Homeopathic remedies recalled for containing real medicine
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
While I think that "real" placebos would be better for this than de facto placebos with bullshit pseudoscience attached to them, it's still not completely stupid to reimburse them if they do provide the same level of relief as active medicine through placebo effect.
Of course they're not effective at killing bacteria, but there are some domains in which placebos have their place.
Edit - to be clear, the reason given for reimbursing them is explicitely that they are good as placebos, they are not claimed by the French social security to be useful as active medicine.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/dec/22/placebo-effec... [1 alternate] http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/placebos-w...
The research I've heard about basically says "placebos only have subjective effects". The classic study was on asthma. Participants receiving the placebo reported feeling better, but had no measurable improvement in lung function.
So relying on a placebo for a subjective feeling of improvement could be dangerous whenever what's needed is an actual, objective improvement -- ie, "whenever something is actually wrong".
Would you go to a doctor who you knew dispensed ineffective sugar pills to the sick?
Would it be ethical for a doctor to dispense ineffective sugar pills to the sick and conceal this fact?
Here's the official opinion of the American Medical Association: http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/medical-...?
It depends a little on what else they could dispense. I would rather they give out homeopathic medicines then give out antibiotics, in the face of unreasonable demands from their patients. I'd more rather they successfully educate their patients. I'm not sure the degree to which that's typically possible.
I myself take homeopathic medicines for various ailments (small or big) and have seen improvement in my physical condition every time. Also a lot of people I know rely on homeopathy and not one has ever said that it did not give the desired results. The only factor is that the doctor should be able to diagnose the patient properly and have enough knowledge to understand how each chemical interacts with the body and with other chemical to be able to make a compound that will help the body in overcoming the disease. Homeopathy is as much about the medicines as it is about the knowledge and experience of the doctor.
Homeopathic "medicines" contain no chemicals that interact with the body or form compounds, which is exactly why anyone who isn't a complete idiot should immediately understand that it's all a bunch of bullshit.
Your homeopath peddler (who does not deserve to be called "doctor") understands absolutely nothing about your body, he has merely memorized a bunch of arbitrary meaningless rules.
That's exactly the Placebo effect that you are describing.
So read up on them. Here's a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy it is very well researched and you can review the papers yourself.
Also:
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/homeo.html
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6860/has-most-pe...
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1915/has-there-e...
>I have doubts that these studies are really done by independent personnel and not by those who get directly/indirectly paid by companies like Merck, J&J, etc.
Oh come on!! Do you really think the National Science Foundation[1] is a Merck shill? or the scientific journal Bioethics?[2]
[1] http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/c7/c7s5.htm#c7s5l2
[2] http://www.dcscience.net/Smith-response.pdf
>have seen improvement in my physical condition every time
Please note, the types of things homeopathy is prescribed for are self limiting. Your body will heal over time without intervention, so yes! You will feel an improvement! The remedy you took has nothing to do with it though.
Not exactly. The medicine course brought the illness down to a level where i could really not make out if I still have the problem or not. The problem again surfaced to a very lesser extent after 3 years of finishing the course. What I am talking about is Sinusitis and there is no treatment of it in allopathy apart from operation and the allopathic doctors themselves say that after operation it will again return in 1-2 years.
Why I said that I do not believe the tests that are done by US agencies because most of the tests that are done by US agencies come out to be heavily influenced by the private sector companies who have their business interest in those studies incase the result come out that go against what they claim after few years when skeletons tumble out. I do not reside in US so my opinions are based on what I read in major newspapers.
So you can downvote me to any extent but I have experienced the results on myself and have seen the difference and hence highly doubt those studies. And when I say the doctor really matters that is because you can go for the same illness to many doctors and the medicines that some will give you will show less/no effect at all. So the experience level and understanding of different chemicals and their bonding really does matter.
> What I am talking about is Sinusitis and there is no treatment of it in allopathy apart from operation and the allopathic doctors themselves say that after operation it will again return in 1-2 years.
Completely and totally incorrect.
http://consults.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/the-best-treatm...
