Getting to the Source
As I was researching for a paper on medical ethics concerning the prescription of homeopathic medicine (which I argue is unethical), I decided that I could more poignantly make my argument if I could actually demonstrate how homeopathic “medicine” is made. My rationale was that anyone who saw the process would realize how scientifically ignorant this alternative treatment can be, and my goal here is to share the same information with you so that you too can see the misguided foolishness first hand.
After doing a quick search, I came upon a website that indeed has a recipe for making any kind of remedy that you want to seemingly treat anything. If you have any questions about my selection, take it from the website itself, “Hpathy.com.”
According to the website:
Hpathy.com is the world’s No.1 Homeopathy Portal. With the largest number of unique services and content, millions of users, tens of millions of page-views – Hpathy.com is the undisputed king of homeopathy in the cyber-world! Hpathy develops free, professional content and services for the homeopathic community. Every month Hpathy.com shares it’s world of Homeopathy with more than 500,000 people and serves millions of homeopathic pages each year.
So this is supposedly the number one source for online misinformation about how efficacious medicine works (though I doubt it). Let’s take a look at the recipe.
The Recipe
This is the unedited version (I did cut out the parts not directly applying to the recipe) of the official recipe for homeopathic medicine from the above referenced website. You will learn how to make your own homeopathic remedy, and after we expose how unscientific and nonsensical it is, you will hopefully use your new knowledge to advance the skeptical backlash against this witchcraft.
I will be interjecting my thoughts in italics.
Make Your Own Homeopathic Medicine by Elaine Lewis (not a doctor).
“What’s the value of knowing this [recipe]? It’s immense! If you’re sea sick, you can make a remedy out of sea water; if you’re sick from vacationing in Mexico, you can make a remedy out of the pathogen-infested local water. If the polluted air or pollens in the air are causing your problem, you can put a saucer of water outside for a few hours or days and let it collect whatever is in the air, and then make a remedy out of that. The list of possibilities is endless; in fact, when you’re desperate, and you’ve seemingly tried everything, there’s your own body to make remedies from: your discharges, your urine, your blood–you’re never really without remedies, are you?”
This whole first paragraph should be a HUGE red flag. According to the tenets of homeopathy, “like cures like.” I imagine that this is supposed to sound like the same way that vaccination works, but the body actually creates antibodies via your immune system to fight off these viruses and bacteria when vaccinated. There is no such mechanism for drinking diluted urine or sea water. Contrary to what homeopaths suggest, if you have an STD, you cannot cure it by diluting your own discharges and drinking it. There is no physiological mechanism for this to work, for any homeopathic remedy to work for that matter, and the whole notion of “like cures like” is not based on any science. By the same logic, are we supposed to cure cancer by diluting cancer cells in water and drinking it? What garbage.
“So now, if you’re ready, here are the directions:
Get a small bottle of spring water (any water will do). Pour half the water out (but save the water, don’t pour it down the drain).
Now you have half a bottle of water. Pour in a small amount of what you’re trying to make a remedy of–let’s say for the sake of argument that you want to make “Homeopathic Pepsi Cola”; therefore, your water bottle should now consist of a solution of 90% water and 10% Pepsi–there’s no need to be fussy about your percentages–just guess at what 10% might be.
‘Succuss’ this solution (pound the bottle into your opposite palm) 40 times and after having done that, get a piece of paper and write down “Pepsi 1X”–meaning that you now have Pepsi in the 1X potency, this means you’ve done a one-in-ten dilution with 40 succussions and you’ve done it just once.
Now pour out 90% of this solution–again, no need to be fussy– and refill half way with spring or distilled water, succuss 40 times, and write down “2X” (meaning you’ve now dumped out, refilled, and succussed 40 times, twice).
Now pour out 90% again and refill half way with water again and succuss 40 times again and write down “3X” this time. Keep doing this til you’ve reached either a 6X or a 12X or a 30X–depending on what potency you want. A 6X would have to be taken more often as it’s a lower potency–in a chronic case, two to four times a day; whereas, a 12X would be taken once or twice a day and a 30X as needed–one dose may be enough, depending on what’s wrong.”
The basic idea behind the recipe
The specifics here about “succussing”, dosage, and potency are irrelevant and are just part of the ritual. In this process you are basically diluting any ingredient that you put into solution out of existence. Even if like did cure like, there is nothing in the solution after so many dilutions. Let me put it to you this way: most homeopathic remedies are diluted in this fashion 60 times. At this dilution, you would have to drink 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of homeopathic remedy to get one molecule of active ingredient, this is 10 billion times the volume of the earth in liquid remedy. In the volumes that you would be ingesting, you will not get any ingredient. No active ingredient, no physiological response, no remedy.
“When your remedy bottle is no longer working, you’ll need to raise the potency. The way to do it is this: Pour out 90% of your bottle. Refill with bottled water half way. Succuss (pound the bottle into your opposite palm) 40 times. Again, for the second time, pour out 90% of the bottle. Refill with water half way. Succuss 40 times. Repeat one more time. You will now have raised the potency by 3 degrees. It should now start working again.”
Yes, you read that right; when the remedy is no longer “working,” pour almost all of it out and fill it up with pure water three more times. In the homeopathic mindset, this is how medicine is created. Again, try to figure out the logic behind this recipe. “Take something that will not have a therapeutic effect on your body, dilute it with water until not one molecule of ingredient remains, and drink it. When it stops working, dilute it some more.” I’ll save you the speculation, there is no logic behind it.
Homeopathy is Nonsense
Via XKCD--Click for site
So just to recap:
- Homeopaths claim that you can make a remedy for yourself out of basically anything. Cat dander for cat allergies, sea water for sea sickness.
- To make a homeopathic remedy, you take the following steps:
- Put the thing that you think makes you sick into a bottle of water.
- Pour out 90% of the water and then fill the bottle back up with more water.
- Repeat this process up to 60 times (sometimes even 200 times).
- Drink the solution as a remedy.
- When the remedy stops “working,” pour most of it out and fill it up with more water.
This is absolute gibberish. It flies in the face of everything that we know about pharmacology, physiology, and medical science. You now know how homeopathic medicine is made. Say whatever you want about the handful of shoddy studies which show random noise in the data which homeopaths purport to be evidence, the fundamental ideas behind homeopathy are simply pseudoscience, ranking up there with cranial excision of spirits.
Furthermore, the placebo effect (which homeopathic medicine has never been shown to work beyond) is not medicine, it is a self-reported subjective increase in well-being, not a physiological, objectively measured one. This is the only way that homeopathic treatments can “work.” Without any active ingredient, there is no chance for a physiological response, with no response, a medicine cannot be considered efficacious. And taking homeopathic medicine can actually be dangerous: you can feel better without actually being better. Your ailment will be left untreated, potentially getting worse as you rely on debunked snake oil. Sure, the placebo effect may help you weather the storm of minor cold symptoms this season, but it can do nothing for curable illnesses. In fact, it will never cure anything.
Like the placebo bands sold by the Skeptic Bros., which are a fun way to explain the pseudoscience that is the balance bracelet, knowing the recipe for homeopathic medicine would be a fun way for those of you more skeptically inclined to show your friends just how unfounded those pills they find in the pharmacy really are. The more hands on we can get with science the better. It would be hard for a person to argue that exactly zero molecules of active ingredient would constitute an effective medicine.
One thing that’s for sure, you’ll have a very sore hand, and probably develop arthritis if you follow this recipe often.
I can see the homeopathic response to that: “Don’t worry, just take some of your joint, pulverize it into a powder and dilute the hell out of it. That should clear it right up.”
From where I come, it is common to see protests by people who neither understand the issue they are protesting against nor try to find out what it is. Now I know, it is not just my country but people are people everywhere.; foolish, ignorant yet stubborn. Instead of an honest evaluation, they would rather go on defaming it and laugh at it. What a waste of time and energy!
It couldn’t possibly be that homeopathy actually *is* utter nonsense. It *must* be that people who denigrate it are fools! Riiiiiight. Because, after all, fuck the laws of physics.
Most people who understand homeopathy, having found out what it is, discover that it is an impossibility based on the 200-year-old imaginings of a man who knew nothing of science.
Assuming that anyone who learns about and honestly evaluates homeopathy will see its benefits and accept it seems to lean a tad towards the ‘ignorant and stubborn’ end of the see-saw.
Hpathy may claim to be “Number 1″ blah blah, but it is just another scam. The story you tell is, of course, preposterous, but has nothing to do with medical homeopathy as practiced by qualified MDs. I could site just as much bullshit from daily media (Dr Oz, etc.) to make the case that “Western internal medicine is nonsense.”
Also, you claim that homeopathy is unethical. Maybe you’re right in some cases. But how is “standard” medicine, in the farthest stretches of the imagination, even remotely ethical? Testing on and killing animals “for science”? Really?
NEVER confuse science with ethics. Western science has never been based on anything other than the end justifies the means. Science is just science, not a fucking religion.
Move on with your life and do something productive (instead of whining about homeopathy for chrissakes! I mean really, who the hell cares?) And associating with “Randi the Magician, by the way, is, at best, a very sideways career move…
Please inform me about what was so preposterous.
There is no such thing as “medical homeopathy” because it is not medicine. It is a medicine as much as a sugar pill. Just because some MD’s practice it has nothing to do with the efficacy of homeopathy.
I would agree with your Dr. Oz example, but he does not accurately represent western medicine. I merely stated the principles of homeopathic medicine, the ridiculous idea of dilution for increased potency underscores the practice in general.
My argument was to say that prescribing non-efficacious medicine to a patient is unethical. Also, animal testing is always minimized and constitutes a minor portion of research.
I think science can say something about ethics (see The Moral Landscape, Harris for an example). You suggest that all western ethics is only based on utilitarianism. You should tell all of the feminist, justice, deontological, and care ethicists in the US that they are wasting their time. Science is not a religion, I agree, and my argument is based on the doctor’s code of medical ethics, not a religion. Prescribing non-efficacious medicine is not ethical (I argue).
I’m sorry you don’t see the harm in homeopathy, it can and has hurt a lot of people.
Lastly, ad hominem attacks won’t get you very far.
Please differentiate between “animal testing” and “animal research.” The latter pushed forward the medical frontier, the former generally determines how irritating a substance can be and is designed to minimize the risk of a cosmetic or hygienic going to market. One helps saves lives, the other saves dollars. They’re different ethical issues, and should be separated.
Homeopathy is unethical because there is no proof it provides any benefit beyond that of a placebo. Often, administering quack therapies can delay science based treatments to the point where they can no longer be effective. I for one think that helping to spread the word that homeopathy is at best completely ineffective is a pretty good use of ones time.
Thank you for this excellent report….i absolutely agree with it…..Regards… Don
Great post, Kyle! I recently wrote a similar post on how homeopathy could only work through some mechanism completely foreign to our present understanding of physics and chemistry. If you’re interested, you can find it here: http://thefollyofhumanconceits.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/homeopathy-is-probably-a-waste-of-time/
That is true.
It is also not enough by itself to discredit homeopathy.
EITHER
A) Our current understanding of physics is complete and homeopathy doesn’t work.
-or-
B) Our current understanding of physics is incomplete and homeopathy might work.
That basically breaks it down right there.
It is the height of arrogance to claim that you know with certainty that our current understanding of physics is complete, unless you have a crystal ball into the future.
People are hostile to homeopathy in part because it is comforting to believe that our knowledge of the universe is complete; but knowledge never really is.
Remember how absolutely hostile and condescending the physics establishment was to Quantum Theory when it was first introduced…
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Hello, I’m Elaine Lewis, I wrote the article you’re talking about, and the “recipe”, as you call it, saved my daughter’s life after she was contaminated by perhaps a staph bacteria during a dental cleaning. She was very young at the time, still in elementary school, and had what seemed to be a flu, except that it never went away. She was losing weight, I could feel the bones in her back, it was horrifying, I won’t go into all the horrid, scary details. I made a remedy out of her saliva, which was thick and disgusting as one might imagine. In one day she recovered! The remedy had to be repeated for many days, I did have to plus the bottle many times, and let me tell you, my daughter had no idea she was getting a “remedy”, so much for the “placebo effect”, and my demeanor was no help either because I was quite worried. I would like to know why it is that every time you summarize this method you leave out the “succussion” part, you only emphasize the dilutions, and indeed it’s true, if all you do is dilute, you get nothing, The succussions are key. Yes, there is nothing of substance left in the water, but why would you want there to be when all of our remedies are made from poisons of one kind or another? Why would say, “Hey! There’s no snake venom left in this snake remedy!” Well, we think that’s a good thing! There’s not supposed to be any left, that would be endangering the public–we know there’s no molecules left of the original substance. We have always said, this is energy healing. The water contains a pattern, an energetic imprint of the original substance, that is what’s working. The proof is in the results you get. No one’s asking you or anyone else to take it, we are no threat to the mulit-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry; so, if you want to remain close-minded, it’s your choice. Just don’t take my choice away.
I’m sorry to hear about your ordeal and I’m glad that you daughter is OK.
That being said, you cannot say that homeopathic medicine “cured” your daughter. You seem to only speculate as to what her illness actually was, and obviously could not control for all the circumstances. There is no evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy, whether that be in the medical literature or from simply chemistry and pharmacology. My point is that many illnesses go through what is called “a regression to the mean.” This means, basically, that many illnesses naturally ebb and flow, get worse and attenuate, before they naturally get killed off by your immune system. Based on the lack of evidence for homeopathy, my guess would be that, thankfully, the illness that your daughter was suffering from naturally attenuated, but because you were using your “remedy” at the same time, you merely assumed that the treatment had something to do with it. This is what psychologists call confirmation bias and sums up the “well, it worked for (insert name here)” argument.
If you follow your recipe, by the end you have literally not one molecule of active ingredient. With a remedy that is completely water, I can see no reason that hitting or shaking the water would make any difference. It seems like a superstitious hold over from someone else’s recipe.
You say “all of our remedies are made from poison.” I have provided a definition of poison for you here. Reading this definition you will note that it bears zero resemblance to modern pharmaceuticals. Saying that all remedies are poison is creating a straw man argument that gets the facts wrong and argues against something that was never asserted.
Your analogy about a snake bite remedy is incorrect. We actually make anti-venom out of snake venom. That is to say, we need an amount of venom to produce the remedy. Diluting the remedy out of existence with water would do absolutely nothing for the patient.
My argument, and science’s argument, against homeopathy is simple: no molecules of active ingredient, no physiological response. Your body doesn’t react to nothing.
Your claim about water having “an energetic imprint of the original substance” has no plausibility or evidence behind it that I am aware of. Beyond New Age ramblings, there is no reason to assume that water has “memory.”
Next time your daughter gets seriously ill I would recommend taking her to a doctor rather than giving her a bottle of water that was diluted from her own spit. Homeopathic medicine has never been shown to work beyond the placebo effect, so unless your daughter has a simple headache, I would take her to a professional.
I hesitated, really, telling you about my experience with my daughter’s life-threatening illness, knowing you’d make light of it and reconfigure it to your own ends. I also knew that dispite my success in curing her, you would say that I didn’t, that it was spontaneous remission, or it wasn’t what I said it was and so on. Did you not read that I had to keep repeating the remedy day after day? That’s not a spontaneous remission, that’s constant relapsing; and, if each time the remedy is given, the relapse is turned around and recovery ensues, it means the remedy is constantly proving its efficacy over and over again which should mean something to you, as “repeatability” is a cornerstone of the scientific method. It’s just stupid to keep insisting that homeopathy doesn’t work when so many people, including Dr. Oz of the Oprah Winfrey Show, have first-hand experience with it and swear by it!
