Leaving aside the whole “memory of water” nonsense of homeopathy, the distinction between naturopathy and homeopathy is that, potentially, naturopathy could work (in that plants have active ingredients that one could standardize, test and prove scientifically), and exercise and lifestyle can have impacts on at least some diseases. Now, naturopathy may have failed to prove that, but it could. Homeopathy, on the other hand, is premised on the assertion that a small dose of something that causes a particular symptom will cure you of something with a similar symptom (even though the causative mechanisms are totally different). That’s sympathetic magic, and if you add the water memory issue, we know that even in theory it can’t ever work, even if, by pure random chance, a particular substance, pre-dilution, used in homeopathy did work as a treatment for one particular condition. Homeopathy isn’t so much unproven as disproven.
I prefer pathology.
IOW naturopathy is mostly bullshit while homeopathy is total undiluted bullshit.
As I indicated I’m reasonably sure that that goes the other way. Most of these formalized herbalist traditions (as with most all med systems) are shockingly recent. Dating to the 18th and 19th centuries. And they’ve absolved and back applied new claims and actual medical information.
Willow bark was seemingly reccomended and used as part of folk medicine systems. And it was explicitly called out as a painkiller by early scientific medicine especially among the ancient Greeks.
It was suspected to work. At a time when suspecting was the best we could do. Then proved to work when we had apparatus to do so. Then the key ingredient was identified. Purified. And converted to a safer form. All within the tradition of science, by people working in science.
Those more recent all med systems basically point at that history. Claim it as proof of their base approach, despite theirs nothing being the approach that created that chain of events. Then reccomend white willow bark, but not aspirin. Which is rejecting the very thing they’re using to claim authority.
So semantics?
Most alt med practitioners will hand you willow bark. Not aspirin. Similarly if you look at their info on cancer they’ll demonize standard treatments as toxic. Even when they use the same justifications that point to plant derived scientific successes as proof of what they do, or where those cancer drugs are plant based. It’s a real common dichotomy in field. Just poke around.
Psyllium fiber doesn’t need to be prescribed. You can buy a jar at the CVS when ever you like. And it’s not really an example of pharmacology or complex medical treatment. It’s just plant fiber. To help you poop.
Instead let’s go back to the aspirin. The alt med crowd is more likely to give you white willow than actual aspirin. What you’ve been given is actually. Real world. Less effective and carries more side effects than the medically extracted and concentrated aspirin. And that’s before we get into the purity and dosage issues inherent to supplements. Or that if it’s homeopathic white willow it won’t work at all.
If you’ve got malaria. The herbalist may give you cinchona bark, or quinine. Both of which are less effective and more dangerous than modern anti-malarials. Weve moved away from quinine as a malaria treatment for good reasons. Meaning you will be more likely to die or experience serious complications.
And there are very few example in alt med that line up that cleanly. There are not all that many aly med treatments that contain the same active ingredient or base function as science based treatments.
For cancer the medical doctor may give you chemo, or radiation. The aly med crowd may give you black salve.
Or concentrated intravenous pee.
A difference between something that will likely work pretty well. And something that may actively harm you without any hope of actually effecting the cancer.
Eta: or come to think of it the alt med crew might just give you Psyllium fiber for the cancer and malaria. They’re very into making people poop.
- Science is done by human beings, therefore it is imperfect and flawed.
- Medicine is not science. Some of it is based on science. A lot more of it is sadly not. For instance, medical professionals prescribe antibiotics without actually understanding the mechanism by which antibiotic resistant bacteria are created. Improper prescription of antibiotics is one of the reasons why pneumonia has become such a bear to treat, with some strains of the germ being resistant to nearly all the common antibiotics. This was not inevitable, it was the result of doctors using antibiotics incorrectly.
- A lot of medicine as practised by MDs is based on the philosophy of Allopathy*. That is, prescribing medicine to counteract the thing the patient’s body is doing wrong. If their immune system goes wonky (an autoimmune disorder), then prescribe drugs that weaken the overactive immune system. If their blood pressure is too high, prescribe a drug that causes low blood pressure in a healthy person. And so on. Nearly all drug research is on allopathic treatments. Chemotherapy, for example, is all about seeking to kill the cancer cells, regardless of how badly the drugs affect the patient’s health in other respects.
