Homeopathy 'treatments' must be labelled to say they do not work, US gov orders
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
I'm on a facebook list for dads, and after it came out that a homeopathic teething gel killed 10 kids (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/health/teething-remedies-i...) someone asked if it was worth the risk to keep giving to his kids, since it worked.
I tried to explain to him that homeopathic medicine is either 1) Nothing, if they diluted it 'correctly', or never bothered to put the poison in there to begin with or 2) Poison, if they failed to dilute it properly 3) Maybe some kind of actual medicine, in which case it's not actually homeopathic.
There are no other options.
He responded: "Well, it seemed to work for my kid, so I'm going to keep using it."
There were an additional 400 children caused serious harm.
I'm baffled by the attitude of parents like the one you mention.
There are both high-dilutionists and low-dilutionists within homeopathy.[1][2] I'm not saying you should run out and buy a bunch of homeopathic remedies or whatever, but also realize that the mainstream 'skeptic' account of homeopathy is not especially accurate.
Also realize that the latest scientific research on food allergies involves homeopathic-like mithridatism, so even though the idea of a like-cures-like high dilutionist treatment isn't anywhere near a universal panacea, it does at least appear to work in certain limited cases.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/History-American-Homeopathy-Academic-...
[2] http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/202602
James Randi famously starts out talks swallowing an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills. He's not dead yet despite being almost 90.
And that's exactly why I posted my comment, because it's wildly irresponsible to post comments leading people to believe that they can do the same thing and come away unharmed. The fact is that if you chug a bottle of 3x diluted poison ivy oil then you're almost certainly going to die. And not because it wasn't diluted properly, because it had other ingredients, etc.
Most homeopathic treatments on the market today are highly diluted. But not all. And since historically there was more of an even split between high dilutionists and low dilutionists, it's not unlikely that in the future even more low dilution homeopathic products will come on the market. So when you post shit that's going to come up in Google for the next twenty years that's implicitly encouraging folks to try some stunt that could easily get them killed, don't expect to not get called out on it.
Haha ok, yes, you have a point there. I guess it is really dangerous to assume that all homeopathic remedies are pure water, because some of them aren't actually diluted that much. Some of them still contain poison.
If you wanted to induce a placebo effect, playing up the potency of the sugar pill would be helpful - for example saying "Do not, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, take more than two, as this can result produce DANGEROUS effects" is a lot better than going "Ehh, take more if it'll make you feel better, this stuff's completely inert anyways.".
I believe we already do this in medical field: for example those big ibuprofens they give you after a trip to the ER. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it the exact. same. thing. as just taking multiple over-the-counter ibuprofen pills? The underlying idea being that the patient will be satisfied the doctor is "doing something" to alleviate his pain, while not having to write risky pain killer Rx.
Maybe, homeopathy works in a similar way - it gives a compelling sci-fi / witchcraft / whatever-you-fetish backstory to a sugar pill. And when your subconscious buys in, you may cure yourself. Certainly with the example of insomnia, it seems quite plausible.
As you say modern medicine embraces like cures like for multiple conditions I can think of off hand, including, as you mention immunotherapy for allergies. Others I believe include anti-venom and flu vaccination.
Also, the article itself is clear: many are diluted to be rendered useless and in general aren't based on science. Well there is a clear gap and what I consider an acknowledgement some of these therapies are based on science and do contain the active ingredient. In my mind that makes them not far off from vitamins, many of which if you buy off the shelf and break open will be filled with flour and other fillers. Still that is not to say the science behind vitamin supplements isn't real and there aren't some reputable companies making quality products.
Now I am not encouraging deception in the marketplace, or giving peanuts to kids with peanut allergies. Though that is part of real science and modern medicine using like cures like.
After reading this comment it seems that the books you read are very suspicious.
And the only thing that can be read had nothing to do with homeopathy.
So it is not a like cures like process; it is a processed hybrid molecule that induces an immune response. Another organism has been through an infection to learn how to combat it so you don't have to. Vaccines prevent an infection from taking hold with biologically modified proteins, it doesn't cure an infection.
[EDIT] fixed typo and thinko
Others have also presented arguments why immunotherapy for allergies isn't really like cures like. However, nothing as comprehensive as your post to suggest any significant processing on the vaccination level as much as a simple reduction to the chemical allergen to reduce and/or prevent allergies to said chemical.
Almost no other medical treatments have such evidence which is why homeopathy is labelled as having no evidence to support it and that is being generous as plenty of people have gone looking for evidence to support it but there is no credible evidence to be found after 100 years of trying.
Vaccines and immunotherapy work by giving the body small amounts of the actual thing that is harmful (usually dead, in the case of vaccines). It's easy to see why this is a reasonable approach - it's giving the body "sparring practice" against the disease or substance.
Antivenom works similarly, except that the antibodies are grown in another animal, probably because by the time someone is bitten, there isn't time for their bodies to learn how to produce it themselves.
Homeopathy is based around finding substances which cause similar symptoms. They have no relation to the actual cause of the condition that they're supposed to treat. Is the "cure" for Ebola any random chemical that happens to cause humans to bleed out of every orifice? Is the "cure" for Alzheimer's any random chemical that causes people to lose their memory? How many conditions cause headaches, or nausea, or lack of energy? Are we supposed to believe that anything which can cause those symptoms is a universal cure for all of those conditions? If so, why bother with snake oil at all? Just make sure that one is exposed to a variety of cold/flu viruses, and they should (according to the "like symptoms" "theory") cancel each other out.
The whole concept didn't make sense in the 19th century, and it certainly doesn't today.
The reason it doesn't make sense is because you're mischaracterizing it. Most homeopaths didn't believe that every substance that caused similar symptoms would be a cure, but rather they believed that these substances would be a fertile ground to look for treatments. It's basically like how today we consider drugs that cure diseases in rats as being promising to study further in humans.
It was homeopaths who introduced the idea of clinical trials to mainstream medicine, and if they believed that like cured like in every instance this obviously wouldn't have happened.
That's still based on a pretty bad misunderstanding of how the body works. The action of a virus or bacteria is usually pretty undetectable. If you had no immune system, you wouldn't even get a cough or a runny nose.
A runny nose, a cough, vomiting, and diarrhea are the body's response mechanisms. They aren't caused by any one disease in particular, they are the body's way of trying to flush out the infection.
If you look for the cure in something that also makes your body angry and tries to flush it out, well you're not going to get very far. You're just going to make the problem much worse, and weaken your immune system further. So the whole idea of homeopathy is flawed from the very beginning.
This is completely different to testing cures in rats before human trials. I don't even really see the connection, to be honest.
Even if a hypothetical scenario would actualize where it is found that some specific homeopathic drug/treatment combination is effective as medicine it would not validate the rest of the tradition in any way.
It looks like both homeopathy and the vaccine were even introduced in the same year(1796), which was a spooky coincidence when I looked it up just now.
Not even close to the same thing.
A cutting edge treatment for nut allergies is to consume small amounts of nuts (carefully prepared, etc.).
edit: I want to differentiate the nut thing from homeopathy. The idea there is to consume a very small and carefully measured portion of the nut, not some nonsense about training molecules.
It makes total sense for nut allergy where the disease is the intolerance; if you become immune to the substance you are cured.
Toothache is not an intolerance to deadly nightshades and no level of resistance to the poison will cure what is a totally unrelated issue; pain caused by a something slowly digging a hole through my gum.
Huh. Well, we do inject people with weakened diseases (vaccines). So in that example, "like" really does cure "like", by training our immune system.
So, uhh, that part is kind of true. Only when it's not diluted so many times that it ends up being pure water.
I guess that their downfall in this case was that the manufacturer was a True Believer who actually bothered with the whole add poison to water then water it down until poison is gone, rather than, y'know, just packaging tap water.
The snake oil might be completely ineffective, but it better at least be oil from an actual snake.
Is it good to make pancakes?
Wait, where do you think the vast majority of bottled waters come from? Actual springs?
Wow. That is messed up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna is not something to be playing with when it comes to "inconsistent amounts".