You know, the other thing about my daughter? She has this annoying trait of knowing she doesn’t like a food despite never having tried it! That’s you! “Homeopathy doesn’t work, no I haven’t tried it, I just know!” Meanwhile, people the world over are using it and getting results while you put your fingers in your ears and say, “I can’t hear you! La-la-la-la!”
By the way, shouldn’t you have asked permission before lifting this article off of hpathy.com’s website and posting it here? Has no one here ever heard of copyright infringement?
Again, I’m glad that your daughter if OK and if I somehow made light of it I apologize.
It’s nothing short of pure speculation when you say that there was “constant relapsing.” You knew that I was going to call it spontaneous remission but do not have an argument as to why it couldn’t have been just that.
Your argument about Dr. Oz, Oprah, and the other people that like homeopathy is a logical fallacy. Just because a treatment is popular does not mean that it works and just because someone famous says that it works does not mean that it works. Also, first hand experience and anecdotal evidence are the weakest forms of evidence. We can be profoundly wrong about what is working for us and what is not, that’s why the placebo effect exists in the first place. If first hand experience was worth anything, then we could always tell when a treatment was a placebo and medical trials would go out the window. Of course, this is not the case.
I have tried homeopathic medicine before, it did nothing (obviously). I have tried your recipe before, it does nothing. I have seen others ingest an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills, and they did nothing. The science is sound; no active ingredient, no physiological response.
Homeopathic medicine has never worked on anything that could not be subjectively alleviated by the placebo effect. I am reminded of the case of a little girl with eczema, a treatable skin condition. Her parents were homeopaths and refused to take her to the doctor, who could have saved her in less than 24 hours, instead making their own remedies and giving those to her. The infant later died because of an eye infection resulting from the advanced eczema. The parents were charged with manslaughter by gross criminal negligence. Here is a case with experienced homeopaths trying to treat a disease that is very easy to treat with modern medicine. Instead of their remedies working, their infant passed away. Unless the ailment is minor enough to be subjectively treated be the placebo effect, homeopathic medicine does not work.
In my post I referenced the artilce, the website, and the author, and did not see any copyright information. If you have a copyright on this article, let me know and I will parse down the quote. If you would rather I quote you directly from our exchange here, I could do that as well.
Treating a child that is actually ill with homeopathic “medicine” is border-line child abuse. You’re lucky the child lived because if she died, you’d be held criminally liable for feeding your daughter waterpills instead of real medicine.
” I made a remedy out of her saliva, which was thick and disgusting as one might imagine. In one day she recovered! ”
Sorry lady, but that’s BULLSHIT. You talked about how your daughter was losing weight… but she recovered in one day? She gained all that weight back… IN ONE DAY?
You are LYING.
“The water contains a pattern, an energetic imprint of the original substance, that is what’s working. ”
And this is something you can detect? If I were to show you five different homeopathic medicines, allow you to test them however you like, then swap them around and show them to you again, you’d be able to tell which is which?
Of course not. Because THIS IS NONSENSE, and you know it!
Also… I love how you have no idea what you were treating your child for. “perhaps a staph infection” is not a diagnosis and it wasn’t based on anything. You’re not a doctor and even if you were, I’m pretty sure that in order to determine that it was a staph infection, you’d need to take some bacterial cultures… but you’re obviously too busy defending homeopathy to properly care for your daughter. Moving on… your next bit of information says that the disease “never went away!” – what was the ACTUAL time frame here? a week? 2 weeks? was she going to school during this? Did you try anything before your water treatment? How long was she ill before you tried giving her water? I’m sure that it was scary. Seeing a sick child is often upsetting even if you’re not their mother, but that really doesn’t help us understand how sick she was. I’ve seen mothers freak out over skinned knees – I bet that would be you… But then, “in one day she recovered!” – full recovery? your follow up comment suggests that it took a few days for her to recover. So how long did all of this take? Even if your anecdotal “data” wasn’t worthless to begin with, the utter lack of actual information provided makes it almost impossibly useless.
“We have always said, this is energy healing. The water contains a pattern, an energetic imprint of the original substance, that is what’s working.”
As a physicist I think it’s my duty to tell you that this is, completely and utterly fucking nonsense. It’s not even remotely true; it simply cannot happen.
It makes me sad that people as gullible as you are reproducing aswell as passing on your belief in foolish ‘medicine’.
Are you willing to take responsibility for your “recipe” not working on a kid and them dying? Would you administer this cure yourself?
You were putting your child at serious risk by playing doctor, and you got lucky. Assuming you’re not just full of it, or misdiagnosed it, despite all that medical training.
People die because of people like you peddling things you know nothing about. Stop it.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/parents-guilty-of-manslaughter-over-daughters-eczema-death-20090605-bxvx.html
Hi Elaine,
I just want to thank you for your recipe and I have used it myself with great success. Homeopathy is awesome and one needs to experience for themselves the awesomess of i. My three year old daughter who was vaccine injured is being healed through it. I will always be grateful to you in helping her and setting me on a path of healing that I have made believers out of other relatives. It’s always amazing that nothing has the ability to heal. And I will take my remedies of virtually nothing compared to the poison provided by big pharma any day.
Please don’t harm your daughter by buying into a conspiracy theory that has absolutely no evidence behind it. Vaccines are safe, effective, and prevent the return of a number of dangerous childhood diseases.
I have provided at least ten different resources here if you are still unsure about vaccine safety.
Doesn’t it strike you as odd that you just typed the following sentence:
Again, endangering your daughter by comparing all modern medicine to “poison” can do nothing but harm. What happens if you daughter gets anything more serious than what placebo-based homeopathy can combat? Placebo (homeopathy) will do nothing for a broken arm, bacterial infection, needed surgical intervention, viral infection, or basically anything you would go to the doctor for.
If you have any questions about the safety of modern medicine, I would be happy to answer them or refer you to the proper channels.
Here is what’s on our website:
“Hpathy
This article and all other content at Hpathy.com is copyright protected by Hpathy.com. Any unauthorized copying to other websites or journals is not permitted. See the full Copyright Notice and Disclaimer at Hpathy.com”
**************************
Having said that, I’ll just briefly comment on your remarks above. What stood out to me was, “I have tried a whole bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills and they didn’t work.” Kyle, there is no such thing, unless you’re talking about a “combination remedy”? I don’t have a lot of faith in those. By all rights, a person with insomnia should have his case taken by a homeopath so the right remedy can be prescribed. Some people are awake at night because they’re “crashing” (they’ve stayed up past their “window of opportunity” to fall asleep), others are awake because they are overly excited from good news or just came from a party and are all wound up. There’s all kinds of reasons why a person can’t fall asleep and there’s a different remedy that best matches each one of these. I would have thought that if you understood homeopathy you would never have made the mistake of saying, “I tried a bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills and they didn’t work.” It would be like me saying, “Modern medicine doesn’t work, I took drugs on my own and they didn’t work.” Who am I to prescribe Rx drugs on my own, am I a doctor? What do I know about pharmacy? So it means nothing to me that you self-prescribed and got no results.
You can’t just keep saying, like a parrot, every time someone gets well using homeopathy, “Placebo! Spontaneous remission! Diagnosis was wrong! The study you cite was flawed and poorly designed!” Let me tell you, Kyle, I get sick and my daughter gets sick and injured just as often as anybody else does. If homeopathy didn’t work, for what Godly reason would I persist in using it, year after year, decade after decade? Unlike doctors, I’m not getting paid by homeopathic pharmacies to promote their products! There is absolutely no incentive for me or anyone to stick with medicine that doesn’t work. What difference does it make if the mechanics of it appear mysterious? I don’t understand how cell phones work either! They seemingly work like magic–an energy of some sort, something you can’t see, a “signal” makes your phone ring…it all sounds very hocus-pocus to me. “Energy”? “Signals?” I could fall down laughing if I wanted to but it would look pretty silly since the phone ringing is all the proof you need.
The point about Dr. Oz is that he’s a DOCTOR, he’s not just anybody, he’s on YOUR side! He’s a cardiac surgeon with a reputation to uphold because he has a lot to lose if he gloms on to something truly ridiculous! And what about the British Royal Family? They’ve used homeopathic physicians and veterinarians for over 100 years! And these are arch conservatives, they can afford the best in medical care. Down through the years, the names associated with homeopathy are not easily dismissed: John D. Rockefeller, Abraham Lincoln, Oscar Wilde, Gandhi, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne, Dr. Menninger of the Menninger Clinic, so many important names, even Charles Darwin, you can’t blow these people off.
Are you asking me to take down your recipe? I could write it down in my own words if you like.
My point in mentioning the homeopathic sleeping pills (which pharmacies do in fact sell) is to show how useless the homeopathic modality is. You take an entire bottle, nothing happens. You take a whole bottle of actual sleeping pills, you die. In fact, you could take any poison any dilute it to the levels of homeopathic medicine and nothing would happen to you if you drank it. You know how the body responds to dosage? (a basic idea in medicine that even a homeopath should know) In homeopathic medicine the dosage is always zero. That’s why every review of the literature has shown it is no better than placebo. Even the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine admits this.
It’s funny how you say that my experience means nothing. That is the only argument that you have! No evidence, no scientific plausibility, only personal experiences.
Homeopathic medicine does not objectively work, yet you still use it. That is the only conclusion that I can come to.
You’re right, we don’t need to know what the exact mechanism of action is for a drug in order for it to work, but it does need to have some objective effect (which homeopathic medicine does not). Because it does not work beyond placebo, you can feel better without actually being better.
Saying that you do not know how something works (at all) is not a very good argument for its continued use. That’s why we study things. We’ve studied homeopathy, it does not work.
Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown that he is into debunked modes of medicine and that his reputation is not worth very much. Promoting “energy acupuncture” lowers his credibility as a reputable physician. Regardless, you shouldn’t get your health advice from the TV.
Lastly, you whole final paragraph is a giant argument from authority. It does not matter that any of those people used homeopathy, that does not mean that it works. By the same reasoning, why does the majority of scientists who say homeopathy is bullshit persuasive to you? They are all authority figures in their fields. If Oprah and Dr. Oz started to recommend blood-letting, would it suddenly work?
Down through the years, the names associated with homeopathy are not easily dismissed:
John D. Rockefeller 1839-1937
Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865
Oscar Wilde 1854-1900
Gandhi 1869-1948
Charles Dickens 1812-1870
Mark Twain 1835-1910
Emerson 1803-1882
Thoreau 1817-1862
(Nathaniel ?) Hathorne 1804-1864
Dr. Menninger of the Menninger Clinic July 22, 1893 – July 18, 1990. (Wikipedia says that he also felt demonic possession was the cause of schizophrenia)
, so many important names, even Charles Darwin, you can’t blow these people off.
With the possible exception of the last, these are not contemporary people. Medicine has come a long was since the Civil War. Lets say I give you the benefit of the doubt and grant you that these people had some belief that homeopathy did more than nothing, this is not proof that homeopathy does anything.
Proof would be an experiment, or series of experiments, that can be repeated by others that perform the same process under the same conditions that shows that a homeopathic remedy has ANY effect. One experiment that has been conducted numerous times is to take an entire bottle of homeopathic sugar pills purchased at a local pharmacy and wait to see if there is any measurable effect. Not just the intended effect, but any effect – other than one caused by the sugar. In the absence of any kind of experimental evidence like this I don’t see how you can continue to try to tell people you are providing any kind of therapy at all.
The people you have listed are not MDs. They are writers and lawyers and have very little to no relation to medicine (excluding dr. Menninger being a psychiatrist). While I respect Ghandi, I wouldn’t ask him for medical advice.
Mark Twain never used an iPad either, he must have known not to.
This is merely an argument from authority. You could use the same logic to justify slavery by listing off names of important people who once owned slaves.
>>List of people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
It is always worth checking these names.
For example, Dickens referenced homeopathy once (as far as I know) in a minor novel and did so to satirise the extraordinary claims of homeopaths.
Happy to be proven wrong- but I guess this list comes from the master of homeopathic misinformation, Ullman. His views on Darwin and homeopathy for example have been thoroughly debunked.
Kyle, since you’ve degenerated into cursing, I’m outta here. Oh, and the person you need permission from is Dr. Bhatia, not me. He owns Hpathy.com. And oh, yes, he’s another DOCTOR.
The cursing was not my own words but the words from a book entitled “A Field Guide to Bullshit” that talks about homeopathy.
I will say it again since you don’t seem to read it when I write it: Just because someone with an MD says something works does not mean that it works.
Also, Dr. Bhatia is a homeopath, not a doctor. They do not have the same training and understand far less about the human body. Chemistry or pharmacology 101 would easily show how the principles oh homeopathy violate the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
Touting the title of “MD” is merely an appeal to authority, when what you need it actual evidence of efficacy. Your legal threats are hollow as the author of this post has referenced your site and is protected by fair use.
Dr. Bhatia is an MD.
…of homeopathy. Not a trained medical doctor like you find at a hospital.
A litany of bias and theorizing is all that you have put forward.
My journey to homeopathy began after I bore witness to a series of remarkable cures in my family.
My Grandmother was treated back to perfect health and normalcy after triple attacks of paralysis that has left her completely immobilized. The finest M.D. in town (Allopathy) pronounced the case incurable and asked us to prepare for the final rights. She had lost all control on her motion and urine and the we were preparing for the worst. It was then that a local homeopath, a long time friend of my father, asked if we would be willing to try Homeopathy. Bereft of any other option, we agreed and the results was truly remarkable. Her incontinence went away in 24 hours and all her parts were back to normal in a period of 15 days. She lived 8 more years after that in perfect health and died peacefully in 2008.
For a children of 12, there could be no better proof as regards the efficacy of Homeopathy. After this, I have seen many more cures of inveterate illnesses through the application of Homeopathy.
You can keep ranting in the name of scientific evidence but that will not change the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have been benefited by Homeopathy since its inception.
Empirical research has always been the cornerstone of scientific development. For many years after it was invented, no one knew what electricity was and how electric transmission happened through wires. Many of the best observed phenomenon are explained though models rather than concrete explanations because the concrete explanations are yet to be found.
To repudiate something because it is not explained by the extant principles of science is a logical fallacy of the highest order.
I’m glad that you felt the need to assert your anecdotes, but so far, no homeopath has overcome the simple fact that homeopathic medicine contains not one molecule of active ingredient, therefore no physiological effect.
Could hundreds of thousands of people be wrong about their own experience? Absolutely. What helped them is a combination of psychological (subjective) factors.
Homeopathy is completely explained. It has been tested and shown to be bogus. The claims that you make aren’t mysterious, they are just ignorant of chemistry and pharmacology. You mention empirical evidence, something that homeopathic chronically lacks.
I just saw this:
“Your analogy about a snake bite remedy is incorrect. We actually make anti-venom out of snake venom. That is to say, we need an amount of venom to produce the remedy. Diluting the remedy out of existence with water would do absolutely nothing for the patient.”
