To be driven mad by how many people are utterly convinced by homeopathy?

[Wannabuyawatch]

I am just completely baffled by how many educated, clued up people I know, including family members and many close friends, that do not question homeopathy in any way. It is complete nonsense that bases its "science" on the memory of water?? You might as well wave your magic wand and say Hocus Pocus. Of course the placebo effect can be a cure in itself but not for children?? Even my brilliant pediatrician tries to give me homeopathy (probably bc she thinks it will calm me down rather than my children!!)
There is a mum at school whose son has horrendous allergies and asthma. She has taken him off all his inhalers as she wants to "cleanse his system" and only gives him homeopathy. Arrrgh. I see the little boy in tears every day in the spring as he can´t sleep and is exhausted due to his breathing.
My MIL insisted on giving their old dog who was in agony and riddled with cancer homeopathy instead of conventional medicine and god, did it suffer, why why??
Don´t know why but it drives me mad…such an irresponsible industry that suckers vulnerable people in and leads some to give homeopathy instead of conventional meds in dangerous situations.

Onsera3

Maybe they just showed the pills some sugar, then they magically became sugar pills. Same logic innit

I know this is about herbal medicine rather than homeopathy, but this is my favourite quote from Dara O'Briain.

I'm sorry, 'herbal medicine', "Oh, herbal medicine's been around for thousands of years!" Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/homeopathy-product-recalled-over-fears-it-may-contain-actual-medicine-9217206.html

This says it all really

When homeopath opened her draw of hundreds of vials of homeopathic medicines, Ds asked what would happen if he took all of them. She said nothing, and that mothers with emergency stores at home have called her to say the baby has accidentally eaten all of the entire supply, is it dangerous? She tells them no. DS said this made him realise it was all just nonsense -even if you ate all of the entire supply nothing would happen.

I've heard that quotation from Dara O'Briain before. It's completely true up to "and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'". The rest is a massive over-simplification that ignores the fact that medical researchers in the 18th/19th centuries got a hell of a lot wrong, made a lot of mistakes, and were all too happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We know now that many plant-based treatments are effective- and can be safer than conventional synthetic drugs. There is proper research to support this. Not as much as there is to support the synthetic drugs that make billions of pounds for powerful pharmaceutical companies who fund the majority of research (funny that, isn't it?). But the evidence is there for those who are prepared to plough through the woo to get to it. And that is what annoys me about homeopathy. In addition to the charlatans who merrily relieve their clients of hundreds of pounds for water tablets. but as we've seen upthread, homeopathy is generally confused and lumped in with herbalism and aromatherapy, so they are unfairly tarnished with the same reputation where they can provide real, proven benefit.

angelina
This 'big pharma is deliberately hiding natural remedies from us to bolster their profits' conspiracy theory is nearly as bonkers as believing water has a memory.

When you move away from the big 5 pharma, the vast majority of pharma companies are generic manufacturers. That is, they don't pay for R&D, they don't have big marketing budgets, they don't look to brand certain drugs
They will take any thing that is proven effective and not covered by patents and sell it for less than the branded version.
Hence supermarket paracetamol costs a fraction of anadin.

Do you really, really think that the combined mights of all of these companies has failed to realise they can sell natural remedies where they are proven to work? They don't care if they are synthetic or collected from straining tea leaves, as long as they can sell them on

It is the 'follow the money' mentality of lots of Woo believers which perpetuates the homeopathy/anti vaccination/anti conventional medicine conspiracy theories

"Martorana, that is the experiment. It's not exactly well represented there. I learned about it doing A level Psychology, many moons ago. I didn't say it was 'evidence', just interesting".
It's not even interesting without any more details- and I can't find any. Was it in your a level textbook?

As usual, some clever bugger has said everything I wanted to say, and this time in the form of a 9 minute beat poem

m.youtube.com/watch?v=KtYkyB35zkk

I am open minded about homeopathy not really, I have a chemistry degree. But I have one question, which is thus:

They say that London tap water has been through seven people already. Does it remember any of them and their shit, piss and any diseases that they may have had? What about the sewerage systems and water treatment works, does it remember those?

What is different about the water that comes from the tap, or the super duper pure distilled water in my lab, compared to homeopathic water? Isn't it identical on a molecular level?

Have you read any threads at all on this
HERBALISM OR ANY TREATMENT THAT ACTUALLY CONTAINS ANYTHING IS NOT HOMEOPATHY
Homeopathy contains nothing except a 'memory' of what was once there
PHYSIOTHERAPY IS NOT CONNECTED IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM TO HOMEOPATHY
FFS

Mortorana, I did my A Levels in 1984!

