Are homeopathic practitioners latter day snake oil salesmen?

[flip_flop]

I'll nail my colours to the mast - I find the idea that diluting something a million million million million Million etc... times and that water has a memory to be absolutely absurd.

[dzug2]

But snake oil works - for a lot of people a lot of the time. It's called the placebo effect.

[flip_flop]

Excellent Androm

I have no issue with homeopathy being used as a placebo - taking a potion that has been diluted 14 million million times (apparently it is more effective the more it is diluted!!!) certainly won't do any harm to anybody taking it, and if it works as a placebo, then great, but the fact is these charlatans are selling their utterly worthless unproven nonsense as "remedies" - which is another word for cure - as an alternative, in many cases to proper, proven, drugs.

[ljdksa]

I suppose if people choose to pay for something unproven and unlicensed, more fool them. At least it is harmless. Never quite sure of the Placebo effect. We have clients with dementia, etc, who are on placebos. Not sure if that is a placebo for the client or the relative!

[Addy123]

Which is why all herbal remedies are, from 1st April, going to be subject to having to prove their efficacy.
Any claims they make will have to carry an MHRA license. Some of them do work as they are remedies of days gone by from which some of our current medications have developed.
The 99p stuff you get in healthfood stores are unlikely to have any efficacious value, but something that has ingredients grown under specific closely monitored conditions to ensure a garuanteed measurable amount of active ingredients can and do have claimable benefits.
Let's face it aspirins main ingredient is salicyclic acid.Plant extracts, including willow bark and spiraea, of which salicylic acid was the active ingredient, had been known to help heal headaches, pains and fevers since antiquity. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, who lived sometime between 460 B.C and 377 B.C., left historical records of pain relief treatments, including the use of powder made from the bark and leaves of the willow tree to help heal headaches, pains and fevers.[8]


Obviously some are just placebo effect products, but then again each to their own eh?

[andy-hughes]

When my oldest daughters were small - i am talking movre than thirty years ago, long before the current craze, and proliforation of homeopathy, both suffered severely with eczema, the youngest especially who had to be bathed and banadaged daily.

In desparation, their mum (before i knew her) took them to a local homeopath. Far from being a charlatan, he was hardly known at all - he only saw people by word of outh referral, and made no appointments, but everyone queued and was seen on the days of his surgeries, which could and did go on until the early hours of the morning.

He mixed some dark liquid of which both girls drank a teaspoonful twice a day. The yongest's skin erupted in sores and green puss, before clearing completely. The odest one's skin was less seriously affected, rashed up, and again, cleared - never to return in either of them.

My wife is about as cynical and suspicious an individual about 'miracle cures' as you woll find anywhere, but this was, and is proof that homeopathy works.

The practicioner contiuned until his death, never ever advertised anywhere, saw people no matter how long they waited on surgery days, and loads of people came from all over the UK, and abroad to see him.

I simply put forward this experience as a fact - everyone can make up their own minds - but i doubt you can use a 'placebo' on a four-year-old and expect success.

[Sqad]

Andy, I d not know the time scale between onset of lesions time until seen by homeopathist and time of disappearance.of said lesions or the competence of the doctor who diagnosed the condition.

There is a skin disorder common in children called Besnier's Prurigo and the lesions are very similar to eczema, may become infected and pus producing, itchy red, very debilitating and resistant to treatment.
For no apparent reason, it has the propensity to just disappear, never to be seen again.

I leave that with you.

[LazyGun]

Many people excuse the use of homeopathic remedies on the grounds that if nothing else it offers a placebo effect. The point about taking regular medicine is of course that you get the benefit of the active ingredient PLUS the placebo effect.

I also think people confuse natural remedies with homeopathy - natural remedies at least have the benefit of having some form of active ingredient. Homeopathy,on the other hand, has no active ingredients. Nor does it have any sort of plausible scientific mechanism by which it could possibly work.

Homeopathy has had 200 years to prove itself. Study after study after study after study has consistently shown that the very best that homeopathic remedies can do is to match a placebo effect, and that only for self-limiting,trivial disorders. In the meanwhile, you have dangerously deluded homeopaths offering homeopathic remedies as an allegedly effective alternative to anti malarial drugs, or even worse, offering allegedly effective treatments to HIV patients in Africa.

Recently a 9 month old baby died of eczema because the parents insisted on treating her homeopathically.

@Andy - you speak rationally, and I like most of your posts , but with respect your recounting of an anecdotal event in the past with no controls over confounding factors is most certainly not any sort of credible evidence that homeopathy works.Sorry.

On balance, it is likely you would gain more healthy benefit from taking snake oil than a homeopathic remedy.

[Addy123]

Hi Androm, the link below tells you about it.

http://www.herbsociety.org.uk/legislation.htm

The legislation has been scheduled for some time and April 2011 is D Day. I attended the Healthfood institute AGM on Thursday just gone where there was an MHRA representative giving a talk about it.

[madmaggot]

I don't have any strong feelings about whether these remedies work or not but what cannot be denied is the research that shows that dogs can sniff out the homeopathic 'water' from the plain water. Just because we can't explain something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Or, to put it simply, science is merely what we have learnt to date.
It is not all that long ago that science 'knew' that the world was flat!

[LazyGun]

@MadMaggot - I have absolutely no idea where you get the idea that a dog can differentiate, by smell, homeopathic water - or as we call it, water - from "plain" water

Since there is no active ingredient in homeopathic water, this is scientifically implausible. This assertion of yours can safely be dismissed as myth, unless you can produce a link to some credible evidence.

So, actually your assertion can be denied :)

To assert as you do that science is ignorant of the efficacy of homeopathy, in much the same way as science was once ignorant of whether or not the earth was flat ,is simply a false equivalence and says,with respect, much more about your lack of understanding of science and the scientific method than anything else. There have been 200 years of trials and studies of homeopathy and, in all that time, not a single credible trial in all those years has shown that homeopathic remedies have any effect beyond placebo.

You will get more from Snake Oil than from a homeopathic remedy.

[jomifl]

If the one of the underlying principles of homeopathy (that the more an ingredient is diluted then the more effective it is) holds true then just about every drop of water from anywhere qualifies as a homeopathic remedy for everything. So obviously it is nonsense as if it was true then we would all be cured of everything ............. but we ain't.