Recently I’ve been reading a lot about the practice of homeopathy and have come to the conclusion is that it’s absolute and total quackery. I made an offhanded comment on Facebook and was surprised to find out that someone I have a lot of respect for believes that homeopathy is effective and she’d rather use it than regular medicine. The lack of evidence-based support for it doesn’t seem to bother her because she feels she has seen the benefits firsthand.
Here are a few cites that support my opinion, and I’m very interested to see what Dopers think about this.
Correct, it’s pure nonsense. There’s no evidence for a way that it even could work, given that all it amounts to is giving people plain old water (thus the occasional “magic water” jokes).
However… I think many people conflate homeopathy with non-traditional herbal or “natural” medicine. Herbs and other “natural” medicines can be effective because there is actually an ingredient in the plant that changes the functioning of the human body, and is present in an effective dosage. Just like a real drug, only it comes from a plant, is less processed, less regulated, so you don’t really know how much of the drug you’re getting.
It also doesn’t help that some products which have a real active ingredient use a homeopathic label, presumably to avoid some legal or licensing issues.
Don’t placebos work to a certain degree? From what i understand there is always a small benefit in doing something you think is going to work. That is of course a benefit over doing absolutely nothing, not over actual medicine.
Quackery, but it is a procedure for psychosomatic cures so in that limited sense, it may have some value in tricking people into thinking they’re getting better, which does indeed seem to help them get better in some cases. I’d be okay with selling them (or just giving them, really) sugar pills with official-looking labels and glowing testimonials, for the same effect.
One thing you might want to point out to your friend: Homeopathy “works” on the principal that you can dilute something into water to the extent that it’s only one part per million, or even less, and the water retains some property of the diluted substance. In fact, the dilution makes that substance even more potent.
There is, likely, no water on Earth that, at some point, has not had some person or animal crap in it. And the more you try to purify that water, the crappier it gets. Under the concept of homeopathy, bottled water should be grosser than drinking directly out of an unflushed toilet.
I’ve certainly run into people like that, including my own brother. We got into an argument over homeopathy a few years ago, during which it became obvious that he had the wrong idea about what it actually was. Fortunately the Internet makes it easy for them to just look up the description on Wikipedia or whatever.
Thirded, emphatically. I would even wager that the majority of people think “homeopathy” is the same as, or similar to, “home remedies”. I did some quick searches but couldn’t find such a survey.
Read Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. Obviously he goes into quite a bit of detail about homeopathy as he is well-known for poitning otu the questionable ‘science’ used by homeopaths, but he points out that the best metastudy (that is a study of various other studies, collating their results and assessing their methods, etc) leads to the concludes that homeopathy seems to be no more effective than a placebo.
Note that basically this means that in studies where a people have been given ‘placebo homeopathy’, ‘actual’ homepathy perfroms no better. So that’s not actually evidence against or for the effectiveness of the placebo effect in homeopathy.
the problem I have (not that I disagree in principle) is that if “herbal” or “alternative” medicine is found to be effective and safe, it becomes medicine. Willow bark extract was “herbal” medicine at one time, now you just go get 200 tablets of aspirin for $1.
