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?)

I think it's also worthwhile (as with any theory) to consider whether there is any reason it should work. So the two principles of homeopathy are:

• the more you dilute substances the more potent they become. Now this doesn't seem to apply to anything else in the physical world, why should it apply to homeopathic remedies?
• the more you shake these diluted substances the more effective they are. Again this has absolutely no correspondence to anything else we know about physics and the natural world.

If both assumptions were true, populations living near oceans would be practically disease free with all that lovely dilluted, well shaken ocean water!

Homeopathy works only to the extent that all well prescribed placebos do. Spedning time with a doc who is willing to listen, is sympathetic, non-dismissive and comes up with a solution, is likely to be effective in and of itself.

To quote The Divine Brian when asked about why people believed in astrology "I think it's because they aren't very good at thinking"

Why would you doubt that the sugar pills made the girls' warts go away by "helping the body" to heal itself aka placebo? Sounds completely plausible to me. Sugar pills are very powerful for the right conditions, that's why we spend millions on double blind trials.

Because it is much likely that a self limiting condition self limited.

But it's equally likely that a condition susceptible to placebo succumbed to a well-applied placebo. I just don't see the problem with using placebo to deal with a harmless but annoying condition for which actual medicine has no satisfactory solution, and then giving credit to the placebo when it works.

So long as everyone involved is aware that it it a placebo so that no ones being duped or beingbrelieved of money under false pretences. Which rather, I think, defeats the object of a placebo for adults and humans at least.

You can actually get decent results from placebo labelled as such in some circumstances. But the standard formulation for GPs is "Some of my patients have had very positive outcomes from.....sugar pills or sucking on a stone from a toad's head or whatever....you might want to try that" the problem is that the bloke selling you the toad stone may then elaborate into all sorts of dangerous bollocks.

I'd like to see NICE really get to grips with the safe and effective use of placebo.

Homeopathy always gets a bashing on here but it does work for some people who have tried conventional medicine with no luck. After years of migraine and having tried many other treatments, I went along to a homeopath as a bit of a last resort and have never looked back. I don't know or care how it works but it has given me back my life so it does get me a bit miffed when people who have never tried it say that it doesn't.

The risk of proper doctors prescribing homeopathic remedies in the full (but unspoken) knowledge that they are placebos is that it legitimises homeopathy itself and, by extension, it adds credibility to all the other alternative 'medicines'. And that leads to situations such as Steve Jobs' untimely death.

I don't have to try it to know that it doesn't work except qs a placebo. Common sense, scientific knowledge and extensive research tells me that doesn't work.

I had really bad atopic ezcema as a child. The doctor told my mum that most cases clear up by age ten or so. Mine didn't. When I was about 12, having gone through most of the creams and treatments available at that point, the GP suggested a homeopath. He listened to me and my mum and gave me some tiny pills to take, and I think I had some cream as well. I didn't have much confidence in the tiny pills, any more than I did in all the other treatments that hadn't really worked. By the time I was about 13-14, my ezcema had gone...

My mum, an intellegent woman, but one who was distressed at seeing her child suffer, says the homeopathic remedies cured my ezcema. She maintains this, despite understanding the arguements against alternative remedies.

As I remember it, between the ages of 13 and 14, I gave up swimming for the local club 3 times a week, and I hit puberty. To my mind, these factors had a far greater effect than any medication, and my childhood ezcema went away gradually by itself.

She still tells people that it was only when we tried homeopathy that I was cured. She is roughly correct on the timing, but gets very upset when I try and disagree on the cause, as if I'm questioning her parenting or something. Maybe she was just so relieved it disappeared, she needed something to attribute it to- everyone likes a nice neat explaination. It sounds patronising, but people are really bad at seeing coincidences and assessing probabilities, maybe this has something to do with it. Anyway, I understand why people believe homeopathy, but having had experience, I still don't myself.

All drugs have a placebo effect of around 30%- all the ones the big pharma cos. make. That is why if a drug works, it has to be effective at +30%.

Isn't there a reward of £1m or $1m around, for anyone who can prove with proper scientific trials that homepathy workds?

yes, I think it is brilliant James Randi who offers this

Evybody knows that Neurophen works better than own brand.

But the sensible amongst us know that that is a very stupid thing to believe!

