I’m in full agreement here.
My past comments on this:
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Here here. If i had a dollar for every time some one tried to tell me I a) somehow deserve to die and b) could be faith healed of cancer by drinking a lot of some tropical fruit juice… I woudn’t be working now. I’d be enjoying my early retirement. Hell, from now on, every time some one spouts this shit to me I’m insisting they owe me a dollar. Every. Time.
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The two are exponentially different. Literally.
That image makes it look like a 1:1 dilution. To make your analogy effective the “Homeopathy” part is going to have to be about 15-20 orders of magnitude smaller.
The rare reaction but very serious reaction to aspirin in children recovering from viral infections is associated with salicylates in general, not just aspirin. There is no sound reason to assume that willow bark with therapeutic levels of salicylic acid is any safer in terms of Reye’s syndrome than acetylsalicylic acid. To make the intimation that willow bark (with it’s unknown dosages) is safe where aspirin isn’t is unproven and a form a form naturalistic fallacy.
Scientific medicine is not based on the philosophy of “Allopathy”. Allopathy is a pejorative term coined by Samuel Haneman to distinguish his pre-scientific nonsense from the pre-scientific nonsense that was what passed for medicine in the late 1700s. Today the term has no relevance and is a misleading and false characterization of modern scientific medicine. The term is “useful” in the sense that one can successfully mislead people with it, but it is not useful in the sense of being an accurate characterization of scientific medicine.
Ironically, for all the talk of holism in alt med circles, homeopathy is entirely symptom based. If you have a symptom, homeopaths give you a substance that is supposed to treat that symptom. If you have teary eyes, you may be given homeopathic doses of onion juice, on the theory that since onion juice causes watery eyes it cures them, too. Why your eyes are watering is irrelevant to homeopathy. It does not address the causes of disease. Symptoms are not distinguished by what caused them, so whether you are crying from depression, have an eye infection or have allergies is irrelevant, because homeopathy is symptom-based superficial, made-up fake medicine. Whereas if you go to an actual Medical Doctor with, say, chest pain, they will try and find the source of that pain before treating it. They don’t just give you “chest pain” tincture.
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Thank you for… agreeing with me? The links you posted literally agree with what I was saying, rather than mr Skeptic.
Germany has a surprising, fascinating background of being way more of a hippie culture than Americans might expect. They go in for things like homeopathy and naturopathy in ways beyond what we do in the states (for the most part). While there’s extremists in anything, I think most people see naturopaths as an alternate medicine that can supplement what their PCP can give them or offer alternatives to healing — not a replacement for hospitals or modern medicine. They can be extremely helpful in suggesting ways to use your diet, exercise, meditation, and things like that to help improve your life, and I’m OK with that.
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HOLY CRAP!!! The ocean has so much volume, and you really couldn’t have peed much into it, so it was dilute at the time…
By the time the ocean currents mixed your pee water with the rest… (a process continually diluting, and exposing more water molecules to the components of your original urine…)
OHMIGOD! The ocean must be an amazingly strong homeopathic solution of your urine! It’s basically super urine now!
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And this always confuses me about the people who are so negative about alternative medicines: why the fuck not take advantage of the placebo effect?
For things like pain relief, or for conditions where regular medicine is unable to do much of anything, why on earth not poke needles into the patient or give them sugar pills that once rubbed against something other than sugar long ago and far away? It cannot hurt and it may help a great deal, depending on how strong the patient’s placebo effect is.
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I drink pure rain water. It has homeopathic ultra-diluted quantities of everything. Thanks to homeopathic rain water I am now immortal.
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Much of the placebo effect of Alt medicine is attributable to good bedside manner and listening to patients. We can apply that understanding to scientific medicine and improve how patients are treated for better overall results that include the placebo effect and actual efficacious treatments. But with alt medicine, practitioners believe that their therapies are real and not placebo. A false understanding of the efficacy of placebo treatments can kill people.
