to think homeopaths really just make money out of the gullible?

[WidowWadman]

A remedy made from diluted bits of the Berlin Wall - seriously, that's surely just a test to find out how far they can push it, isn't?

How do you judge that it works - by anecdote or the effect it has had when you tried it?

I've never tried it. By collective anecdote.

Do you not believe it works by Hahnemann's principle of treating "like with like" and do you not believe that "water has memory"?

No, I don't.

So do you think that Hahnemann and many other homeopaths who came up with homeopathy and believe in "water has memory" did it to give it a pseudo-scientific air of respectability or do you think they believed in what they said.

Do you think that Hahnemann was a quack selling snake-oil and by chance it just happens to work, which you believe it does?

I don't know, I've never thought about it. I don't really see the relevance. Maybe he really did believe in his product, how would I know?

I think there may be something in it, hard as it seems to understand why.

I am not sure that Hahnemann was a quack, and he may have stumbled onto something.

If it works, I don't believe it is just to do with the placebo effect.

"I don't really see the relevance."

Because it gets to the heart of were and are homeopaths for real or are they deliberately conning people. I don't think that the majority of them are trying to con people, I think they believe they are onto something.

If they are in fact onto something, and if you believe it works, which you do (though you believe it is only through placebo effect), the question is how else might it be working.

I just can't see how it is in any way useful to conflate the two discussions. They are very different in nature. One is if HP works in principal or not and the other is about the usefulness of conventional medicine which surely must be discussed for every individual group of drugs. For what it's worth I probably wouldn't use statins knowing the data for it but I was very happy to take antibiotics (after a rather lengthy discussion with my GP which one would be the best) for my infected and bloody painful sebacious cyst recently. These are entirely different discussions.

Claig I have some involvement in drug discovery and if we could develop drugs that do no harm, we would. It's just so difficult to find compounds which target exclusively the problem and nothing else.

Yes - I guess I don't believe homeopaths think they are conning people, most of them anyway. I have no idea how this is possible. I've seen a GP who ran a homeopath strand as well, all perfectly under the law and very common in that country. I don't know how they conflate those two things in their heads.

Gracelo: I explained why it was useful to conflate the discussions, in some posts this morning.

Well yes crumbled and you haven't convinced me.

"I just can't see how it is in any way useful to conflate the two discussions. They are very different in nature. One is if HP works in principal or not and the other is about the usefulness of conventional medicine which surely must be discussed for every individual group of drugs."

But I think this is at the heart of Crumbled's view of homeopathy.

Crumbled does not believe what teh homeopaths say about "water has memory" or treating "like with like", she believes that it works purely by the placebo effect. And she thinks it is good and useful precisely because she thinks it is less harmful than conventional medicine.

I think it is her distrust in conventional medicine and the harm its drugs can do that leads her to support homeopathy, whose claims of "water has memory" she does not believe. She believes in homeopathy as purely a placebo which is less harmful than conventional medicine.

Well yes Claig that's a large part of it. Thank you

Not quite all of it but yes a lot of it.

Well. this warning letter from th FDA to Nelson's seems to suggest that th manufacturers of homeopathic remedies are pretty cynical about the active ingredients, even if the practitioners aren't.

And I can understand that, because I understand some of your views about vaccines etc.

I am a conspiracy theorist and I wouldn't take some of the vaccines. but it is not because I believe the conspiracy is about money.

I think we need to be aware of what treatments we use and look intio them and study the side effects. I don't throw the baby out with the bath water over conventional medicine, because I believe that much of it works and is effective, and I also do not throw the baby out with the bath water over homeopathy, because I think it is possible that there may be something in it which is above and beyond a placebo effect.

So, the argument is to use HP to prevent people from using other medication? Why not question very carefully in each individual case if medication is necessary and/or helpful rather than using HP? Shouldn't we attempt to get people to understand that not every problem needs medication?
This is one thing that bugs me too about HP how it has normalized taking medication for any problem no matter how minor because HP doesn't cause any harm so you can take something without having to worry about side effects. I see this in Germany all the time, Britain is probably not as bad yet. My cousin gave her daughter some HP remedy before she started secondary school just in case she was anxious about it. Something that is a normal part of growing up has now become something to be "treated". She wouldn't have done that with proper drugs.

"She wouldn't have done that with proper drugs."

But some people would have, and they would not have been aware of the side effects. Prozac is claimed to have all sorts of effects on mood and it was widely said to instill confidence etc. I wouldn't use it myself lightly, but each to their own.

"She wouldn't have done that with proper drugs."
She wouldn't have done that because she knows of the side effects and is not prepared to take the risk. But people always search for things that will help them e.g. herb teas or camomile tea or reducing coffee intake etc and these things do no harm, they are safe and so they will use them.

Homeopathy appears to do little if any harm, and people seek solutions are prefer solutions that do not cause harm or have side effects.