---
The foliage and berries are extremely toxic, containing tropane alkaloids. These toxins include atropine, scopolamine and hyoscyamine, which cause a bizarre delirium and hallucinations,[1] and are also used as pharmaceutical anticholinergics.
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Yap, perfect for unregulated "natural" cure for babies.
To be fair, there is: 4) Placebo.
Placebos do work. So it might well be working for his kid.
> or never bothered to put the poison in there to begin with
In that case, it would be pure water, and therefore it would be completely effective for treating the condition of dehydration.
Maybe you can suggest a few things that do work..
Rubber teethers with a gel in them that you can put in the freezer and get cold, but not so cold they burn or feel uncomfortable or could choke them (like ice cubes).
Cut, cool, washed celery stalks at least 4" long, so the baby (or you) can pull them back out of their mouth if the baby starts to stuff them down their throat (which happens). The baby will instinctively pull it back out if it hurts. (Note: carrots and most other vegetables are NOT safe, because the baby can break off little pieces and choke on them, but you can put them in a baby straining mesh thing to keep small pieces from choking them.)
To all parents (especially on sites that are not HN): please do not put anything in your baby's mouth that might hurt them. It's better to listen to them cry then to risk hurting them.
EDIT: removed anbesol/orajel suggestion as unsafe and probably ineffective anyway.
They recommend putting pressure on the child's gums and/or providing a cold washcloth or teething ring to chew on. Make sure you supervise so the child doesn't choke.
http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm385817.ht...
The AAP are more direct "The American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend putting any prescription or over-the-counter pain relievers or medication that contain lidocaine [Anbesol] or benzocaine [Orajel] on babies' gums. These products are not useful for teething pain because they wash out of the baby's mouth in minutes."
https://www.aappublications.org/content/35/8/32.1
In short, the actual medicine is just as bad. It also doesn't work and causes death.
Neither organization recommend the use of vegetables.
Teething is itself natural, safe, and perfectly normal, even if is a bit painful... so letting the process occur naturally is the most homeopathic approach. It's ironic and tragic that people are giving their precious little ones poison to stop what is really just pain from normal growth.
Real "homeopathic" treatments that actually work are things like a rubber teething toy to chew on, or a stalk of celery... that's about as natural as it gets! Poisons need not apply.
FWIW, the only reliable 'treatment' I've found for my Crohns is pizza. And I guess even this is 99.5% psychological!
But I love not spending days in hospital more.
:)
I've noticed a sharp uptick in people utterly detached from reality lately where presumably the former checks to keep people grounded, like a critical news ecosystem, or a robust education system, has imploded.
It feels like we're slowly falling off the trajectory of the Renaissance and Enlightenment; avoiding fatalism about that is my main challenge right now.
You used to need substantial capital to earn the reputation as a serious news organization, but now the barrier to entry is a vaguely-authoritative domain name and social media accounts.
But for the people in charge its more like:
"would you gain more authoritarian political power by promoting that we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?"
Now lets add another wrinkle... lets say by the magic of groupthink 99% of one population is already a devout member of one belief system. If 50% of climate scientists (small group though they are) were dyed in the wool Republicans then coming out against them would cost votes prestige and power. But if they already are indoctrinated to hate you and your race and your religion and your group, you don't lose very much in a practical sense by signalling against them. In fact as a member of the opposition you probably should oppose them on general principles and your own group expects you to live up to your ... devoutness.
I've seen it, watching people nearby me convert to denialism. I have to admit I agree with them on a lot of smaller details. A fascination with symbolic level commitments that are a rounding error WRT altering the Earth's long term problems but ruin innumerably human lives in the short term. "This symbolic proposal will help absolutely nothing in the long term, but in the short term it'll sure destroy a lot of jobs, jobs for people that our political group are trained to bitterly hate..."
Absolute power corrupts absolutely and its not hard to absolute power in the form of political consensus in legacy mass media, academia, hollywood, SV. And with that absolute power comes corruption. Telling the truth becomes an act of disbelief or apostasy, or you can faithfully believe while knowingly lie. Its not just the left, in that any group thats 99% composed of one political group tends to fester and get smelly, there's plenty of this on the right. You can only gain power by a public display of ever more devout true believer statements, truth is gone out the window. Ask yourself if people gain power in academia or the legacy media by telling the truth or by loudly proclaiming their devotion to the political causes that 99% of them share... that's what post-truth world means. A healthy balanced competition would force the truth to make an occasional appearance, but in a polarized consensus of groupthink its just a legacy fable. Remember when that stuff was about the truth? Yeah not so much anymore.