>The best treatment, first line, is nasal irrigation with saline solution to just move the stuff along. If you took all the people in the world who say they have chronic sinusitis, and you put them all on nasal saline irrigations, a big proportion would not have any symptoms anymore.
>After that would be medications, like steroids, which are anti-inflammatory drugs. And if you can actually culture bacteria from a patient’s sinuses and know what you’re treating, antibiotics are appropriate. Decongestants, when appropriately used for a limited duration, are incredibly effective at relieving the obstruction and letting the sinuses drain.
>The sinusitis patients who do well are the ones who really abide by using the neti pot or the saline irrigation bottles. And whether we add additional medications or not to the saline, it’s that mechanical flushing and lavage that really has a tremendous effect. Because it’s getting rid of the mucus, getting rid of all the inflammatory cells and whatever bacteria are there.
The vast majority of sinusitis cases resolve on their own within 10 days. The cause of most cases is a viral infection.
Chronic sinusitis can be caused by asthma or allergies, which are known to spontaneously reverse with age. Or pollutants, etc, which can be removed from your living environment, even on accident.
Sinusitis surgery is far from the first line of treatment.
Sinusitis surgery isn't just one surgery, it is tailored to the individual patient and their causes and symptoms. for example, removal of infected, swollen, or damaged tissue if that is what is causing it. Can remove some bone if the sinuses are unusually small, or polyps if that is what is causing it. While it is true that sinusitis can reoccur after surgery, it is far from guaranteed. "Will again return in 1-2 years" is absolutely stupid and false. It depends a lot on the patient, their immune system, the type of surgery, the cause, and importantly, post-op care. Not to mention luck!
I had a chronic cough for years, caused by post nasal drip. No medications helped at all, I tried all of them. Nobody could figure out what was even causing it. One day though, it resolved completely by itself. I still do get mild flareups once in a great while for a week or two though. People have even been known to spontaneously recover from cancer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_remission
The other interesting thing is in the case of cervical cancer. The Human papillomavirus virus (HPV) can cause precancerous changes in the cervix. Mostly, these changes just reverse themselves. When you get an abnormal pap test, as long as the changes aren't very advanced, the course of action is "wait and see" to see if your body fixes the problem. In the vast majority of the cases it does, only a few with abnormal pap test will go on to develop cervical cancer. I had an abnormal pap with "low grade changes" several years ago. My heart skipped a beat when I heard the news. Guess what? We just retested me in a year and I was good to go. My body fixed itself.
>I have experienced the results on myself and have seen the difference and hence highly doubt those studies.
That is extremely flawed reasoning. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
For example, if everytime I had a cold I did 25 situps in the morning. My cold always went away. I can not then conclude that 25 situps in the morning is a cure for the cold.
Please review the cited studies (See the GP) for bias.
And you mean to say that just because my mind thought that what I am taking is real medicine hence my body developed the immunity to fight back the bacterial growth by itself? It is not necessary that what people do not understand now does not mean that it is wrong/flawed/fake. We are not so advanced to know each and everything about chemistry and biology and human body.
I have seen multiple results and have also tested myself by stopping the medication and again starting it and seeing the results for numerous other ailments, hence my belief stands.
Yes, and this is called chronic sinusitis, which is what I posted about.
>It wasn't that one day I woke up and found that I am cured
Real medicine is the same way.
>We are not so advanced to know each and everything about chemistry and biology and human body.
Correct, however we know enough to know that homeopathy is bull-fucking-shit.
>I have seen multiple results and have also tested myself by stopping the medication and again starting it and seeing the results for numerous other ailments, hence my belief stands.
As I said before, this is false reasoning. See my GP.
A lot of health plans in the US cover chiropractors and acupuncture.
[1]http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11655-011-0665-7
People report relief from chronic pain after taking placaebo. Cancer patients have relief from pain after cognitive behaviour therapy - a psychological intervention.
I have no problem accepting that someone feels pain, has acupuncture, and then no longer feels that pain. I do have a problem with the bullshit mechanisms that acupuncture suggests.
Since acupuncture has reasonable few side effects and long term pain medication has some scary side effects it's not so easy ro just dismiss it out of hand even though we know it is nonsense.
