So I thought—I'm going to try homeopathy. What's the worst that can happen? I'm in pain anyway. I decided to try a scientific approach (not very, given N=1), so again I waited 2 weeks to see if it was going to resolve itself. It didn’t. I went to a homeopathic doctor and got a bottle with some "magic." It took 3–4 days for the symptoms to improve, but they didn’t come back for months. When they did, I jumped straight to the homeopathic medicine, and it helped in the same way it did the first time around. I haven’t used antibiotics for my throat since.
I have no explanation for this. There have been hundreds or thousands of studies on homeopathy, and my reading is that the consensus is that it's "quack medicine." Yet it clearly worked for me, and it worked better than antibiotics for that particular issue. What gives?
Oh and unlike homeopathy, leeches have a real effect besides placebo.
see, for example:
Hohenschurz-Schmidt D, Phalip J, Chan J, et al. 2024 Placebo analgesia in physical and psychological interventions: Systematic review and meta-analysis of three-armed trials.
“The average short-term placebo effect was small,”
Strijkers RHW, Schreijenberg M, Gerger H, Koes BW, Chiarotto A. 2021 Effectiveness of placebo interventions for patients with nonspecific low back pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis
“probably not clinically relevant.”
[1]: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/placebo-effects-without-dec...
Assuming the placebo makes the mind activate the immune system in a proper way, eliminating the root cause of the inflammation, while the antibiotics only kill the bacteria while it is active, so no lasting effect. Bacterias that makes a sour throat are very common and will just come back if not kept in place by body defense mechanisms.
Key is a healthy and active immune system. The way placebos work, is apparently they support that.
Or it was a specific bacteria, where the body finally developed immunity from and it was just coincidence that he took homeopathy before. Impossible to tell with the given information.
I'm just saying that the placebo effect, by itself, doesn't explain why homeopathy would be more effective than antibiotics
Still, all speculation of course. I also don't rule out the possibility that (some) homeopathics do have a real efffct because of undiscovered quantum fields (whatever) and hard to quantify. But current studies do imply strongly otherwise. And I consider them sugar. But I do occasionally take some if people I like give them to me with a genuine feeling of care. That effects my mind.
TLDR:
Homeopathic medicine is, in theory, 100% safe, since it's literally nothing.
Homeopathic medicine is, in theory, 100% ineffective, since it's literally nothing.
Homeopathic medicine is, in practice, rolling the dice with unregulated producers that have been known to ship poisons.
Homeopathic medicine is based on the same principles as sympathetic magic. You might as well ask someone to cast a spell.
https://pietersz.co.uk/2013/07/homeopathy-magic
There have been similar problems with dilution of herbal medicines, but of course herbs do often have medicinal properties.
In my case, however, I turned to pure ginger infusions, following the advice of a herbalist. Haven't gone through it again so far, plus it also works great for colds and flu.
But then you end up with peer reviewed studies which indicate some anti-viral properties of garlic: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7434784/
It depends what you understand by "quack medicine".
To me, in the beginning, all the stuff about drinking weird plants and doing homemade remedies did sound a bit quacky. But that was because of my absolute ignorance.
People have been using these remedies for thousands of years based on a deeper knowledge of nature than your random dude has, but we've fallen into a scam where we are made to feel that anything not made in a lab and costing a certain amount of money is nonsense.
Garlic, onion, ginger, turmeric, honey, echinacea, raspberry... those are natural wonders for basic natural medicine.
But several times this happened I've been at my home and I have some old empty inhalers with 0 doses left and like 5 years past expiry date. I'm talking the disk inhaler, with discreet capsules of the drug that get used on every application - so if there were any traces of the drug substance - it would have been very small amounts that stuck to the inhaler walls or whatever.
I still used it and it stopped the asthma attack just as well as the real thing.
Placebo is one hell of a drug.
