[[Because people don’t die from not owning Marilyn Monroe’s dress. Homeopaths are murderers, and should be treated as such.]]
Well, not always. Many people go to homeopathic remedies for mild conditions that modern science is unable to effectively treat, like colds. I agree with you that there is the dangerous potential of people being encouraged to use ineffective therapies when effective therapies exist. But for a cold, homeopathy is as likely to work as anything else.
I happen to like the Monroe/Picasso analogies, too.
fyslee: Your water musings are brilliant! I’ve never encountered that in the homeopathic arguement, and it put into words a big doubt in my mind.
I try to approach things with a rational mind, but open to other possibilities too. My use of homeopathic medicines is limited to one product, given to me by an enthusiastic proponent. It was a tube of homeopathic Arnica Gel, used for muscle pain & bruises.
I’d fallen, and banged my knee up pretty bad. Deciding to test the stuff, I put it on the already darkening bruise. I bruise easily, and was amazed to find that the bruise never progressed as badly as I would have expected. I really didn’t expect for the Arnica to have much of an effect.
Since then, I’ve used it on a nasty sprained ankle. There was swelling, but minimal bruising. I brought it to my physician- a standard MD- and he was interested in the lack of bruising as well. It’s a case, for me, of really wishing it didn’t work as well as it did, because I have a hard time believing that dilute sustances can be effective. And, no, the only “active” ingredient in that product is a homeopathic dilution of Arnica ( a plant).
I’ve never been to a homeopathic physician, but from the enthusiastic reports I’ve heard,(not in this forum) perhaps it would do well to detail the practitioner’s M.O. Homeopathic physicians rely on a detailed initial interview with the patient. From my reading on the subject, the Law of Similars takes the specific symptoms of the patient, regardless of a previous categorization, and matches them to a specific remedy. “Weepy, teary eyes” would be matched to the remedy Allium Cepa, or the common onion, because onions cause the same symptoms. So, to introduce that substance, in a dilute form, should be able to bring the body back into balance.
Homeopathic physicians spend a lot of time listening to the patient on this initial diagnostic period to reach a judgement of which remedies to use, and I imagine that for many people, that much time with a doctor is a rare occurence. If homeopathic medicines are placebos, perhaps the interaction with the physician enhances that effect. I’d like to see a reputable study done using this as a variable.
Again, I have problems with the effectiveness of such infinitesimally dilute substances, but think we can explain a system of thought without the attending harangue of pre-judgement. On both sides.
Thanks, Jill, for defining the difference between immunizations and the homeopathic Law of Similars. I’ve heard proponents of homeopathy bring up the comparison as proof that allopathic medicine uses the same theories. But they are really two different birds. Perhaps, in the early part of the century, when less was delineated about the immune system, that comparison arose. I’d like to hear any elaborations.
Any sane homeopathy proponent (insert mandatory oxymoron comment here, David :rolleyes: ) has long since been run off. The pitchfork & torch-bearing townsfolk have once again saved the day.
I’ve been lurking, and it took me a while to find my Kevlar vest & helmet, but I’m ready now.
First let me say that I am not an advocate of homeopathy for life-threatening conditions, or for conditions for which allopathic medicine has a cure.
But somewhere around 60-70% of outpatient visits for new complaints are for things like weight loss, fatigue, depression, indigestion, impotence, joint/muscle pain, headaches, etc. After an appropriate evaluation, often no specific curable cause is found, and we use our trial & error method of treatment (based on perhaps 8 minutes of patient contact), and hope that either we eventually pick the right treatment, or the the problem is self-limited & goes away & our “intervention” gets credit.
Even when we identify a treatable cause of a patient’s symptoms, sometimes our treatment of the condition is so far removed from the root cause it’s amazing. Example:
Graves’ Disease (Basedow’s Disease in Europe) is the most common cause of hyperthyroidism. It is caused by a mistake in the immmune system resulting in the production of antibodies which are directed against a protein in the thyroid cell membrane. This membrane-bound protein is the receptor for thyroid stimulating hormone from the pituitary. The antibodies affect the receptor in the same way that TSH does, so that the thyroid cell makes much more than normal amounts of thyroid hormone.