I would put two arguments against that. The first is that users of homeopathy are often engaged in a willing suspension of disbelief. There's no shortage of information about what homeopathy really is. And there's no shortage of anecdotes about converted sceptics who know it's a placebo, and are still surprised the placebo works on them anyway. I don't think this is a paternalistic approach

According to some studies you don't need a placebo to be presented as anything other than a placebo in order for it to work on the lucky people who are prone to it working for them (slightly bitter about only getting the nocebo effect, I feel this is a short straw).

A sterile water injection is more effective as a placebo than a pill. So if one was so inclined one could open placebo clinics in the NHS offering "it's not actual medicine, it's just water, but for some people the brain perceives an injection as "proper medicine" and it having an actual effect , so they get a reduction in symptoms. It won't give you any physical side effects"

It might be a cheap solution, but IMO not the best. I think you risk seeing people of a certain personality type, with real medical issues, being fobbed off in that direction, and I think you'll see a diminishment to some degree of how patients who do benefit from it are viewed by their clinicians. There is still a slight whiff of "oh you are just so suggestible" attached to having a placebo/nocebo effect, and I think that contributes to a sub conscious attribution of "weak minded" towards the patient, lowering the ethical barrier thus enabling less rigorous and committed attempts to provide treatment with good evidence and providing more than lip service towards informed consent.

Rather better IMO would be a speciality and facilities that comprehend the emotional element of illness, conditions and pain. And provide greater access to services that intend to offer support and treatment that (withput prejudice) accept the emotional element as part of the human condition, rather than "a weakness" that people should try not to have by pulling their socks up and starching upper lip.

I get pain caused by my head. I display strong physical symptoms when in emotional distress. It can quite literally bring me to my knees. I also cope badly with "real" physical symptoms caused by illness. My fear and distress exacerbates the physical symptoms. I think I may be up one end of the spectrum, but it is a spectrum. Where I believe "holistic" has a place is in remembering the patients are much more than the bit of them that has gone wrong. They are real live humans, with an emotional content, that unsurprisingly, to some degree, gets 'involved' when they are not well.

I don't accept that the best way to "deal" with that is via deception and an endorsement of the underhand and dodgy practices of Big Pharma being reproduced by Big Alt Med in the name of "if it's sauce for the gander, then the woo goosey here wants some too".

I think a far better solution is to work with what it is, part of the human condition, and enable medicine to better provide a humane and well rounded approach to patients as they actually are, rather than the more stream lined, less diverse and less emotionally complicated beings the system is currently more set up to deal with.

I need to stop reading this thread and do something in real life! It's my due date today - does anyone know any homeopathic remedies to get things moving? ;)

"This is one thing that bugs me too about HP how it has normalized taking medication for any problem no matter how minor because HP doesn't cause any harm so you can take something without having to worry about side effects."

It is like diet. We know that diet works and "you are what you eat" and we will always search for things to strengthen us whether that be diets or other harmless methods, and that is why many people turn to homeopathy too, for the same reason that Crumbled believes in it, because they know it is less harmful than some prescription drugs.

Claig I think homeopathy worked better than the alternatives at the time - which was why it became popular (the alternatives of the time were prob fairly likely to lead to death though!).

I believe homeopathy continues to be popular because it works better than alternatives for some conditions or offers something when medicine offers nothing. Whether it's action is through placebo or not I don't really care or think about. I just use it while it works (and an always mildly amused when it does).

I'm not fussed about homeopathy being available on the NHS - although I do like GP surgeries who have a little collection of alternative practitioners around them they refer patients to as I believe it shows the GP's have a holistic understanding of the word 'health'.

I've never had a acupuncture but my best ever GP offered it - we tended to think the same way about health.

Exactly. Keep an open mind.

I believe acupuncture works in many cases too. I think that the ancient Chinese spiritual understanding of chi and the life force etc is not all mumbo-jumbo and I believe that the Chinese learned things and stumbled upon things that really do work over thousands of years of history.

I believe that the Chinese learned things and stumbled upon things that really do work over thousands of years of history

I believe that Chinese medicine has much blood on its hands. As do the the crew that popularised it in order to paper over their inability or lack of desire to provide what effective health care there was at the time.

It was truely sickening in BKK to watch such large numbers of people sicken, die, or suffer long term from treatable or containable conditions in because in significant numbers they placed more trust in Chinese medicine than hospitals and doctors.

I think one can afford to be romatic about it only when viewed through an "option rich" local rather than global lens.

"
I believe that the Chinese learned things and stumbled upon things that really do work over thousands of years of history"

Yep, they did. And the ones that worked and don't involve killing endangered species are now called "medicine"

"Exactly. Keep an open mind."

Until such time as whatever it is has been proved categorically to either work or not work. Such as paracetamol as a pain killer(works) or homeopathy (doesn't work).