When Homeopathic Products Hide In Plain Sight
November 25th, 2010
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Imagine the following situation: You’re home from work sick. You have a severe cold or some other virus that has you in a miserable state of congestion, fatigue, headache and low grade fever. Unable to get restful sleep and suffering from these symptoms you venture out to your local corner drug store seeking an over the counter remedy to provide some temporary relief to your symptoms so you can get some rest.
It’s certainly reasonable to expect that the cold and cough isle in a pharmacy would have products that would provide some basic symptomatic treatment for minor ailments like colds, allergies or sore throat. A number of OTC products exist that contain safe and effective ingredients such as antihistamines, decongestants and general purpose pain relievers.
After looking over the medications available, you select a product that appears to be a good match for what you’re looking for. The label offers some straight forward indications for use, “Non-drowsy formula: for relief of stuffy or runny nose, sinus congestion and headache.” So you buy it, never even realizing that it does not have a single active ingredient in it and will do absolutely nothing to help your condition. Most of the other products on the same shelf are totally legitimate and do contain some kind of therapeutic ingredient.
Is this a realistic scenario? Could a person seeking a legitimate over the counter medication end up spending money on a completely sham product containing absolutely nothing? Many pharmacies in the US and elsewhere stock homeopathic products right alongside the real thing, often in similarly styled packaging with only a small, easily overlooked mention of the fact that they are homeopathic.
Consider this image. Most of the products shown here are legitimate over-the-counter medications. They contain ingredients that are actually proven to be safe and have value in providing some level of temporary symptomatic relief. One or more, however, are homeopathic and thus contain no active ingredient and do not provide any direct therapeutic benefit.
The image above is made intentionally small to illustrate that glancing over these products does not provide much insight into which are homeopathic and which are real. If you read this blog frequently or a self-described skeptic then chances are you are well aware of what homeopathy is and know to keep an eye out for that word on labels because it means the product is worthless, but does the general public even know this?
While this is admittedly an entirely unscientific method of judging public perception and knowledge, in my experience most people seem to think homeopathic means “traditional,” “herbal,” “natural,” “nutrition-based,” or even “good for the body.” With such nebulous and inaccurate perception of the very meaning of the word and considering that few packages will come out and say what homeopathy actually means, can anyone be blamed for believing one of these products is legitimate?
And why shouldn’t the public feel confident in picking a product off of the store shelves. In the US and most other countries, any medication sold with indications of treating a certain condition must actually have medical evidence that it does so. If a pain reliever states that it is effective to reduce headaches, it must, at the very least, have some scientific backing to that statement – even if it’s not 100% effective for all headaches in all individuals, it can’t be completely bunk, there has to be something to it. Furthermore all OTC and prescription drugs must meet standards for safety and quality of manufacture.
Homeopathic preparations are exempt from this. It would seem that they can publish bold faced lies without any problem. Simply by virtue of not being considered real medication they are allowed to pretend to be real medication and make bogus claims that no other product can. When real drug companies are found to have crossed the line with marketing of their products they may be subject to millions of dollars in fines, but for homeopathic providers, these lines don’t even seem to exist.
This is not simply a medical issue, it’s an issue of out and out fraud. It’s generally established that no product, medical or otherwise can be sold under false pretext. Doing so is theft by deception, taking the money of the buyer by tricking them into thinking they receive a valuable product in return. If a car dealer tells you that a vehicle’s gas mileage is 68 miles per gallon by EPA test standards and it’s actually 14, that lie constitutes fraud and they can be prosecuted. It’s also fraud if the dealer turns back the vehicle’s odometer to make it seem like it has not driven as far as it actually has. If a vacuum-cleaner advertisement states that it is twice as powerful as competitors, but it’s actually half as powerful, that’s also fraud.
People go to prison for this kind of thing, companies have been shut down, huge fines have been imposed and courts have ordered that those scammed receive reparation. Yet it seems that law that protects consumers from being sold a car with a bogus mileage reading or a vacuum cleaner of less power than it is advertised as having doesn’t care much about products labeled as homeopathic.
