Why does Homeopathy seem to irk skeptics the most?

Nah! That is what Medicare is for! Besides which, despite what the average young "perfect Princess" thinks you will NOT die from a "dirty aura"

The only reason they would ever back something as harmful as colonic irrigation is that they believe all their clients are full of ............

 

Do you know that the drug with the longest history of use is Alcohol - and yes it does have a LOT of side effects. Don't see many people using the homoeopathic equivalent though

But the second oldest drug would have to be the derivatives of the Opium flower. Again undeniable side effects but somehow given a choice between a hoemoeopathic "remedy" and a pain killer - oddly I would choose the pain killer.

But let us look at a drug that was in use BEFORE homoeopathy and is still in use today

Digoxin

Originally a herbal remedy for "dropsy" it was first refined and used in 1780 but had been in use long before that. There is no doubt Dig is one of those drugs that has "poisoned" a lot of people - on the other hand it is one of the most widely used drugs in the world and has saved a bloody sight more. But it is often NOT the dig that is the problem - it is the overprescribing and lack of adequate tracking of blood levels

 

I think this is the fundamental thing that a lot of devotees of alternative medicines don't understand.

if you study medicine - you study science. it is highly competitive to get in (just being willing to pay thousands of dollars for a course is not sufficient as entry criteria), and the examinations are hard. very hard.

if homeopaths and others had the same entrance criteria for their courses, and the same degree of scrutiny before they could practice, it might be easier to compare them.

it is true that there have always been people who understand the importance of correct dosage - in western culture, Culpepper - who established the Chelsea Physic Garden - obviously was someone who understood this, and provided training to ensure that this knowledge continued.

clearly there have been others in various cultures as well - but the thing is today, now we have a better understanding of WHY certain remedies may work, a better understanding of side effects, and more exact information in dosage.

this is due to science - not traditional or alternative medicines.

 

No, I don't focus on isolated incidences. If you read any of my blogs about homeopathy you would know that I have used it, I have studied it and I have addressed and demolished every argument ever made for it. However, I realise your purpose here is not to engage critics of homeopathy in reasoned and intelligent argument. As you said yourself[/URL] when I pointed out that you had ignored my post in answer to your OP:

I note your failure to engage with those reasons, now that you know them. Your knee-jerk red herring response quoted above, has been suitably dealt with by others, which just leaves this:

Evidently you don't quite grasp the purpose of the mass overdose demos. They are not intended to demonstrate to homeopaths that there are no active ingredients in the remedies. The purpose is to demonstrate that fact to everyone else because everyone who assumes that there must be something in those remedies (otherwise insurance companies wouldn't cover them/the NHS wouldn't fund them/Her Majesty the Queen wouldn't use them/whatever) has the potential to be ripped off by homeopaths and by the pharmaceutical companies who sell homeopathic "remedies" in their high street retail outlets, without making clear that they can only work as placebo. Homeopathy is still widely believed to be a variety of herbalism and people don't realise the bottles of sugar pills they are thinking of trying for their headaches or insomnia are nothing more than that.

The ten23 campaign has obviously a upset a few people who stand to lose financially because it has enlightened a great many more.

Hope that clarifies.

 

So how many blogposts have you written about pharmaceuticals which have killed millions since its inception?

You know, if you are truly "concerned" about the welfare of people and medicine.

 

Yeah, a lot of reading comprehension problems going on.

I agree that it is snake oil, but I didn't know that it is especially irksome to skeptics. Personally, chiropractic medicine bothers me the most because those quacks bilk insurance companies for a lot of money, for treatments that are mostly ineffective. My girlfriend used to work at a chiropractors office, and she said they have a test where the patient holds a sealed jar with some allergen inside to see if the patient is allergic to what is inside the sealed jar!!! Furthermore, it seems there a lot of things for which the patients should to see a real doctor, but the chiropractors convince their gullible clients that bone cracking is the way to go.

 

What qualifications are required for a person to practice chiropracty in the US?

 

Generally a bachelor's degree followed by 4 yrs in chiropractor school.

 

Bump for Skepticat

 

Homeopathy, like all alternative medicine is bull(*)(*)(*)(*).

 

You can overdose on homeopathy. It's called WATER INTOXICATION.

 

Something you'll never read about homeopathy:

That lovely molecular-based medicine.

Do you think the skeptics will blog about the dangers of pharmaceuticals? Me either.

 

No, we'll just continue to read about people who died because they were dumb enough to use homeopathy.

 

From the perspective of a skeptic, the fact that overdoses of painkillers can kill you isn't a suitable topic. Everybody admits that an overdose is dangerous. The pharma industry, your doctor, anyone knowledgeable enough will tell you that an overdose of painkillers might kill you. There are no lies or misinformation here.

