Homeopathic bollocks, placebo

I love alternative medicine, medicine for the gullible. How to prise money from desperate people, but if they feel better what the harm!

My real favourite above all else though is Homeopathy. Everyone knows that crystals, aromatherapy, reflexology and chiropractic is a load of bollocks. Homeopathy, however, has the whiff of the mainstream. It is accepted, and every middle class housewife believes in it, with Prince Charles and the British royal family using it, it must work, mustn’t it?

I first became sceptical of homeopathy when one of my ex’s, a huge advocate, described what was happening, so I did a little digging, a bit of basic research, and I couldn’t believe what I found. This I would like to share.

Homeopathy originated in 1796 and the idea was founded by Samuel Hahnemann. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy. The basics are simple and seem logical, at first. Think of a vaccination. You take a small amount of the dead cells of the thing you are trying to create an immunity against. You body does its bit, and from then on you become immune to those diseases, simple yes. Homeopathy supposedly works in a similar way. For every malady there is a substance, which if you take in a small quantity will ward of the malady.

It all makes sense so far. Except the next bit. The smaller the quantity, the more effective the remedy. So what homeopathy does is dilute its medicine. It dilutes it a lot. Let’s take 1 lire of water and add 1ml of our medicine. Dilution one. Homeopathy will then take 1ml of that dilution and dilute it with 1l of water. Keep doing this 50 or 100 times.

From the point of view of science what you have left is….water.

Just water, not one molecule of the original medicine would be left.

The gullible and their wallets, easy isn’t it.

This is a multi billion pound con, which is sold in pharmacies around the world, and it makes me really angry.

It makes me angry because Homeopathy, including prince Charles is asking for money to do research. Pay for it out of your duchy funds then, or like any other pharmaceutical company, pay for it yourself.

A great deal of research has been done, and every single time shows that Homeopathy is no better at curing disease than a placebo. And this is where it gets really interesting.

The placebo started in WW2 due to a lack of medicine, actually pain relief. They had run out, so instead they told the patient they were going to administer pain relief but instead gave the patient an injection of saline, salty water. The patients pain was however relieved. Now there is some really big moral questions here, doctors lying to patients and all that, but over the years they have done more studies on the placebo effect and have found;

Small pills are more effective than big pills

Blue pills are better than red pills

Injections are better than pills

Surgery is better than injections

Yes you read right, they have done placebo surgery.

The prognosis for hip replacement surgery is not good. Very few patients last more than a few years past the replacements. The surgery is very intrusive.

What if you put the patient under, made a few incisions, jiggled around a bit, sewed them up and they felt better. Well, they have tried this and it works!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo

Where did I get all this from? Certainly not a homeopath. This book as well as others;

In summary, what Dylan Evans postulates is that repairing the body is a really energy intensive and debilitating process. First the body reacts to the injury by getting it away from harm, your hand on a hot surface, it hurts. But after that, the body rushes red blood cells to the area, to repair it. The wound swells. The body also needs you to look after the wound while it heals, so it makes it hurt. What if the body thought something else was doing the healing for it, it could back off the swelling and the pain. An interesting theory. Which could explain how placebo and homeopathy actually work, not the bollocks homeopaths put forward, the water has memory, and knows what was diluted in it. This goes against all science, and there is absolutely no evidence for it.

So let’s not waste millions of pounds on research into homeopathy, money down the drain. Put that money into research into placebo, and let’s get our bodies healing themselves, in the best way that they can.

Next on the reading list.

GDR