Walmart, CVS face trial for homeopathic products next to real meds
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
I'll also note the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Model_List_of_Essential_Me... - its under "Medicines for other common symptoms in palliative care" as Loperamide.
> 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.
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.
If freaking 7-11 stores can sell me Aspirin tablets, I don't see how Whole Foods can't.
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.
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.
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.
Also, even in America I think you can order contacts and glasses online without a prescription; you just have to know your numbers.
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.
If the consumers want it I have no problem with a section of homoeopathic stuff. I do have a problem with it being mixed in.
The fact that it doesn't happen suggests that either they don't care - or they have some interest in maintaining the confusion.
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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_dilutions#Potency_...
> 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.
https://cacmap.fda.gov/drugs/information-drug-class/laborato...
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...
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.
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.
EDIT: Thanks for the info on St John's Wort! I should have picked a better example.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=St+John%27s+Wort+double...
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.
Is that the case in the US? Because here in Germany, lower potencies are very common.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Mechanisms
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifestation_(popular_psychol...
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14705842/
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hundreds-of-babie...
In fact, I wonder why nobody is doing homeopathic chiroptactic via Zoom yet... Looks like a good startup idea.
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.
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.
There has never been a substantive, peer reviewed study showing the benefits of homeopathy anywhere, ever.
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.
I disagree with the results of the risk of bias assessments of the studies involved in that meta-analysis: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-022-02127-3/tables/1
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.
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.
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.
Hahnemann's first homeopathic drug was to cure malaria. Are you saying it was meant to make you think you didn't have malaria?
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.
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.
I don’t know when the dilution became part of the story. As you said, a lot of allopathic medicine is like cures like (such as vaccines).
Hyoscyamine has been prescribed for decades
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.
- 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
People are free to but them off course, from their pocket.
Why don't we subvention sport, which would have much better effects?
Boiron (the biggest homeopathy scam) is sueing anyone who publicly states the truth (that all double blind tests failed).
Together with our law on squatters this is a national shame.
- 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?)
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.
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.”
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.
Some herbal remedies work, but a ton don't and are almost completely untested.
A lot of it seems to be innate trust of (false) authority figures: the MDs, naturopaths, and authors who shill this stuff.
And whatever education or tests naturopaths do are not comparable to what MDs have to do.
Even if I told patients I think thought the treatment would work but it's not FDA approved.
how does that work? the DEA controls the ability to prescribe, and they're federal.
https://centerforinquiry.org/news/washington-bill-would-expa...
Besides emergency room doctors, I don't think they have to think fast.
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.
https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-conflicts-pha...
https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/revisiting-financ...
Regulation without oversight and action is meaningless.
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.
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.
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.
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."
https://theconversation.com/are-over-the-counter-painkillers....
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...
The point here is that no one is trying to replace homeopathy along these lines, and that’s why homeopathy thrives.
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.
You can pay Costco $10 for a 5lb bag of turmeric in the spice aisle, or pay Costco $30 for 1lb of turmeric tablets near the pharmacy.
Perhaps I should not complain, as people wasting money on these tablets subsidizes lower prices on other products at Costco for me.
I don't think that's true in any way. If anything, they are crowding out products you might be more interested in.
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.
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.
https://www.costco.com/feel-good-usda-organic-turmeric-powde...
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.
People dont need science to explain everything. Positive experience is more important.
What's next? 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.
See https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/paste... from the article.
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.
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.
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.
[0] For example, the Canadian government is trying to push through sweeping legislation that would give them the ability to regulate the Internet: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-what-is-bil...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
Both products are legal, but are definitely not deserving of similar placement within the store.
(EDITED)
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.
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!
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.
Not all that is legal, is legal in all contexts.
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.
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.
1: https://www.cvs.com/shop/yeast-gard-gel-treatment-prodid-924...
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.
[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...
1: https://www.cvs.com/shop/cvs-health-clotrimazole-3-vaginal-c...
2: https://www.cvs.com/bizcontent/merchandising/productimages/h...
3: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-consumers-and-patients...
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.
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.
The thing is, meta-analyses just don't prove as much as they're claimed to. There are meta-analyses "proving" all sorts of nonsense, like ESP: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...
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.
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
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".
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).
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.
See also: https://youtu.be/L1ZbJRAyexM
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/content?templateType=abstrac...
That said, unlike homeopathic medicine vitamins can at least be argued to contain medicinal ingredients.
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.
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…")
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.
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.
(BTW, you should really ideally be carefully reading about any drug or treatment you are about to take :-)
I suspect a fairly decent chunk of homeopathic drug sales come from people who think they are normal (evidence-based) OTC medication.
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.
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.