Am I the only one who knows homeopathy is a crock?

The BBQ Pit
41

Tradition and inertia have a lot to do with ineffective and even dangerous remedies being used over the generations. Traditional Chinese herbal medicine is not immune to this phenomenon. As this site (which contains some information suggesting that Chinese herbal medicine might be useful in certain circumstances) notes, systematic study of efficacy and side effects was not undertaken in pre-modern China; failures and fatal reactions could be missed or attributed to other causes (if people are dying off en masse in a famine, for example, you might not notice that their traditional herbal meds were killing off their liver or kidney function). And the problem with Chinese herbal mixtures available in this country today is that you may get mislabeled harmful ingredients as part of a complex mixture (including Aristolochia, which was given to people at a European weight loss clinic, resulting in kidney failure and pre-cancerous changes requiring kidney transplants).

*"…Chinese herbal medicine traditionally uses treatments that are now recognized as dangerous, such as mercury, arsenic, lead, licorice, and Aristolochia. Mercury, arsenic, and lead accumulate slowly in the body, and for many years their harm can only be detected by lab tests.

Licorice (used in many herb formulas to �harmonize� the ingredients) can raise blood pressure and disturb blood chemistry.33,34 These effects were presumably undetectable to traditional practitioners unless they became quite severe.

…Finally, there are many incidents in which use of Chinese herbs appears to have caused liver injury, such as acute hepatitis, chronic hepatitis, hepatic fibrosis, and acute liver failure.44 Ancient herbal practitioners might not have been able to distinguish these herb-induced illnesses from the effects of infectious hepatitis, a widely prevalent condition, and thereby failed to make the connection.

Another set of potential problems arises from the fact that Chinese herbal medicine does not restrict itself to plant products with subtle effects. Many traditional Chinese herbal remedies are, simply put, poisons. When taken in proper doses, they may be safe for use, but dosage miscalculation or use in a particularly susceptible person may lead to serious consequences, including death. For example, in Hong Kong poisoning caused by the herb aconite (used in numerous Chinese herbal formulas) was sufficiently widespread that public health authorities felt it necessary to launch an information campaign to combat the problem.45

Besides toxicity caused by Chinese herbs, other problems have been caused by adulteration of herbal products with unlisted ingredients.36 For example, the Chinese herbal formula PC-SPES, used for prostate cancer, turned out to contain three pharmaceutical drugs�diethylstilbestrol (DES), warfarin (Coumadin), and indomethacin. This appears to have been an intentional adulteration designed somewhat along the lines of a traditional Chinese formula, with one pharmaceutical adulterant that treated prostate cancer balanced by two others to offset the side effects of the first. Unfortunately, the combination is dangerous and has caused at least one case of severe bleeding.37

In another episode, 8 out of 11 Chinese herbal creams sold in the United Kingdom for the treatment of eczema were found to contain strong pharmaceutical steroids.38

Herbal products approved by the Japanese government have undergone meaningful safety testing and are very unlikely to contain known toxins or unlisted drugs. However, this does not mean they are completely safe. For example, several case reports suggest that therapy for chronic hepatitis combining an approved herbal formula with the standard drug interferon can cause severe inflammation of the lungs.39�43

The bottom line: TCHM is a potentially dangerous form of treatment that should only be used under the supervision of a physician."*
As for homeopathy and some other “alternative” treatments, I think one can go only so far with under the banner of “unproven” until one must conclude that one is dealing with quackery.

42

Right. But scientists did not wake up magically one day and say, “Hmm…let’s grab the bark off of the big ole yew tree and see if it has medicinal properties.” They had a starting place in the ethnobotany of Native Americans residing in the Pacific-Northwest.

I’m not discounting scientists (hell, I’m one) or traditional medicine. But I think sniffing your nose at the little old lady who swears by her herbs is snobbish.

43

I’d be willing to bet that’s pretty common. My sister swore by homeopathic colic medication. After a conversation, I discovered that she, and the rest of my family, thought “homeopathy” was pretty much the same as saying natural, or herbal medicine. And what do you know, aside from the “this water once touched whatever” part of the ingredients, there were also a bunch of herbs in the mix. And this was something my sister was used to seeing in “homeopathic” medicines. My explanation of what homeopathy actually involved was met with complete disbelief.

Now, this seems like cheating to me. As has been noted in this thread, there are lots of very useful herbal remedies. So lets say you want to market a homeopathic headache remedy, which also incidentally includes extract of willow bark…and it works!! Gosh, homeopathy must work, right?

Anyway, I’m willing to bet that lots of the people who extoll homeopathy don’t really know what it is and just think it’s some kind of fuzzily defined “natural” herbal sort of thing.

44

You can argue that acupuncture, chiropractic, and massage therapies work at least in part, if not wholly, because people expect/hope they’ll work. But that doesn’t apply to animals.

