To be looking so differently now at Drs, schools etc etc

Tbf, a lot of GP practices do now have pharmacists reviewing patients' medication, particularly those who are on a polypharmacy rollercoaster.

I also don't think that anyone is claiming conventional medicine is without its weaknesses and can't be improved. But it's based on a colossal canon of knowledge and experience, whereas much alternative medicine, and homeopathy specifically, just isn't.

Nobody is stopping individual patients from participating actively in their healthcare either. To run with your blood pressure example, anyone on antihypertensives can monitor their own blood pressure and see if the drugs are helping or not, and ask for a review if they aren't. We all also know what lifestyle changes improve blood pressure, and there's a considerable amount of support available now via primary care for weightloss, smoking cessation etc. However, the truth is that high blood pressure is largely familial, and there's a limit to what can be done about that. You are right that the percentage difference many drugs make is small, and likewise the percentage difference made by lifestyle changes, but cumulatively they can prevent or mitigate cardiovascular events, renal damage, eye damage and vascular dementia. Show me an alternative therapy that can do that - certainly not homeopathy.

But you are right that bad experiences can damage trust, and in my experience that does hold true for alternative medicine too, which is abysmally badly regulated. Try getting a complaint against a homeopath investigated.

All of Mumsnet: It’s water. It’s fake. It’s placebo effect.

OP: No it’s not.

May I offer a cheaper miracle cure? A wet paper towel works wonders in most UK primary schools. Can be used for any bump or scratch, across the forehead for headaches, back of the neck for sickness.

But it does stop people getting proper treatment. People have been given homeopathy instead of antimalarials.

France has not covered homeopathic treatment for a while because it doesn't actually do anything. It IS used in Europe but the use of it is changing, like a lot of things that are shown to not actually work.
Also, only about half of German health insurances are paying for homeopathic treatments, by far not all.
I went to the emergency pharmacy in Germany one Christmas a few years back because dd had bad earache, we hadn't brough any calpol with us and all my sister's friends with small children just had homeopathic "remedies". When I said to the pharmacist that I don't want anything homeopathic, she said "oh good, someone with some sense". I asked her why they sell it in the pharmacy and she told me that it keeps the pharmacy in profit.

Yes, I worded that badly!
Remedies aren't dangerous per se, but replacing effective treatments with remedies is!

I think it really is what you make of it - there is no one way that's better to live your life and you just need to do what works for you.

ie the 9-5 I have struggled with in the past. When I had a spiritual experience and subsequent life crisis I quit my 9-5 and went self-employed, I've since gone back to a 9-5. All I can say it is all about perspective and how you individually view it. The 9-5 and snatched holidays etc can seem a bit soul destroying if you're actively burnt out and unhappy but there's plenty of good too. I like having a regular income and am grateful to be living a fairly cushy life. Yeah capitalism isn't great but I choose to wake up with gratitude, it is all about perception and your reality if that makes sense.

Medicine is the same, it's what works for you. A hollistic approach is best and realistically we are so limited in what we know of our bodies, the mind-body dialectic is so interesting and we've scratched the surface of what we understand of how mental state plays into physical health etc.

tldr it's not about being a hippie necessarily, plenty of 'hippies' will be just as narrow minded as the people they criticise. Just be open-minded, informed, open to all sides of the topic in question.

It conveniently forgets all the poo it's had in it.

You know what else - the whole premise of homeopathy is that water remembers. So they put the water on sugar pills and the water evaporates and you take the sugar pill - what are we saying now, that sugar also has a memory?!

FFS - the whole world used to believe the world was flat and that the sun orbited the earth - didn't make it true.

As a GP, I'd love to spend time helping patients sort out their BP with diet and exercise, I'd love to have lots of consultations with my patients with MH issues and help them to slowly come off their drugs - I'm sure a lot of them could.

I don't have the time.
We are fire fighting.

Blame the politicians of every colour (Blair included, though everyone wrongly thinks he was a hero to the NHS) for that.

It's not dangerous, unless it stops you getting proper treatment. Homeopathy is just water.

Oh dear OP .
It is great news that DD is feeling better.
Conventional medicine is not good at managing certain symptoms and conditions eg chronic pain, the common cold and many many others.
It is clear to all medics that there is a link between diet , activity and health and going down this route will help us all.
Some alternative therapies are definitely helpful eg acupuncture and talking therapies.
Some herbal medicines are effective eg St John's wort are also effective but tend to require an expert practitioner with knowledge of eastern and western medicine so that the point of overlap doesn't cause harm.
The placebo effect is real and to be welcomed.
Homeopathy has been scientifically debunked I'm afraid so don't waste your money unless you are enjoying the holistic experience so much that you want to keep going.

OP, if you’re open to hearing evidence about alternative medicine, I’d recommend reading “Trick or Treatment” by Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh. Ernst began his career working in a homeopathic hospital, and became the UK’s first professor of complementary medicine. He’s very well qualified to investigate homeopathy and other alternative treatments, and the book gives a great overview of the claims made many of these treatments.

I believe it’s really important that we are well-informed about health, because medical culture definitely has problems - especially in its treatment of women and marginalised groups. So I totally understand looking for some alternative. I used to use homeopathy and herbal remedies a lot. But after reading about how it’s actually scientifically impossible for homeopathy to have any active ingredients at all, I realised that I should instead be trying to educate myself about what the evidence says. My health is important. I don’t mind using treatments that have some basis in science - some herbal remedies, for example. But homeopathy is faith-healing dressed up in a lab coat.

I imagine if your DC ever got sepsis op, you'd be begging the conventional doctors for antibiotics

How could it possibly work though? When the 'active ingredient' is literally water?

