Fair point, except, IMHO there seem to be a growing number of nurses who believe their own knowledge and experience precludes medical school. I blame all the ridiculous TV shows where nurses and paramedics all running the hospital making decisions, and diagnosing patients:rolleyes:.
There are a lot of doctors that will use people’s belief in homeopathic medicine as a placebo type treatment. It’s probably the safest placebo you can take.
Also, I will again point out that there are homeopathic medicines that contain active ingredients. Head On contains mostly menthol, a proven topical analgesic. And Rescue Remedy (a sleep remedy) contains 20% brandy.
Beyond the fact that placebos themselves can cause serious reactions in some people, there are dangers involved in any physician’s recommending a homeopathic “remedy” to a patient.
Homeopaths often promote their products for people suffering from diseases like diabetes, coronary artery disease and even cancer. If patients are led to believe that homeopathic drugs are effective for minor conditions, they could well decide to forego effective mainstream therapies for serious disorders (who wouldn’t be tempted by a “safe”, “natural” drug, or by other forms of woo that promise results based on magical properties?). Also to be considered are the time and money wasted attempting a homeopathic water cure, plus the loss of confidence in one’s physician when one discovers they’ve been enabling nonsense.
Placebos are a difficult gray area for physicians to delve into, on the basis of ethics and duty to one’s patient.
And I blame the internet. Woe be to the R.N. who diagnoses or prescribes for it is outside the parameters of most state Nurse Practice Acts and there will be a day in front of their State Board of Nursing or a lawsuit in their future for negligence/malpractice.
I have a friend who is skeptical in every way except this one issue. She swears it works and so does her sister, who is a nurse. When I tell her it’s a placebo, she claims it works on babies and animals and has seen it work first hand. I can’t get anywhere with her.
Call me old-fashioned but I blame that rock and roller music. The kids may like it but I think it’s just noise.
That’s not quite the homeopathic theory.
The theory is “like cures like.” This theory has no basis in fact; it’s just a hair-brained idea that Samuel Hahnemann thought up in the days before the germ theory of disease had been developed.
Let’s say you have a headache. The homeopathic treatment method is to find some substance that causes a headache, and take that. But not at full strength, because that would cause a headache, and you want to counter it, not reinforce it.
So you dilute the substance enough that it can no longer cause a headache – that makes it safe – and take that. Of course, if it can no longer cause a headache, it is probably too weak to do anything else, too, but at least it won’t harm you.
But it gets worse. Homeopathy relies upon “provings.” Ingest an unknown substance and keep a record of how you feel. Did your skin turn green? Then it is written down as a possible cure (when diluted) for green skin.
Never mind that the reason your skin turned green originally might have nothing to do with the reason the supposed cure does it. The two actions appear to be similar so they are declared to be so; this is the “law of similars.”
All this might have made some sense when medical science was yet to be developed, but it is absolute nonsense now.
Tell that to Delores Krieger, a nurse who believes, and teaches, that waving your hands over a patient without touching them will cure almost anything, or at least make them feel better.
Nobody’s yanked her license yet, in fact, IIRC, she has headed departments that devoted themselves to this practice in standard US hospitals.
Head On, huh? What do you apply it to?
Your penis of course.
I cannot believe the garbage I just found in my inbox. Some company is pushing homeopathic remedies for KIDS to “relieve the stress of Halloween”. Because between the scary movies, the scary costumes, all that candy, all that excitement, the kids are all stressed out and revved up. So they need a homeopathic potion to calm them down!
:rolleyes::smack::mad:
The nerve. The gall! I’m sure someone is making a bundle selling this horse manure.
This just smacks of desperation, on top of being a scam. If your kids are that bent out of shape over Halloween, maybe you should switch off the TV and take them to a G-rated movie that night and skip Halloween altogether!
Is the best homeopathic medicine you can take!
-it’s cheap
-it contains a little bit of everything-in tiny concentrations-so it has something to “cure” everything!
-(finally) you can get it without a prescription!
