First two sentences from the page snifter linked:
I believe everything this woman has to say… :rolleyes:
She also seems to hold a lot of those degrees that nobody else has ever heard of.
(Not knockin’ you, snifter, I realize you linked it for the humor.)
Seeing as she charges $25 for telling the sex of a bird or reptile from a feather or scale, I imagine we’d have to take up a collection if we wanted to hear from her . . .
Hi, I have been lurking a little and find your posts to be interesting. ( and some funny ) I don’t use homeopathic remedys. I don’t buy anything that has a disclaimer on the bottle stateing that the product has not been proven to be effective for the very ailment I intend to buy it for. I believe that natural means an herb picked in the woods, not something that has been processed with preservatives added. Having said that I believe that we are being * processed and chemically treated * to death , and can understand to a degree why so many gravitate to anything that has a * natural * claim involved. I do have a question : I have read both the pro side and con side of homeopathy and the con side has two claims. One , that it is completely void of anything other than water and two that it can be dangerous ( excluding the use of homeopathy in place of scientifically proven. ) Such as black kohash causing kidney problems , and efhedra causing death. Are some comprised of nothing more than educated water and others not ? Thanks for your reply in advance.
Chay Lynn, welcome to the SDMB! You probably didn’t realize you were resurrecting a year-old thread, but your question certainly deserves an answer.
First, you may be confusing homeopathy with “natural” or “unprocessed” supplements often passed off as folk medicines.
Homeopathy is based on Samuel Hahneman’s 1769 “law of similars,” that what causes X can also cure X. (Ex: If BobWort makes your skin yellow, then BobWort can cure jaundice.) The disease/cure substance is diluted greatly on the theory that the less of the active substance there is, the more potent it is. This challenges the known characteristics of most chemicals and compounds, and the law of similars has validity only in “eye of newt, toe of frog” magic potions.
Other folk medications and supplements do not necessarily rely on dilution. Many are harmless, some are not. In either case, if they are not legally marketed as medicine (in the U.S.), then they cannot legally make any curative claim, since such claims have not been sufficiently proven to the FDA.
It can be shown using Avogadro’s Number, that many of the homeopathic dilutions are so extreme that it is highly unlikely that a single molecule of the active substance exists in the solution. (That certainly explains why they “cannot cause side effects and you cannot become addicted to them,” doesn’t it?) This forces proponents to postulate that:
[ul][li]Either some magical phenomena is at work here, orwater has a memory of the substance’s properties, retained perpetually after the substance is no longer present.[/ul][/li]I think you can see the problem with these postulates. Giving magic the credit not only returns us to the Dark Ages and before – and you know how good medicine was back then – or gives us absolutely nothing that can be tested scientifically.
The “memory” theory has never been proven, either, and can be considered pure fantasy. It raises the question: If water retains the memory of all substances that pass thru it, why doesn’t a simple glass of sea water cure everything?
Hi Musicat , Thank you ! You did clear that up for me . I was just adding a few folk remedies to homeopathic ones, I guess , and confused myself. ;>) Sorry to drudge up old issues ; I have some catching up to do. Everything that I have read is interesting and thought provoking. I do appreciate your response.
I was curious about this and ran around the Inet looking for refs.
I found a contradition: Benveniste says Randi et.al. found only one in five of the supervised trials failed. Randi seems to imply that, once supervision raised methodological concerns and the addressing of those concerns produced changes in experimental procedure, the alleged phenomina was consistently irreproducible.
Wait a minute, not so fast… I also found an interesting account at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~daood/paulc.htm , in which the writer (who seems to favor the “memory” model) echoes the Randiian version of events.
The question is: Does Nature often publish findings whose discovery methods fail to meet methodological standards (e.g., a proper double blind)?