I’ve had three different horses with various skeletomuscular problems over the years, who’ve shown clear improvement after one or all of these “alternative” treament methods. My primary veterinarian, who has been practicing large-animal medicine for several decades, and who is NOT a gullible New Age whoo-hoo type, recently completed a course in large animal chiropractic and acupuncture, and uses it in conjunction with conventional verinary modalities. I’ve seen a clear difference in how my horses move before and after therapeutic massage by a trained equine masseuse.

These therapies are in no way a substitute for conventional verinary medicine, but they do have an adjunct role to play. I might add that I have had acupuncture for some musculoskeletal stuff and found it helped me dramatically, even though I went into it with a rather skeptical “can’t hurt, might help” attitude.

Homeopathy, however, belongs on the manure pile. Herbal does not always equal safe and effective.

45

Grownups have the right to do whatever they want.

But if a child comes down with a life-threatening illness, and the parents choose to use some alternative therapy instead of standard Western medicine, and the child dies or suffers long term damage, I think the parents are guilty of neglect/abuse.

46

I don’t think anyone here is saying that massage therapy is bunk. A certain massage therapist mentioned above said that muscles have memories, which is unmitigated bunk, but I don’t think anyone implied that such ideas are at the foundation of the discipline.

Similarly, from my limited knowledge of chiropractic, it seems to be one of those crackpot practices that accidentally hit on some useful ideas, and has since grown toward traditional orthopedic care, in its more sane incarnations. In other words, a chiropractor who manipulates your back to make it stop hurting has a lot in common with a conventional back doctor, and might well help. A chiropractor who “cures” everything from colds to fibromyalgia through the elimination of subluxations, and perhaps dabbles in herbs, homeopathy, and therapeutic touch is the very definition of “quack.”

Anyway, **EddyTeddyFreddy **, I don’t think the treatments your horses got are necessarily being poo-pooed by folks here. Yet I must add, you do realize that the placebo effect (for lack of a better term) could influence your perception of the animal’s condition, right?

47

Simple. You may tell me “10,000 generations of Chinese people swear that sticking a toothpick up your nose will make zits go away”. You may tell me “I stuck a toothpick up my nose and it made my zits go away, even when every face cream known to man failed”. I don’t care. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying that anecdotal evidence and cultural tradition don’t impress me.

If a double-blind controlled study proves that sticking a toothpick up one’s nose does, in fact, make zits go away, then I will believe it. Which won’t make me suddenly a fool for not having believed you in the first place.
There’s an adjunct to this: there’s at least some evidence that acupuncture is, in fact, an effective treatment for various things. Fine. I have no problem with that. That does not, however, mean that the theory of acupuncture, which includes balances of various ill-defined bodily forces, is at all meaningful. If that theory can be used to make falsifiable predictions, and undergo rigorous scientific analysis, good for it, but until then, even if acupuncture itself proves effective, the theory behind it continues to be unproven and suspect.

Similarly, if a group of native herablists claim that the the Great Happy Purple Spirit inhabits a particular flower, and because he loves children, eating that flower helps women during childbirth, well, they may or may not be right about the flower helping women during childbirth. Might be worth investigating. But even if they are right about it, that doesn’t prove the existence of the Great Happy Purple Spirit.

48

It’s not that all holistic medicines are a crock of shit. It’s that the methods used to create / evaluate these medicines are often complete bullshit.

So homeopathy, the method, is always bullshit. Some herbal medicines loosely referred to as “homeopathic” might have a non-placebo positive effect, if only by fluke. (Note that medicines that are STRICTLY homeopathic, ie created according to reverse dilution rules etc, are ALWAYS bullshit.)

As others have commented, any promising alternative medicine goes through the testing process and becomes part of real medicine. So I’ll stick to real medicine.

49

Including pointing out the snobbishness other grownups.

If I had a child with a life-threatening illness, I would follow the advice of my traditional medical doctors, but I would not be averse to other ways of knowing. Western medicine has its limitations…it does not have a monopoly on cures and treatments. It is not always the “best” way.

What if I subjected my terminally-ill kid to an experimental treatment program of heavy doses of radiation and chemotheraphy, causing the child so much pain and trauma that the she regularly begged for the therapy to end. And what if the child died at the end of it all. Would you think the parents were guilty of abuse? Why or why not?

My point is that people should be open-minded and not think their way is automatically the best way. This goes for consumers of both Western and alternative medicine.

50

Obviously not, because the child will have been empirically proven to be in excruciating pain and have a terrible quality of life, thereby satisfying our blind arrogance and compulsion to sacrifice and the almighty alter of western thought.

51

But that’s the point! Real, mainstream medicine based on scientific principles IS the best way, or as close as we can get to it at the present day. How do we know this? Because it’s been scientifically tested and has analysis coming out the wazoo! “Alternative medicine” is merely a collection of remedies thrown together without rhyme or reason, that range from decent remedies discovered by accident to pure steaming piles of crap like homeopathy.

I’m sick of accusations of closed-mindedness being levelled against scientists, whether in the field of medicine, or in evolution threads, or any other field. Science is not in itself a system of belief, it is a system that attempts to remove guesses and inaccuracy and find the truth. It cannot be closed-minded if one of its main principles is skepticism. It cannot be blindly arrogant if one of its main principles is perpetual inquiry.

