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.

Comments

I Can't Figure Out

[MightyMartian]

I can't figure out how this brand of witchcraft was ever seen suitable to refer patients to.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[Anonymous Coward]

This is likely why

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[MightyMartian]

This is likely why

That may explain the UK, although honestly I doubt Charles has that much influence. But it doesn't explain the US or Canada, or anywhere else this utter bullshit gets passed off as "medicine". Some of these crap treatments are even covered under my job's health coverage. It's crazy and a waste of money, or more specifically premiums I pay.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[Tx]

It's no different than prescribing a placebo, which does have a proven effect, although I expect it costs a lot more to see a homeopathy "specialist" than it does for a regular doctor to prescribe some do-nothing pills.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[NotDrWho]

Next time he does it, show him a picture of Steve Jobs at the end.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[BradMajors]

Scientific studies have shown that placebos are more effective when they cost the patient more money. Seriously.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[tripleevenfall]

The most common placebo is antibiotics prescribed for viral infections.

It's becoming pretty uncommon for a physician to actually do this, no matter how many dorks show up for minor viral illnesses saying "Can we just TRY an antibiotic?" even though everyone knows they don't have a bacterial infection.

Physicians are well aware today of the issues with over-prescribing them and some lose patients over it, but it's pretty uncommon for a family practice doc to do this anymore.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[nospam007]

"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). It seems silly to ban homeopathy while overprescription of antibiotics is still rampant."

IOW you want homeopathic antibiotics.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[alex67500]

This.
£4m is absolutely *nothing* compared to other wastes. Homeopaths are not covered by National Insurance, you have to go with private medical to get them covered. We're only talking about pills prescribed by registered GPs... and if they are only little sugar pills, they're a cheap placebo!

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[Rei]

Here, can we compromise? The homeopaths get their £4m, only we'll first dilute it down 60X before giving it to them. That'll only increase it's buying power, right? ;)

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

This is under 10 pence per capita a year.
This part of "the system" ain't broke, it is a waste of energy trying to fix it.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[RKThoadan]

This is a brilliant solution! Why do I not have mod points now!

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[serviscope_minor]

Scientific studies have shown that placebos are more effective when they cost the patient more money. Seriously.

Not that suprpising: placebos work on the belief that they work. People generally associate more expenive with better, so it's not surprising they work better when they're believed to work better.

Funny thing is placebos even work when patients know they're placebos. I even know that and I'm pretty sure most cold medication is nothing but placebo. However there's a part of my brain that believes that pills cure things and won't listen to evidence to the contrary. As a result they make me feel a bit better even though I know they're placebos. Except now I know they work, they seem to work better.

Remarkable, really.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[alex67500]

OK you win :-) I was comparing to the waste in antibiotics...
To complete your analogy, what we need is to have those 4m in 1 pound coins, spread them over 240 million wallets, and ask them to pick just one.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[SuricouRaven]

Most cold medication isn't a placebo. There's no way to cure the cold, or even a treatment to fight the virus effectively, but there are plenty that will lessen the symptoms. Ibuprofen for the headache, caffeine for the lethargy, pseudoephedrine* to clear the stuffy nose. They won't do a thing to actually fix the illness - you'll be just as ill, but you'll feel a lot better about it.

*Now largely replaced with the barely-effective phenylephrine, because pseudoephedrine is a precursor in methamphetamine manufacture.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[judoguy]

But most medicine is bullshit as well. Not that there aren't great and useful live saving medications, but so much crap is prescribed in the U.S. at least, essentially by the drug reps.

I know a pharmaceutical rep. Man, the stories he tells about getting doctors to prescribe crap based on at least as much bullshit as homeopathy.

Push, push, push a high profit drug. Don't actually practice medicine just push the drugs that make money.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[JazzLad]

At the risk of 'me too'ing the AC above, I have done so recently as well. They usually cite prophylactic benefits, yadda yadda, but honestly, I think they do because of the aforementioned dorks. It's bad medicine.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[KGIII]

I wonder how much value they get for that 10 pence. I'd imagine, getting all those people to STFU is worth the cost.

Re:I Can't Figure Out

[KGIII]

I had some lady telling me how water has a memory and that I needed some homeopathic crap. I asked about the water memory. She told me some silly shit. I pointed out that she was drinking Moses' piss. She let me finish my beer in peace. This was some time ago. I wonder if she's still bugging people in airport restaurants and trying to share the benefits of homeopathy with them.

Two Likes Don't Make a Right

[Pseudonymous Powers]

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.

Re:Two Likes Don't Make a Right

[jez9999]

It's still dangerous. Forgetting to take a dose can be fatal.

Re:Two Likes Don't Make a Right

[Anonymous Coward]

The Perfect Martini:
Store your Gin and Martini Glasses in the Freezer.
Pull a Glass out, and show it a bottle of Vermouth.
Pour ice cold Gin into the Glass, which now remembers the Vermouth, and add an olive.
For a Perfect Gibson, use a Cocktail Onion in place of the Olive.