Correct. No arguments from me on that. However, as noted in the Wikipedia article, few modern day acupuncture therapist actually incorporate the original concepts of qi and meridians in their practice.
What I was saying was the actual insertion of needles can release endorphins and that's a plausible explanation for reduced pain besides just the placebo effect.
Despite the recommendations of friends, I DIDN'T go to a chiropractor and within a month I was much much better. Today my back has never felt better. I'm not sure that this proves that one shouldn't go to chiropractors, and I'm just a random guy on the internet so what does this prove?
I've also had tinnitus, and it too subsided WITHOUT chiropracty. I'm glad that not going to a chiropractor cured me.
The efficacy of any kind of treatment is hard to determine, and the subjective interpretation of our own experiences is always hard to keep in perspective. Anyway, I'm glad that you're ailments abated (with the chiropractor's help).
There is no need to be afraid of the idea that a chiropractic procedure might have possibly worked. If an alt-med procedure works, and there are rigorous scientific studies to back it up, congratulations, it is now science-based medicine. Science-based medicine is not particularly picky, and if physical manipulations or sticking people with needles is shown to work as a treatment for a particular condition, it's no worse a modality than any other.
The reason to reject chiropracty and acupuncture as fields despite their occasional successes because of their lack of rigor, and tendency to keep using treatments after they have been shown to be ineffective or dangerous or both. Some practitioners still adhere to the original, discredited foundations of their fields (sublaxations, nonallopathic lesions, qi), some practitioners will happily treat for conditions for which their methods have been proven completely ineffective, and some practitioners will happily injure patient after patient with fractured vertebrae and punctured lungs. And their professional organizations have shown no ability or desire to regulate their practitioners.
Rigor, not modality, is the problem.
Quackery runs amok in their industry, as evidenced by their major trade groups' stance on vaccination,[1] and genetically modified plants.[2] Ironically, while also supporting "alternative elective course of action" in lieu of vaccination they also support "enforcement efforts against quack medicines...that endanger the public health..."[3]
[1] http://www.acatoday.org/level2_css.cfm?T1ID=10&T2ID=117&ID=1...
[2] http://www.acatoday.org/level2_css.cfm?ID=10&T1ID=10&T2ID=11...
[3] http://www.acatoday.org/level2_css.cfm?T1ID=10&T2ID=117&ID=1...
Hey, how typical. Let's not imagine a kind of collusion between politicians and homeopathic drugs makers, let's not.
I'm not sure if that's true or just a clever excuse to keep homeopathy reimbursed though. An other element to consider is that Boiron, the largest homeopathic manufacturer in the world is a french company.
Then we are really reimbursing a very expensive form of sugar. I'm not sure who we are kidding but there is no science behind that kind of policy - and if placebo can make such claims, then it should be Open-bar for products making health claims all across the board, from supplements to food items. Yet these are actually controlled, while the regulations on homeopathics benefit from special provisions. No need to prove anything.
Yeah, and they have actually moved their site to my home town in France, and they have detestable practices. They grab all the land around them to expand their operations (even though it used to be land reserved for agriculture) by threatening the mayor to leave the city if they don't get everything that they want. They're just a bunch of bullies and I wouldn't be surprised there's some shady thing going on with them and politicians at the national level.
There have been double blind vs placebo tests for homeopathy. It doesn't work. It's no better than a placebo.
Absence of evidence where you should expect evidence is evidence of absence.
They submitted one. It was two dozen blank sheets of paper that "remembered" the data showing homeopathy works.
Regular medicine.
Let homeopathy go through trials. Let it fail & put these discussions to bed.
You gotta be kidding me! Do you really believe that?
Traditional Chinese Medicine is based on an incorrect understanding of the body and an incorrect disease model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_medicine
>With an eye to the enormous Chinese market, pharmaceutical companies have explored the potential for creating new drugs from traditional remedies.[126] Successful results have however been scarce: a 2007 editorial in Nature said that while this may simply be because TCM is largely irrational pseudoscience, advocates have argued that it is because research had missed some key features of TCM, such as the subtle interrelationships between ingredients.[126]
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/acu.html
I am not saying there might be merit in some of the practices, however to say "usually fares relatively well when put in clinical trials" is incorrect.
