Is it a con or can it help my sick child?

Sent you a DM, @Nightswimminginoldpants

@LytesCarey why wouldn’t there be massive profits for the pharma industry from homeopathy if it is effective and cheap to produce? A lack of profit can’t be the reason GSK et al haven’t swooped in can it?

Yes but the concept that a 2 litre bottle if water has 1 molecule if the substance it, seems a insane that the "active" ingredient is doing anything?

PLEASE EXPLAIN how that single molecule will fix what ails me. ... Please!

I'm ready to be converted.

Well water is pretty good stuff.

All you did was give them water...

How did giving them water stop them dying? (Apart from the obvious...)

That makes no sense.

Homeopathy is a license to print money - no research costs, no preclinical development, no clinical trials, no regulatory costs and of course no active ingredients, so all you pay for is the sugar/water and I think you need to have some kind of horsehair filled striking board, as slapping the water vials against it apparently makes it more potent. Teeny tiny fraction of a cost compared to bringing actual medicine to market.

And they 'remedies' are not even cheap - just checked random online pharmacy, homeopathic cold remedy is 2-3 times the price of a regular one.

That seems logical. 😀

Of course there would be. It would free to them (tap water) and they could charge for it.

Because there would be no massive profits in it such as they enjoy now.

clearly homeopathy works already when it's still in the mail - if more diluted is better then so is having more distance between you and the substance, right? :D

I get b12 jags. They give me a mega dose at once. My body uses up the amount it needs and any excess gets peed out. The body takes what it needs and doesnt use the rest.

So I imagine it’s the same for homeopathy. The body takes what it needs and pees the rest.

That doesnt prove it’s bollocks at all. It proves that it doesn’t store any excess.

In my case, I’ve treated quite a few wild animals with mange with homeopathy. All successfully. The animals would likely have died without it. Only a couple of the animals actually knew they were being fed by me. I really don’t see how placebo was a big factor here. For a wild animal that is 2/3 bald with scabs, and very run down to regrow fur and be back to health within a very few weeks is highly unusual.

I’m not poo-poohing the placebo effect in general. It’s well documented to be very effective - in some cases up to 75% - and it works even when people know they’re taking a placebo. It is as much of a factor in the success rates of conventional medicine, of course, which can raise some interesting questions.

Looking at SSRIs, for example, some of their efficacy rates are only very slightly higher than placebo. Yet they’re prescribed and described as effective.

The NHS is constantly trying to use fewer and cheaper medicines - for cost saving and because patients should, in general, be on a few medicines as possible that still controls their conditions. It is absolutely not in cahoots with Big Pharma (or indeed small pharma).

Why on earth would they not use homeopathy if it worked?

@LytesCareyif homeopathy is low cost and so effective why hasn’t the pharma industry jumped on it? Why would the pharma industry decide to ignore homeopathy when presumably it would be relatively easy to bring to market and be low cost enough to be readily accepted by healthcare systems such as NICE?

Yes, placebo is very interesting and potentially powerful even with animal treatment. The clinician and owner are both susceptible as the patient does not directly report the results. When Scruffy is given the homeopathic treatment is he really scratching less or does the owner just perceive it? Or is he actually scratching less because the pollens he is allergic to are dropping off now? Almost certainly not because of any homeopathic remedy he may have been given!

There are some really interesting points made in this post. I'm still not sure where I stand on homeopathy. My lovely mum was a homeopath and treated everyone at every opportunity, whether they wanted it or not.

BUT - I have seen some amazing results with some remedies, both people and animals (horses and dogs), and too many to all be coincidence? I have a few "go to" remedies that I use when needed - I think they work - who knows?!

Actually there is evidence of the placebo effect on animals which has come out of double blind studies. They theorise that the animals are affected by their relationships with their owners.

Recognizing the placebo effect in veterinary medicine - News - VIN share.google/imBKShC9l2fJxD9IZ

FFS. Homeopathy was dreamed up a few hundred years ago. If it worked (it doesn't) there'd be no such thing as "big pharma". People and animals may both get better after taking homeopathic remedies. There is no evidence that they get better as a result of taking homeopathic remedies!

I used to have a dog who went through a prolonged period of frantically biting himself. It was very distressing for everyone and we’d tried the vet, a behaviourist, everything. Then out of desperation we tried a homeopathic remedy from Amazon(We didn’t actually realise that it was homeopathic and thought that it was herbal) and ordered it. I had Prime so it was due to be delivered the next day. Only it didn’t arrive the next day but the day after that. But the next day, when it should have arrived, he suddenly stopped biting himself and never did it again.

No idea why but if the remedy had arrived as it was supposed to do so that day we’d have given him the remedy and thought it was a miracle cure, but no. It would have stopped regardless.

In three words - the pharma industry.

What I don't get about homeopathy is that, say it's true that very diluted chemicals have a powerful effect on the body, even MORE powerful than concentrated versions... how are we not all completely high from tap water? There's traces of cocaine, ketamine, all sorts in rivers and drinking water. There's also antibiotics, birth control (how come we're not all sterile?), pesticides, fertilisers, blood pressure drugs, antidepressants...

Acupuncture used to suffer the same kind of bigotry and closed mind, as no one (especially doctors) could understand the meridien system upon which it is based and did not accept it. Why condemn out of hand something you know nothing about? There is no placebo effect when treating animals, which homeopathy does.

Quite. Many animals and people will, indeed, get well with time alone (and a functioning immune system). Correlation does not imply causation!

Pet caregiver placebo effect is very much a thing. Plus of course regression to the mean - as mentioned before, my dog was magically cured of lameness overnight. My guess is - by healing powers of nature. But could have been a tooth fairy as well, let's keep an open mind here.