Homeopathy: Medieval Mysticism

"Homeopathy influences the body's energy  rather than its chemical balance. Hence, the remedies do not cause side effects since there is no chemical trace to accumulate in the tissues.  For the same reasons, it is not possible to take an overdose of homeopathic medicine in the same way as in allopathic medicine (which works on a chemical level)  Homeopathic remedies are therefore not intrinsically dangerous..."

No, nothing dangerous about harmless, tiny, inert sugar pills.

Inter-Est-Ting

Latin for "between" - Latin for "It is" - Chinese Dynasty of the 3rd Century

What the heck does that mean?

Inter-est

I don't know, but it sounds very Zen. "It is between".

Interest=it is between [time periods, when money interest accrues?]

Homeo, from the Greek "Homer", meaning mythical or fake

"Pathy" - from the Greek pathos, or pathetic

Therefore: Homeopathy = Pathetic Fakery

AAAHHHHHHMMMMMMM......zzzzz......zzzzzz.....zzzzz.....zzzzz....

For example, belladonna (deadly nightshade) is a common homeopathic remedy. In a large enough dose (which is actually quite small) it is poisonous. Homeopathy says that if you take a much diluted-dose, it will help you recover from poisonous bites like bee stings, headaches, and various other pains.

The idea is that when you're ill, your body is overwhelmed on one front, causing the illness to break through and for you to feel the symptoms. The small dose in the homeopathic remedy re-stimulates your defenses to push the illness out of your body. Homeopathic proponents cohtrast this with traditional Western (allopathic) medicine, by saying allopathy suppresses symptoms and drives physical illness deeper into your body, where it will manifest later, in an emotional problem, perhaps, or another physical problem.

I'll certainly agree that there haven't been enough studies done on the various homeopathic remedies (not as much profit in it though), and a lot of it does look terribly silly. My own purely anecdotal, personal evidence: when I take allopathic medicines I get sicker, and when I take homeopathic medicines I get better. This has been the case since I was a little kid and didn't know the difference between the two. I've only had to go to the doctor a few times in my life anyway; maybe I'm just lucky but I think that not taking a lot of traditional medicine is what makes me a healthier person.

people with certain immune disorders have to be really careful w/ some natural substances. allergies, thyroid disorders, and lupus are all immune disorders. for example because i have hypothyroidism i can't take echinacea, and large doses of vitamin C aggravate my allergies. interestingly, with the hypothyroidism, the most effective thyroid replacement is organic, from animal thyroids and is called "Armour Thyroid". Only older doctors will prescribe it because the newer doctors have been indoctrinated that "Synthetic is better" despite patient reports to the contrary.

That said, I'll reiterate that they might be effective in bolstering the psyche to fight or just ignore intrusive problems. But putting magnets in your shoes might help do that as well.

So I earn a little pocket money by running AV tech in the conference centre my department turns into over the weekend.

This weekend I am sitting through a conference on homeopathy by someone I understand is a famous homeopather, so I'm not even going to Google proof his name. Honestly, the shit is his coming out with is staggering, and I have to be polite to this charlatan.

This guy is charging people money to treat their autistic children and knows less about the condition than I do after reading that last Jonathan Safron Foer book. And he has over a hundred people in this lecture theatre paying to listen to his waterfall of bullshit all weekend. And I bet he's going to nail one of them at the dinner tonight.

I'm very weary of homeopathic meds but alas so many doctors - especially the pediatrician we visit for our two daughters - is very much pro-homeopathy. I am extremely inclined to tell her that I am very much against it. I am all for classical medicine. Yes, antibiotics are very aggressive but I want my child to recover as quickly as possible.

Yeah, no placebo effect with babies, and you don't want to mess about. Get that pathogen in the cross-hairs and take them down.

Update: first coffee break. They are playing world music and drum and bass over the PA. Also, there is no regular milk with the tea and coffee, only soya milk. I want to kill them.

(take the pathogen down, not the baby)

I just like saying the word homeopathy. The stress on the second o pleases me.

It is a euphonious word!

Update: I have just seen the conference pack. They are giving these delegates, all of whom "practice medicine", a photocopy of the periodic table which is set in Comic Sans.

Also, they say "provings" rather than "evidence".