Ideally, we would have a treatment that prevents the immune system from making these antibodies. We don’t. We have 3 ways of dealing with Graves’ Disease.
I can arrange for a surgeon to slash someone’s throat & push some muscles around, and cut out the thyroid gland and sew everything back together. Mind you, the thyroid is a perfectly healthy gland if we could just get rid of the antibodies… Then we get as close as we can to giving the patient the right amount of thyroid hormone for the rest of their lives.
I can arrange for a nuclear medicine doc to give the patient radioactive iodine to destroy the thyroid gland - with enough radiation that they’re supposed to avoid close contact with other people for 3 days afterward. Often this makes the hyperthyroidism worse before it makes it better. Sometimes after waiting 6 months to see if the treatment really worked, we decide that it didn’t & give another dose of radioactive iodine and wait another 4-6 months. Again their normal thyroid gland is permanantly destroyed & we give them our best approximation of how much thyroid hormone they need.
We can poison the thyroid with chemicals (aka medications) & control release of thyroid hormone. We do this for a year in the hopes that the immune system will, on it’s own, stop making the antibodies responsible for the Graves’ Disease & allow the thyroid to function normally afterwards. This happens about 33% of the time. About 5-10% of the time, though, we have to stop the medication because it has caused toxicity to the liver, or caused a rash, or caused the bone marrow to stop making white blood cells so that the patient is unable to fight off infections normally.
(Obviously, I can & do put a better spin on this when I’m counselling patients; I’m just trying to point out how un-scientific/inelegant much of we do as allopathic “scientific” physicians can appear if one applies any degree of scrutiny to it.
I do think that homeopaths have a reasonable alternative treatment modality to offer many of the common complaints which trouble patients. I suspect that much of the therapeutic benefit occurs from the provider spending enough time with the patient to create the expectation of improvement. (Although that doesn’t explain elelle’s experience very well) It is possible that if a patient believed that homeopathic solution X was a cure for Graves’ Disease that the as yet poorly understood psyche-immune connection could kick in & cause the immune system to stop producing the antibodies & and, much more elegantly than any treatment I can offer, cure/control the Graves’ Disease. But that is a combination of speculation & wishful thinking, I fear.
Reality check: Actually, I do believe that the treatments I have to offer (perhaps minus the surgery choice) are the best thing out there for a majority of patients. BUT, if a patient with mild-moderate hyperthyroidism wanted to try acupuncture, homeopathy, herbal medicines, or other alternative strategies, I would be willing to provide medical supervision/back-up while they did so.
Allopathic medicine has a strong scientific basis for most of what we do. Our scientific explanations do have more internal logical contistency than any alternative modality with which I am familiar. I’m excited about the Human Genome Project & the potential for what it has to offer me as a provider & all of us as potential patients. But sometimes I do wonder if we’re seeking God a little too hard in the details. When I read historical accounts of medicine, I have to conclude that a person with chronic mild depression 100 years ago just might have gotten more satisfying treatment through a close relationship with his/her doctor than patients of today get from their 8-10 minute visit & a bottle of Prozac.
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
[[I do think that homeopaths have a reasonable alternative treatment modality to offer many of the common complaints which trouble patients. I suspect that much of the therapeutic benefit occurs from the provider spending enough time with the patient to create the expectation of improvement.]]
Good post, Sue, but to the above comment I would respond that the homeopathic remedy is not the effective variable here. It is sickening (literally)that doctors of Western medicine can’t offer this as well. I strongly believe that because so many modern Western medicine docs have a lousy bedside manner (though I know many good ones, and I think the percentage of good ones is increasing), the gate opened for practitioners of unproven “remedies.” There was a vacuum to be filled - people need to be seen as more than defective body parts by their health care providers. The holistic thing. Some “alternative/complementary” therapies do work. Many, however, are unproven and their proponents love to talk about the greedy, unethical pharmaceutical companies, etc. But the herbalists are getting rich, too. And they don’t have to prove a thing.
