This is a rather long post, but homeopathy is one of my favorite bugaboos. I've put it together from posts on the
Yo-God ForumIf you've tried Zicam lately, you may still have a sense smell. But if you lost that sense,
this may be why.
The article points out that the stuff isn't really homeopathic - it contains measurable amounts of zinc, not just distilled water.
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This from New Zealand Science Monthly.
Read the whole article here.
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| Quote: In a Coroner's Court late last year, a mother described how she had refused antibiotics for her baby's ear infection, preferring to take homeopathic advice. Two weeks after the initial consultation, the baby was taken again to the homeopath, who expressed concern about its poor health but who did not suggest seeking conventional medical treatment.
The mother, a registered nurse, commented that the symptoms looked like meningitis and, two days later, took her baby to her regular doctor. The doctor insisted on the baby being hospitalised immediately and noted that it took some time to convince the mother to do this.
The consultant paediatrician at Wellington Hospital, Dr Thorston Stanley, reported a "great sense of frustration in dealing with the mother, who opposed him every step of the way". Despite intensive treatment, the child died a week later from brain damage as a result of bacterial meningitis. | |
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At 10:23 a.m. on January 30, 2010, a group of 300 British skeptics demonstrated the uselessness of homeopathic "medicines" by ingesting massive overdoses of "powerful" homeopathic cures and apparently, nothing happened.
You can read more about it here. And here.
The British homeopaths have an explanation: each remedy is "person specific", so no one should notice anything unless they had a condition that the cure was intended to treat. And, such cures are intended to work in small doses only, large doses do not produce effects. Amazing. The effect is that there is no way to test these placebos scientifically.
Homeopathic cures in the US are exempt from the requirement to demonstrate safety and efficacy that other drugs must provide. Some so-called homeopathic cures in the US also contain measurable amounts of foreign substances (Zicam nose swabs, for example contain sufficient zinc to destroy one's sense of smell), and therefore are not actually homeopathic. But it appears that here just labeling a substance homeopathic makes it so - as magically as the cure itself.
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According to an article located by Dr. Boli's Press Clipping Service, the participants in the recent mass suicide attempt via homeopathic remedies have found that they are 0.0000000001% dead. I guess that closes the book on that debate.
Read about it here---
Believers in homeopathy often ask, "If homeopathic treatments are just water, what's the harm?" Orac answers with
a graphic video about a baby, the daughter of an Australian homeopath. He follows it with
another video explaining why homeopathic woo doesn't (indeed, cannot) work.
Why do I bring this up in a forum about religion? Because homeopathy IS a religious faith - a belief without proof, and because this religion often requires human sacrifice. You can see more of Orac's stuff at
his blog, Respectful Insolence---
Here's James Randi's take on WHAW (World Homeopathy Awareness Week). I especially like his description of the homeopathic sleeping pills you can pick up at your neighborhood chain pharmacy at a premium price.
The homeopaths' biggest problem is their claim of "water memory". I remember what I flushed into the water this morning, and if homeopathy were even slightly true, I certainly wouldn't want to use that memory as a cure.