- Alternative approaches that seek not to negate the thing that’s going wrong in the body but to enhance and improve the things that are going right do not get the same amount of love from the drug industry or from doctors. Low Dose Naltrexone, for example, which acts by enhancing the functioning of the immune system, languishes in obscurity despite extremely promising small scale trials for a wide range of autoimmune disorders and cancers.
- Because mainstream medicine has by and large ignored the realm of seeking to enhance what’s right, alternative (traditional, naturopathic, etc) medicines have moved into that gap.
- Alternative medicines lack the self-policing of a professional society empowered to defrock members who engage in quackery. In part because mainstream medicine enjoys state support (ie, it’s illegal for an MD to practice medicine without a license) and alternative medicines don’t.
- But mainstream medicine is not immune to charges of woo or quackery. When my father was dying of cancer, he spent $10,000 on a magic box from a quack in texas (Doctor Rhodes and his Vecctor therapy gadget). And the more time passes, the more it looks like all the dietary and lifestyle advice that doctors have been giving since the 60’s (fat is bad for you but sugar is harmless, a calorie is a calorie no matter what kind of food it’s from, if you get fat it’s your fault for being a glutton) is actually a pile of steaming woo.
Is naturopathy full of piles of steaming woo? Absolutely. It’s also home to a lot of medical treatments that work more or less well. Dismissing the whole kit and kaboodle just because it lacks the imprimatur of mainstream medicine is kind of like making a big deal about a mote in your fellow’s eye while ignoring the gravel in your own.
*Allopathy. Modern medicine is an eclectic mix of different things, ranging from vaccination (originally a homeopathic treatment) to drug therapies to surgery. But if you trace things back in time to the origins of the AMA in the 19th century, you find that before germ theory, before medicine had any scientific basis at all, the mainstream medical establishment subscribed to a philosophy of diagnosing which of your humours were out of balance (the Galenic/Hippocratic woo that everyone accepted as gospel back then), and then prescribing a drug chosen because it would have the opposite effect on your humours, thereby forcing them back into balance. Powerful purgatives and emetics were seen as excellent drugs because they would clean you out of whatever humour you had too much of. The stronger the purgative or emetic effect of a substance, the “better” it’s medicinal power was perceived as being. So you got into a situation where doctors were prescribing actual poisons like mercurous chloride (Calomel) in large doses to everyone, including babies.
It’s hardly surprising that a lot of patients died, or became much sicker, at the hands of conventional medicine. Alternative medical philosophies like hydropathy (lots of fizzy water to drink, lots of baths, lots of sitting around wrapped in wet cloths) and homeopathy (which sought to prescribe as little as possible of substances that had the same effect as the symptom you were trying to treat) were basically invented by doctors who saw the carnage being wrought by allopathy and sought alternatives.
Homeopathy has been in highly successful in the British NHS for years:
Everything @Glaurung said!
Especially this:
I’ve been outclassed, and with a biblical reference no less.
Rings a bell…
Yes but science is self correcting. In a lot of ways Science is nothing more than a complex logistal structure for testing, updating, And distributing information on the basis of validity.
Medicine is a science. More over. Regular medicine is in large part science based. There is to some extent a divide between medical practice and medical science. But historically the thrust of improved medical practice has come from medical science.
Broadly speaking we know exactly the mechanism behind antibiotic resistence. It’s called natural selection. Within that there are thousands of variables because each antibiotic attacks bacteria in different ways. And each bacteria will react uniquely. Even down to the population.
Over prescription of of antibiotics is an issue. But it isn’t as simple as “science didn’t understand!” specifically it’s an issue of medical practice. Patients often demand treatment where none is called for. And since antibiotics are cheap, regarded by gen pop as a sort of cure all, And have few side effects. Doctors were prone to prescribe them as a sort of placebo. It’s not that we used them too much for the thing they were meant for. It’s that we used them to much as if they did nothing.
Medical science and public health authorities. Identified that problem and put new medical practice in place. And over prescription is own a down trend. Because science is self correcting.
Meanwhile antibiotic resistance continues to rise. Because while over prescription was a factor. The bigger ones are the routine addition to antibiotics to animal feed and over use of anti-bacterial cleaners.
Is itself an alt med term. Coined in the 19th century by the founder of homeopathy to describe medical approaches other than his own. It is not a technical or scientific term. It’s not an academic category. If you go to regular old medical school you do not have a class on the subject of allopathy, do not discuss allopathy. And no-one describes themselves as an allopath.