Combine the two ideas above and its a real mess. Atomized individuals and groups are broken off into groupthink hubs that rapidly share no common ground or affection with any other group and their interactions are based on gaining internal strength by showing their devout belief by denigrating the opposition. Traditionally this leads to revolution and civil war. I'd be surprised if the 50 states are together much longer. Frankly I can't wait, as the younger I am the better I'll come out in the rebuilding, assuming I survive. I'd rather rebuild at age 50 than age 70, for example.
Most newspapers, television and radio stations, along with the big new sites are controlled by a handful of companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...) that are far from left-leaning.
Rupert Murdoch, as but one example, is the driving force behind Fox News. Is that part of some grand left-wing conspiracy?
The number of left-leaning publications is pretty thin. The Huffington Post, parts of MSNBC, The Daily Show, and a case could be made for The Economist and The Guardian. For every one of those there's a dozen like The Daily Mail or USA Today.
> I'm not sure the SJWs have anything in common with the vast majority of the country...
"SJW" is a strawman pretty much by definition, but those who get slammed as being one are typically in the under 30 crowd which are generally more accepting and understanding of social justice issues. The so-called SJW group has more in common with their generation than "the majority of the country", but that's how things always are.
She's also being painted as a communist by the extreme right which are so far to the one side of the political spectrum that everyone else is considered a "liberal" by comparison.
I agree that the left/right stuff is irrelevant when it's establishment and profit driven.
If you want actual left-leaning news you need to visit publications that don't give a fuck, like The Rolling Stone or Vice Magazine where they're not part of the establishment and have nothing to lose.
The challenge now is to predict whether society in 50 years is going to look more like "Idiocracy" or "The Walking Dead".
Either way, I don't foresee a good future for the human race.
Hopefully, in some parallel universe, humans have avoided this fate, and are continuing the trajectory of the Enlightenment, and will proceed to exploring the stars, going where no one has gone before.
I'm not sure which is worse.
I can't wait to see all the conspiracy theories that pop up around self-driving cars.
ELON MUSK DIDN'T GO TO MARS, WAS ALL TO DODGE TAXES.
In these hyper-partisan environments, everyone is afraid to tell the whole truth because Team A might use pieces of Team B's statements against them (see the sibling comments about feminism and global warming, or anything around the current election, but any and every partisan topic applies). So what happens is people choose tidbits of truth that fully support their side's claims and ignore the rest of truth, and make sure everyone on their team follows suit. These tidbits of truth then get used in broader contexts and somehow become universal truths. These now universal truths are not questioned in one's own echo chamber because it would work against their shared goals.
Team B then admonishes Team A within the Team B echo chamber because of the obvious ignorance of reality of the truth tidbits that became universal truths. The (not so) funny thing is that Team B is completely unaware that they do exactly the same thing.
So, inside the Team A echo chamber all you hear is how the other side is completely ignorant of reality, suppresses the truth, ignores facts, outright lies and deceives, while our team is where the logic and reason exist. And the exact same thing is happening in the Team B echo chamber. Both teams are equally fervent about their superiority over the other team. And both sides have the same answer to the problem: get rid of the other team's echo chambers and everything will be fine.
The actual truth cannot exist in this kind of environment.
When reality becomes inconvenient to people, they'll happily ignore it and do whatever it takes to get by. As long as they're not ignoring something that's going to imminently harm them, they can get away with it for a long, long time, especially when they can find a community that reinforces it.
You also never know what people actually believe, in their heart of hearts, and they may be professing nonsense so they can signal that their in some group, or because it's what they think you should believe, or what you they think that you want them to believe, etc.
The problem is a worrying lack of critical thinking.
