To ask whether or not people here believe in homeopathy?

[DaisyLovesMetronidazole]

I don't at all.

However, I'm not out for a bunfight!

Just curious, as was surprised by the response of a certain group to this question today.

Apologies for the illiteracy, I have fat fingers IPhone syndrome..,

i used to live near a homeopathy hospital. i love it, an entire hospital devoted to sugar water. in fact, there's not even that much sugar in the water. cheap bastards.

thanks for asking OP, i personally think it is a complete and utter bunch of bollocks.

Let me tell you - if there were any medical drugs which could have helped I would have taken them. And I did.

And we're talking about 15 years of hayfever misery and now 9 years hayfever free. Nothing else changed in that period of time - I didn't move house, I didn't clean more, I didn't have kids (and I know sometimes pregnancy triggers allergies or makes them better)... The only thing which changed was the homeopathic treatment.

So it's not something which got better by itself, and it's not because I believed the homeopathy was some magic cure because I was very skeptical about handing over £200 to some "quack". But there wasn't much else I could try and the medical doctors had no answer to my problem except to up the doses of steroids which made me fat and really very grumpy without really alleviating the symptoms any.

Be as skeptical as you like - but if you have a good homeopath they'll be able to sort out problems which your GP just can't. Belief doesn't come into it.

Gooseberrybushes, you said "Onagar I'm sorry I can't even read your post that came just after mine. It's written in such a patronising and insulting way. You are not talking to stupid people, they are people who think differently."

It's not clear which one you meant and how you can tell since you didn't read it I don't know. I expect you have faith that it was.

Later you said "Homeopathy is valuable because of its complex and little understood placebo effect. It appears to be the most effective delivery system of placebo in the UK."

Which had me rolling up because any effect it has is based on telling people it will work when it won't and making them feel better. So "most effective delivery system" translates as "really good at lying to patients"

I wouldn't dream of arguing with that :)

rockinhippy Your point 'seems' to be that homoeopathic facts have to be treated differently to other facts. There is only one reality and in that reality it can be shown that homoeopathy practitioners are only pretending to provide treatments, but are in fact offering water without ingredients at all. We know the properties of water and what it can do.

Herbal medicine supporters please note. Herbal medicine has herbs in it. homoeopathic treatments have water in it that once saw some other water that had ingredients in it.

homoeopathy is the best April Fool of all time.

onagar that's simply not true - how do you explain medical conditions being solved in a skeptic then? Because for your theory of it being a placebo effect either presumes that I didn't have a medical problem or that I somehow believed so much in homeopathy that it somehow cured me. Both are untrue.

Now I cannot tell you how it works - but it does. We didn't know about germs or blood types or DNA or all sorts of different things before we had better technology. Born in the middle ages you probably would have burned a few witches at the stake for making the crops fail.

And the medical profession has a very good reason for not wanting it to be proved effective - to take my example: I paid over £200 per summer on prescription charges (I have no idea what the actual cost would have been) and it was an ongoing cost. Homeopathy solving my hayfever actually lost the medical profession hundreds and hundreds of pounds - of course they try to discredit it.

So now the medical profession are set on discrediting homeopathy because it's so effective it might put them out of a job? This really, really, doesn;t sound particulaly likely!

northerngirl14 - You don't have symptoms any more and that's great. But your case tells us only that you don't have symptoms any more. You are far to complicated to allow us to put it down to any one cause. Thats why we need lots of cases to smooth out all those other possiblities so that we can see the effect of a particular one.

Placeboes work even if you know they are placeboes by the way. Our subconsious is less skeptical than our concious mind.

Scientists who discredit homeopathy just want proof that it works. They have tried to prove it using randomised controlled trials but this has always shown homeopathic treatments to have no more effect than a placebo treatment which had not gone through the homeopathic process.

That doesn't mean that noone on those trials got better, it's just that the same number of people in the placebo arm got better (or felt better) than in the homeopathic arm.

Lots of treatments seem to work before they're properly tested using rigorous, blinded, randomised trials. And then we find out that actually they don't. Or sometimes that they actually cause harm.

That's not to detract from your experience. You're better and for you, that's all that matters.