Mercury sulfide, asbestos ore and lead oxide might give you an erection thanks to the placebo effect, but pornography has been proven to be much more effective with fewer side effects, and can be delivered efficiently over the internet.
Why is it that in an age of science and technology and their palpable, measurable advantages, do so many people intentionally choose to "hate on" science? What is it that's missing, at least for them?
As an imperfect product of nature, rather than perfect observers of it, we are subject to illusions and delusions, that from a phenomenological perspective are as real to us (or as important to us) as gravity. People have the ability to never consider walking out the window but to believe in astrology at the same time, and that's probably not going to change. And yes, people are going to die as a result of intentional ignorance, but people die of many things, many of them are just as stupid.
Instead of constantly trying to fight this, I've been trying to open myself to these views, not because of any physical reality they possess (as they possess absolutely none), but because of their phenomenological reality, and what they teach us of human nature.
My impression is that people miss the Devil. You know, the horny guy with the pitchfork: something well identified, to hate personally, almost anthropomorphically, for everything that goes wrong with their lives, with the world, and with their lack of control and understanding of it.
Disclaimers:
1) the ravings that follow are grounded in anecdotal and mostly Western-European observations. They only partially and imperfectly apply to the USA, but that you'll find significant similarities.
2) I'm intentionally caricaturing to get my point across. Just keep the grain of truth deep inside.
Consider the caricature of the homeopathic believer: ecologist, liberal, anti-vaccine, anti-big-corps, who might have graduated in humanities but probably not in sciences, who sort-of believes in astrology, completely believes in every alternative medicine that either uses a couple of greek-sounding big words to explain its "theoretical foundation", or draws from extreme-oriental mysticism. Easily sympathetic to conspiracy theories, especially when it's about big money colluding to destroy the ecosystem or maintain suffering populations into poverty.
This person is typically defiant of organized religions, be it Catholicism or conservative protestantism. But although she--she seems to be majoritarily female--rejected organized religions, she still needs identifiable, if possible anthropomorphic, incarnations of Good and Evil to worship and hate respectively. Ecology is her Pachamama, a thinly veiled reboot of the Mother-Goddess cult. Science, this mysterious and powerful thing that's used by corporations to shape the world and sometimes dehumanize it, is the instrument of Evil. And her reactions to science at large, including medicine, are uncannily similar to her (great-?)grand-mother's reaction to the Devil. First she'll pretend it doesn't work; if it's too obvious that it does, then she'll be convinced that nasty side effects are going to haunt those who use it, and she'll be desperate to believe in any hollier alternative. And when her religious views contradict her obvious immediate interests, she'll use science, but first she's temporarily unplug any part of her intellect that might see the contradictions between her faith and her acts.
This could probably be fixed, by offering less counter-productive ways for people to indulge into their religious feelings. Established mainstream religions don't cut it anymore for most people in Europe, and for increasingly more people in the USA, especially those of liberal inclination. They need a better alternative religion than anti-scientific new-age cults. The difficulty in engineering such an alternative is that in order to work, it must be non-obvious that cults are manufactured by humans...
http://www.michaelshermer.com/2002/09/smart-people-believe-w...
I know people with degree (good degrees, good English universities) in Chemistry who believe in and use homeopathy.
It's baffling.
Homeopathy is actively harmful.
It's particularly common with penicillin. This is why people who are allergic to penicillin know about it and check their medication so that they don't get some accidentally.
This is IMHO probably the reason for this recall: it is an immediate danger to a significant number of people. Sadly increased antibiotic immunity in the environment is not viewed with the same level of concern as a sudden medical crisis that causes next of kin to sue.
Homeopathy is harmful because it's a bunch of patent nonsense that does nothing and people spend billions on it that could be used for something productive.
1. Homeopathy is probably less harmful than whatever was prescribed as placebo in the past, and whatever would be prescribed in its absence. That is, in many cases it's literally replacing antibiotics in this role. That's makes it a net positive on this point.
2. Putting anything in your body is actively harmful in the sense that you describe. Most foodstuff/most everything contains pretty nasty bacterial strains and any number of contaminants. Anything is potentially allergenic to a proportion of the population.
