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?

quality control for homeopathic mixtures are notoriously poor

You know, this is something that’s been bothering me for a while… In fact, I think it’s my favourite new line of attack with homeopaths: “how can you tell whether you have prepared your remedy correctly?”

In all kinds of areas, we need to use quality control tests to check that we have actually produced what we think we have. How do homeopaths do QA testing?

It makes perfect sense when you realize that it is a case of cherry picking data. Suppose you have two thousand people who are sick and use traditional medicine. Now, suppose that twenty of them die, but the rest recover. The proponents of Homeopathic medicine will claim that traditional medicine killed 20 people and, had they used homeopathic meds, they would have survived. (They write off the 1,980 people traditional medicine saved as inconsequential as “obviously” their remedy would have saved them as well.)

Let’s put aside the “Homeopathy doesn’t work” issue for a second. The problem I see with the manufacturer’s claim is: How do we know that the company is selling the “medicine” that they are claiming and not just distilled water? There is no regulation so they could be selling “miracle cures” that are just distilled water poured into tubes. How do they do quality control? If you mistakenly added three drops of “cure” to the batch instead of 1, how would they catch that and keep it from going out?

In other words, even if we were to accept that Homeopathy works (it doesn’t), then the companies making Homeopathic remedies have no method of quality control and we have no method of verifying that they are actually selling us what they say they are selling us.

“Big Pharma” might be greedy, but they can be held accountable. We can test that Ibuprofen capsule and see that it only contains X grams of active ingredient when it was supposed to have Y grams. If they released sugar pills and called them Extra Strength Ibuprofen, they would get in trouble. The same can’t be said for the manufacturers of Homeopathic “cures.”

As for the harm done by selling useless remedies to suckers, I would say that deaths due to useless remedies pale in comparison to the deaths due to procedures and treatment in “good corporate citizen” hospitals, or to use of “approved” medicines (those which beat the placebo).

Eh?

So, what exactly are you saying here? That modern medicine actually achieves the opposite of its goal? In what universe does that make any sense?

I have had a serious female issue that debilitated me and I tried nearly 50 things from ‘traditional’ medicine. None of them worked, and I would be on the floor basically having labor pains every 28 days – unable to move and barely able to speak. Then I tried this wonderful homeopathy product for my problem, and the damn thing allowed me to walk around and live my life. Has also helped with allergies, headache and several other issues immediately for me and many, many, many other people I know. This article is non-sense written purely because the pharmaceutical companies are finally seeing people figure out that nutrition, vitamins, exercise and other simple means can often cure and aid in most diseases and problems people face. What we put in our bodies directly AFFECTS our bodies. People are figuring it out slowly but surely (and finally), and it’s hurting the pharm exec’s wallets. I’d love to see the money trail that asked for this ‘science’ article to be written.

In fact, due to the absence of any regulatory oversight of homeopathy, the cost of producing a homeopathic product is trivial.

OTOH, the cost of discovering, testing and then producing a real drug product is huge. A Phase III clinical trial will typically cost a drug company something in the region of $50,000,000 – $75,000,000. And that says nothing of Phases I and II (which, of course, are cheaper but still costly) or of the initial discovery and the scale-up of production.

So, in light of the relevant context, do you think the manufacturers of homeopathic products are merely doing what they do out of the kindness of their hearts, or because there is money to be made?

Obviously, they’re not making even all of the 10C dilutions they could from 1ml of active ingredient–that’s 10 million liters.

Well, first, homeopaths don’t do “direct” dilutions, they do them stepwise. Each dilution step is a 100x dilution (so, for example, 1 mL would be diluted to 100 mL as a single step). Each dilution step is a “C” (C for 100, see?). The number tells you how many steps of 100x dilution they have done.

So, a 10C dilution is 1 in 10^20.

A direct dilution of 1 mL to 10C equivalence would be 10^17 Litres. That’s 100,000 cubic km.

A 30C dilution is 1 in 10^60. To do this directly from 100 µL of starting material would require 10^30 Neptune masses of water (taking the mass of Neptune to be 10^26 kg, which is approximately right).

IIUC, 30C is a common homeopathic “strength”.

There’s also this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBUc_kATGgg&feature=channel

Yes, but remember that in homeopathic logic, only once it’s diluted does it do the opposite (as opposed to regular logic, where dilution makes it do the same thing only less so until it doesn’t do it at all anymore).

And in fact homeopathic preparations of caffeine — like Coffea Cruda, which is just coffee beans before they turn it into just water — are used to treat insomnia and hypertension! Many sites even specifically recommend it to people who drink too much caffeine!

Which I guess could work if you drank this stuff instead of coffee (as would drinking regular water, or orange juice).

Which is kinda how the whole homeopathy thing got started — if you gave patients an extremely dilute amount of mercury instead of a totally-not-dilute dose of mercury, the patient miraculously didn’t die! It didn’t do anything positive but hey that still looked pretty good by the standards of 1700s medicine, when rich people who could afford doctors were more likely to die.

Compared to administering elemental mercury, homeopathy is a step up. That’s about all good that can be said of it though.

So, what? When homeopaths drop the health claims we’ll have a rival for Tic Tacs and Smarties?

Again, if a person e.g. has headache again but the cure wouldn’t work on the second time, THEN the test would be right and proof that homeopathic wouldnt work. But it is surely wrong to just have 1000 people, throw them some pills, say swallow it and see whats happening. Isn’t it kind of obvious that something may have gone wrong?

How do you think they test the efficacy of acetaminophen or ibuprofen in curing headaches, joint aches, or reducing fever? They don’t just throw pills at 1000 people and see what happens. They look at people specifically suffering from headaches or joint aches and see how the medicines affect at them at various dosages compared to a placebo group. A placebo group who, without fail, shows some effect from the sugar pills they were given. Some of the people feel better despite not receiving any actual medicine.

Just like how you say, anecdotaly, that some people benefit from homeopathic medicine. Statistically, according to the studies that have looked at homeopathic remedies, it’s the same number who benefit from this non-medicine as benefit from the placebo. It’s not about precisely determining the correct amount of nothing to give them, it’s about the placebo effect. And you don’t need to sell someone expensive nothing-pills to make the placebo effect work. Heck, there’s some evidence that placebos work even if the patient knows it’s a placebo.

Be skeptical of your own anecdotal evidence — the skepticism of a real skeptic must always start with our own beliefs.

@ Digital Atheist

If water can retain the memory of a substance, then why doesn’t a drop or two of bourbon in a tall glass of water make me drunker than a tall glass of bourbon with a drop or two of water in it?

Because homeopathy is sillier than that! See, the ‘memory’ of the substance is kinda like a negative, in that it has the opposite effect of the original substance. So a highly diluted amount of alcohol would cure drunkenness! Which I guess is kinda true at least in this case…

Oh but if that wasn’t silly enough, it doesn’t even work based on the actual chemicals involved, but rather the high-level symptoms that arise. Yeah, somehow the water “remembers” that alcohol causes lack of motor control, dizziness, memory loss, etc, and works to nullify those effects even if they were not caused by alcohol. So you could probably cure, say, GHB dosing or something with super-diluted alcohol.

As you may be aware, when Coke and Pepsi were first created both contained “medicines” in their original formulations. Coke contained cocaine and Pepsi contained digestive aids that supposedly acted similar to pepsin.

They were far from being cure-alls, but they did have active ingredients in their formulations.