Let's get one thing straight, right off the bat. Not all homeopathy is created equal. In and of itself, some homeopathic "therapies" are indeed quite harmless. The harm comes in the claims made by those selling the "treatments".
What is homeopathy? It is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine. Thanks, Wikipedia. The basis for homeopathy is simple - if you give a healthy person a substance and it makes them sick in a particular way, then a diluted version of that substance, when given to a sick person with the same symptoms it will cure them. The dilution process is repeated to such an extent that the solution being taken is often completely devoid of the original substance.
Seems harmless enough, doesn't it? Like a placebo? Except placebos aren't given to people in lieu of medicine except in the trial phase of a medication or treatment. Regular patients don't get handed a placebo at the pharmacy and told it's an effective medical treatment.
If you had cancer, and I said to you that I had a medicine which would cure your cancer, you would want to be sure it worked. If I was a good homeopath, I would be able to convince you of this, despite there being absolutely no evidence which would stand up to even basic scrutiny. You take the "cure" I'm selling. You spend lots of money on months or even years of treatments. You might see an initial improvement in your overall well being - that's the placebo effect. If you believe a treatment will work, you can convince yourself it is working even if it isn't.
A positive frame of mind has been shown to have short term positive effects on a person. In pain studies, especially. People use hypnotherapy, breathing and other mind-over-matter techniques during child birth, in particular. This is where the placebo effect can be useful. Parents will also use the placebo effect on small children when they have a bump by giving them a bandaid to make the pain magically disappear. The bandaid is doing nothing for the bump, the parents soothing voice and the distraction of the bandaid are usually what is doing the trick, as well as the child not understanding how pain or bandaids actually work.
But back to you and your hypothetical cancer. You've been taking my homeopathic medicine for months, maybe years. You initially felt better but, as the cancer is still progressing, the symptoms return and are quite possibly worse. If I'm really good at my job I can convince you to try a different treatment or change the dosage of the original. Your cancer will keep progressing. It will eventually kill you.
If you decide that my treatments aren't working, no harm no foul, you can just change over to scientific medicine, right? Well, maybe. But maybe not. Even if you can start scientifically designed medical treatments right away, you are probably in a worse position that you were before I started treating you, so the medications you're now getting might not work as effectively, or at all.
You might think that's an extreme example and that most people use homeopathy for things that aren't going to necessarily kill them. They might use it for a cold or the flu. What's the harm there? Except the pain to their wallet, there probably isn't one for the person taking the treatment. In fact, a recommendation for many low level infections is to keep well hydrated, so drinking a homeopathic concoction is probably quite good, in that sense. But they would have had the same result from drinking a glass of water every day, and saved themselves a lot of money in the process.
The harm comes from thinking that the homeopathic treatment is speeding up your recovery and that you are no longer contagious to other people. The harm comes from that person advocating homeopathic treatments to others who might then seek that kind of treatment for more serious conditions. The harm comes when parents treat their child with homeopathic allergy treatments at the exclusion of all other medicine and that child dies.
So why are homeopathic treatments as popular as they are? Because people like to think they are putting natural things in their body. It's also why natural remedies and organic treatments sell so well. The clients hear the line about "the body healing itself" or the familiar sounding ingredients and are comforted. That is the stigma of science. People distrust what they don't understand.
A classic example of this mistrust is the di-hydrogen monoxide experiments that have been conducted, usually by university students. They convince people to sign petitions to ban the substance. The substance is, of course, a fancy way of saying water. But they used a "chemical" name which sounds a little like an actual substance you wouldn't want to ingest - carbon monoxide - and it scared people into signing a bogus petition to ban water because they didn't want their foods washed in di-hydrogen monoxide.
Homeopathy works on the same principle. It tells people that scientific medicines with long, scary-sounding names are not to be trusted, but their unproven elixir will work wonders.
I'm not telling you that science has all the answers. No scientist worth their weight will tell you that either. What they will tell you, however, is that the medicines available go through rigorous testing, must meet incredible scrutiny, and are pulled from shelves when proven to be ineffective.
Would I go anywhere near a homeopathic treatment? Not if my life depended on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment