Chemists should be forced to mark 'nonsense' homeopathic remedies as 'placebos' to stop customers being misled
Favorite line-Dr Tom Dolphin, from the BMA's junior doctors committee, said that he had previously described homeopathy as witchcraft but now wanted to apologise to witches for making the link.
I thought I had found an advantage to the US healthcare system over Britain's NHS, that at least my tax dollars weren't being used so some person could get free quack medicine. Then I stumbled onto the NCCAM, a department of the National Institutes of Health, spending $132 million on quackery, far surpassing Britain's £4 million.
3 comments:
The problem with marking "nonsense" homeopathic remedies as 'placebos' is that as soon as they are marked, they lose their effectiveness.
There has always been controversy over the ethics of placebos. I've been curious about placebos and have asked Ricky, Armando, and other doctors their opinion. Most, if not all, have said placebos can help the right patient, but, again, all have said that they would have a hard time deceiving a patient by prescribing one.
Placebos became so important in medicine after a 1955 study by Henry Beecher, where he concluded that placebos had a 34% positive response percentage, that almost all medical studies now have a placebo control group for fear that 'nonsense' witchcraft might account for healing rather than the actual medicine.
In 2001 a couple of Danish physicians did a study that said the placebo success rates were not due to 'the power of the mind', but due to the natural ebb and flow of the disease. I'm not sure if this has sparked a movement not to include a placebo test group or not.
I personally think the best doctors are the ones who don't separate the mind from the body and treat the whole person. I also don't think our tax dollars should be spent on providing placebos to patients. After all, if placebos do help, the sacrifice of spending your own hard earned dollars will only help.
I have no problem with use of plecebos, just as long as the patient pays placebo prices. The fact fact is these homeopaths are confidence artists and scammers of the first order. Beyond that, we have the problem of people seeking homeopathic remedies when they need actual medicine.
I did appeciate the apology to the witches.
Second Myk's point. The main problem with homeopathic practitioners is that they do not believe their treatments are placebos based on an arcane theory of water memory. Also that many practitioners believe that it is not only complementary but an alternative medicine system and will advocate so. So a practitioner will give herbs to a women dying of breast cancer but won't tell her the medicine is bullshit and to get chemo. It like Coke advertising itself as a cure for cancer and Parkinson's disease and believing it.
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