Homeopathy.... At last

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Discussion

dubloon

64 posts

104 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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BlackLabel said:
No doubt there will be a letter sent from Clarence House to a minister or two about this.

Yup, he's the idiot who was heavily promoting "alternative medicine" and pressured the NHL to spend a fortune on it. Clown.

anonymous-user

53 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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deckster said:
Indeed. I'm a died-in-the-wool sceptic and have absolutely no time for 'alternative' medicine in any form, but I'm all for financial efficiency. I suspect that the studies have never been done, it would be fascinating to see:
1) The ultimate outcomes for people sent home from the doctor with nothing, vs those who were prescribed placebos, including homeopathic remedies, and
2) The incidence of return appointments for the same two groups

If either of those showed a significant cost saving for prescribing homeopathic remedies (or some other placebo) vs doing nothing then I can see great sense in doing so. Of course the Daily Mail would have a fit, but that's not necessarily a bad thing...
Think how much money you could save by prescribing a placebo instead of real drugs! smile

ATG

20,488 posts

271 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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I wonder how much money we're spending on "real drugs" that are actually placebos?

anonymous-user

53 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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AndyDubbya said:
TwigtheWonderkid said:
The homeopathy society booked The Cure to play at their Xmas party, but Placebo turned up instead. No one noticed.

getmecoat
I called my band "Prevention" cos we were better than either.
Do they have a support act called 'Abstinence' that everyone says they want to see, but no one ever buys a ticket? sperm

rxtx

6,016 posts

209 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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dubloon said:
Yup, he's the idiot who was heavily promoting "alternative medicine" and pressured the NHL to spend a fortune on it. Clown.
The rinks are made from frozen homeopathic water?

its an older code

66 posts

101 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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yes about time this unsubstantiated woo was kicked into touch

http://www.crispian.net/PTIR/Nonsense.html





Thorodin

2,459 posts

132 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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Johnnytheboy said:
Couldn't agree more.

The NHS should be providing things that (a) the nation can afford, (b) people actually need and (c) that might work.
Re recent job advert for 'Psychic Healer' in the Telegraph for treating Reiki 'sufferers', falls down on all three of your categories. And one or two others.

Derek Smith

45,514 posts

247 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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There has been a considerable amount of research on placebos. The New Scientist often comes back to it but roundly condemns homeopathy. It is a difficult position to maintain I think.

Doctors in my youth would carry around with them bottles of 'sugar pills' that they would dispense in cases where medicine had no effect or else they thought it was all in the mind. On a programme on R4 some years ago, a doctor reminisced that he would prescribe 'no more than one a day, just one. You must never go over this. I'm not really supposed to give these out, except in extreme cases, but I'd like you to try it, just for four days. Don't touch it except with surgical gloves'. More often that not, he suggested, it effected a complete cure. His one gripe was that under then new guidelines, doctors were banned from giving them out.

There was a poster a year or two ago who was doing something IT in casualty when a chap was brought in after an overdose. He was on a double blind clinical trial and had taken all the remaining pills. His blood pressure was critically low. They phoned the number on the bottle to be told that the person had no idea what he'd been given but the actual pills would not have cause low blood pressure. It turned out that the chap had overdosed on placebo. When they asked the doctor what they should do to treat him, he said "Tell him." That cured the chap.

There were some remarkable findings on tests, some that defied logic as the person experiencing a 'cure' had not even been aware that they had been given a placebo. Explain that!

The most widely used placebo is prayer. Oddly, though, it makes the person praying feel better rather than the subject of the prayer.

Homeopathy is not a placebo. It is a fraud. The proponents claim it is medicine, which it is not. It builds its case on the placebo effect. If what they say is true, then taking half the dose is more likely to kill you than taken twice the amount. It is abuse of logic. But then, so is the placebo effect.

Placebos work and we need to find out why in the same way when licking trees reduced pain and inflammation, aspirin was discovered. The problem is that the big pharma subsidise so much medical research and they are not going to pay to sabotage their income.

I've got a small book on the placebo effect. I bought it in the expectation that it would explain the phenomenon but all it consisted of was a list of bemusing results from research that defied explanation.

There would appear to be little doubt that a bit, some more, about half or the majority of drugs which are prescribed by doctors owe their effectiveness to the placebo effect. Homeopathy products are probably cheaper and no more fraudulent. Yet we are happy to pay the big pharma £billions but £4 million for water, now that is a scandal.

Mind you, I'm of the same opinion. I think homeopathy pedlars should be flogged, taken down, hung, drawn, quartered, and then flogged again.

It's a funny old world, and people defy logic. Rather like the results of research into placebos.


VolvoT5

4,155 posts

173 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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ReallyReallyGood said:
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, if such a placebo did genuinely make some percentage of patients feel better - thus preventing them from undertaking the time and resource for further investigations at greater expense to the NHS - isn't it money well spent?
No, providing homeopathy on the NHS just gives it a credibility that it doesn't deserve. Also homeopathy can be downright dangerous when people are conned into taking ineffective homeopathic 'treatments' for serious diseases instead of proven conventional medicines.

