The customer is always right, or so they say. But it's the manufacturer who decides to package it in the same shape and color as popular FDA-approved medicines. And it's the retailer who decides to intermingle the different types of product on the same shelf. Practices which are sure to result in someone who intends to buy a familiar medicine to instead pick up the imitation and not realize they're getting something completely different.
Gasoline is immediately verifiable as being effective or not. The problem with homeopathic medicine is that people can't tell whether it works or not. Placebo is a hell of a drug.
Nearly every market where the quality or efficacy of the product isn't readily verifiable by the purchaser is a hotbed for scams and snake oil.
They don't look like "real" medications though because they are clearly labeled with "This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease."
We allow gas stations to have diesel pumps right next to gasoline ones. We just require that they be labeled appropriately and its expected that people read the label and not make assumptions based off proximity.
The packaging looks super similar to real medicine to me (see: oscillococcinum). The gas pump analogy would be a pump selling <85 octane or even water instead of gas right beside the 87+ octane people want.
Attempt to prevent. As I recall, leaded had nozzles that were also larger than no lead but that didn’t stop people from using it and slaughtering their converters. People are ingenious in both good and bad ways - funnels and screwdrivers.
OTC medical matter isn’t regulated anywhere as tightly as active drugs. They’re supplements or food additives or other such things. Whole lot of that shelf space goes to stuff that’s not as useful or desirable as people think. And any ambiguity is naturally exploited to the max.
We know that homeopathic medicines are complete fraud (ie no better than placebo). This has been shown over and over again in thousands of studies. What you are saying is that your car stopping because of bad gas is worse than your asthma not being treated.
I really don't know actually; I never tried when I was in America because it was cheaper to buy contacts through my optometrist using my vision insurance. So you're probably right. I was told that you could buy prescription glasses offshore without a real prescription (you just had to input the numbers), but that wasn't an American site obviously.
Here in Japan, you do not need a prescription to buy contacts; you can just write down your numbers on a form and buy them over-the-counter.
Blaming the pharmacy is a little
disingenuous. Consumers should be able to buy medication without the same shelf being sprinkled with fraudulent placebos. This is something that needs to be regulated with warning labels or similar.
I think the pharmacy has part of the blame. They know which of the products are homeopathic. To mix them with other medicine or to put them separately is their choice. They can do better, they just don't care enough to invest the minimal effort.
To some degree yes. On the other hand, they'll optimize profit within the bounds of regulation, that's kind of their job. I wouldn't be surprised if margins on homeopathics were higher than margins on effective meds.
I'm not a supporter of homeopathic medicine, but I'd be curious to know the research on half the other stuff in the medical aisle. OTC pain medicines have famously little power vs placebo for instance.
What I don't understand is that on the one hand they want to sell their customers wholesome foods --on the other hand-- they sell charlataney stuff, products of dubious efficacy.
If freaking 7-11 stores can sell me Aspirin tablets, I don't see how Whole Foods can't.
There’s an unfortunate crossover between people who want whole food and people who follow Gwyneth Paltrow, believe in Sedona vortex fruit cocktail crystal magnet medicinal woo, and have had their catalytic converter stolen 7 times for reasons they could never possibly comprehend.
What, pray tell, does having your catalytic convertor stolen have to do with believing in Goop? Last time I heard of one being stolen, the thieves didn’t bother to do an interview.
Immodium is one of my "always have it stocked" things now. A few years ago, I had a bad case of the runs where Friday was "ok, that's uncomfortable" and Friday night was "this isn't good". Saturday was "I don't have enough energy to be able to safely drive a few blocks and back." I was able to call up a relative and they got some and dropped it off at my house.
So that's always in my drug cabinet now so that I won't have that situation again.
The chemistry part of it is neat:
> It is an opioid with no significant absorption from the gut and does not cross the blood–brain barrier when used at normal doses.
The "morphine giving you constipation" thing... this is the same, except that's all it does.
You almost certainly know this, but I feel compelled to add that Immodium does have downsides.
The most intuitive is prolonged use can stop all waste leaving your system for a while. As you can imagine, when the system finally starts going again it's initially uncomfortable, and can also be long-term damaging.
Yeah I think it probably has some kind of warning on the box. I keep it around. Once in a blue moon something I eat hits me wrong. I don't really want to go out and find a pharmacy in that state.
"palliative care" by the WHO is underselling it. In countries that struggle with basic sanitation, being able to prevent someone from literally shitting themselves to death with dysentery and other diseases that specifically suck the water out of your body into your intestines, it's downright lifesaving. "Shitting yourself to death" was a regular concern for average people for most of human history.
I've heard of people using it to manage withdrawals when kicking opioid/opiate addictions. Indeed it would at least help with the diarrhea symptom when withdrawing. No idea how well it works.
> The primary intent of users has been to manage symptoms of opioid withdrawal such as diarrhea, although a small portion derive psychoactive effects at these higher doses. At these higher doses central nervous system penetration occurs and long term use may lead to tolerance, dependence, and withdrawal on abrupt cessation. Dubbing it "the poor man's methadone", clinicians warned that increased restrictions on the availability of prescription opioids passed in response to the opioid epidemic were prompting recreational users to turn to loperamide as an over-the-counter treatment for withdrawal symptoms.
Oh man thanks, I had no idea that that had made its way into studies/academia/that kind of thing. Yeah no matter what withdrawals mean you're gonna end up paying painfully whether its all at once or on the installment plan.
It would be easy to reconcile it - just have a separate shelf clearly marked "Homeopathic remedies" and people who asked for it would have the easiest time finding it, while people asking for the real thing would not be confused.
The fact that it doesn't happen suggests that either they don't care - or they have some interest in maintaining the confusion.
I mistakenly bought homeopathic eye drops from a CVS once, for exactly this reason: I was in a rush, it was in between real medicine, I didn't notice the tiny "homeopathic" text on the package, and it was the lowest priced item. It didn't work, obviously, which is when I inspected the package more closely and was actually shocked (this was over 10 years ago) that CVS would sell homeopathics. I stopped shopping at CVS because of that, but they're not the only ones selling this junk.
That experience got me reading up on what was and was not allowed to be sold in stores. Turns out consumers have to educate themselves: the US government doesn't sufficiently ensure items on store shelves are effective or even harmless.
I think a good litmus test as to whether a thing is actually desired by consumers is how small the fine print is. Whether a person wants or does not want homeopathic sugar pills or organic food or whatever, they almost certainly want a label large and clear enough to distinguish the different sorts of goods. Stuffing that into fine print only serves to increase profits by deceiving people into paying more than they think they are for items less valuable than expected.
Homeopathy medicines are the best examples of the placebo effect. The common argument I often hear is that it worked for me in the past. Homeopathy people say it works slowly. It works slowly because you are giving your body enough time to cure itself. It works for some and some it doesn't work. Lot of people miss this basic logic.
Some other people believe in homeopathy because it's a herbal medicine. These two are completely different. The fundamental logic of how Homeopathy medicine is created is flawed. From Wiki, "Homeopathic preparations are termed remedies and are made using homeopathic dilution. In this process, the selected substance is repeatedly diluted until the final product is chemically indistinguishable from the diluent." If you know basic chemistry you will know that this doesn't make sense.
> repeatedly diluted until the final product is chemically indistinguishable from the diluent.
That, at least according to Wikipedia [0], is only the case for C/D 12 and higher. It’s pretty clear to anyone, that weak (homeopathy says the higher the dilution, the stronger the effect) tinctures like D2 (so 1 part whatever in 100 parts water) will still be chemically distinct from just water.
My parents use that as explanation why they use it and not the high concentrations (= high dilutions = pure water). Which requires more mental gymnastics than my brain can handle.