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 25th, 2010 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Obfuscation, Quackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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November 25th, 2010 at 8:05 pm
This is a scandal of the highest order, and it is not restricted to the US., it is the result of an outright assault on the political process with homeopaths running for office, and inculcating themselves into government. And it is only the beginning. In Ontario, for example, they can now write prescriptions for some pharmaceuticals, that until no could only be prescribed by a legitimate doctor.
IT is going to get worse before it gets better. The government takes the position that with health care resources spread thin, or out of financial reach for some patients, CAM is taking some of the pressure off.
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November 25th, 2010 at 9:48 pm
Yeah, I’ve seen the same thing. You go to the headache/bodyache area and there’s aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen of various brands – all of which are totally legit otc medicines for that kind of thing. Then mixed in with it, in boxes of the same basic type are a couple homeopathic products which are labeled with fine print that anyone could easily take for being as medically valid as ibuprofen or aspirin. It annoys the hell out of me. same in the cold isle.
The medicines shown in the graphic, I assume that those are mostly OTC decongestants, expectorant and pain reliever combinations. Yeah, I’ve had some head colds before and it can be a godsend to have a good decongestant (I find psuedofed works really well) to get some better breathing so you don’t keep snorting and blowing the nose until its raw. Also helps get some sleep. So yeah, I’d be incredibly pissed off if I went out and bought something that was supposed to help with decongestant and it turned out to be totally bunk.
Okay, I think I see two boxes that might be homeopathic. The first is the one “coldcalm” but only because I know the maker Boiron is a major homeopathic huckster. The other I think might be the “Complete flu care” but only because I see it blown up large enough to read the fine print in the bigger graphic. I would not have picked it out otherwise.
Did I miss any? I get the point though, VERY hard to tell!
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November 25th, 2010 at 11:51 pm
Scary but a good point very well made.
It’s also amusing/disturbing is the number of packages that say “Maximum Strength”, “Max Strength” or “Extra Strength” (one of them even does it twice!) without actually qualifying what this means. Do they contain medication that is 100% active ingredient? Or medication that equals the maximum dose of an ingredient allowable by law? Or, dare I ask, is it just bull**** marketing too?
Interestingly, Coldcalm makes no claims on the front of the packaging and only *implies* that it would treat the listed symptoms. And the Flu Care product has one valid claim – it does fight flu naturally: using your own immune system!
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November 26th, 2010 at 5:46 am
I actually have to pay attention next time I stock up on “drugs” for the cold and flu season. Unfortunatley as a chemist (degree in chemistry) I am a nerd all the time and always look at the active compounds in any pharmacutical product I pick up.
Also I have to be careful when picking up decongestants for the wife as she is allergic to all painkillers except the opiate derivatives and alcohol (yea, she is Irish) more and more of them seems to come packed with paracetamol these days.
I would be rather upset if I picked up a package from the analgesic shelf and end up with a homepathic product. Mostly for the reasons listed above but also at the annoyance that the vendor I am frequenting is selling such c***p.
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November 26th, 2010 at 9:03 am
Sorry for double post, but according to directive 2001/83/EG (European council directive):
“Effect and usage may not be presented in relation to the packaging of the homepathic product.” (loosly translated)
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November 26th, 2010 at 9:41 am
Matte said:
Do you know to what extent this directive enforced? Is it a binding issue of letter of law in all EU countries?
Even if it is the case, they sure as hell imply it strongly, even if not using the actual words “effective” I have been in the UK and seen homeopathic products in very similar packaging to legitimate ones and strongly implying that they have effect.
You can look at this image of “Chestal” homeopathic cold and cough, which I believe is packaged for the US. Clearly the United States would appear to be enforcing no such regulation.
http://d33d8mgunhcj87.cloudfront.net/prodimg/101328/450.jpg
“Relieves Cough” – a lie
“Loosens Chest Congestion” – a lie
“Pleasant tasting” – well that might not be a lie
Then there’s this one:
http://reviews.walgreens.com/2001/prod6000589/boiron-coldcalm-homeopathic-cold-medicine-60ea-reviews/reviews.htm
It says “sneezing, runny nose, nasal congestion, minor sore throat”
It does not say “treats” or “releaves” but the fact that it has those words on it sure as hell makes it appear that it does.
