Homeopathy: "Selling placebos wrapped in ritual"

A $1 million prize for proving homeopathy’s efficacy remains unclaimed:

So what about the fact that some homeopathic patients get better? Part of the effect comes from the ritual of consultation with a practitioner who treats the patient like a person rather than a body part on an assembly line. And just taking anything can help; the placebo effect is real. In gold-standard, double-blind studies, placebos presented as possible cures sometimes rival pharmaceuticals for effectiveness, or beat taking nothing at all.

Comments

Penny
It’s like Granny Clampet’s cure for the common cold. Take it, and in 10 days your cold will be gone!
Criminallopath
It also sounds like the “whiplash” crap that physicians are so fond of diagnosing given physical examinations based on purely subjective metrics.
Q. Does it hurt when I palpate your cervical paraspnial extensors?
A. Of course it f***ing hurts! Cant you see that I am trying to build up a soft fraud case!
We won’t even shine the bright light on other compensation neurosis such as fibromyalgia or the now forgotten but oft diagnosed “railway spine.”
Anonymous
Making light of fibromyalgia? You’re just the kind that drives them to alternative medicine in the first place!
Criminallopath
Making light of a garbage can diagnosis for which there exists 0 objective measures for its determination… Yes. The ACR should be ashamed of itself by its attempts to legitimize a purported “condition” whose existence is based purely on subjective indicators.
Anonymous
Subjective doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. I guess that you’re about as useful as homeopathy.
Criminallopath
Actually “it hurts” is subjective. Try again when you can differentiate between the terms objective and subjective.
Criminallopath
It is amazing how some would set the science based implementation of clinical medicine back to the non-science days of the five humors and using leeches for “bleeding treatment” in order to justify the subjective whining of our modern populace or to fatten their own pockets with “treatment” for such nonsense.
Gasman
Most alternative medicine does not even require invoking placebo effect.
Conditions for which alternative medicine claims efficacy tend to be ones with waxing and waning symptoms as part of the natural history of the disorder. When do people seek care? When conditions are worse. Since the next likely thing to happen in the patient’s condition is gradual symptomatic improvement, the homeopath dully accepts credit where no credit is due. (Financially they do not accept credit, only cash will do.)
Darrell
You guys are sort of missing the point that many of these people do have problems that modern medicine is not addressing. Homeopathy isn’t helping beyond placebo effect, but modern medicine isn’t helping either. Criminallopath, you are so fixated with seeking something objective that you are attacking patients when you don’t know the cause of their problems. I wouldn’t want you to be my doctor. Neither would they. That’s why some people turn to alternative medicine.
Gasman
Darrell. You excuse homeopathy by stating that allopathy has little to offer some people who experience symptoms for conditions that have unclear diagnosis and treatment. At least allopathy is honest in this regard. Though homeopathy is as woefully inadequate, they do relieve the patient of their money, even while not altering their condition.
Criminallopath
Fixated with finding something objective? Yes. One of the hallmarks of scientific investigation. Slapping a fancy name on wholly subject complaints only goes to provide some degree of vindication to the whining patient and justification for their continued whining. Allopathic medicine has much to clean up in its own cupboard before whining about the snake oil of others.
Anonymous
Criminallopath, are you a medical practioner?

Homeopathy: "Selling placebos wrapped in ritual"

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