spray. Now whether or not it's a good idea to be inhaling zinc is a separate matter (what with all the reports of loss of sense of smell), but nevertheless, there are real active ingredients in this drug. But it's marketed as homeopathic, probably because it helps skirt some FDA regulations.
vaccines actually do something.
Such as, for instance, not dying a horrible death in absolute pain and agony from a little scratch that contracted tetanus, as one might add.
I like this new submitter Maritz; summary was grammatically decent, clear, and with a sharp twist on wording. Well done ;-)
You must hate fractals and mathematic chaos.
> "Placebo effect" != placebos having an effect. If the placebo itself had an effect then it is not a placebo. Any curative effect has nothing to do with the contents of the placebo.
Your second sentence is precisely correct. The effect is not dependent on the ingredients in the placebo. THE effect. In most cases, giving a patient a placebo (which has no useful ingredient) does in fact result in both better outcomes reported than giving them nothing. So there IS an effect, which has nothing to do with the contents of the placebo.
Acetaminophen has an effect through a chemical process caused directly by the chemistry of the drug. A sugar pill has an effect caused by a psychological process which may in turn trigger a chemical process (does hope increase serotonin? ). Both are real, measurable effects. One depends on the active ingredient, one doesn't.
Whenever I hear the word "reality" I think someone is ham-fisting some half-chewed opinion down my throat and calling it factual.
I don't know much about homeopathy, but I can digest opinions for myself thank you.
" but critics say patients are being given useless sugar pills" just call them like we call them all : doctor, chemist, physicist, any people understanding what happens when you dilute stuff to the point homeopathic scammer pretend they do.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Great answer. Thank you :)
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Great answer! Thanks for sharing :)
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
No, it is an argument against the position that we have a tight intellectual grip on the process of what goes on in the human body.
I don't think you'll find too many doctors who seriously think we don't have a lot to learn. But even if we did suffer from that misconception that would not be a good reason to treat homeopathy as anything except the snake oil that it is.
Though by that measure, it may become an argument in favor of homeopathy, for noncritical cases: homeopathy has no known (or conceivable, by the standards of the model we are using) side effects, and it appears to work as well as a "good" placebo.
A sugar pill works well as a placebo too and doesn't carry the snake oil baggage that homeopathy does. Just because some foolish people believe in homeopathy does not justify using giving it credibility as a treatment for anything. Homeopathy is an economic fraud as well as a medical one.
So if you were to take two groups of people with cold/flu with viral and/or mild bacterial infections, it seems quite possible that those given homeopathic treatment (placebo) would fare better than those taking antibiotics
I'm sure you could find plenty of cases where no treatment is better than inappropriate treatment. That is not a credible argument to start promoting homeopathy as a treatment for anything.
So you assume that i'm an idiot and an anti-vaxxer because I asked a perfectly legitimate question?
Why don't you go do something - like go f**k yourself, anonymous coward.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
"Do you see a difference?"
:)
Yes, thanks for sharing.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Wow, that is harsh. We should not wish that on him. I would however be all for wishing him to lose the use of his hands, so he can't type these replies and post them everywhere, but can still read everyone's comments wondering where APK went.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I don't see the connection. What do you mean?
Yeah, because big phama corporations and their federal lackeys in the FDA are all about undercutting their huge profits by spending money establishing the efficacy of nonpatentable remedies.
You've got to be impressed with the homeopath's ability to store large numbers of litre bottles though. I think I'd run out of space on the second Korsakov dilution.
"Based on the common definitions of "alternative medicine", your statement is false"
No, I think you're confusing "alternative medicine" with "natural medicine". I know full well that something like willow contains salicylate, which is one of the main ingredients of aspirin. When such plants and herbs pass through peer-review clinical trials and the proper dosing is determined, they are determined to be medicine, even though they contain natural ingredients. I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who thinks aspirin or opium is an "alternative medicine", even though both are derived from plants.
"However, you missed my point that "homeopathic" is often a meaningless term used more as a marketing gimmick than anything else"
I didn't miss the point. The FDA has set guidelines that a product must follow in order for it to be labeled as homeopathic.
http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/Compl...
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
but can still read everyone's comments wondering where APK went.
LOL
How would we keep sellers of homeopathic remedies honest?
Well, first there would have to be an honest sellers of homeopathic remedies.
In the late 18th century, when Hahneman formulated the principle of "like cures like" (a medical milestone and an important important precursor of modern immunotherapy) homeopathy was a pretty major improvement over all other schools of medicine.
It was unlikely to outright kill you, and would keep you well hydrated. The next best treatment was almost certainly prayer (because it might have psychological benefits and at the very least it didn't involve bleeding or the administration of poisons) followed by herbalism (which could definitely kill you, but might also heal you) followed by a dog's breakfast of other therapies which mostly involved greatly increasing your chance of an untimely death in the name of healing.
Over time, the bits and pieces of things that actually worked (such as keeping patients hydrated, and various herbal remedies such as willow bark &etc.) became the basis of modern medicine, mostly through the efforts of snake-oil hucksters and patent medicine companies who found ways to profit from them. The profit-driven system has mostly worked rather well (despite numerous debacles like aspirin, thalidomide, Coley's cancer cure, etc.) because you couldn't make profit from dead patients (until the development of mass media campaigns, anyway).
