I the field of applying a definition that’s obviously other than what the speaker intended, we’ve now got “organic” and “homeopathic” covered. Anyone want to speak up for the fact that light yogurt weighs as much as regular yogurt?
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The first vaccine was created by Edward Jenner around the time homeopathy started. Since then we’ve learned that there’s sound science to back up the efficacy of vaccines and no science to back up the efficacy of homeopathy (besides the placebo effect, of course).
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I may have shared this before, but my grandmother was a nurse, and told me once that when hypochondriac patients (ones who rotated in and out of the hospital regularly with vague symptoms but nothing measurable) insisted on treatment, they’d often send them home with a prescription bottle of sugar pills marked Obecalp (placebo spelled backwards) and “they seemed to get better every time!”
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The internets claim that Lady Montagu was inoculating for smallpox before Jenner, but honestly I’d never heard that before today.
Anyway. “it is notable, that since the general distribution of Jenner’s Cow Pox vaccination, human small-pox never again appeared as epidemically or virulently as 40-50 years before” --Sam Hahnemann, founder of Homeopathy, expressing his approval of Jenner. Although I’ve never found a stronger quote, Hahnemann was said by his contemporaries to believe that the efficacy of vaccination was the strongest proof of his method. Remember this was all happening long before Semmelweis or Pasteur, so the miasm theory of disease was still dominant.
Hahnemann stated that the defining principle of his method of treatment was similia similibus curantur or “like cures like”. That is essentially the basis of modern immunology - an exposure to a small or weakened dose (a diluted form) of a dangerous substance (or something very like it, as cow pox is similar to smallpox) causes the body to marshal its defenses against that substance, conferring healing or even immunity.
It’s a nerd shibboleth to loudly disdain homeopathy, but fundamentally vaccination is homeopathy. In the individual, a small dose confers resistance or immunity to something much like it, and in a population, this can literally cure a disease.
None of the above should in any way be construed as a defense of modern quacks practicing ludicrous forms of dilution homeopathy. Just because someone had a basic principle right, does not mean that all bad implementations of that idea should be respected. But I see it as a problem when people have the idea that an vast category of physicians - such as chiropractors or mainstream pill-pushers - are all equally deserving of a single response. Should I judge every mainstream research physician by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study? I think you’ll agree we should not. I similarly will not judge homeopathy itself by its modern practitioners; I will instead reserve my opprobrium for the actual people doing bad practices, and continue to enjoy lovely mercury-free vaccinations, which I see as the ultimate development of Hanhemann’s ideas, for myself and my loved ones.
EDIT: I should note in passing that Hanhemann was notably inspired by Paracelsus, specifically by the claim that “the dose makes the poison”. Which I’ve already mentioned I hate!
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Holy crap. How did I never see Dolemite before? That trailer has some of the worst fight choreography I’ve ever seen in color.
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It feels like you’re trying to argue with me about something I wasn’t at the time saying anything about maybe? The homeopathy jab was aimed at people in the now, not people from 200 years ago, and aimed at ideas as applied in the modern world, not ideas as applied 200 years ago. We’ve learned a lot since then. The wheat (vaccination) has long since been separated from the chaff (homeopathy).
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Really? Because I don’t think I’d call being vulnerable to, say, botulism toxin “weakness” on the part of the victim. And the dosage is the poison, which is why we can use one of the most lethal toxins on earth to merely temporarily paralyze facial muscles. Nor does correctly noting that dosage is the poison imply a linear relationship to dose and toxicity, only a positive one.
I’d say that immunization is fundamentally not homeopathy, as we use immunizations to prevent disease rather than cure disease, by triggering targeted immune reactions in advance of exposure to the real pathogen.
Immunizations only superficially resemble homeopathy. Homeopathy is based on the non-science of vitalism. Hanaman believed disease is caused by 3 kinds of miasmas of suppressed itch, the most “ancient” of which he claimed was “Psora.”
Hahnemann’s simplistic theory of like cures like (that which causes the same symptoms in a healthy person will cure a sick person exhibiting those symptoms) is nonsense. Under that theory, the best way to treat a gunshot wound is with more gunshots. Or to cure nausea you should give syrup of ipecac.
The obvious, inarguable flaws in his “like cures like” theory eventually led Hahnemann to a massive and convenient fudge, where he “discovered” that diluting a substance until there is none or almost none left makes it even more powerful - contrary to reality, and implying that one could overdose on homeopathy by drinking truly pure water. (It is a shibboleth of quack medicine to claim that their treatments can only cure and never harm.)
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No no no, I don’t want to argue.
I just wanted to share a different viewpoint that I thought you might enjoy. And seriously, vaccination is homeopathy; it didn’t magically stop being homeopathy just because it actually works. But that doesn’t mean any other homepathic treatment is valid, or that any particular modern homeopath is or isn’t a quack.
To my mind people worship physicians far too much. Having worked in a doctor’s office counting pills, I find the way people treat them a little nauseating. And if history is any guide, in 200 years the hip people will talk about the medicine of today the same way we now talk about homeopathy.
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Ok, cool, I see why you want to frame things that way, and while I’m a little leery of overloading the term as used in modern parlance that way, I see why you’re using it that way (even if I won’t).
I don’t worship (or even necessarily really like) physicians, I just prefer modern medical science to past versions.
We can hope so, anyway.
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For the love of FSM can we hurry this one up? 
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“My God, man, drilling holes in his head’s not the answer!”
