My daughter has a sore throat, and the pediatrician told us to get some children’s Robitussin. Sitting right next to it on the shelf at CVS were two different homeopathic cough syrups (honey based, meaning presumably you are buying a very expensive bottle of honey). In fact, the Robitussin was significantly cheaper.

I took the Robitussin and one of the homeopathic ones back to the pharmacist and had the following conversation:
“My two year old daughter has a cough and I was wondering which one of these you recommend.”
“Does she have a runny nose, too?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’d go with this one (picking up the Robitussin), it has an antihistamine. (Picking up the other one) I’m not sure what’s in this homeopathic one…”
“Then why do you sell it?”
“Exactly.”

My impression was that she was about as impressed with homeopathy as we are, which is comforting, but has little power to take them off the shelf, which is too bad. You’d think that if enough pharmacists got together about it, they could change the corporate policy.

The other thing that struck me was that the honey bottles were very cleverly marketed. They seemed very much like real medicine, and were recommended down to two years old, while the Robitussin said age six, so if I didn’t know what homeopathy was and hadn’t asked a medical professional, I could have easily picked the fake medicine for my daughter. It makes me sick to think about all of the well-meaning parents giving their children fake medicine without ever realizing it.

don’t you guys know the feeling when buying new stuff and every time something is broken, missing or gets damaged within a few days and you think: Ironically, every time I buy something it is damaged!

Yes, this is the well-known post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy (roughly translated as “after this, therefore because of this”).

… another example would be, funny, every time I go outside and wanna do X, it starts raining

And this is the reporting bias logical fallacy. How many times have you gone outside to do X and it hasn’t started raining? Do you think you would actually remember every time it didn’t rain when you wanted to do X?

Richard Feynman used to illustrate this with a cute little example. At the start of a lecture, he’d say “you know, on my way here this morning, I saw a car with the licence plate DGR 592 (or whatever). Isn’t that amazing? I mean, what are the chances of that?”. The point being, of course, that any specific licence plate is as likely to occur as any other, but we only remember the ones that have an obvious meaning.

… disregarding whats proofable, whats not, what we know and still don’t – it was a weird feeling. Please get my point right … and to me, there was always something extremely positive going on when using or getting in contact with homeopathy. I hope this gets it right.

That’ll be the placebo effect, plain and simple.

When homeopathic preparations have been properly tested, they performed exactly the same as a placebo.

… and again, being a sceptic means also being a sceptic towards scientists saying that the universe contains 10^80 atoms

While scepticism is a key part of science, being sceptical of something that is supported by the preponderance of evidence is irrational. Just because you might not understand the evidence, or might not be aware of it, when people who study particular phenomena make statements about those phenomena, it is worth your while recognising that not all opinions are equal. They probably do know much more about it than you or I.

If you find yourself doubting it, that’s fine – but if you are going to express that doubt, you should at least go to the trouble of finding out what the evidence is (from the actual scientists who know about it, not secondhand from some other source).

while still not being able to watch around the “next blocks corner”

I don’t understand what you’re getting at here.

(which I am not saying again that homeopathy 100% works without any doubt … I am just saying it seemed like)

No-one can rationally claim that homeopathy works, because it doesn’t. Under appropriate test conditions (i.e. a controlled trial) it performs exactly as if it were a placebo. If homeopathy really did work, all of the homeopathic organisations would be conducting clinical trials all over the place to gather the evidence to show that it does work.

Then, of course, the scientists would sit up and take notice and start trying to work out how it does it. Sadly, all of the evidence that has been collected to date shows that homeopathy has no effect beyond being a placebo. The only rational conclusion is that homeopathy doesn’t work. On top of that, its proposed mode of action has no logical basis and defies the known laws of chemistry.

… and again, being a sceptic means also being a sceptic towards scientists saying that the universe contains 10^80 atoms while still not being able to watch around the “next blocks corner” (which I am not saying again that homeopathy 100% works without any doubt … I am just saying it seemed like) … maybe I should that have set clear much earlier .. and yes, maybe I was a bit too hyped about what happened to us/me …

IIUC, Phase II clinical trials do look at dosing, and physicians are free to adjust the dose of many licensed medicines.

You are correct. Phase I trials look primarily at safety, which includes fiddling with the dose to figure out how much the human body can handle before bad things start happening. Phase II continues to play with dose to find out which doses produce the desired effects/outcomes. Phase III continues to gather safety data, but focuses more on efficacy. There may still be some dose adjustments in Phase III, but these trials are looking more at establishing that the doses finally decided upon in Phase II actually work the way they should.

All I am saying is, that if you want to find or test homeopathic stuff it could take a few weeks until found the right dose and the right globuli. You might try 50 different globuli and it wouldn’t have any effect. Then the 51st might in the right dose might work and everytime … but then again not for every other person but just for that individual.

Yeah, you seem to have missed that human beings all have essentially the same biochemistry and immunology. Granted, the differences within the population are quite important, but you don’t have a medicine operating by different mechanisms in different people – it’ll be the same biological activity operating to different extents in everyone.

IIUC, Phase II clinical trials do look at dosing, and physicians are free to adjust the dose of many licensed medicines.

When homeopathy has been tested in a proper trial, it performed exactly the same as a placebo. Most physicians consider it unethical to prescribe a placebo and tell the patient it will do something that it won’t – even if they know that it will make the patient feel better.

Homeopathic preparations are very good placebos, but that does not make homeopaths any more ethical for claiming that homeopathy will do things that it really will not do.

A notable example is the FDA’s recent decision to limit the maximum dose of acetaminophen – Tylenol – in prescription medications to 325-mg in order to reduce the potential for liver damage in patients taking large doses of pain medications

Heh. We have a similar thing over here in the UK – you can’t buy more than 32x 500 mg tablets at a time unless you have a specific need for more.

But over here we call it paracetamol (which is a contraction of its chemical name para-acetamidoyl phenol), and it doesn’t have any trade names because it’s only a generic.

I disagree with calling it acetaminophen because it doesn’t contain an amine group – it contains an amide. I could go with “acetamidophen”, though.

Mary (38) said:

That’s a problem with anecdotal reports—there is no establishment of acceptable controls or consideration of possibly other influencing factors. That renders the concluded assumptions quite unreliable.

And then, in the very next comment, Lalitha (39) said:

I too after nearly 37 years of asthma have been off inhalers and tablets for the past few years.So I say,Homeo may not be scientific,but it works,like many other inexplicable things in the world

Lalitha, did you read any of the preceding comments?

How does you anecdote rule out the possibility of one or more of the following:
1. Confirmation bias;
2. Regression to the mean;
3. The placebo effect?