I want to throw up [homeopathy]

The BBQ Pit
41

[QUOTE=fessie]
I was responding to this. You’re saying moms should seek only advice from doctors.
[/QUOTE]

But that’s not what he said, fessie, not even in the part you yourself quoted. He said, “The website which so alarmed Mom and turned her away from physicians to the services of a quack, is one of those MEDICAL CARE KILLS AND DOCTORS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW sites.”

You’re accusing him of saying “moms should only seek advice from doctors” when he was condemning the mindset that moms should NEVER seek advice from doctors. These are not at all the same thing.

42

[QUOTE=fessie]
Pretty wide brush you’ve got going there, Jack - there’s plenty of advice on that website that coincides with mainstream medicine. Right off the bat they recommend NOT automatically using antibiotics to treat ear infections, and that’s exactly what the American Academy of Pediatrics says. I don’t have time to investigate every nook and cranny, there may be some dreck on that website, but I saw plenty of things that are commonly believed and practiced by competent mommies of my acquaintance.
[/quote]
That’s a scary thought.

That website is heavily populated by cranks and proponents of quackery. One of the people quoted on the home page is an alleged retired physician, a Dr. Greenberg who says:

“I can honestly say that unless you are in a serious accident, your best chance of living to a ripe old age is to avoid doctors and hospitals and learn nutrition, herbal medicine and other forms of natural medicine unless you are fortunate enough to have a naturopathic physician available. Almost all drugs are toxic and are designed only to treat symptoms and not to cure anyone. Vaccines are highly dangerous, have never been adequately studied or proven to be effective, and have a poor risk/reward ratio. Most surgery is unnecessary and most textbooks of medicine are inaccurate and deceptive. Almost every disease is said to be idiopathic (without known cause) or genetic - although this is untrue.”

How many inaccuracies and absurdities can you spot in that one paragraph? How much have lifespans increased since we developed evidence-based medicine and did not have to depend on “natural” medicine and folklore? “Vaccines are highly dangerous”? How many kids will that claim ultimately harm? “Almost every disease is said to be idiopathic or genetic - although this is untrue.”??? Has this guy ever opened a medical texbook or read a journal article published since 1880?

What the site does in general (including its section on ear infections in kids) is cherry-pick single journal articles and undocumented allegations by fringe practitioners (like Joseph Mercola) to present exaggerated, distorted, and refuted views of medical practice (including the usual pandering about our problems being due to “toxins”. Fine, it recognizes that antibiotics are overused in children - but it tries to scare parents into avoiding medical treatment altogether, including safe and curative surgery when needed. It also falsely alleges that steroids have horrific effects from the start of their usage (the mom in the OP refused to allow her child steroids to help his breathing based on fears of growth retardation promoted by “Shirley’s Wellness Cafe” - which doesn’t tell you that health professionals including those at the NIH have weighed in to reassure parents on that question.

Medicine evolves through research and clinical studies, not a dogged reliance on folklore, most of which has never been adequately tested and remains a relic of an age when vastly more children died of illnesses that are readily curable today.

This does, unfortunately, demonstrate a scenario that drives some people to quacks. They have one or more bad experiences with mainstream medicine and become prey to hustlers who tell them they have the answers that the Medical Establishment doesn’t want them to hear, as well as a magical system that explains all disease (dietary problems, allergies, toxins, parasites etc.)

If “competent mommies” of your acquaintance are turning to homeopathy and refusing necessary medical treatment in favor of eliminating “toxins” and imaginary allergens, they need a wake-up call.

43

Hmmm, well “homepathy makes me barf” doesn’t exactly sound like he accepts alternative medicine. The mother in his OP did go to doctors, she just thought their solutions were poor, so she tried something else.

It sounds like you guys assume that “homeopathy” is synonymous with “infomercial”, which isn’t at all true - people buy most of the stuff at Whole Foods.

And, btw, yes, drinking water IS key for treating cystitis. Especially postcoitally; if your partner doesn’t pee afterwards, she should.

44

[QUOTE=fessie]
Hmmm, well “homepathy makes me barf” doesn’t exactly sound like he accepts alternative medicine.
[/quote]
The original thread title (“I want to throw up”) was my reaction to the situation of a child struggling to breathe and a mother turning down effective and potentially life-saving care in order to trust to the services of a quack. And yes, homeopathy is quackery.

It’s one thing for a parent to get second opinions, or even to take the advice of a trained and qualified health professional who does not concur with majority views on a medical problem. Taking a kid with a serious problem and placing them in the hands of a quack is child abuse.

45

Sure, average lifespans have increased – but studies HAVE shown that the people who live to a ripe old age do so because they DID NOT happen to get sick, not because they survived a number of illnesses.

Vaccines are a tricky issue, because they’re NOT all the same, and mothers who care to educate themselves on the issue realize it’s complex, with a lot of special interests represented.