> After investigating reports that more than 400 babies were sickened and 10 died in connection with homeopathic teething products, the Food and Drug Administration confirmed Friday that it had indeed found elevated levels of the toxic substance, belladonna, in the products.
> The National Center for Homeopathy, which has ties with Hyland’s, slammed the FDA, calling the agency’s warnings “arbitrary and capricious.” In an “action alert,” the organization went on to suggest that warning was prompted by “groups interested in seeing homeopathy destroyed” and led to “fear mongering” by the media.
Although the levels in some of the products tested were elevated, in no case were the levels anywhere near a toxic dose. The amount of belladonna in the tablets were measured innanograms.
edit: Yeah downvote me, but look at every doctor selling these extremely high priced fake solutions to patients. When people with aids and cancer are getting sold what amounts to vitamins for tens of thousands of dollars, I'm sorry, but what else do you call it? There is no such thing as alternative medicine...
It boggles my mind that my medical insurance covers homeopathic and chiropractic treatments.
Which means that effectively, some portion of my astonishingly large medical insurance premium that I pay every month despite being in near-perfect health, goes to subsidize bullshit alternative medicine believers and lines the pockets of literal snake oil salespeople.
The core dynamic of health "insurance" is to restrict access to health care to pay out less, so offering up fraudulent placebo treatments make a lot of sense. Just be glad they don't force you to try using (those specific) fake cures for a year before they'll cover real treatment.
Ugh, I got bit by this at Walgreens I think it was. Went to buy some zinc lozenges for a cold, didn't notice the tiny "homeopathic" text on the label, got lozenges made with ingredients that might have touched a zinc molecule once.
There's an extra level of misdirection here - those zinc lozenges say "homeopathic" on them, but are not homeopathic in any traditional sense. Homeopathic generally means that whatever 'active' ingredient has been diluted to the point that not a single molecule remains and the supposed therapeutic value comes from some sort of BS 'resonance' or whatever that the molecules have supposedly left on the remaining water.
However, if you look at the fine print, it's something like a '1x' homeopathic dilution, and it in fact contains the correct amount of zinc gluconate, which is the active ingredient that has been tested and found to probably reduce the duration of the common cold.
Edit: That said, zinc acetate has been found to probably be the more effective substance for reducing the duration of the common cold, and the main brand of those don't pretend to be homeopathic so are probably a better bet.
Homeopathy is a specific term that means “doesn’t actually have the substance in it”. I’m making no claims to the curative power of zinc but a lozenge with zinc in it is totally different from a “homeopathic zinc lozenge” which contains materials that were once mixed with zinc then diluted until no zinc remains.
I’d be pretty mad if I bought “homeopathic gasoline” where someone puts a drop of gasoline into a million gallons of water then sells it to me as gasoline.
Homeopathy refers, specifically, to substances diluted down so much there's basically none of the original substance left in the resulting dilution. It's based on the premise that water has "memory."
I think you're getting homeopathy confused with "CAM," which stands for "complementary and alternate medicine." You might consider Zinc CAM (I haven't read the literature on it).
It is the case that something advertised as a "medicine" can include both homeopathic ingredients and other CAM ingredients as well.
Zinc is a mineral that's often good to take as a supplement.
Zicam is a popular "remedy" that's homeopathic, and is almost certainly what they are referring to.
My friend bought some once and when I pointed out that it said "homeopatic" in very, very tiny text he was super upset that he'd been duped.
What makes you say that? Most homeopathic formulations are explicitly diluted to the point that no measurable amount is left. That is not how Zinc lozenges work.
That's just how homeopathy is supposed to work. I don't think there is any standard about what you can call homeopathic or not, but it's supposed to be the more diluted the stronger it is.
Yes, I know how they say it works. But D2 (1 part in 100) is still called homeopathy and commonly available. As I posted in another comment [0], my parents only use the weak mixtures.
This is interesting because people will buy supplements that have no scientific basis for efficacy (biotin, mega-doses of Vit-C, St John's Wort) but they will deride homeopathy, which also has no scientific basis for efficacy. I'm not bashing zinc, because I don't know the science, but I am bashing homeopathy. Openly. Show me some double-blind studies. Unless the placebo effect is what you are selling, in which case, say that.
EDIT: Thanks for the info on St John's Wort! I should have picked a better example.
Interestingly enough there’s significant clinical evidence of St. Johns Wart acting as an SSRI and most serotonin-based medications warn about taking St. J’s Wart. See the indications for this other antidepressant for serotonin syndrome (St. John’s is listed as a potential cause):
https://www.rxlist.com/effexor-drug.htm
The brain is so powerful that just by believing something will work, it actually can work. This is the placebo response. We don’t know the mechanism [0] yet, but I think it is probably the same thing as manifestation [1].
I believe that visualization is powerful because once we have visualized something, we can start taking steps (either consciously or unconsciously) to actualize it. This could include reaching some goal, such as alleviating a disease state.
The placebo response is great. It doesn't require poisoning oneself with arsenic [1] or unknown substances [2]. It certainly isn't a substitute for real medicine.
This is a misunderstanding of placebo. Placebos do not cure anything. They change the user's subjective observations. For example, they're effective for pain because pain is subjective.
The placebo effect has been demonstrated many times to actually be able to alter objective bio markers and lab test results. This is why it’s so critical to do placebo controlled studies of drugs to determine that they actually have efficacy beyond the placebo effect.
Having said this, the placebo effect is no justification for medical deception. When people want medicine they shouldn’t get sold placebos that are marketed as actual medicine.
> A placebo presented as a stimulant may trigger an effect on heart rhythm and blood pressure, but when administered as a depressant, the opposite effect.
If placebos have been experimentally observed to induce changes in their subjects, then it holds that placebos can be used to alleviate symptoms similarly to conventional medications.
Comparing things to placebos does not imply that placebos have no effect. In some cases, placebos have very powerful effects, which is why we compare against them.
Chiropractors are a little more interesting. There are a lot of quacks out there that claim that aligning your spine will cure cancer, but the reputable ones can actually improve some things. My wife has an issue with her SI joint that she works with both a sports medicine doctor and a chiropractor on, and the chiropractor legitimately improves a misalignment around that joint that happens over time due to muscle weakness and the injury. It's not a permanent fix, unfortunately, but it's a necessary step toward then allowing PT to work on the muscle.
The thing to me is, "chiropractic" is quackery. The reputable ones aren't doing chiropractic, and by using the name they're lending credence to an unscientific field.
It'd be the same thing if the chiropractor was actually sitting on the other side of the planet and would do movements that'd hurt you if you were in the same room with them, but the theory were that since the action is so weak as to be imperceptible by you, it is actually somehow healing you, and the further the chiropractor is from you, the stronger is the effect.
In fact, I wonder why nobody is doing homeopathic chiroptactic via Zoom yet... Looks like a good startup idea.
I used to know some people who were pleased that they could received their Aura massage over the phone, as it saved the inconvenience of visiting their Aura massage provider in person.
For those who are not fully caught up on Gwyneth Paltrow bullshit, an "Aura massage" involves a charlatan waving their hands near you, without touching you.
I can't tell if you're supporting or criticizing chiropractic care, but I agree that its philosophy maybe aligns with homeopathic remedies.
Someone has either had good results from chiro, or hasn't found a good practitioner yet IMHO. We forget that the body always heals itself, drugs are just a way to suppress an infection long enough for the immune system to catch up.
I dunno, I would always recommend joint manipulation, massage, rehab/PT and other holistic and integrative approaches over surgery. I've known multiple people who have had stuff like back surgery and just not had a good result. Whereas athletes and gym rats like me come back from pretty significant injuries all the time.
I view the body as fungible and almost an expression of the mind, not something that declines and needs all this medication. The magic pill is basically to show up and do the work, but nobody wants to believe that or that it's that simple, because practicing the discipline of proper exercise and nutrition can be hard. And frankly not always feasible in today's world which prioritizes external reward over internal health.
