Homeopathy Zone

I have used homeopathy for my own health issues, other human friends, and many animal friends for almost 20 years.  I have had far more successes than failures.  I continue to learn, grow my skills in assessing health situations, and in choosing appropriate remedies and potencies.  Likening homeopathy to some hokus pokus is malpractice.  Big Pharma and a lot of the so-called science is not interested in healing.  They are interested only in money, and fostering dependency.  It strikes me that Dawkins probably suits Big Pharma quite well.

Science of homeopathy is a true science as all homeopaths know, taste of the pudding can only be said after one tastes it. People of mainstream type medicine can never understand because they are so closed up in their own world that they do not want to explore the power of homeopathy treatment. I read once a statement by the great Dr Kent that homeopaths are doctors not pphysicians. A doctor will get to the core of the problem facing the patient not his pocket. After the consultation with the doctor the patient should feel relieved that, yes, someone does care to listen to the patient wholeheartedly. Not like a conventional physician in whose clinic every 5 to 10 minutes a patient walks out with a prescription to a nearest drug store with side effects to deal with.
Though when homeopathy falls into wrong hands where medicines are mixed and overdosed it is not any different than other type of treatment available. We do need doctors like Kent, Hering, and Allen, learn from their findings, and study the drug picture.
Thanks.

You really cannot still be pulling the Lancet 1997 study out? That has been gone over and shown to be flawed for including too many low quality trials. Rubbish In, Rubbish Out. Even in its original form, the paper concluded that, “we found insufficient evidence from these studies that homeopathy is clearly efficacious for any single clinical condition”

Is this the best evidence to show that homeopathy is not a delusion and homeopaths are not the ‘enemy of reason’?

The answer is of course to look at the science. Physics and chemistry says that the principles of dilution and succussion are impossible (even if there is a memory effect in water, and there is no evidence so far, it still does not explain homeopathy — How does the water memory transfer to a sugar pill? How does the memory get stronger after dilution? How does the memory have a biological effect? etc.). Biology shows that ‘like-cures-like’ cannot be a general principle of healing. And the experimental evidence is shoddy.  To remind you, your best meta analysis concluded “we found insufficient evidence from these studies that homeopathy is clearly efficacious for any single clinical condition.”

Yes, not only is there no explanation as to how water retains the memory of dilution. There is no evidence that it does. Their is also no conclusive double blind trials that show Homeopathy works. Dr Peter Fisher is being a little disingenuous when he claims some research shows an effect above Placebo. When prompted for the research he refers to, it appears that the research is actually inconclusive. It’s also true that the Chinese Meridian system is not used in Modern Medicine. Why? The answer is - no meridians, no chi.

Homeopathy may be 200 years old, that fact alone adds nothing to the arguement as to whether it works. Rather it goes against it. Why in 200 years has it not evolved or at least produced conclusive evidence that it works?

The Richard Dawkins programmes were made by the establishment for the establishment, and the establishment applauded.

As I watched I wondered if he was putting the cause of complementary medicine back into the dark ages. He did his best, but I don’t believe that he succeeded, as many of his set pieces were laughable, and his axiomatic statements were poorly researched, using flawed evidence.

My biggest problem with this man, is that he is using his position as a respected Oxford University Professor to persuade people that he is right, by using the age old ploy of pretending to be on their side. This position is often taken by those who desire to control others.

He has undoubtedly earned praise from the pharmaceutical industry, the medical profession, and all those interested parties with a finger in the allopathic pie. What he seeks to achieve with free thinkers, is to stop them from thinking for themselves, and toe his party line. In other words to take away choice.

In the UK we are forced to pay for a failing National Health Service, and in any other society a success story like the London Homoeopathic Hospital would be applauded, not derided as playing with the placebo effect. Only someone of Dawkins’ stature would have been provided with air time to do this, only someone feeling a need to ‘protest too much’ would have done it. I suggest that he is feeling insecure within a society that is beginning to take complementary and alternative therapies seriously.

For more discussion on the opinions of Richard Dawkins and his disciples visit:
http://liveholistically.com/richard-dawkins-and-the-enemies-of-reason/

Here’s an article that addresses the memory in water question:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4152521,00.html

I think it’s laughable when people who have not given something an honest try state that it is a “delusion.”

Nobody will ever convince me that the healing I have known through homeopathy is a delusion or the placebo effect. Why didn’t all the medications I was prescribed over so many years cure me through the placebo effect? Yet these drugs are accepted and praised by these homeopathy debunkers, while homeopathy—which actually works—is spurned.

People need to grow up and stop being so sure that their own biases are reality.

If you are so fond of homeopathy and really want to prove that it works then give me the answer to following question:

The homeopathy medicine is avilable in dilution up to the magnitude 30 and above. At the dilution of about 23 there is only one molecule left in the homeopathic drug, now at dilution 30 we have a solution in which having one molecule of drug is like having a megamillion lottery. How does the solution retain the “memory” of said drug in order to be effective?

Do not post your answer here; publish a research paper in any journal.

PS: You will win Nobel prize for physics if you could publish such a theory which explains the memory effect.

You want evidence that reduced interest in science is harmful (and in what way) to modern society?

Please, please tell me you are joking that you don’t see the need for the continued growth of science when it has done and continues to do so much for our species.

Andy Lewis & J Garrinton:

Your claim that there are no good studies demonstrating the reality of the homeopathic effect are contrary to fact. It is only through selective reading of the literature and ad hoc interpretation of the evidence that you can sustain your claims: whenever a study shows a positive effect then you conclude that it must be low-quality, inconclusive, or clinically inapplicable.

A consistent scientific attitude would require of you to apply the same stringent criteria also to conventional medical studies. It would also require of you to exercise the principle of charity, according to which you would acknowledge that any individual study could at most generate a small piece of the puzzle rather than provide an all-encompassing proof of homeopathy.

Homeopathy is admittedly a huge puzzle vis-à-vis modern science, and only a long-term research program could provide breakthroughs. Therefore your hostile attitude toward the whole research effort, based on the dogma that water cannot possibly hold any information, is patently unscientific. I need only refer to this reference list as proof that this is a hot topic in conventional scientific circles (with much of the research performed by scientists ignorant of homeopathy).

The results that individual homeopathic practitioners obtain in complex, otherwise incurable clinical cases are difficult to convey to those who have not observed homeopathic patients being treated long-term. No armchair reasoning — not even by great intellects — can substitute for such experience. The claim that such results are due to placebo, especially when enough results contradict this hypothesis, is simply an evasion from true engagement with the subject-matter. Finally, your absolute reliance on common-sense and randomized controlled trials is a mockery of scientific process. A mature scientific attitude would acknowledge that there are multiple types of evidence, including observational and anecdotal evidence, that go into building up a scientific picture of the world.

antibarbie:

I am far from claiming that we should turn away from science! It is precisely because I share your concern about the decline of science that I am arguing that scientific process has to evolve.

The main premise and promise of the Enlightenment was for science to be the tool through which we would come to a progressively more complete understanding of the universe. But in recent decades it has become clear that science as it is practiced today reveals more mysteries than it solves. In other words, as the sphere of scientific knowledge expands, scientific anomalies that remain unaddressed by science continue to accumulate at an ever-increasing rate.

The result is that science doesn’t answer people’s need to understand the universe fully, which explains the turn away from science back to traditional religion and superstition. This worrisome state should act as a wake-up call to scientists: people are part of the universe, and any complete explanation of it must address people’s experiences without dismissing them as merely subjective, illusional, or delusional.

So what I propose is precisely the continued growth of science, but not only in details (e.g. yet another genetic breakthrough) but in essence. To begin, an alternative must be found to the Cartesian division between mind and matter than still rules (even post-Newtonian) science so that human experience can become part of the universe, which will have to be not merely material but mind-like at the same time. It is only when science respects and acknowledges human reality that it will begin to regain its ground.

David, I did not say that there is no good evidence. I merely picked the study you chose to bring up as evidence and I showed how weak it was.

Meta analyses are important because if you do enough studies of homeopathy, occasionally a good study will show a positive result, even if there is no effect. This is due to the statistical nature of such studies. It is you who cling to these flukes like they are proof. Meta analyses, like the one you link to, show how weak this position is.

And talk of water memory is an utter red herring for homeopaths. There is a massive chain of implausibility in homeopathic thinking where only one step would be solved if water really did have a memory.