Similarly, everyone who sells cutlery will agree that if you stab a knife deep into your heart, you risk killing yourself. Nevertheless, they keep selling knifes and recommend that you just don't stab yourself. Heck, even pillows can be deadly. The difference to homeopathy is that nobody spreads misinformation related to all those common goods.

Lies and misinformation are issues that a skeptic, by definition, wants to address. I agree that overdose deaths are tragic too, but you're comparing apples and oranges. Skeptics don't address every societal ill. Nobody has the time to do so. Skeptics chose to focus on lies, myths, and misinformation.

 

Haven't you?!?! The teenagers seem to go for that watered-down (*)(*)(*)(*) in a can.

Isn't that the homoeopathic equivalent of alcohol?

 

What?? You talking about VB there bugs?

 

I know you aren't serious, but let's compare homeopathy and alcopops.

Typical alcopops contain (according to Wikipedia) 4% to 7% of alcohol by volume. Let's take the most dilute alcopop, which has 4 vol-% or 1.27 mole-% of alcohol. The purest alcohol you can store at room temperature in ordinary air has 89 mole-% of alcohol (it attracts the water vapor in the air). In other words, alcopops are diluted by a factor of 1 in 70. Let's be generous and say it's a dilution of 1/100 = 10^-2.

Homeopaths recommend dilutions of 10^-60. In other words, homeopathic remedies are 10^58 times more dilute than alcopops. 10^58 is a huge number. Let's try to make a comparison using length scales.

The observable universe is about 10^26 m in size. The smallest structure probed by the LHC particle collider is about 10^-20 m in size (as a comparison, an atom has a diameter of about 10^-10 m). Experimental physics today covers 46 orders of magnitude, which is very impressive, but still falls short of 10^58 by a factor of 10^12 (also called a trillion).

Crazy numbers.

 

lols ... it might be a good thing if you could market homeopathic alcohol to teens!

 

Glutton for punishment, aren't you?

As Herby has eloquently pointed out, unlike homeopathy, overdoses of pharmaceutical drugs do not involve people making false claims about what the drugs do. Therefore there is nothing to be skeptical about, so why would I blog about them?

Any drug which, unlike homeopathy, has active ingredients is, of course, going to have the potential to harm as well as heal. That's why proper drugs, unlike homeopathy, have the prescribed dosages on the labels. Think of water as an analogy: if someone's dying of thirst, you give them a good drink of water, you don't submerge them in a tank. If I have a headache, I take a couple of painkillers, not the whole bottle.

Unless, of course, they are homeopathic painkillers, which have no active ingredients and in which case it will make no difference either way how many I take because I lack the faith in magic necessary to get the placebo effect.

Although you started this thread about homeopathy, you seem to be preoccupied with people dying from pharmaceutical drugs. But you have given no examples comparable with the examples I have given of people dying preventable deaths because they put all their faith in homeopathy.

As Herby said, apples and oranges.

 

So you skeptics chose to focus on lies, myths, and misinformation that kill or leads to death of a fraction of other things? Interesting.

 

What false claims are printed on Homeopathic remedies?

I'm just wondering why you skeptics are so obsessed with homeopathy and when you say it's because you "care" about the people who are duped by it (that a lot of you skeptics call them "stupid" which is ironic that you care about them, but call them stupid at the same time) but there are so little people hurt by homeopathy compared to pharmacology which you seem to spend no time warning people about the dangers of that it seems like your priorities are a little jaded.

Yes I did. I posted a link the showed pharmaceuticals were the leading cause of death in the accident category (or something like that). I didn't see homeopathy listed in that list.

 

Well, let's have a look at the real data. Here are the leading causes of death in 2008.


http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index.html

As you can see, neither conventional nor homeopathic drugs are on the list. Does that mean that everyone who chooses to talk about a subject other than anything seen on this list wastes time on an irrelevant topic (including you and me)?

I say no. In my humble opinion, it's better to tackle one small problem at a time instead of waiting for superman to solve all of them for us. Why not talk about false advertising done by homeopaths? I, for one, sympathize with skeptics. The argument that there are some things causing more suffering than homeopathy is rather weak.

 

Yeah, that's not the list I was talking about. I said "the leading cause of death in the accident category."

No mention of Homeopathy (or any other Alt medicine for that matter).

What false advertising are the Homeopathic companies peddling?

I thought it was all about saving lives?

 

If it's all about saving lives, the statistics that matter are the leading causes of death overall. That's where proper nutrition and science-based medicine come in. As a reminder, here are the numbers again:


http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index.html

Accidents only account for about 5% of all deaths in the US (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr59/nvsr59_04.pdf). Drug abuse is the cause for 1.5% of deaths. Of course, if you're able to bring that number down without causing far more harm by spreading misinformation about remedies that just don't work, more power to you. As I said before, everyone is entitled to their pet cause, even if it isn't a huge life saver.

 

Do not get drug addiction and abuse confused with medication