I think the placebo effect is partly about making a conscious effort to corral one's immune system. I vaguely remember something about cancer therapies where patients think really hard about kicking cancer that supposedly work to some degree.

"A kind of magic?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/nov/16/sciencenews.g2

The print edition had a much harsher headline, IIRC.

Yeah, brave of them to go with "A Load of Old Wank" there.

Update: first coffee break. They are playing world music and drum and bass over the PA. Also, there is no regular milk with the tea and coffee, only soya milk. I want to kill them.

They probably heard that the local dairy was run by a "big farmer", and overreacted.

Lunch was good.

Apparently one can prevent harm from mobile phone radiation by taking an "imponderable" whose "mental affect" is "as if caught in the multiplictiy of microwaves or mobile phone waves". Good times.

You should start laughing really loud when he comes out with some choice bullshit.

start asking astrology questions. If he takes that seriously, move on to phrenology.

this stuff is amazing to me

you know head-on from all the tv commercials, an $8 stick of wax with "white bryony" (basically mandrake root) diluted at .000001 PPM - that's a hundred-thousandth of a part per million

can ilx chemistry nerds name ANYTHING that would have a medical effect at a hundred thousandth of a part per million?

Apparently one can prevent harm from mobile phone radiation by taking an "imponderable" whose "mental affect" is "as if caught in the multiplictiy of microwaves or mobile phone waves". Good times.

^^^ this is happening in the physics department of 0xf3rd University, by the way. I am sat in the projector room watching 30 Rock, but occasionally I hear something that catches my ear. I went out and smirked at him during his mobile phone bit. Jackass.

They are giving these delegates, all of whom "practice medicine", a photocopy of the periodic table which is set in Comic Sans.

-- caek, Saturday, November 17, 2007 5:39 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Link

outstanding

oxferd?

I think I'm beginning to understand the problem.

He is now demonstrating a technique he pioneered to use Omnigraffle as a diagnostic tool. I mean, I like Omnigraffle and all, but that's some serious, dangerous bullshit right there.

xposts: best bit was watching them unpack their conference materials. It was clear several had never seen this magical table of patterns before and thought it was something like this:

http://z.about.com/d/altreligion/1/0/3/c/2/abracadabra.jpg

Actually, no, the best bit was the Comic Sans.

First of these guys that tries to tell me that Newton was down with alchemy gets smacked.

On the PA during this coffee break: Cirque du Soleil soundtrack.

report any finger-bell sightings, plz.

As is usual at conferences there are stalls selling books, etc. The main one at this one is "The Tr4v3lling Homeopaths C0ll3ctive". They look like the book store at Slab City in Into The Wild. They are really nice people, but they are still RONG. Also, the organizers are flirting with me in that awesome way middle-aged women do. Everyone at this conference except the speaker is hilarious. The speaker is an asshole.

As I was leaving the organizer asked me if I had learnt anything, so I explained I had spent most of the day working on my PhD. He asked me what I was studying so I told him and his face lit up. "Do you know what Avogardo's number is?" I told him I did, and he laughed and said "one over that is the concentration factor we use for our remedies". Ha!

For non-scienticians: 1 / Avogadro's number = 0.000000000000000000000001666667.

He found this funny.

It reminds me of that thing about how a homeopathic remedy diluted to 200C (this means you take 1% and dilute it, 1% of that mixture and dilute it again, 200 times) would need to be sold in a bottle bigger than the solar system just to have one molecule of active ingredient in it. 30C is a pretty normal potency for it to be sold in too, but anything over 12C is very unlikely to have a single molecule of anything but water in it.

Right, but... that's the whole point, isn't it? The whole point is to dilute it so that there isn't any of the original substance left, just its "energy". So please debunk the "energy" theory, not the lack of chemically efficacious molecules.

I think the probelm with the energy stuff is that it has never been adequately proven in the first place. Anyhow, what's wrong with soya milk, u fannies?

Well, if nothing else making homeopathic cures seems very cheap to do.

FUdge tho I hate these fux too. Sorry you have to listen to all this maddening horseshit, caek my pal.

Haha also, "You're working on a PhD, do you know what Avogadro's number is?" I wish he'd have gone on asking junior high chem questions. "Do you know what an alkaline earth metal is? Do you know what an electron is? etc?"