Yeesh, it should NOT be prescribed for kids, I agree. I've experienced chiro working (borderline miraculously) after months of no improvement with massage/stretching/anti-inflammatories, but there is a tiny risk of nerve damage and stroke etc which shouldn't be taken lightly or without consent.
For a short time I worked for a major natural health nonprofit. What I learned about homeopathy is that it has no actual medical benefit whatsoever, and at best causes a placebo effect. Additionally, the use of belladonna and nightshade in the production of many homeopathic products should be considered the same as if something was made with arsenic.
There has never been a substantive, peer reviewed study showing the benefits of homeopathy anywhere, ever.
> Additionally, the use of belladonna and nightshade in the production of many homeopathic products should be considered the same as if something was made with arsenic.
This doesn't contradict what the GP said: you shouldn't ingest nightshade just because we've been able to extract and safely medicate its constituent chemicals.
That’s not true. There are plenty of studies (see reply on, for instance, childhood ADHD) showing the benefits of homeopathy as a placebo. The whole concept of homeopathy has always been a mental effect with increased safety over allopathic medicine—and as such, homeopathy remains valuable for home treatments.
Better and safer than vitamins and most allopathic medicines precisely because they don’t have real effects. People aren’t machines and treatments don’t need to be rational to be helpful.
Take a look at the long history of “like cures like.” I should take back my claim that it is “always” viewed as a mental effect— things get a bit squishy in the olden days.
> Take a look at the long history of “like cures like.”
I did. It has nothing to do with the claim that homeopathy was only ever meant to be a mental effect. If you claim that then you're doing God-of-the-gaps but with homeopathy.
That document lists a great number of like-cures-like cures from long before Hahnemann. However of note is that they don't claim that dilution makes medicine stronger. Chemo and radiation make you sick as a dog but they cure cancer. If we allow "like cures like" to be the only meaning of homeopathy (its name itself a synecdoche for the dual claims of homeopathy) then tons of real medicine is homeopathy.
I get the impression that you're in this field. I once worked at a military contractor where my job was either to waste the tax dollars of productive members of society or enforce a global hegemony that will end human life on earth. There was a path out of there for me, and I'm sure there's a path out of there for you.
But "allopathic" means the opposite of "like cures like." Hahnemann created what we now call homeopathy and it included the dilution part. Also the like curing like is incidental to cures. It's the tail wagging the dog.
Just to back myself up here: consider childhood ADHD. Homeopathic pills have an effect size over 0.5 (half a standard deviation). Now, sure, maybe it’s a sugar pill and sure, maybe Ritalin is a better choice. But I think this example shows that homeopathy has an ethical place in human medicine.
> A limitation of our analysis is, however, that the sample size of the individual studies was generally small [...] Thus, our results can be taken as an encouraging interim finding but should be corroborated by other, long-term studies.
That is a meta analysis conducted by homeopathic doctors, on studies done by some "homeopathic institutes" and other such associations.
It's curious how positive results only come from associates in an industry profiting from trying to convince you that their water, chemically indistinguishable from regular water, has magical healing properties through its memory of past events.
In case you are curious, here is a rigorous research paper on the topic. It is extremely hard to evaluate. Any researcher who would try to do this sort of research is immediately suspect, so it takes a certain type. But I see no reason to dismiss a priori.
See what you think (over 250 cites):
Roy, R., Tiller, W. A., Bell, I., & Hoover, M. R. (2005). The structure of liquid water; novel insights from materials research; potential relevance to homeopathy. Materials Research Innovations, 9(4), 98-103.
I know it does, and that has been cited countless times by homeopathic studies. The problem is that you still need magic for it to have a biological effect.
They dismiss this criticism as undiscovered science, in much the same way fairies and leprechauns are undiscovered animals. They'll often cite quantum mechanics and even cosmology, the more esoteric the better, to try to shoehorn science into their beliefs.
I wouldn't downvote you, but I think you should be aware that meta-analysis is making the case that homeopathy is better than placebo and has an unknown mechanism of working, which is a much bolder claim than you originally made.
Out of the 6 studies used, only 2 are from general research institutions. The other 4 are all specialists in homeopathy or private practices using homeopathy. Seems like the risk of bias there would be extremely high.
IMO, homeopathic medicines should be packaged at least as prominently as cigarettes are labeled in the EU, e.g. big bold letters on every package that say "This is NOT real medicine" or "Pill shell only" or "Placebo Effect Only"
I think oftentimes it gets a pass when it shouldn't due to certain factors:
1. Homeopathy shills are modern day Alchemists - they are really persuasive bullshit artists (trying to make money out of literal thin air)
2. Many people associate homeopathy with herbal remedies, which is ironic, because herbal remedies actually do have a measurable non-placebo effect. Many of the actual medicines are based on isolated plant compounds, etc.
3. It's still niche enough that it gets a pass, sort of like modern day Anti-vaxxers. So not a lot of harm from it simply due to being a small % of the population.
I think in many countries one can not open a pharmacy without a proper paperwork/personnel with university degrees etc.
IMHO it would be beneficial if every pharmacy store was visibly divided into "pharmacy proper" and "shampoo/water/wrinkles-be-gone cosmetics".
Homeopathy should be expelled to tarot and crystal balls stores.
I'm french and I believe there's at least 3 good reasons to have homeopathy in a state, and reimbursed, even if you don't believe in it:
- Placebo effect always works, (improving by around ~ 20% your recorvery / curing process depending on the studies and metric). More importantly, and something which is often overlooked, it works EVEN IF YOU DON'T CONSCIOUSLY BELIEVE IN THE DRUG.
- Homeopathy was given quite often at times where Doctors were generally prescribing too many antibiotics, especially to children, which we found later was generally detrimental to the immune system and promoting virus mutation. In general I believe there's way too many 'drugs' which are taken by the general population in mild cases which has the same effect. Basically if you don't believe in Homeopathy 'doing nothing' might often be better that 'doing something'.
- There are a lot of people who sometimes are vaguely sick but don't really need something (like cold or some vaguely psychological stuff) who ARE going to take some shitty drug for the sake of feeling better, and such drugs are in general a lot more expensive than a tube of homeopathy is. So it also makes sense in the economic / healthcare viewpoint.
Personally I had a lot of homeopathy young at a time when my general practitioner was super heavy handed an antibiotics and my parents wanted to try something else, and believe it or not it coincided to an quick improvement of my state. (from asmathic to not asmathic, from having heavy allergic reactions to mild ones later etc..).
After that homeopathy was always the first line stuff I've took most of the time except for stuff like anginas which obviously require antibiotics (which funnily, that general practicioners are sometimes reluctant to give because "hey it could be viral").
Now, I'm honestly rarely sick in general, when I am it's super mild or invisible (ex: COVID) to the point I was shocked at the age of 27 that it was even possible to take a day off work or not being able to go do sport or party because you 'had a flu'. I literally though it was a joke when my collegue said that. Also I've recovered super fast from stuff which are supposed to take longer.
Not sure how linked this is to the kind of treatment I had younger but I wouldn't change a bit now
I briefly dated a woman from France that regularly took homeopathic “medicine”. It hold her that it didn’t do anything and her counter argument was that it was paid for though the French government health care system so it must be efficacious. I then said that just because some people believe the Moon affects our clouds doesn’t mean that it does; her reply was “everyone knows the Moon brings the rain.”
I'm french and I believe there's at least 3 good reasons to have homeopathy in a state and reimbursed even if you don't believe in it:
- Placebo effect always works, (improving by around ~ 20% your recorvery / curing process depending on the studies and metric). More importantly, and something which is often overlooked, it works EVEN IF YOU DON'T CONSCIOUSLY BELIEVE IN THE DRUG.