Kyle, I think you’re confused. I said “snake remedy”, not “snake bite remedy.” A lot of our remedies are made from snake venom–the bushmaster snake, the cobra, etc. You say that homeopathy is a fraud because there’s nothing in our remedies but water and I said, Do you really want there to be poisons–snake venom, for example–left in our remedies, just so you can say they contain some sort of substance? We think that would be a very bad idea, to be selling snake venom or arsenic to the public. So, we are just fine with the fact that there is nothing substantive in our remedies. Let’s be clear: this is ENERGY medicine. You can say there’s no energy in there if you want, and that there’s no such thing as the “memory of water”, but Dr. Emoto’s photographs of water crystals say different. Google Dr. Emoto and look at his photographs.
Dr. Emoto’s work is a sham, which had been known ever since “What the Bleep do We Know” came out. Here is a review of the criticism. And more critically here. His study had insufficient controls, was open to significant human error, he urged his photographers to only photograph the “pretty” examples, he refused to share his original data with other researchers for checks, and the study failed under triple blinds and under subsequent replication. It’s nonsense.
“ENERGY” medicine huh? So homeopathy does not just violate the laws of physics once, but twice? There has never been shown to be any magical vibrations, auras, mystic frequencies, quantum consciousness, or any other New Age buzz-word, let alone usable for medicine.
In addition, the article you have used is more properly called ‘Tautopathy’ or ‘Isopathy’. A much debated topic that many don’t even consider proper Homeopathy.
So how does the more mainstream homeopathic medicine work?
If it involves dilutions or “energy” type claims, my detractions are the same as above.
My contention remains the same. That there is no model to explain Homeopathy doesn’t take away the empirical fact that it cures.
We can quote hundreds of evidence from Physics where there was not and there is still not a proper explanation. That is the Philosphic mistake of positivism.
Empirical evidence leads to further studies and development. I agree there is no concrete EXPLANATION for Homeopathy. But that means nothing. It just means that we have more to learn.
By no means our knowledge of Physics and Chemistry is perfect. There are more unresolved questions that resolved ones. Biology is still in its infancy, you may ask the lead researchers of the field.
Would you also say that because many laws of Physics break down in open systems, the evidence that open systems provide are not correct. The Physicist will never say it. He will try to find answers.
If you have to see the efficacy, try it in the hands of a good prescriber. And, you will be pleasantly surprised.
The empirical fact is that homeopathy has, in medical research, not been shown to work beyond placebo. Your “cure” is a subject psychological benefit that doesn’t do anything physiologically.
You have no evidence from physics, I assure you.
There is an explanation for homeopathy: a hyper-diluted remedy that does not work beyond placebo and its tenets don’t just elude science, they contradict it.
I know many biology researchers, they would disagree with your argument about homeopathy. Your are simply making a special pleading argument because medical science says homeopathy is bogus. We have studied it, it does not work beyond a subjective benefit.
Your argument about open systems is incorrect. The laws of physics absolutely do work for open systems; any freshman in thermodynamics could tell you that.
Efficacy does not depend on the practitioner, it depends on the medicine. In the medical literature, homeopathy has been shown to have no efficacy. Here is what a large systematic review of homeopathy studies concluded:
Case closed.
“That there is no model to explain Homeopathy doesn’t take away the empirical fact that it cures.”
If there is no model to explain it, then it’s LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to say that it’s working. Period. This is as stupid as claiming that the planets move because of “physioplastiopathy”, but then saying you have no idea what that is.
You keep talking about ‘empirical evidence’ but you only offer anecdotes. Do you understand what ‘empirical evidence’ means? Do you understand what a double-blind study is and why it’s important? Do you understand that the reason that every homeopathic experiment that has ever been performed has been mocked is because it doesn’t work and not because of some massive pharmaceutical conspiracy?
If you don’t like Dr. Emoto, then here’s an experiment done with water in Germany, it’s a video, and it’s less than three minutes long:
Could you produce the peer-reviewed study which outlines the actual experiment? Without support the video is interesting but useless.
Kyle, all I’ve got is the video, it’s not my experiment, it’s someone else’s. And yes, the video is interesting.
Research is usually published in peer-reviewed journals and is available to the public. Without any support, the video is thoroughly unconvincing.
LOL, kyle, they could reproduce it 50 times which is about what they’ve done with all the NMR, theromluminescence, spectroscopy studies etc combined twice over and you people throw it all in the trash…. it’s because you’re a professional skeptic.
your mind is hard-wired to be that way. it thinks only in terms of “NEGATIVITY”, never IN TERMS of possibilities.
in a lot of professional skeptics there is an underlying depression involved, a black cloud that envelops their thinking. I don’t know if that’s you. But I’ve seen it too many times.
Do you realize how many substances any given random drop of water has previously come in contact with? Much of the water you drink has passed through various peoples’ and animals’ urinary tracts, through sewage systems, rain clouds, you name it.
Even if it were proved that water truly has ‘memory’ like this, then homeopathy still wouldn’t work in principle, since you’re essentially just mixing all of these ‘memories’ together in a big jumbled mess. How does the water ‘choose’ which of the millions of substances it’s ‘remembered’ and become a remedy for that specific case?
It’s ridiculous.
So you’re offering up a youtube video about “pictures taken of water” as proof that water has memory? Here’s the easiest way to fake that “data”: Get each student to make 24 drops each. Pull out 4 that look similar to each other and IGNORE the other 20 drops (those other drops don’t support our theory, so we can just write them off). Next up: drop a flower in the water. Then take a drop and photograph it. If it doesn’t look like a flower, disregard it. Repeat until you have a photo that you like.
This video was, well, it was pure nonsense. It wasn’t an experiment, it was more of an art project.
I am willing to try to keep an open mind and I would like to try to reproduce these results since I think I probably have access to all the requisite materials to do so. Can you provide some more information so can find where this was published as I have not been able to find that information myself.
MAKE the connection. How does this provide evidence that water has memory? We are not looking at individual water molecules in these images. There is stuff IN the water that is making it look different with their imaging techniques. This proves absolutely nothing, even if the study was properly controlled and replicated, which is dubious at best.
Kyle mentioned, “Could hundreds of thousands of people be wrong about their own experience? Absolutely. What helped them is a combination of psychological (subjective) factors.”
What about a cure of inveterate case of paralysis in an 80 year old who had given all hope?
What about cures in infants?
“Homeopathy is completely explained. It has been tested and shown to be bogus. The claims that you make aren’t mysterious, they are just ignorant of chemistry and pharmacology. You mention empirical evidence, something that homeopathic chronically lacks.”
There are thousands of published cured cases with backing of Pathological reports. If you ignore then, it is you who are closed to a possibility. These are all empirical evidence.
See previous comment.
The plural of “anecdote” isn’t “data”. Whether you have 1 story or 1000 stories makes no difference in the SCIENTIFIC community. Now feel free to take any one of those stories and reproduce it in a lab, under CONTROLLED conditions, THEN AND ONLY THEN will you have “data”. – unfortunately, it probably won’t be the kind of data that you want.
So, you mean to say that psychological factors can bring a person out of comatose state, low-grade febrile fevers or paralysis agitans? :)
Even cancer goes into remission.
There is a difference between remission and cure. No relapse for 8 years before the person eventually died in the case of paralysis is definitely a case of cure rather than remission.
Or it’s a case of 8 year remission…
I meant febrile states…
Then you need to talk to an advanced researcher in thermodynamics.
As a postgraduate in physics, I know what I am taking and if you need so, I will direct you to papers that will solve your quandary.
I’m surprised. Your fellow homeopaths continue to babble on about energy medicine that clearly violates the laws of physics. If you are a post-grad in physics and think that open systems do not work, you need to change schools. For example, when sunlight warms the Earth and provides energy to plants, the laws of physics amazingly still apply even in this open system.
There are many cases where they remain but a close approximation. Will share the researches soon.
That I am a post grad in Physics has let me know that there are still a lot of questions that remain unanswered.
You’re not saying that there are things we haven’t answered. You’re saying there are things we have answered, but that they’re completely wrong.
Honestly, without evidence, just saying you’re a physics postgrad isn’t evidence. Even physicists can be wrong. Additionally, there is a big difference between “still not 100%, but improving accuracy” and introducing whole realms that there’s no evidence for on the basis that we might be wrong.
We may be wrong on physics in some spots still, but on the whole, we’re less wrong than we were before. And to introduce extra ideas of energy just because we could be wrong isn’t a valid argument.
- From someone with a Master’s in Physics (before you try to argue credentials)
Nilmadhab has raised a good point. What do you do with verified cases of cures with homeopathy based on X-rays, blood work, sonograms and other manner of before-and-after testing? What do you do then? We have lots of those at our website. So, seriously, what do you say then?
We say: Reproduce it.
If you’re so certain that you KNOW that it works, now it’s time to figure out HOW it works. I’d suggest using techniques like “double blind studies” and then try publishing in “peer reviewed journals”. Show us HOW it works and I can guarantee you that every person here will change his or her tune. I do not believe in homeopathy at all, but I will gladly join your crusade as soon as you show us HOW it works.
>So, seriously, what do you say then?
Very simply, I say, anecdotal evidence has almost zero value in helping us determine what is real and what is not. If I were to claim to know of 5,000 examples of people who have won the lottery immediately after having said a very sincere, silent, and elaborate prayer to their shoe laces (one that must be made in a very precise manner), I hope you would reply that, while there was a correlation, it is unreasonable to assert a causal connection based solely on these anecdotes (even if I protest that I know of a website where one can find lots of examples and that someone close to me had successfully used this method). You know that people win the lottery, sometimes without having prayed to their shoe laces in the prescribed fashion. The fact that they prayed to their shoelaces (and did it just the right way) before winning does not tell us that the prayer made them win. This knowledge might make us wonder whether there is a connection, but it does not prove causation.
Let me offer another, more mundane example. When I was a child, marijuana was considered by many to be a “gateway drug”, the theory being that using marijuana caused people to use “hard drugs” (a term, which then referred to heroin, LSD, PCP, and cocaine). It’s important to note that I am not talking about the claim that marijuana use is a predictor of the use of other drugs. I am talking about the claim that marijuana use causes the use of “hard drugs”. This claim involves the same confusion between correlation and causation. Just because many users of the “hard drugs” used marijuana first (a fairly well described correlation that actually exists and has been proven through rigorous scientific study) does not mean that it was the marijuana that caused them to use “hard drugs”. I use this widely held belief as an example because there is another very simple example that shows just how silly it is to assume causation based solely on correlation. While some very high percentage of the users of “hard drugs” used marijuana first, even more of them drank milk as infants before turning to “hard drugs”. Sometimes people use “hard drugs”. Some of those people use marijuana or drink milk before doing so. It is not reasonable to assume that the milk that caused them to turn to “hard drugs”. It is no more reasonable to assume that marijuana use (without actual evidence) caused that use. These correlations do not establish causation.
Similarly, ill or injured people sometimes get better without treatment. If they pray to their shoe laces, then get better, we have no more evidence that the shoe lace is the one true god or that prayer to one’s shoelaces, if done in just the right manner, cures or treats illness or injury. If they take a homeopathic remedy before they get better, we have no more evidence that homeopathy cures disease or injury than we had before. This alone does not mean that homeopathy does not work. It means that anecdotes offer almost no value in establishing that it does. If one wants to prove the efficacy of homeopathy, no number of anecdotes will help the cause.
With brevity, the scientific method doesn’t stop at publishing a paper based on an experiment conducted in one “lab.” It takes MANY independent labs replicating the SAME study and publishing their findings to yield a positive result with any kind of significance or impact.
Humans are extremely biased and the only good way we know how of separating biases from causal links is through reproducing the same study over and over again. This helps us significantly reduce the probability of the null hypothesis being true given the findings we discover.
“Science” isn’t some omnipotent, omniscience, monolithic entity that arbitrarily sets rules and guidelines for shits’n'giggles, it has rules that mean something. It’s a process, a flawed one, but it’s the best process we have for discovering knowledge.
For Kyle – In India, homeopaths are trained in all aspects of modern medicine before being given the degree of a homeopathic doctor. Homeopaths have the same legal position as conventional medicine doctors. So your degrading a homeopathic MD does not stand.
‘Science’ does not know it all yet, and you can see that from history. A lot of things that ‘science’ scoffed at and claimed impossible centuries ago have now been ‘scientifically proved’ to be true. The same will be the case with homeopathy.
You may scoff all you want and rave and rant at your own site; however, life always gives out learning experiences; I hope you will find a good homeopath to help you when your turn comes.
That something is thought to be wrong now is no indication that it will be right in the future. Someone being trained in astrology does not validate astrology.
I would also ask which things you discuss science scoffing at, why were they scoffed at, and what evidence was there in favor for them at the time?
“Science” is not some monolithic entity. There are areas that are very reproducible and some that are not. There are soft sciences and hard ones. There are areas where we have so much knowledge about the subject that the chance of our models being wrong is negligible.
To claim that “science” doesn’t know everything is basically a nonsensical thing to say. Of course science doesn’t know everything nor does it claim to! You’re attacking science because you don’t understand what it actually does.
It’s a process. Nothing more, nothing less. The rules are not arbitrarily made like so many are in our everyday lives. These rules help us inductively reason what we can know about this universe as human beings. It is heavily flawed, but everything else human-created is orders of magnitude more flawed. So keep in mind that even though the scientific method is far from perfect, it is leaps and bounds better than anything else we currently have in our intellectual arsenal.
Key statement: “IN INDIA”
A developing country with questionable credibility…
A nation of rampant violent superstition and human rights issues…
I’m glad you pointed out that “homeopathic MDs” are “trained” in modern medicine, and I assume this training is hardly even the beginnings of becoming a REAL MD. But if it is the case that a “REAL” MD can get a “degree” in homeopathy in India than I will avoid using ANY medical facilities if I should by chance be there one day.
Each country can say it produces so many accredited doctors, engineers etc. according to their own subjective standards….
For Kyle – if you truly have a scientific interest and an open mind, please search for and read articles by Cyril Smith.
Cyril W. Smith, physicist, is the author of countless papers on the effects of subtle energies and co-author of Electromagnetic Man. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the biological effects of subtle energies. He was Research Fellow at Imperial College, London, researched electromagnetic effects in living systems at Salford University, was Secretary of the Dielectrics Society, worked with H. Fröhlich treating electromagnetically sensitive patients and acted as a scientific consultant for the Breakspear Medical Group Ltd.
Giving you link to one, at the bottom of that page there are links to continuing articles -
http://hpathy.com/scientific-research/homeopathy-%E2%80%93-how-it-works-and-how-it-is-done-1/
(and oh yes, everything at hpathy is copyrighted, please read the copyright notice)
Please read the DMCA and especially the section titled “Fair Use” – if you want to get the article taken down due to copyright infringement then you’d need to rewrite the law… (Oh wait… homeopaths ‘believe’ in laws… physical or civil… ha!)
damn it… that should say “homeopaths DON’T ‘believe’ in laws… physical or civil…”
For Kyle again – sorry if your trial of homeopathy didn’t work for you – it would have been the case of the right remedy not being found. You need a good homeopath. Elaine would be glad to help you, I’m sure.
However, if you are not ready to give another chance to curing you, perhaps you would like us to give you homeopathic remedies as an experiment and maybe a good homeopathic proving/aggravation would convince you?? :)
I am getting tired of all of the arguments from authority and anecdotal evidence.
I wold much rather hear answers to the following:
If the “mainstream” homeopathic medicine does not involve this implausible dilution process, what is it?