Jill
In the otherwise excellent column on homeopathy, you stated:
" …if a large amount of medicine produces a given symptom, then a small
amount of the medicine will stimulate the body to combat that symptom.
This isnt a completely crazy concept; modern vaccines use the same
basic idea. "
I’m sorry, but that’s not really correct. First off, vaccines don’t treat
symptoms, but attack root causes – specifically, the bacteria and viruses
that cause disease. (Yes, there are also synergistic causes that work with
the bugs, but that’s a side issue.)
More important, though, the dose isn’t the issue. It takes, after all, only a
very small dose of most viruses to cause infection – with some, including
measles, a single virus may do the trick, whereas a typical vaccine will
contain billions of virus particles or bacteria. The real question is the
status of the bugs; in a vaccine, the virus or bacterium has been either
killed or “attenuated” – the latter referring not to a lower or more dilute
dose, but to a weakening of infectious powers. The bugs in the vaccine
usually can’t reproduce (the Sabin polio vaccine is an exception to this
rule), and won’t cause a full-blown attack of the disease in question.
However, surface proteins on the bugs remain intact, which stimulate the
immune system to create antibodies that zap active, infectious bugs if they
ever show up.
In other words, the bacteria or viruses have been “fixed”, so to speak,
rather than diluted. Very different principle, no relation to homeopathy at
all.
JillGat You’ve expressed a thought I’ve had for a long time … that a lot of the alternative medicines that emphasize a lot of metaphysical concepts - energies, vibration, auras, etc. - are in fact successful just because they call upon the practitioner to get in touch with the patient. The auras and vibrations are just pseudo-intellectual vehicles for paying attention to your patient as a person, something all medical professionals should do, and something the good ones have been doing all along.
It’s sad to say it, but I can imagine a situation where a victim of domestic violence might do better with a homeopath or even an astrologer than with an MD. (It’s just a parable, but bear with me.) A nervous, soft-spoken woman comes to the hospital with a black eye and a fat lip. The MD asks her what happened. “I fell down.” He then proscribes some topical antibiotics to prevent infection, recommends ice to prevent the swelling, and sends her home. After all, she doesn’t exactly have a life-threatening condition.
A life-threatening medical condition, that is. Her living situation is probably pretty horrible, at least if the augenblick I’m writing into the parable is true: she’s getting beaten up by a family member. Instead of sending her home, her astrologer/palm reader/shaman would tell her her aura was seriously disturbed, that her home was not in order, that her family played an important role. Not really meaty psychoanalysis, to be sure. More like a Zen riddle: “Love heals except when it harms”.
Okay, so a good MD would figure out what was going on too. A GP could recommend professionals that could help out the family situation … and I humbly submit that psychiatrists are more useful than bee pollen in this situation. I trust that medical schools are putting family health in their curricula - nursing schools have been doing it for years. The point is, years of postgraduate biochemistry and corpse mincing are all very well and good, but far too many doctors hide behind their sphygmomanometers and treat diseases when they should be treating patients.
I have a question that’s been chewin on me for a while now … what does the homeopath prescribe that causes the symptoms? I mean, say the person is suffering from a cold: runny nose, watery eyes, sore throat. So the homeopath prescribes a minute dose of XXX, which produces runny nose, watery eyes, and/or sore throat in larger doses. What is XXX?
The only example I can think of is, if someone is suffering from an overly rapid heart rate, give them some very dilute digitalis. Or maybe an insomniac would be given a microdose of caffiene?