- Homeopathy was given quite often at times where Doctors were generally prescribing too many antibiotics, especially to children, which we found later was generally detrimental to the immune system and promoting virus mutation. In general I believe there's way too many 'drugs' which are taken by the general population in mild cases which has the same effect.
- There are a lot of people who sometimes are vaguely sick but don't really need something (like cold or some vaguely psychological stuff) who ARE going to take some shitty drug for the sake of feeling better, and such drugs are in general a lot more expensive than a tube of homeopathy is. So it also makes sense in the economic / healthcare viewpoint.
Personally I had a lot of homeopathy young at a time when my general practitioner was super heavy handed an antibiotics and my parents wanted to try something else, and believe it or not it coincided to an quick improvement of my state. (from asmathic to not asmathic, from having heavy allergic reactions to mild ones later etc..).
After that homeopathy was always the first line stuff I've took most of the time except for stuff like anginas which obviously require antibiotics (which funnily, that general practicioners are sometimes reluctant to give because "hey it could be viral").
Now, I'm honestly rarely sick in general, when I am it's super mild or invisible (ex: COVID) to the point I was shocked at the age of 27 that it was even possible to take a day off work or not being able to go do sport or party because you 'had a flu'. I literally though it was a joke when my collegue said that. Also I've recovered super fast from stuff which are supposed to take longer.
Not sure how linked this is to the kind of treatment I had younger but I wouldn't change a bit now
First things first, homeopathic remedies do help, but only if you're already mostly in tune in the first place. As a very crude metaphor, if you car is a little out of whack an oil change or lube job might be the thing, but if you've been in a serious accident no amount of pouring oil on the car will get the dents out, you gotta go to the boddy shop. Most of us are living in such a way (junk food, junk lifestyles) that homeopathic remedies are no better than placebos. (I don't really want to get into it, but, uh, water carries liquid crystal "echoes" of the chemicals, these can be detected and categorized by a simple reproducible protocol involving dripping water onto a transparent panel illuminated by polarized light, something like that. A Japanese scientist figured it out, but I lost the reference and haven't been able to locate it again. Sorry. If you're already in pretty good health then your system has what you might call "higher gain" on incoming stimuli, including the phantoms of the biomolecules encoded in the structures of the water molecules, which is enough to "remind" your system of, uh, balancing influences, without requiring actual "doses" of chemicals. Just like how hearing a faint echo of a song you like from, say, a passing car might make you recall it and groove to it all over again.)
- - - -
Anyway, second, the placebo effect, whatever it is, is real and very potent. The craziest thing I've heard about was placebo knee surgery. (O_o)
A lot of approved medicines are no better than placebos.
- - - -
Third, yes, almost all supplements and herbal remedies that you can get over the counter are B.S. "What you have there are the ingredients for very expensive urine." as Dr, Cooper told Penny.
(In my family it was the Vitamin C. Got a cold? Chew these C tablets. Nothing actually to it, vitamin C does not cure colds. It does affect your Ph balance which can affect your viscosity of mucus, however, that's not the reason we took it as kids. We took it because our parent though it was a kind of medicine, which it is not.)
- - - -
Last but not least, selling snake oil is an old and venerable custom here in America at least, and people like buying and using nostrums and potions. The last time the FDA tried to crack down on this stuff the public pushed back (the snake-oil sellers whipped them up a bit, but the general sentiment was "you'll take my magic beans from my cold, dead hands!" y'know?)
The popularity of homeopathic medicine, a concept so obviously wrong that even someone who doesn't understand chemistry can debunk it in seconds, is fascinating.
Why are people drawn to such absurdly wrong medical cures? This says something really interesting about human psychology IMHO.
Like at least chiropractic and ineffective herbal remedies have a somewhat plausible (but wrong) mechanism of action.
> Why are people drawn to such absurdly wrong medical cures?
Because the "official" cure/treatment prescribed by their doctor isn't working or has unwanted side effects.
I have an uncurable disease with medication that creates unpleasant side effects. You bet your ass I've spent a considerable amount of time researching "alternative" treatments.
> Why are people drawn to such absurdly wrong medical cures?
IMO, most people don't know what "homeopathic" means. It sounds vaguely like "naturopathic", which would at least contain something other than water.
They see the claims on the label, compare the price to actual medication, and buy the fake product because it's cheaper, probably has more fantastical claims about what it will do, and doesn't mention any side effects.
There are definitely folks who are so irrational that they know how homeopathic products supposedly "work" and still believe in it, but IMO they are a tiny minority. Most of the people buying them are honest folks being scammed.
This lawsuit was long overdue. I hope after this they go after retailers doing things like putting "Cinnsulin" next to actual diabetes treatments.
They go through the same work as non naturopath Made in addition to their naturopathic work. Whycant you allow people who want their care to go to them? They're not misleading people, theyre offering an alternative.
If I had a medicial degree, opened a clinic to treat patients for cancer, and the medicine I used had no emperical evidence that it works (meaning some probability of success determined used a properly done study) should that be acceptable?
Even if I told patients I think thought the treatment would work but it's not FDA approved.
In Europe naturopathy is more common. I would say MDs en masse hold similar views to the general populace. Most MDs aren't reading research papers, they're simply repeating what they get told in school and the attitudes they observe around different treatments. I'm not trying to say this is bad necessarily but it is not a very scientific or rigorous way to do things. Most MDs think fast on their feet and have a blast knowledge of treatment for different things but they don't have a lot of experience working on nuance.
You have an innate trust in the pharmaceutical industry. . your parents are statisticians. They know how those studies get made. The fact that they are highly educated statisticians and disagree with you may be a signal rather than a fluke
The person you're responding to didn't state any degree of trust in the pharmaceutical industry, only distrust in a separate and significantly less regulated industry.
Do you have any citations for pharmaceutical trials being ineffective or frequently incorrect?
You are right that the industry is highly untrustworthy, but that's exactly why the FDA process is so highly regulated to control for conflicts of interest.
Paying for convenience? Raw turmeric, or even turmeric tea, is IMO a rather acquired taste. I like it in spice mixes but on its own, or even if I spice food with it but lean too hard into the turmeric, it tastes like dirt to me. I dunno what I'd do if I wanted to take in quite a bit of turmeric daily but not taste it, aside from buying capsules like that. (which I don't do, to be clear)
Yeah if it were me I'd just suffer through a few seconds of a flavor I don't love, if I really wanted to take turmeric as a supplement, given the extreme cost difference. Plus I wouldn't be surprised if the sold-as-spice version is fresher and higher-quality. But I can see why some folks might want the capsule.
From what I understand, Costco aims for their net income to be equal to their membership revenue.
And so the sum total of all things sold is equal to all the costs. And so if they are getting a high margin on some items, such as fake medicine which typically have huge markups, then this would allow them to have near zero or even negative margin on other items (which I presume are popular staples like milk/eggs/etc).
With the cash back rewards for executive membership, I do not even end up paying for my membership, so I assume items with higher markup are subsidizing that also.
> which I presume are popular staples like milk/eggs/etc
I don't know why those would be what is subsidized. Why wouldn't Costco just cut the prices on the homeopathic medicines to make their target 3% or whatever.
Because milk/eggs are what draws people into the store. And their famous rotisserie chicken or hotdog. Standard retail tactic. Once at the store, people might decide to buy things they did not need, or cost more than elsewhere, such as a 6 pack of knives when they only needed one, or turmeric tablets.
The rotisserie and the hodogs are clear loss leaders (or maybe just "almost no profit" leaders). I don't believe Costco treats milk or eggs as loss leaders. Google'd comparison sites show that Costco milk, for instance, is more expensive than Aldi or Trader Joe's. And eggs may be cheaper per dozen (maybe) than Trader Joe's but are still more expensive than Aldi's. And you have to buy them in larger batches.
