I have had family members suffering badly for years under traditional (and various kinds of alternative) care who suddenly improved dramatically (and so far permanently) with homeopathy. I don't know why that is. It could be explained by the natural tendency for the body to return to equilibrium, it could be that they just found a placebo they could believe in, but the bottom line is that they are now fully healthy, the treatment had no side effects and it was relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, the harm from traditional medicine was extraordinary.
Although I've never experienced any definite benefits from the occasional homeopathic remedy whose drops a friend has urged on me, I know several "hard-headed" (meat-eating, non-"granolas", rationalists) who swear by the homeopathic treatment for poison ivy/oak.
It may just be placebo mind/body effects, but if anything so innocuous can reduce symptoms for something so slow-to-resolve and aggravating, I'm up for "getting foolish".
As long as it's basically distilled water "with a healing vibration," is way cheaper than trip to doc, and cannot have side effects (see the zicam recall), what's not to like? --just my 2¢
Why would anyone choose to ingest powerful pharmaceuticals if they could experience significant improvements simply by believing that homeopathy works?
Even when you take advil for a headache, some/all of the effect may just be the placebo effect.
note: placebos are used by many modern doctors who write prescriptions for a drug called "Obecalp" routinely to harness the placebo effect:
"Why would anyone choose to ingest powerful pharmaceuticals if they could experience significant improvements simply by believing that homeopathy works?"
Because if you want to perpetuate a widespread belief that homeopathy works, you have to require an equally widespead ignorance of how real chemistry works. Then, to have a modern civilization at all, you have to also have an elite that does understand how real chemistry works.
I'm sure you can understand how much of a problem this is going to become.
Well, the placebo effect is also due to real chemistry ... just not chemistry that anyone understands enough to start designing actual patentable pharmaceuticals to harness it (yet).
I would counter that just as many people naively take advil when they get a headache. I think many doctors would say that OTC NSAID abuse is probably at least as big a problem as people not getting rid of their ailments b/c they took homeopathic remedies.
Most people don't have a clue what is really happening when they flip on a light switch in their home ... so by your argument they should avoid electricity, appliances, etc.
The difference is, the light switch switches on the light regardless if I believe in light switches. Thus it is comparable with conventional medicine rather than homeopathy.
And even though - just like with regular medicine - I don't have to know exactly how it works for it to function, I also don't have to have false beliefs how it works.
Do you think mainstream pharmaceuticals are 100% effective? They are analogous to a light switch that switches the light on/off about 60% of the time at best.
The placebo effect works 10-20% of the time. So we're talking about something that is almost as effective.
Most people taking advil OR those little homeopathic tablets know/understand nothing about how they work.
In the case of homeopathy, you don't need to know why it works -- in fact, knowing that it works via the placebo effect might undermine its effectiveness :)
Ask someone on the street how Advil works. Just because a placebo works only because of a false belief and not just in spite of a false belief does not make those who take it any dumber. :)
No homeopathy is bunk. The placebo effect is psychological in the sense that by unwittingly taking a sugar cube instead of an advil causes your mind to ignore the pain. While homeopathy may induce some wellness via the placebo effect the premise of a former solute having an effect on a solvent is ridiculous.
Why would anyone choose to ingest powerful pharmaceuticals if they could experience significant improvements simply by believing that homeopathy works?
Because believing isn't a choice.
Why would anyone choose to spend his life in existential crisis, when he could experience significant improvements by simply believing there is a God?
Because I don't believe there is a God and I don't have a choice in that. If I had a choice, I would gladly believe there was a God: it would make my life a lot easier.
Consider the basis for which most atheists believe in any complex piece of engineering or science. At best, most people have a kindergarten level understanding of most of the natural world, and they pat themselves on the back for trusting authority figures.
But all they are doing is trusting authority, not actually understanding anything.
My point is that this sort of "truth" is on equal footing with religion... just because someone in a white coat tells you something doesn't mean your belief is of any better quality than if someone in a clerical robe told you to believe it.
This is true for most people anyway... Please note that I am an atheist, but I try to avoid patting myself on the back for what amounts to nothing more than bowing to authority.
Well, you don't just trust the authority figures: you trust whole communities of authority figures, that consist of persons that differ in about every imaginable aspect. I do not believe something is right because a few authorities say so, but because their arguments are checked and criticised by a wide variety of scientists, including such varieties as Chinese Christian biochemists, Gay Ethiopian surgeons, White French scholars in Hindi and Argentinian female anthropologists. People of different backgrounds, with different values and ethics, that are yet all persuaded by sound evidence and reasoning. I cannot believe that is just coincidence.
Edit: (And of course because the arguments seem plausible to me, with the limited understanding I have of the subject)
"The authors sent a questionnaire to 772 randomly selected Danish clinicians and asked them about their use of placebo interventions. Sixty-five percent responded. Among the general practitioners, 86% (95% confidence interval 81-91) reported to have used placebo interventions at least once, and 48% (41-55) to have used placebo interventions more than ten times, within the last year"
Someone else beat me to refuting your comment. The nytimes article was just chosen as a quick example. Use of Obecalp is taught in major medical schools and it is used routinely though not frequently by doctors.
Think of it this way, any pharmaceutical treatment you have undergone was probably only 80-90% as effective as you think it was :)
And here I was thinking that there was some grain of truth in homeopathy.
If I recall correctly, the link was here, a few months ago, about "13 things that Dont Make Sense". A scientist who was the scourge of homeopathy, had to admit that there was _something_.
Then there's water remembering when it freezes. Occasionally, distilled water will not freeze until a bit lower than 0c. It'll be around -2 to -4c before it freezes. Now, if we add a small amount of water, that is also distilled, but shown to freeze at 0c, all the water will freeze no lower than 0c. You must boil the water rigorously before it can retain the possibility of freezing below 0c.
Who knows how it happens. Quantum memory, perhaps? But there is something.
_______________________
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
I do remember that the WBC/histamine test and water test were different, but I thought the WBC test was shown to have some kind of an effect.
And then, 20/20 goes and debunks the water memory. Now, how trustworthy is 20/20? And it gets deeper and deeper with one side saying nay and other saying yea.
