I would disagree with you in part. The human body is self correcting in most cases. Providing the basic chemicals needed is as functionally medical as anything a doctor can provide within certain limits. Looking at chemo therapy as recognized medicine is a bit of a misnomer. It’s a controlled poisoning of the body. Many drugs make it to market without an exact understanding of why it works other than it has been tested for safety.
I’m in no way dismissing prescribed drugs but I understand that it is far from an exact science. In many cases drugs are prescribed on a trial and error basis until the right combination is hit.
Or, looking at it another way, you get the classic maxim, “Bleeding always stops”.
Water (or alcohol) and faith, the staples of homeopathy, don’t take you very far.
It also is not accurate to say that pharmaceutical drugs are approved these days without a good understanding of not only how they work, but more importantly that they work at all. Homeopathic drugs, by contrast, are not shown to work by standards more rigorous than testimonials, and the theory under which they are presumed to work by believers is ludicrous.
I know people who go to homeopaths and they’ve never been directed to drown their prayers in alcohol as a method of improving their health. I do know people who took their hyperactive kids to homeopaths who were successful in improving their lives. In one case, the medicine prescribed by a doctor was making the child suicidal.
From personal experience I was prescribed drugs that were proven so dangerous they were removed from the market. Fortunately I figured it out beforehand. I’ve been to numerous doctor’s for BP and the vast scientific wealth of knowledge has yet to trip over a combination of drugs that are really effective.
With the exception of antibiotics, most drugs treat the symptom of illness and not the actual illness. While that makes stock in drug companies a sustainable commodity it is not without room for improvement. I don’t know what constitutes homeopathic medicine but if a bunch of chemicals produced by nature can be used to treat symptoms then it is logically no worse than the chemicals produced in a factory.
It involves ingesting minute quantities of substances – past the point where any molecules of the substance can be detected within the “mixture” (if you can call it that, since its basically pure alcohol/water).
It works about as well as rubbing rocks on your head.
Example. Homeopathic remedies often use 12C and 30C tinctures. Take a 12C tincture.
That means it’s been diluted 12 times by a factor of 100 each time. That’s diluted by a factor of 1x10[sup]24[/sup] (or 10x10[sup]23[/sup])
Compare that to Avogadro’s Number which is 6x10[sup]23[/sup], the number of molecules in a mole of substance. So, if you have 1 mole of water (18 grams) and dilute it 12C, you’ll get 1 mole of water with, on average, less than 1 of the original water molecules you started with.*
Then think about taking that 12C tincture, which may or may not have even a single molecule of the original substance, and diluting it by a factor of 100 another 18 times to get your 30C tincture. There’s a vanishingly small chance that even one molecule of the original survived all that dilution.
Homeopathy is not about dosing with natural substances, it’s about diluting substances to cause an effect.
If you took one of the original water molecules and added back fresh water to make 18 grams, it would be diluted by a factor of 6x10[sup]23[/sup] the 12C tincture is somewhat more dilute than that
At those rates of dilution, there would be a stronger case for the homeopaths to say that water contamination is a form of medication, as there will be far more non-water contaminants that there will be of the supposed curative substance.
Although our current monarch allegedly uses homeopathy, I somehow doubt she would rely on it if she was suffering a critical illness or injury, I wish she would, and then dropped dead, let’s see how the quacks would defend themselves then.
I understand that’s how homeopathy is supposed to work, but do the industrial suppliers actually go through that rigmarole? Maybe I overestimate the effort, but it seems to me that diluting and filtering at those levels would take an enormous amount of energy and time and it’d be far cheaper to just, you know, put some water in a bottle.
If so, they carry the standard blurb: “Not Intended to Diagnose or treat Any Disease or medical Condition”-that ought to be a red flag-if the stuff is useless, why use it?
How would they prove they aren’t? All they have to do is set up some stuff that can make the dilution, and turn it on when the inspectors get there. It’s not like they have any way of differentiating their product from water anyways.
Since children are disenfranchised and lack the cognitive ability to understand and make informed choices, there needs to be laws protecting children. Sound medical treatment should be a basic right. If ignorance is a defense for harming a child, then laws need to trump ignorance. An adult can choose not to seek medical care but an immature child is not capable of making the choice. Therefore, the choice needs to be removed from the parents by legally protecting the child’s human rights.
The linked article claims the child was developmentally delayed, underweight, and suffered vitamin and protein deficiencies. The child obviously suffered from gross neglect. The parents should be held liable.
Or about drinking alcohol and pretending it has medicine in it, which is more fun. In the old patent medicine days 100 or more years ago lots of snake oil contained a high concentration of alcohol, which made it possible to get drunk even if you were living in a “dry” community.
In case there is still confusion, here’s a summary of homeopathy by the American Cancer Society, which in its genteel way is telling us "Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!
I don’t think parents should have the right to deny life saving medical attention to their children. The law is supposed to be able to protect children even when their parents don’t, and denying children mandatory medical treatment for any voluntary reason (including the Jehova’s Witnesses) should result in jail time. Maybe not a murder charge, but I can’t think of a reason why it should be something less.
Sounds like a slippery slope to me.
As far as the OP goes, no…I don’t think the parents were ‘murderers’. They obviously felt they were doing the right thing…even if they were complete idiots. The law can’t protect us from being idiots in all ways all the time. This is pretty much an isolated incident afaict…and as has been pointed out, homeopathic cures ARE legal and even approved by the government. That they are stupid, psudo-scientific bullshit is beside the point. THAT should be the focus of change…not the idiotic parents who are probably stunned and devastated that their magic cure didn’t work.
Instead of going after the parents someone should be seriously looking at WHY this kind of stuff is allowed to be used as medicine, I’d say.
Homeopathic remedies are literally just pure water (or in some cases other substances like alcohol or wax). The magic behind it is lies in the proposition that you can start by putting the alleged active ingredients in water and that this somehow “changes the molecules” of the water. This original solution is then diluted over and over again. The hokum is that the more it’s diluted, the more the molecules change and the more “potent” it becomes. The end product is so dilute that it contains only a molecule or less of the original active ingredient. They are literally selling vials of water or grain alcohol and saying it’s medicine.
That Head On thing (“apply directly to the forehead”) is an alleged homeopathic remedy for headaches which is nothing but a pure stick of wax (which has supposedly been diluted over and over again with some kind of original magic ingredients). The placebo effect and the fact that most headaches will go away sooner or later anyway makes people think it works when all they’re really doing is rubbing a crayon on their heads.