I was reading some people seeming to say that homeopathic medicine is “unscientific”. I frankly do not necessary agree with the North American concept of what is “science”. The term science comes from the Latin scientia i.e. knowledge. What you are calling science is Empiricism. Have empiricists have tried to dismiss faith and healing in the past and then found they could not. The medical community dismissed acupuncture and then later accepted it.
Now, I do think that much of allopathic or conventional medicine is valid, but let us face it many people have had some bad experiences. For example, I once had chronic fatigue and they would run all these tests and nothing! I was at my wits end and I did not really know what homeopathy was, and it was like my last hope. There was no placebo affect. I wanted something to work. But nothing seemed to work. I also know that after a month my chronic fatigue began to go away. I also know I had lots of strange dreams after taking the remedy and I was not told by the homeopath I would have all these cleansing type dreams, and when I related them to her it made sense to her.
I also found that the way I reacted is I actually would feel energetic vibrations in some portion of my brain. How does one explain that away. I had no expectation of sensing that. I remeber once taking a strong homeopathic remedy and certain old memories that I had long forgotten just came to the surface. It was kind of neat. I also do know my allergies have been reduced. I have found homeopathy, for me, to be more affective than acupuncture.
Many of the "scientific" medicines have gone through trials and scientific evidence only to kill people and have been withdrawn. It is hard to be use Empirical science to justify homeopathy since that kind of narrow "science" which is contrary to the Platonic-Aristotelian concept of science dismisses a certain kind of human experience and homeopathic remedies are chosen based on the individual rather than given en masse like allopathic medicines. In sum, both approaches have their positive.
Many allopathic doctors are also homeopaths. By the way, in Germany and France many doctors do when when they see it is appropriate prescribe homeopathic remedies. I have seen them work, over and over again and treat things I wasn’t looking to treat as a positive side-effect.
Basil
Even more effective as acupuncture, huh?
Basileus, why do you suppose that homeopathy keeps failing when people actually write the results down and add them up? There’s nothing “North American” about keeping records and tabulating, and that’s all that’s required to show that homeopathy doesn’t work.
My gal came home today with a homeopathic “treatment” for the flu. It’s called oscillococcinum, and with a name like that it’s bound to work! One problem… the product monograph states “Does not cause drowsiness,** or any known effects.**” :smack:
Basil,
Did anything else in your life change between the time you were suffering from alergies and fatigue and now? Are you getting more or less exercise? Are you eating anything different? Have you moved to a different place (or even just to a different building)?
The problem is that your ailments are of the type that can be affected by many factors. There’s no way to determine exactly what caused your condition to improve. You are assuming it was due to the distilled water (face it, that’s all any homeopathic treatment is) you were taking, but it could have been any of a thousand other changes that caused it.
The only way to prove it was homeopathy that helped is to treat a large number of people and compare their results with untreated persons. That way, all the random, uncontrolled factors tend to cancel out, and the treatment is the only change in common among all the subjects. When this method is followed, improvement in the condition is seen in the same percentage of both the treated and untreated subjects.
This indicates that the improvement in those subjects couldn’t have been the result of the treatment, but was due to one of those random factors that was not studied. The same as your improvement was due to something that you weren’t doing intentionally as an attempt at a cure. It was not due to the water your homeopath gave you.
Also, understand that when we refer to science around here, it has a very specific meaning: the application of the scientific method. Science is not knowledge itself, it is a technique for gathering and testing knowledge. In fact, it seems to be the only effective and reliable way of building knowledge available to us.
It is somewhat imprecise, in a way, to say homeopathy is unscientific. A pedant would only apply that term to knowledge-gathering systems, I suppose, and homeopathy doesn’t seem to qualify. Rather, homeopathy has not been proven scientifically.
It would even be correct to say it has been disproven scientifically.
You know, I have to laugh when advocates of “alternative treatments” make statements like this. Ephedra is not the natural source of Sudafed. It is a natural source of ephedrine. Sudafed is Pseudo-ephedrine, an isomer of ephedrine.
Yes, I would like to study the placebo effect.
What are we going to use for a control?