Medical science and drug trials aren't perfect but it is the best system we have at the moment - only medications and interventions that can be shown to work better than placebo should be funded on the NHS. If people want to waste their own money on nonsense like homeopathy that is fine, but don't expect the NHS to pick up the bill.


richie99

1,116 posts

185 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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julian64 said:
Sorry you didn't get the point of my post

Placebo is real, but spending millions on drugs that have no effect is the most expensive way possible to supply the placebo effect.
No real axe to grind either way but as I understand it, there are many very expensive 'real drugs', you know from proper pharma companies and everything, that are scarcely better than placebo, and only then on the basis of selecting the trials that show the best results. That's a much better way of wasting serious money, with the added advantage that the side effects can create problems the patient didn't have in the first place, or even kill them.

Johnnytheboy

24,498 posts

185 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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It would be nice if at least one pher had appeared and tried to justify homeopathy for its own sake, rather than via the benefits of placebos.

VolvoT5

4,155 posts

173 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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richie99 said:
No real axe to grind either way but as I understand it, there are many very expensive 'real drugs', you know from proper pharma companies and everything, that are scarcely better than placebo, and only then on the basis of selecting the trials that show the best results. That's a much better way of wasting serious money, with the added advantage that the side effects can create problems the patient didn't have in the first place, or even kill them.
That may or may not be true, but the fact that crappy drugs and treatments exist that aren't much better than placebo still doesn't mean Homeopathy (proven not to work) is justified.

I've noticed those that wish to justify homoepathy and other such nonsense often seem to do so by banging on about "chemicals" and "big pharma", as if two wrongs somehow make a right. Of course that line of attack is a lot easier than trying to argue against the mountain of evidence showing homeopathy is no better than placebo.

Yes dodgy science and manipulation does allow for bad drugs and treatments on the market, but usually it is even better science investigation that discovers the truth. It is all far from perfect but better than going around waving crystals about and talking about 'energy' and 'toxins' or whatever other bks people believe in.


HarryW

15,150 posts

268 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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Whilst I agree modern homeopathy is probably no more important than prescribing placebos I think it important to remember a lot of modern medicines are synthesises off naturally occurring drugs that were investigated because they appeared to work. All opiates and quinine based drugs to start with.

Johnnytheboy

24,498 posts

185 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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HarryW said:
Whilst I agree modern homeopathy is probably no more important than prescribing placebos I think it important to remember a lot of modern medicines are synthesises off naturally occurring drugs that were investigated because they appeared to work. All opiates and quinine based drugs to start with.
Yes, but presumably someone tested them and they work.

Derek Smith

45,514 posts

247 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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Johnnytheboy said:
It would be nice if at least one pher had appeared and tried to justify homeopathy for its own sake, rather than via the benefits of placebos.
I've taken homeopathy medicines today, twice. And I felt better for it.

At around 09.30 I had a glass of water and around 14.00 I had another one. Highly recommended.

Dr Jekyll

23,820 posts

260 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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HarryW said:
Whilst I agree modern homeopathy is probably no more important than prescribing placebos I think it important to remember a lot of modern medicines are synthesises off naturally occurring drugs that were investigated because they appeared to work. All opiates and quinine based drugs to start with.
A) They work, homeopathy doesn't.
B) The modern medicine actually contains the active ingredient. The whole point of homeopathy is that it doesn't.

Therefore homeopathy is the complete opposite of finding something that works and prescribing it.

bodysnatcher

230 posts

249 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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The Spruce goose said:
I am pretty sure the nhs run a homeppathy hospital.
Indeed, NHS Scotland has Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital

Used to have it's own building on Great Western Road (passed it every day going to uni)
now at

http://ghh.info/welcome.htm

VolvoT5

4,155 posts

173 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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HarryW said:
Whilst I agree modern homeopathy is probably no more important than prescribing placebos I think it important to remember a lot of modern medicines are synthesises off naturally occurring drugs that were investigated because they appeared to work. All opiates and quinine based drugs to start with.
Oh FFS. The reason some "naturally occurring drugs" and herbal remedies become MEDICINES is because they were tested and show to work. All the other "naturally occurring" ste we used to use to 'treat' things have been thrown out because they were shown not to work.

Homeopathy contains NOTHING. No trace of any active ingredient whatsoever, not one single molecule is left by the time they have diluted it to 30c 'potency' . It cannot work unless our understanding of chemistry and physics is completely and fundamentally wrong.



Edited by VolvoT5 on Friday 13th November 21:49

Derek Smith

45,514 posts

247 months

Friday 13th November 2015
quotequote all
Dr Jekyll said:
A) They work, homeopathy doesn't.
B) The modern medicine actually contains the active ingredient. The whole point of homeopathy is that it doesn't.

Therefore homeopathy is the complete opposite of finding something that works and prescribing it.
I think you should read Goldacre's Bad Pharma.


Sheepshanks

32,541 posts

118 months

Friday 13th November 2015
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98elise said:
I heard on the news that the NHS currently spends 4m on this crap.
In terms of NHS spending, £4M is about the same dilution as a typical homeopathic remedy.