There is no evidence in the medical literature that homeopathy works beyond placebo. Anecdotes are dandy, but where is the scientific evidence for homeopathy?
It is not enough to say that we don’t understand everything, therefore homeopathy works. This is a logical fallacy called argument from ignorance. Why isn’t the testing (done by the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine) which shows homeopathy no better than water or a sugar pill enough?
You keep mentioned “verified” cases of people being cured. Anecdote is again not enough, where is the research on the subject?
your belief that modern scientific medicine is the only system that can cure is understandable. please keep track of statistical figures which show that more and more people have started going to alternate systems all over the world and also the rising popularity and success of homoeopathy in treatment of diseases. i am sure you do not see even in this, the failure of modern medicine at least in some areas. arguments can go on and on, but people go where they find relief. the great scientists and the clever knowalls can enjoy their game of deriding others for as long as they can. last but not least, very soon, people who can afford modern medical treatment will be the chosen lucky few.
Statistical figures that you didn’t show. Also, stating that something is popular doesn’t make it correct. A popular plague remedy in London in 17th century was tobacco. There were people who smoked tobacco and didn’t even get the plague. There were people who smoked and survived the plague. Does it mean that tobacco smoke saved them from the plague?
>the rising popularity and success of homoeopathy in treatment of diseases.
No matter how many people claim anecdotes of being ‘cured’ by homeopathy, all that gives us is exactly… zilch.
Anecdotes are not data. Double-blind trials, peer-reviewed and repeated, are data.
And guess what the data says. Not just from one peer-reviewed double blind study, not just from a systematic review of many studies, but the systematic reviews of the systematic reviews! They say it doesn’t work a lick above placebo. That’s it, that’s all.
There is no evidence it has any therapeutic effect beyond placebo. There’s really nothing more to say.
And because of this, if you treat someone with homeopathy and they die from something easily preventable through modern medicine, you WILL be charged with manslaughter and criminal negligence and sent to jail.
As the prevalence of homeopathy and other woo cures increases, so will these deaths, and so will these criminal charges. Hopefully after a few more gain mainstream coverage people will start to realize that this shit isn’t harmless, it’s actively dangerous.
http://whatstheharm.net/
I’m not a scientist or a homeopathic doctor — I’m just a person looking for relief from health problems. The thing that bothers me the most about this blog post begins with the first three words: Homeopathy is Nonsense. If we start with the premise that one purpose of promoting the public understanding of science is to enhance and improve our lives, then I would suggest that beginning a post that is likely going to provoke and perhaps even insult some people isn’t perhaps the best way of enhancing and improving our lives. In other words, with just those first three words, the stage has been set for a war. Why a war, though? Don’t you want to enhance and improve our lives? Is it possible to search for science-based findings and at the same time not slap a huge community of people in the face?
If you had said, “So far homeopathy doesn’t hold up to the vigorous scientific studies that allopathic medicine abides by, but I hear that, for whatever reason, many people around the world have found relief in this…” it would feel different to me. You could even list all the various studies that concluded homeopathy is but, at most, a mere placebo. But to take an entire article that someone wrote and poke fun of it (“nonsensical” “witchcraft” “gibberish”) , doesn’t seem like it’s helping any cause. The dosage and potency may be irrelevant to you, but not to those who have benefited from it.
I don’t blame you for designating homeopathy to the Doesn’t-Fit-The-Scientific-Mold-Yet-To-Get-a-Thumbs up-From-Me box. Truth be told, I have tried more than a dozen homeopathic remedies and still have yet to find one that works for me. It’s also true, though, that just because homeopathy hasn’t yet worked for me doesn’t mean that others haven’t benefited from it (for that matter, I have been working with an allopathic medical doctor and nothing he has done has helped me either).
Kyle, you say, “Without any active ingredient, there is no chance for a physiological response…” but all one needs to do is imagine they are smelling a lemon and you may notice yourself salivating a bit. Just because we aren’t holding the actual lemon in our hand doesn’t mean that we aren’t having a physiological response. Have you ever found relief from an emotion? Has anyone loved you and then you felt a good feeling in your body? If yes, could we say that you had a physiological response with no active ingredient? Could you tangibly hold love and measure it in that case? There is “no logic” behind some of our feelings but they really do exist and impact us…yes? Acupuncture is also an energy medicine based on meridians in our bodies we can’t see, but millions of people worldwide (including me and many I know) have gotten relief from that form of medicine. Biofeedback and meditation are also practices that bring on physiological responses without anything more active than our minds.
I’m not saying that I know without a doubt that homeopathy works. Like I said before, my experience is actually more like yours in that I’ve yet to get benefit from it. My disappointment, though, has to do with how you write about your thoughts and findings. So, maybe for you, homeopathy isn’t “medicine” or “science”. Maybe it’s a belief system. But, even if homeopathy was nothing more than a placebo vehicle, aren’t you glad that so many people world wide have gotten relief from it? Would you say to a young child, “That teddy bear you’re holding to provide you comfort and relief is nonsense!” ? No, you would be happy they have something that helps me. Yes, some have not benefited from homeopathy, including you and me, but I, for one, am glad to have a variety of potential healing modalities to try when I need help. In other words, uncovering proven facts and being respectful are not mutually exclusive.
Maybe you’re right: If homeopathy “…flies in the face of everything that we know about pharmacology, physiology, and medical science…” and if it continues to help people all over the world–even if not everyone and even if not scientifically validated–we are lucky to live in this day and age when we have more than one healing paradigm to benefit from.
Apart from the argument from ignorance, and the fact that unfortunately, treating with homeopathy instead of real medicine actually kills people, which is why people should be told to use actual remedies,I find the paragraph about the lemon and emotions really bewildering.
Why do you think we smell the lemon ? Is there some magical energy floating from the lemon towards you ? Nope. Molecules, are emitted by the lemon, and detected by captors inside you nose, which then activates in turn nerves (really short version of the process…), which will trigger a hunger response from you brain, hence the physiological response.
Furthermore, as for emotions, studies have shown that there are increases of some molecules inside you brain (if i remember correctly, mostly serotonin and endorphin), which also trigger pleasure response. We target this kind of stuff with anti-depressant, and they also are the targets of most drugs (morphine,…)
Acupuncture has never been shown to work under actual scientific conditions.
Seriously, don’t any of you people think any real scientist would love for all of this to work ? If he could show it works, automatic nobel prize for the dude…
The thing I like the most about this blog post are the first 3 words “Homeopathy is Nonsense” be cause homeopathy IS nonsense and the reasons why needs to be clearly pointed out in places like this blog. Your response, though poetic, is nonsense as well. The scientific method states that the results of an experiment must be repeatable by someone else using the same procedure. The fact that ones mouth might water if one were to think of a lemon proves the hypothesis that memories in the human brain are strong enough to invoke a physical response, but that is all. It does nothing to prove efficacy of bloodletting or acupuncture or cupping or any other nonsense. The is no large body of repeatable experiment evidence that can prove the efficacy of homeopathy. In fact just the opposite exists. You or I or anyone else could ingest thousands of homeopathic pills and we would never show any measurable response other than those that we would expect to see from the sugar. All we ask for is simple proof, a set of repeatable experiments, science does not require that we understand what causes the repeatable results, just that they can be repeated. Please don’t prattle on about the benefits about something that has been proven to have nothing better than a placebo unless you are able to provide even a shred of concrete evidence.
First of all, who are you to say witchcraft should be grouped with nonsense? Witchcraft and homeopathy are very much the same. There are people that believe in both. There are people that point to examples of both. There’s no evidence for the mechanisms at work in both. It’s biased to say that witchcraft is like nonsense, but saying that homeopathy is nonsense is unfair.
Jen, we have a name for an alternative medicine that has been demonstrated to work. We call it … medicine. (With apologies to Tim Minchin)
I would like to re-emphasize from the previous post, “People go where they can find relief.” Well said.
And now Kyle, I have been gone so long because I have been looking for the research that you have been demanding! You’ve said nothing else matters to you, so here it is! This doesn’t even scratch the surface, though. I’ll leave the links for whomever is interested and I’ll only post one of the abstracts:
http://hpathy.com/scientific-r…..moeopathy/
http://hpathy.com/scientific-r…..d-surveys/
http://hpathy.com/scientific-research
RESEARCH IN HOMEOPATHY
Author: Robert Medhurst
The author presents a formidable list of homeopathy research studies (abstracts) to counter any lingering claim that homeopathy is not proven.
I’m constantly amazed at the ease with which critics of homeopathy confidently declare that there’s no evidence for homeopathy, and even more amazed at the lack of scrutiny that’s given to this statement by the media. Whether this declaration is made through simple ignorance, stupidity or with the deliberate intent to deceive, would make an excellent topic for investigation. Either way, the assertion that there’s no evidence for homeopathy is plainly and clearly wrong. Shown below are abstracts from human, animal, plant and in-vitro scientific studies that attest the reality that there is indeed evidence for homeopathy, and lots of it.
Human studies
1. Albertini H, Goldberg W, Sanguy B, Toulza CL. Homeopathic treatment of dental neuralgia by Arnica and Hypericum. Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, 1985, 3, 126-129. Carried out at the Faculty of Medicine of Marseilles, this placebo controlled study was designed to determine the effectiveness of Arnica 7C and Hypericum 15C for people suffering from dental neuralgia. 60 people received either 4 pilules of Arnica alternated with 4 pilules of Hypericum every 4 hours or placebo administered in the same way. Pain levels were assessed over 3 days from the beginning of the trial. From this assessment it was found that 12 of the 30 people who received the placebo had a positive response to this intervention, and 23 of the 30 people given the homeopathic medicines responded positively to these.
What strikes me regarding you “research papers” is, that none of those papers are published in peer-reviewed medical journals. Go search for a paper that proves homoepathy works beyond the placebo effect, that was published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. You won’t find one because there are none. No acceptable scientific papers -> no science. That’s what homeopathy is. Something a German quack pulled out of his ass 250 years ago.
And because I know you like anecdotes: Because of my job, I’m sitting in front of a Computer 8h a day. Last year I had serious back problems because of that. So i eventually started to visit a chiropractic for some weeks without improving my situation. Absence of pain was only possible through heavy (real) pain medication, which obviously can’t be no long term treatment. A friend gave me the name of an established homeopathic osteopath. I was (wet) fire cupped till my back was full of hematoma, then he injected some homeopathic remedy into my back and gave me some vitamins and pills to. I also had to stop the pain medication so it won’t interfere with the remedy. Long story short: It did nothing. I visited him for 3 months without any improvement to my situation. Those months were hell. Then I had a long talk with another friend, who is skeptic of homeopathy. He told me to start the medication again. He also suggested taking me with him to his exercise in a gym. After a few weeks, my back pain was gone. I didn’t take any homeopathic remedy when my muscles finally relaxed.
I would suggest linking to a source that isn’t clearly biased. I actually took a look at the papers linked in the “article” in your comment and they’re either all from journals that have “Homeopathy” in their title (Do you seriously think the Journal of Homeopathy would publish research showing that homeopathy does no better than placebo? Be honest with yourself – at least in medical journals, when a drug or medical modality is demonstrated not to work, they have the balls to publish that fact), or they’re from journals that publish papers only on “alternative medicine” (i.e. medicine that has NOT been shown to work).
This is one of my major complaints with proponents of homeopathy. Anyone can start a “journal” and publish in it, thereby making the claim to be peer-reviewed. That doesn’t mean anything though if the bias is clear from the start. There are “peer-reviewed” journals that publish “scholarly” articles on UFO’s every year – that doesn’t mean we’re being visited by little green men!
Here’s a hint for looking for bad research – you can’t make scientific claims based on trial studies. They’re trials for a reason (ie. The controls are almost never rigorous). You also can’t make sweeping physiological claims based on studies with a sample size under 10 people! That’s ridiculous. People vary wildly from person to person, and will react to stimulus in a vast range of ways, so you need large sample sizes with tight controls to be able to make statistical claims about the the thing you’re studying. In this case, out of all the literature I’ve ever looked at on homeopathy, the effect either disappears when you increase the sample size to statistically significant numbers, or the effect itself is a result of statistical fudging/incompetence (Surprise! Doctors/biologists are not mathematicians/statisticians which is why there’s such a demand for bio-statisticians in medicine – not everyone can be an expert on everything, especially math).
Interesting: I thought you did not believe in one size fits all approach! Arnica for X disease is so un-homeopathic, the results should not support classical homeopathy!
You may also be interested in checking how many cases of Swine Flu in India were cured with Homeopathy during the outbreak last year.
Zero. Homeopathy can’t cure anything. There is no mechanism to provide such a cure–other than being well hydrated, I suppose.
You are wrong, homeopathy helped me and my relatives , and in these cases allopathy was powerless?
Was it ‘none’? cause I bet it was none.
The number probably correlates with the survival rate of individuals left untreated…just a wild guess…
Wild guess indeed. There are thousands of reported cures. Just search for it instead of guessing. Here you are guilty of the same that you are accussing Homeopaths of – Ignoring evidence.
Actually, when I say “wild guess” I am being sarcastic. Its a way of pointing out how invalid and silly the arguments for homeopathy are here. It is hardly worth anyones time to waste good information on fools. But we must try if we are to eventually save the world from the madness that credulous individuals spread.
To put it bluntly since we can’t seem to read the sarcasm…
Good time of the day Kyle!
I am homeopathic patient whose health was improved under homeopathic tretament.
Now I have two questions for you.
1) Could modern science explain all phenomenon in universe ?
2)
Could placebo hypothesis explain phenomenon described in this
http://homeoint.org/cazalet/tyler/nottodoit.htm
article ?
Good Day Alex,
The short answer to your question is yes. Science can explain pretty much every phenomenon in the Universe.
Thanks for your inquiry though!
If scinece can explain pretty much every phenomenon in the Universe why there are so many universities in which foundamental research is conducted ?
And I repeat my question :
Could placebo hypothesis explain phenomena described in this
http://homeoint.org/cazalet/tyler/nottodoit.htm
article?
Revise your knowledge.
That article is painful to read, and considering it’s nothing more than unsubstantiated anecdotes, its about as useless in terms of providing REAL information as any other random person saying any number of random things about any random topic. Sometimes you’ll get words that sound “right”, but that doesn’t mean the person knows what they’re talking about. And yes, the placebo hypothesis is more than sufficient an explanation.
In two of my posts I gave link to article and I asked the same question, but nobody answered.
Why?
I don’t know why I can’t reply to you directly Alex, but I thought I had answered the question. What you’re asking is “Could your vaunted science explain orcs in Lord of the Rings? How nuts were those guys!?!?” I guess no, the placebo effect might not be sufficient to explain a collection of UNSUBSTANTIATED and OUTRAGEOUS claims if we’re going to assume that said collection of OUTRAGEOUS and UNSUBSTANTIATED claims are 100% true. But I’m not that credulous a person, and I contain my credulity to claims that CAN be substantiated through documented and verified experimentation. A collection of poorly written anecdotes IS NOT HOW SCIENCE IS DONE. Period. You don’t get to use the language of science and then demand that the rules of scientific inquiry don’t have to apply to you.
And yes, the placebo effect is sufficient to explain homeopathy (when outright fraud has been excluded as an option).
“In two of my posts I gave link to article and I asked the same question, but nobody answered.
Why?”
