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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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