Elia V, Niccoli M. New physico-chemical properties of extremely diluted aqueous solutions. Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry, Vol. 75 (2004) 815?836.

In a multi-centre study including four research centres in Europe the effect of high dilutions of histamine (10-30 ? 10-38 M) were confirmed. Researchers were able to document that high dilutions of histamine inhibit human basophil degranulation. Results cannot be explained through molecular theories.

Just because our current level of scientific understanding cannot explain the facts, does not mean that there is not something there to be explained.

There are other studies regarding the properties of homeopathic dilutions cited on here

Trials listed on the same page show that time and again, Homeopathy has been proven to be better than the placebo.

No ongar my point was, that Scientific reality as you call it can change - you only have to look at history to see that as fact & the Scientific reality that you spout as discrediting Homeopathy is based on whats available NOW,

Who's to say that future tests won't have a far better understanding of the workings of the body/mind/spirit & prove Scientifically that it DOES work??

Acupuncture quite a good example of that - again based for a lot in hocus-pocus, but works for many, an incredibly ancient oriental "art" - that works on the mysterious "Meridians"

in more recent times the bodies fascia has come under scientific study & diagnosis of Myofascial Pain & therapies based on healing that are now common place & accepted MEDICALLY in many countries -

the Fascia follows the same patterns as the hocus pocus meridians - so in that, modern science is finally catching up with Alternative practise - who is to say that in future discoveries wont be made that will make more sense of WHY Homeopathy does work for some people & some conditions????

I've never said there aren't crap homeopaths out there, nor out & out charlatans, but most are genuine & believe in what they do & it CAN work

& there are Doctors who could also be called Charlatans - its common practice for Medical Specialists to prescribe newer drugs on commission from drug companies - the side effects of some of these drugs are horrendous - so why just because they wear a white coat are they seen as any less out for themselves??

I can see this one going round & round & round

Night night:)

MistyB - Before looking for a mechanism for an effect, you need to show that the effect exists. No one has shown that Homeopathy works, so if doesn't make sense to look into how.

The research on Acupuncture shows that where it does work, it's not related to any theory of Meridians.

Thats because the research wasn't looking at the Meridians theory, like homeopathy, it was outside the realms of understanding of science - but top Myofacsial Therapists will & have made that link

Number of posts now equals 666. And i have namechanged. Wooooo, perhaps one caused the other. Or probably not eh?

Some of the anti Homeopathy posts on here cite the lack of evidence that Homeopathy is effective as a reason to question it's validity - only 11% of conventional treatments received on the NHS have clinical evidence to suggest they are effective, here.

Coalition More evidence that Homeopathy works on here as well as on the original link.

Sorry for this huge c&p:

Meta-analyses, in which large groups of studies are analysed and conclusions drawn based on the results as a whole, have been used to evaluate the effectiveness of homeopathy. Early meta-analyses investigating homeopathic remedies showed slightly positive results among the studies examined, but such studies have warned that it was impossible to draw firm conclusions due to low methodological quality and difficulty in controlling for publication bias in the studies reviewed.[12][13][19] One of the positive meta-analyses, by Linde, et al.,[13] was later qualified by the authors, who wrote:

The evidence of bias [in homeopathic trials] weakens the findings of our original meta-analysis. Since we completed our literature search in 1995, a considerable number of new homeopathy trials have been published. The fact that a number of the new high-quality trials...have negative results, and a recent update of our review for the most "original" subtype of homeopathy (classical or individualized homeopathy), seem to confirm the finding that more rigorous trials have less-promising results. It seems, therefore, likely that our meta-analysis at least overestimated the effects of homeopathic treatments.[14]

In 2001, a meta-analysis of clinical trials on the effectiveness of homeopathy concluded that earlier clinical trials showed signs of major weakness in methodology and reporting, and that homeopathy trials were less randomized and reported less on dropouts than other types of trials.[19]

In 2002, a review of systematic reviews found that higher-quality trials tended to have less positive results, to the point that those results were clinically irrelevant. Also, when taking collectively all the systematic reviews, there was no convincing evidence that any homeopathic remedy had better effects than placebo, and current evidence did not allow to recommend its usage in clinical treatment.[2]

