It seems to be a combination. But what do you mean?

I disagree that doctors would naturally jump to include alternative treatments if they were successful. Certainly some would, and there are such partnerships between western and traditional medicine available. However, there are also doctors who won't even consider the possibility.

For example, in the fallout from the "kidnapping" in Seattle, the local paper interviewed various people about alternative medicine and one person reported that he was under treatment from a regular medical doctor, possibly cancer, but wanted to see a naturopath to see if he could alleviate some of the side effects from treatment. The doctor told him that if he saw a naturopath, the doctor would no longer have him as a patient.

Now, it's possible that the doctor had very good reasons for not wanting to involve the naturopath. Perhaps there was a danger of herbs interacting with the conventional treatment. Perhaps he was afraid the naturopath would recommend abandoning the conventional treatment altogether in favor of several incantations and a bowl of sunflower seeds.

However, my experience with conventional medicine - both my own and that of family members - is that many conventional doctors are NOT interested in mitigating unpleasant side effects, pain management, or alleviating chronic, non-lethal conditions. If it's not going to kill you, then live with it. Pain is good for you.

So - why not try something else? If my insurance covered alternative treatments, I'd be all over trying to reduce my allergy symptoms. (Conventional docs don't care - they're not "severe" so no treatment - just learning to live with feeling like I have a cold All. The. Time.)

Obviously you don't go to a naturopath if you think you have a suspicious lump or might be having a heart attack, but in an ideal world you could consult one - with your doctor's blessing - to help manage chemo nausea or arthritis pain.

It can't be a combination. Either your stuff has something in it, or it doesn't.

Homeopathy is the theory that if something causes a symptom then consuming a very small quantity of that item will cure that symptom, even if that isn't what is causing the symptom in the specific case. So, if you're exposed to toxin that causes your eyes to water excessively, a minute quantity of onion (perhaps, this is a made up example of a treatment) would cure you of that toxin exposure. The second half of the theoryis that the smaller the dose, the more powerful the medicine.

Now, when talking about minute quantities, I mean truly infinitesimal quantities. Start with 1 ml of the substance and dilute it to 100 ml. Take 1 ml of the diluted mixture and dilute that to 100 ml (one such dilution is called 1C).

When Hahneman first put forward his theory of homeopathy he recommened a dosage of 30C (doing the dilution described 30 times). This means that for every molecule of the original substance you have 10^60 molecules of water.

To put it another way. If you wanted enough of this homeopathic solution to guarantee that you were getting at least one molecule of the "curing chemical" you would need 10^34 gallons of water. That is if you had a glass that could hold 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water you would likely on be drinking one molecule of "onion." So, when you take a single capsule or eyedrop or whatever of a homeopathic solution your chances of actually consuming the substance that will supposedly cure you is essentially zero.

To put it yet another way: if you took that one "onion" molecule and dropped it into the Pacific Ocean (and assumed that all water on earth was connected), it would still be too concentrated by a factor of 10^16.

And this is just Hahnemann's original theory. Modern homeopathy frequently uses dilutions of 50,000C (called LM). This means that if you had a swimming pool the size of our galaxy, it likely would still not contain even a single molecule of curative substance.

To counter the obvious bunkness of all this, many homeopathy proponents posit that molecules of water somehow remember the "vibration" of the curative substance. This ignores the fact that most of the water in the dilution was never anywhere near a molecule of the curative and that all water on Earth has been in contact with billions of non-water molecules since the Earth first cooled and how exactly is it supposed to remember the onion molecule but not the time it was in Caesar's bladder?

The great advantage for homeopathists is that since all they are selling is water, their materials overhead is minimal and margins are very high.

Here is a claim of it curing cerebral vascular disease.

Among actual diseases (as opposed to more general discomforts) this site says it can treat psoriasis, exzema, tonsillitis, bronchitis, and emphysema.

This one says that not only can it cure cancer, it will prevent it from happening in the first place.

On this one it cures asthma and Bell's Palsy.

This guy uses it to cure liver cancer.

Ewwww..I was taking a swig of water when I read Alex's "Caesar's bladder" comment.

I meant a combination of herbs and flower essences. I've never heard of what you are saying, but I've also never researched homeopathy. Perhaps it includes more than that? Anecdotally, the friends I have that swear by it are never sick.

