the guardian's bad science writer is pretty good for debunking such stuff....here's his article on homeopathy.....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1558417,00.html
if there were more guardian readers and less daily mail readers....the world would be a better place lol
This is an interesting article. It basically says that homeopathy only works because of the placebo effect. So what is the placebo effect? According to
Wiki, it is
the phenomenon that a patient's symptoms can be alleviated by an otherwise ineffective treatment, since the individual expects or believes that it will work.
So if you believe the placebo treatment will or may work, it may help you. If you don’t believe, it probably won’t. Further, if you believe it will hurt you, it may do so (this is called the nocebo effect).
From an
FDA article, we have the following:
Researchers have been studying the placebo effect for decades. In 1955, researcher H.K. Beecher published his groundbreaking paper "The Powerful Placebo," in which he concluded that, across the 26 studies he analyzed, an average of 32 percent of patients responded to placebo. In the 1960s, breakthrough studies showed the potential physiological effects of dummy pills--they tended to speed up pulse rate, increase blood pressure, and improve reaction speeds, for example, when participants were told they had taken a stimulant, and had the opposite physiological effects when participants were told they had taken a sleep-producing drug.
"Expectation is a powerful thing," says Robert DeLap, M.D., head of one of the Food and Drug Administration's Offices of Drug Evaluation. "The more you believe you're going to benefit from a treatment, the more likely it is that you will experience a benefit."
I think that it would be beneficial to patients to be able to take advantage of the placebo effect, where possible. In addition to standard therapy, of course. In that situation is it ethical for a doctor to also prescribe a placebo while letting the patient think that he is prescribing an effective drug? Many doctors don’t think so, and don’t do it, but some will, if they think there is a good chance it will help the patient.
And is it ethical for a doctor to refer a patient to a homeopothist, knowing that the homeopothist will very likely conduct placebo therapy, which may help the patient if the patient believes it will? I suspect that many doctors do just that, rather than prescribe a placebo themselves.
So perhaps homeopathy has a place in medicine, for those who aren’t skeptical about it. Provided, of course, that the placebo is not substituted for conventional therapy, but is used in addition to it.
There is a catch 22, here, in that the more intelligent and knowledgeable (and skeptical) you are, the less likely you are to benefit from placebo therapy. Unless, of course, you can learn to harness whatever causes the placebo effect, and invoke it without benefit of an actual placebo, sort of like the mind-over-body control that buddhist monks in Tibet are supposed to have after a lifetime of meditation.