See here,

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php?p=40

I am a Homoeopathic Doctor with post graduation in the Organon and Philosophy of Homoeopathy from a recognized University in India. I am practising Homoeopathy for the last 30 years. I was working in a Government Hospital with a daily attendance of about 100 patients a day. Now after retirement from Government service I attend a similar number of patients successfully in my private consultations. We are about 9,000 qualified doctors practising in a state called Kerala. In the whole of the country, there are about 200,000 qualified practitioners who had their qualifications by about 4-5 years of study from about 175 recognized colleges in the country. The government of India is very much convinced about the efficacy of Homoeopathic Medicine and hence it has recognized this system of treatment for the last several decades.

We homoeopaths do not believe that Homoeopathy is only a material science. It is not only a science but also is an art and a philosophy. If material science only is truth, there is no meaning in conducting scientific experimentations to reveal the mysteries of nature. How can one say that Health is purely a material science? I had patient of Hypertension who developed the diseases since her only son who was her only supporting individual in the world died in a car accident in a Gulf country. How science explains all the aspects of Arts like music, paintings, drawings etc.? How science explains the Beauty, Peace, Happiness, Goodness etc.? Do they not exist? Are they not truths? The materialist who cannot appreciate and explain the infinitessimal dilutions now explains that a mobile phone call from my brother in California can reach me at the other side of the globe within seconds and thousands of electonic signals that pass though my vicinity can be received using proper receivers.

The conventional medicine is now frightened seeing that majority of the people are not approaching them for their health promotion or maintenance but they only approach them for the surgical interventions, and some accident management measures, which they are monopolizing. How can they ban a system of treatment that gives the people relief from their innumerable complaints? This system takes into consideration the spirit and mind of the individual in addition to the Physical ailments. The majority of the population in the world are believers of various religions. In the eyes of the material scientists, how will they explain the peace, happiness, morality etc. they get out of their faiths? Then let them first ban the religions of the world. The truths are not always born in the laboratories outside, but they are first born in the laboratories of the mind. Dr. Hahnemann was one such god-man who could understand the human sciences in a better manner than the material scientists.

Many thanks to everyone for at least providing a rational and reasoned debate on a controversial subject.

I do not know that Homeopathy works but I do know that I refuse to see an entire field of medicine wiped away, and that appears to be exactly the goal of the anti-homeopathists, based on a few misinterpreted studies and “meta” analyses and their knowledge of high school chemistry. There is more going on in a thimblefull of water than will be known in the next 100 years.

The anti-homeopathists, rather than pursuing a long course of research, keep seeking the one knockout that will kill ALL research and funding to Homeopathy.

THAT is not research, it is an attempt at assassinating an entire field. This can easily be shown when Maddox decided to introduce ‘debunkers’ as a precondition to publishing the dedicated work of the resepected immunologist and researcher Benveniste, or when Lancet carefully scheduled a “debunking” issue to appear right after Prince Charles spoke in favor of Homeopathy in a courageous address to the World Health Organization in 2005.  To do such things indicates more a FEAR that Homeopathy might just be viable, rather than an unbiased and objective attitude towards research.

Nor am I impressed by claims of “placebo” effect, or other logical fallacies which insult one’s intelligence such as the pre-definition of “standard” medicine as “that which works” and of alternative medicine as “that which does not”.

Last but not least, and for me this is the ultimate refutation of the anti-homeopathists’ unreasoning stance, you might think that if they were this mad at a relatively harmless modality such as homeopathy, they would be up in arms and STORMING THE RAMPARTS of conventional medicine and the drugs put forth by the pharmaceutical companies which are almost routinely killing people. What was the last recent news item, a 5-billion-dollar settlement from Merck over Vioxx that was granted to 27,000 people?  And then there was Fen Phen, and many others.

But, such is not the case, the anti-homeopathists are just fine with the “double-blinded” studies which approved such dangerous nostrums, only to stand by and remain silent when the drugs are “withdrawn” or “new warnings” are added to the labels after the damage is done. Such “selective” outrage on the one issue and curious acquiescence on the other tells me that I DO NOT AGREE with the anti-Homeopathists and that I will KEEP AN OPEN MIND on Homeopathy.

What a heated debate !

I am myself a reflexology therapist and I work in a clinic with a pro-homeopathy doctor. His point of view is that sure he can always prescribe drugs. But in countless cases where stronger drugs are not urgently required he first gives a fair go with homeopathy. He’s been very successful and this proves to me that a gradual approach to healing can succeed.