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Originally Posted by tracilicious
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?
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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.