Most of the rest of your description of modern medicine and alt med approaches is likewise borrowed from CAMs own descriptions definitions and play book. They’re superficial mischaracterisations.
Come now, so are your comments on willow bark, the etymology of allopathy, and your assertion that medical praxis is a science. Don’t hold others to rigor you do not practice; either it’s a casual conversation or a scholarly debate, but do as you would have done.
BTW the term “doctor” is derived directly from the religious title, granted to physicians in order to elevate them socially to the same status as the learned doctors of the church. PhDs are the “real” doctors, historically. Calling mainstream physicians allopaths is a useful distinction, regardless of whether it offends the tender sensitivities of MDs or not. (I’ll note my own MD is fine with it, and I personally am open to any other term that is equally descriptive).
The fact that we need an article like this is massively depressing.
I wonder if a dose of Aurum metallicum 2C twice daily will treat that…
The general consensus here seems to indicate that St. John’s wort would be the ever-so-slightly less ridiculous treatment for your depression.
I’m very much with @Ryuthrowsstuff and @Skeptic in this, and definitely with @Melz2. 
However, I need to say several things which burn in my heart:
Fuck naturopaths. Of course, fuck homeopaths, but I think we can agree in general on that. (Yo, @Glaurung, how come vaccinations started as homeopathy in your book? It’s a historically parallel development, but that’s that. Hahnemann got caught up in his “potency” stuff, end of story, me thinks.)
Some context why I would like to see naturopaths given the pitchforks in their arse:
Germany has strong laws regarding medical professionals, but naturopaths are a very weakly regulated branch. Year after year, severely to terminally ill people from all over the world come here to join those who have annoying maladies which medicine can’t really cure, including atopic dermatitis and others. They visit official naturopaths who, at least in part, believe in what they are selling. They struggle for help, and they are not getting it. Instead, the severely to terminally ill get worse, and some of them die under circumstances which actual medical staff would pay for dearly, and I’m not only talking money here.
Fuck this shit.
More context: my niece needed a liver transplant. A relative (indirect) suggested to her parents that she should not undergo treatment, and instead suggested naturopathy. Said relative is a naturopath, and “certified shaman”. FTR, when the parents talked about the risk of loosing the child, and not wanting to try natural remedies, said relative suggested my niece could be meant to die, by nature.
More context: a former flatmate was working part-time during his medical exams as a paramedic. About twice a month he was called to a specific naturopath to collect cancer patients who were interested or desperate enough to try this last straw. He knew some of them from the university hospital he attended during his studies. He knew some of them refused chemo because they were afraid of it. At one point, he told me stories about some patients who had treatable cancers who came back after the more “natural” treatment.
Nobody never ever sued the naturopath. (Also, they wouldn’t have much luck with it.)
I personally know the environment where this putrid flower of the “humane” and “natural” treatments come from, and I know people who chose this profession and truly believe in this shit. I’m a botanist, and I had friends who wanted to become naturopaths because they “didn’t trust” medicine. I don’t trust “medicine”, myself, but FFS, I trust my medical staff to a certain degree. And I trust in the scientific method, which naturopathy is not in the remotest concerned with.
More context: naturopathy, in Germany, has a special fucked-up branch called “New Germanic medicine”. Don’t go too deep into the hole when you look on the web for it, the brown stuff you are going to find isn’t rabbits. And “established” naturopaths don’t kick those arseholes’ butts.
Bottom line: I wish there was a hell for them. I really do.
Thank you for that warning, I needed it. Wow. I get where you’re coming from.
I think that was me, not @Glaurung. I usually toss out vaccination when the Two Minutes Hate for homeopathy makes its cyclic appearance on bOINGbOING, both because Hahneman viewed it as validation of his prime principle (“like cures like”) and because it’s a great example of how people think labels matter more than principles. Just call it vaccination, and suddenly the idea that small amounts of harmful organisms can do you good is totally acceptable! I bring up desensitization therapy sometimes instead; the same hypocrisies get exposed.
I’ll agree with you that Hahneman went off on an unproductive tangent for most of his career. Do note that the alternatives to homeopathy in his time were far more likely to kill you than a jug of water, though! Mainstream medicine was fairly lethal, and homeopathy would at least keep you hydrated.
Doctors are not necessarily scientists. Medical science and medical practice have a huge gulf between them in some areas, less so in others. And doctors tend to be educated in the medical science that was current as of their stint in medical school, so the older the doctor is, the more out of date they can be and often are.