For example, just recently Gardasil was introduced as a vaccine for cervical cancer, and some states wanted to make it mandatory. What the manufacturers didn’t say is that it protects against 2 strains of the virus, but not the other 2. They also rushed the product to market despite clinical trials that showed serious adverse effects. That sort of practice is a black eye to the pharmaceutical industry.

I’m still pro-vaccine, because of the herd-immunity effect, but my heart goes out to those unlucky families who are part of the 1% for whom it doesn’t work.

Nothing about this is simple; I don’t know of ANY mother who would deliberately deny her child needed care. We’re just not automatically confident that doctors have all the answers.

The funny thing is, I’ve been going through this myself – I suspected my 3-yr-old daughter had asthma because of her night cough, but nobody believed me (we went through 3 rounds of antibiotics) until she caught RSV and I had her hospitalized, on steroids and oxygen. Sure, we used medicine – and I also put our beds and pillows in those anti-allergen bags, bought a HEPA vacuum cleaner, and 86’d the stuffed animals.

No more night cough.

Now I gotta go pay some attention to the rugrats.

46

A family friend has spent years telling us about how she hasn’t been to a Doc for 30 years, sees and herbalist, uses homeopathy and rolfing…etc. She can converse in astounding detail albout her stools (do they sink or float, you may [or may not] wonder).

I tell ya, though- when she thought she was having a heart attack over the holidays, she did not run to her homepath or herbalist. She ran to the nearest ER …who didn’t treat her fast enough so she ran to the second ER… and got admitted …for 3 days… for gas.

They did find a urinary tract infection, but she threw the prescription away on her way out of the hospital.

47

Feel the need to vomit, eh? A judicious regimen of nux vomica should be just the thing to relieve the nausea induced by hearing homeopathic quackery sanctioned by the credulous (and the predators who are ever-willing to profit from their gullibility).

But for god’s sake, don’t take too little—an underdose could be fatal.

48

Just to be clear, homeopathy is not the same as using herbs and other traditional treatments for illness. It seems like maybe the two are getting confused in this thread.

49

Argh.

Sure, for a lot of run-of-the-mill mild illnesses and complaints, home remedies work just fine. Chicken soup for a cold (notice I said chicken soup, which is a home remedy, not a glass of water through which one has induced a chicken to swim, which is homeopathy), aloe gel for a minor burn, tea tree oil for dandruff or acne, ginger for nausea.

But if your kid is turning blue, lady, listen to the damn doctors! Get a second opinion by all means, or even a third or a fourth, but anyone who thinks magical water is going to magically shrink their kid’s adenoids and tonsils like magic needs to be beaten about the head and shoulders with a hardbound copy of the Physicians Desktop Reference manual.

50

[QUOTE=fessie]
Hmmm, well “homepathy makes me barf” doesn’t exactly sound like he accepts alternative medicine. The mother in his OP did go to doctors, she just thought their solutions were poor, so she tried something else.
[/QUOTE]

Is “homeopathy” a perfect synonym for “alternative medicine?” I was under the impression that homeopathy was a small subset of alternative medicine. Surely, one can have problems with one particular type of treatment without automatically dismissing all non-mainstream medical treatments.

So what? We’re not talking about people who never got sick, we’re talking about people who got sick and then got better. Folks who never get sick doesn’t really tell us anything about differing medical practices, because they’ve never been subject to either modern medicine or alternative medicine. Anyway, the claim wasn’t that modern medicine makes you live forever, the claim was that modern medicine lets you live longer than you would have if you’d been killed by whatever disease you had treated. We’re not talking about the thin edge of the bell curve populated by geezers with excellent consitutions, we’re talking about the big hump in the middle made up by the majority of people who are going to have some sort of serious health crisis at some point in their lives.

Or, hell, if you really want to make the point, just look at infant mortality rates. Time was, you need to have about a dozen kids if you wanted to make sure you had a couple of them around to take care of you in your dottage, and it wasn’t tea tree oil and willowbark that changed that.

I find it funny that you consider a shortened period of clinical trials to be a “black eye” to the pharmaceutical industry, while at the same time championing a vast, fuzzily-defined array of medical practices, the majority of which have had absolutely no clinical trials at all.

Now, since you seem to be having a little trouble with excluded middles in this thread, let me make it clear that the above does not mean I condone or approve of rushing drugs like Gardasil through the testing process, nor does it mean I automatically discount anything that hasn’t gotten a stamp from the AMA. But it seems to me that, if only in the interest of internal consistency, anyone who is going to criticize mainstream medicine for an abbreviated testing process ought to avoid alternative medicine like the plague.

51

[QUOTE=fessie]
The funny thing is, I’ve been going through this myself – I suspected my 3-yr-old daughter had asthma because of her night cough, but nobody believed me (we went through 3 rounds of antibiotics) until she caught RSV and I had her hospitalized, on steroids and oxygen. Sure, we used medicine – and I also put our beds and pillows in those anti-allergen bags, bought a HEPA vacuum cleaner, and 86’d the stuffed animals.

