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.

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

Homeopathy - what does water remember?

Homeopathy is nothing but quackery. It is a practice designed to relieve you from you money without actually doing any good to you (if we discount the placebo effect). So far there hasn’t been any solid scientific proof that homeopathy works, despite the prize of million dollars offered by James Randi to anyone who could prove otherwise. The main problem here is that solid science can’t do much to change people’s minds when it comes to homeopathy. For that reason, it might be better to examine the origins of homeopathy instead.

It all begun with Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), a physician from Germany who was appalled by medical practices from his day, such as leeching and bloodletting. Quite understandably he began to seek alternative therapies.  The word “homeopathy” is derived from two Greek words, homoisos (meaning similar) and pathos (disease). Hahnemann’s basic idea was that the symptoms of a disease can be cured by very small amounts of substances which cause similar effect in healthy people when taken in large amounts. He claimed that diseases are disturbances in body’s self healing abilities and chronic diseases are manifestations of a suppressed itch, which is a kind of miasma or evil spirit. In the beginning Hahnemann used small doses of medications, but later he started diluting them enormously and he claimed that the lower the dose the more powerful the effect. Today we call this the “law of infinitesimals”.

We know now that 18 century medicine didn’t have very good understanding of physiology and these kinds of claims look ridiculous. We also know that the dose response is completely opposite of what Hahnemann claimed. Another crucial information that he lacked was that all matter is composed out of atoms and molecules. Years later, when the structure of matter was discovered it was possible to calculate the number of molecules in a given amount of substance and the calculations proved that those “highly potent” homeopathic meds that are diluted beyond any reason don’t actually contain a single molecule of the active substance. By that time homeopathy was already well established business and in order to keep it running, the protagonists of homeopathy came up with “memory effect”.

According to this ridiculous notion, that wasn’t even mentioned before the existence of molecules was known, water “remembers” what has been put into it and it miraculously keeps those “healing powers”.

Now, consider this – “highly potent” homeopathic dilutions are more diluted than the solution you would get by placing a drop of some substance in the World Ocean. In other words all the water on this planet is not enough to give you the level of dilution found in homeopathic drugs (that is why they dilute in steps, up to 30 steps for those “potent” drugs). If the water really “remembers” that active substance then it should also “remember” many other things. So, do you believe that the water you just drank “remembered” the content of your toilet from several years ago? If you believe in homeopathy and the memory of water, you must believe this too.