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Well, I’ve been exposed to so much salmonella that when a chicken barbecue sent nearly 40 people to the hospital I didn’t even get a tummy ache. In that case, their resistance was weaker than mine, probably because I refuse to stop eating raw food. What can I say? I like raw beef, and lots of things I like have raw eggs in them. I’ve known people who could drink giardia Lamblia without any effect, which is supposedly impossible but people in upstate Pennsylvania do it all the time.
But then again, I’ve already had lead poisoning, so a dose that you might shrug off would have me seeing butterflies, and would probably kill one of my bronzesmith friends (when he went mad, one of his doctors said it was the arsenic in his bloodstream that prevented the heavy metals from killing him. Now that he’s better, he’s not supposed to get near anything of the sort ever again, so he uses a respirator in the forge which looks weird).
Did you read the two links I provided? They are kind of lengthy, but you might find it interesting how “the dose makes the poison” philosophy has spawned bad science and bad public policy. It’s too Dunning-Krueger simplistic for many (I’d say most) purposes, although I suppose it’s not a bad thing to tell children to explain why they got sick from eating too much Hallowe’en candy.
In re Homeopathy - Hahnemann clearly considered vaccination to be homeopathy, and as far as I am concerned he gets to make the distinction as the founder of the school. Just as Mussolini considered placing the needs of corporations above the needs of the people to be the very essence of Facism - since he invented it, I will follow his definition of what it is. I think it’s cheating to use a circular logic of “homeopathy doesn’t work so therefore this thing that works isn’t homeopathy” as part of the reason for disdaining homeopathy and acclaiming vaccination. But obviously I am highly opinionated, and very skeptical of medical practitioners in general. Many people find my opinions a bit too counterculture for their liking!
@TooGoodToCheck_, exactly! Although I suspect trepanning will be with us a long, long time.
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That’s not a poison. And, hell, by now you might just be a carrier of Salmonella, like various kinds of reptiles are, making other people sick.
Right, because of the dose. Nothing in dosage is the poison says anything about the dosages being universal with no account for the individual. Just as you are describing, the positive relationship still exists.
And yet here you are using simplistic argument that immunizations are homeopathy. So, Dunning-Krueger is something you might want to be careful about invoking with unintentional irony.
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Detoxing and cleansing are scams. They will in no way improve your health.
“Our livers and kidneys, if healthy, do a great job of cleansing our bodies on a daily basis,” professor Stella L. Volpe told Live Science. “Increasing fruit and vegetable intake, whole grain intake and drinking more water over sweetened beverages would go a lot farther to improve someone’s health over the long-term than a ‘cleanse.’”
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Pretty harsh there Skeppy.
Finesse it how you wish, but I again encourage you to read on how stubborn insistence that the dose makes the poison has literally caused bad science and bad public policy. Dedication to inadequate memes has real world consequences.
You can of course call vaccination whatever you want. And you can call bleeding people for their imbalanced humors therapeutic phlebotomy if you wish, as we now do in cases of haemochromatosis, porphyria, and Polycythemia vera. The treatment itself looks the same to observers who aren’t committed to seeing a difference for tribal ideological reasons.
I shall continue to call vaccination the apotheosis of homeopathic principles, since that seems eminently reasonable to me as a student of history (and also because I like the way new viewpoints can sometimes open other people’s minds). And unless someone can explain to me how like cures like magically does not apply to mainstream treatments like allergy desensitization, vaccination, and immunology in general, I’ll continue to regard homeopathic principles as an important contributor to modern medical knowledge.
But anyway, good night, and be ye well.
Usual disclaimer dilution homeopathy is bunk, except in certain specialized circumstances and treatments such as immunology. Bleeding as therapy is bunk too, except in fairly rare cases such as already mentioned and linked above. Detoxing, also bunk, unless we are talking about chelation therapy for heavy metal poisoning, which is extremely dangerous but real. Ear candling, bunk, although somewhat amusing, at least to me.
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All homeopathy is bunk. A painting of an analog clock face will display the correct time twice a day, but such a painting is not a functioning clock, and certainly not an example of the apotheosis of horological principles. Same for the superficial resemblance of immunization to the principles of homeopathy.
Do you claim that polio is a miasma? One of the three kinds of “itch,” sycosis, syphilis or psora? And that immunizations treat this disturbance of vital life force. If not, then, no immunizations do not follow the principles of homeopathy, which is based on those very principles.
Furthermore, does the polio vaccine cause actual, subjectively detectable symptoms of polio in healthy people? No? Then it doesn’t follow homeopathic principles at all, given that homeopathic “provings,” the basis of all homeopathic nostrums, consist of a healthy person taking a substance, then writing down their subjective impressions of the symptoms they get from taking the substance as the indicators of what it is good for treating in sick people.
or a bartender, for more.
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Look here! I must say! if you are suggesting that we should all go about boxing up large samples of various poisons and toxins and mailing them to licensed homeopaths imploring them to aid us in our research, I say you are cruel, cruel and inhumane. You should be ASHAMED!
Such an experiment would obviously lack that necessary controls to bear any real fruit.
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Gotta do something with all of that Flint water…
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the cat litter branded wood pellets are useless. Get the stove ones. Terpines in the softwood do something to the ammonia.
And yes, the entire biodegradable mass gets tossed, and yuou replace it with 50 cents of pellets for the week or two. I’ve had several cats, nothing has ever been as effective as stove pellets, for me.
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