I think a lot of it is just about "trust". They don't trust the government so they definitely don't trust FDA approved drugs or Big Pharma. I mean there are people who actually believe that the Covid vaccines contain nano transmitter trackers put there by Bill Gates. When you tell them there is some root from Chile that solves their issue, they trust that more than something built in a lab.
I think the thing we need to change is that all of these homeopathic "medicines" and vitamins need to go through some clinical rigor. They should have to show the actual benefit of taking Vitamin XXX. We also need testing of these items at random. There are lots of these items that don't even contain the thing they claim they do. It is $40 Billion industry that has marginal benefit and is an outright scam in some cases.
“Homeopathic preparations are termed remedies and are made using homeopathic dilution. In this process, the selected substance is repeatedly diluted until the final product is chemically indistinguishable from the diluent. Often not even a single molecule of the original substance can be expected to remain in the product.”
You are not alone in this confusion. I though "homeopathy" meant "medicine based on herbs" for a few decades, and I'm sure we are not alone, and this may explain why so many people buy products that are based on a mix of idiocy and nothingness.
Which reads as "they work, but the people promoting them don't know how".
I mean, the classic example would be willow bark as a pain reliever. I doubt anybody who understood that it appeared to be an effect pain reliever knew much about COX1 and COX2 inhibitors.
That sounds accurate. Plants do have tons of chemicals, some of them may have very potent effects on the body chemistry. Unlike homeopathy where the proposed effect model defies physics, there's nothing implausible here, the problem with herbal remedies may be that ingesting a very complex cocktail of chemicals and thinking "it's fine because it's natural" is not always the best approach. It's usually not easy to properly understand what happens when ingesting such mixtures. Evolutionary, things that are very likely to seriously hurt you have been probably excluded by now, but it's still pretty poorly understood what exactly is going on when you use some "natural herbal mix". So, anybody who makes bold claims about what exactly is the action of this or that herbal remedy, usually is not painting the whole picture.
Homeopathy usually refers to the claims that dilution of an herb makes the medical effects stronger, which is ridiculous. That poster wasn't denying that herbal medicine could be useful, as many herbs do have chemicals that are biologically active.
Because people are drawn to being under the influence of the placebo effect, specifically.
You could make a billion dollars by offering a kiosk that sells a bottle of sugar pills with a custom label printed on it. Let people enter whatever symptom they have that’s bothering them and get a placebo bottle of sugar pills for it.
Nope, there’s no pharmaceutical in them. Yes, sugar is an “active ingredient” in placebo pills.
This pair of statements is deeply hostile to a pharmaceutical mindset — but we’re human beings, and human beings like to be fooled and like to pretend and like meaningless gestures that still make us feel better, and our bodies sometimes play along.
Homeopathy uses a lot of pseudoscience to sell their placebos because they’ve figured out how to market placebos to human beings. Find a better way to market placebos to human beings, as placebos and with the express purpose of having the placebo effect, and you’ll displace homeopathy altogether.
Arguing that humans shouldn’t seek the placebo effect is hopeless, though. We are human beings, and if there’s one thing you can guarantee with people as a whole, it’s that they’ll seek as wide a variety of altered states as possible by all means available — including both pharmaceuticals and placebos.
I think you understate the value of the placebo effect in medical treatment, especially for certain types of treatments, i.e. pain and psychological treatment. I'm not saying we should treat infectious diseases that way, but the placebo affect is probably most of the power of many of "real" treatments. If the goal is to feel better, it seems a lot safer than using addictive opiods and other drugs. It may also be ultimately more efficacious:
For anti-depressants, "a 2009 meta-analysis of anti-depressant trials concluded: The placebo effect accounted for 68% of the effect in the drug groups. Whereas clinical trials need to control the placebo effect, clinical practice should attempt to use its full power."
I’m suggesting that plainly-labeled placebos should replace homeopathy, so no need to convince me of the value of placebos! I’m just not interested in litigating the medical evidence with homeopathy proponents, because that tactic has been tried for decades and is an abysmal failure at ending homeopathy. (You’re welcome to keep trying if you like, but I’ve nothing new to contribute to such efforts.)
> sells a bottle of sugar pills with a custom label printed on it. Let people enter whatever symptom they have that’s bothering them and get a placebo bottle of sugar pills for it.
Bandler and Grinder wanted to try that back in the 70's or 80's, but the FDA wouldn't go for it.
They were going to include a booklet that listed how effective placebos were for various ailments, all based on scientific studies. If the placebo was only ~%50 effective you just take twice as many...
Using a kiosk to let customers enter whatever name they want to print on the placebo bottle solves this, because the FDA has no business declaring that my name can’t be Headache, and they aren’t claiming any treatment will occur when they sell it or invite me to enter my name.
The point here is that no one is trying to replace homeopathy along these lines, and that’s why homeopathy thrives.
I think with Homeopathic medicine people usually don't know how it is supposed to work. If you look at the label there is no explanation of the idea like cures like and diluting to an absurd degree, just a list of what's in it, some unsupported claims, and a small disclaimer that it is not FDA approved.
Confusing "herbal" and "homeopathic" shows the success of advertising by the alternative medicine industry to keep customers misinformed about what is in -- or in the case of homeopathy, what is not in the products they buy. The opposite of regulated medicines which need to be specific about what goes into them. Promoting homeopathy is promoting ignorance.
People probably conflate homeopathic vs. naturopathic. They sound similar enough.
One of them a good doctor would never prescribe as it is bunk; the other a doctor might recommend as a course of action sometimes, depending on the ailment and its severity.
"after thousands of years of practices" It's important to note that much of what gets labelled as traditional Chinese medicine today is actually modern and invented by the Chinese government in the 60s.
A thing I've heard repeated, but I've never seen a citation for, is that during the cultural revolution China had a problem of not enough doctors to see all the patients with aches and pains who were guaranteed to get health care. So they plucked acupuncture from obscurity and established that as the thing you give to people who would feel better having seen a professional but don't have anything curable wrong with them.
But like I've said: I've read this once on a skeptic blog and heard it repeated possibly by another reader thereof but I've never seen a citation for this and it may be smug western bullshit meant to portray China as cynical. IDK.
My understanding is it was a mix of things. Mao had a barefoot doctor program which emphasized practical learning and getting medical practitioners to rural areas. These practitioners had some valuable knowledge for things like hygiene, but also didn't have access to western drugs so emphasized herbs and other remedies. This was combined with Mao's desire to differentiate China from the USSR and emphasize Chinese cultural unity.
you mean mercury like Western dental fillings until a few years ago?
the assassination of President McKinley only succeeded after weeks of lingering infection because "the best surgeons in the country" kept putting their fingers into the bullet wound
My point here is not the technical content of the Chinese practices, but rather the arrogance and military-style dismissal of alien techniques and knowledge.
Yes, I mean mercury like Western dental fillings (which are not believed to be harmful). The technical content matters a lot! I don't understand why you think I'm supporting western medicine (I do, but admit that it bungled a lot of things on its way to the current state).
Walmart and CVS you bastards. I've been buying your homeopathic products for years and am in perfect health—just think of how healthy I could have been had I been using "real meds"!
I'm not a fan of homeopathic "treatments", but if the main argument for this trial is "the products were too close to others" that seems like a bullshit case. Something's legality shouldn't hinge on its distance from other legal things or arrangement in a store. Either a thing is legal or illegal. Moving it 5 feet to the right or 2 shelves down shouldn't change its legality if it's already a legal product with whatever government warning labels and disclaimers are required.
What's next? Suing an art supply store because they had markers on the same shelf as highlighters?
