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.

I've just put my mental finger on something that I think has been bugging me. I think it's the idea that you guys have, that you are somehow tremendously sceptical and cynical and are in the know about some great rational truth.

There's no scepticism here, really. There's is so little awareness or interest of where the big money is made, and the serious damage done, that there is far more credulity and blind faith than scepticism.

The reason you're finding it difficult to follow is because it's a nice, simple idea to point and laugh - whereas you can't cope with or manage the thought that many people could actually be aware of the fact that homeopathy has no grounding in physics or chemistry - just like you are - but can go a step further - believing it still has enormous value, and it would be childish to vilify and ridicule. it.

I have already said that I know what the pharmaceutical companies are doing too, you chose to ignore that bit.

Unlike you many people don't know that they are just buying a pill that might remember some Arnica.

Conventional treatments must be proved to work by properly designed studies. The products must be tested to show that they contain the correct active ingredients, in the correct quantities. The system may not be perfect but it is designed to provide effective treatments (and of course to make money.)

Homeopathy has no side effects...think someone else covered that point above.

It's the perfect example of a false correlation.

You may just as well bang your elbow three times on the door before you go out, and them if you feel better say it was because of that. And it costs nothing. Free placebo effect.

i believe homeopathy works on the placebo principle. and that's why i don't dismiss it.

but don't try and treat diabetes / cancer / alzheimers etc. with it. that is criminal.

If homeopathy worked as well as the propaganda says it does, why hasn't it become part of conventional medicine?

Have we had this yet?

nope, have you got a link to the homeopathic semen one?

i love xkcd!

Jaggy: if you do agree with me, that's marvellous of course.

UQD: placebo has nothing to do with false correlation. It is entirely to do with cause and effect, and not coincidence in any way. The cause and effect may be different to the cause and effect you, the patient, imagines it to be: but it certainly nothing to do with false correlation or coincidence, far from being the perfect example of it.

Unfortunately placebo requires belief in effectiveness - perhaps you forgot this before you wrote your post. Unless you believe that the door knocking will have an effect, it won't.

Homeopathic semen - no good anyway, they only diluted it 30x!

This is about the level that most people can manage it seems. This and a bit of ffs you fuckwits.

yay! I am ttc so find it especially amusing :)

When my sister was studying she came home saying that renal failure like I had was sometimes borne out of fear. This was very interesting as when I first showed signs of kidney disease years before diagnosis I was living with a very real fear and it was consuming my whole teenage life. There is more to us than simple black and white homeopathic or conventional. What we think and feel subconsciously is hugely powerful.

The falsehood is the belief that there is a connection between a perceived correlation and an actual causation. Anecdote is not data.

Derren Brown illustrated the folly of homeopathy perfectly in his episode about horse-racing. Yes - horse-racing. He chose, through selective editing of the various people betting, to mislead the audience into thinking that his predictions were coming true, when in fact someone had to win each time (in a horse-race of 6) and he was only showing us the winners.

You may believe the homeopathic pill is making you feel better and so "feel better" as a result (but this is not the same as "felling better" after taking a paracetamol for a headache, where the symptoms genuinely do abate), but in that case you might as well forget the expensive stupid sugar-and-water pills an just do something free for your placebo effect. Howl at the moon, or run round the house widdershins.

Gooseberry: I don't hate homeopathy; as a Placebo it clearly has a role for many people, and since they pay for it themselves, no problem. However, there is no medical evidence that it works, and what I find sad is the people who reject proven treatments because of it and suffer as a result.

I accept that there are a great many failures of accepted medical treatments, nonetheless they are carried out based on the best possible evidence. The same does not apply to homeopathy, which is at best harmlessly ineffective, and at worst dangerous because of omission of proper treatment.

not sure what I agreed about...gooseberry

Anyway so is what you are saying that homeopathy is only the placebo effect, but that's ok because people have to believe in something for it to work?

Gooseberrybushes Most of us have been saying all along that homoeopathy works by placebo so I'm not sure who you are trying to convince. I guess it's you against the Homoeopathy practitioners. They claim that you are wrong and that water does indeed have memory. You claim they are lying.

One of your arguments I notice was that it's okay for them to lie as conventional medicine doesn't tell you about the side effects Obviously not true so I'm not sure where that is supposed to get you.

northerngirl41, Others have replied to you, but since you spoke to me I didn't want to ignore you.

onagar that's simply not true - how do you explain medical conditions being solved in a sceptic 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 homoeopathy that it somehow cured me. Both are untrue.>>

I don't need to explain homoeopathy because water without anything in it doesn't cure hay-fever. If it did then drinking tap-water would always cure it and there'd be no such thing. If the guy says "ah but this water once saw some ingredients and remembers" then it also remembers all the other chemicals that it has ever encountered. Surely all tap water will at one time have encountered the ingredient in question?

