Slashdot Mirror
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.
"Most dangerous" is a rather odd metric to use when measuring healthcare.
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.
All real drugs have side effects. Therefore the metric used is based on risk vs. reward.
If your reward is zero, then any risk at all - even just the risk of not having your money to spend on proper medicine - is sufficient to tip the balance hard over to the "don't use this" side.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
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
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.
What is more dangerous, dumb people or dumb questions like this?
Sounds like some BS a chiropractor would do.
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.
If you are hypoglycemic, it's just the thing really. The fact that it isn't a pharmacuetical doesn't mean it isn't useless.
Unfortunately, sometimes "life happens" and interferes with your desire to tightly regiment it. Things don't always go to plan. People in a forum hip deep with IT professionals should be well aware of that.
On the other hand, you need something to put in your gut first if you are going to take certain drugs. So a nice shelf stable snack in the first aid kit is actually medically quite appropriate.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
No. A chiropractor would have at least made an adjustment.
Although regardless of their "branch" of medicine, neither a proper physical therapist nor a chiropractor would do a "one and done". Both would expect treatment to require time and be up front about it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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?
meh, while marijuana should be legalized for recreational use, I don't think you'd have much trouble documenting legitimate medical uses of it. It's not homeopathy in the sense of diluted sugar water drops, but probably needs better regulation on claims being made.
I mean it's quite clear that marijuana has analgesic effects, and I wouldn't have issue with people selling it as as an over-the-counter painkiller in that case. For me, its a hell of a lot more effective than a bunch of ibuprofen or most other OTC painkilllers. The list of legally-mandated "might cause" side-effects in the commercial will be pretty long and hilarious, I'm sure.
The problem comes if someone sells a cannabis cream to fix your acne or whatever, and there isn't any medical research to back it up. That goes on to some degree in today's medical marijuana community. But no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater -- if someone is claiming Aspirin is going to cure your cataracts, you don't go banning Aspirin, you just crack down on the quacks and their false claims.
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
If the reward is the same as just giving the user a does-nothing sugar pill, then it can be said to be the same as zero.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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".
Presumably banning GPs from prescribing homeopathy would be based on the mountains of evidence showing that homeopathy doesn't work. As for "most medicine" well, you'd have to be more specific, wouldn't you?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Doctors are still allowed to prescribe placebos. The placebos just have to be actual cheap placebos, not massively-marked-up sugar pills from water wizards with all sorts of promises that simply aren't true.
At the cost of them believing in pseudoscientific bullshit, which is a high price for someone who wants a more reason-friendly society.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
but the reward isn't zero, at the very least it activates the placebo effect (for people who believe in it) depending on the specific condition placebo effect can yield improvements of 45%
Indeed. Homeopathy will work via the placebo effect and it will be stronger for people who believe in homeopathy. The placebo effect doesn't work equally for all symptoms, but a lot of the low-grade annoying health issues that people have do respond to it. Although homeopathy itself is bullshit, the placebo effect is not. If people with non-critical problems are benefiting from it then there isn't anything wrong with it. The problems come when it's used for things it should not be and its practitioners get rich from the misery of others.
soylentnews.org
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.
> Placebos work, so why shouldn't GPs be allowed to prescribe them?
They do all the time. And if the abstract is accurate, I suspect it costs a lot more than 4 million a year.
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.
A solution that relies on an ignorant, scientifically illiterate population is not a great solution.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
You can tell the patient they are taking a placebo, it still works for some people. There was a placebo research project done in the US shown here in the UK on TV. They told a hospital nurse with IBS that she was one of the test subjects taking a placebo and she was convinced her symptoms improved over the 3 week project. She actually asked to continue taking the tablets after the project completed but was refused because the rules/laws surrounding the project.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.
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?
First they came for the NHS.
Then we told them where to go and where to stick their stupid ideas about making us pay for basic healthcare.
I grew old and got a rare disease and got free treatment no matter my age, income or medical history for as long as it was necessary.
