Homeopathy more popular in the UK?

[Barber Shop]

Is homeopathy more popular and/or well-known in the U.K. than in the U.S.?

I ask this because I have seen more articles and YouTube videos about homeopathy that come from Britain than from here in the States. I am pretty sure that if I were to ask 10 Americans about homeopathy 9 of them would have no idea what it is.

But I have even seen comedy routines from British shows and comics that rely on a knowledge of homeopathy for the parody to even make sense. I do not think those same kind of jokes would work on an American show like Saturday Night Live.

So...is my observation (based on a very limited data set) accurate? Is it more popular in Britain than the U.S.? If so, WHY? And besides being better-known, is it also accepted as legitimate by a higher percentage of the population?

Thanks,
Barber Shop

 

[Rolfe]

Let me tell you about our royal family....

Rolfe.

 

[randman]

If it works, good.

The point of medicine is to help people get well. I don't doubt there is some quackery in homeopathy or whatever.....same is true for modern medicine.

 

[rjh01]

I would not worry too much about the UK. See this thread New UK rules mean it's open season on UK quacks

May take a year or two but quacks may have to be able to substantiate their claims. May result in a decline in popularity.

 

[randman]

I would not worry too much about the UK. See this thread New UK rules mean it's open season on UK quacks

May take a year or two but quacks may have to be able to substantiate their claims. May result in a decline in popularity.

I know there are quacks but in my lifetime, some so-called quacks have been right and modern medicine wrong. We must each consider our own lives. Maybe medical science has not done the science and so considers something quackery.

If it works, good. If not, then not good. Something may work for one and not another.

Medicine is about helping people.

 

[RationalVetMed]

I know there are quacks but in my lifetime, some so-called quacks have been right and modern medicine wrong.

Care to elucidate - who has been initially branded "quack" and then vindicated by modern medicine? If that HAS happened doesn't that mean that modern medicine was RIGHT by being flexible and recognising merit?

I look forward to your answer.

If it works, good. If not, then not good. Something may work for one and not another.

Medicine is about helping people.

Homeopathy doesn't work other than by the power of suggestion in the user and practitioner. This has been shown time and again in scientific trials. All evidence allegedly in support of homeopathy is weak and or flawed.

Whether medicine is about helping people or not is beside the point - homeopathy isn't medicine.

Yuri

 

[randman]

Probiotics for starters, and a lot of nutritional ideas as well.

I'll add breast-feedng as preferable to the bottle. Modern medicine said otherwise and traditional midwives and others disagreed.

As far as homeopathy, not sure I know what it is. I thought I did and then someone said it was shaking a solution then diluting down and repeating that to about 100x less it's strength.

We took our daughter to a MD, a pediatrician trained also in alternative medicine. She was tested due to very visible skin break-outs on her face. She was allergic to a massive amount of foods. She wouldn't die from them, but she was "senstitive" or allergic to about 100 different kinds of foods, including cane sugar, milk, wheat, some seafoods and the list was truly daunting.

The doctor said we could try something first before drugs. At her office was a publication on homeopathy as a concept that would include something like probiotics. She prescribed probiotics and said that if my daughter could go 3 months without these foods, taking probiotics, some people lose the allergy. It worked. Each time she went 3 whole months not eating some food, she lost the sensitivity or allergy to that food.

But it took a long time for her to do that with all of them. Sugar was particularly hard as you'd be surprised how many things have sugar in them and how often such things are offered to kids.

She is not sensitive or allergic to any of them now.

Since that time, probiotics have become part of mainstream medicine.

 

[RationalVetMed]

Is homeopathy more popular and/or well-known in the U.K. than in the U.S.?

... If so, WHY? And besides being better-known, is it also accepted as legitimate by a higher percentage of the population?

Thanks,
Barber Shop

With apologies for the reference dump these might be a good start for you:
Roberts, 2009 The Politics of Professionalization: MPs, Medical Men, and the 1858 Medical Act
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2629176/
Book online - Medicine transformed: health, disease and society in Europe, 1800-1930 By Deborah Brunton -
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iFWASHAZH9gC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Morrell, ARISTOCRATIC SOCIAL NETWORKS AND HOMEOPATHY IN BRITAIN - http://www.homeoint.org/morrell/articles/pm_arist.htm
(worth looking elsewhere on this (pro-homeopathic) site, there are some excellent historical references)
Morrell A History of Homeopathy in Britain - http://www.homeopathyhome.com/reference/articles/ukhomhistory.shtml
Loudon 2006 A brief history of homeopathy (JRSM) - http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/cgi/content/full/99/12/607 - including a
brief comparison between USA & UK
Morrell - A BRIEF HISTORY OF BRITISH LAY HOMOEOPATHY - http://www.homeoint.org/morrell/articles/pm_lay.htm
NCAM survey of CAM use in the USA - http://nccam.nih.gov/news/2008/121008.htm
Ernst, 2000 Prevalence of the use of complementary/alternative medicine (Bulletin of the WHO) -
http://whqlibdoc.who.int/bulletin/2000/Vol78-No2/bulletin_2000_78(2)_252-257.pdf

The history of homeopathy in Europe and the USA and the way what we now refer to as alternative medicine emerged from the morass of medical guilds, wise women and healers that were around in the UK prior to the medicines act of 1858 is fascinating. The Roberts (2009) article is especially enlightening in this respect.

