homeopathy

[Horza2002]

I saw this article on the BBC website

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8489019.stm

 

I've personally never tried homeopathic remidies before....I was wondering if anyone hear has actually used them and what they think.

[Mokele]

They're complete and utter bullshit, and only the stupid/gullible believe in them.

 

The entire premise is that diluting something in water makes it *stronger*. By this logic, if punching you causes a bruise, if I so much as glance in your direction, you'll explode.

 

Similarly, homeopaths believe that swimming in a vat of 98% pure sulfuric acid should be fine, while 0.0000001% should kill you.

 

It'd be laughable if they weren't tricking people into taking bogus cancer remedies instead of using legitimate medicine.

[Sisyphus]

It's a good thing that solutions diluted to nothing don't still have "imprints" or whatever, as that would mean any given glass of water would be "imprinted" with billions of different substances, millions of which would be deadly poisonous.

 

And if bleedingly obvious logic isn't sufficient, homeopathy has also been demonstrated to be worthless whenever it has been tested.

[mooeypoo]

The australian skeptic society ran a "10:23" project, protesting Homeopathic "vaccines" and other shams from being promoted as equivalent to mainstream medicine:

http://podblack.com/2010/01/1023-event-filming-in-sydney-with-the-skeptic-zone/

 

Hundreds of people in Austrlia and the UK took hundreds of homeopathic pills at once to prove this case. Homeopathic 'drugs' have no active ingredients whatsoever.

 

And the official site: http://www.1023.org.uk/

 

 

That said, I would like to point out that in Australia and the UK these "supplements" *are* under the supervision of their equivalent FDA, which means that you can actually trust the ingredients on the package. Unlike in the USA, where supplements are *NOT* supervised and only god knows what's inside the bottle. It might *claim* to be homeopathic but actually not be, and contain hazardous substances.

 

Sources to that incident:

http://www.druginjuryattorneyblog.com/2009/06/fda_links_zicam_to_permanent_s.html

http://www.examiner.com/x-6964-Portland-Wellness-Examiner~y2009m6d16-FDA-reports-Zicam-smell-loss-complaints

http://www.fda.gov/Newsevents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm167065.htm

 

So.. don't go around swallowing random pills. This project was a protest, and it was planned and executed carefully. Just saying. Safety first.

[CharonY]

What the....? They do not have to register it with the FDA? Now that is scary. And weird. I would have assumed that anything that claims to have any health effects should undergo FDA approval. Or at least testing for safety.

[Mokele]

What the....? They do not have to register it with the FDA? Now that is scary. And weird. I would have assumed that anything that claims to have any health effects should undergo FDA approval. Or at least testing for safety.

 

Any sort of "natural product" can go unsupervised by the FDA, and even claim that it cures cancer, as long as it has a teeny tiny, itty-bitty, vaguely worded statement that claims have not been evaluated by the FDA

 

This is how Ephedrine and Zicam slipped by, until they started giving people heart attacks and permanently destroying their sense of smell, respectively.

 

I can market cobra venom pills as a cure for joint aches, as long as I include that disclaimer in tiny letters on the box - and until someone with an ulcer swallows one and dies within hours.

[mooeypoo]

The FDA acts "backwards". You need to show that a supplement is dangerous for the FDA to take it off the shelves, while the supplement company has no obligation to prove itself. Their claims are so vague and politically-correct that they're allowed just the do what they please.

 

They can't make absolute claims like "cures cancer" but they *can* make vague claims like "boosts your immune system in fighting disease" or "strengthens the body's natural defenses" and other crap like that. As a result, the drug is FIRST released and, if needed, recalled.

[timo]

It's a good thing that solutions diluted to nothing don't still have "imprints" or whatever, as that would mean any given glass of water would be "imprinted" with billions of different substances, millions of which would be deadly poisonous.

I think you don't fully get the concept of homeopathy: Negative effects (the negative energies?) of a substance do get weaker under diluting the solution. Only the positive effects are amplified by diluting the substance. Also, it's the water that remembers the molecules that were in there, not the container.

[John Cuthber]

An old joke, but it illustrates the point.

Did you hear about the homeopath who forgot to take their pills?

They died of an overdose.

[insane_alien]

i think sisyphus was reffering to the water.

 

although... water could diffuse into the glass and diffuse back out later allowing for the glass to act as a homeopathic repository.

 

not that it'll affect anything though.

[Baby Astronaut]

The entire premise is that diluting something in water makes it *stronger*. By this logic, if punching you causes a bruise, if I so much as glance in your direction, you'll explode.

