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Allopathic Medicine!!!

arthwollipot said:
The so-called "power" of the placebo effect is greatly exaggerated. When it boils down, the placebo effect consists of nothing but uncontrolled variables.
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I find the placebo effect genuinely fascinating - the way something as trivial as the colour of the pill can affect the perceived effectiveness and so on. We know that not only does brain chemistry affect thoughts, but thoughts can affect brain chemistry (e.g. meditation). But I agree that confirmation bias, fallacious post hoc reasoning, regression to the mean etc are at the root of it.
 
Norman Alexander said:
So let's see what these ingredients really are:

Calms Forte:

Avena Sativa - Oat straw
Calcarea Phosphorica - Calcium phosphate
Chamomilla - Chamomile extract
Ferrum Phosphoricum - Iron phosphate
Humulus Lupulus - Extract of hops
Kali Phosphoricum - Potassium phosphate
Magnesia Phosphorica - Magnesium phosphate
Natrum Phosphoricum - Sodium phosphate
Passiflora - Passion flower extract

So a bunch of phosphate salts more commonly used for toothpaste and cement. Some weak extracts of flowers, aka tea. And extract of oats, aka weak porridge. And somehow it is supposed to help you sleep.
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But be fair, they’ve been translated into Latin.
 
Caroline13 said:
Homeopathy is harmless and if those who use it believe it's helping then -- Why Not? Much of the world uses it.
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Well, opinions differ of that. As already noted by others, if you let it replace active medicine, it is not harmless.

Personally, I don't mind, or care, if you want to use it, but when you go and espouse it on a skeptical forum, you must expect to be challenged. You must be prepared to be presented with the facts of the thing which is that true homeopathic remedies contain no active ingredients, and a lot of the stuff that is sold as homeopathic medicine is often full of uncontrolled stuff. There are even examples in the world of "homeopathic" medicine that contained steroids and antibiotics.

Hans
 
Caroline13 said:
Homeopathy is harmless and if those who use it believe it's helping then -- Why Not? Much of the world uses it.
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It is not harmless, because trusting a completely ineffective (beyond placebo) remedy causes people to eschew treatments that actually work. You have twice been directed to What's the Harm as evidence. You have ignored this both times.
Also, as has been explained to you before, just because lots of people believe it, doesn't make it true. That's not how truth is determined. What you need is evidence. Please link to it, if you want to continue to promote homeopathy as a valid system of medicine.
I think we would all particularly love to see the successful double-blinded trials of sucussing and grafting.
 
Caroline13 said:
Homeopathy is harmless and if those who use it believe it's helping then -- Why Not? Much of the world uses it.
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Well as has been shown not all things sold as homeopathy are homeopathy sometimes they put real drugs in there with out bothering to put them on the label.

If everything sold as homeopathy was really of homeopathic concentrations say min 20x then it would be no issue. But a lot of them have actual ingredients still left in them and not diluted out.
 
Caroline13 said:
A glass of water does NOT get me to sleep. And I worked up a sleep combo about close to 30 yrs ago when I went thru menopause...So much changes at this point in our lives. I'm never without Calms, Inositol, 1mg Melatonin, L thyptophan and B6 which is all for my 8-10 hrs of healing sleep.

Continued good sleep with your glass of water.
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I thought you depended on homeopathy not things with real active ingredients.
 
Steve said:
I think the idea is that anything goes as long as it has no connection to an actual trained medical professional.
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Oh so naturopathy, where you can embrace fundamentally incompatible ideologies of how health and the body work, but so long as they are not real medicine they will ignore all the inconsistencies.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Well as has been shown not all things sold as homeopathy are homeopathy sometimes they put real drugs in there with out bothering to put them on the label.

If everything sold as homeopathy was really of homeopathic concentrations say min 20x then it would be no issue. But a lot of them have actual ingredients still left in them and not diluted out.
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That was pretty much my point about Zicam but I may not have expressed it clearly.
 
arthwollipot said:
I'd like to make a mention of the duck liver thing, Oscillococcinum. It's "discoverer" was Joseph Roy, who while looking at the blood of cancer sufferers, thought he saw an oscillating bacterium. He further thought that he had seen the same thing in the blood of people suffering from influenza and herpes - though we now know that these are viral diseases and not bacterial. He later claimed to have discovered the same thing in the liver of a duckling, so obviously this is what he diluted for his remedy - to 200C :eek: which maths out to one part duck offal to 10400 parts water.

Now here's the thing. Not one other person has seen this mysterious oscillating bacterium, anywhere, ever, under any circumstances. It is nigh-certain to be entirely mythical. And yet it is the bases for a cold and flu remedy that is available in over 50 countries.
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They call the source of the liver the "Billion Dollar Duck"
 
Darat said:
Or - and I am not making this up, put one of your pre-prepared tablets into a bottle with your blank pills and leave for a little while. Or even just put a bottle of your remedy next to one of blanks. All accepted ways of preparing a remedy.
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:eek:


And here I am, going to work all week, hard graft and little reward. Yet my local homeopath...

:mad:
 
Caroline13 said:
How many have died from homeopathics? Can you tell me. And Zicam, wonder how many issues from this drug. I have no clue what it's used for is it for asthma? I'll have to look it up. If one has a great trust in Big Pharma go for them, they need your business.

Zucam lawsuits:

https://www.phillipslaw.com/zicam

This article says it's essentially homeopathic that is hard to grasp. It does contain zinc and take daily zinc and especially during this covid mess.

Zicam is also classified as a homeopathic product, which means that it is technically not sold as a medication like many that require a prescription. While this may seem like a small difference, this classification means that Zicam did not need to go through the formal approval process thats required by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for many medications. Therefore, no formal studies or statistics were offered to the FDA for approval prior to Zicam hitting the market.


If I ever get a cold and I have NOT had one in 30-40 yrs, thanks to my herbals, and grape seed extract, I'd look at Zicam. There are also homeopathic cold remedies on the market and I have some here at home for just in case.
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Yes, they are very effective, a cold is completely banished after around 5-7 days.
 
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Norman Alexander said:
In total, this cocktail is simply a health store cash-cow. The substances are already naturally produced in abundance in a healthy body, or the obvious excess is excreted, or it is potentially dangerous.
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And people wonder why I've been calling it Big Supp.

Pixel42 said:
I find the placebo effect genuinely fascinating - the way something as trivial as the colour of the pill can affect the perceived effectiveness and so on.
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Except that that's not actually true. The paper that Ben Goldacre cited as saying that did not, in fact, say that. It's a bit of a mystery how he got from that paper to that conclusion.

Mojo said:
It’s diluted until nothing is left but the quack.
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In the case of occilococcinum, it's diluted until not even the quack is left.
 
arthwollipot said:
And people wonder why I've been calling it Big Supp.

Except that that's not actually true. The paper that Ben Goldacre cited as saying that did not, in fact, say that. It's a bit of a mystery how he got from that paper to that conclusion.

In the case of occilococcinum, it's diluted until not even the quack is left.
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I’ve heard this 'pill colour' claim beyond Goldacre. Is he the source of the claim?
 
welshdean said:
I’ve heard this 'pill colour' claim beyond Goldacre. Is he the source of the claim?
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As far as I've been able to tell, largely yes.

I realise that I'm not backing up what I'm saying, but my source is the last three years of the Skeptics with a K podcast, in which Mike Hall has systematically looked at many of the claims for the placebo effect and has shown that the source material does not say what people - including Goldacre but also others - say it says about placebo. Unfortunately the podcast is not well indexed so I can't point you to specific episodes. People keep saying to Mike that he should write a book about placebo myths but he doesn't want to.
 
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