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.
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
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.
Mikhail_Edoshin•3h ago