3. That one homeopath made a mistake is bad, but does not damn the whole industry. We would not judge any other industry on the basis of one bad actor/one mistake.
The fact that it exists (and in such force) means that it is being used to replace modern medicine by several individuals. That is the true crime.
Supplementing with some snake oil typically won't kill you. But using it to replace a real doctor's visit very well might. And that's basically the attitude that this industry has bred.
It's just complete nonsense.
Basically if you are hit by a blue car, they need a homeopathic traces of blue color to 'cure' you.
If I remember correctly a single duck is raised every year, and due to the dilution, is enough to produce the millions of dose.
I am not sure what makes more sense, the nosode or the duck liver...
Episode (in Dutch / French) http://keuringsdienstvanwaarde.kro.nl/seizoenen/2011/aflever...
Usually they are sold as granules, containing some form of sugar... to capture the magical water :) So technically it's sugar+water that you ingest.
Icing on the cake, the dispenser http://goo.gl/xsT3IM would be vetted by Steve Jobs, cute squary bottle, press the cap to fill it with a dose, open, ingest, close. Genius ?
That's why it's been revoked. Because it might work.
Above certain dilutions it goes beyond the Avogadro figure and there should be no molecules/proteins left of the original disease agent.
Of course, homeopathic "remedies" are uniquely adapted to our litigious society--since they can have no effects, they can have no side effects, and thus you'll never see ads from lawyers looking to sue over side effects of homeopathy.
Completely and totally incorrect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
In medicine, a nocebo (Latin for "I shall harm") is a harmless substance that creates harmful effects in a patient who takes it.
Basically, you think "I'm taking medication, that could cause side effects," that thinking it and of itself can causes side effects!! It's like a reverse placebo.
Also see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2hO4_UEe-4 (watch this short video, it give a great rundown on the nocebo effect, including examples)
and people are thinking they are getting specific side effects....at least they are searching about them.
"The legal status of homeopathic remedies in the United States is unique. In 1938, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act was sponsored by Senator Royal Copeland who also happened to be a homeopathic physician. The senator wrote wording into his bill that recognized all products listed in the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States as drugs and made them subject to regulation by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The legislation passed, and as a result, homeopathic products are legally sold in food stores, pharmacies, and elsewhere as a unique category of drug.
Despite such widespread use, the FDA regulates homeopathic preparations much less stringently than conventional drugs. Homeopathic products are not required to prove effectiveness or safety. Some regulations do apply. For example, homeopathic products can only be sold without a prescription if they are specifically for self-limiting conditions such as the common cold. Products marketed for severe conditions such as cancer are prescription-only."
Source: http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-supplements/ingredientmono-115...
That gray area has done a lot of damage to a lot of people.
I don't see much harm in taking homeopathy for a common cold for example, however for anything more serious, you are probably endangering yourself.
I am not trying to defend the efficiency of homeopathy there, but I am saying that triggering the placebo effect is beneficial.
That's harsh. The average consumer doesn't have the time/expertise to go through scientific research on homeopathic medicine. Someone tells them "this is going to work" and they believe them. It might be sad, but not all humans are skeptical nor to they have the time or energy to invest in research. They may not even be aware they are buying homeopathic medicine. Homeopathic medicine is sold near the real medicine, once I picked up a pill bottle on the shelf (while buying another thing) because it caught my eye. I was like "I didn't know they could treat this." I turned it over to read the ingredients and that's when I noticed it was homeopathy. If I was in the store looking for a cure, I could have easily just picked up whatever I saw that was a "remedy" for what I was experiencing. My mother even once bought some homeopathic medicine because of a marketing campaign, having no idea it was homeopathy, and actually, I didn't know at first either, I didn't look closely at the label, it wasn't until later I saw it was. While purchasing medicine, do you turn over the bottle, examine each ingredient, then look up the science behind them? For example there "no good evidence for or against the effectiveness of OTC medications in acute cough"[1] and is probably just a placebo,[2] yet people take cough syrup all the time. Even heroin was developed to be a non-additive cough suppressant, and was marketed as such. [3]
[1] http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001831/over-the-counter-otc-...