Actually that product is what inspired this post. It’s sold at Walgreens – a major US pharmacy chain. It’s in over the counter drug section, right alongside Advil, Tylenol, Benadryl and other medications that are totally real and do have a therapeutic effect.
Then check out these from Australia:
http://www.shop4products.com.au/brand/All-Natural/
EVEN WORSE! The word “homeopathic” does not even seem to be on the front of the product! It just says “all natural” which basically means nothing.
It goes on to say “temporary relief from Cold and Flu symptoms, Fever, Runny and Stuffy Nose, Sneezing:
It does no such thing!
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November 26th, 2010 at 9:51 am
I have read this site for a while, but never commented. I think you are right about homeopathic products being completely useless.
There is one thing I find a bit missing from this site though. Every medical article seems to say pretty strongly that all medical problems need to be fixed by going to a doctor and to pharmaceutical industry products. Do you really believe that there are never times when simple home remedies are not called for? Maybe even for minor problems? If so, how are people to know what works and does not?
It is not even an insurance or expense issue. I just don’t feel it’s necessary to go all the way to a doctors office for every sore throat, stuffy nose, cut and scrape or stubbed toe. I think people used to be a lot better at taking care o these things themselves. I know in my grandparents time, that they’d go to a doctor for serious things, but they also knew full well how to clean out a cut with soap and water and iodine and bandage it and they knew how to make a tea with lemon and honey for a minor scratchy throat.
Is there no value to this? I don’t think so! What is your opinion of this? Are you going to tell me that all natural and non-professional kinds of treatment are not ever of value?
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November 26th, 2010 at 11:14 am
Robbie said:
I would like to see some quotes supporting that contention. I don’t recall anyone taking such a hard line for minor ailments. Nevertheless, you make a valid point that many minor conditions can be treated, or ridden out without turning to doctors. The point has been made in many places that antibiotics are over prescribed, and are thus loosing effectiveness, particularly for some childhood conditions, like ear infections, that in most cases will go away without help.
However treating symptoms, (which most of the traditional procedures you are referring to do) can also be helped by OTC products that are more effective than tea with lemon and honey, and these can help one function when time-off in bed isn’t an option. Now I am old enough to remember when home remedies were still the norm, and while they provided some comfort, the fact remains that a liniment rub and a slug of rum helped one fall asleep with congestion, an OTC antihistamine works better at letting you stay that way.
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November 26th, 2010 at 11:27 am
Robbie said:
Go to a doctor or hospital if it’s at all serious. If you have illness that does not go away or at least improve in a couple of days – see a doctor. If you have some weird symptom that you’re concerned about – see a doctor.
But I do agree I do not see a doctor every time I stub my toe or have a mild head cold. For that, there are plenty of good OTC products that work well – follow the directions and when in doubt, ask the pharmacist for assistance. Yeah, of course I use things like OTC decongestants for a mild stuffy nose.
If you want “home remedies” that are okay for treating ailments, you might consider a publication called the Doctors Book of Home Remidiess. I thumbed through it a few times and it’s descent. A lot of common sense, but a few descent pointers. It does not have any information on bogus stuff like how to supposedly cure cancer or anything. What it does have is information on how to prevent acne using some basic products, how to treat swimmer’s ear, how to reduce the itch of poison ivy and how to avoid ingrown hairs when shaving. So… nothing real groundbreaking, but possibly useful.
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November 26th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Some one should run some of these ‘medications’ through a mass spec. Almost guaranteed that you will find at least one atom of a highly toxic metal like Cd, Hg, or Cr in there somewhere.
Then sue the breath out of the company that rolled these pills using their own reasoning against them, claiming the more dilute the concentration of these metals, the more toxic they must be, as they must have been ’sucsused’ in during preparation and thus had their toxicity amplified.
