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Comment by namdnay | Hacker News Reader

haha come to france, and weep at the shelves and shelves of homeopathic remedies on offer at every pharmacy

Why I find the anger about this drug to be a bit overdone.

All sorts of "remedies" that don't pretend to have a scientific basis and have never worked in any context, unlike phenylephrine, which does work when sprayed in the nose, are sold in pharmacies.

I had a pharmacist recommend diluted ground up bees for an eye infection.

(As a french) I argue that it's better for physicians to have a way out to not give anything active to the patient who is adament they need a drug for their flu to be over faster. Also, placebo effect do work.

Oh, so then you are ok with those companies offering those placebos for immense prices and the insurance (aka the people) paying for that? You could just give some natural products as placebos that are not hurting trust in medicine by legitimizing quackery.

> Oh, so then you are ok with those companies offering those placebos for immense prices and the insurance (aka the people) paying for that?

The price isn't immense though... We're speaking of like 3€ for a month of "treatment". I would definitely rather the state to pocket that money but for the placebo to work you need a bit of marketing, so I don't really know what's the best way.

> You could just give some natural products as placebos that are not hurting trust in medicine by legitimizing quackery.

homeopathics are completely natural products, since it's literally sugar...?

Stuff like this is why people are losing trust in medicine.

YES .. Genetic tests can predict when placebos may be the best medicine

https://www.cell.com/trends/molecular-medicine/fulltext/S147...

"Highlights

•Predisposition to respond to placebo treatment may be in part a stable heritable trait.

• Candidate placebo response pathways may interact with drugs to modify outcomes in both the placebo and drug treatment arms of clinical trials.

• Genomic analysis of randomized placebo and no-treatment controlled trials are needed to fully realize the potential of the placebome."

Doctors are just people, they are not gods. It is actually possible self-perscribe if you are well informed.

Strongly disagree, especially when they make a profit upselling me some useless placebo, if you can't fix it, don't sell me something that doesn't work, it should be fraud.

Here in the US I got pretty upset the other day when I got an ear infection and went to the pharmacy, and all of the ear drops they had were homeopathic. Even the CVS brand medicines were homeopathic, labeled along the bottom edge of the box where you had to pick it up off the shelf to even see that.

Is there a non prescription ear drop that would help resolve an infection?

I'm not sure. But I would at least like to trust that, if there is one being sold on the pharmacy shelves as helping an ear infection, that it isn't just water.

Doesn't polysporin have actual antibiotics?

Oh, it's even better than that. "Homeopathic", being unregulated, has gotten itself slapped on all sorts of things... some of which work fine! They're labelled homeopathic, but have meaningful quantities of active ingredients. Which makes them bad "homeopathic" remedies, but good remedies overall. And probably contributes further to the confusion that homeopathy makes any sense. Example, I was once given some "homeopathic menthol cough drops". They worked fine, because they contained the same amount of menthol as any other cough drops. Just as labeling something homeopathic doesn't make it work, it doesn't make it not work either.

I imagine there must be message boards out there where "real" homeopaths rant at length about the difficulty of getting homeopathic remedies nowadays because there are so many things falsely labelled as homeopathic.

Or Whole Foods in the US where aspirins are hidden somewhere and all you do have is this expensive homeopathic stuff on the shelves…

Another lovely legacy of fascism in Europe. The popularity of homeopathic remedies is a hangover from Nazis adopting and promoting them as an alternative to the “abstraction” of “Jewish” medicine.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/standing-up-for-the...

This is the same in the US.

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