No more night cough.
[/QUOTE]

Good deal, but I’m not sure of your point. Your daughter was showing symptoms, so you took her to the doctor. You also went the extra mile and removed anything that could exacerbate the situation. That’s not only a compassionate step, but a logical one. And it worked, so you can verify the success of your actions.

If you wanted to make Jackmannii blow chunks, you would have instead cured your daughter by covering her in chicken entrails, drilling a hole in her head, and burning incense.

On behalf of your daughter, I thank you for doing it the way you did.

52

[QUOTE=fessie]
Hmmm, well “homepathy makes me barf” doesn’t exactly sound like he accepts alternative medicine. The mother in his OP did go to doctors, she just thought their solutions were poor, so she tried something else.

It sounds like you guys assume that “homeopathy” is synonymous with “infomercial”, which isn’t at all true - people buy most of the stuff at Whole Foods.

[/QUOTE]

Not to speak for the OP, but I think that what he finds disgusting is that the homeopathic industry/community thrives on the concept that the mainstream medical community is harmful to society. It persists on suggesting that the right supplement to your diet or whatever is always going to be better for you in the long run than medical treatment by a licensed, practicing M.D..

The issue isn’t that there are things that an informed individual can do to help him or herself stay healthy and combat various ailments. The issue is that these things are promoted as a responsible alternative to the medical establishment in all cases.

The site linked in the OP, for example, is specifically geared towards stearing readers away from doctors. Because doctors are bad, you see.

53

Homeopathy is such bullshit that it offends me that half of the crap on my local Wallgreens’ shelf is now homeopathic. What’s next, voodoo dolls and dowsing rods in the analgesic section?!

54

[QUOTE=C3]
Just to be clear, homeopathy is not the same as using herbs and other traditional treatments for illness. It seems like maybe the two are getting confused in this thread.
[/QUOTE]
This cannot be stressed enough.

Ban xia hou pu tang tablets (compound of pinellia, magnolia bark, poria, and I forget what else) are on my shopping list for my next trip down to Chinatown. It’s the only thing that seems to work for a peculiar sleep disorder my GF has.

The thing is, herbal medicine has… you know… actual properties and effects. Certainly some remedies are more effective than others, but herbal medicine is not in any way comparable with homeopathy, which is pure Magical Thinking. (That’s a polite euphemism for Fucking Bullshit.)

55

[QUOTE=Marlitharn]
(notice I said chicken soup, which is a home remedy, not a glass of water through which one has induced a chicken to swim, which is homeopathy)
[/QUOTE]

Actually, wouldn’t homeopathy be more like pouring a spoonful of chicken soup into a swimming pool?

56

[QUOTE=Revtim]
There is the “lightness of wallet” side-effect.
[/QUOTE]

Maybe . . . but allopathic medicine is a lot more expensive.

57

[QUOTE=tdn]
Actually, wouldn’t homeopathy be more like pouring a spoonful of chicken soup into a swimming pool?
[/QUOTE]
It would be more like pouring a spoonful of something that causes a cold into a swimming pool.

58

[QUOTE=Revtim]
It would be more like pouring a spoonful of something that causes a cold into a swimming pool.
[/QUOTE]

Ah. Like my chicken soup.

59

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Maybe . . . but allopathic medicine is a lot more expensive.
[/QUOTE]
Not if you judge it bang-per-buck.

60

[QUOTE=fessie]
Sure, average lifespans have increased – but studies HAVE shown that the people who live to a ripe old age do so because they DID NOT happen to get sick, not because they survived a number of illnesses.

Vaccines are a tricky issue, because they’re NOT all the same, and mothers who care to educate themselves on the issue realize it’s complex, with a lot of special interests represented.
[/quote]
Um…you don’t see a conflict between your first and second sentences?

Even if you disregard all the mainstream medical advances made in treating various surgical emergencies, pneumonias and other infections, cancers, etc., you’ve still got smallpox, polio and other diseases which used to kill large numbers of people or cause lasting harm, which have been greatly reduced or eliminated by vaccines. What’s most “tricky” about vaccination in general is failure to get vaccinated due to unreasonable fears.

Can you provide us a cite for this claim? All the information I’ve heard to date is that reported side effects have been minor and typical of what you’d expect with vaccination in general (i.e. temporary injection site soreness, fainting etc.) Also there are many more than four strains of human papillomavirus, only some of them predisposing to cervical dysplasia and malignancy. Gardasil offers protection against a total of four strains and is expected to prevent 70% of cervical cancer cases (not to mention a vastly greater number of infections leading to painful biopsies, surgeries, and considerable medical expense). There’s room for legitimate debate about whether Gardasil should be mandatory, but let’s hope that the controversy doesn’t rejuvenate the anti-vax crowd that wants to paint vaccination as a whole as evil.