I’d love to see them wiggle out of that.
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November 26th, 2010 at 3:52 pm
I see mention of the UK situation. UK regulation of homeopathic remedies is complex and difficult to understand. I speak from experience…
With one exception, the UK remedies that carry therapeutic indications predate the implementation of the Medicines Act 1968 (in 1971). All medicines on the market in 1971 were granted a Product Licence of Right. Over time, “proper” medicines were reviewed and PLRs became obsolete. It was always intended that PLRs for homeopathic remedies would be reviewed, but this has never happened.
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November 26th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
DV82XL said:
They’d wriggle out of that very easily. Homeopaths claim that “like cures like”; that illness can be cured through treatment by homeopathic dilutions of substances that cause the same symptoms. Therefore they’d claim that succussion of these substances would make this also a homeopathic treatment for illnesses that produce similar symptoms to poisoning by these substances.
Maybe if you could find trace amounts of acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) you could claim that this is a homeopathic treatment that would cause fever and headaches?
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November 26th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Brian-M said:
Just find a molecule of dissolved oxygen and say that the preparation must cause asphyxiation.
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November 26th, 2010 at 6:40 pm
Oh I should also mention one thing: DV8 is actually right about the whole issue of contamination in one sense. while I’m sure it does not apply to all homeopathic products, there are many “natural” health remedies that have, upon analysis, turned out to exceed maximum allowable levels of lead, mercury and other toxic metals.
Since these products are not subject to any major regulatory oversight they can be created with very shoddy manufacturing and oversight.
In general I don’t think any have been found with levels high enough to cause symptoms of acute poisoning, but still they have been measured above what regulatory standards.
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November 26th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
Nice post, one additional point though. “Homeopathic” on the box is sometimes a marketing term, and applied to products that have some active ingredients (usually herbs). In these cases, the term is even more misleading.
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November 26th, 2010 at 11:08 pm
Point well made with the graphic above. Yes, it is a big problem. Homeopathic products and other products that fall under the category of natural or supplement products can easily be mistaken for real medicine. It’s a disturbing trend that pharmacies are now putting them along side with little distinction. they used to confine them to the vitamin isle, but now they are ending up on the shelves next to aspirin and Tylenol.
All in the name of consumer choice, or so they often say. I’m not so sure that the average consumer even knows what the word homeopathy means. In medicine there is something called informed consent which basically means that to make a real choice you need to understand what you are choosing. If that’s how you look at this, then the products are really taking away choice.
There were also some products sold as homeopathic which contained zinc as the active ingredient. The levels of zinc were not minuscule, as would normally be the case with homeopathic products. They claimed to fight colds, but the evidence for this is disputable. What they did do is cause many people to lose some or all of their sense of smell, in some cases permanently.
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November 27th, 2010 at 6:23 am
Real is scientific homeopathy. It cures even when Conventional Allopathic Medicine (CAM) fails. Evidence-based modern homeopathy is a nano-medicine bringing big results for everyone
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November 27th, 2010 at 11:43 am
NancyMalik said:
I am Binky the God-Dachshund From Outer Space. I have personally talked to Jesus. He lives on the rings of Saturn. I have evidence. Incontrovertible evidence, I tell you. But you are not capable of understanding it, so I will not show it to you. Only the Enlightened can see it and grasp its profound meaning. If you do not believe me, it means you are a shill for the atheist publishing industry, or worse!
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November 27th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
NancyMalik said:
This is a blog of folks who love evidence. They live for evidence. I do a lot of reading on the site, but not a lot of commenting, but let me tell you, these folks live on evidence.
If you have access to (or at least can provide the names of, since I and others have the access as well) the controlled clinical studies that were conducted to grant the label “evidence based” please share them. The best way to change opinions is to simply provide your evidence and let the educated person read it for themselves and change their own opinion. (I could give you the research, if you’d like, on how much more likely a person is to change their own opinion than have it someone persuade them to change it via assertions, if you’d like).