Eventually the snake oil industry metastasized into modern corporate medicine, which primarily exists to sell pills. But most of those pills actually do something useful, so it's a huge step up from the days of homeopathy, when the last thing any sick person needed was any treatment that actually did something. Such treatments could just as easily kill as cure.
Today it's popular for self-aggrandizing Internet commentators to hold up homeopathy as a "fake science" that they lump in with whatever other targets of opportunity they think will make them look scientific and clever, such as chiropractery if the pundit is left-wing, and "global warming" if s/he's right-wing. And invariably these critics know almost nothing of the history of medicine, and they'll usually characterize medicine as a "science" (or possibly a "Science") rather than the praxis that it is. But to my mind, today's corporate medicine is very much the same as the homeopathy of Mary Baker Eddy's time - it's currently the least worst choice. Someday we'll probably have something better, but right now the safe bet is to go to a mainstream physician and get some pills for anything you can't cure yourself through diet and exercise.
Anyway, at this point there's still two descendants of Sam Hahnemann's homeopathy in widespread use - vaccination, which Hahnemann viewed as the proof positive of his "like cures like" priniciple, and dilution homeopathy, which is nothing more than obsolete flim-flam surrounding the practice of keeping a patient well hydrated. The former seems worthwhile to me, and I've vaccinated my kids. The latter seems like the domain of con men and kooks who have read too much Schauberger, and should not be regarded as a medical profession any more. You don't need to make claims of miracle healing powers in order to give somebody a glass of water.
I was describing the honest or true believer approach, historically it was done with only one container tho.
Cynical people would probably skip the first step, the 199 dilutions that follow and go straight to adding a bit of water to sugar.
Homeopathy relies on the Laws of Similarity and Contagion, in the folk magic sense. It is literally the old witch woman's potions, given a thin veneer of pseudoscience.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The point of a placebo is that it has no benefit.
That's actually not quite correct. The point of the double blind study with placebos is precisely because the placebo does have an effect. People given a placebo which does nothing to improve their condition, will tend to feel better and are more likely to recover. Hence the need for a double blind study to ensure that drugs do actually treat the condition and any improvement is not due to the psychological effect of a patient's positive thinking.
This is also undoubtedly why people believe in homeopathy. If you take something which you think treats your condition you tend to feel better and are even more likely to get better even though what you are taking does nothing for you physically.
I can't figure out how this brand of witchcraft was ever seen suitable to refer patients to.
Probably a decent lobbying group. It's worked for Chiropractic in most countries.
Some patients are want to come in constantly with half-imagined symptoms they've blown out of all proportion and become convinced are dire warnings of cancer of some other horrid illness they saw on Dr House. If you can use the placebo effect to alleviate their imaginary ills then that seems like an eminently sensible approach. Then you can move on to the next patient who might not be totally wasting your time.
Thanks for the heads up re writing symptoms down! I write lists for everything from shopping to what I need to do tomorrow, so I would have thought that writing stuff down is just a common sense memory aid, particularly if (like my wife) you tend to get easily upset when describing symptoms and consequently forget things, but there you go. I will keep it in mind (unless I forget it first).
So, what you're telling me, if I have an infection of e coli I should drink deep from the toilet?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Apk doesn't think DNS servers are worth running & believes Microsoft Active Directory can run w/out DNS." - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday October 27, 2015
Where'd I say it? I say AD needs internal DNS far back as 2007 http://forums.tweaktown.com/wi...
See "To warn users who have ActiveDirectory/AD LAN-WAN setups to NOT use external DNS servers" there on OpenDNS free (I use it) + AD in my security guide.
+ Migrate hosts across a LAN (admin/scripts not GPO)-> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
---
I'm RIGHT on admin priv + hosts update (WFP/SFP)!
"figured out why privilege escalation's a bad thing?" - by Coren22 on Tuesday September 22, 2015
How else can I programmatically update it?
---
"it requires elevation to write hosts" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday September 23, 2015
Hypocrite later admits it!
Even MalwareBytes AntiMalware (best one) DEMANDS it or it can't do its job fully like many security tools!
Guess what?
Don't NEED to run my program as ADMIN - I do it here manually vs. auto.
---
"Needing admin privileges every time a program updates is poor design" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 10, 2015
Users set it, not programmatic impersonation for autoupdate. You design zero & say what's what here?
---
"90's technology to fight modern war" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 10, 2015
Ozymandias/Watchmen per a namesake:
"I resolved to use antiquities teachings" (hosts) "to our world today & began my path to conquest - Conquest not of men but of the evils that beset them: Fossil Fuels (antispyware), Oil (antivir), Nuclear Power (addons) are like a drug & you gentlemen along w/ foreign interests are the pushers"
It works Aryeh Goretsky NOD32/ESET said hosts = good security-> http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
Oliver Day (Symantec) too-> http://www.securityfocus.com/c...