[2] http://www.uptodate.com/contents/acute-bronchitis-in-adults-...
I mean, I can't fathom this question:
> While purchasing medicine, do you turn over the bottle, examine each ingredient, then look up the science behind them?
Who says "no" to this?! Is that really a thing?
I swear, there is no hope for humanity.
It is one of the best researched effects (because most studies have a treatment group just with placebo) with very real results. Homeopathy for some people just seems to be a good vehicle for tapping into placebo. So yes, even if you're 'smart' and 'educated' it pays to reap the benefits of that mechanism. It would be shortsighted to paint these people as lesser than.
The irony is that people who feel compelled to discredit alternative approaches that have little scientific consensus are actually campaigning to take away an approach that works for some people, purely because it doesn't sit well with their beliefs.
Different story, of course, is criticising the way alternative medicine is practised. I believe there is as much malpractice and fraud there as there is in mainstream medicine and the food industry, which is a pity. This story just points out a very troubling production problems. Worser still is that this is not unique to one homeopathic production company, you can find similarly outrageous problems in other industries as well.
I find that much of it is actively harmful to users, especially when they truly need real medical care. It's the indirect consequences (not seeing a real doctor for your ailments) that are far worse than the potential direct side effects.
But at the same time, people are searching for it, so they might as well get it from us / through us.
So my solution was to write a negative analysis of the homeopathy category, drop it so that it can only be found if you are actively searching for it, and kind of never speak of it again.
Won't spam, but you can see the link to my site in my profile if you care and search for the category.
At the end of the day, I do love the supplement/nutrition industry, but this kind of stuff makes my blood boil.
Why? It is almost entirely unregulated and unsupervised. They have been known to contain unlisted ingredients, none of the ingredients they say, and dosages that differ wildly from what they are labeled as. I saw a movie where they just put some random shit into a pill (flour and stuff) and started marketing it as a supplement. This was apparently legal.
http://www.livescience.com/40357-herbal-products-unlisted-in...
> In the study, nearly 60 percent of herbal products tested contained plant substances not listed on the label. In nearly a third of products, the main ingredient was substituted with a different product. More than 20 percent of products contained fillers such as rice, wheat and soybeans, in addition to the main ingredient.
>Overall, out of the 12 companies that produce herbal supplements included in the study, just two had products with no substitutions, fillers or contaminants, the researchers said
> Such unlisted ingredients may pose health hazards for consumers, the researchers said. For example, one produced was labeled as St. John's wort, but actually contained the laxative plant Senna alexandrina. The laxative is not recommended for long turn use, and can cause serious side effects, such as chronic diarrhea and liver damage.
> 2011 study of 131 herbal tea products found that 33 percent were contaminated.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/health/policy/26herbal.htm...
>Nearly all of the herbal dietary supplements tested in a Congressional investigation contained trace amounts of lead and other contaminants
>The levels of heavy metals — including mercury, cadmium and arsenic — did not exceed thresholds considered dangerous, the investigators found. However, 16 of the 40 supplements tested contained pesticide residues that appeared to exceed legal limits, the investigators found. In some cases, the government has not set allowable levels of these pesticides because of a paucity of scientific research.
> Among the witnesses at the hearing will be Dr. Tod Cooperman, president of ConsumerLab.com, a company that has tested over 2,000 dietary supplements made by more than 300 manufacturers and has found that one in four have quality problems. According to Dr. Cooperman’s written testimony, the most common problems are supplements that lack adequate quantities of the indicated ingredients and those contaminated with heavy metals.
> Travis T. Tygart, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, wrote a letter to the committee saying that some athletes have been rendered ineligible for international competitions because they took supplements that contained steroids not listed on the products’ labels. There are thousands of supplements available for sale that contain steroids or other harmful ingredients, he wrote.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1852683/
>Case Presentation
> A 54-year-old woman was referred to the University of California, Davis, Occupational Medicine Clinic with a 2-year history of worsening alopecia and memory loss. She also reported having a rash, increasing fatigue, nausea, and vomiting, disabling her to the point where she could no longer work full-time. A thorough exposure history revealed that she took daily kelp supplements. A urine sample showed an arsenic level of 83.6 μg/g creatinine (normal < 50 μg/g creatinine). A sample from her kelp supplements contained 8.5 mg/kg (ppm) arsenic. Within weeks of discontinuing the supplements, her symptoms resolved and arsenic blood and urine levels were undetectable.