52

That doesn’t answer my question. Hell, it doesn’t even address it. Thing A doesn’t turn into thing B just because a bunch of scientists passed judgement on it. It is either still thing A or it always was thing B. Get it?

53

This is the attitude that people are talking about. Nobody in this thread has said that all alternative treatments are great, or better than traditional treatments. But people are being closed-minded and blindly arrogant.

54

Let’s say you’re having migraines that last for weeks. You try aspirin, ibuprofen, and Midol and some prescription stuff. Either it doesn’t work, or the side effects are worse than the headaches.

A friend says her headaches go away when she drinks green tea. On a whim, you try it and it works. You decide to stick with it. The headaches aren’t gone, but they are manageable now. In fact, when taken in combination with aspirin, you feel mighty fine.

Are you telling me that you’ve just bought into a load of steaming pile of crap?

I am a scientist. I’m a devotee to the scientific method and will defend it till the day I die (probably). But you know what? I’m not arrogant enough to believe that the body of knowledge compiled by scientists is complete or 100% accurate. I’m also not convinced that the scientific method is appropriate for solving every problem. Science is way of knowing the natural world. It is not the only way of knowing the universe, however.

I take my aspirin just as readily as the next person. But if someone I trust recommends something unconventional for a health problem, I will not automatically assume they are full of crap. As a scientist, I love making my own inquiries and performing my own investigations. If green tea works where Pamprin fails, then guess what? I’m going with the funny looking herb stuff! Damn the whitecoats! :smiley:

55

This quote is so pertinent it bears repeating. Over and over, if necessary.

Thanks, Early Out

56

monstro, if green tea works for someone’s headaches, great. But the only way that we can prove that green tea is a good treatment for everyone’s headaches, that it is more than a mere placebo, and that it doesn’t have significant side-effects, is the scientific method. I’m not against green tea, I just don’t tend to automatically accept it as a good thing until it becomes part of medicine. Until then, it’s just a thing that occasionally works.

Get some reading comprehension. I said that there are some remedies from alternative medicine that work, but that most of the systems of belief that underpin “alternative medicine” are steaming piles. So green tea may or may not be correct, but homeopathy is always a steaming pile. Got it?

Medicine isn’t always right, sure, and it’s always being updated to take into account the efficacy of green tea, and so on. But as it’s a system of knowledge that perpetually seeks for further truths, it is absolutely the best way we’ve got.

How can you look at an argument and fail to connect with it so dramatically. I argued that medicine by its nature can’t be closed-minded and blindly arrogant, you just responded that yes, it is. That’s not an argument.

57

And nothing I have posted in this thread should make you think I don’t agree with this 100%. I entered the thread after someone said made a blanket statement about “alternative” medicine being A CROCK OF SHIT. It’s that kind of sweeping judgement that I disagree with. That is it.

I’m sorry I’ve hijacked the thread.

58

No, I said people are being closed-minded and blindly arrogant. I shouldn’t have used your quote in there, I apologize.

59

Accepted. This is too nice and rational for the Pit though. There needs to be more eye-gouging going on…

60

Good golly, no. Unless this “muscle memory” thing is a way of describing how a body that’s been compensating for a disease or injury for a long time can get – well, “locked” isn’t quite the right term, but can tend to develop patterns of movement and posture that are hard to change when the disease or injury that caused them is healed. I recall after the first chiropractic treatment I had, walking away with my whole body feeling altered in its interrelationship; then a half hour later, what I can only describe as a cascade sensation of my vertebrae reverting to their old alignment.

That’s exactly how I look at it, too. I’ve encountered a veterinarian who’s an acupuncturist-chiropractor-homeopathy fanatic, and I would shoot my horses before I’d let her work on them.

Right you are. I’d not have brought them up at all, if the discussion hadn’t veered from strictly homeopathy to the general topic of alternative treatments. I’m also well aware of the possible placebo-perception effect. But my veterinarian has spent over three decades training his eye for lameness (starting with a boyhood of following his veterinarian father on barn calls), and in fact is regarded as a specialist in that aspect of veterinary* medicine. If he, in his professional experience, sees enough benefit from acupuncture and chiropractic to put in the time (despite an insanely busy practice) and effort to learn them, I trust his judgment.

I’ve watched Jack Meagher, one of the founders of equine massage, work on a horse that, on being trotted out, appeared quite lame in the left front leg. When Jack had finished releasing the muscle spasms in the horse’s whole body, he had the animal trotted off again. This time, the left front was perfectly sound – and the right hind was off. What Jack had done was release the body’s compensatory defenses, uncovering the root of the problem. Which he recommended that the owner have a veterinarian follow up on, since Jack knew quite well the limits of his therapy.

Now, all that said, lambchops, would you be kind enough to hold still for a minute while I gouge your eyes out, and feed them to monstro? :smiley:

*Where the hell did “verinary” in my first post come from? :smack: