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.

Reflexology – just another quackery

Reflexology, a form of alternative medicine, is a practice of massaging – applying pressure on specific areas of body, usually feet and hands, by which practitioner can diagnose and cure all sorts of diseases and problems. Like any other form of alternative medicine it is not backed by science and it doesn’t actually work.

Reflexology, also called zone therapy, maps the whole body on the feet and hands, each organ has a corresponding zone on one foot/hand or both feet/hands.  Body is divided in ten longitudinal zones, 5 on each side. Anatomically speaking this is nonsense because no such zones/pathways exist in our bodies. Reflexologists claim that by feeling specific zones on feet/hands can diagnose diseases and that by massaging hands/feet they can increase the flow of energy, cleanse toxins, cure hair loss, etc. None of these claims have been backed by clinical trials and it is perfectly safe to assume that reflexology doesn’t work, along with other similar practices such as Vacuflex or Vita Flex.

Reflexology is not recognized by law in any country (correct me if I’m wrong) and the consequence of this is that there is no formal training. Therefore anyone can practice reflexology and anyone can call oneself a reflexologist.

All that there is to reflexology is placebo effect. Foot massages feel good and the most likely reason for that is the fact that area of the brain that controls the feet is adjacent to the area which controls genitals. There could even be some neuronal overlapping between these areas.

Image source - Wikipedia.

Homeopathy works, but not really

Despite the lack of any credible scientific evidence that homeopathy has any real effects on human body, thousands, if not millions people swear by it. They all claim that homeopathy helped them with all sorts of problems. While there are certainly a lot of people who are simply lying in order to promote homeopathic treatments, there are ones who are genuinely and honestly convinced that homeopathy helped them.

So, how to explain this? The answer is simple – placebo. All the positive effects of homeopathy come from placebo effects – in short, if we believe that something will help us it does help (in a way). Placebo effect also explains alleged effectiveness of other forms of alternative medicine.

For a long time scientists were dismissing placebo effect as a figment of patient’s imaginations, however, in recent time it became evident that there is something more to the placebo. Our minds have great deal of influence on our physical well being and by tricking the mind into thinking that we are getting real treatment we are indeed making ourselves better. Science has proven that placebo drugs can act as pain killers, improve asthma, treat Osteoarthritis, etc.

There are two aspects of placebo effect of greater interest when it comes to homeopathy and other forms of alternative medicine. According to Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, effectiveness of placebo is greatly influenced by the cost of the treatment. Expensive treatments work better than cheaper ones. The other thing is that treatments which include elaborate rituals work better than simpler ones. This is all simple psychology really, if something is good it has to cost a lot of money and involve a lot of work.

Think about this – what is more logical: the fact that some centuries old shenanigans of infinitely diluting some weird substances really works, despite what all of our modern science says, or that all there is to it is just placebo effect?

Source - emedexpert.com