Homeopathy

[flyingcloud]

So, I was always a believer, always carried arnica pills around as well as Rescue Remedy. I can't say I had a firm conviction, but did it because so many people swore by it.

Incl MIL who is a nurse and her sister who is a pharmacist. Any sign of a illness, pain or minor complaint and they recommend a homeopathic treatment.

Until I read a thread on here a while ago debunking most of the myths of homeopathy. I did some googling and found that actually, there is very little proof that it works.

So, who is right? If two health care professionals are convinced of its effectiveness maybe Google was wrong?

I don't want to start a fight here, but am genuinely curious how something with so little scientific proof of effectiveness has come into widespread use.

That's not to say that I don't believe in the placebo effect and I know that DD thinks she feels much better if I give her an arnica pill or two if she has a bump (but that's just the sugar, right?)

It 'works' because of the placebo effect.

Er, think that's about it!

I don't believe it's anything other than the placebo effect. You think it's going to work and it does. The mind is incredibly powerful like that.

I tried Rescue Remedy after lots of people told me how brilliant it was. Have to say I was mightily disappointed as it had zero effect.

So, considering the lack of evidence that it works, and only heresay from lots of people saying how excellent it is, I firmly think it's a waste of money because it doesn't work.

Now if someone wants to show me evidence of properly run clinical trials which prove its effectiveness then I'm open to changing my mind. Until then I'll be sticking to medicine that's proven to work.

Most hcp here in France seem to recommend it at some stage or another, certainly all those I have come into contact with.

I too share your views but I feel very much in the minority here in my family!

I became interested in the homeopathy because my son, who was diagnosed with colitis (prescription drug induced) and epilepsy, was getting worse and worse on his conventional medicine. Someone said go and see a homeopath and I did. Within 6 months he was asymptomatic. That was over 20 years ago and his symptoms have never returned. I was so amazed by his recovery that I began to study homeopathy myself. I qualified in 1993 and ran a successful private practise until recently. I was witness to many patients recovering their health when conventional medicine failed them. This is a very interesting thread because what you probably don't know is that the present wave of anti-homeopathic publicity is an orchestrated campaign run by people who are funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Over 6 million people visited homeopaths last year in the UK alone and the numbers are steadily growing. The pharmaceutical industry see this as a threat and they want to put an end to the competition. If they win and homeopathy gets banned your democratic right to seek an alternative, if conventional medicine fails you or your child, will be taken away from you. Think about it. And do check out the link below written by someone who worked for the drug industry.
vaccinexchange.org/2011/07/20/ex-pharma-reps-story-holds-lessons-for-vaccine-safety-movement/

Absolutely miluna. It is all the eeeee-vuuuhl drug companies that are carefully arranging the universe such that whenever there's a proper, double-blind scientific test of homeopathy, it always comes out as no better than placebo. And that the supposed explanations of how homeopathy works are utterly ludicrous and are based on no sound scientific principles whatsoever. So it can't possibly be that homeopathy is bollocks, it must be a conspiracy. (And let's not talk about how the pro-homeopathy publicity is largely funded by people such as yourself, those who stand to make money out of homeopathy. Biased much?)

Except, of course, that if homeopathy did work then the eeee-vuuuhl drug companies would jump in with both feet and make even more profits. Because, after all, thumping a bottle of clean water a few times then dripping it onto a sugar pill is a fuck of a lot cheaper and so immensely more profitable for the manufacturers than doing all the research, trials, and careful manufacture of proper drugs that they currently do.

Find me a single case of anyone with a genuine, physical, non- self limiting illness who has been cured by homeopathy, and I'll give you my IPad.

Oh, and before anyone says it, it doesn't work for animals!

Placebo is jolly good stuff, someone should bottle it. Oh, they have - well, that's fine by me so long as people are aware what it really is, and use it only as a complementary therapy not an alternative therapy. The danger of homeopathy is not the treatment itself - unlike herbal medicine, by definition there's nothing in it that could harm you - the danger is that someone goes to a homeopath instead of a proper doctor and fails to get diagnosis and treatment for something that needs it.