I had a sports medicine doctor give me arnica tablets for a knee problem, and those are in the scope of homeopathy, are they not? It is a flower.

With the disease acupuncture thing, I simply meant that no one I know that goes to acupuncture does so to cure disease. Although, I suppose arthritis is a disease, and they do cure that.

I never get sick either. I suspect it is my strict regimen of coffee and cigarettes.

;)

No, the essential element of homeopathy is the extreme dilution and like curing like. If you're medicine includes herbs in measurable quantities then it isn't truly homeopathic.

In recent years various other alternative remedies have begun slapping the word homeopathic on things simply because it is a term with cachet.

If homeopathy works, then we should all be perfectly healthy since drinking a glass of tap water is essentially the same thing as taking a megadose of every homeopathic elixir.

Anecdotally, my mom is a big believer in homeopathy and other altnerative supplements and she is constantly sick. I don't take even "Western" medicines and I'm very rarely sick.

Also anecdotally I have a friend in high school who raced the train at a nearby crossing every day after school. He's still alive so I guess that's safe too. He also has seven kids now so it maybe train racing is good for fertility.

What I am curious about is you have problems with Western medicine because sometimes it seems like they don't know so well what they are doing. But you are ok with homeopathy though you haven't looked into it enough to know what it is. You also said you are skeptical on most things.

What methods do you use to to decide which altnernative methods you are ok with? Obviously you exclude brocolli necklaces. But on what basis is that obvious quackery but blowing ozone up your ass isn't? Acupuncture is ok without any real validation but presumably you'd cast an eye askance at paper remedies, a modern variation on homeopathy, where they simply write your problem on a piece of paper, along with the homeopathic cure and you carry it in a pocket on the left side of your body with writing towards the body (this is real).

When it comes to medical claims, I have a certain toolkit of bull**** detectors:

1) Claims that there are no side effects. That there can be no negative impacts. Or that dosage is not important. Honestly, if it is impossible for a treatment to do damage then it probably doesn't do anything at all.

2) Does the claimed affect appear to violate the known physics of our universe? Such appearance is not, ipso facto, evidence of falsity but it should creates a pretty large burden of evidence. Homeopathy does this because its theories of dosage violates everything we understand about biology and chemistry while its theory of vibrational memory violates what we know about chemistry and physics. It is the pharmaceutical version of a perpetual motion machine.

3) Do its proponents rely on conspiracy theories for why their ideas aren't widely accepted in the mainstream. Yes, conspiracies happen and scientists can be just as dogmatically rigid as anybody else but most scientists really do want to find the closest answer to the truth and it almost always wins out in the end. The skeptical version of Godwin is "They laughed at Galileo." Well, they also laughed at Lysenko.

4) Do you have to "believe strongly enough" for it to work? Tylenol will get rid of my headache whether or not I believe in it. Lipitor will reduce my cholestorol. Applying electricity to water produces hydrogen and oxygen gasses whether I believe in the atomic structure of minerals. When I asked a friend who just graduated some Chinese medicine school (and is a licensed acupuncturist) he said that there isn't really anything he could do for me if I wasn't inclined to believe that it could work.

5) Can evidence of efficacy be argued without resort to simple anecdote?

None of these things is an absolute indicator of fraud, deception, or inefficacy. But they are all signs that scientific examination is being resisted for some reason.

As I've said, what I marvel at is that so many people toss aside "Western" medicine when it fails to live up to there expectations only to grasp at things that don't even try to meet those expectations.

But how do you really feel about it, Alex?;)

Actually, I agree. I'm too much of a realist not to. Show me as many facts as you can, and I'm a happy consumer, but don't tell me that your best friend's brother's MIL ate nothing but brown rice and tofu for a year and is now cured of her uterine cancer. I'm real happy for her, but not quite convinced that it's enough proof for me should I land in the same boat. I'm also very skeptical of meds that have been subjected to studies, in that studies are like statistics- any company with enough motivation can warp them to show whatever the hell they want. (Some experience in that area).

Let's face it- I trust no one....

...and just to help fan the flame that Alex is doing such a good job building, much of the recent medical acceptance of alternative medicines is due to the fact that insurance companies love love love cheap alternatives and pressure doctors and hospitals to offer them. An HMO telling you that a treatment is OK is not the same as a doctor saying it, but unfortunately with "managed care", the doctors are essentially in the employ of the insurance companies.