Homeopathy- Love It Or Hate It?

[pixie373]

Inspired by an earlier thread.

Do you think natural remedies have some uses, or are they a load of tosh?

I feel if something is effective and safe, it would have a license. However, i have used a few things (manuka honey, for instance) which i have seen to work. But i don't believe has a licence yet.

What do you think?

[gness]

Sorry about that LG...I googled and got the wrong end of the stick. I could put it down to the smell of the enormous bag of mushroom compost I shifted from the front of the house so the neighbours didn't have to put up with the smell or the two glasses of red that helped me do it. I'm usually quicker with irony but mushroom compost and wine combined are competition for anesthetic I've discovered...x

[jomifl]

LG, when my wife had her free flu jab in France Her doctor gave her a pack of Oscillicocinum,..She now has a new doctor. So you see homeopathy does work, it enables one to spot the quacks.

[LazyGun]

@Jom - :)

[jake-the-peg]

Depends what is meant by 'works'

In my mind it's a very effective way of administering pacebos and I'm pretty sure nobody would argue that placebos can be very effective in certain conditions - there have even been studies showing physiological changes in response to placebo.

Clearly it doesn't work if you do double blind tests and elliminate the placebo effect.

That leaves a difficult moral question of whether it is right to spend tax payers money on placebo treatment if that is effective

[LazyGun]

@JtP - We should be aspiring to better than placebo.

There appears to be a school of thought amongst some that the placebo effect is a powerful and legitimate therapy, one that is equally valid as medication, or perhaps an intervention - but for the most part it is not.It should be regarded as a baseline only, where there is no proven effective treatment.

There are certain areas in medicine where we have no adequate therapies as yet - chronic back pain, for instance. In circumstances like these, where the alternative therapies have no ill-effects, then you might as well prescribe them as anything else - This seems to be largely the basis by which acupuncture has come to be recognised by NICE as legitimate therapy for the NHS to prescribe.

Placebo is at its most effective when the patient is effectively deceived. Does not sit well to me with the Dr- Patient relationship that it should be founded in part on deception. Although interestingly, placebo has been demonstrated to work even when the patients have been told they are being given a pill or therapy with no active ingredient.

It is also worth noting that the more theatrical a placebo is, the more effective it often is. So sham acupuncture, with its theatre of needle placement etc. but no actual needling, has been demonstrated to be better than, say, the administration of a sugar pill.

People often talk about "mind over matter". That might work for pain and pain relief, but it is not going to make a cancer go away.

[Khandro]

A friend of mine had an advertising agency and one of his clients was a well-known homoeopathy medicine manufacturer, due to the restrictions of the advertising standards agency they were unable to claim that these substances had any effectiveness whatsoever.
As Moliere said in Le Malade Imaginaire; 'The art of medicine is to keep the patient pleasantly occupied, while nature effects a cure.'

[LazyGun]

@Khandro - In Molieres day, you could well argue that the Doctors of the day did at least as much harm as they did good, and his argument might be relevant in those circumstances and when dealing with a hypochondriac.

To extend such a quote to the modern day and to modern day medicine and to genuine illnesses would be a mistake.

[McMouse]

No problem provided it's done in private.