What Snorbs said.

If it could be proven to work then big pharma would be right on it - why would they muck about with expensive to produce conventional medicine with actual ingredients to buy if they could get away with selling sugar pills with water dripped onto them?

I believe that they are only proposing that remedies have to be proven to do what they claim on the bottle to be sold - which sounds fine to me.

As to being handed out by french medical professionals - my french friends tell me that they feel short-changed if they leave the doctor without some kind of treatment, so perhaps the french doctors feel that leaving with sugar pills is better than leaving with unneeded treatments - not that I completely agree with that.

Does anyone else think its sort of a pity that in the UK its considered unethical for doctors to prescribe placebos? In the past, the 'must have something prescribed' mentality lead to prescription of antibiotics for viral infections - a sugar pill would have been better.

A placebo from big-name pharma would work better too, wouldn't it?

Especially if you upped the dosage from one pill to two if it wasn't working in a couple of days.

Homeopathy = the ingredients for very expensive urine

"Works no better than placebo" is not the same as "doesn't work". Homeopathy is cheap, safe and highly effective for certain conditions (especially when prescribed by a plausible holistic practioner) as long as you don't get conned into using it for conditions for which we have actual functional treatments.

I'm crap at links, so somebody do Mitchell and Webb's Homeopathic A & E.

Please read Dr Ben Goldacre on this subject.

www.badscience.net/2008/03/all-bow-before-the-might-of-the-placebo-effect-it-is-the-coolest-strangest-thing-in-medicine/

Placebo effect is astonishingly effective.
However, I object strongly to Boots, as one example, promoting overpriced bollox with no real studies or trials.

I was part of the mass overdose of homeopathy outside Boots last year. The silliness tickled me immensely.

Also worth a Google is 'regression to the mean'. In other words, most things go away all by themselves!

And it's not true to say it doesn't do any harm- if people want to spend their money on sugar water it's up to them. Anything which encourages anti- rationalism is bad for society as a whole. It makes us vulnerable to bullshit pedlars and gets in the way of us analysing properly what we're told.

Thank you, seeker.

Thank you seeker. just what I would say, if I were as articulate as you

consulted a homeopath when my young daugter had lots and lots of warts on her fingers and hands (more than 25 and making her very self conscious at school about them) and it cleared them up in less than 4 months. Doctors advice of 'it will generally clear up within 18 months by itself' clearly wasn't working for her. To my mind, the homeopathy helped the body kick start getting rid of the virus, and I would definitely use a homeopath again for those sorts of ailments/conditions

So you were told that warts generally last no longer than 18 months. In other words, there was every chance that they would spontaneously go all by themselves before then. Which they did.

But, sure, it was the sugar pills wot dunnit. FFS...

" To my mind, the homeopathy helped the body kick start getting rid of the virus"

What makes you think that?

And it's not true to say it doesn't do any harm
yes, its harmful in the sense you mean, in addition to the tangible harm caused by using it as an alternative to proper medicine. Normalising irrationality is bad.

I reckon GPs should be allowed to dole out placebos, using something like the script from Nork's link so that they are doing it honestly. Placebo is fine - its the pseudoscientific woo surrounding homeopathy which is corrosive.

I absolutely agree about the normalisation of irrationality and the promotion of bogus "alternative" medicines as being harmful.

Had Steve Jobs chosen real conventional medical treatment promptly he would likely still be alive today. As it was, he pursued a number of alternative medical treatments instead, the sole effect of which was to make the "practitioners" wealthier at the expense of wasted time and so giving the cancer more opportunity to spread. By the time it became obvious to him that the alternative treatments were bogus, the cancer had progressed to the point where the chances of proper medicine being able to successfully treat it had substantially reduced.

Even clever people can be fools.