Yes we did. the article is a 1912 article full of unsubstantiated anecdotes.
Scientifically, its useless.
We can find just as easily anecdotes arguing the oposite, what then? (http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html)
“Modern Science” is simply ‘stuff we know and have proven’. The word “science” is derived from a latin word that is literally translated as “knowledge”. Modern science isn’t an elusive club or gang; it is the collective research of humanity over many centuries that has led to established facts. If homeopathy exists outside of “modern science”, it means there is insufficient evidence to validate its claims – which is interesting, since it’s been around for a few centuries.
So modern science could explain everything in the universe?
There are no more mysteries?!
alex, did you actually read what chris just wrote? he just explained it to you, and yet you ask the same question again! seriously…
If you understood the concept of science you would know that no scientist worth their salt would claim that everything is fully explained. Quite the opposite, their careers actually depend upon everything NOT being fully explained.
There’s no conspiracy to deny the effectiveness of homeopathy within modern science, your problem is that there is no evidence that homeopathic remedies are any more effective than placebo. Of course that won’t stop you believing in their efficacy anecdotally, but there’s nothing particularly notable about that; human beings have proven themselves time and time again to be quite capable of believing the most ridiculous notions and disregarding all logic otherwise – much to the detriment of our species. I think that’s why these arguments annoy me. Our advancement as a civilisation is crippled by this nonsense and I’m quite fed up of it.
Alex,
1) Do you understand what science really is? Do you want understand the scientific method? Do you know what are the differences between a scientific theory and layman’s theory? peer-review? Statistical significance?
2) Do you know what is anecdotal evidence and how useless it is? Are you familiar with cognitive distortions such as confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, or texas sharpshooter fallacy?
3) Perhaps after you are familiar with all that you can enlighten us, on how the hell does the dilution procedure makes any freaking sense, or perhaps the cognitive dissonance in your brain would prefer to some conclusion-after-the-fact fallacy, which then you will have to enlighten us on the lack of any statistical difference between homeopathy and placebo effect in all credible double-blind studies done on the matter.
correction: fact-after-the-conclusion :)
e.g http://www.sullivan-county.com/images/sci.gif
1) I understand.
But I also understand the following simple fact : statistics is an instrument, and one should know how use it.
2) Could you answer my question :
Could placebo hypothesis explain phenomena described in this
http://homeoint.org/cazalet/tyler/nottodoit.htm
article?
I am waiting for your detailed answer.
I DID answer your question. At this point , from your reply, its quite obvious you dont understand science or what I was talking about, nor do you want to, you just want to be right.
Why don’t you change a little your first question and ask yourself that; Is there any way to discover the universe and explain its phenomena? if so what would that way be like? What I mean by that you may be thinking, let me explain it better: wouldn’t it be the best way (of knowing the universe) the one that is based in evidence? if not what are the alternatives?
Having evidence means having a proof for something, that’s obvious, and is also obvious what “evidence based” means. And so if science is a philosophy based in evidence, doesn’t it means that is in the correct way? As I asked before: what are the alternatives?
A lot of people think that science is some kind of “packet of knowledge”, a book of answers, or the opinions of some privileged geniuses; it is not, is a road rather than a goal, is a process of observation, science is not knowledge but a way to reach it.
So let me ask you this: if we wanted to explain every phenomenon in the universe which way should we take?
What if we wanted to explain only one: health?. What if we wanted not only to explain it but to make it better, wouldn’t again, be the best way the one that is based on evidence, science?
I regards to the copyright claims made in the earlier comments: It is painfully obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of copyright that the source material here was used for commentary and is covered by fair use.
After reading through the comments and becoming increasingly frustrated by the level of ignorance and denial exhibited by some of the commentors, namely elaine lewis and the like, I have really only one thing to say.
Some people just want to watch the world burn, and some want to dilute the shit out of that fire in a bucket of water and then pour it on a pile of logs and expect the same exact results even though common sense would make you realize all you’re doing is getting the ground wet. Homeopathy is dangerous. Homeopaths are dangerous. But most importantly, those who ignore the evidence and continue to argue for superstition are the worst. They will not stop until they kill someone with their poor excuse for medical treatment, and even then, their minds are so clouded by their own misinformation and their self-esteem is so tied into their own belief that being wrong is bad that even the death of a friend or relative may not be enough to show them the error of their judgement. If people wish to keep arguing for something that is so obviously false and has been proved as much so many times over, that is their choice. Just don’t expect me to agree or even accept such blatant ignorance.
To be fair, homeopathic remedies are an excellent preventative measure against de-hydration.
Yes, and while all those bottles of homeopathic sleeping remedies he’s eaten over the years never once put James Randi to sleep, he does look rather fit for an 83-year old!
The same James Randi who ran away once Viltholkas accepted his challenge to prove Homeopathy!
Homeopathy, pro or con: Whoever keeps quoting “Randi the Magician” as any kind of reliable scientific source should have their head examined. Anyone citing a magician, as their source, is to be immediately dismissed, in any rational discussion. I mean really… for the love of pete…!
Kyle I think your point about not understanding how something works so it can’t work is probably a bit of a lost cause. They didn’t understand how penicillin worked when it was first used as an antibiotic either, they didn’t know why or how it killed bacteria, they just knew it did.
Having said that though they could then test penicillin to see how well it worked removing bacterial infections compared to not taking penicillin. People who took penicillin got better. People who took sugar pills got better too, but more people got better taking penicillin than those taking sugar pills, lots more. The point to take away from all this is not that people who took sugar pills can get better. People will get better. The point here is that MORE people got better when they took penicillin than when they didn’t.
What I want to know is not how homoeopathy works but what is it about homoeopathy that means that it is not able to pass the same simple test? Why is it that homoeopathy can’t make more people better than just taking a placebo? Why is it that homoeopathy does not pass the standard medical tests?
There is no such thing as alternative medicine. There is only Medicine, untested medicine and not medicine. Homoeopathy falls into the last category. It has been tested and tested and failed.
Thats the problem I have with homoeopathy. I don’t care how its supposed to work. I only care that it doesn’t…..
It’s hard to test homeopathic pills against sugar pills because they’re the exact same thing though…
If homeopathy works, then why do so many studies say the opposite? What studies, you ask? Well, for starters, here are 20+
http://stateofmyignorance.blogspot.com/2009/10/homeopathy-fail_04.html
Because in order to investigate some phenomena one should use appropriate experimental design.
All studies which showed that homeopathy do not work were bad designed.
In what ways? please comprehend that you can’t just throw that claim there, what if it where the opposite? would you simply say “See, those are well designed”?
If you want to claim that you don’t only need to say why, but also point where and how, and you would help as well offering an alternative if you have one, and we would have another experiment about homeopathy rather than a battery of “it worked for…”‘s.
I’m not sure if you’re being serious or sarcastic, but please describe to us what an effective ‘homeopathic’ experiment would look like?
Badly designed? Yes … with far too much emphasis on the outdated notion that the patient’s condition must improve for it to be considered a success!
If you’d like you could do a double blind study using tap water, and homeopathic cures on a group of people with persistent ailments.
Record it, carefully log your methods and the process and come back to us with the results. =P
I doubt you’ll do it, but if you did, I’m certain you’d find nothing more than placebo effect at work.
Clearly you and me and all those doctors and “scientists” are being paid off by Big Pharma to come here and promote “facts” and “tests” and “studies” – but any real homeopath knows better than to be fooled by “reality”.
>Clearly you and me and all those doctors and “scientists” are being paid off by Big Pharma
Not all, but many, and not being directly payed, but they have financial interests – it is obvious.
To describe correct homeopathic experiment ?
I do not know, but I know the way homeopathy should researched :
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2288/7/7
Some phenomena are so complicated that it is not clear at all what is correct experimental design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afshar_experiment
you know who else has a financial interest? people selling water as “medicine”
Your research paper offers nothing except to say that we should throw out the rules by which we judge every other medical treatment and use new ones just for “CAM” – sounds like a stupid move, imho.
Comparing a simple drug effectiveness trial to a quantum physics experiment is a bit of a reach. Here’s the thing: first you have to prove that water has a “memory” or that it can retain the effective molecular whatevers. It has never been proven. Time and time again it has been disproven. But after you’ve proven something that’s impossible, then you can start testing it in medical trials. I’m not aware of any drug effectiveness trials that prove quantum mechanics.
> I guess no, the placebo effect might not be sufficient to explain a collection of >UNSUBSTANTIATED and OUTRAGEOUS claims i
So if theory does not explains some phenomena you put tag on it “UNSUBSTANTIATED and OUTRAGEOUS claims” ?
Very scientific! :-)
This remind me a phrase ” stones do not fall from the sky”.
P.S. Do lighting balls exist ?
Why do you assume that whoever is tagging a theory (homeopathy?) as unsubstantiated and outrageous claim is doing so because it can’t be explained?
I will tell you what is not very scientific:
Has been homeopathy proved to work? where are the papers that prove its efficacy? Has someone replicated the experiment with similar results?
But direct to the point, if a single study proved that some homeopathic remedy work, would that mean that all homeopathic remedies work? A experiment may appear to cure people that suffers from chronic back pain, does that mean that all homeopathy works equally well with other illnesses?
Then why are there homeopathic remedies for distinct types of cancer, for losing weight, epilepsy, for the skin of you dog, etc.? shouldn’t every single of those be proved to work before releasing them in the market, like is done with normal medicine? How can a single experiment be proof enough that a whole range products work?
That’s not very scientific.
Homeopathy is not a theory – it is applied science,practice.
Homeopathy has phenomenological theory.
>But direct to the point, if a single study proved that some homeopathic remedy work, would that mean that all homeopathic remedies work?
As I wrote before it is incorrect to test homeopathic remedies in RCT.
Why?
Becouse remedies selected very individualy.
I give an example : surgery is not only surgical instruments, but also skills of doctors,
quality of aseptics, et cetera .
You cannot separate surgical instruments from surgery.
The same in homeopathy : you cannot separate remedy from individual presciption.
As system, homeopathy works.
>I DID answer your question. At this point , from your reply, its quite obvious you dont understand science or what I was talking about, nor do you want to, you just want to >be right.
You did not.
So I am waiting.
I did reply, you just didn’t get it because you dont understand 1) and 2), not to mention you totally ignored 3).
Sorry, but you did not.
How typical! :-)
Hi Alex, There was at least 3 replies to your question, from AutonomicNotion and Myself. I assume good faith on your part, and that your not actually just trolling, so I will give this one more go.
First reply, I stated in 1) concepts one must understand about science and 2) pitfalls one must understand about the human brain and how science tries to minimize those. once those are understood, the answer to your question will be made obvious to you.
Second reply, AutonomicNotion did attempt to reply (twice) to you directly, and then I also did (in case you missed it):
“Yes we did. the article is a 1912 article full of unsubstantiated anecdotes. Scientifically, its useless.
We can find just as easily anecdotes arguing the oposite, what then? (http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html)”
—————————–
Ok, now, lets repeat the question and analyse it:
“Could placebo hypothesis explain phenomenon described in this http://homeoint.org/cazalet/tyler/nottodoit.htm article ?”
Answering “yes” or “no” to this question is to fall into a trap, its essentially a loaded question. e.g asking “Have you stopped beating your wife?” is a loaded question, since answering it acknowledges the “wife beating”. It is a invalid question, here is why:
The question is basically this “Can Science [placebo 'hypothesis'] explain this evidence [link-to-100-year-old-article]?”
Before one answers this, one has to evaluate the evidence being given, and the fact is that the evidence being given is a article from 1912 article full of =>Anecdotal<= evidence.
Since Anecdotal evidence is NOT accepted scientific evidence, the question is invalid, and THAT is the answer to that question.
One issue which has not been addressed by any of the supporters of homeopathy here, is that it is possible to replace “homeopathy” in their responses with voodoo, prayer (within any faith), blood-letting, or any number of other popular superstitious healing belief systems. All of these beliefs are full of anecdotal evidence which support their believers’ world view.
The scientific method provides our best hope to take a step back from our world view; to prevent ourselves from fooling ourselves; to avoid favoring short-cuts of belief over the hard work of proof. This is not easy. It often challenges our sense of self and of humankind’s place in the cosmos.
Doctors and other “experts” are just as susceptible to false conclusions and delusion as the rest of us. I know many intelligent, creative, well-educated people who hold beliefs based on misinterpreted personal experience. I know some who have died younger than they might have, because these beliefs influenced their choice of treatment when presented with serious medical conditions. This is why I do not remain a “shruggie”; why I agree that homeopathy, homeopaths, and naturopaths are dangerous. I don’t believe they are malicious, simply mesled and mistaken.
I used homeopathy on my children as toddlers, and was convinced that I was seeing efficacy. Now I am teaching my children, as teenagers, how to think critically and challenge their own beliefs, as well as mine (they love that part). This is one of the greatest gifts I can give them.
Kyle, thanks for the excellent forum and blog.
Here is a question which no supporter of homeophathy has ever answered: The biotech industry is a multibillion dollar concern with thousands of chemists working hard to gain the slightest edge on the competition. Much of the chemistry is done in water. If water had a memory – if there was any property of water which could be construed as a memory – that property would be studied and used to make money. Yet there is no example of such a property anywhere in the literature or in any patent. How do supporters of homeopathy, whose existence depends entirely on this property, explain this?
Homeopathy is snake oil for the modern era
Homeopaths act as if ‘science’ is fighting against homeopathy in some sort of ideological battle. They don’t realise that ‘science’ isn’t a thing. Science is a tool we use to discover the underlying truths of our reality.
The scientific method is used because, funnily enough it works. Empiricism, double blind tests, reproduction of experiments, statistical analysis, observation, rigorous peer review and so on are used because they work. They filter out the bullshit. We don’t listen to people who suggest the world is flat or that the sun orbits the earth, because the observation of such phenomena leads to the opposite conclusion.
Homeopathic remedies filter out whatever ‘active ingredient’ they use in the water to the point where nothing of the original ingredient is present anymore.
They claim that the water has a ‘memory’ of the ingredient. Water however has passed through the digestive tracts of hundreds, thousands, millions of people. Any given molecule could have come from anywhere else on the planet, thus retaining the ‘memory’ of its previous location and all the bacteria and other molecules present there. How does the water ‘know’ which ingredient to retain the memory of? How can H20 have a memory?
It has not been demonstrated to have a memory in any peer reviewed journal article. This isn’t discrimination or dogma. This is prove that it works beyond a placebo, prove that it works beyond the statistical probability that the person’s recovery was chance or a boosted immune response. Prove it with double blind studies, prove it with controlled experiments, prove that it’s not a placebo, prove that the homeopathic remedy was the cause of the recovery and wasn’t administered, coincidentally, at the same time that the immune system started to gain ground on the illness. Prove that water has a memory through independent, controlled studies.
If none of this can be proven, demonstrated, reproduced or falsified, then I’m sorry, homeopathy will continue to be labeled as pseudo-science. It’s not alternative medicine. Either it’s medicine or it’s not. Anecdotal evidence isn’t a sound foundation for peddling snake oil. Anecdotal evidence is dismissed when people talk about seeing ghosts, being abducted by aliens, communing with supernatural beings and manipulating the chakra of the body to produce healing energies.
If someone says ‘oh wow, you should try this remedy, it really works!’ and there’s no hard evidence to support it, the standard position as regarding the efficacy of the remedy is doubt. If you claim that it works, the burden of proof is on you. If you cannot prove it using the tried and tested methods of scientific endeavour, then please stop peddling this placebo rubbish.