James Randi explains Homeopathy

I can't believe there are doctors who suggest homeopathic remedies for shit. You should lose your license for that, what in the fuck, why not just tell everybody to go home and pray harder?

at the height of my half-assed hippie dippie phase i turned my nose up at homeopathy, it's like even if it works this shit looks hella complicated

Voodoo etymology!

this is really well done sir.

what fucking sucks or used to fucking suck about touring in Germany would be if you got really sick and needed something and you stopped by the Apotheke you stood a fair chance of having the sonofabitch behind the counter pushing homeopathic stuff on you when what you wanted was some fucking nyquil

I also resent that it gives a bad name to some of the genuinely useful hippie-dippie stuff

He found this funny.

-- caek, Saturday, November 17, 2007 2:19 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

buy $10 worth of a substance, sell $10 billion dollars worth of water. i would laugh, too.

Yeah, the phrase "...all the way to the bank" keeps floating to the top of my mind for some reason.

i wonder if those people who sell diluted cancer drugs self-justify by claiming some homeopathic benefit.

although they actually leave a detectable amount of the substance in solution

HAVANAGILA
HAVANAGIL
HAVANAGI
HAVANAG
HAVANA
HAVAN
HAVA
HAV
HA
H

The Man from Hava Nagila.

It reminds me of that thing about how a homeopathic remedy diluted to 200C (this means you take 1% and dilute it, 1% of that mixture and dilute it again, 200 times) would need to be sold in a bottle bigger than the solar system just to have one molecule of active ingredient in it.

OTM. I remembered a great order of magnitude question: students are asked to estimate the number of drops of water in the worlds ocean. An accurate number is approximately Avogardo's number. So this means their remedies are approximately one drop of melancholy or whatever mixed with the ENTIRE WORLD'S OCEAN. And they give you a small phial of the ocean.

Right, but... that's the whole point, isn't it? The whole point is to dilute it so that there isn't any of the original substance left, just its "energy". So please debunk the "energy" theory, not the lack of chemically efficacious molecules.

See 300 years of physical and organic chemistry for details.

FUdge tho I hate these fux too. Sorry you have to listen to all this maddening horseshit, caek my pal.

Thx dude. To be fair to these fools, this beats last time, which was a medical conference where I spent the weekend watching babies have epileptic fits. Good times.

(Videos of babies. I didn't stand by and watch.)

^^^ I'm not sure that helps any.

"I feel that a spiritual mistake creates pathology, and then the disease comes, but that disease contains the solution."

Who should prevail in this struggle between naturalistic healers and ass-kickers with syringes full of chemotherapy? In a sense, neither side. Both have much to offer and plenty to be embarrassed about. To date, neither has established an all-encompassing operation so wondrous that it should demand monogamy from patients. So far, though, the problem with pairing the two disciplines at your corner medical center is that it mostly serves to diminish each: The West looks spent and flabby, a bully gone to seed, while the East seems like a kid with a new car and no clue how to drive.

The enforcers of the Western orthodoxy are the preening evidenced-based medicine crowd, those notorious killjoys who operate on the almost amusing premise that every square inch of medicine is built upon reason, the product of a rationally ordered stainless-steel world. If no evidence, they insist, then no truth. And if no truth, get thee out of my medical center. They briskly have swept away the entire alternative field, viewing chelation, St. John's wort, and music therapy, for example, as interchangeably absurd.

fukk slate imo

"Such an absolutist stance ignores the observations of thousands of people over thousands of years"

the plural of anecdote is not data.

plenty of "the preening evidenced-based medicine crowd" are willing to enter into a dialogue about the ethics and practicalities of offering placebo-based treatments but it is the notorius killjoys in the woo community who (obviously) bristle at any suggestion that their treatments might be ever so slightly, er made-up.

Homeopathy sceptics have staged a mass "overdose" of homeopathic remedies, in a bid to prove they have no effect.

Protesters ate whole bottles of tablets at branches of Boots in places such as Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London, Leicester, Edinburgh and Birmingham.

They have asked the pharmacy chain to stop selling the remedies, which they call "scientifically absurd".

The Society of Homeopaths called it a "stunt". Boots said it followed industry guidelines on homeopathy.

From 2005 to 2008 the NHS spent almost £12m on homeopathic treatments, according to a 2009 Freedom Of Information request by Channel 4 News.