Similarly - even just preparing to go to the doctor in the middle of the night lessens the asthma attack for me. Just before I go to the doctor waiting in the queue the symptoms are often very minor.
One possibility that RCTs are designed to eliminate is "regression to the mean." If the natural course of disease is to wax and wane and you intervene whenever the disease is waxing it can seem like your intervention is effective even when it has no specific effect.
In addition, placebos produce a small effect even when you know you are taking a placebo.
I still get sick a lot, but haven’t needed antibiotics in all the years I’ve kept to this routine.
Still, that doesn't explain why the symptoms return sooner after antibiotics than with homeopathy. The body is complicated and there are many variables.
Do you drink alcohol? I'm wondering whether you consciously or subconsciously adjust how much you drink more during or after an antibiotics course than the homeopathy, or whether there's some similar confounding variable. Strong alcohol of course has some anti-bacterial properties (as well as some well-known side-effects which aren't so beneficial), but I don't really know what I'm talking about, just a thought that occurred
For me, the most probable explanation is that your body just healed by itself and taking nothing would have had the same result. It is not uncommon for symptoms to appear, repeat a few times, and disappear completely. It happened to me countless times, like, for example a cough persisting after a cold episode, coming and going for a few weeks after I realize it is completely gone, some minor injury occasionally manifesting itself before finally disappearing completely.
Your symptoms are a bit more serious, enough for you to justify doing something, but it is probably the same idea. That your interventions worked may be a coincidence, in addition to some placebo effect which is known to be somewhat effective for pain.
Yes, there are old ways that have been proven wrong, which were based on ignorance at the time, but there are also old ways which are totally legit and are little known or accepted nowadays based on today's ignorance.
In most cases when we do find evidence for something clinically relevant in traditional medicine we either discover that the effect is something other than it is traditionally associated with and/or that you need to take it at extreme doses for it to do anything at all.
- From a strictly scientific standpoint, wouldn't it be interesting to properly understand why and how it works?
- From a purely practical standpoint, who cares about any of that if not only it works, but is also better and healthier than what you might get prescribed at the doctor's?*
* yes, in some cases, not all.
Personally I think it would be, but I think people who actually engage in using traditional medicine couldn't care less how it works beyond making it sound even more magical and spooky.
> From a purely practical standpoint, who cares about any of that if not only it works, but is also better and healthier than what you might get prescribed at the doctor's?*
I don't think most people engaged in traditional medicine care about it actually being healthier, again because they are first and foremost interested in the ritual and cultural aspects rather than the effectiveness of the active ingredients.
My reason for believing this is that people consistently ignore evidence that their favourite magical plant does nothing. And that even when there is evidence to support it, they frequently ignore all findings about effective doses and treatment plans in favour of doing the "natural" thing like making into tea or putting it in orifices you aren't meant to put plants in.
I think you're repeatedly resorting to all manner of generalisations. Maybe that's your experience, and all that you've seen. While I've seen a bit of that too, I've also seen quite the contrary, very smart and learned people scientifically exploring fringe approaches in order to obtain results.
I could give you some personal and near examples of that if it were to mean something.
There's also quite a lot in natural medicine (including papers and proper scientific studies, if that's the only thing that matters to you) if you look into it.
Telling that person apart from the sea of charlatans complicates things a bit. They're not the people who launch their careers with Oprah's help and spawn a million others riding in their wake.
> Telling that person apart from the sea of charlatans complicates things a bit.
Peer review (for all its faults) and clinical trials that inform evidence based medicine. That’s how you tell them apart.
There are many reasons why this is not true. One of them is profits, another one (at least where I live) is the mass oriented, streamlined healthcare, in which there are not enough resources to treat you as an individual, but rather as a number, a small part of an average.
For these reasons, as an example among others, when a woman goes to the doctor because her period is painful, they'll prescribe her birth control pills rather than raspberry leaf tea.
This is the very nature of evolution; not all rituals will make sense. The ones that do, prevail.
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