I am 28 years old and, except for cough syrup, I have never taken any specific medicine for anything. Even though I’ve been bed-laden for weeks sometimes. I’ve been “automagically” cured every single time.
This is certainly not a unique situation and probably holds true for a majority of people my age. In this day and age, lethal disease in people below 60 is relatively uncommon (compared to earlier in history), and a lot of people live until they are in their seventies before they actually need to see a doctor.
Anyone, that happen to invest emotionally in any kind of therapy, and starts using this therapy to treat simple ailments, will therefore find that it works, simply because they are not actually intervening.
I think that this is interesting and I just wanted to make that point to show my appreciation to this new-found blog.
P.S. Just for the fun of it, here’s a picture with me and James: http://i.imgur.com/NvvtD.jpg
Thank you for your good writing!
Yeah it’s funny, last time my kid was sick, she was very sick for a few days, then the day I finally decided to start the antibiotic course, she recovered immediately.
I did finish the antibiotic course simply because there is much harm in exposing populations of bacteria with antibiotics without going through the full course to eradicate them. But the recovery was so speedy that I am privately convinced that her adaptive immune system simply kicked in.
That’s the thing. Even in “House M.D”, they recognize that sometimes, people just get better by themselves. But because the time it takes for the adaptive immune system to react is quite long, people have had all the time in the world to panic and administer remedies that later can be thanked for doing the work.
Obviously the remedies that have been proven to increase the likelihood of survival should still be administered, but this type of very human reaction leaves room for many alternative cures to gain credibility.
Yes these homeopaths simply overlook the statistical likelihood that they will recover without any treatment anyways…
I overdosed on homeopathy every day for four months. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened.
Here’s when I started it:
http://furtherthoughtsfortheday.blogspot.com/2010/11/homeopathy-overdose.html
Here are my posts:
http://furtherthoughtsfortheday.blogspot.com/search/label/overdose
There’s really nothing too homeopathy, save wishful thinking, the placebo effect, and childish behaviour. In other cases, there’s actual fraud. It’s my opinion that homeopaths are either frauds or children:
http://furtherthoughtsfortheday.blogspot.com/2011/01/homeopathy-overdoes-frauds-and-children.html
There is a simple answer, and I allready provided it.
Actually, homeopathy has been shown to be effective. It has cured both simple ailments like colds and aches, up to serious diseases like cancer and AIDS. There have been thousands of case studies reported by professional medical doctors which backs this up.
As for your claim that there is no such thing as energy patterns in water, you clearly don’t know your physics. Molecular orbital theory for example is entirely to do with energy patterns and changing energy states in chemicals. Even your science shows that there is a basis behind homeopathy, so please don’t claim that it’s unscientific, you just show your bias.
You should really read more about this stuff before you spout off nonsense in your blog.
Shown to be effective? Where? On what peer reviewed journal? Oh that’s right, NONE.
No, science doesn’t show a basis behind homeopathy, because you’re applying words that sound interesting to an area where they simply don’t have any meaning. Even if we accept that the water has a “pattern”, it doesn’t mean that said pattern actually has a physiological effect. This isn’t a bias, except against bullshit.
I’m very curious to see any information showing treatment of HIV/AIDS.
This doesn’t make me an expert on the matter, but I do volunteer with a group that helps those with HIV/AIDS and would love to see any research on any effective treatments of the disease.
As for claims against what this blog goes in to, I haven’t seen any double blind clinical trials on homeopathy that showed anything more potent than the placebo effect.
As for as Molecular orbital theory, that deals with where electrons are in the bonds of a molecule, not what concentrations of any molecules in a solution are, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say there.
I have yet to see any legitimate scientific backing behind homeopathy or most alternative medicines. I’d be happy to conduct a real, live, double blind study with you some time.
Cures AIDS? I don’t need a double blind study to point out that your claims are false and your description of “energy patterns” in physics as support to your claims of “energy patterns” in water is yet another fallacy or more simply shows a juvenile understanding of the subject…
I think/hope Sandeep is just being sarcastic
If you argued for homeopathy here, then you are no more intelligent or enlightened than faith healers. Please get help. Or an education. Or both. Before you kill someone, especially your children who trust in your judgement unconditionally, who are innocent minds that absorb whatever information you give them even if it is nonsense…
>“Yes we did. the article is a 1912 article full of unsubstantiated anecdotes. >Scientifically, its useless.
The same phenomena observed by today homeopaths and homeopathic patients.
If science rejects facts it is not science – it is faith in existing theories.
How many people saw lighting ball?
Several thouthands at most.
How many people are or were under homeopathic treatment?
Millions, tens of millions.
But nobody reject fact that lighting balls exits.
By the way science is unable to explain lighting balls phenomena.
I hope someone else comes over to reply, because I see a logical fallacy here but its 2300 in Baghdad and I am too tired to point out which one it is…
Hey Mike,
I did ask Alex if he understood, and I quote:
“1) Do you understand what science really is? Do you want understand the scientific method? Do you know what are the differences between a scientific theory and layman’s theory? peer-review? Statistical significance?
2) Do you know what is anecdotal evidence and how useless it is? Are you familiar with cognitive distortions such as confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, or texas sharpshooter fallacy?”
He said he does understand (yeah right), and yet he makes this kind of arguments, so maybe he is doing it on purpose :)
The difference is Alex, we can reproduce the conditions in the lab where ball lightning can exist. There isn’t a whole lot of evidence that ball lightning can actually manifest in nature though, and the possibility is fiercely debated amongst, you know, scientists. There might be no doubt among you and your friends that ball lightning exists, but AGAIN, that’s the difference between unsubstantiated anecdotal claims and EVIDENCE.
And frankly if scientists were to waste a lot of time on unlikely and implausible phenomenon, I would be worried and a little upset that they aren’t working on things that actually are interesting or make a difference.
Lighting balls was not reproduced in lab, and this phenomena was not explained despite quite extensive research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lighting#Laboratory_experiments
not that it matters anyway, XYZ of the gaps is a stupid argument anyway
If you think anecdotal claims is valid evidence, you definitely dont understand science how science works.
btw, of course your confirmation bias left out the second part “We can find just as easily anecdotes arguing the oposite, what then? (http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html)”
On another point, in your posts, you seem to keep stating ‘science cant explain this, and that’, and I get the feeling your trying to imply that somehow points out that homeopathy is true. It sounds like the God of the Gaps argument, or Homeopathy of the Gaps if you prefer. See this to understand why thats a pretty bad argument ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GYuXSsk4EQ )
If you think anecdotal claims is valid evidence, you definitely dont understand science how science works.
btw, of course your confirmation bias left out the second part “We can find just as easily anecdotes arguing the oposite, what then? (http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html)”
On another point, in your posts, you seem to keep stating ‘science cant explain this, and that’, and I get the feeling your trying to imply that somehow points out that homeopathy is true. It sounds like the God of the Gaps argument, or Homeopathy of the Gaps if you prefer. See this to understand why thats a pretty bad argument ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GYuXSsk4EQ )
>you know who else has a financial interest? people selling water as “medicine”
Yes , but they are less powerfull thatn those who are selling allopathic medicines.
>Your research paper offers nothing except to say that we should throw out the rules by which we judge every other medical treatment and use new ones just for “CAM” – sounds like a stupid move, imho.
Medical tretament should be judged not by RCT , but by final results.
It is obvious and clear.
>Comparing a simple drug effectiveness trial to a quantum physics experiment is a bit of a reach.
You probably misunderstood me.
I wanted to say that homeopathical tretament is very complicated, and in some cases
when scientists are dealing with much more simple systems they cannot find proper design and give clear interpretation.
Homeopathy is not reduced to remedy like surgery is not reduced to surgical instruments : surgical instruments in improper hands are usefull.
>Here’s the thing: first you have to prove that water has a “memory” or that it can retain the effective molecular whatevers. It has never been proven.
Memory of water no more than hypothesis, often misquoted and misudenrstood.
Correction :
Homeopathy is not reduced to remedy, like surgery is not reduced to surgical instruments : surgical instruments in improper hands are useless.
>Here’s the thing: first you have to prove that water has a “memory” or that it can retain the effective molecular whatevers. It has never been proven.
Memory of water no more than hypothesis, often misquoted and misunderstood..
>Answering “yes” or “no” to this question is to fall into a trap,
So you cannot avod this question and this is why you resort to demagogy.
And take in account simple fact : phenomena described in this article is observed by millions of homeopathic patients and by hundreds of thousands of homeopaths.
So, as soon ,as I understand the answer is : placebo hypothesis cannot explain this phenomena.
Yes, it absolutely can, as all of the systematic reviews of clinical trials of homeopathy have found.
People, unfortunately, can be profoundly wrong about their own experience.
I am not talking about systematic reviews of clinical trials of homeopathy.
I ma talking about phenomena descibed in article by Maragret Tayler.
Your confirmation bias is absolutely incredible, yet here it is again:
again: read the whole thing again, there is no demagogy, Anecdotal evidence is NOT valid scientific evidence. thats what everyone who replied to you is trying to tell you.
And again, one can find thousand of reports of people for who homeopathy DIDNT work, some of whom it actually did harm (or even death), what then, what explanation you give to that. Anecdotal evidence is highly unreliable and its not scientifically acceptable be it for or even against homeopathy.
And btw, you did again another fallacy there, maybe someone will point it out for you or maybe someday you will get it.
Alex, I hope you are a young guy, I used to be like you when I was younger, the younger the mind the easiest it is for it for evolve and develop, study philosophy with an open mind, it will help you greatly. this blog might also be of interested to you http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/ and http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/
Evidence from millions of peoples around world is not an anecdotal evidence.
If somebody thinks otherwise this one is prejudiced or well paid for his/her prejudicement.
Anecdotal evidence is exactly what that is. Millions of people used to believe that sacrificing humans would increase the harvest. The numbers of subscribers does not increase the validity of truth.
Alex, you also believe in voodoo i guess, if millions of people believe in it and swear that it works.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lighting#Laboratory_experiments
>not that it matters anyway, XYZ of the gaps is a stupid argument anyway
This is not reproduction – this only attempts to reproduce.
I don’t care about scientific validity and I care even less about self-styled skeptics telling me what is nonsense and what is not. Maybe homeopathy is rubbish and everyone who’s benefitted from it is delusional. If it helps me, that’s all I care about. People who imagine they know it all and nothing is beyond understanding or proof are high on ego and self-importance.
At least we agree that homeopathic medicine is rubbish and all the people who thinks that is helps them are delusional.
Rubish from view of point contemporary science.
From point of view of 19-th cetury people Quantum Mechanics and relativity is rubbish.
Research of long-term homeopathic tretament:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/5/115
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/8/413
http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.2005.11.793
http://dcscience.net/spence-jacm-05.pdf
http://scienceofhomeopathy.blogspot.com/search/label/Research
http://audesapere.dk/filer/Homeopathic%20Treatment%20of%20Chronic%20Sinusitis.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11680802
The fact that you say that random, placebo controlled trials, the ones that test ever other medicine, are not suitable for CAM is just special pleading because they do not work beyond placebo.
>just special pleading
No, it is assertion of simple fact.
Because CAM treatments are very complex it is impossible to devise appropriate experiment.
By the way efficacy of some medical tretament are not evaluated by RCT .For instance surgery, anticancer therapy are not evaluated by RCT.
And in any case proper evaluation of any medical method is not done in lab but
by long-term observation of patients.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/holmes-deconstruction-ebhc-06.pdf
http://skynet.ohsu.edu/~hersh/ebcm-04-ebm.pdf
The evidence from homeopathy teaches us that homeopathy is not placebo, but extensive research is needed. May be we will know more about placebo effect itself.
PLacebo effect is not well studied and there is disagreement among scientists about it presence at all.
Again, saying CAM is too complex for science is just special pleading.
The evidence, in the form of all of the systematic reviews of homeopathy in the medical literature, says quite definitively that it does not work beyond placebo. Medicine, pharmacology, biology, and chemistry all agree on this conclusion.
And one more time, saying that the placebo effect has not been studied enough is special pleading to try to keep homeopathy plausible. It has been tested, it is not plausible.
You can’t accept science that agrees with your position and disagree with the science that does not at the same time. That is a defining characteristic of pseudoscience.
Hi Alex,
So all those scientific studies are all invalid and done by closed minded scientists who badly designed the experiment etc etc, UNLESS they agree with my point of view right? :)
I’ve seen some of the studies, and they dont seem to use control groups, the approach seems to take stats of the ‘follow-up’ after the treatment. and others were actually inconclusive.
I CHALLENGE you to post those to reddit.com/r/askscience/ and see how it holds up when analysed by people who understand the nature of scientific studies.
>Millions of people used to believe that sacrificing humans would increase the harvest.
Million used to believe in human sacrificing?
We cannot interview mesomaricans who lived in 16th century.
But our case is very different : people from different backgrounds, from different countries , who do not know each other , many of them university educated experience phenomena described in article by Margaret Tyler.
So it is not mass psychosis and not ideological indoctrination.
This is evidence.
>The numbers of subscribers does not increase the validity of truth.
Which truth is valid and which is not?
Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of medical efficacy.
The truth, especially medical truth, is backed up by scientific evidence, not shared stories.
It is not anecdotal evidence – it is phenomenon.
THis phenomenon was not properly investigated.
>Again, saying CAM is too complex for science is just special pleading.
I did not say that CAM too complex for science. I said that RCT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_controlled_trial
is not well suited for investigating of CAM, and it is certanly are not well suited for ultimate investingation of efficiency of any medical method.
>The evidence, in the form of all of the systematic reviews of homeopathy in the medical literature, says quite definitively that it does not work beyond placebo.
Could you give me a reference to such systematic reviews?
>The truth, especially medical truth, is backed up by scientific evidence, not shared stories.
So you claim that science possesses ultimate truth?
But how to be with some medical rearch in 1930th and later which claimed that tobaco does not cause damage to human health?
Homeopathy was not investigated enough, and most studies which were done were incorrect.
Why do you not understand what special pleading is? Saying that all the studies which say homeopathic is nonsense were done incorrectly is a logical fallacy.
Here is just one of the systematic reviews.
Their conclusion:
Eleven independent systematic reviews were located. Collectively they failed to provide strong evidence in favour of homeopathy. In particular, there was no condition which responds convincingly better to homeopathic treatment than to placebo or other control interventions. Similarly, there was no homeopathic remedy that was demonstrated to yield clinical effects that are convincingly different from placebo. It is concluded that the best clinical evidence for homeopathy available to date does not warrant positive recommendations for its use in clinical practice.
Case closed.
Again, you fail to realize that saying science does not know everything if it says homeopathy is bogus, and touting it when it does not is a fallacy (not evidence).
You are right! Just like alien abductions are a phenomenon! All those people can’t be wrong! Its not anecdotes; its a PHENOMENON that hasn’t been “systematically reviewed”!
You have opened my eyes to the truth Alex! Now I know I wasn’t crazy when they probed me on their ship!
[This is sarcasm by the way]
>Why do you not understand what special pleading is?
Kyle it is not a special pleading – it is constatation of facts.
And I explained why it is as it is.
And I gave links to articles.
I would like to say more : not all phenomena should be researched in the same way.
