PSA: HOMEOPATHY IS FAKE. It's not real medicine. It's water or sugar and nothing more. Do you want to know how homeopathy "works"?
Homeopathy "works" on the principle that like cures like, that something which causes a symptom will, when sufficiently dilute, cure that symptom in the body.
Let's say you're suffering from insomnia. You might take homeopathic caffeine (or honest to god, homeopathic owl) to help you sleep. That's kind of crazy BUT IT GETS BETTER.
The more dilute a homeopathic remedy, the more potent it is meant to be. So they take the active ingredient and they dilute it in water. Then they take a drop of that water and dilute it in some more water. Then they take a drop of that water and dilute it in more water.....then they do that again and again and again until there is not even ONE SINGLE MOLECULE of the "active" ingredient remaining in the water....and they call that medicine and sell it to you.
Tl;Dr: What homeopaths call "medicine" most of us just call "rinsing"
There is a phenomenon in toxicology called hormesis.
The standard model of toxicity in animal models is that toxicity is linear with the amount of toxin the animal ingests. This is clearly seen in Hg and Cd toxicity where people eat fish and it slowly builds up and poisons them.
Hormesis is nonlinear and threshold toxicity of an agent. Basically the toxicity is bi- or tri-phasic, with maximum toxicity being at low loads because higher loads inhibit biological responses. So less is more re toxicity.
I bring this up because homeopaths will use this to defend homeopathy, even though no nonlinear response is demonstrated.
Well that's quite an interesting phenomenon. One of those things that was demonstrated through rigorous experimentation. Unfortunately for homeopaths, they have yet to clear that hurdle.
Yes, i believe i did mention that the principle was " like cures like" , that an agent which causes a symptom can cure that symptom in the body. And that is not a scientific position.
Hahnemann was a smart man but he let his pet theory lead him astray. He initially thought up this idea when investigating a cure for malaria. Quinine, the active substance in the traditional cure from cinchona bark. He found that ingesting quinine resulted in symptoms that were similar to a malaria infection. Turns out that's just quinine toxicity but from that mistake he went on to assert that this was a fundamental law of nature....and he was wrong and science continues to prove him wrong.
The idea is that the water "remembers" what it had in it before. It's interesting how that's only the case for specific things and it forgets all the poo any water once must have contained.
I mean, according to their methodology, any water you drink is both the ultimate cure and the deadliest poison because it has memory of all that has come in contact with it.
@Pikachu and the suggestion that it gets stronger the more you dilute it, would mean you can overdose on it if they forgot to add the cause and give you clean water.
Not entirely true. Some homeopathic remedies do absolutely not work this way. Additionally, there are plenty of studies indicating that at least some homeopathic adjuncts and treatments do, in fact, yield a positive result.
For example: Black elderberry (Sambucus nigra) supplementation effectively treats upper respiratory symptoms: A meta-analysis of randomized, controlled clinical trials J. Hawkins, C. Baker, L. Cherry, E. Dunne https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0965229918310240
I'm not parsing words. You advocated for homeopathy and submitted an example which bore no mention of homeopathy. I understand that many people conflate homeopathy with any "natural" remedy but that is simply wrong. Homeopathy is a specific sort of intervention. It is not the use of herbal remedies, it is specifically the use of incredibly dilute substances to cure the symptoms that the " active " ingredient would produce. You can look it up if you don't believe me.
Wouldn't vaccines work under the dilution principle?
Absolutely not. Vaccines contain portions of the virus which the immune system can recognize. There exist many molecules of the pathogen within the vaccine. Homeopathy on the other hand contains virtually no active ingredient to LITERALLY no active ingredient. For example, a very common preparation of homeopathy is 6C (a dilution which contains just 0.0000000001% of the original substance, there is a 50/50 chance that ONE SINGLE MOLECULE of the "active" ingredient remains. At the common dilution of 30C there is literally not even a single molecule of the " active" ingredient which remains.
Homeopathy is magical thinking and deserves to be treated the way you would treat any other example thereof.
@Pikachu I was thinking about this yesterday. While in my line of work we consider herbal medicine and homeopathy to be the same, they are, in fact, not. It's a technical distinction, but one I should've made.
Gotcha on the vaccines. And that makes sense; just didn't know if introducing inactive portions of a virus would be considered the same thing, but there's also a distinction there, I assume.
I'm not a particular follower of homeopathy and I know most of it is junk science (though I do like seeing the placebo effect at play); but now there's a personal challenge to find any evidence of research suggesting it's effective. I'm just completely curious now.
Yeah, colloquially homeopathy gets lumped in with various other remedies. Always good to investigate for oneself! I think you'll find largely what i described earlier: The better the trial, the smaller the apparent effect for homeopathy.
Well to be fair that is the concept behind vaccines
Introduce attenuated or weakens disease particles (or a closely related but more mild disease) into the body to cause a mild infection and train the immune system to fight the disease
So a small diluted dose of whatever, could make you I’ll, I guess
That is actually an argument that homeopaths make but it is fundamentally flawed.
Homeopathy says that something which causes the symptom can cure the symptom. That is NOT how vaccines work. Vaccines work by preparing your immune system with a dummy virus so that it is prepared with antibodies if it encounters that virus in the wild.
I'm sure that it seemed that it did. But in every controlled test of rigorous standards, homeopathy fails to outperform placebo.
Regression to the mean, natural history of the disease, reporting bias....these are things that can convince people that something that doesn't work actually works.
So homeopaths were unable to submit any evidence sufficient to convince the evidence committee that homeopathy had an effect beyond that of a placebo intervention.
They failed, i do remember that...but i'm not clear on the point you're making?
many people had cured themselves from homeopathy ...
Those people Most Likely Did Not Have whatever horrid thing they "CURED" themselves of to begin with! They didn't go to the Real Medical Doctor FIRST for an ACCURATE Diagnosis! Did They?
THEY NO MORE CURED ANYTHING THAN I CAN by Emailing the Word "CURE" to Someone ½ the World away from me!
🤷🏻♂️ Wow! .... NOW They arent sick anymore! I CURED THEM BY EMAIL!! I Am SO Amazing!!