It's much more likely that someone will reject a truth from an untrusted source than an untruth, even a clear untruth, from a trusted source. This is always true at some level. There is so much data on everything that all of it cannot be considered and independently evaluated by each person; at some point you have to believe that someone else who knows more about this than you do has verified the claims.
[1] http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/teach-philosophy-to...
The homeopathic "doctor" was delighted. You see, the other thing in homeopathy, apart from the belief in water memory, is the concept of most disease as a type of itch ("psora"), which can erupt through the skin ("psora miasm"). No, really, I didn't make that up, you can (with some difficulty) find this stuff with Google. Since like cures like, allergens such as poison ivy, which cause skin rashes, are thought to be curing internal disease, and some homeopathic medicines are full of them, and are used as a complement to the super-diluted ones. Stay away from that whole swamp.
The rest of the placebo effect, outside of that domain, is being increasingly found to be the result of under-powered experiments.
To show something only has a placebo effect is the equivalent of showing it does not work.
The (understandable, traditional) reason for measuring relative to placebo is that, "well, you don't need the drug if it's only as good as what a placebo gives -- just use the cheaper placebo! You should only bother with some special drug if it's better than what mere belief-in-effectiveness yields."
But that assumes that people are equally credulous of every placebo; if a person is more credulous of homeopathy, and credulity is hard to manufacture, then it's not quite wrong to say that it "works" under a relevant definition.
(I know this is kind of an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pen technicality, but eventually we'll want to actually understand why belief-in-effectiveness can matter at all, so we can exploit it, and reasoning like yours tends to give the idea that such an effort, by definition, can't work.)
Which is to say, we're not 100% sure it's bullshit—we can't be, in science—but we're 99.999999% sure, or so.
It's better to make the negative claim (the former) rather than risk losing what little authority you have with people who are struggling to understand the evidence behind these products to begin with.
However, if a label would say "10 peer reviewed and published scientific studies find no evidence that this product works". Now that is convincing.
"No scientific evidence this product works" does not mean the same thing as "this product does not work!" People confusing the two is very harmful.
It could mean, for example, "there is plausible mechanism of action but there hasn't been much research on the topic [for whatever reason]" or it could mean "there's absolutely no known mechanism of action, it doesn't make physiological sense, and a century of research has proved it doesn't work." These two statements are obviously not the same!
> However, if a label would say "10 peer reviewed and published scientific studies find no evidence that this product works". Now that is convincing.
I don't think that this is how medical labelling should work. If you want to sell a product on the basis of its effect on your health, then the onus should be on you to prove that it works, not on others to prove that it doesn't. In this setting, I think that a presumption of guilt (ineffectiveness or harmfulness) until proven otherwise is appropriate.
The fundamental problem I think is that much of society simply doesn't understand what science is, and why it's important, or why they should care about scientific studies in regard to allegedly medicinal products they may use.
It seems we're just generally very bad at this stuff as a species.
You're not going to rationally logically reason someone out of a position they got into via completely irrational illogical unreasoning belief.
Now you might replace their irrational illogical unreasoning belief with another like faith healing or anything an actor in a tv commercial wearing a doctors white coat says is true.
As an analogy, in the history of mankind I don't think any Christian Creationist has ever been converted to evolution by throwing scientific journal papers at him. You'd have better luck setting him on fire or being torn apart by lions in a Colosseum and even that mostly doesn't work. But Christian Creationists DO convert to other religions every day, all the time, plenty of currently Buddhists or Hindus or Pagans or Satanists or whatever.
"By definition", I begin "Alternative Medicine", I continue "Has either not been proved to work, Or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call "alternative medicine" That's been proved to work? Medicine."
1. All churches, mosques, temples etc. to have a board outside their "Prayer Does Not Work." 2. All astrologers, tarot card readers, psychic readers etc. to have a large bold faced notice "This does not work". 3. All laws passed by congress must begin with "This might have severe unintended consequences that are bigger than the problem this bill claims to solve".
Safety is a good thing, but so is liberty.
One of the oft-cited claims by practitioners is that water has memory[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory
This sounds cute and it's probably true that water has some subtle hard-to-reproduce property of retaining certain configurations, but even if this were true, what's so great about it?