'Placebo effect'

Supporters of homeopathy say it is a system that uses very highly diluted substances to trigger the body to heal itself, but critics argue there is no evidence they work.

HAVE YOUR SAY

I believe herbal remedies can help various ailments but I'm very sceptical about the preparations that are sold

Hope_Full, Birmingham
Send us your comments

The demonstrations were organised by the Merseyside Skeptics Society (MSS).

Michael Marshall, from the MSS, said: "We believe that they shouldn't be selling sugar pills to people who are sick. Homeopathy never works any better than a placebo. The remedies are diluted so much that there is nothing in them."

Mr Marshall said demonstrations were also planned in Canada, Spain, the US and Australia.

The Society of Homeopaths said it did not expect the protesters to suffer any adverse reactions from taking large quantities of the remedies.

'Ill-advised stunt'

The society's chief executive, Paula Ross, said: "This is an ill advised publicity stunt in very poor taste, which does nothing to advance the scientific debate about how homeopathy actually works."

Paul Bennett, professional standards director from Boots, said the company follows advice from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain on the correct selling of complementary medicines.

He said: "Homeopathy is recognised by the NHS and many health professionals and our customers choose to use homeopathy.

"Boots UK is committed to providing our customers with a wide range of healthcare products to suit their individual needs, we know that many people believe in the benefits of complementary medicines and we aim to offer the products we know our customers want.

"We would support the call for scientific research and evidence gathering on the efficacy of homeopathic medicines. This would help our patients and customers make informed choices about using homeopathic medicines."

Watching that James Randi video. Jesus, he's so patronizing I even feel sorry for homeopaths! He's scoffing at the thought of "giving the patient a highly diluted substance that in a well patient causes the same effects" yet isn't this basically what happens when we get a flu shot? In order to make sure we are immunized don't we take a highly diluted amount of the flu virus and let our body interpret that in order to generate the proper immune response?

I was under the impression that this mass overdose thing was because Boots have been selling homeopathic remedies, but with super-vague advice about 'what to do in case of an overdose' ie seek advice from the pharmacist who sold you it (and in some cases, go to A&E).

Oh, full story here:
http://skepticbarista.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/just-a-spoonful-of-sugar/

He's scoffing at the thought of "giving the patient a highly diluted substance that in a well patient causes the same effects" yet isn't this basically what happens when we get a flu shot?

Um, no?

Actually the problem with the first round of swine flu vaccines was that there wasn't enough of the actual virus particle in there to provoke a proper response. Giving a very very very small amount of any immunogen (a virus or allergenic substance or a bacteria or toxin or whatever) can promote a mild "tolerance" response that leads to a weaker immune response when the same immunogen is reencountered subsequently (this is the theory behind allergy shots). Vaccines try and provoke a big giant immune response, since that's the way to get antibodies against the flu or tetanus toxin or whatever to hang around for a while.

He's scoffing at the thought of "giving the patient a highly diluted substance that in a well patient causes the same effects" yet isn't this basically what happens when we get a flu shot?

In a vaccine, the patient receives a diluted version of the microbe that causes the condition, so as to stimulate the production of antibodies to fight a real version of the disease when it comes along. There are two big differences with homoeopathy: (1) that it does not use the same microbes, but something that causes the same symptoms (this is about as nonsensical as treating a headache with a bang on the head with a hammer, since both make your head ache), and (2) the dilution is so extreme that all of the well-understood principles of physics and chemistry indicate that to ingest a single molecule of the active substance would require taking the amount of water that would fill a sphere with a radius the size of the distance from the sun to the earth. So (1) is just silly, and (2) means there's nothing being taken except water anyway.

(All probably said upthread, apologies for the repetition.)

http://drboli.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/massive-homeopathic-overdose-homeopathy.png?w=430&h=538

http://drboli.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/dr-bolis-press-clipping-bureau-23/

the plural of anecdote is not data.

jesus christ am i ever gonna overrepeat this line.

Wonder what Jim Corr thinks of this.

something about the NHS no longer funding this rubbish?

steer clear of the Shakey/misery thread with that dangerous challop

don't think it's as simple [no archaic pun intended] as that, darragh, as it's usually down to local funding? Some will provide it, some won't.

Thought i read swhere the scots arent buying it no more

Yeah, Lothian iirc.