Did you read this book
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/feyerabe.htm
?
Ernst’s review is methodologically incorrect.
Take a look on a phrase :
“Similarly, there was no homeopathic
remedy that was demonstrated to yield clinical effects that are convincingly different
from placebo”
Homeopathic treatment is not reduced to single remedy : in order to treat patient one often should change remedy – I already wrote that RCT are not suited for homeopathy.
I wounder that author wrote :
“he author is a trained homeopath; he has no financial interests in this area.”
But he is not a homeopath :
http://www.hmc21.org/#/edzard-ernst/4543212059
And I found another article for you :
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/5/12
If you cannot study homeopathy with a scientific clinical trial, you cannot claim any evidence in your favor that is a clinical trial. You cherry-pick evidence and then present anecdotes as facts.
>you cannot claim any evidence in your favor that is a clinical trial.
The usual RCT design is not suited to homeopathy, as well it is not suited to surgery, anti-cancer therapy, AIDS therapy, psychotherapy.
So all these areas based on cherry-pick evidence and then present anecdotes.
Actually believe it or not, RCT is also done with surgeries, although its very rare for obvious reasons.
its also done with cancer & AIDS treatments.
As for psychotherapy, its in the field of psychology, a social science, so I have no idea, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they did do it, or at least something similar in order to reduce bias.
>Again, you fail to realize that saying science does not know everything if it says homeopathy is bogus, and touting it when it does not is a fallacy (not evidence).
Sorry, but homeopathy is not a falacy : I gave links to articles which say that homeopathy succeeds when allopathy falls.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11327521
http://www.integrativemed.org/text/OutcomeStudy.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16226198
http://www.altcancerweb.com/homeopathy/outcome-829-homeopathy-uk.pdf
So we have two paradoxes:
1) Most of scientists claim that homeopathy is no more than placebo. But millions f patients and tens of thousands of homeopaths observe phenomena which placebo hypothesis cannnot explain at all, including healing animals and plants.
But these scientists simply ingnore this evidence.
2) For many conditions homeopathic treatment is much more effective than allopathy:
everyday evidence and research ( please see links to papers ) tells us about this.
But skeptics continue to claims that homeopathy is not efficients and it is just placebo.
“Sorry, but homeopathy is not a falacy”
Indeed its not a falacy, the sky being or not blue is also not a falacy.
Before you start using this terms, from fallacy, to facts, anecdotal evidence, science, etc… (you know, those 1) and 2) points i mentioned) perhaps you should investigate them a little better
1)
“most of scientists claim that homeopathy is no more than placebo” -> that ‘claim’ is made based of scientific evidence of double blind studies. the claims done by homeopaths is anecdotal evidence. scientists dont ‘simply ignore’ those explains, they have been analysed and proven to be false.
2) post that on reddit (see above reply). although if you actually read them carefully they basically say the oposite of what you want to.
This claim stems from improper designed experiments, and from ignoring phenomena which are witnessed by hundreds of thousands homeopaths and by millions of patients worldwide.
>You are right! Just like alien abductions are a phenomenon!
You is completely wrong!
Please show me abducted person!?
But there are millions of homeopathic patients who can testify and who can bring results of medical tests which show health improvement.
That was obvious sarcasm Alex.
He was showing you how ludicrous it is to claim that just because people say something happened to you to assert that it is a fact that it happened.
What he just did with alien abductions is exactly what you are doing with homeopathy. The irony is fantastic.
>He was showing you how ludicrous it is to claim that just because people say something
Please do not forget that scientists are people too, with their believes, prejustices and personal interests.
Let me remind you a story how French Academy rejected existence of meteorites.
>What he just did with alien abductions is exactly what you are doing with homeopathy.
This analogy is false and I wrote why.
>> Let me remind you a story how French Academy rejected existence of meteorites.
Yes they did indeed, in the 18th century. (modern science & science is considered to have started in the 19th century btw). there is a book called “Meteorites: messengers from space” that describes this:
“[on rejecting meteors] This was perfectly natural skepticism. For thousands of years ignorance, superstition and imagination had been turning meteorites into gods, monsters and other utterly unbelievable wonders in which science could take no stake. Even people who actually saw meteorites fall told conflicting stories, coloured by belief and tradition, and sometimes purely imaginary. It was inevitable, therefore, that an astronomer who described a fall of meteorites in 1753 was met by the same disbelief that greeted imaginary tales. (……….) by 1830 the true nature of meteorites was generally admitted and collections were being made”
notice: why they rejected it: it was anecdotal evidence and very ludicrous one because testimonials from people are highly unrealiable. And why was it later accepted? When there was scientific evidence for it!!
Modern scientists don’t believe in homeopathy just for the hell of it, there are specific reasons that makes them reject it that have already been mentioned in this blog.
Btw, the whole the french academy reject this and that, seems to (again) imply a Gaps Argument. It seems that all pseudosciences counter arguments seem to boil down to Anecdotal evidence and Gaps Arguments.
>Yes they did indeed, in the 18th century. (modern science & science is considered to have started in the 19th century btw). there is a book called “Meteorites: messengers from space” that describes this:
Sorry, but I should to correct you.
Modern science started in the end of 17th century.
>notice: why they rejected it: it was anecdotal evidence and very ludicrous one because testimonials from people are highly unrealiable.
This is simply not true : there were a lot of witnesses, all of them credible people.
IN one particular case they simply ignored evidence from 300 people.
“But when a rain of meteors fell on 24 July 1790 in Barbotan, near the French town of Agen, the preferred approach of the scientific establishment was denial. Sworn affidavits by 300 witnesses attesting to the fall were simply ignored. Professor Nicolas Baudin, a local physicist out for a stroll, did see a meteor fall, but when he wrote this up five years later his editors added their comment on Baudin’s and other such reports: “We do not place any faith in any of them.” “
“Even people who actually saw meteorites fall told conflicting stories, coloured by belief and tradition, and sometimes purely imaginary.”
Anyway, at the end of the day, this is a silly Gaps like argument that doesn’t prove anything to a rational person.
Homeopathy has been given a serious look, its mechanisms dont work, and its results dont hold up either.
>Even people who actually saw meteorites fall told conflicting stories, coloured by belief and tradition, and sometimes purely imaginary.
Not these 300 people and many others.
And scientist should anyway take in account belief and tradition.
But their accounts were ignored as ignored experiences of millions of peoples.
>Anyway, at the end of the day, this is a silly Gaps like argument that doesn’t prove anything to a rational person.
If rational person is rationaly paid for his rationality nothing can convince him/her.
>Homeopathy has been given a serious look, its mechanisms dont work, and its results dont hold up either.
Could you give me a link on properly done work in homeopathy?
It is simply wrong. Since its invention there is a serious bias against publications of homeopathic articles, many works on homeopathy were done against laws of homeopathy, more than hundreds cases are ignored, and patients and homeopaths experiences ignored too.
Is this science or some kind of religion?
I guess, it is religion.
>Actually believe it or not, RCT is also done with surgeries, although its very rare for obvious reasons.
>its also done with cancer & AIDS treatments.
I know, but as you noted they are done very rare : actually I know only about one such study.
The same true for emergency room procedures.
>As for psychotherapy,
It is imposssible to evlauate psychotherapy by RCT.
Anyway ultimative tests for any medical system is “field effectivness” and homeopathy
is VERY EFFECTIVE medical system.
that ‘field effectiveness’ has to be documented properly and usually with control groups to reduce for bias, thats what scientific studies are for. in the case of homeopathy its simply no better than a placebo, indicating that it doesn’t do anything at all. Again, one cannot take conclusions based on anecdotal evidence, what about people who claim homeopathy did nothing at all or even did harm, in either case there is no way to prove either right or wrong without a time machine. only by proper scientific study can one determine this.
>‘field effectiveness’ has to be documented properly
This was properly documented millions of times.
>nd usually with control groups to reduce for bias,
For study of complex intervention control groups method is wrong design of experiment – I wrote why and gave links.
I provide them again :
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2288/7/7
http://www.chiro.org/research/FULL/The_Placebo_Trap.pdf
http://www.liebertonline.com/toc/acm/7/3
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2288/6/29/
>Again, one cannot take conclusions based on anecdotal evidence,
It is anti-scientific to dub observance of natural phenomena as anectodical evidence.
Consider this, Antiobiotics, We know how it works, the effects on bacteria can be shown and explained on a molecular level. On top of that, double blind studies on humans shows that it works.
Now consider homeopathy, the original remedy is diluted countless times, we actually know roughly the number of molecules in a portion of (say) arsenic and in water. at 12C its unlikely to even contain 1 molecule of the arsenic, at 30C is virtually impossible. a 12C dilution is like a drop in an ocean. In other words, its just water. To know this and to take a 30C dilution to treat a illness is truly an act of faith or madness if one has a serious illness.
Alex,
You might be interested in an alternative medicine called PlungerTherapy.
This medicine brings the toxins out helping the body heal itself faster. Thousands of people online swear by it, plunger-therapists report their patients satisfaction. Studies done show most patients feel better weeks after the treatment.
Now, those pesky scientists claim that the mechanism for plungertherapy doesnt make any sense and its impossible for it to have any sort of effect in the body. They should know better of course, science has been ‘wrong’ before like when they rejected existence of meteors, they shouldn’t do the same mistake again and ignore the evidence of thousands of people.
And then those pesky scientists, also claim that even if plungertherapy somehow worked and they all missed a ginormous piece of physics, chemistry, etc.. (and our nuclear power stations, computers,etc.. work by sheer luck. ) plungertherapy results dont hold up, because in tests, patient recovery is not better than those with a placebo. stupid scientists dont understand that PlungerTherapy is not reduced to remedy like surgery, if only they knew…
>You might be interested in an alternative medicine called PlungerTherapy.
I am not interested, but any way I looked in web and found no mention about PlungerTherapy.
This is cheap trick to divert discussion into other direction.
We are talking about homeopathy.
I am in process of homeopathic treatment and not in process of some other treatment.
So your in process of homeopathic treatment, now we can understand why you have such a confirmation bias, you have a big stake on it. I hope you aren’t wasting too much money.
Have you tried PlungerTherapy yet?
Alex, Plunger Therapy would be a perfect complement to your homeopathic treatment.
Kyle,
hi! just new to this discussion… almost fully qualified now as a fully fledged homeopath!
so i have a problem with your bottle of “”homeopathic sleeping pills”… Elaine is right, they don’t exist.
A lot of big pharma (homeopathic big pharma labs) produce combination remedies (many remedies all on the same pill, and unfortunately, even I have to agree that some of the remedies are counter productive when put together!).. this is marketing, quick fix stuff and has a very low chance of success.
With all the energy you are putting into making people believe homeopathy is worthless, I presume you have looked things up, and so you know by now that homeopathy is the “individualization of symptoms, matching to the patient”.. we do not prescribe sleeping pills, homeopathic or not!
We will prescribe a remedy which is directed at the main thing stopping you from living your life freely in all respects… and once the remedy is matched to you by a proficient homeopath, your sleeping problems, as indeed all the other symptoms will disappear by themselves.. we don’t need to prescribe sleeping pills.. so whatever junk you got under the name of “homeopathic sleeping pills” is just an over the counter, non prescribed, big pharma marketing shot!
I am probably not the only homeopath completely exasperated by this way of doing things, it just gives the profession a very bad image, whereas it is not even proper homeopathy.
Proper homeopathy is unicist – one matching remedy to the patient. NEVER EVER combine two homeopathic remedies, because if you have proficient homeopath, you won’t even need the two, one will do fine…
And then Kyle, just for the sake of being able to criticize us more knowledgeably, why don’t you go see a real homeopath for your “sleeping problems” which are just one of the symptoms of your general malaise?
Dominique
I am not concerned with the procedures of homeopathic process, rather the “medicine” itself.
There is absolutely zero evidence beyond anecdote or placebo that homeopathic treatments can cure or even treat anything.
There is no magic “memory” to water. Without any active ingredient, there is no biological effect, plain and simple. Homeopathy cannot even overcome this basic obstacle.
Hi Elaine,
As just said to Kyle, I am new to this forum..
just wanted to say, good for you treating you and yours homoepathically… i do too… i have saved my kid from acute appendicitis incidentally, he was the only one of our five not to be operated on thanks to homeopathy, although he had the sx…
I’ve been doing this for years now, firstly with our own homeopath, and now starting to do my own stuff….
Keep going,
Dom ;)
You are playing a very dangerous game.
You are so lucky your child isn’t dead. And I hope that no one listens to your anecdote as a credible reason for using homeopathy on their own children especially for life threatening conditions like that. You are an incredible danger to yourself and others…
And just a last one for you Kyle….
I wonder why I am working with so many vets if homeopathy is worthless and quack medicine.
These guys have no time to lose, they definitely don’t want to lose face… and yet… we are working together.. have been for some time.. we are getting excellent results with animals that vets can do nothing with… time after time… wonder why they keep on asking us????
get savvy with homoepathy before criticizing… then at least you sound as though you know something about it!
The fact that many people use the treatment says nothing about whether or not the treatment works. Yes, absolutely, a treatment can be worthless even if many people think it works.
You say I do not understand how homeopathy works, I am not sure that you understand the fundamentals of medicine. Get savvy about actual science…then at least you sound as though you know something.
Hey Dom, I guess Plunger Therapy would also be a great complement for you
I am big on going to the gym and staying fit and eating halfway decently, but I in my experience I have noticed that many people who follow things like homeopathic medicine are just like those that follow fad diets or the newest diet pills/fitness boosters etc. They are looking for what I think is a lazy way of taking care of yourself; nothing is better preventative “medicine” than a truly healthy and active lifestyle. Your chances of getting sick in the first place plummet (if I am not mistaken) when you are fit and eating properly. Homeopaths that I know are just looking for another quick fix to their health.
Kyle, could you also put out some research on exercise/fitness/health science as opposed to some of the baloney that is out there, the “pseudo” exercise science?
In the fitness world a lot of people follow bad advise that comes out in one article on one study or try different pills and such based on word of mouth. Its hard to sort out what is really science based or not. On the other end of that, many people try to find quick fixes so they can avoid going to the gym or doing rigorous exercise and follow bogus fad diets and silly fitness plans backed by some “Dr” or “professional” trainer.
It would be great if you could get us some worthwhile research and sources…
The Mike, check this out: http://www.evidencebasedfitness.blogspot.com/
Hey crew, I am thoroughly enjoying this discourse. It would be improved by resisting the urge for insults and sarcasm, imho. Remember that intelligent people can hold on to mistaken beliefs for a surprisingly long time.
Personally, I welcome Dom’s input, however misguided I think he is. I agree that the “overdosing” on homeopathic sleeping pills is a tired stunt that reveals a basic misunderstanding on the part of skeptics; and one that will not make any converts of believers. We can do better.
“We will prescribe a remedy which is directed at the main thing stopping you from living your life freely in all respects… and once the remedy is matched to you by a proficient homeopath, your sleeping problems, as indeed all the other symptoms will disappear by themselves..”
Dom, that is a classic description of the apparent effect of placebo and confirmation bias. The same claims can be made for acupuncture, reflexology, reiki, blood-letting, voodoo, and many other modalities with thousands of adherents. When well designed, repeatable studies examine the effects of these methods, the results are consistent: no better than placebo.