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/5292535_Nutritional_...
>These investigations showed that nutritional supplements contained prohibited stimulants as ephedrines, caffeine, methylenedioxymetamphetamie and sibutramine, which were not declared on the labels. An international study performed in 2001 and 2002 on 634 nutritional supplements that were purchased in 13 different countries showed that about 15% of the nonhormonal nutritional supplements were contaminated with anabolic-androgenic steroids (mainly prohormones).
>In 2005 vitamin C, multivitamin and magnesium tablets were confiscated, which contained crosscontaminations of stanozolol and metandienone. Since 2002 new ‘designer’ steroids such as prostanozol, methasterone, androstatrienedione etc. have been offered on the nutritional supplement market. In the near future also cross-contaminations with these steroids are expected. Recently a nutritional supplement for weight loss was found to contain the b2-agonist clenbuterol. The application of such nutritional supplements is connected with a high risk of inadvertent doping cases and a health risk.
This actually worries me a lot, since I am required to take an iron supplement because of chronic iron deficiency. If I get the tablets from the pharmacist (I have a prescription) they just repackage the over the counter stuff and charge me triple the price. There's no way to tell if I'm getting medical grade iron.
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_mead_the_magic_of_the_placebo
However for conditions where a placebo is not suitable, homeopathy may well keep people away from real medicine. There have been several high-profile examples of homeopaths keeping folks away from 'allopathic' medicine, eventually killing them. But even in the more passive sense this can be true - the simple existence of snake-oil, even without the homeopath persuading the patient to stay away from mainstream medicine, can delay treatment.
If you believe homoeopathy is better than medicine, then yes, I can see it holding more authority than a prescription.
I must be getting old.
"Lottery is a special tax aimed at people who are really bad in math"
I guess Homeopathy is a tax (health and money one) for people who are really bad in Chemistry and Biology.
"Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is resistance of a microorganism to an antimicrobial medicine to which it was originally sensitive....The misuse of antimicrobial medicines accelerates this natural phenomenon."[1]
versus
"This plant is effective because it's 100% natural!"
7 out of 10 times, people will go for the explanation that's easier to understand.
If I didn't know better, "salicylic acid" sounds like one of those chemicals that scientists keep putting in our food as part of their ongoing efforts to KILL ALL OF US, while "willow bark" sounds oh-so-natural and wholesome and makes me think of green meadows and chirping birds. So despite the fact that we know aspirin is a lot more effective than willow bark, I'd still feel a lot more comfortable eating willow bark. If I didn't know better.
Basically, evidence-based medicine faces a big marketing problem, thanks to the "evidence" part.
And allopathy is a major money earner for a lot of corporations and they go to every effort to tell the people that any other medicine system be it unani, ayurveda, acupuncture, acupressure, homeopathy, etc are false and bad.
In case you have not tried homeopathy then give it a go for small illness like fever, diarrhea, body pains, etc and test it for yourself. Also go to a doctor who is recommended by someone. Doctor's knowledge is the most important part in homeopathy as it is in all other non-allopathic systems.
Incorrect to a large degree. If alternative medicine was proven to work, then it would just become medicine. (or "allopathy" as you call it) We are always studying alternative medicine and some make the cut and get promoted to medicine. Some don't have enough research yet, and we are working on it. Is asprin "allopathy"? Well it was derived from an ancient practice of chewing/eating bark from a willow tree. We found the active ingredient, and isolated it. Now it is just known as medicine.
That being said, there are political and economic reasons to treat/not treat study/not study, but that isn't the 100% norm.
In addition, primary health care is poor in India, so everyone knows of a story of some member of the family having a poor experience in the organised health care sector. This leads to many people's search for 'something better' at a time when they're particularly vulnerable.