I just can’t figure out what a homeopath would prescribe for warts, or bunyons, or dyslexia, or a deviated septum, or whatever. Maybe they would just say, “Hey, that ain’t my field, go to my friend the voodo priestess or my other friend the chiropracter” (ain’t that weaselly, subtly comparing homeopathy and chiropracty to voodoo?). I just can’t figure out where a homeopath would draw the line as to what the profession is ostensibly able to treat…
(Sigh). I think a lot of people’s disaffection with modern medicine stems from unrealistic expectations. There are unrealistic expectations of the local doctor and what they should be able to achieve, and people also seem to have unrealistic expectations of their own health. We’ve all seen patients in who the only real disease is the obsession with finding the cause of some mild functional disorder. When I say “functional”, I don’t mean, it’s all in their head, I mean that some bodily organ gives pain when it functions. Western medicine looks for dysfunctional and diseased bodies but it doesn’t do much for those bodies that are functioning within normal limits but painfully. I think these are the largest group of patients who end up at naturopaths etc. In our consumer-driven, fast food society, people seem to think that they should expect to be 100% pain-free, 100% healthy all the time. This just isn’t true and two generations ago, of course no-one would even consider it a possibility.
Modern doctors make no claim, to being able to give people 100% wellness, and I think that’s what people are often looking for. I can’t fix someone’s whole life. All I can do is try to help.
The fact that remuneration for doctor’s services is often diagnosis/pathology driven doesn’t help the situation. This is where the “art” (or quackery) side of medicine is dying. If I could charge as much as I wanted for a consultation, I could sit around and talk about the patient’s whole life for hours as well as the naturopaths.
It’s also a two way contract. The media does such an effective job of exposing poor practice amongst doctors that patients are only to ready to disbelieve. Tell a patient that yellow dock root will help them conceive in some arcane fashion, however, and the patients have great faith in everything you say. Evidence-based medicine is a disaster, really. Patients want the mysterious.
Precisely. Almost exactly what I would have said if I’d gotten back to the board first. In fact, I have said essentially the same thing before elsewhere.
Below is a “local opinion” I submitted to the local paper a couple years ago because of a series of articles focussing on alternative medicine being used in a local hospital and the letters that followed, attacking the author. Although the managing editor told me to submit the piece, it was rejected by the asst. managing editor, who gave several different excuses at the time. I may submit it again later if the topic comes up again. Anyway, here it is for everybody’s perusal:
Science, Not Magic, In Health Care
By David Bloomberg
Tony Cappasso recently wrote several articles about the St. John’s Hospital Center for Mind-Body Medicine and some alternative medicine practices.
Several letters have been printed claiming that Mr. Cappasso and others who favor science in medicine were “closed-minded” or didn’t understand the subject.
Why was there such an unfavorable reaction? Every day, people gain the benefits of scientific medicine. We live longer, better, and healthier than people at any time in history. Yet still we hear that the old ways are the best ways; or that if some method has been used since ancient times, there must be something to it; or that we should try everything, no matter whether it’s been shown to work.
Would they say those same things if they were wheeled into an emergency room suffering from a heart attack, and the doctors decided to refocus their “energy field” instead of using proper medical procedures? I tend to doubt it.
So why is there such an interest in alternative medicine? Unfortunately many feel that scientific medicine is too detached from the patient. Doctors may run from room to room, making diagnoses and providing treatments without spending much time with the people they are treating. Hospitals, and even doctors’ offices, can seem to be cold, detached places.
Alternative medicine practitioners, however, may spend a great deal of time with the patients, providing a caring feeling that may not be present otherwise.
In addition, even with all our research, there are still diseases we simply cannot cure at this time. One of my relatives has recurring sinus infections; she has tried numerous medications and even outpatient surgery, but they have not let up. Scientific medicine cannot give her an answer. So she sought out an alternative.
Her alternative medicine practitioner has spent a great deal of time with her and given her bags full of “medicines.” She’s spent a lot of money and taken a lot of pills, but she still gets just as many sinus infections. Because the practitioner spends time talking to her, she doesn’t recognize this as a failure of alternative medicine the same way she recognized the failure of scientific medicine. Luckily, she still gets the proper antibiotics and other medicines from her doctor, or else her infections could cause significant problems.
Where does this leave us? We recognize that scientific medicine cannot solve every affliction. We have to recognize that many patients need more time dealing with the human side of the doctor.
