Funily enough, snake oil has been shown to genuinely have medicinal properties (double blind tests have proven this), but because it was sold by Chinese Merchants after mass immigration to the US, the local buisnessmen encouraged people to believe it was a scam, thus the expression.TopazFusion said:Okay, well Homeopathy is nothing more than snake oil, pure and simple.
As for other alternatives medicines, some of them do seem to work. But I dare-say, it will be the work of the placebo effect, in most, if not all, cases.
Or maybe they have't accepted it because it doesn't work. Your testimonial doesn't mean much and the placebo effect can be very powerful. There are a lot of tests out there that can remove the placebo effect and actually prove if the medicine works or not. The reason none of these have been added to standard medicine is that they don't work. If they did work pharmaceutical companies from all over the world would push to have it accepted.Kikosemmek said:So here comes another thread about CAIM where most everybody doesn't seem to have gotten much education on the subject.
#1: from all the alternative or integrative medicine courses I've taken, I haven't seen convincing evidence that homeopathy is anything more than placebo.
#2: many CAIM modalities are similarly ineffective, relying only on placebo: prayer, spiritual rites, spells, Reiki (my own mother swears by it, but I'm really not convinced- I even went on and centered a research paper around Reiki, and still found no substantial evidence as to its credibility).
#3: most importantly, NO, we do not simply add all of working CAIM to standard medicine. Why? Western medical schools have tried-and-true pathology and treatment protocols that they are very reluctant to change, especially with regard to the inclusion of techniques not developed by the modern scientific establishment. Many effective CAIM modalities, such as Chinese medicine, acupuncture, some Ayurveda, and yoga, to name a few, simply don't make it into the curriculum and thus are not represented by conventional Western biomedicine.
Any time someone presumes that we just automatically include everything that works into something like our scientific or health establishment really underestimates how slowly large institutions tend to change. In the US, NIH really has most of the controls when it comes to what gets funded for research and what gets to be taught to conventional doctors. Its budget share for CAIM research is about 2%. I can't comment on whether that is too high or too low, because I can't presume to be an expert. I can say that that is by all means a marginal amount. As long as working medical modalities remain marginal, the term "alternative medicine" has credence.
There are institutions that try to combine conventional biomedicine with non-Western alternative techniques, such as the Center for East-West Medicine at UCLA. I recommend you check them out if you want to learn more about this kind of stuff.
Frankster said:I'm gonna go against the grain and the vast medical expertise of posters in this thread and say: homeopathys got a bad rap but there are existing effective treatments within it for light ailments, natural remedies that have proven to be effective for generations (ex: to cure a cough, try a spoon of honey. Forgot the mechanics of why it does, only that honey contains tons of good stuff, and is better to deal with a cough then cough medicine at your local pharmacy), but well when you say homeopathy you're basically putting under the same label everything from crystals to voodoo, course a lot of its gonna be daft, doesn't mean ain't some things that work.
I mean another example, when having an upset stomach have any of you tried sugary water? If its placebo then don't tell me cos i've never had to take tummy medicine in my life ^^
Course I'm heavy biased as the best doctor I know, uses homeopathy and explained to me there is a reason why doctors avoid using them (nothing to do with effectiveness, more a question of money and earnings) and how pharmaceutical and drug companies are involved in the trainning of doctors and their education to raise them to give drugs to deal with light cases that could be dealt more effectively with homeopathic treatments. Course this sounds rather conspiracy theory like and none of you know the guy so this isn't much of a support for my view, but was just to explain where I was coming from
I am 100% serious thought starting to wonder if i'm talking about same topic as everyone else.Ed130 said:snippy
Shame telepathic communication isn't available to us, but the guy is anything but a quack, he really is the single best doctor i've known in my life. It's easy for ya to sit back and call him a quack from your established preconceptions but from where I sit, this doctor's given better advice then any other doctor i've known and the times we did not listen to him in favor of other doctors (such as the treatment of my sick grandma...who died because of all the nasty strong substances she was given) turned out to be bad calls.Woodsey said:Hahahaha, come on. If you do have that opinion then don't openly admit you take it from some quack who asserts themselves as some sort of great moral force in the medicine world.
'Sigh'Frankster said:-snip-
No problems, most useful herbal remedies where the basis for drugs we use all the time. Willow bark gave us aspirin for instance.Frankster said:Edit: Just looked up homeopathy in wiki, yeh not quite what I was defending xD Darn, so all these times i've been standing up for homeopathy in front of my classmates i was actually bigging up alternative medicine? Well, better i learn this now then keep living with my ignorance i guess. Apologies all round for the misunderstanding.
Don't worry about it too much, you realised you were confused as to what homoeopathy was and admitted it, and I for one applaud your courage to do so.Frankster said:Rest assured, I feel suitably embarassed.Ed130 said:snip
Yes, I think it's bogus. I could explain why, but instead a standup comedian has already done so for me, observe (skip to around 1 minute in if you want but it's all relevant):FluffyWelshCake said:So, what are your opinions on Homeopathy, alternative medicines and natural remedies? I'm just going to write more crap here now, personally I believe in the fact that alternative medicine is either medicine that has been proved not to work or not properly tested. So, please, go play with this topic.
Actually it's even worse than that. At the level of dilution used for homeopathic treatment, it is statistically unlikely that there is even a single molecule of the "active ingredient". Even if you made the volume a hundred times larger there wouldn't be any in there. It's just pure water and nothing else.Greyhamster said:However, that doesn't mean that diluting something so much you have about three molecules of the stuff in a bottle actually works. Heh, imagine how much cheaper health care would be if that was the case. So yeah, it's pretty much like a dude who heard about surgery and proceeds to perform surgery on people by cutting them to pieces with a chainsaw. But not as lethal.