Homeopathy effective for 0 out of 68 illnesses, study finds

You are being unfair on doctors.

If you had gone to a doctor with your influenza virus, he would have cured it, as tens of thousands of others with similar viruses are cured every year, by prescribing you an antibiotic.

He's being sarcastic, nulli.

And so am I

Thanks for the link @thunder_chunky. The result is unsurprising, of course.

I am not sure, though, why people are anti-homeopathy and yet freely go to to pharmacies to buy sugar pills and sugar syrups with little to no active ingredients.





This study found that even after patients knew they were taking a placebo, they still felt the effects (granted they'd already associated the placebo with medical effects). It certainly isn't a "dumb people" thing.

In most areas of life, the baseline that is used is "doing nothing". We know that a placebo is more effective than "doing nothing" for many conditions, so in requiring homeopathy to achieve more than a placebo rather than more than "doing nothing" one is imposing an arbitrary benchmark (the effect of a placebo) uniquely on homeopathy.

You are being unfair on doctors.

If you had gone to a doctor with your influenza virus, he would have cured it, as tens of thousands of others with similar viruses are cured every year, by prescribing you an antibiotic.

We're not talking about most areas of life, here. We're talking about clinical trials, and in clinical trials, treatments are tested against a placebo. It's not imposing an arbitrary, unique benchmark on homeopathy, it's applying the same benchmark to homeopathy that we apply to all other medical treatments.

I'm starting to think that you either have no idea what you're talking about, or you're intentionally spouting garbage in the hope of eliciting a reaction. Antibiotics have no effect on viruses such as the flu. Antibiotics are only effective against bacteria, and occasionally fungi and protozoa.

Homeopathy is a treatment with no active ingredient but the policy the medical profession imposes requires homeopathy to exceed (not equal) the medical profession's preferred treatment with no active ingredient (placebo).

That, surely, is because placebos are essentially almost free, while homeopathic 'medicines' are most certainly not. To achieve the same effect as something that costs next to nothing while having a meaningful cost is not very cost-effective.

The other problem with them is that they are potentially dangerous as the claims made for them inveigles people to take them when truly effective medicines could be taken instead.

Homeopathy has no basis in science but the placebo effect is well documented to work. And they're related, in both cases the person thinks they're receiving treatment that is going to work. Thus they get better.

Thanks for the link @thunder_chunky. The result is unsurprising, of course.

I am not sure, though, why people are anti-homeopathy and yet freely go to to pharmacies to buy sugar pills and sugar syrups with little to no active ingredients.

In most areas of life, the baseline that is used is "doing nothing". We know that a placebo is more effective than "doing nothing" for many conditions, so in requiring homeopathy to achieve more than a placebo rather than more than "doing nothing" one is imposing an arbitrary benchmark (the effect of a placebo) uniquely on homeopathy.

I bold the word "uniquely" because I'm curious to see why you think this is the case.

It's my understanding that when testing the effectiveness of various drugs in clinical trials, a placebo is always administered to a control group and their results are then the bench march to test for statistical differences.

It's homoeopaths who ignore this fact -- focusing only on the "better than nothing" placebo effect that their remedies produce. The inconsistency lies with them rather than us or Drs imposing a unique condition.

Most opponents of homeopathy apply a different standard to homeopathy than they apply to other treatments.

Homeopathy is usually tested against a standard of it "being no better than a placebo", meaning no more effective in clinical trials.

If you invent an over-the-counter pain killer, it would not have to meet a standard of being better than paracetamol. It would be good enough if it was as effective as paracetamol and was cheaper or safer or had fewer side effects than paracetamol.

Is homeopathy as good as a placebo? I don't think the evidence base exists, one way or the other.

Does homeopathy have any other advantages over a placebo? Yes, it probably does, because although its practitioners spend longer on average with patients than do doctors, the time cost of a homeopath is much lower. Therefore homeopathy is probably cheaper than a placebo.