Every day people spend precious time and money on methods that are unproven and sometimes run counter to the laws of chemistry and physics. What could we accomplish if this same money were instead put towards real research? Scientific medicine relies on such research to determine what may or may not be useful. The results can lead doctors to new forms of treatment and have led us to unprecedented health care.
Turning to magical means, though, will not solve our health care problems, and can even make them worse. Magic has no place in science or in medicine.
To Boris B
Yes, you can imagine, but it may not necessarily be true. I’ve met many people in the “New Age” holistic field who were scumbags and hid behind their jargon. Kindness and compassion are not a given with these folks.IMHO, a lot of these folks are like Funeral directors, taking advantage of the distressed.
I remember this Massage Therapist who was very verbally/physically abusive to me while I was worked on. I should have sued her and had her license taken away.
The Medical profession can learn some tact and compassion, but at least their remedies have been tested, unlike the products of Quackery.
Claw
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>It’s sad to say it, but I can imagine a situation where a victim of domestic violence might do better with a homeopath or even an astrologer than with an MD. (It’s just a parable, but bear with me.)
Claw, you are certainly right – like so many other things, there are those who truly believe in what they are doing, and those who know damned well that it’s a bunch of baloney and are just preying on the sick.
I was once on a TV show discussing psychics. I summarized my position by saying there are two kinds: Those who are fooling others and those who are fooling themselves (I may have stolen that; I honestly don’t remember). The same is true of homeopaths.
If I may summarize, your point is that for a lot of common complaints, traditional medicine can’t do much, so therefore if a person believes in some cure, regardless of whether or not it works, it’s comforting to the patient to know that they are being treated. And if the patient believes they are getting better, in certain circumstances they may actually get better.
I think that is a very bad idea. Treatments like homeopathy get much of their business from people that don’t believe strongly in it, but think “well, it can’t hurt…”. Well, it can hurt, monitarily. Why should companities be allowed to profit on a placebo? Plus, any positive upturns in health will be attributed to the placebo treatment, and then patients might start using the placebo when they should be going to traditional medicine. Certainly, belief in alternative medicine seems correlated with a disbelief in traditional medicine. As we see above, some people don’t even believe in vaccinations. This is very, very dangerous.
Secondly, doctors already do prescribe inappropriate medicine for people who are sick and feel they have to have something (for example, prescibing anti-bacterial medicine for those who clearly have a virus). This is generally viewed as not being a good thing. Even though I think it’s a mistake to ever prescribe a placebo, I’d rather a real doctor do it, since he or she is under no delusions of what they are prescibing.
Thirdly, people are apologists for homeopathy on the basis for the great bedside manner. Excuse me? So you take someone who is deluded about medicine, combine it with someone who has no clinical psychology background, and this is the person you trust? If you want a doctor, go to a doctor. If you want a psychiatrist, go to one. Perhaps psychiatrists should be making the rounds with doctors more often, but most doctors are far too busy to be psychiatrists as well.
At any rate, the bottom line is in no way should we allow people to get away with profiting on sickness with a bunch of recycled lies.
Here is something to ponder. It is interesting just how far Western “allopathic” medicine has come in just the last century. At the turn of the 1900’s, there wasn’t a whole lot doctors could really do. Amputate limbs, give some pain medications, tell you what was wrong and how you were likely to die. In one century we went from the doctors being the ones watching you die to not only them having many cures and treatments, but expecting them to cure you, right away. Suddenly we think doctors should know immediately the cause of illness, and have a cure sitting in a bottle on a shelf, just waiting to be dispensed. Guess what, it doesn’t happen that way. True a lot more is known about illness, its causes, and how to treat it, but we’re far from knowing everything, and as great as western medicine is, it cannot cure everything.
That does not mean I advocate turning to “alternative” or “complimentary” or whatever the current buzz label is for quack medicine. Alternative supporters are quick to laud traditional Chinese methods. Guess what, if you go to a hospital in China, they aren’t going to realign your qi - they’re going to use Western medicine on you.
