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pooley

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Re: House of Commons Committee advises end to NHS funding of homeopathy

Feb 24, 2010, 14:04

pooley wrote:

tingltangl wrote:

NO SHIT! Given that most of the members of the committee are well known critics of homeopathy there was fuck all chance of it getting a fair hearing.
Having practised homeopathy for 10 years I now have a case file chock full of effectively administered placebo!!, so do my colleagues. The vast majority of my clients have chronic conditions that do not resolve by themselves and most of them have been on numerous conventional drugs prescribed by their GP, for whom the "placebo effect" has been woefully inadequate in relieving their suffering. I know that all of this will be batted away as merely "anecdotal evidence" and therefore worthless. Well its not fucking worthless to my clients, but then what do they know.

The line "Homeopathy has no evidence to back it up" is a crock of shit and makes me want to weep with frustration. I`m running out of space now but do ask me to back up my claims Merrick and i`ll do my best.

I'm sorry to say this, but homeopathy is complete and utter bullshit. It's about time a grown up NHS with a cash shortage woke up to this and stopped funding sugar pills.

Water with memory, the very idea...

Just found this online - worth a read
Homeopaths claim to be able to treat many illnesses including the following, but none of these actually works in the way claimed any benefits of the treatment can only be ascribed to the placebo effect.

Acne
Allergies
Anxiety and panic attacks
Asthma
Back pain and neuralgia
Bruises
Colic
Coughs and colds and croup
Cystitis
Eczema
Heartburn
Insect bites and stings
Irritable bowel syndrome
Leg cramp
Menstrual and menopausal problems
Morning sickness
Nausea
Stress
Teething pains
Some practitioners even offer homeopathic alternatives to antimalarials and vaccines for serious diseases. This practice is very, very dangerous. If you visit a homeopath and they offer a preventative for malaria instead of you taking proper antimalarials, then you run the risk of catching the disease if exposed to malaria-carrying insects. Not a good idea, at all. I’ve seen spam email recently for homeopathic alternatives to bird flu and swine (H1N1) drugs and vaccines. The World Health Organization recently warned against turning to homeopathy for treating serious diseases.

Where’s the evidence?
There have been lots of tests carried out to see whether homeopathy works, including trials with animals. (Critique of veterinarian homeopathy claims). None of these stand up to scrutiny and those that are more scientific fail to show anything but a placebo effect. The majority of studies cited by homeopaths to support their claims are simply not scientifically rigorous enough to prove anything. The British Medical Journal and the Lancet, two well-respected medical journals, have published reviews of several trials into homeopathy but it seems have found no substantial support for its effects beyond a placebo.

UPDATE: 2009-10-20 – An email correspondent claims that these two old papers (1991 and 1997)

Linde, K., Clausius, N., Ramirez, G., et al., “Are the Clinical Effects of Homoeopathy Placebo Effects? A Meta-analysis of Placebo-Controlled Trials,” Lancet, September 20, 1997, 350:834-843 and J. Kleijnen, P. Knipschild, G. ter Riet, “Clinical Trials of Homoeopathy,” British Medical Journal, February 9, 1991, 302:316-323 contradict my statement, although in their email they misquote my post.

Fundamentally, preparing a homeopathic treatment involves diluting the supposed active ingredient over and over again to the point where there will be not one single molecule of the ingredient in the final remedy given to the patient.

In the late 1980s, French scientist, Jacques Benveniste, tried to show that although the original drug might not be present it does leave a ‘memory’ in the water in which it was first dissolved and it is this ‘memory’ that causes the effects of homeopathic remedies. Of course, no scientist has succeeded in duplicating his experiments and the consensus now is that he was wrong.

What do doctors think about homeopathy?

Homeopathy does not work. Physicians know this and will not morally prescribe homeopathy to their patients. It is an ethical minefield to consider homeopathy except as a deliberate exercise in placebo of last resort either for hypochondriacs who are actually not ill or for cases for which conventional medicine has no further answers.

Does homeopathy work?

It is difficult to separate out the marginally positive results that have been seen in some spurious clinical trials from the placebo effect. Practitioners use vanishingly low doses of a compound or drug that if given in large enough quantities would cause the symptoms of the disease they are trying to cure. The homeopathic remedy Allium cepa, for instance, is made from an extract of onions. Onions, of course, make your eyes sting and water and your nose run when you peel and chop them. The homeopathic ‘like for like’ principle says that a disorder with these symptoms would be cured by a small dose of onion. So, homeopaths may use Allium cepa to treat hayfever. But any effect will be purely placebo, as there is not even a single molecule from the extract left in the solution after homeopathic dilution.

The underlying idea is that the symptom-causing remedy kick-starts our body to begin the self-healing process. There are a wide variety of homeopathic preparations, common ones might be made from the deadly nightshade, belladonna, arnica, chamomile, mercury and sulfur, sepia (extracted from squid ink), snake venom and even compounds extracted from bodily fluids. But, again, none of these so-called remedies contain any active component, despite claims about water having a memory of the molecules that were once dissolved in it. If that were the case, then surely we’d all be cured of everything just by drinking a glass of tap water.

For more on why homeopathy is nothing but snake oil, quackery and seriously bad medicine, check out Singh and Ernst’s – Trick or Treatment and accompanying website, which at the time of updating this page (June 6, 2008) is still under construction. Skeptic’s dictionary definition of homeopathy and UK skeptics.

UPDATE: 2009-10-20 An email correspondent sent me a rather insulting and sarcastic message regarding this post, hence the various updates. In the email, which was from someone represent homeopaths, needless to say, I was accused at once of being a “super-smart man” and “clearly not living up to your own high expectations of yourself”. Apparently, “a combination of arrogance and ignorance is a deadly duo” and that I could cure this state but first, I have to “recognize that a dis-ease exists.”

The correspondent, who could just as easily have left a comment on this post instead of emailing concludes: “I hope that I am lighting a fire underneath so that you can get better, even if we may not be in agreement on all subjects…”

Hmmm…well…I think I have pretty much the whole of science-based medicine on my side when I reiterate that homeopathy is pseudoscience based on the ludicrous notion of the infinite dilution of “remedies”.

There are many small studies which show it works, although they tend to be poorly designed and conducted by homeopaths themselves.

Even if science has missed something fundamental about the nature of atoms, molecules, and chemical bonds, the idea that removing absolutely all traces of an active substance from a “remedy” and expecting it to have anything but a placebo effect is surely nonsense. If homeopaths are not using infinite dilution, and instead are actually using herbal remedies diluted only a little then I’d have no truck with that. Herbal medicine is valid. Indeed, approximately 30% of modern pharmaceutical products have a herbal origin. No modern pharmaceutical products have a homeopathic origin.

In reply to:
Re: House of Commons Committee advises end to NHS funding of homeopathy (pooley)

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Re: House of Commons Committee advises end to NHS funding of homeopathy (tingltangl)

Topic Outline:

House of Commons Committee advises end to NHS funding of homeopathy – Merrick, Feb 22, 2010, 16:07


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