I'm not entirely convinced that a hard-to-reproduce configuration of water will affect my physiology, and if it does, then this would have to be put through scientific rigeur, which it is not, it's performed on blind faith that it works.
They'll simply put the name on the label without an claim about what it does, and leave that to books.
The regulation will do nothing.
My mother in law just gave me a bottle of pills containing a Chinese herb meant to treat hair prematurely graying. I don't mind trying it and finding out it doesn't work in order to keep her happy but I've ran into some reports that it can cause liver damage, but I can't gauge how reliable those reports are. Any tips on how to find scientific research on things like this?
The product is called "Fu-Ti"
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/sidebar-whats-in-th...
In before the stereotypical MiL jokes along the lines of "of course the pills are pure cyanide" etc.
Search PubMed there seem to be a few papers around indicating it's toxicity and discussing it like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22210538
A few thoughts as someone who has pursued a lot of alternative medicine (successfully, with a very critical eye):
Minerals, like zinc, can build up in the body. Thus they are a means to wind up poisoned. (Too much of anything is not good for you. Even water can kill you if consumed in excess. It gets called water poisoning.)
I was told by people who did their research that B vitamins (particularly PABA) and nutritional support for the adrenals can reverse grey hair. I was going prematurely grey due to a serious health crisis. I had some limited success with this approach in my thirties.
You could try taking zinc supplements to see if that is, in fact, the active ingredient in this super secret mumbo jumbo, minus the part where you expose yourself to god-knows-what.
If you don't actually care about your hair going grey, I strongly suggest you just tell her "No thanks." You shouldn't have to experiment with your own health to appease anyone at all.
Best.
It's not perfect but they have assembled information on quite a variety of substances and scientific trials therof.
These debates always devolve into how placebo is a proven effect and doctors should prescribe placebos. Placebos seem to have limited effects though (they're not going to cure cancer or a cold) so this feels like a red herring.
From the wikipedia page:
"In Germany, to become a homeopathic physician, one must attend a three-year training programme, while France, Austria and Denmark mandate licences to diagnose any illness or dispense of any product whose purpose is to treat any illness.[284]...
The Indian government recognizes homeopathy as one of its national systems of medicine;"
You could draw multiple conclusion from that. Nonetheless, it is interesting.
Only Ayurveda could possibly be looked at a little charitably, since it involves use of potential active ingredients, but even there efficacy is largely anecdotal, with barely any scientific rigor applied.
For example look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitalism - infants will themself to death because they are not loved.
Ask doctors and nurses and they'll tell you about people with and without the will to live, and how having a good outlook can mean the difference between life and death.
These are infants who are well cared for, fed, clean, warm. But they die simply because they are not held.
Even if they did die is quite a stretch to assume they willed themselves dead. Infant lack a mental concept of death or dying to even be able to will themselves dead.
As for a cause, I would assume something similar to amblyopia.
So it cured someone, yet didn't work?
I don't think you realize how powerful the placebo effect actually is.
But that is simply incorrect, placebos can cure, yes, actually cure. And not just mental conditions either (which is another common, yet incorrect, belief).
Last night the baby went to sleep because I walked counter-clockwise while singing lullabies? That's it, that's the only direction I can walk in from here on out while putting her to bed. The kid ate her veggies with no complaint because I was humming The Simpsons theme? It's now the official meal-time song.
When she gets older and starts having well-developed preferences, then I will no longer be crazy - only my behavior will be, because I'll be in thrall to a tiny crazy person.
Talking to nurses working with babies apparently this is a thing and they get to understand babies quite well when they cry.
Parents rate their children as hyperactive after consuming sugar, no matter if the "sugar" is actually just red colored water. It's perception that's changed.
Since there's almost no regulation the buyer has no way of knowing if it was correctly diluted or not.
http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/uc...
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/fda-homeopathic-teeth...
The people who buy this are probably the ones who can't afford real medicine, and now regulation is going to make this even more expensive. If you think this is the government trying to protect us against ourselves: it's not, and that's not the role of government anyway. This is just an alternative medicine attack to remove competition and keep the price of real drugs high.