The most fascinating part of this to me is how complicated our beliefs are. Not to be confused by facts, they are intricately entwined with our ego, world view, culture, and self image. Misinterpreted personal experience usually trumps scientific evidence. Until our arguments, as skeptics, reflect this understanding… we are wasting our breath.
Your obsession with homeopathic trials is driven by malice and your rhetoric is tiresome.
If you need to see one of the many positive trial for homeopathy I suggest you contact the W H O and ask when the 2005 trials are going to be published.
There are hundreds of others you just choose not to believe them through bias.
You have nothing to add to that’s not already in the shadowy & shifty world of homeopathy bashing.
While on the subject regarding double blind trials I would be very interested if you could direct me to the results of mainstream RCT trials regarding toxic drug interaction. They need to be genuine not faked or corrupt.
There should be freedom of choice between mainstream and CAM.
Intuitively patients seek Homeopathy as they are weary of mainstream failures , half truths of unfulfilled claims. They are seeking the truth. They do not care too much about the RCT regarding homeopathy they can see and feel the evidence -it works- in other words treating them and not the disease.
The system of medicine and the ethics that you seem to support has a track record more representative of `dirty medicine’ we can see it here.
http://freepdfhosting.com/53888d5b53.pdf
Here are some relevant quotes that sum up this;
Quote;
“Researchers are deliberately falsifying data to make it seem that a drug is safe and effective. As a result, doctors who believe the ‘science’ are putting their patients’ lives at risk by prescribing them the drug.
The practice is so widespread that some doctors and scientists are calling for a new regulatory body that solely roots out ‘dirty science’, which is usually undertaken at the behest of a study’s sponsor, the manufacturer of the drug.
In a survey of 2,700 scientists and researchers, 13 per cent – or 351 – said they had direct experience of a colleague manipulating data to make it appear that a drug was safe or helpful when, in fact, it was useless or dangerous, or both.
The British Medical Journal, which carried out the survey, fears the UK may gain a reputation for ‘dirty science’ unless it creates more controls that are already being introduced in other countries.
(Source: British Medical Journal, 2012; 344: e14).’’
Quoting a past Director-General of WHO summed up mainstream very well:
“Most of the worlds medical schools prepare doctors, not to take care of the health of the people but instead for medical practice that is blind to anything but disease and the technology for dealing with it; a technology involving astronomical and ever- increasing prices directed towards fewer and fewer people…The medical empire and its closely related aggressive industry of diagnostic and therapeutic weapons sometimes appears more of a threat than a contribution to health…the very attempt to diagnose and treat one illness may produce another, be it through side effects or iatrogenesis’’
Pharmacillogical supporters should not be judgemental to homeopathy and CAM.
Fraud in science is nothing new, and it certainly does not mean that all of the medical literature on homeopathy is fraudulent. Needless to say, this non-sequitur is a logical fallacy. Show me a quote (or study) about fraud in homeopathy research, and then you’d at least be making a point.
Furthermore, you sound angry about “homeopathy bashing.” However, you offer not one argument for why/how homeopathy works. You can’t just blame the establishment. The science is clear: homeopathy does not and cannot work. If you want to be taken seriously, offer up a serious argument about the efficacy without deviously misdirecting into a discussion of fraud.
I t seems you have been drawn out of your comfort zone of mono themed insult and paranoid delusion. My comments were to inject some balance.
Pharma are the biggest corporate fraudsters and their drugs killed more people than traffic accidents. This is not fallacy it is relevant fact concerning patients interests.
“
First, do no harm’’ …..
Medical fraud is confined to the pharmacology fraternity and is not germane to natural medicine
You have deviously side stepped my questions to focus on your treacherous and nihilistic diatribe against homeopathy . Perhaps you have a spot of convenient amnesia.
Just Answer my questions;
Where are the RCT trials to confirm that it is safe to administer a cocktail of drugs to patients without disrupting the inner ecology of the body.
You have not acknowledged that the successful trials of homeopathy were suppressed by the WHO and the pharma cohorts in 2005.
Further, why do you think you should steer patients into one track medicine that proves to be failing. In a free world there is choice.
You and your co-horts stand in judgement against homeopathy and natural medicine while praying at the high alter of big pharma and it seems supporting the bad ethics of its brethren.
It is a shadowy and very shifty world .
It will not be possible to openly debate issues relative to homeopathy and complimentary medicine until you can demonstrate you are a true skeptic .
The conspiracy argument, also used by ur friendly neighbours creationists against biologists, and climate change skeptics against climate scientists.
Wanted to post this down here instead of being buried up in the middle where you won’t see it.
kyle, they could reproduce it (the German water photography study) 50 times which is about what they’ve done with all the NMR, theromluminescence, spectroscopy studies etc combined twice over and you people throw it all in the trash…. it’s because youre a professional skeptic.
your mind is hard-wired to be that way. it thinks only in terms of “NEGATIVITY” never IN TERMS of possibilities.
in a lot of professional skeptics there is an underlying depression involved, a black cloud that envelops their thinking. I don’t know if that’s you. But I’ve seen it too many times.
(going to try & get lucky & embed a youtube)
Water has Memory
Ask me how i think it might work…..
Harvard University….. electron tunneling…. phonon assisted tunneling
U of Arizona study on Olefaction and Homeopathy proved successful…… it’s Quantum!!!!
Quit being so negative!!!!
Hi Bosho,
There are 2 things i wanna to address, one is the water memory and the other is the so called ‘negativity’ you keep mentioning.
That video has been posted here a second time now being waved as ‘proof’ of homeopathy. I dont think the Oasis Channel ever thought this video would be misinterpreted the way it has been. Personally, I see little connection on what is being described in the video and the kind of water ‘memory’ that is claimed by homeopathy. I googled but couldn’t find the name of the researcher, institute and and any peer-review (or otherwise) studies (if you do please post in the comments, im most curious, and im not being sarcastic here…)
——-
Now, regarding water memory, when Samuel Hahnemann invented homeopathy, he had no concept of water memory whatsoever. indeed atomic theory developed in the beginning of the 19th century, It was then with this new knowledge that science dismissed homeopathy due to the fact there isn’t a single molecule left at any dilution above 15C. Homeopaths had =>NO explanation<= for this for +150 years.
Then in 1988, an experiment by a french scientist seemed to indicate that water had some kind of memory, now there was a mechanism that could explain homeopathy. The interest in the scientific community was huge, so big that the study got published in Nature.
Later, a follow up independent investigation found serious problem with the design of the experiment, specially observer bias, After a proper double blind procedure was done, the experiment was not reproducible with the same results. Other independent replications experiments were unable to replicate the finds.
However still to this day water memory is used by homeopathy enthusiasts even through it has repeatedly been debunked.
There seems to be nowadays also a tendency to turn to quantum physics to try to explain homeopathy, Its a case of a conclusion-searching-for-facts (http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/Images/CA230_1Trever.gif?w=300&h=300)
——-
Regarding, "negativity". There is a huge difference between trying to be a rational person and being a 'negative' person. Calling someone closed minded or 'negative' is a typical tactic used by ,say, fake psychics to cover themselves when things dont go well. A lot could be said on this subject, this lad explains it quite well http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI
Kyle — kept it short this time
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16813507
J Altern Complement Med. 2006 Jun;12(5):437-43.
Thermoluminescence in ultra-high dilution research.
van Wijk R, Bosman S, van Wijk EP.
Source
International Institute of Biophysics, Neuss, Germany. meluna.wijk@wxs.nl
CONCLUSION:
The nature of the phenomena here described still remains unexplained. Nevertheless, data suggest that thermoluminescence might be developed into a promising tool to study homeopathically prepared ultra- high dilutions.
==========
Kyle, hope this is better!
much shorter.
REPLICATED!!!! Martin Chaplin likes it….. nano-bubbles.
the truth is stranger than fiction; open your mind to a world of possibilities.
every polar molecule (H2O or ethanol) that come in violent contact with the solute through succussion — is slowly being put in a different state. it’s electrons and whatever else are all vibrating at a different frequency due to the violent mixing with this “different” solute.
–and as the process is repeated on down the the atoms and molecules resonate stronger and stronger…….. the thermoluminescence experiments along with NMR and spectroscopy show this to be true.
the human body is shown more and more and more to work on a quantum level….. that is why i posted the Harvard University — Dr Brooks Phonon assisted tunneling olefaction paper
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0611/0611205v1.pdf
Our body senses the vibrating atoms/molecules of the “remedy” frequency and starts to “push” back on the “bad” frequency pattern in our body.
Now, there’s one problem — homeopathy works like utter garbage (slight exaggeration)… that’s why it’s being left in the dust and being steamrolled in so many trials. Occasionally it comes out good in a study/trial. –But for the most part IMO it should be treatment of last resort.
Kyle — shortened the abstract this time.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16813507
Thermoluminescence in ultra-high dilution research.
Source — International Institute of Biophysics
CONCLUSION:
The nature of the phenomena here described still remains unexplained. Nevertheless, data suggest that thermoluminescence might be developed into a promising tool to study homeopathically prepared ultra-high dilutions.
===================
REPLICATED — DR. Martin Chaplin likes it….. nano-bubbles may be responsible. the truth is stranger than fiction; open your mind to a world of possibilities.
every polar molecule (H2O or ethanol) that come in violent contact with the solute through succussion — is slowly being put in a different state. its electrons and whatever else are all vibrating at a different frequency due to the violent mixing with this “different” solute.
–and as the process is repeated on down the atoms and molecules resonate stronger and stronger… the thermoluminescence experiments along with NMR and spectroscopy show this to be true.
the human body is shown more and more to work on a quantum level…that is why i posted the Harvard University – Dr Brooks, Phonon Assisted Tunneling Olefaction paper
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0611/0611205v1.pdf
Our body senses the vibrating atoms/molecules of the “remedy” frequency and starts to “push” back on the “bad” frequency pattern in our body.
Now, there’s one problem — homeopathy works like utter garbage (slight exaggeration)… that’s why it’s being left in the dust and being steamrolled in so many trials. Occasionally it comes out good in a study/trial. –But for the most part IMO it should be treatment of last resort.
Till 2010, there have been 213 human studies published in 92 peer-reviewed international medical journals and 2 Cochrane Reviews in support of homeopathy. Out of these, 103+ are available as FULL TEXT PDF which can be downloaded at http://drnancymalik.wordpress.com/article/scientific-research-in-homeopathy/
Medical degree in India is extremely competitive, the standards are at par with anywhere else. Those who fail to enter mainstream medicine ( the acceptance rate may be 5% of total entrance exam applicants) take homeopathy or Ayurveda which are still kept alive due to traditional practitioners.
I am a Homeopath and my practice deals mainly with children and babies, many of whoms parents come to Homeopathy as a last resort, with no faith in it, absolute doubt in its credibility and with a fear of ridicule in their hearts. They are quickly converted. Homeopathy works. It is paradoxical, inexplicable, outrageously illogical to the logical mind, but it works.
Let’s remember how many people have been imprisoned and ridiculed in the history of mankind for a belief that was held yet unable to be proven at that point in time (e.g Gallileo). Time will one day vindicate the Homeopaths of the world who tirelessly toil for the good of mankind and the upliftment of humanity.
Just try and understand it. Not some terribly superficial assessment from a few internet sites, but an earnest attempt. You could help prove how it works, rather than waste time moaning about it. It would be a Nobel prize in the making and the dawn of a new paradigm of understanding substance, the human body, and how they interact.
Who would turn their nose up at that?
Thanks
PS – a good book for curious and intelligent physicists:
‘The Emerging Science of Homeopathy 2 Ed: Complexity, Biodynamics, and Nanopharmacology’
Paolo Bellavite, Andrea Signorini, Peter Fisher
‘In this updated reissue of their classic ‘Homeopathy: A Frontier in Medical Science’, Italian physicians Paolo Bellavite and Andrea Signorini thoroughly examine previous and current literature on the science of homeopathy in order to discover answers to the elemental questions about homeopathy. Bellavite and Signorini engage in a fascinating discussion of the biophysics of water, biological effects of electomagnetic fields, chaos theory, and fractals’
Also: ‘Scientific Foundations of Homeopathy’ by Gerhard Resch and Viktor Gutmann.
Enjoy!
I absolutely agree. Homeopathy makes no sense, and all of the clinical evidence that we have indicates homeopathy is pure placebo. In science, when we are confronted with something “paradoxical, inexplicable, outrageously illogical” we don’t make a jump to a magical explanation like homeopaths do. We don’t have to resort to magic, the placebo effect completely explains any tremendously minor effects that homeopathic produces.
Galileo was a serious scientist who had evidence and theory behind him. Homeopaths have neither. Don’t try to co-opt a legitimate science to make something with no evidence behind it seem legitimate. The day will not come when astrologers are vindicated, and by association homeopaths face the same fate.
Scientists have attempted to understand homeopathy. However, medical studies offer no support, the theory behind it is biologically impossible, and homeopathy actively conflicts with other (far better established) scientific principles.
The problem is that you are assuming before hand that homeopathy works and then looking for evidence to prove yourself correct. This is not how science works. Anecdotes are not data and water and sugar pills are not medicine.
I turn my nose up at homeopathy, labeled as pure “witchcraft” by medical professionals in the UK.
Hi Kyle,
Did you read the material suggested? Doesn’t sound like it.
My previous comment was one which entreats an investigation, a true and willing participation in understanding rather than judging and condemning.
I understand that you reject Homeopathy based on scientific principles. But at some point it needs to be acknowledged that the substance under investigation can only be measured within the parameters of the tool itself. Hence light was discovered to be a particle and a wave in 2 separate investigations. The light could only exhibit certain behaviour according to the parameters of the experiment. Serious scientists are using their intelligence to expand the current scientific paradigm to account for how homeopathy works.
It would be a dangerous position for any scientist to assert that everything about our universe and all matter within it is definitively ‘known’.
It is not assumed that Homeopathy works. It works. When a 2 year old has rapidly spreading impetigo on their face and neck they do not have the capacity to will themselves out of a highly contagious bacterial infection. And a 2 year old cannot convince themselves out of a painful ear infection. To suggest that this is the case suggests two things: Firstly that infants and small children have a mature system of reason and intelligence which leaves them susceptible to the placebo effect, and secondly that your faith in Faith and Belief is greater than in your beloved Science. In my opinion both are doubtful. You can’t have your cake and eat it, so choose your position – Faith or Science first? For individuals such as yourself they are mutually exclusive.
Science requires that one records faithfully ones observations. Homeopaths observe time after time how Homeopathic medicines cure people of a wide range of problems, and this accounts for what you term an assumption. It is not an assumption, it is empirical knowledge.
It has taken many years of hard work and sincere, responsible practice to come to a position of understanding the powerful system of medicine that is Homeopathy.
True investigation of Homeopathy is only for the brave. If you truly devoted yourself to a sincere understanding and experience of it (ie. not setting out to disprove but rather to be unobjective as a scientist is supposed to be), you will be disturbed because you will find it does indeed work despite the fact that chemistry says it can’t. Then what? You will be forced to consider that perhaps there is something in the behaviour of particles and atoms that is as yet undiscovered and not fully understood.
Some will see this as unchartered territory begging for an explanation, and others will fob it off and return to the ignorant safety of the ‘known’universe.
I am entreating you to be one of the former.
Read the research that has been done with the attitude of a true scientist, that is, an objective view that is concerned with results and not a view that is narrowed by a priori assumptions.
Thank you.
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