I just did a quick search on GoogleScholar. The study was led by a Russian scientist called Perov, I think in Leningrad University, and also Sevastopol, in 1965/6 I think. It was looking for evidence of ESP, with a long term aim of using ESP as a weapon in the cold war. The experiment found a response of over 50% and concluded there was evidence to suggest ESP did exist. That's the gist of it, from what I can recall.

Sorry, forgot to say it wasn't a one-off study but part of a series of studies on the same subject. Also that it was informed by previous research conducted in China in the 1930s.

Ah. So one rather odd study in 1965 apparently proves ESP exists- at least in rabbits- - about a zillion since have clearly shown it doesn't- but the rabbit studyis the interesting one?

It's the tapping on leather that makes all the difference OnIlkleyMoorBahTwat.

However, it is possible there could be a homeopathic activation effect on the piss of people who enjoy masochistic beating with leather belts. As far as I know, homeopathic scientists have not investigated this.

pixie - "Firstly very little is known about particle physics"

Particle physics concerns what happens at a subatomic level - i.e. between subatomic particles. It does not concern what happens at a biochemical level, which is the realm of medication and its interaction with the human body.

Repeat after me: Quantum Physics Has Nothing To Do With Sugar Pills.

"naïve to say that because we don't understand how something works, that it doesn't work"

But it doesn't work!

Study after study after study after meta-analyses of hundreds of studies have found that homeopathy works no better than placebo.

There is a $ 1 million reward offered to whoever proves that homeopathy works in a proper scientific test. The reward remains unclaimed. Do you know why?

Because it has never been proven to work. And do you know why that is?

Because It Does Not Work.

Why is Rescue Remedy being touted as herbal? My understanding is that it's dew taken from plant petals and diluted to homeopathic levels (albeit not using homeopathic principles).

Hey Mortarana, take it up with Perov et al. I didn't say it 'proved' anything. They, based on a series on related studies using a variety of animals, found a positive correlation. My saying I find it 'interesting' does not imply I believe or disbelieve it. My point way up thread was that we know too little of the brain's functions to rule out 'power of the mind.'

*Particle physics concerns what happens at a subatomic level - i.e. between subatomic particles. It does not concern what happens at a biochemical level, which is the realm of medication and its interaction with the human body.

Repeat after me: Quantum Physics Has Nothing To Do With Sugar Pills*

(sighs) This is what really pisses me off about people on MN.They don't read the whole thread and so miss context
Listen cleverclogs! I did not say that homeopathy was anything to do with quantum physics.My comment about quantum physics was merely to illustrate that there is much about science that we do not know.It was in response to someone's comment that homeopathy could not possibly work because it was not rooted in (existing) scientific knowledge

Amber teething necklace ? What school would that belong too ? Homeopathy , herbalism , witchcraft , woo woo ?
Dunno ,but I wish I'd thought of it first !
All the kids round here have them and someone's making a lot of money .

Tuhlulah as an academic psychologist and neuroscientist, rather than someone with a 30 year old A level in the subject, I can tell you that we know a huge amount about how the brain functions.
One thing that we know is that there is no such thing as ESP whatever a couple of poorly controlled studies from 1960's Russia might appear to suggest. Another is that placebos operate through a combination of conditioning and expectation. A whole other set of factors unrelated to pharmacology also influence clinical outcomes and are often, incorrectly, attributed to placebo (such as response bias, interpretation bias, reversion to the mean, etc...). What these things all go to show is that you need to conduct proper randomized controlled trials to determine whether a treatment has a genuine effect. Whenever this has been done with homeopathic treatments, they have found absolutely no effect whatsoever.

"It was in response to someone's comment that homeopathy could not possibly work because it was not rooted in (existing) scientific knowledge". Homeopathy does no work because repeated testing has shown it not to work. It's not that it works but we don't know why. It just does not work.

Exactly, Martorana.

pixie - I assure you that I have not mixed the context of your claims that (1) homeopathy works, and (2) we don't know how it works but it might have something to do with quantum physics.

I said this before, but to make it clearer:

(1) Homeopathy doesn't work. It has been proven over and over again not to work better than placebo. See Martorana's post.

(2) Quantum Physics has nothing to do with what happens when you swallow a pill. The interaction between the pill and your body does not happen on a quantum level, because neither you nor the pill are subatomic particles.

What you are doing is hoping everyone here finds Quantum Physics are impossible to comprehend as you, so that your wild claim that homeopathy must have something to do with it looks remotely credible.

Well, it doesn't

Neither have I missed the context of your claims

There is a bigger picture to all of this though , if you end up going down the alternative route it usually has a knock on effect .
Patients will perhaps start looking at their lives with a more holistic approach . Diet and mental well being are often suddenly given a shake up .
This is less likely with the NHS approach for some reason . Lots of ailments that end up with a homeopath may be stress and lifestyle induced I would imagine .