Also, the FDA has the responsibility to make sure that fake medicine cannot be advertised as being medicine. It doesn't remove competition, it removes fraudulent competition from competing with real medicine.
"The people who buy this are probably the ones who can't afford real medicine"
This is the reason. If they can't afford real medicine I am doubly-supportive of labeling that prevents them from wasting that money entirely. I'm also not sure how often real medicine is more expensive... I've seen some expensive homeopathic treatments.
Homeopathy is popular in the UK where medication is usually free and has a low cost if it's not free.
However, goods sold with the expectation of efficacy should _be controlled_ based on that promise.
Homeopathic treatments are simply not fit for purpose, even by the standards of ordinary products. If an engine oil failed to provide any lubrication, or if an electric cord could not power devices attached to it, it would promptly be withdrawn from the market. Standards should only be higher for products that are intended for human consumption.
Given that I don't smoke and hate the smell I'm sure that I'm heavily biased, but I still think that this is a good thing. The government isn't restricting access to your drug of choice, it just tries to make it less appealing.
Labeling water with 'Actually, this is useless' feels like a good idea to me. People that jumped the fence, 'true believers', won't be affected. They shake their head, mumble that The System is broken and doesn't support alternative treatments and .. will continue to buy that shit.
But people that are in need of help might actually read that disclaimer and save time & money.
If you cannot buy real medicine for some reason (how barbaric is that, btw?) I don't think that you should buy overpriced water instead.
Isn't like cures like the principle behind many modern medical therapies, such as: flu vaccination; anti-venom; and immunotherapy for allergies.
Not saying this is wrong decision, but its always interesting to watch the Government pick winners and losers. In this case their justification includes "many are diluted to the extent..." and "in general claims not based on science". So is that an acknowledgment products are based on science and not diluted to the extent rendering them useless? On the other hand its great watching members of congress explain why they refuse to pass laws require labeling of food containing GMO, because they generally acknowledge GMO could be harmful to consumers but the science is still out and so until then consumers shouldn't be making their purchasing decisions based on GMO labels.
Homeopathy works by taking a chemical and diluting it, generally to the point where it practically doesn't exist. Best case scenario, it's a sugar pill, worst case, they don't dilute enough with something dangerous and you are taking poison.
This isn't picking winners and losers, it's consumer protection that's required for a free market to be fair to consumers. If homeopathic producers follow clinical standards and proven that their products produce statistically better outcomes, then they can call it medicine and sell it on the market.
Certainly I could be wrong it's just that "process" sounds a lot like immunotherapy for allergies. I am not trying to lump homeopathy and immunotherapy in the same boat by any means, but looking beyond the differences in the two I think it is possible to be more open minded than labeling the like cures like doctrine pseudo science.
>This isn't picking winners and losers, it's consumer protection that's required for a free market to be fair to consumers.
Like I said I don't disagree with the labeling, but that doesn't mean there aren't winners and losers being picked. Sure its fair for consumers to know homeopathy treatments haven't been tested (not unlike supplements require FDA warnings), but they are still losers while others are winners and escape fair disclosures to consumers (e.g. my example of no GMO labeling).
They do sound similar!
The items you cite work on the principle of training the immune system to react to known pathogens in ways that allow an effective immunoresponse later. Homeopathy works by diluting some compound to the point where you might have one molecule of it in a homeopathic dose and positing that this is a cure.
The former isn't "like cures like". It's more like an educational process, based on an understanding of how immune systems work. The latter isn't really "like cures like" either, because one molecule of anything in a teaspoon of water isn't enough to matter to anything or anyone.
You're absolutely right. The processes do sound similar! They're just very different in very important ways well past how similar they may superficially sound.
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6860/has-most-pe...
If it is placebo effect, it will not be effective for multiple times at multiple times in same person, could say there is personal bias. There are many conditions like cold, migraine which have no definite treatment in modern mainstream medicine, so there is no harm in experimenting homeopathy when having these conditions. I believe it is better to get a diagnosis from regular doctor first and then use homeopathy.
But reality is that it doesn't work, it is just a big fraud
When you have any actual proof and no the same "Belieeeve!!!" call us