For what it’s worth, prednisone is good for some asthma conditions; I’ve been prescribed it. I’m not sure how close it is to prednisolone.
I’d like to add that a friend of mine in Europe totally believes in it, and so does his sister who is a nurse. It’s considered a very viable alternative treatment where he lives and he uses one for allergies, sore throats, etc. and says they work. He also says he’s seen it work in babies (crying for hours, given remedy, crying stops) and animals. I gave up trying to explain the reasons why it “works” in those instances to him.
Sister Vigilante: in most humans with healthy livers, prednisone is readily interconverted to and from prednisolone. Yes, oral steroids are used for asthma, but only after other treatments (such as inhaled steroids, inhaled bronchodilators, leukotriene receptor antagonists, and antihistamines for allergic asthma) have failed, and only for as short a time as possible in as low a dose as possible. Besides anti-inflammatory effects, steroids can have myriad side effects including immunosuppression, impaired collagen synthesis (which can affect all manner of connective tissue including that in skin and bone), water retention, appetite increase and weight gain, insulin resistance, cataracts, retinal damage, mood swings, adrenal suppression, osteoporosis, etc., and some of these systemic effects may be seen even with sufficient doses over time of inhaled steroids. Not something you want to unknowingly take an unknown dose of repeatedly without physician supervision.
I shouldn’t laugh at something like this but I remember the stories about Alexa Ray Joel’s suicide attempt. The initial reports said she had tried to kill herself by overdosing. Then there were reports that she had tried to overdose on sleeping medications. Then there were reports that she had tried to overdose on homeopathic sleeping medications. And that’s when I started chuckling.
Like I said I shouldn’t make light of something like this. After all it is possible to kill yourself with an overdose of homeopathic medicine. Robert Maxwell did it.
But surely it’s not homeopathic if there’s some active ingredient in it that actually does something to humans. I thought homeopathic ‘medicine’ was just diluted water + small amount of something that now no longer exists?
If you have never seen this, I urge you to watch it NOW or as soon as humanly possible. This should be REQUIRED viewing for every Doper. Hell, every educated human.
The word “genius” is overused, but in Tim Minchin’s case it is absolutely correct. I say this as a straight man: there’s no male on earth whose babies I would rather bear than his.
I’m surprised no one has come out in support. I mean the answer is obvious, obvious enough that maybe this should be in GQ rather than GD. Even so there always seems to be someone who has to take the other side. Either way, I’ll just leave this here:
Not a believer by any means, but I have read something recently in a book called “13 things that do not make sense” by Michael Brooks that seems to indicate that there may be something going on in homeopathic remedies that is not as simple as the placebo effect*
A summary of each chapter of the book was printed in New Scientist (chapter on Homeopathy on this page) and the abstract for the research referred to in the chapter can be found here.
Of course, the true believers seize on research like this to say “YOU SEE - its all TRUE!!!”, which is nonsense - but to absolutely dismiss it out of hand also appears unwise.
On a recent wilderness experience in a game park in Kwazulu-Natal (South Africa), we were filling our water bottles and asked whether the water was safe to drink or needed to be purified - to which the guide’s response was “The entire world is contaminated by TBS**”
Grim
*not that the placebo effect is simple - it gets a chapter all on it’s own in the book
** Tiny Bits of Shit
In particular, I’ve known people to confuse “homeopathy” with “holistic medicine.” Thus, otherwise intelligent people have told me that they believe in the former, when they had in mind the latter.
Okay, which medicines and what type of treatment regimen? Details, please.
Losing ten kilos will help a sore knee. You need to establish that you are losing your hair before you can show that a treatment is preventing that hair loss. And so on.
[QUOTE=Lothario_1]
I lost 10 kilo weight…all credit goes to homeopathic medicines
I cured a recurring knee pain…again homeopathic medicines
I’m able to prevent hair loss and dandruff…homeopathic medicines
So I can’t agree with anyone who has ignorant views on such an excellent system of treatment.
[/QUOTE]
Anecdotes does not equal evidence. There are people who have claimed to be cured of terminal cancer by visiting a shrine in France, and folks who have similar claims to yours abound in history…Coca Cola was once considered a cure all for myriad ailments with endorsements such as you list here.
Because you SAY that homeopathic medicine cured all of the above doesn’t mean that’s what actually happened…only that you THINK it’s what happened. In order to demonstrate that homeopathic medicine works you need to be able to replicate the results. So, whatever you used to make your dandruff go away and hair stop falling out would need to do the same thing for others. Same with chronic knee pain (which means that this stuff not only alleviated your pain but healed your knee, which sounds like pure magical bullshit to me). Same with the weight loss.
Sadly, NONE of your cures has ever been able to demonstrate those effects in a clinical environment. How do I know? Because if they did then there would be some evidence that this was so, and especially the weight loss and hair loss cures would be getting big news.
Your cures are no different than the cures that are peddled on late night TV. Weight loss and hair loss cures abound, and if you will only rush $19.95 today you will get a giant bottle of cure…but wait! Act now and you’ll get TWO bottles of cure, if you pay postage and handling! Plus a Ginsu knife that slices, dices and juliennes!
It’s not ignorance to ask for some sort of non-anecdotal evidence. You are just some person posting on the internet, so we have zero proof save your word that any of these magic cures actually happened. And even if you believe they happened we have no idea what, if anything ACTUALLY happened. And even if you were cured of some or all of those ailments we have no proof that it was the magic water that did it, and not something else. That’s why people test prospective medicines in clinical studies to see if in fact there is a real, measurable effect, and if the results are replicable. It’s ignorance to just offer anecdotal evidence with nothing else to back it up and expect people to just believe.
My wife lost 90 pounds over the past three years with just diet and exercise. I dropped 35 pounds over the past year, controlled a pre-diabetic situation, and have less knee pain through diet (I am terrible with an exercise routine). No conventional or homeopathic medicines needed for either of us.
[QUOTE=Smeghead]
I didn’t take any homeopathic medicine when I had a cold last month, and I got better! Therefore, avoiding homeopathy is an amazing cure-all!
[/QUOTE]
Did your cure have any water in it?? Assuming it did (almost all of them do), then it’s possible that the homeopathic cure was in there all along! Sometimes through random shacking, certain helpful elements can imprint the water used in over the counter cold medicine, and they can decrease the standard cold from 7 days to merely a week! The OTC cold medicine without the magic water in it can only reduce the duration of a cold to 5 days plus 2, sadly.