This handy study of active albuterol inhaler vs. placebo inhaler, sham acupuncture, or no-intervention control illustrates the issue well.
The subjective patient scores (how well subjects thought they could breathe) were all similar, and showed a clear belief that they were better compared to no intervention,
The objective scores showed that only the albuterol inhaler actually made a difference in lung function.
Placebos only affect the subjective symptoms of disease, not the organic cause. They are another symptom-based treatment, which is the opposite of alt med’s constant claims to be holistic and all about the root cause of disease.
False belief in the efficacy of a treatment leads to the substitution of ineffective treatments in place of effective treatments, which can be fatal, not just in the case of asthma but also for cancer treatments and a wide range of other diseases with serious consequences. The idea that placebo medicine “can’t hurt” is a false one. And some alt-med treatments are in and of themselves dangerous, such as Miracle Mineral Solution, black salve and many others.
Once you divorce medicine from the rigors of science you separate the practice of medicine from objective facts, leaving alt med practitioners to make stuff up as they go.
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changing the subject, 5 yard penalty.
I remember, back in the day and I think maybe two BB comment systems ago, Mark getting into a vigorous argument with an NY Food Saftey Microbiologist about raw milk. The Microbiologist was (obviously) trying to tell him that it really was risky, and Mark wasn’t having a bar of it. Didn’t matter what the chap said, or what details he brought up, Mark just would not budge.
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I sometime ask to people using Homeopathy (we have a LOT of them in France) what they think Homeopathy is and how it work. Most of them describe a mix of Naturopathy and other vague pseudo medicines.
Boiron (Homeopathy company) have made a lot of effort to promote its product to let think they have something to do with plants even if they don’t. Their advertising and packaging feature a lot of trees ans leaves, and extensively use the green colour.
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This is not true. In China there is clear data showing that willow bark poses the same risks as aspirin in children, especially in relation to Reye’s Syndrome. The government mandated there had to be warning on willow bark products because several children died in recent years.
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I absolutely agree, but I also think there’s a fine line there that homeopathy often crosses. It can be extremely effective in helping people who genuinely believe in it, but homeopathic remedies can be so expensive and over-promise their healing qualities that I find them hard to forgive. Pain relief via sugar pills is one thing; taking $40 sugar pills that promise to cure actual ailments is another.
I think I’ve told the story here before but – my grandmother was a nurse in a hospital in the 50s-60s, and said that when patients had mystery (or psychosomatic) pains with no physical cause and refused to be placated or leave, they’d often give them a ‘prescription’ of sugar pills labeled Obecalp – placebo backwards – and “it cured them every time”.
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To one of your examples - there is in fact a science of cancer immunotherapy, basically immunizing you against your own tumor. There’s also a research field of regenerative medicine, and stem cell therapies, and gene therapies, and tissue engineering. These things are just much much harder to do scientifically, and haven’t really reached medical practice much yet.
That said, i think we have to recognize that at least some things that are or look like woo are doing something, even if the practitioners completely misunderstand or don’t know what, and i wish we could remove stigma that prevents or limits real research into examining alt med stuff properly.
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To be fair, if I was a plant I’d want you to stop eating me too.
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Hey, I’m just using your own logic - if there’s no peer-reviewed paper proving it, it’s not true. I am holding you to the same incredibly narrow and self-serving definition of proof that you use. Fair’s fair.
Oh, I see Comrade Boris already penalized you for that one. Carry on!
Oh, damn, wait… @emo_pinata, can you provide a cite?
Generally Chinese cites are not accepted in these arguments, because acupuncture, but personally I won’t play that.
You’re being reasonable. Why are you in this thread?
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Because even though I’ve taken kung fu lessons from someone who really thought he had proven he could cure cancer in rats with qigong, I’m also married to a therapeutic harpist who has shown nurses she works with that certain styles of music can reduce heart rate and increase blood oxygen saturation levels for newborns in the NICU. There’s lots of room for nuance here. Also, baby/bath water.
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