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November 27th, 2010 at 2:54 pm
ErBearPsych said:
Pity. Commenters like you are what we need more of.
Enough is enough. Evidence-based medicine is beautiful, elegant, clever and, most of all, important. It is how we know what will kill or cure you. Homeopathy is based on biblical themes, and it is ridiculous that it be referred to as a science.
The fact is if you take an ineffective sugar pill, at your sickest, it’s odds on you’re going to get better, in exactly the same way that if you sacrifice a goat, or maybe you are going to die, in which case the intervention will have been too late, according to apologists of both methods. They also just pick out the positive outcomes,and quote only those. This is called “cherry picking.” It is not a new trick, and it is dishonest, because it misrepresents the totality of the experience.
By pushing their product relentlessly with scientific flim-flam, homeopaths undermine the public understanding of what it means to have an evidence base for a treatment. Worst of all, they do this at the very time when legitimate medical professionals are working harder than ever to engage the public in a genuine collective ownership and understanding of clinical research, and when most good doctors are trying to educate and involve their patients in the selection of difficult treatment options. This is not a nerdy point. This is vital, and it is infuriating to see this effort marginalized by childish beliefs that somehow there are secret cures, known only to the select that are being repressed by a hidebound establishment.
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November 27th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
NancyMalik said:
Ooh! We got a live one here poeple!
Or was that sarcasm?
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November 27th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Matte said:
No I think it is an attempt at obfuscation. CAM, meaning Complementary and Alternative Medicine is often the term used by critics, rarely by practicing quacks. I suspect that its misuse by Nancy Malik, herself a practicing quack, in Gurgaon, Haryana, India, (and well known blog spammer) was an attempt to sow confusion.
“Dr” Nancy Malik is a very prolific commenter on Science, Medicine and Skeptical based blogs. When ever the word “homeopathy” is intoned she shows up for a drive-by comment and almost never engages in conversation. She is so prolific that there are a number of bloggers that have started referring to her as the NancyBot. Many suspect that she is using a script to make her posts.
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November 28th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
I recently tried to explain to a friend just what ‘homeopathic’ means – the dilution dilution dilution, etc, and ‘like cures like.’ He looked at me like I had grown two heads. Many many people think ‘homeopathic’ means something like natural, traditional, organic, whatever. They have no idea of what the underlying theory / belief system is. Try as I might with my friend, all I got from him was, ‘well its kind of like vitamins. might help, cant hurt.’ Sad really, and that’s how these OTC homeopathic ‘treatments’ make money for the hucksters -
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November 28th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
The answer to “it can’t hurt” is to point out that going without proper treatment certainly can hurt!
A lot of people confuse homeopathy with “natural” medicine – for which there is research and evidence of effectiveness. I’m sure the homeopathy pepole don’t do much to make the difference clear!
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November 28th, 2010 at 8:24 pm
MikeC said:
Although even there the natural stuff is very often worse than synthetic drugs (and a lot of so called natural ‘cures’ aren’t anything of the sort).
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November 28th, 2010 at 11:31 pm
I had a chemist try and sell my wife a homeopathic teething remedy for our child. What sort of lowlife sells fake pain relief for infants ?
Where can one find an ethical pharmacist nowadays ?
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November 29th, 2010 at 5:34 am
Mick Cee said:
Geez… You don’t suppose that maybe the pharmacist was a genuine believer in it? I’m not sure what’s worse, one who is that unethical or that deluded!
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November 29th, 2010 at 11:27 am
About ten or so years ago, I read an essay by Harlan Ellison in which he mentioned that after a heart attack, somebody convinced him to try these homeopathic tablets, and they WORKED, and it was great!
I wonder if anybody’s set him right since then? He’s a cranky guy, and attempting to correct him could be fatal. (Not literally. He’s just got an extremely sharp tongue and is not at all shy about saying what’s on his mind.) But I’d always thought of him as a skeptic. I guess anybody can be a sucker. He can’t possibly have known what “homeopathic” actually meant.