OK, now for the Viking Blast:
Store your Aquavit and Shot Glasses in the Freezer.
Put some Grieg on the Stereo. (Peer Gynt is good. For something more Modern, consider Katzenjammer.)
Take both Aquavit and Glasses out to the Hot Tub, on a tray with sticks of Celery.
Pour a shot glass full, Toast to Grieg, (Or Katzenjammer...), which imbues Vikingness, take it down in one swig, start chewing on the Celery, and Burp.
På snørra!

Re:Two Likes Don't Make a Right

[alexhs]

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.

But that would put them at risk of an overdose, as more diluted substances have higher potency !

Homeopathy on BBC news this morning

[seanellis]

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?...

Whew, for a minute I thought you meant ...

[davidwr]

... 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>

Re:What is most dangerous?

[seanellis]

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.

The BBC aupports homeopathy

[DCFC]

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.

Re:The BBC aupports homeopathy

[wonkey_monkey]

Note how sympathetic the BBC is to homeopathy, giving a soft ride to someone who makes money from punting it.

What "soft ride"? What "sympathy"? They quoted someone in an article on the website - it's not a grilling from an interviewer and isn't meant to be. How was it any different to the "treatment" that they gave to the anti-homeopathy side (which was also just quotes)?

Wait until they get the opposing parties on Newsnight, then you might see what kind of a "ride" each gets.

Apparently that's "balance".

Yes, yes it is.

Snake oil

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Snake oil

[jedidiah]

They don't push for "things better than a placebo". They push for things better than "best possible current treatment".

Read an actual trial report sometime.

Freedom be damned?

[davek]

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?

Re:Freedom be damned?

[lowkeyknight]

You say that like it's a bad thing. If the state is paying for your medicine, at the very least it has the right to ensure you aren't spending the money on candy rather than medicine that works. The point of state funded healthcare is that it is in the nations interest for you to be healthy, and therefore productive. If you want candy, buy candy, if you want medical super-expensive-wasp-sting-magic-water-candy, pay for "homeopathy insurance" or some other bullshit.

Placebos by definition don't do anything

[sjbe]

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.

Re: Do it in america!

[jedidiah]

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.

Toilet water

[andrewbaldwin]

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?

Don’t be an asshole about people who need al

[Theovon]

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

MAKE MONEY FAST!

[grnbrg]

• * Buy homeopathic remedies
• * Dilute 10:1
• * Repackage
• * Relabel as extra strength
• * Sell (by volume) at 2X price
• * Make 2000% profit!

homeopathic funding

[Cederic]

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?

Legitimisation of homoeopathy does harm

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:But Vaccines....

[jonnythan]

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.

Not the solution to overprescribed antibiotics

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Not the solution to overprescribed antibiotics

[iMadeGhostzilla]

In most cases the antibiotics will have little to no short term negative consequences for the patient.

There was an article on Ars yesterday that a single course of antibiotics can disrupt the flora in the gut for a whole year. (Though, curiously, not in the mouth.)

Re:But Vaccines....

[jonnythan]

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.

Re:The point is, any treatment should be allowed

[ledow]

Not for free and not on the state.

This is about the UK where we provide, like most civilised countries, free healthcare to all.

You won't get homeopathy for free, is what this says. If you want to piss your own money away on it, you're welcome - same as cosmetic surgery, unproven drugs, experimental treatments, Chinese medicine, etc.

But I as a taxpayer am not going to pay for your stupid, proven-no-better-than-placebo "treatments" in preference to buying someone else effective drugs or surgery that they need.

Re:Placebos are by definition ineffectual

[Bill Hayden]

You are correct, but so is the person to which you are responding. Due to the placebo effect, a placebo *is* more effective than no treatment.

Re:But Vaccines....

[EvilAlphonso]

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?

Boole

[ledow]

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".

Separate issues

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Separate issues

[iMadeGhostzilla]

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. It's also an argument against naive interventionism, eg. using antibiotics in less critical cases instead of waiting it out.

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. (I believe it essentially *is* placebo, possibly aided by the practitioner who spends more time with you than an average doctor and in a more relaxed environment -- with the caveat that we don't have a model for the placebo effect.)

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 (placebo plus gut flora disruption), which by the way used to be common for a number of people I know. It's possible even that gut flora disruption would impede recovery from illness.

And to make matters more complicated, by what measure would you know those people's health and how soon would you know it? Previous study of antibiotics on infections caused by flu probably didn't measure gut flora health for a year. And a person with a bad gut flora health for a year could be making other decisions in the course of the year that would affect their well-being differently than if they didn't have it. And so on. We know so little, and I don't think we can afford to be arrogant.

Re:Separate issues

[iMadeGhostzilla]

There's a difference between using antibiotics when we have a bacterial infection in general and using antibiotics when we have a bacterial infection that the body likely won't handle well, from best we can tell. For a "minor" infection like with a cold or flu, depending how you define minor, if the person has a relatively good immune system and so on, waiting it out may be a better strategy than using antibiotics. As well as staying home and recovering instead of going to work, drinking lots of fluid and avoiding food that slows down recovery and so on.

the (real) effect not dependent on ingredient

[raymorris]

> "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.