Another thing to consider about western medicine is the effect of HMOs and other “cost-saving” plans. Doctors arrange to be paid a set fee by the companies based on how many patients they see. Those figures are based on an expected number of patients a day, roughly 10 - 12 mins per patient. No wonder they don’t have time.
Boris B asked what substances homeopaths use to treat certain conditions. That is the beauty of homeopathic medicine, the link does not have to be obvious. Warts… frogs have warts (commonly believed), so use essense of frogs. Dyslexia is scrambling things, so use scrambled eggs. Deviated septum? That’s a nasal thing, so use cow snot. You just have to be creative.
James Randi, paranormal investigator, skeptic, and magician, testified to Congress on homeopathic medicine. (I can’t find where I read this.) He took a package of homeopathic remedy that listed as the homeopathic ingredient a poison, I think it was cyanide. Something that it only takes a few grams to kill. He proceded to take the whole package of pills - 40 or so of them. Why? To prove they have no effect.
Someone pointed out to me the difference between doctors prescribing placebos and alternative therapies. (I’m not discussing clinical studies.) When doctors prescribe a placebo, they are aware they are using it, and can evaluate if it is not being effective when to move on to something else. An alt med practitioner/believer does not realize it is a placebo, so they don’t move on.
To “MajorMD”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Any sane homeopathy proponent (insert mandatory oxymoron comment here, David ) has long since been run off. The pitchfork & torch-bearing townsfolk have once again saved the day.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Don’t know whether you are joking or not.
“The pitchfork & torch-bearing townsfolk”
is inaccurate. We just have basic common sense and want to see solid proof, something that Homeopathic practioners have failed to provide. Homeopathy and other unproven alternative medicines are sold in mass quantities in the stores. Tons of mags on touting the subject can be found at the local bookstore. The old whine that “we are oppressed by the Medical Establishment” sure doesn’t hold water.Potraying a belief system as persecuted is an old ploy to gain sympathy.
Claw
Hey, if homeopathic water “remembers” the chemicals that were once in it, why doesn’t it “remember” its container? ____________________________________________
I took an airplane trip recently, and was given a small bottle of water during the flight. The amazing thing: it had an expiration date. From this, it seems pretty clear to me that the problem isn’t that water remembers, it’s that it forgets. I’m not taking any chances: I’m not drinking that water until after the expiration date.
Unfortunately, for all the protestations to the contrary, too many docs do misuse the term “functional” to mean psychosomatic, supratentorial, or whatever other clever label we can come up with to mean bullshit.
Actually the term functionl, when used correctly simply means “as opposed to structural”. High blood pressure can be structural, if the cause is a narrowed aorta (coarctation) or a tumor secreting too much aldosterone. The overwhelming majority of cases, however, are functional. Something is wrong in the communication between the heart, the smooth muscle cells lining blood vessels, and kidneys resulting in more forceful heart contractions, contraction of the muscle cells around arteries, and retention of too much salt & water leading to high pressure within the arteries. We can measure this high blood pressure, though, and because the disease is characterized by objective (measureable/observeable to someone else) abnormalities, as opposed to the subjective pain of a headache, or the exhaustion/lethargy of chronic fatigue syndrome, high blood pressure is often not included when people think of “functional” disorders.
You’re right, though, about Western medicine not doing much for bodies that are functioning painfully. And this is a major failing of allopathic medicine as praciced today. With the vast amount of scientific education in our training, we are very comfortable in giving someone chemicals to make the blood pressure go from 167/98 to 138/84. Often, this takes someone who felt great and makes them feel tired, have less sex drive, have lower exercise tolerance, but heck, we’re saving lives. But we are much less adept than our pre-20th century allopathic predecessors at the art of medicine to assist someone with disabling muscle pain & fatigue in returning to full productivity.
[[Alternative medicine practitioners, however, may spend a great deal of time with the patients, providing a caring feeling that may not be present otherwise.]]
Fine. But if they sell them little vials of tap water for $75, they are frauds and are taking advantage of people.
In fact, I have said essentially the same thing before elsewhere.