Dangers of homeopathy

I've already written about homeopathy and outlined how ineffective it is. Now, I'll try to describe the dangers of homeopathy, which can also be applied to other forms of alternative medicine.

Homeopathic remedies have no physiological effects on humans or on any other living being. Their alleged effectiveness is just placebo effect. By themselves, homeopathic remedies pose no danger, they are pure water or other inert substance, unless they are contaminated. Alternative medicine can even be beneficial in some cases, such as for example pain relief. It is better to rely on placebo effect to suppress the pain than solely on pain medications.

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The danger comes in cases of severe illness when patients may delay visiting real doctor and getting real treatments or even decide to rely on solely alternative medicine. This is real problem. Homeopathy and alternative medicine in general are getting increasing popularity worldwide. It is all to easy in today's world to put together a website and start advertising some fake products.

This is one example of those. They claim that poisonings by toxic metals can be cured with homeopathy. These poisonings can be very serious and potentially life threatening. Homeopathy can do nothing to help and if a patient decides to take homeopathic approach instead of going to a real doctor the consequences can be grave. Unfortunately there are thousands of websites like this and the most unscrupulous ones even claim that modern medicine is some sort of big conspiracy designed to make us sick.

Homeopathy actually kills people. Whatstheharm.net has a list of more than 400 people who died because they used homeopathic treatment instead of real medicine. Most of those people are adults, but sadly, there are many children and babies on the list, all of whom died because their parents failed to use their brains.