It's rather like asking me how to prove that kangaroos don't grow on trees. I don't need to prove it. Show me a tree with ripe kangaroos.
Sure there are plenty of anecdotes from people willing to say "I think I saw a kangaroo in a tree once" but they can't find it now can they?

Some of us have suggested that what you think happened might have been the placebo effect, but we don't need to prove that. It's just a helpful suggestion.

Eh? Can't you pay to advertise your hobby horse like everybody else?

Have read 2 pages of that thread gooseberry most of it is just you talking to people who agree with you, so not especially convinced so far...

Gooseberrybushes - why are you so keen for people to condemn the system of modern medicine, rather than, on another thread where it is actually relevant talking about areas where further research is needed, or how to fix specific problems in the regulation and practice of medicine.

I expect people don't want to condemn medicine, because risks-and-all it is the best system we have and it has (unlike alt med) in-built in it systems for improving knowledge, regulating practitioners and replacing treatments that work less well, with ones that are better on balance considering effectiveness, cost, safety and accessibility.

I expect that most people on this thread have family members who are alive because of modern medicine, many will have illnesses that haven't been effectively treated, some will have suffered side effects, some serious, and a few will been failed through medical negligence.

But on balance the grown up response is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Homeopathy is not grown up. It works through placebo and regression to the mean. But because its 'professional bodies' doesn't recognise this it perpetuates an unethical relationship between training schools, practitioners and patients, not to mention pill manufacturers and pharmacists (pharmacists!) who sell this stuff too.

It is unethical to waste people's time and money on a three year course which teaches them a lot of discredited nonsense, and leaves them with the belief that homeopathy works in some other way than placebo.

It is unethical to lie to patients about how a medicine works. It is unethical (although wierdly legal) to sell a medicine with the label 'used to treat x, y and z' when there is no evidence of effectiveness in treating x, y and z.

You are not quite right in saying Homeopathy works by placebo, by the way. It works by placebo (which has some value, which may or may not be worth it given the corruption it involves) and regression to the mean which has none.

The way to study this is to have 2 control groups - 1 gets no treatment and 1 gets a placebo, as well as 1 which gets the real deal. You can even have another control group that gets seen by a fake homeopathist - an actor with some basic training in the questions to ask. Then you could work out how much of the apparent effect is completely bogus, how much is genuine placebo, and to what extent this placebo effect depends on a highly trained homeopathist or can it be achieved by any old sympathetic person with time and sugar pills to hand out.

That would be a grown-up approach to researching the effaciacy of homeopathy - the kind of thing advocated by Proffesor Edvard Ernst. Funnily enough he is not too popular with Prince Charles and the alt med industry.

iwant: Thanks for a sensible response.

"nonetheless they are carried out based on the best possible evidence".

This is not true: one example is MMR (Cochrane: "inadequate"). Earlier I mentioned non-publication of unsupportive studies etc etc which you will know about I guess.

UQD: Anecdote is indeed data. Certainly, quite a lot of anti-homeopaths on this thread think so. Quite apart from that, studies show that the benefits of H are statistically significant. There've been links earlier up the thread. Assuming this is due to placebo; placebo is just as much cause and effect as active ingredient. The belief is the cause: the improvement in condition is the effect. It's just not the cause and effect the patient imagines it to be.

Your examples aren't illustrative or helpful, particularly since you miss the point anyway. Really, I don't need pictures - I get that you don't understand what placebo is.

Onagar: not much point in responding to me if you aren't interested in what I'm saying, which you're obviously not, or you would have read.

Jaggy: you aren't sure what you agreed about? But.. you told me off for not acknowledging that you had agreed with me?

i don't beleive it can work BUT nelson's homeopathic sleeping pills work brilliantly. i'm as baffled as any one as to why- it's not psychosomatic, honest...

Jaggy, just read it: try not to let your prejudice get in the way. Some of it is hard to understand, and there is a lot of it. But not to worry, it all becomes clear in the end

Gooseberry - really, I don't need patronising. I get that you don't understand what I am saying. It's fine.

ANECOTE.
IS.
NOT.
DATA.

I shall keep saying it until I am blue in the face, and I don't give a damn who tries to deny it.