You spend a lot of words defending medical science, but I was speaking of the practice of medicine, not medical science. Medical science (apart from a bit of anatomy) did not exist prior to the late 19th century - there was only medical practice, based on the non-science of Galen and Hippocrates.
I know very well what causes antibiotic resistance.
You seem to be reading things into what I said that are not there. I was not in any way saying that medical science did not or does not understand, I was saying that medical doctors have made a mess of things by misusing antibiotics.
I was writing about the problems with medical doctors and the practice of medicine, you have written a defence of medical researchers and medical science. In short, what we have here is a failure to communicate.
As to allopathy and terminology. You don’t have to be a Marxist in order to find Marx’s theory of value useful as a tool for discussion of how the economy works. Similarly, you don’t have to be a homeopathist to find the term allopathy a useful label for the “heroic” medicine of the 19th century before germ theory, or a useful concept for explaining the philosophy underlying medical practice then and still haunting it today.
Your superficial mischaracterizations of my earlier post aside, it is a fact that there are a number of diseases that regular medicine is incompetent to address - often diseases that medical researchers dismiss for years or decades as not actually existing, or existing “only in the heads” of the patients with the illness. Chronic fatigue syndrome (now conceded to be a real thing), or multiple chemical sensitivity (still denigrated as “all in their heads”), for two examples.
It is a fact that drug research is mostly focused on drugs that seek to correct the thing that is perceived as going wrong rather than improve the thing that needs to go more right. Thus we have billions of dollars poured into psychiatric drugs that manipulate serotonin levels (despite said drugs causing a host of side effects, including suicide if you ever dare stop taking the stuff), but none spent on therapies like Acetazolamide and thiamine, which supports and improves oxygen metabolism in the brain, and which doesn’t have much of any negative side effects to speak of. Likewise with the Low Dose Naltrexone therapy I mentioned previously.
Both of those therapies were discovered by regular medical doctors, not naturopaths. But both are languishing in need of funding and greater attention. part of that lack of attention is due to the patents on the drugs in question being expired. But drug companies are really good at inventing new drugs with new patents that are basically just variations on old drugs, so that’s not really the answer. A lot more of it, I think, is due to a mindset in the medical community that doesn’t think of treatments to support and enhance what’s going right as a thing worth looking at. And I don’t know of any better label for said mindset than allopathy.
Finally, let me say that given the choice between a system of medical treatment that tells me that I am not actually sick and that the profound illness i experience when I breathe perfume is all in my head, and one that at least tries to find ways to help me, I’ll take the latter. Given a choice between a medical system that thinks the best way to treat cancer is to poison you and hope the cancer succumbs before you do (without much if any regard for your quality of life during or after the poisoning), and treatments that try to enhance the immune system, I’ll be enhancing my immune system starting now before I get sick, thank you very much.
On the other hand, I won’t be buying a magic box like my dad did, or spending thousands of dollars talking to a homeopathist like my mom is now that she’s been diagnosed with cancer too. Wanting to benefit from naturopathy is not incompatible with wanting to avoid woo.
Homeopathy == Placebo effect.
Naturopathy == Random luck.
I find an excellent example of the issues with homeopathy right here:
http://www.interhomeopathy.org/trituration_proving_of_the_light_of_saturn
I just like saying “psyllium”
I ran out of time and the post was too long and I should have clarified or deleted that reference.
What I did not have the words to say was that vaccination predates the germ theory of disease. The concept those early doctors who vaccinated people with cowpox to prevent them from getting smallpox had of what they were doing and why it worked – that was in the same conceptual neighbourhood as what Hahnemann thought he was doing by taking a thing that causes a symptom and diluting it down. They were both giving their patients a tiny bit of something that causes illness in order to prevent or cure said illness.
ETA: as to the rest of your post:
The first place everyone should go to for help when they get sick is a regular doctor, not a naturopath. However, for some things, regular doctors are more or less worthless (eg, conditions that regular doctors do not admit exist). For those things, naturopathy might be able to help, and it cannot do worse than regular medicine. For other things, say life threatening illness where regular medicine is only sometimes able to save your life, it might be an idea to combine regular treatments with naturopathic treatments.
People who go see naturopaths exclusively and avoid regular doctors are fools who will not live long when they get sick with something serious. Naturopaths who advise their patients to avoid regular treatment for conditions which are treatable are criminals and sadly are not treated as such very often.