> the products were too close to others" that seems like a bullshit case
It's deceptive. If you're in a pharmacy and see a number of cold and flu medicine grouped together on one shelf, you'd be pretty pissed if you bought one and didn't realize that it was just Mike & Ikes with no medicinal ingredients.
Your marker and highlighter example is flawed because those are both useful for writing and are usually distinct in packaging and form.
You're arguing about an evolution in legal opinion that very few people really understand.
Often, in the past, judges would use a test of 'would a reasonable person be deceived by this?' and come out on your side.
Increasingly, due to people calling for increasingly less government control, the test is becoming 'does the government have the right to tell a store owner which shelves a legal product can be on?' and come out on the other side.
I can see both sides, but in general, a government that protects 'reasonable consumers' over the interests of businesses seems preferable.
> I can see both sides, but in general, a government that protects 'reasonable consumers' over the interests of businesses seems preferable.
Agreed. People rallying against "big government" annoys me because they're invariably for government intervention when it aligns with their personal belief.
I do not think that the government should regulate information or speech, especially with the express purpose of censoring things[0]. I do think the government should regulate food, medicine, or other commercial or consumer goods that are subject to counterfeiting/fraud or where perversion of quality affects safety or longevity. When I go to the pharmacy, I want to feel confident that the medicine I'm purchasing meets a high bar and is both safe and effective. I want to feel confident that the avocado oil I'm purchasing is actually "Avocado Oil" and not rancid or adulterated. Etc.
That's the key point. It's deceptive (and should probably be illegal) to make a product look like medicine. It doesn't matter where you place it, if you put a banana on the side of the aspirins no one is going to complain it didn't cure their headache.
> Suing an art supply store because they had markers on the same shelf as highlighters?
I dunno, it seems a bit more like the store getting in trouble for having lead paint right next to the section labeled "edible paints!" without much of a line between them. In my grocery store (Wegmans) they're slapped in the general "cold and flu" section.
If there is an aisle that says Cold Medicine, and you put a product that is in fact not cold medicine but something designed to look like cold medicine and trick people into buying it because they think it is cold medicine, then it sure looks like you are purposefully trying to deceive people.
My analogy. You go to REI or wherever to buy some carabiners and rope for your next rock climbing trip. Intermingled amongst these are carabiners made of cheap pot metal and ropes intended for [tying down cargo] rather than climbing.
Both products are legal, but are definitely not deserving of similar placement within the store.
I don't believe so. Climbing ropes deliberately have a one-time certain amount of stretch to them. (And if you take a fall that uses that stretch you retire the rope.)
While climbing is not my thing I definitely know REI sells the climbing carabiners with the climbing stuff and the lightweight equipment ones in a different part of the store. I don't need a big safety-rated bit carabiner to attach a 4oz sitting pad to the outside of my pack!
I think I used the wrong term. Or a vague one. I'm talking about the difference between a rope used to tie down cargo in a truck and one used by a climber for safety.
Doing a quick search for "rigging rope" shows me all sorts of tree-climbing ropes as well, so I should have said "cargo hold down rope" or something.
Oregano is a legal substance. But mistakingly buying then selling oregano, thinking it is weed, is still illegal and still considered drug dealing in the eyes of the law.
Carrying a hairbrush is legal in New York City. But walking into a New York City bank with a hairbrush in your sweatshirt pocket and pointing the handle at the cashier is justification for the use of deadly force even if you do not say a word.
I guess the problem to me is that the labeling on the homeopathic products I’ve seen that indicate that they aren’t FDA approved either isn’t there or is in tiny print hidden in an obscure spot. In my opinion as a consumer I feel that for something that has potential to be harmful there should be a warning akin to the surgeon general’s warning visible on the medicine container. Note that I still would find it deceptive from a consumer protection standpoint if there was almond milk labeled only as “milk” directly next to the animal milk with no indication it was almonds. Similar reading on the current battle with plant-based milks: https://www.networkforphl.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Iss...
Eh I mean it’s a white liquid that goes with coffee and cereal. Who cares where it really came from unless you’re allergic or something? None of the three claims in the pdf say that Almond milk was being labeled “milk”, but the dairy milk corporations are trying to push that narrative that you’re being tricked. Labeling it as “soymilk,” “almond milk,” and “coconut milk” and federal courts found those three terms to be a fine use of the word milk because they included the nut name in the description. Big milk wants to force all imitation milk to be labeled with the word imitation, but when it’s already labeled with the nut name where it comes from, forcing them to add the word “imitation” on top of that seems excessive.
> I guess the problem to me is that the labeling on the homeopathic products I’ve seen that indicate that they aren’t FDA approved either isn’t there or is in tiny print hidden in an obscure spot.
I understand that the labeling on all kinds of products is often bad and they go out of their way to get away with as much as they can, but I think this point underscores that this is a backwards approach. In real life, you don't prove a negative.
It shouldn't be up to homeopathic treatments to prove that they're NOT FDA Approved, it should be up to FDA Approved Medications to prove that THEY ARE FDA Approved.
You should assume that nothing is FDA Approved unless verified.
I can't speak to the legality but the current setup is shady. I am much more well informed about medications than the average and very anti homeopathy. It still takes me 5 minutes of reading the fine print of several bottle to avoid accidently picking up a homeopathic treatment.
It might be better if there was just a regulation that the active ingredient(s) in each product had to be printed on the front of the box, in letters as big as the rest of the branding. That would correctly label homeopathy ("water"), as well as chase some of the woo out of actual medicine.
The argument is that CVS and Walgreens have aisles dedicated to medicine. If you go into one of those isles, it would not be unreasonable to expect the contents of those aisles to be, at the minimum, regulated and tested to medical standards, rather than the significantly weaker standards applied to supplements and homeopathic treatments.
The closer analogy here would be to go to an art supply store and buy paint tubes, only to find that you've accidentally bought ones filled with water because they were placed directly next to the real ones. You'd be rightfully annoyed in that scenario, wouldn't you?
No. CVS and Walmart are massive chains, with thousands of pharmacists and entire teams dedicated to store layout. They dictate stocking and planning, and it is not remotely unreasonably to expect them to consult the experts (including legal experts) they work with.
Also, none of this requires awareness of some obscure DC law. That's just the justification for this particular court case. "Don't stock fake medicine next to real medicine" strikes me as a somewhat common-sense thought.
> No. CVS and Walmart are massive chains, with thousands of pharmacists and entire teams dedicated to store layout.
Personally I hate that this line of reasoning has been brought up because I think it's a bad argument based on reality. In the real world, it's true that big companies spend thousands of hours putting together rules and guidelines from experts. But then their fancy policies and guidelines are passed down the chain through less and less trained people until the ultimate task arrives in the hands of perhaps a minimum wage high-school kid with maybe 30 seconds of training.
A real solution should be foolproof and not rely on proper placement through a game of telephone. If that's the system that you're arguing for, IMO it's a very bad one that guarantees human error.
> But then their fancy policies and guidelines are passed down the chain through less and less trained people until the ultimate task arrives in the hands of perhaps a minimum wage high-school kid with maybe 30 seconds of training.
Nobody (either in this thread or in the case) is attempting to sue minimum wage high school kids for placing homeopathic products on the wrong shelf.
The claim (which is attested by both the case and independent anecdotes in this thread) is that, on a corporate level, both CVS and Walmart have made it their official policy to put homeopathic products in the same aisles and shelves as actual medicine. That kind of corporate policy clearly has made its way through the game of telephone.
In other words: I don't have an opinion in this context on the "right" solution. I only know that the current policy has successfully placed fake medicine on real shelves, and that the lawsuit we're discussing identifies the appropriate defendants (the corporate entities themselves, not a pimply 17 year old).
Store layouts are heavily researched and engineered at the corporate level. "Little old me had no idea" isn't an argument that's gonna be easy to make.