 

Similarly, homeopaths believe that swimming in a vat of 98% pure sulfuric acid should be fine, while 0.0000001% should kill you.

That's just a completely inaccurate and reverse description of their premise.

 

I haven't tried it, nor would I advocate its supposed benefits, however I've read up on it just as I have browsed various things of interest.

 

The way it supposedly functions: if an ingested chemical produces symptoms that happen to resemble the known symptoms of an unrelated disease, then the chemical -- if diluted to a very tiny amount (so as leave the patient unharmed) -- should have a curative effect on that disease.

 

But only if the symptoms of the disease and chemical would've matched in a larger dose.

 

Even if homeopathy is fantasy, the rebuttals against it seem fantasy as well.

 

At least, in the BBC link by the OP, it reads...

 

"We would support the call for scientific research and evidence gathering on the efficacy of homeopathic medicines. This would help our patients and customers make informed choices about using homeopathic medicines."

Whatever gripes anyone has, their invitation of science is more than we can say about the majority of weasel organizations.

 

Looking up studies, I found an interesting one. Nothing even close to definitive, but still interesting.

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9884175

Randomized controlled trials of individualized homeopathy: a state-of-the-art review.

.....

CONCLUSION: The results of the available randomized trials suggest that individualized homeopathy has an effect over placebo. The evidence, however, is not convincing because of methodological shortcomings and inconsistencies. Future research should focus on replication of existing promising studies. New randomized studies should be preceded by pilot studies.

Don't know what they mean by "individualized" however.

[Sisyphus]

I think you don't fully get the concept of homeopathy: Negative effects (the negative energies?) of a substance do get weaker under diluting the solution. Only the positive effects are amplified by diluting the substance. Also, it's the water that remembers the molecules that were in there, not the container.

 

Actually, it's nothing that remembers anything. But thank you for correcting my notion of what the claim actually is. Interesting. So it's even sillier that I thought, in that not only does water "remember" what it was once in contact with (but is now "diluted" to the point where no molecules of the "remembered" substance are still present), but its able to distinguish between what will and won't have a positive effect, and "forget" the negative ones!

 

The point still stands that:

 

1) No coherent mechanism is proposed.

2) The incoherent mechanisms proposed (namely that water has memory) flies in the face of everything demonstrable we know about chemistry.

3) Despite lots of attempts and an obvious motive to demonstrate efficacy, no trial without obvious flaws has ever gotten a result other than identical results to a placebo.

[insane_alien]

1) No coherent mechanism is proposed.

2) The incoherent mechanisms proposed (namely that water has memory) flies in the face of everything demonstrable we know about chemistry.

3) Despite lots of attempts and an obvious motive to demonstrate efficacy, no trial without obvious flaws has ever gotten a result other than identical results to a placebo.

 

IIRC a few have tested worse than placebos, although that is very likely just down to chance as there have only been a few.

[Baby Astronaut]

So it's even sillier that I thought, in that not only does water "remember" what it was once in contact with (but is now "diluted" to the point where no molecules of the "remembered" substance are still present), but its able to distinguish between what will and won't have a positive effect, and "forget" the negative ones!

I didn't know about the water memory, just looked it up. The older stuff I've read was probably from before the 1988 publication. Why on Earth did Nature allow that publication into the journal?

 

Anyway, do you realize that homeopathy involves actual parts of the chemical to water? There's no such beast as "water memory" in traditional homeopathy. The guy who published in Nature's journal made up his own version, totally bastardizing the original concept.

 

You know, it's pretty ironic. The subject was closed to me until now. Yet when I see a blatant misrepresentation coming from on high, an impulse drives me to look further into why there's a need to misrepresent it -- especially when they can just debunk it with the actual facts.

 

It'd be as if official reports were circulated that young-earthers believe our planet was created a hundred years ago.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Anyway, do you realize that homeopathy involves actual parts of the chemical to water? There's no such beast as "water memory" in traditional homeopathy. The guy who published in Nature's journal made up his own version, totally bastardizing the original concept.

 

Yes, the chemical is added to water, but it is then diluted into oblivion, to the point where it's likely the chemical is no longer even part of the medication.

[Baby Astronaut]

Yes, the chemical is added to water, but it is then diluted into oblivion, to the point where it's likely the chemical is no longer even part of the medication.

Citation.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

http://altmed.creighton.edu/Homeopathy/philosophy/dilution.htm

Many homeopathic remedies would be expected to contain zero molecules of the original substance.