No need to consult with these quacks-just drink copious amounts of tap water!
Sounds like classic placebo prescription to me. While doctors (and nurses) cannot, in this day an age, get away with prescribing actual literal placebos for minor complaints. Its pretty common, in my experience, for them to prescribe things like this. They could theoretically treat the condition in question so you can’t sue them over it (though in the case of homeopathy only if the theory in question is decidedly dicey and unscientific), in reality the largest affect will be the psychological one of taking a “medicine” in fancy packaging recommended to you by a doctor.
I always assumed that homeopathy came from allergy theory. A certain foreign substance will cause a reaction, but you can condition your immune system if you use a small enough dose, gradually increasing over time. That’s how allergy shots work.
Someone took it further to all substances, which may have had limited success for some of them, and then reduced the small amounts to the point where it makes absolutely no sense. The placebo effect took care of the rest.
Just wanted to say a final thing about homeopathy in the NHS.
If you come to the UK, you are not going to be treated with homeopathic “remedies”.
Even if a doctor believed that your condition was best served by a placebo, they would still be unlikely to prescribe a homeopathic treatment, or refer you to a homeopath.
It’s something you really have to ask for, and I firmly believe that most doctors would dissuade you from that option, even for trivial conditions.
There is token homeopathic support in the NHS, and it exists really as a quirk of history.
Uhhh…? No, they can’t. Unless you think “tap water” is the theoretical cure for something. Well, not counting dehydration.
I got into it once with some homeopathy promoters on an equine message board I frequent. Bizzarely, they were insisting that it was possible to overdose your horses on “Bach’s Rescue Remedy” and you should OMG never give more than a dropperful!!! I asserted that BRR is mostly water with some brandy and there would be no unsafe dose for a horse that didn’t involve purchasing it by the gallon. They took umbrage at my allegation that BRR was not terrifyingly powerful.
In the “heat of someone’s wrong on the internet” I established using various cites, that it was perfectly safe to dose your horse with plutonium at the same level as what you would find in the entire bottle of BRR (it’s 5X dilution, which, compared to some homeopathy preparations, actually contains a nonzero quantity of err… “flower essences”). Needless to say, I was a big meanie with all my pesky “facts.”
The experience actually spawned a pretty decent (well, for me) SDMB thread, about whether it’s worth it arguing about woo when the woo is not harmful and not offered as a substitute for actual medical care.
In homeopathy terms, “5x” dilution actually means going dilution to 1/100 5 times, right? If someone reading this didn’t know that, it might sound reasonable like you mean one part in 5 or one part in 6, but it’s actually diluted so there’s 99 parts out of 100 water, then that solution is made 99/100 water, etc. 6 times. Leaving us with 1 part per 10,000,000,000 of the original solution, right?
Oops. I guess 5x means 1/100000. I was thinking of the “C” scale. Wiki page.
Back in the bad old days when you could write whatever you wanted in medical notes, secure in the knowledge that neither your patient, nor their legal team would ever see it, you would sometimes see “TEETH” in the margin.
It was there for the heartsink patients, the ones with minor but annoying problems who don’t get better despite every treatment and investigation you throw at them.
It stands for:
Tried Everything Else, Try Hoemopathy.
Homeopathy is what doctors resort to when the issue won’t kill the person, but every treatment has been tried and has failed and the person is becoming a pest in their quest for a “cure”. Then you can recommend homeopathy- safe in the knowledge that it won’t kill them, it might make them feel better and they’ll get their emotional needs met by the homeopath rather than you.
It’s where you send people who you believe have psychosomatic illness, when THEY believe they have physical illness and won’t accept psychological treatments.
I’m anti-woo, but I think some people do benefit from placebos, tea and sympathy.
I said “nonzero” to distinguish it from those dilutions in which it is statisitically unlikely that even one molecule of the “ingredient” is present. Not in order to say that any notable quantity is.
Bargain if you ask me. Great way to use the Placebo Effect instead of prescribing costly treatment regimes for ‘the worried well’.