> Suing an art supply store because they had markers on the same shelf as highlighters?
If the art store had an entire white board shelf that went "Whiteboard markers (dry erase)", "Whiteboard markers (dry erase)", "Whiteboard markers (dry erase)", "Whiteboard markers (dont erase)", "Whiteboard markers (dry erase)", "Whiteboard markers (dry erase)" I would think a lawsuit would be appropriate.
If you have this[1] on a shelf between Clotrimazole and Miconazole then it really seems like there is an intent to confuse things (though I should point out it's not purely homeopathic, but arguably also naturopathic since there is also tea tree oil in it).
Are OTC FDA tested and approved medication packages required to bear any kind of standardized and highly visible mark or symbol? If so, what does this mark look like? Is there any effort to publicize this if it exists? I genuinely don't know.
It seems like the real core of this issue isn't that homeopathic medicines' exist or are in the wrong location in the store, but that approved and scientifically tested medicines aren't labelled well enough to distinguish them from other products (homeopathic treatments, nutritional supplements, etc)
There probably should be 1 clear symbol for OTC medication that is common and well known and that children are taught to avoid touching.
Certainly isn't anything on the front; here's a non-homeopathic remedy[1] that might be adjacent to the homeopathic one. The back has a "Drug Facts" which I believe is FDA required, but homeopathic remedies often have a visually similar table with an asterisk (e.g.[2] also sold at CVS)
[edit] The "Drug Facts" label is an FDA requirement[3] for OTC drugs, but apparently it's totally okay to copy the format as long as you add a "not FDA approved" asterisk? Even if it's not okay, the certainly isn't pursuing enforcement here...
I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but the peer-reviewed literature actually does support some beneficial effect of homeopathic remedies for some very specific conditions.
Simply go to pubmed and type in homeopathy and you'll find the first few results showing meta-analyses of the available literature (which is actually quite a lot of studies) and you'll find evidence for the effect being more than just placebo.
I think unfortunately homeopathy has been demonized because I'm sure there is plenty of snake oil being sold as homeopathic remedies, but this has led to people dismissing it entirely. I guess the biggest reason people dismiss homeopathy is we don't have an understandable mechanism for its effect, but it does seem that there is indeed an effect greater than just a placebo. People can dismiss the science, but that doesn't seem very rational to me.
Clicking five semi-random links on the first page of pubmed is not a comprehensive review of the literature.
If you search homeopathy on Cochrane, who are somewhat the gold standard for reviews of medical evidence, 6 out of 6 that I checked concluded there's not enough evidence to say it works (there are more but I got bored and didn't check them all).
> People can dismiss the science, but that doesn't seem very rational to me.
On the contrary, homeopathy is like a low-level skill check for rationality. If you can be convinced homeopathy is real by a questionable grab-bag of studies, you can be convinced of anything.
There are also studies and meta-analyses showing parapsychic phenomena are real.
It's not that difficult to produce positive studies if you're motivated enough.
It's not just a case of "mechanism of action is unknown", it's that given the nature of homeopathic remedies, any possible (non-placebo) mechanism of action for it goes against our current understanding of physics and chemistry.
And any suggested mechanism for how water with not a single molecule of active ingredient is effective would additionally have to explain why it only works if it's packaged and sold at your local drugstore. Tap water should be high-strength homeopathic medicine for everything. After all I'm sure people have dumped homeopathic ingredients down the sink at some point. Water is cycled so most water should have most homeopathic properties already by now.
I chose not to provide my own sources so I wouldn't be accused of cherry-picking. Instead I showed how anyone could find the evidence for themselves, if they so choose. Which is to say, simply go to pubmed and type in homeopathy. You'll find plenty of peer-reviewed literature, meta-analyses even, suggesting an effect for homeopathy greater than just placebo (within limited domains of application, of course)
That might be understandable, but I'm a lazy skeptic and don't want to make your argument for you. You made the claim, why must I support it?
If I find a meta analysis that agrees with your claim, but has obvious methodological flaws you could simply say "you picked the wrong one" or "that wasn't one of the limited domains of application".
I did as you asked anyway, in my pubmed search 5 out of the top 10 results are by the same author and are published in the journal "Homeopathy". I have no doubt there are many positive studies in that journal, just as there are many true sasquatch sightings in "Sasquatch Magazine".
Homeopathy is dismissed because the fundamental idea it claims, that like cures like after it is diluted to an undetectable amount to the point where there might not be a single molecule of it in the dose, is reliant on claims about physics, chemistry, and biology that quite simply have no credibility in our modern understanding of how the world works.
Not understanding the mechanism of action for a specific observed effect is no reason to dismiss it. I would actually argue that's a very unscientific mindset that would hold the progression of science back. If there is indeed an observable effect beyond placebo, as suggested by the peer-reviewed literature (according to various meta-analyses), then it is quite possible that there is indeed a gap in our understanding. To assume this is not possible is hubris of the worst kind, bordering on ignorance.
> Not understanding the mechanism of action for a specific observed effect is no reason to dismiss it
It's not just that we "don't understand" the mechanism of action, it's that there's no remotely plausible way for it to work in our existing model of the physical world.
> If there is indeed an observable effect beyond placebo, as suggested by the peer-reviewed literature (according to various meta-analyses)
"As suggested by the peer-reviewed literature" is a deep and frankly disingenuous mischaracterization. Studies and meta-analyses are divided on the topic, as you must surely know. And, as another commenter noted, there are 6 Cochrane reviews which all find homeopathy to have no effect beyond placebo. Cochrane reviews are generally regarded as the gold standard of medical evidence.
Disregarding anything that doesn't confirm your favored hypothesis isn't science. It's confirmation bias, one of the oldest and most common failure modes in human cognition.
> It's not just that we "don't understand" the mechanism of action, it's that there's no remotely plausible way for it to work in our existing model of the physical world.
That's the same thing. FYI the posited mechanism of action is that water is able to form substructures just with H2O molecules themselves and it's these water structures that theoretically produce the effect. Obviously this isn't verified and just is speculation but atleast it's a "remotely plausible" way for it to work in our existing model of the physical world, even if we don't understand all the mechanisms underpinning it.
> "As suggested by the peer-reviewed literature" is a deep and frankly disingenuous mischaracterization.
Fair, but that's why I qualified with "the peer-reviewed literature (according to various meta-analyses)" so you know that I'm not referring to peer-reviewed literature as a monolothic beast that achieves consensus but instead am referring to the various meta-analyses.
So I agree that studies and meta-analyses are divided on the topic, for sure. There are studies that show positive effects and studies that show no positive effect. The fact that there are any studies showing a positive effect though should be of interest. If the results are not due to error or bias, then the positive effect of homeopathy needs to be followed up on and deserves more funding to get to the bottom of. Unfortunately a lot of science is political and homeopathy doesn't have a lot of political clout.
> Disregarding anything that doesn't confirm your favored hypothesis isn't science.
Couldn't agree more, but you should consider that you're guilty of doing exactly this when you disregard any studies that show a positive effect for homeopathy beyond placebo. It is, as you say, one of the oldest and most common failure modes in human cognition, but moreso is often easy to see in others much harder to see in yourself.
I'm very skeptical of homeopathy, and what you list here is a big part of why, but I will point out that it is not a scientific approach to rejecting homeopathy. If homeopathy truly has no effect, medical trials should show that. If medical trials show an effect, then it is possible that our model is wrong.
I disagree. If there is no physical plausibility for a claim it does not need experimental evidence to be dismissed. Homeopathy is essentially a claim of magic, if I claim I can cast spells on people on another continent to give them diseases you don't need to conduct a clinical trial, you can just say that I'm a fraud.