 

http://altmed.creighton.edu/Homeopathy/Glossary.htm

The process of increasing the vital energy, and thus the potency, of a substance through specific forms of serial dilutions, termed "succussion" or "trituration". Dynamization is the goal of remedy production. It is the most characteristic aspect of homeopathy. The process of dynamization is sometimes referred to as "potentization."

[Mokele]

Citation.

 

Basic math, see here

 

 

Also, the meta-study you mentioned is problematic for several reasons, mostly that a) studies showing no results don't get published or not as often, so many failures are missing and b) metastudies are shit anyway (crap+crap+crap =/= gold).

[CharonY]

Shoot, lost my post. To make it short, homeopathic stuff usually comes with a dilution indicator. A common one is 12 C. This corresponds to a (1/100)^12 dilution.

Now, if you start with a 1M solution (which is pretty high) you would end up with 0.6 molecules per liter (just multiply the dilution with the Avogadro number).

So, of you drink 1 liter of it, you got a 60% chance to actually have ingested one single molecule....

 

Edit: OK, lost original post and cross-posted.

 

Regarding the meta-study: it is also likely to be a false positive report due to multiple hypothesis testing issues.

Edited February 1, 2010 by CharonY

[mooeypoo]

Shoot, lost my post. To make it short, homeopathic stuff usually comes with a dilution indicator. A common one is 12 C. This corresponds to a 1:100e12 dilution.

Actually, 12C is 10^{-24} which is larger than avogadro's number, the ratio representing the lowest possible dilution in which 1 molecule of the substance will be available.

 

 

In such dilution, the statistical possibility that you have a *single* molecule from the original diluted substance is so low, it's practically nonexistent.

[CharonY]

My bad, I retyped it in a rush. Corrected now to (1/100)^12. The point was to show where the 12 came from. The calculation amounts to the same, though (i.e. 0.6 molecules per liter).

 

In such dilution, the statistical possibility that you have a *single* molecule from the original diluted substance is so low, it's practically nonexistent.

 

This is not necessarily correct as the absolute number of molecules present depends on the volume, of course. Given the fact that much smaller volumes are routinely sold, the chances are very low to have any molecules in them, of course.

Edited February 1, 2010 by CharonY

[Baby Astronaut]

http://altmed.creighton.edu/Homeopathy/philosophy/dilution.htm

 

 

http://altmed.creighton.edu/Homeopathy/Glossary.htm

Well, that's a bit eye-opening. Knowing the math is helpful. So if you diluted all the entire universe worth of atoms to 40C, you'd be left with one molecule half of the time. Well, anyone doing more than 40c leaves nothing in the water, guaranteed.

 

Also, the meta-study you mentioned is problematic for several reasons, mostly that a) studies showing no results don't get published or not as often, so many failures are missing and b) metastudies are shit anyway (crap+crap+crap =/= gold).

Ok thanks. How do you identify a metastudy from a real one?

[CharonY]

It is in the description. If they rely on data from several other group rather than doing it on their own it is a metastudy.

[mooeypoo]

Well, that's a bit eye-opening. Knowing the math is helpful. So if you diluted all the entire universe worth of atoms to 40C, you'd be left with one molecule half of the time. Well, anyone doing more than 40c leaves nothing in the water, guaranteed.

Anyone doing more than 12C leaves nothing in the water, guaranteed, that's the point of Avogadro's Number.

 

 

Ok thanks. How do you identify a metastudy from a real one?

It defines itself as one, usually, by stating that it's collecting multiple results from multiple studies, rather than making an actual claim/test on its own.

[Baby Astronaut]

After following Cap'n Refsmmat's links and reading the quote below....

 

In Hahnemann's words:

 

The thirtieth (dilution) thus progressively prepared would give a fraction almost impossible to be expressed in numbers. It becomes uncommonly evident that the material part by means of such dynamization (development of its true, inner medicinal essence) will ultimately dissolve into its individual spirit-like, (conceptual) essence. In its crude state therefore, it may be considered to consist really only of this underdeveloped conceptual essence.

I went to investigate the original quote in Google Books....

 

http://books.google.com/books?btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=consist+really+only+of+this+underdeveloped+conceptual+essence

 

then got the following...

 

Sorry, this page's content is restricted

Limited preview

 

Inside you see "Copyrighted material" and a few blocks of pages missing.

 

Wtf? Anything older than a hundred years is public domain and I never saw Google Books do that with any other public domain books -- especially older than the 1900s.