Why the respective prevalences are the way they are is hard to say. I'm sure there will be allsorts of factors from the degree of state intervention, aristocratic patronage at critical times, the "counter culture" and post modernism, the relative aggression of respective national medical authorities towards unorthodox methods of healing ('the competition'), social attitudes such as fairness, deference, support for the under-dog etc. All these will have a part to play I imagine.

Hopefully that's given you something to go on.

Yuri

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

If it works, good.

It doesn't. It's water. Or dehydrated water.

The point of medicine is to help people get well.

Medicine does. Homeopathy doesn't.

 

[randman]

It doesn't. It's water. Or dehydrated water.



Medicine does. Homeopathy doesn't.

Dehydrated water sounds like such an impossibility that if they can do that, maybe it does work.

 

[mercian]

Probiotics for starters, and a lot of nutritional ideas as well.

I'll add breast-feedng as preferable to the bottle. Modern medicine said otherwise and traditional midwives and others disagreed.

As far as homeopathy, not sure I know what it is. I thought I did and then someone said it was shaking a solution then diluting down and repeating that to about 100x less it's strength.

With respect Randman, homeopathy is completely different to all herbal medicine as it has no active ingredient left in it. I was part of this campaign:

http://www.1023.org.uk/

As someone who has suffered from many of the illnesses you list above, I find it personally offensive that homeopaths claim to have any effect on them at all. There is no mechanism for how it could work, except "water has memory", which would require a re-writing of the fields of physics and chemistry; and there's NO evidence that this is necessary.

It's all well and good to say "if it works for you, fine" but every well made controlled trial has shown that it is only placebo at work. This raises the problem of people taking it INSTEAD of real medicine.

We need to educate people about the actual process in which it's made; which hasn't changed at all in a few hundred years; as all the rest of medicine has evolved around it in leaps and bounds! Hopefully then this snake-oil industry can die out

 

[mercian]

Back on topic, hopefully due to current campaigns the practice is on the wane in the UK; in France it is still a HUGE industry, there are homeopaths on many street corners like pharmacies.

India has a huge homeopathic industry too, like as big as the medical profession, I don't have figures. They call real medicine "allopathic", which is a made-up term of derision, claiming it's bad for you, whereas homeopathy is "holistic", an equally made-up and meaningless term with connotations of healing the 'whole' body.

 

[PixyMisa]

Dehydrated water sounds like such an impossibility that if they can do that, maybe it does work.

What they do is take water, dilute it with water, then drip it onto sugar pills, where it evaporates.

So homeopaths are selling diluted dehydrated nothing.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Probiotics for starters, and a lot of nutritional ideas as well.

Probiotics have been around since before antibiotics. And the best medical nutritional advice you can get is to eat a variety of food, preferably fresh, and not to eat too much meat, particularly red meat. Nutritionists are, generally speaking, con-artists.

As far as homeopathy, not sure I know what it is.

That's your problem.

I thought I did and then someone said it was shaking a solution then diluting down and repeating that to about 100x less it's strength.

That's part of it. The other part is in treating like for like. So if you want to cure a cold, you give the person a substance which, in a healthy person, would induce the symptoms of a cold. Then you dilute it down (with lots of ritual banging on a Bible) until there wouldn't be a single molecule of the original substance in a bottle which contained all the water on Earth. Or, if they want to make a really strong solution, dilute it so much that there wouldn't be a single molecule of the original substance in a bottle which contained all the matter in the universe, if all the matter in the universe had been converted to water.

The word "quackery" doesn't even begin to describe it.

We took our daughter to a MD, a pediatrician trained also in alternative medicine. She was tested due to very visible skin break-outs on her face. She was allergic to a massive amount of foods. She wouldn't die from them, but she was "senstitive" or allergic to about 100 different kinds of foods, including cane sugar, milk, wheat, some seafoods and the list was truly daunting.

The doctor said we could try something first before drugs. At her office was a publication on homeopathy as a concept that would include something like probiotics. She prescribed probiotics and said that if my daughter could go 3 months without these foods, taking probiotics, some people lose the allergy. It worked. Each time she went 3 whole months not eating some food, she lost the sensitivity or allergy to that food.

