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Comment by gioele | Hacker News Reader

> A similar phenomena was witnessed in South Africa with the Marikina massacre of 2012, where miners believed that herbs provided by a witchdoctor would make them invisible.

The US market for homeopathic products was $6.4 billion in 2013: http://www.pharmacytimes.com/publications/issue/2013/Septemb...

In Italy, post-earthquake survivors are being provided homeopathic products: http://www.ilpost.it/2016/08/27/regione-marche-terremoto-ome...

Credulous people are everywhere.

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Surely you understand the difference between middle class people taking some sugar and people believing unwaveringly that herbs will protect them from that shotgun.

> Surely you understand the difference between middle class people taking some sugar and people believing unwaveringly that herbs will protect them from that shotgun.

I don't understand it; please spell it out for me because all I see is magical thinking. If you think homeopathy isn't a matter of life and death, you might have not considered the people whose lives could have been saved had they turned to real medicine.

I don't believe in homeopathy, however I highly doubt it's being used in matters of life and death in any way that has the slightest veneer of respectability.

It may exist, I suspect, but only peddled by shady online gurus.

Dr Oz

Cleveland Clinic is a prestigious organization known the world over for their cardiology centers.

http://my.clevelandclinic.org/services/wellness/integrative-...

Sorry, I admit, it's not homeopathy. It's Reiki, which is one step less valid. At least homeopathy is actually interacting w/ your body in a physical manner, even if it just water; Reiki doesn't even do that.

People will hawk anything when the profit motive gets high enough.

I'd love to hear from negative consequences directly attributable to homeopathy and not caused by the state of mind of those seeking it exclusively.

Steve Jobs and Jim Henson

...neither of which had access to 'common'/appropriately researched medicine of course

I think that you don't realize the gap.

So let's take South Africa. This country is often so successful in so many dimensions compared to other African countries that they are commonly excluded from statistics related to its continent...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manto_Tshabalala-Msimang

This is the Health minister recommending AIDS patient to stop retroviral drugs and take her magical garlic instead (!)

300000 victims.

It is not only in the government... I lived there few years, loved it but I really can't say that common sense is their forte.

Colloidal silver will eventually turn you a nice shade of blue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria

Middle-class white folks taking sugar-water only want the sugar water as long as they're getting their chemo, because, "eh, it can't hurt." This type is, almost, every patient I've ever interacted with.

Believing herbs will protect you from a shotgun is rather more like the crunchy granola nutjobs that take sugar-water instead of their chemo, because "that stuff's just poison." These are a relative rarity, and the worst patients you've ever dealt with, because you get to watch them choose to suffer and/or die.

It's a difference in degree that amounts to a difference in kind.

Theres really not much difference. Its both irrational.

Given the amount of generalised irrationnality I don't think that qualifies as an equality function when observing human behaviour. One leads mostly to a lighter wallet (people with access to homeopathy are not particularily underexposed to medical coverage to begin with), the other to a missing limb. In terms of impact I'd argue there's a world of difference to the affected.

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