Well, I guess most of you guys see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear. You also don't have to have a point to make a point. You are also not much into democracy, so it seems.
In answer to all your questions which if you are a confirmed skeptic you will not hear anyway is:

1. Homeopathy is not a placebo in the way that you see it. If the right remedy is chosen then it will initiate a healing response. if the wrong remedy is chosen it will do nothing. It is highly scientific. It's practitioners prescribe based on clearly defined principles, which have been shown to be effective for over 200 years. RCT's are not that effective at establishing whether drugs work. If they were then why do drugs get banned after being shown later to not do exactly what it says on the tin? Think of Thalidomide. Thin of Voxx. And whilst we're onto it, when Prozac was tested by RCT it was shown to not work any better than a placebo even at that point and yet it was still marketed. And aspirin has never been tested for efficacy at all. Obviously, you believe what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.
2. Homeopaths do not run a multi-million dollar industry. Homeopathic remedies are cheap to buy. Its practitioners charge a fraction of the cost of a private doctor for a lot more of their time. There is very little money to be made and therefore it is not much use to big pharma at all.
3. And talking about harmful. Take a look at this: www.naturalnews.com/009278.html

Statistically, over 750,000 people die each year from prescribed medication. Over 1 million people in the US are injured in hospital each year.That's lethal. Meanwhile, homeopathic remedies have never killed anyone and its practitioner are not negligent as you erroneously report.

"It's practitioners prescribe based on clearly defined principles, which have been shown to be effective for over 200 years"

Shown how?

Absolutely, conventional medicine gets it massively wrong- nobody says it doesn't.

And I agree that generally homeopathy doesn't kill anyone, unless they are daft enough to choose it over something that works for anserious illness. But it also does not cure.

RTC are the best method we've got for testingbthe efficacy of drugs. And there hasn't been a single on that shows homeopathy is more effective than placebo. Oh, sorry, there was one there showed a slightly higher level effectiveness for rhinitis. But it was a trial on people who were attending the London Homeopathic Hospital, so probably not very impartial.

WTF has democracy got to do with whether something is actually true or not?

1. RTCs aren't perfect - in particular, they won't detect side effects that you aren't looking for. Most drug trials are done in young men so couldn't detect a teratogen so mentioning thalidomide is muddled thinking. But they are the best means we have of determining whether a treatment works at or better than placebo level.

If prozac only works at placebo level, then they should fess up - I do believe sauce for the goose.

2. culmulatively its millions.

3. two wrongs don't make a right.

"Homeopaths do not run a multi-million dollar industry." It is a million dollar industry though, just because it is not a few very big companies just "little" doesn't make it any better.

Homeopathy never killed anyone

We have millions of filed case studies but obviously, in your opinion Seeker, what happens in the laboratory is far more important than what happens to the individual that gets treated - I'm pleased I'm not your child.
My son was cured of epilepsy and colitis with homeopathy when conventional medicine failed him miserably - I don't need James Randi to make it real - I have my reward.
And just to get you mumbling under your breath in your narrow minded exasperation. Check this out: www.impossiblecure.com/index.php

Yes what happens in labs is more important, because it can bring about real cures that fix millions of individuals. Scientists have come up with cures that have wiped out spanish flu, small pox, allsorts of awful things that killed thousands of people, that are unheard of today.

well, people who are ill will either get better, stay the same, or get worse.

It's my opinion that the ones who get better do so because they drank nescafe. The ones who got better without it were just chance, as were the ones who drank it but got worse. If necessary I can demonstrate thousands of people who got better after drinking nescafe, which proves I'm right.

Miluna, how old was your child when he was cured of epilepsy?

Homeopathy does cure, it cures loads of people every day, it just doesn't cure any better than well-applied Smarties.
But Smarties are really really good for some stuff (including moderate depression, which is why there are still questions over the efficacy of Prozac, because anyone who can get to their doctor and ask for help with their depression is extremely likely to get better, so any actual treatment has a mountain to climb to prove efficacy).

There is no connection between "Conventional medicine sometimes gets it wrong" and "therefore homeopathy works".

None. At all.

And, as you are a (ahem) "qualified" homeopathic practitioner and made your living from it, I'd suggest that you are more susceptible to hearing only what you want to hear than anyone else here as, after all, you have/had a significant financial interest in homeopathy.

But, please, enlighten me. What are "highly scientific" principles that homeopathy is based on? Because the stuff I've seen - all the like cures like, the the more diluted the more powerful it is, the succussion... That all sounds like highly unscientific woo-woo nonsense to me.

But, presumably, my scepticism is clouding my view. Could you explain the science behind it?

FC, it would be nice to think that people who work as HCPs know about evidence based practice.

Unfortunately many are frighteningly ill informed.
I coudl list you hundreds if not thousands of real life examples of NHS employees talking absolute drivel about a wide varity of issues.