The issue with this argument is that it’s trying to assert that “science says” something isn’t true (generally one of the most valuable things laypeople derive from science, but not the spirit of reasoning that is responsible for its original determinations) rather than observing the actual phenomena and creating falsifiable hypotheses which may be tested.
As a thought experiment, this line of reasoning appears akin to past epochs of scientific understanding that were not enriched with more nuanced understandings developed by looking carefully into the threshholds of prior understanding. I.e. “it’s absurd to say that a particle can be both a wave and a particle, since science says nothing about this” or for that matter suggestig that light may be be quantized at all.
I actually think the “placebo effect” is actually quite fascinating and worthy of deeper understanding, yet in conversations like this the phrase appears as a dismissal like “just the placebo effect”. Which is rather a lot like saying “just this small corner of our medical understanding which, due to its apparently small scope, can have no significant impact on our broader theory but rather will be reduced to 0 at some point”. Which of course was the same response to black body radiation at the onset of early development in the theory of quantum mechanics.
The placebo effect is of course a grouping of unknown mechanisms of healing, and at the very least is the very standard against which new pharmaceuticals are tested (and which is often only barely exceeded by trials of medecine that go to market).
Pethaps a more relevant example is the assertion that it’s absurd to believe non-ionizing radiation at the levels produced by cellphones could be harmful. Dismissed by the same line of reasoning, but now an assertion increasingly being taken as a serious matter worthy of research in Europe.
It's certainly not on us skeptics to run trials if we don't believe in homeopathy. But if what OP says were true--if experimental evidence shows an effect--rejecting that evidence on the grounds that it doesn't fit our existing model is unscientific.
I'm not saying there is such evidence, just that "it doesn't fit the model" wouldn't be grounds for rejecting it if it exists.
I wouldn't argue that they're all super bad and dangerous, but it's the presentation that matters. When dubious products are put next to decades-old tried-and-true FDA-approved products, it gives the customer the illusion that they're of similar quality and thus effect. Some homeopathic drugs work on some, but not for others, and to frame it as though they're as trustworthy as their neighbor could be dangerous.
I do not believe that homeopathy has an effect exceeding placebo, but... it is very easy to verify that the GP comment is at least partially correct: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=homeopathy
Click on the link and you'll see that the top few results from PubMed for homeopathy do indeed include meta-analyses. On my side, the very first result is:
#1 Homeopathy: meta-analyses of pooled clinical data. Hahn RG.
Forsch Komplementmed. 2013;20(5):376-81. doi: 10.1159/000355916. Epub 2013 Oct 17.
PMID: 24200828 Free article. Review.
I highly doubt that the results depend on the user searching.
Meta-analysis can't turn garbage into gold. If the studies in a meta-analysis are overwhelmingly low quality, the meta-analysis will also be unreliable.
Thats the thing, homeopathy is an expensive placebo and not harmless when taken outside the vacuum. The linked papers are often either saying homeopathy is not efficacious or they are homeopathy groups claiming that the filtering of low quality studies are not correct,
ultimately it comes down to belief in magic or greed. but in what is testable, they are expensive placebos often to the exclusion of things that work
I find this rather obnoxious; if I wish to purchase a purely placebo homepathic remedy, let me. The idea that I will be confused and think the homepathic remedies are actual drugs because they are in the same aisle is absurd.
"Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business." -- Thanksgiving Prayer, William Burroughs
Edit: I have changed my opinion from "obnoxious" to "annoying" and retract my characterization of the danger of confusion as absurd -- per 3 comments, apparently people really are getting confused!
So in light of the above, perhaps there is merit in more cleanly separating traditional pharmaceuticals and homeopathic remedies. It still seems heavy-handed to me personally to require it or file a lawsuit, but the case is not as without merit as I had originally assumed.
I do continue to think this is actually just one battle in a war to prohibit alternative treatments entirely, which I still strongly disagree with, but time will tell if that's just paranoia on my part or well-founded.
If you follow that chain of reasoning we might as well legalize meth and put that next to medicines as well. Also tinned food with poisons, or expired meat.
This is one of the huge problems with a laissez faire approach - people aren’t sophisticated on mass, don’t know the implications of their choices, and thus why wouldn’t we want regulation when helpful to prevent misguidance? The article cites a case where hundreds of toddlers were injured in a similar situation.
Not all of these products are pure placebo, and depending on what’s wrong with you, placebos can be dangerous. Imagine a placebo to take a fever down, for example, which turns out not to reduce a fever at all.
Comparing something with no effect to something as harmful as meth is entirely disingenuous.
At some point we have a right to treat ourselves as we see fit. Taking your fever example. Shall it also be illegal to try to get through a fever without any medication? After all, you're apparently a danger to yourself at that point.
There's a difference between saying "here's a thing that makes no difference; take it if it amuses you" and saying "this is as effective at treating your condition as the other medicines you find nearby, so you don't need any of them." Whether or not homeopathy is a good thing, or better or worse than conventional medicine, it isn't the same as conventional medicine, and shouldn't be presented as such.
The other sibling addresses your second paragraph, but for your first I suggest with this line of reasoning it’s a very slippery slope. To me it’s a bog standard libertarian argument, which I believe to be very myopic.
I forget which logical fallacy this is but they’re not being removed from the store, they’re being moved to their own section. You can still choose to buy them, Twitter is just no longer amplifying them into your feed.
Akinetopsia is a very interesting neurological condition where a person cannot see motion. If they try to fill a cup with water, it will overflow. Somehow their brain can't process the idea that the water is rising; whatever level they see it at, that's where they think it will stay.
It's a very rare disease, but a related phenomenon in the anlysis of social and political trends is common.
So yes, at the moment they are merely suing to create a separate aisle, but I hardly think that is their final goal.
(The very first comment on Ars article: "Now if we could just get them to quit carrying that crap altogether…")
> (The very first comment on Ars article: "Now if we could just get them to quit carrying that crap altogether…")
And if news comments were the same as legal trials, then that would be something to be worried about! But "let's not label things accurately because the next step might be banning them" is a slippery slope too far.
Well, let's check back in a couple years. :-) To me, from the tone of the Ars article and browsing the CFI website, it seems clear they will not be satisfied with this minor victory.
> To me, from the tone of the Ars article and browsing the CFI website, it seems clear they will not be satisfied with this minor victory.
My response is that, if we have to choose between accurate labelling and proper placement with the risk of banning homeopathic medicines entirely, or permitting inaccurate (though probably scrupulously legal) labelling and misleading placement to make absolutely sure that we stay off that slippery slope—then I feel that we have to take that risk. Allowing flouting of regulations and norms for fear of what it would mean to enforce them is just the same as not having regulations and norms.
> I find this rather obnoxious; if I wish to purchase a purely placebo homepathic remedy, let me.
Sure, just don't put placebo homeopathic "medicine" in deceptive packaging beside actual medicine. Put it in a section called "water and sugar pills" and clearly label that they contain no actual medical ingredients.
This isn't really a compelling counter because supplements are commonly criticized for not doing what they're purported to do. I would love for the FDA to enact more stringent regulation on supplements.
That said, unlike homeopathic medicine vitamins can at least be argued to contain medicinal ingredients.
I don’t see why it is such a huffy issue. People aren’t being hurt.
Medicinal ingredients present the potential for harm. At least homeopathy doesn’t contain anything at all. It’s not like the packaging says “will cure cancer” or something—the FDA is quite clear on making misleading claims.
The one that got me, was I think I remember Oscillococcinum being advertised on TV as a kid. Didn't realize it until I was waiting to check out at the counter and started reading the boxes next to the checkout line because I was bored.
My wife came home with a homeopathic treatment once, from CVS specifically because of this reason. The "homeopathy" label was not particularly prominent and didn't raise any alarm bells because she didn't know what homeopathy was.