First off, what you're describing sounds more like a sensitivity to certain foods than an allergy. They are not the same thing.

There is some evidence that probiotics can help with allergies, but a lot of the research is flawed or contested. As far as I know, there is not enough evidence to declare that it does actually help.

What there is ample evidence for, however, is that babies can grow out of these things all by themselves.

 

[randman]

Back on topic, hopefully due to current campaigns the practice is on the wane in the UK; in France it is still a HUGE industry, there are homeopaths on many street corners like pharmacies.

India has a huge homeopathic industry too, like as big as the medical profession, I don't have figures. They call real medicine "allopathic", which is a made-up term of derision, claiming it's bad for you, whereas homeopathy is "holistic", an equally made-up and meaningless term with connotations of healing the 'whole' body.

You know, some of what you guys say about homeopathy does sound outlandish, but I thought allopathic or whatever meant treating the symptom and homeopathic was treating the body itself, strengthening it, so it could heal itself from the symptom. The little booklet we read talked about the need for allopathic medication for things like a bacterial infection but that some ailments can be better treated by not directly attacking the symptom.

Then, when the doctor talked about allergies being the result sometimes of antibiotics throwing the system off and taking probiotics to restore the system along with refraining from the specific foods for 3 months, it sounded like homeopathy.

So I wonder if there isn't some modern homeopaths that are not out there selling items that had evaporated water on them?

As far as I am concerned though, if people want to buy it, that's their business. Doesn't sound feasible to me, but why should I be interested in trying to control others that are.

 

[randman]

Probiotics have been around since before antibiotics. And the best medical nutritional advice you can get is to eat a variety of food, preferably fresh, and not to eat too much meat, particularly red meat. Nutritionists are, generally speaking, con-artists.



That's your problem.



That's part of it. The other part is in treating like for like. So if you want to cure a cold, you give the person a substance which, in a healthy person, would induce the symptoms of a cold. Then you dilute it down (with lots of ritual banging on a Bible) until there wouldn't be a single molecule of the original substance in a bottle which contained all the water on Earth. Or, if they want to make a really strong solution, dilute it so much that there wouldn't be a single molecule of the original substance in a bottle which contained all the matter in the universe, if all the matter in the universe had been converted to water.

The word "quackery" doesn't even begin to describe it.



First off, what you're describing sounds more like a sensitivity to certain foods than an allergy. They are not the same thing.

There is some evidence that probiotics can help with allergies, but a lot of the research is flawed or contested. As far as I know, there is not enough evidence to declare that it does actually help.

What there is ample evidence for, however, is that babies can grow out of these things all by themselves.

She wasn't a baby and it worked and avoided her being on prescription drugs, for maybe her whole life.

So I appreciate alternative medicine, but maybe it wasn't homeopathy. The doctor is an MD from a respected medical school and residency but she in her practice also learned more about alternative medicine. I just wish she treated adults as well.

 

[PixyMisa]

So I wonder if there isn't some modern homeopaths that are not out there selling items that had evaporated water on them?

Well, homeopathy as such is water or sugar pills from which water has evaporated. Unless it's contaminated, which is quite possible as the industry is unregulated.

Naturopaths, on the other hand, will sell you anything at all, as long as it hasn't been scientifically evaluated for efficacy and safety.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

So I wonder if there isn't some modern homeopaths that are not out there selling items that had evaporated water on them?

All of them are.

As far as I am concerned though, if people want to buy it, that's their business. Doesn't sound feasible to me, but why should I be interested in trying to control others that are.

Nobody is saying they shouldn't be able to sell their pills and solutions. What is being said is that they shouldn't be allowed to make claims about these pills and solutions which aren't true. Especially as doing so can mislead people in such a way that they don't seek out treatments which work for ailments which can be dangerous if left untreated.

The most recent controversy in the UK was about homeopaths selling homeopathic vaccinations against malaria and recommending that they don't get the real vaccinations to people travelling abroad. Such behaviour can kill people. Killing people is not a good thing. This is also why homeopaths should not be able to claim the same perceived authority as doctors, because their medical opinion is not trustworthy.

She wasn't a baby and it worked and avoided her being on prescription drugs, for maybe her whole life.

Replace the word "babies" with the word "children" in my post and it's equally true.

So I appreciate alternative medicine[...]

You should probably read more of the science behind most of what is classified as alternative medicine, then. Especially if you're trusting the health of your family to it.

 

[randman]

You make them sound as bad as evos.

 

[Mashuna]

You make them sound as bad as evos.

Why the hate for Mitsubishi?