Homeopathy Awareness Week

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=556

by zkz • 17 years ago

22 31 17 years ago

grandalf8• 17 years ago

homeopathy is as much bunk as the placebo effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo

Why would anyone choose to ingest powerful pharmaceuticals if they could experience significant improvements simply by believing that homeopathy works?

Even when you take advil for a headache, some/all of the effect may just be the placebo effect.

note: placebos are used by many modern doctors who write prescriptions for a drug called "Obecalp" routinely to harness the placebo effect:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/health/27plac.html

The human mind/body healing process is too complex to dismiss placebos offhand.

timcederman• 17 years ago

By giving them a voice, you encourage stuff like this: http://www.smh.com.au/national/parents-guilty-of-manslaughte...

grandalf8• 17 years ago

Sorry I don't buy the idea that free speech/expression is bad.

Many people are quite foolish, and they are this way in spite of much information that would prevent ridiculous things like the link you posted.

philwelch2• 17 years ago

"Why would anyone choose to ingest powerful pharmaceuticals if they could experience significant improvements simply by believing that homeopathy works?"

Because if you want to perpetuate a widespread belief that homeopathy works, you have to require an equally widespead ignorance of how real chemistry works. Then, to have a modern civilization at all, you have to also have an elite that does understand how real chemistry works.

I'm sure you can understand how much of a problem this is going to become.

grandalf8• 17 years ago

Well, the placebo effect is also due to real chemistry ... just not chemistry that anyone understands enough to start designing actual patentable pharmaceuticals to harness it (yet).

I would counter that just as many people naively take advil when they get a headache. I think many doctors would say that OTC NSAID abuse is probably at least as big a problem as people not getting rid of their ailments b/c they took homeopathic remedies.

Most people don't have a clue what is really happening when they flip on a light switch in their home ... so by your argument they should avoid electricity, appliances, etc.

Jebdm• 17 years ago

Going to become?

logjam• 17 years ago

Physicians do not routinely gives patients placebo (except in research), nor would it be ethical to do so routinely in clinical practice.

The article you linked really talks about parents who are trying to market "Obecalp". Neither I nor any physician I know has ever heard of it.

There is a significant "mind/body healing process", but neither homeopathy nor placebo is a legitimate or ethical part of healing.

jibiki• 17 years ago

> Physicians do not routinely gives patients placebo (except in research), nor would it be ethical to do so routinely in clinical practice.

Wikipedia says otherwise (and here is its source):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=retrieve&db...

"The authors sent a questionnaire to 772 randomly selected Danish clinicians and asked them about their use of placebo interventions. Sixty-five percent responded. Among the general practitioners, 86% (95% confidence interval 81-91) reported to have used placebo interventions at least once, and 48% (41-55) to have used placebo interventions more than ten times, within the last year"

grandalf8• 17 years ago

Someone else beat me to refuting your comment. The nytimes article was just chosen as a quick example. Use of Obecalp is taught in major medical schools and it is used routinely though not frequently by doctors.

Think of it this way, any pharmaceutical treatment you have undergone was probably only 80-90% as effective as you think it was :)

nonono• 17 years ago

No homeopathy is bunk. The placebo effect is psychological in the sense that by unwittingly taking a sugar cube instead of an advil causes your mind to ignore the pain. While homeopathy may induce some wellness via the placebo effect the premise of a former solute having an effect on a solvent is ridiculous.

grandalf8• 17 years ago

Of course the premise of homeopathy is ridiculous, as would be the typical person on the street's explanation of how Advil works.

Also, some percentage of the effectiveness of Advil is also due to the placebo effect.

Confusion3• 17 years ago

Why would anyone choose to ingest powerful pharmaceuticals if they could experience significant improvements simply by believing that homeopathy works?

Because believing isn't a choice.

Why would anyone choose to spend his life in existential crisis, when he could experience significant improvements by simply believing there is a God?

Because I don't believe there is a God and I don't have a choice in that. If I had a choice, I would gladly believe there was a God: it would make my life a lot easier.

grandalf8• 17 years ago

Your example brings up a good point.

Consider the basis for which most atheists believe in any complex piece of engineering or science. At best, most people have a kindergarten level understanding of most of the natural world, and they pat themselves on the back for trusting authority figures.

But all they are doing is trusting authority, not actually understanding anything.

My point is that this sort of "truth" is on equal footing with religion... just because someone in a white coat tells you something doesn't mean your belief is of any better quality than if someone in a clerical robe told you to believe it.

This is true for most people anyway... Please note that I am an atheist, but I try to avoid patting myself on the back for what amounts to nothing more than bowing to authority.

jah• 17 years ago

Oh the irony.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31388177/ns/health-cold_and_flu/

GiraffeNecktie• 17 years ago

I have had family members suffering badly for years under traditional (and various kinds of alternative) care who suddenly improved dramatically (and so far permanently) with homeopathy. I don't know why that is. It could be explained by the natural tendency for the body to return to equilibrium, it could be that they just found a placebo they could believe in, but the bottom line is that they are now fully healthy, the treatment had no side effects and it was relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, the harm from traditional medicine was extraordinary.

CalmQuiet• 17 years ago

Although I've never experienced any definite benefits from the occasional homeopathic remedy whose drops a friend has urged on me, I know several "hard-headed" (meat-eating, non-"granolas", rationalists) who swear by the homeopathic treatment for poison ivy/oak.

It may just be placebo mind/body effects, but if anything so innocuous can reduce symptoms for something so slow-to-resolve and aggravating, I'm up for "getting foolish".

As long as it's basically distilled water "with a healing vibration," is way cheaper than trip to doc, and cannot have side effects (see the zicam recall), what's not to like? --just my 2¢

alexfarran• 17 years ago

Well one side effect is that magic water displaces real medicine where it really matters.

Such as:

The recent case of the child who died of eczema,

The recommendation of many homeopaths to avoid anti-malaria drugs,

And the campaign against anti-retroviral drugs in South Africa.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

That's an incredible personal account.

richieb• 17 years ago

I have case of homeopathic beer. It's $5 per bottle.. write me.... ;)

jjames• 17 years ago

The theory surrounding homeopathy would suggest that would only be useful for curing extreme and persistent drunkenness.

TheAmazingIdiot3• 17 years ago

And here I was thinking that there was some grain of truth in homeopathy.

If I recall correctly, the link was here, a few months ago, about "13 things that Dont Make Sense". A scientist who was the scourge of homeopathy, had to admit that there was _something_.

Then there's water remembering when it freezes. Occasionally, distilled water will not freeze until a bit lower than 0c. It'll be around -2 to -4c before it freezes. Now, if we add a small amount of water, that is also distilled, but shown to freeze at 0c, all the water will freeze no lower than 0c. You must boil the water rigorously before it can retain the possibility of freezing below 0c.

Who knows how it happens. Quantum memory, perhaps? But there is something.

TheAmazingIdiot3• 17 years ago

Aside the self-response and copy-pasta, here is the snippet of text and in where I got this from.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things...

_______________________ MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

scott_s• 17 years ago

No one has replicated her results. Fourth paragraph from top of the section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory#Subsequent_researc...

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