I would also be remiss if I did not mention that at least some degree of cultural chauvinism is responsible. To some, the West has ignored Eastern knowledge of medicine, and there is, at least among some, a belief that there are secrets unknown to modern science.
My parents are surgeons in India, and while what I've said is my opinion, it is derived in part from what I remember to be their experience.
I lived with a person that had an intolerance (sometimes called "asprine intolerance") and it is basically impossible to keep your diet free from that.[1]
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salicylate_intolerance#Treatmen...
Some substances, due to their large adverse reactions in some, can and are restricted.
>produced during fermentation
That's what it says, that seems to imply to me that it was accidental.
To bulk out the pill until it is visible to the naked eye.
Saying that something should have been left in some old era implies that people of that era are inferior to us, the fact that all past eras are targeted, make me think there is some sort of superiority thinking tied to being in the current age, like if current humans are inherently better.
As someone that has some practices and beliefs that were actually more common in the past, I personally hear that sort of argument a lot, and I think lots people don't realize that when they diss the past, they also diss lots of things important to them ( like, printing press... Created to print the bible no less... )
EDIT: alright, I get it, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, criticising the writing style of someone criticising something you dislike, even if I dislike it too, is reason to get blasted with downvotes.
Pro tip: If water really did have a memory and diluting things made them stronger, then all water everywhere would cure everything. Including terrorism since Bin Laden was buried at sea.
The article discusses medical practice and knowledge. Which in past centuries has clearly been inferior.
Before its formal discovery, people were already treating it correctly (with dissecated thyroid from pigs).
In the 70s it was found how to track TSH and T4 hormones in the blood, and in the light of this discovery there was a push to adopt it, and that diagnosis should be based only on that, not in patient symptoms.
Also the manufacture of synthetic T4 started since then.
This resulted in two problems: One, most doctors now use a protocol where you don't treat the person until the blood test show he HAS to (if you read the official guidelines, the ones that doctors use as "confirmed" disease, in the guidelines are instead listed as critical state and you must treat), the second is that for many patients, the problem does not manifest as T4 production, but in the conversion of T4 to something else, and to that people, synthetic T4 obviously don't work.
The personal result to me, was that I struggled 11 years to find a medic willing to treat me and ignore the blood tests, I've been being treated since 1 month and a half ago, and feel MUCH better, and I am sad that I had to go some extremes (including threatening to beat up a medic if she refused to order the exams I thought was needed).
For others, the result is that people created whole associations of thyroid patients, that has as major ethos defend practices of the 1960s, several countries has groups of patients and lawyers specialized in launching lawsuits to force medics to treat them like people were in the past, in hope that this will fix the problem (And whey they DO succeed in the lawsuit and the medic treat them like in the 60s, the disease DO get fixed).
There are lots of information on this site, mind you, despite the at first seemly crazy conspiratorial tone, I must say from personal experience, and from personal experience of all other people I know with the same disease, that this site is absolutely correct, and modern medicine that is wrong: http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/
I plan in writing a blog post in some months, comparing my coding performance before and after taking the medicine (one of the symptoms of the disease is "foggy mind")
Now why that was downvoted?
In other words, it's not "this from the 19th century and therefore stupid," but rather, "this was debunked a very long time ago and it's ridiculous that anybody continues to use it."
Some people, those with the lowest amount of faith in unsubstantiated beliefs, debunked homeopathy according to their own standards. They proved that it did not work better than the placebo effect, one of their existing and well-substantiated beliefs, resulting from a through examination of the simple question: "What if the effects of this treatment are all attributable to the patient believing that it should work?"
A large fraction of humanity, probably an overwhelming majority, has not been trained to examine the world scientifically. Many have been indoctrinated into religions or nonscientific pedagogies from a very early age. For those people, it is not sufficient to prove that a treatment does not work better than placebo to stop using it. It must be proven to not work at all.
Clearly, homeopathy activates the placebo effect. Thus, scientifically minded people reject it as a treatment. For everyone else, they find that it either works for them, or they can move on to a different placebo that does work. They may be wondering why scientific people work so hard to debunk placebos, because they are really just limiting the number of placebos they could be using.