We called it civilisation.
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".
Oh please, political != scientific.
I'm not arguing 'safe', because the jury is still out on that, but you'd have to be an idiot to see it doesn't have an impact on the perception of pain. Just try the shit.
"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.
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.
At least, let's have a citation from an impartial source with some expertise in evaluating drug hazards and efficacy. Not the law enforcement agency with a vested interest in maintaining their business model. Pot, probably less harmful than booze. As far as efficacy goes, the jury is still out on that. So take it for jollies, but don't come crying about "Muh medication."
And shut down the DEA while you're at it. Move their classification responsibilities over to the FDA and law enforcement to the FBI.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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?
Why should it be perfectly fine to lie to a patient who has only a minor illness anyway? And make big bucks with it?
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.
Placebos work, so why shouldn't GPs be allowed to prescribe them? .
This is not an uncommon argument, even among physicians. But there's a simple rebuttal, in my view: Giving a placebo conflicts with the patient's right to be informed.
Patients deserve accurate and unbiased information about the risks and benefits of every medicine they are offered. Indeed, at every clinic I've worked in, the patient signs a form stating "I have been informed about the risks and benefits of this medication" (or words to that effect). If I give a patient a treatment that I know for certain is useless- let's say, a sugar pill that is dummied up to look like a prescription medication-- then I would have to inform the patient that I know the treatment to be useless. It's not OK for me to withhold that information, or to keep secrets from the patient, even if I think it's "for their own good".
(There's one exception to this rule: If the patient is enrolled in a clinical trial, they can be randomly assigned to receive either active treatment or placebo. But that's a special case, with special rules. And even in those cases the patient must be told about the process of randomization and how it works).
It *is* OK to give treatments when the evidence that it works is weak, or dubious, or where we just don't know if it is an effective treatment or not. Sometimes, when the risk of the treatment is minimal, that can be a reasonable thing to do (I'm thinking of, for example, folate supplementation for clinical depression). But you have to be honest with the patient about what you're doing.
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.
I like this new submitter Maritz; summary was grammatically decent, clear, and with a sharp twist on wording. Well done ;-)
Remember, children, there are no stupid questions, only stupid people.
> "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?
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.
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.
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.
A paper cut.
as any fule kno
Placebos work, so why shouldn't GPs be allowed to prescribe them? .
This is not an uncommon argument, even among physicians. But there's a simple rebuttal, in my view: Giving a placebo conflicts with the patient's right to be informed.
Physicians prescribing homeopathic sugar pills can fully inform their patients that no good study ever showed that these pills worked better than a placebo. Many patient will still accept them. Also GP's would not prescribe them because they think they are useless, but prescribe them because they work well as a placebo and a placebo can sometimes be the medication with the best profile of wanted effects vs. side effects. Placebo's are evidence-based medicine. The placebo effect is extremely well documented and studied.
But even if the patient is not informed, things are not that simple. Patients deserve the best possible treatment (which sometimes might be a placebo or might have extremely rare but very scary side effects that will cause patients to stop taking their medication), at the same time patient deserved to be fully informed. Sometimes it is just not possible to achieve both goals. No matter how GPs act in such a situation, they will always fail in some respect. Not properly informing patients can sometimes be the smaller ethical issue.
Jan
Because a minor illness might still be a huge issue for the patient from his or her subjective perspective. A placebo can help a lot in these circumstances and can sometimes be a better alternative to not doing anything or prescribing medication that works only slightly better than than a placebo and has real side effects that can sometimes be worse than the wanted effects.
Jan
More expensive placebos actually work better. (And placebos administered using a syringe also work better than pills.) At the same time many real medications are abused as placebos, e.g: when GPs prescribes an antibiotic to a patient that most likely has a viral infection without a additional bacterial super infection that is effectively a placebo but with real side effects. A "homeopathy" based placebo might work very well for some patients and in most cases will be very cheap, even if not as cheap as other sugar pills.
Jan
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.