In 2005, a systematic review of the representation of homeopathy in the medical literature suggested that mainstream journals had a publication bias against clinical trials of homeopathy that showed positive results, and the opposite was the case for complementary and alternative medicine journals. The authors suggested that this could be due to an involuntary bias, or otherwise a submission bias, in which positive trials tend to be sent to CAM journals and negatives ones to mainstream journals.[17] Reviews in all journals approached the subject in an apparently impartial manner, though most of the reviews published in CAM journals made no mention of the plausibility of homeopathy, whereas 9 out of 10 reviews in mainstream journals mentioned a lack of plausibility of homeopathy in the introduction.[17]

In 2005, The Lancet medical journal published a meta-analysis of 110 placebo-controlled homeopathy trials and 110 matched medical trials based upon the Swiss government's Program for Evaluating Complementary Medicine, or PEK. The study concluded that its findings were compatible with the notion that the clinical effects of homeopathy are nothing more than placebo effects.[6]

From: here where you can get all the links to the references.

NO, no, no, no, no. It's galling that so many people make so much money conning people but it happens all over the place, the beauty industry, fat busting books, advertising....what a world.

rockinhippy - Nothing that can be measured objectively is outside the realm of science. All science is, is a formal method to find out 'does x cause y (to a certain level of certainty)'

So it is certainly within the realm of science to find out 'do more people treated with Homeopathy/Meridian based Acupuncture report that they get better than those receiving placebos'.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2769056/?tool=pmcentrez

This study comapared acupuncture with and without Meridian points.

"A small analgesic effect of acupuncture was found, which seems to lack clinical relevance and cannot be clearly distinguished from bias. Whether needling at acupuncture points, or at any site, reduces pain independently of the psychological impact of the treatment ritual is unclear."

Now I'm sure one can critique the research, but you can't say that these methods don't apply.

suzi I think your C&P shows that it is important to understand what the intentions of a trial and the motivations of the authors and publications are.

Taking a single homeopathic remedy and giving it to a group of 20 people with a cough is unlikely to result in the entire group recovering from their cough as there are many remedies which may be appropriate depending on a number of analysis of the person and their symptoms. So in this case we could be looking at comparing 12 different remedies against the placebo, which is not normally the type of trial that is examined.

Homeopathy is required to comform to and follow the medical trials protocols of the conventional medical world, when it does not really fit. This is not an excuse, more of an explanation. The problem lies in designing and executing large scale trials that stand up to scrutiny and sharing that information effecively without author / publication bias. Drug companies have vast resources to design studies, fund research and recruit patients. Individual Homeopaths do not.

MistyB - So the evidence is that 100% of Homoeopathic medicines don't work, but only 11% of conventional medicines do work and are beneficial, 23% are likely to be beneficial, 23% are likely to be beneficial (I don't know if this means sometimes beneficial or likely to be beneficial but not enough evidence yet), 7% have a trade off between benefit and harm, 5% unlikely to be beneficial, 3% ineffective or harmful (hopefully we don't use these any more) and only 51% where we just don't know.

That looks to me like a better evidence base for conventional medicine to me.

And interestingly, medical doctors TELL YOU when there is no/thin evidence for a treatment. We were prescribed metformin as a treatment for infertility, and were told - 'well we don't know how it works, and there isn't good evidence that it does, but it works sometimes, so we use it while we start looking at other things'.

MistyB - It's easy to do a proper double blind test for homeopathy. You let the Homeopath do their thing and decide on the prescription. You then give half the patients the prescription and the other half a placebo. Someone else explained this up the thread. And you don't want 20 people, you want 200, 2000, as many as possible really.

Blast it! And there was me thinking that the wretched homeopath had cured my frontal lobe - I understood the OP to be referring to herbal medicine and not homeopathy.
I retract everything I said - how on earth can anything, which contains nothing, work in any other way other than with a placebo effect.
That said of course, if it works for some, for whatever reason (perhaps because it has encouraged the body to produce more endorphins or adrenaline because it thinks its going to need them), then surely that is good enough for that person?!