MalwareBytes' hpHosts' Admin hosts+recommends APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit-> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...
APK
P.S.=> Continued in #2/4... apk
"Virus scanners/Adblock software don't need admin priv to update" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @04:14PM (#50904323)
Stupid, neither does my program! AV does to remove threats - Adblock addons = VASTLY INFERIOR in abilities + efficiency vs. hosts as I've proven & nobody proved me wrong to date!
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"your software does" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @04:14PM (#50904323)
No, hosts do due to WFP/SFP!
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"won't reveal your source code" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @04:14PM (#50904323)
I don't owe you it. I don't give away work to be stolen by others so it's misused like GOOGLE CHROME http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
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"What's stopping you from pointing my bank's web site at your private server?" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @04:14PM (#50904323)
I don't keep a server. You're a security guru (not - you create no ware for security & your forensics skills = non-existent): Put it in a VM, trace it using process monitor + wireshark to prove it (don't need code) & I only put in hardcodes of fav sites @ top of hosts for speed & reliabilty - you'd spot it easily & bulk of the file is sorted blocked known bad threat origins.
---
"the possibility of being caught, which would be pretty hard to catch w/ such a large hosts file, as no one can go through it manually." - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @04:14PM (#50904323)
See just above!
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"What are you going to do when Windows gets rid of the hosts file completely?" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @04:14PM (#50904323)
Hasn't happened!
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"They have already taken steps to make it useless in Windows 10." - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @04:14PM (#50904323)
It still works there - who're you bullshitting but yourself you assbergers outism retard?
APK
P.S.=> To be continued in part #3/4... apk
"I guess we should avoid your crap, it looks like it is marked as malware. Good luck getting that removed." - by Coren22 (1625475) on Monday November 02, 2015 @03:52PM (#50850445)
62 sources of good repute show + /. users say otherwise:
Proven safe by 57 antivirus programs in its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
+
Same for the 32-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
&
Per VirScan its installer too -> http://f.virscan.org/APKHostsF...
---
MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus per this VERY recent testing of them all http://www.av-test.org/en/news... /.'ers say my work is good too:
"his hosts program is actually pretty good" - by xenotransplant (4179011) on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:34PM (#50287195)
"I like your host file system." - by Karmashock (2415832) on Wednesday September 09, 2015 @03:57PM (#50489401)
"APK is kinda right... I've given up on JS based adblocking and gone to blackholing in /etc/hosts, just like it was back in the 90s. The computational load has gotten intolerable for any ad-blocking using JS. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works." - by bmo (77928) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @11:30AM (#50736071)
"his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources" by alexgieg (948359) on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:57AM (#50596461)
---
You tried using Computer Associates another antivirus I turned over on false positives (1/8 over time) & they were caught in ACCOUNTING SCANDALS FRAUD http://www.bing.com/search?q=c...
Reputable source (not): They had to sell off their PC security suite too (crap fraud also) LOWERING the 'threat level' on THAT program (not my hosts file engine) TO ZERO!
* YOU ARE WRONG ON EVERY ACCOUNT NOTED!
APK
P.S.=> To be continued in part #4/4... apk
"but rather than take my advise on various things, he feels that he is allowed to defame me by saying things he knows are not true - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @10:06AM (#50863109)
Hypocrite, I show you're projecting in my posts. What "advice" can you, an INFERIOR to me, like yourself give?
"I have offered him advise on ways to improve what he does to reduce the feeling of icky his software - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @10:06AM (#50863109)
I've shown /.'er saying differently - Show us you've done better: YOU can't - & you're "advising"? Talking out your ass on things you haven't done is what you're doing.
"posting them so often that maybe, just maybe, someone will think they are true - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @10:06AM (#50863109)
Quotes of you are true! You can't keep your word as you're replying to me yet again + projecting what I prove YOU do (AD/DNS lie).
"I don't have time for the Troll APK, and refuse to respond anymore to a post signed APK" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @04:27PM (#50858983)
No troll. I protect users for free w/ a program that speeds them up, helps reliability, & even anonymity online w/ more abilities & efficiency than ANY other 1 solution doing more w/ less - do you? No.
"Maybe I should change my signature again just to rile him up some more." - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @10:07AM (#50855451) FROM http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"Rile" me? Childish sig bs is all you've got!
"I have repeatedly refuted his assertions - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @10:06AM (#50863109)
BS - See my last 4 posts here!
APK
P.S.=>
"I never admitted you were right" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @04:14PM (#50904323)
You PROVE I AM FOR ME part #1-#4 of your "Greatest Hits Fails"... apk
A paper cut.
as any fule kno
They should let homeopathic practitioners continue. They should just limit them to one practitioner for every 1 000 000 000 000 patients. That should be effective.
No, but that's just about what homeopaths will tell you. Only that's stupid, so they 'dilute' it down to about the level of distilled water, and start babbling about whatever it is they babble on about. I'm surprised they haven't gone for the 'the water is now quantum entangled with the harmful thing' gambit.
Though, if you drink deep from the toilet, and turn your guts into bacterial Thunderdome...e coli vs diphtheria...
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.