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November 29th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Calli Arcale said:
He had one heart attack? Got medical treatment in conjunction (yes, they pump you full of stuff at A&E) to that episode and possibly changed his lifestyle and diet afterwards. What relevance did the sugarpills (?) have in this? Appart from raising his blood sugar levels ever so slightly, possibly?
When faced with ones mortality, most poeple change in some way, sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse…
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November 29th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
I can honestly say that I bought a homeopathic aid for my cold and it worked great.
It had all this stuff at 32X in a saline solution.
And I bought it as a saline solution for my nose.
And it worked!!!!
And since it was a new product it was on sale so a good bargain, too!!!!
Of course ANY saline solution would work and although salt & water was cheaper I wanted something convenient to carry.
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November 30th, 2010 at 12:00 am
On rare occasions I get migraines. I have discovered that the way to control them is that I have to take something for it when I first feel it coming on. The cure is some caffeine and a couple OTC pills. I think Advil (Ibuprofen) works best, but Tylenol or aspirin will do the trick too. It is just an issue of having to get it in that narrow window when it first starts, about maybe an hour. If I do not get it then I have no way to stop suffering but to wait it out.
If I ever were to feel one coming on and inadvertently buy some homeopathic product because it looked like it was real medicine and I was in a hurry, someone might get killed.
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November 30th, 2010 at 6:42 am
L.Long said:
L.L, I took the liberty of correcting you slightly.
I have heard that saline solution does help against some of the symptoms of the common cold.
You can usually get an applicator from any well stocked pharmacy and you can make the saline solution your self…
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November 30th, 2010 at 11:40 am
Matte said:
I have no idea what other treatment he had, apart from the ER visit, because he didn’t go into more detail. That’s, of course, the main problem with anecdotes like that. It just made me so sad, because here was the crankiest, least trusting guy around, who never hesitates to tell you exactly what is on his mind (he’s not a proponent of “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all” — more the opposite), and who even wrote for Skeptical Inquirer. And even he got suckered. He really seemed to think the homeopathy was doing something for him.
I have no doubt that it was doing nothing whatsoever apart from possible lightening of the wallet. But it goes to show that even those who ought to know better can still be taken in by a fraud presented when they’re not as likely to think about the details.
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November 30th, 2010 at 12:53 pm
DV82XL said:
Not really. I didn’t add anything to the discussion, there was no new information. I was asking, in earnest, for citations without expectations of what I would find since I have never fully researched homeopathic remedies (I’ve never wanted to consume them or recommend them to a friend or family member, so they have not topped my list). I was truly hoping for something good. I love science precisely because of those moments when you get results and say “wait, what?!” I wish I could have been around when someone realized mold helped diseases, especially when they replicated it in a lab and realize “wow, this isn’t just an old wive’s tale?!”. Tons of those sorts of home remedies don’t work, but it’s always fun to have the few that do tested and analyzed using the scientific method.
That being said, it’s only ridiculous to call it science for two reasons 1) There is no scientific testing what-so-ever (not true in this case) or 2) because there is SUCH a mass of scientific evidence against it that it’s gone from logical hypothesis to the trash bin. Once I read that this Nancy person was no more than a spambot that happened to have flesh, I googled her and found, as the second link, her arguing that she was not spamming a blog by spamming with what seemed to be randomly selected articles. I didn’t even need to waste my time reading the articles, since the blogger was very nice and quoted passages in the authors’ own words about how their study was not providing evidence, or was not well conducted, etc. Needless to say, I was disappointed that I was not going to have one of those fun moments in science with regards to this issue. It’s a good thing my own work provides them more regularly.