Hahahahah. This thread (and you) are going to be in for a wild ride OP. 😂

But no, i dont believe in that homeopathy - it's just all fucking shit. An aunt took her sick child to see one of these quacks.... son didnt get better, until he saw a REAL dr many many months later. My poor cousin suffered for months because of her, he now doesn't speak to her because he had to miss SO much school and was put back a year. People who believe in this bull shit are so dangerous. Can you imagine telling someone with cancer to try this shit and it might/will cure them?

I think you are too gentle on conventional medicine. It's not just that it can seem cold and impersonal, it can be practiced this way, it can be damaging, doctors can ignore the actual outcomes and health goals of patients.

Two examples: my father was for many years in charge of the GPs in our region.One thing that he was constantly trying to get them to do was test patients that had been put of blood pressure drugs to see if they were effective. The reason for that is the first thing they did when a patient had high BP was prescribe, often without seriously looking at lifestyle changes. Then they just kept those patients on the drugs. But they actually only work for a small percentage of people - others should be taken off because of the potential for side effects, cost, and also just because it's not great to have people on unnecessary drugs.

There was huge apathy from GPs about this. That tells you something about their practice of medicine.

The other example is my uncle. On a lot of psychiatric drugs for many years, his psychiatrist was constantly tinkering. Was it necessary - no one ever really knew. 30 years later, kidney failure, his doctors at that time started going through all of these medications that he was still on to eliminate them. Many were a mystery, lots there to deal with side effects caused by other drugs. No effort ever made to reduce them as it became possible. Some they decided were almost certainly implicated in the fact they had struggled to control his diabetes, and his kidney failure likely a result of the year on these drugs too. The mental effects of stopping all but one - he felt a lot better, brain fog decreased.

His bi-polar diagnosis also came under some significant scrutiny in later years, he was diagnosed back in the 90s when everyone and his dog was being labeled bi-polar.

Now, age may well have mitigated his mental health problems which isn't uncommon, and at the time they were better than doing nothing. But the fact is there was zero effort from any of his doctors over 30 years - and he had several GPs over that period - to look carefully at medications that ultimately have destroyed his kidney function which is likely to kill him within the next few years.

People don't only become skeptical of conventional medicine because they are silly. Just look at what's going on with gender medicine or some of the COVID stuff - it's completely unscientific. (Or even a lot of things in maternity services, for that matter.)

Once people lose trust it's difficult to get it back because it's not an area where most people have enough expertise to know who is practicing well and who isn't.

My FIL believed in homeopathy. He didn't take the anti hypertensive medication that his GP prescribed because it was "traditional medicine". He is now dying of stage 4 kidney failure, a direct result of untreated high blood pressure. Beware homeopathy OP. As some else has said, the placebo effect is a powerful thing, until it's not.

A GP where I worked was struck off for prescribing homeopathy. She had a book of herbs she would recommend at the expense of inhalers etc. Dangerous woman.

I don't disagree.

Good practitioners see themselves as supporting conventional medicine.

People do feel better when they have the opportunity to feel listened to, feel human touch.
Conventional medicine often doesn't have time for this. There is also a tendency for conventional medicine practitioners to forget that the symptoms or side effects a patient is experiencing may be 'normal' but they arent normal for the individual and may be deeply distressing.

The charlatans see themselves as replacing conventional medicine. They are dangerous.

You know that the placebo effect works even when people KNOW its the placebo effect, right?

Its the placebo effect thats working in your case too.

You aren't special and you can't escape the placebo effect by dismissing it as not being the placebo effect.

While the former homeopathic hospital still exists, now known as the hospital for integrated medicine, you'll be happy to know it stopped providing NHS-funded homeopathic remedies in 2018. They now do stress management etc.

Yes but this is exactly what placebo effect is.

You have observed “results” but you have no way to objectively measure whether what you’re seeing has a causal relationship with the therapy: spoiler: it doesn’t. As numerous large scale clinical studies have shown.

So the “results” you have seen are one of two things:

• this is a self limiting illness which has cleared up on its own OR
• the placebo effect has supported your daughter’s recovery by stimulating her mental health etc

If the latter then great. Crack on with it, you are one of many people to have benefited from the positive impact of a placebo and if it helps your daughter’s recovery that’s a great thing.

But don’t confuse that with thinking there’s any efficacy in the homeopathy. That’s demonstrably untrue. And whatever you do don’t substitute this for conventional medicine.

Because in the UK we are taught to practice in evidence-based way. There was a whole module when I studied called "Evidence-based practice". We also have NICE who evaluate available evidence before making recommendations for whether something should or shouldn't be used. Since there doesn't appear to be any evidence as to the efficacy of homeopathy, it is not taught or practiced in the UK.
In India, astrology is widely practiced but that doesn't mean that we all have to teach our doctors how to prescribe homeopathy to Sagittarius.

It's one of three things: placebo, traditional medicine kicking in, or the condition improving with time. Probably a combination.

It's not actually possible for it to be the homeopathy because there isn't actually anything in the homeopathy.

First I've ever heard of this miracle cure. It breaks my heart to see my Dad and how his Parkinson's is worsening. Nothing has cured this disease yet and I'm guessing it won't for a long while yet, not even in my lifetime.

Sorry, OP, but I agree with other posters; homeopathy is a con.

With medicine, I think we can only go with what science has at the date we need it. Hundreds of years ago, it was all they could do, to go along with 'bleeding' patients to rid them of all ills. Science is updating and discovering all the time. In 100 years they'll laugh at some of our current ideas.