MikeC said:
I am one of those folks who has a modified version of the “it can’t hurt” perspective. I don’t mind if the placebo effect works on me, so long as my symptoms go away. Granted, I’m not going to spend big money for a placebo and I certainly wouldn’t forgo needed medical attention for one, but if I had a pill that someone told me consistently stopped my migraines for the same price or less than what I would pay for other OTC meds and it worked, and then research showed there was no reason for it to do so, that it was just a sugar pill? I wouldn’t care so long as it kept stopping migraines (which, granted, once I read that research, it might not anymore). You can insert any non-life threatening illness that folks usually just have to deal with (and typically that my doctor has already said something to the effect of “you’ll just have to let it run its course”) for migraines. If I can trick my mind into making my body feel better, I’m okay with that, so long whatever I trick my mind with isn’t harmful (and I know that my other option is “deal with it”). Of course, none of this applies to homeopathy as we find it in the US, which is usually more expensive, recommended in place of seeing your doctor, and recommended for conditions that do not fit the “non-life threatening” and “just deal with it” categories.
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December 1st, 2010 at 12:01 am
L.Long said:
I’d be willing to bet that saline solution didn’t have homeopathic quantities of salt in it.
ErBearPsych said:
They probably weren’t that surprised. Most early medicines came from testing traditional remedies. If you grow up believing traditional remedies to be effective it’s not that much of a surprise to find out that some of them actually are.
For example, the bark of the cinchona tree is a traditional remedy used by the Quechua Indians of Peru and Bolivia and brought to Europe by the Jesuits. The active ingredient in the bark, Quinine, was the first effective anti-malaria drug. Modern medicines based on traditional remedies is nothing new.
With the mold, I assume you’re talking about penicillin. The traditional remedy was to use blue bread mold to treat infected wounds, but it was only of very minor effectiveness until the active substance produced by the mold was identified and concentrated. The amount of penicillin naturally produced by these molds is far too small to have a significant effect without artificial concentration.
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December 1st, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Brian-M said:
My idea here was that someone had to be first to try it. Someone had to realize, even if it was a small effect, that there was some benefit to the tree bark, to the moldy bread, even if they didn’t understand it. And whereas the scientist testing it may not have been shocked, folks in the general public who had turned away from more traditional remedies to “modern medicine” could have been. My point was, that it would be an exciting scientific moment if someone today were to discover something similar. There is too much evidence to presume that homeopathy might be the place for that discovery, but your examples prove that just because there is not a scientific basis for why a group of people believe something to work doesn’t mean automatically that it doesn’t work and that it’s underlying mechanisms can’t be discovered and improved upon. But what folks needs to understand is that lack of scientific evidence does not imply a conspiracy to hide the truth either, it implies a need for testing (and IMHO publication of more null findings so that if it’s already been tested and done nothing, that information is available as well).
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January 7th, 2011 at 1:32 am
Your malicious propaganda against homeopathy is set to die soon.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/IIT-B-team-shows-how-homeopathy-works/articleshow/7108579.cms
with technology becoming better, soon even idiots like you will be able to understand How Homeopathy Works.
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February 5th, 2011 at 7:19 pm
[...] However, a renewed effort by the James Randi Educational Foundation, the 10:23 campaign and others has recently kicked in to take on quackery. Efforts now have begun to target the mainstream companies that support this scam and are focused on raising awareness of the ineffectiveness of homeopathy, which, as it was recently pointed out, is becoming increasingly integrated into pharmacies, right along sid… [...]
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May 5th, 2011 at 11:51 am
[...] Depleted Cranium » Blog Archive » When Homeopathic Products Hide … [...]
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May 20th, 2011 at 9:21 pm
Evidence of homeopathy is undeniably positive and consistent. It’s a human evidence of experience, gathered from a real-world observation in a real-world setting (not in an ideal artificial laboratory) giving real-world solutions.
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May 21st, 2011 at 4:34 am
Nancy Malik said:
Sort of like the Intelligent Design movement, the advocates of homeopathy are obviously having to get better at making their BS look like real science…
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May 21st, 2011 at 10:27 am
Ah, the Nancybot again.
Yeah, we’ll admit that most people who take homoeopathic crap get better, just as soon as you admit that they’d have gotten better if they’d taken nothing.
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November 9th, 2011 at 5:22 pm
[...] I wrote about this kind of thing a while ago, but this is the first time I was almost swindled, because I’m usually very careful about these sort of things. [...]
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