My dad has done MSc in Analytical Chemistry he is well educated and a wise man, Me/My Family and Even some doctors cannot debunk his trust on Homeopathy
I want some clever and factual explanations which I will forward to him
Thanks in advance
In: Biology
Here’s what homeopathy says:
* Take some Thing. Dissolve it in water so it’s 99% water, 1% Thing.
* Bang on the container. Homeopathy says that this teaches the water to be like the Thing.
* Dilute it again so that it’s now 99.9% water, 0.1% Thing.
* Bang on the container again.
* Dilute it again so that it’s 99.99% water, 0.01% Thing.
* Bang on the container again.
* Dilute is again so that it’s 99.999% water, 0.001% Thing.
* Bang on the container again.
* Repeat, repeat, repeat until you have 99.999999999% water and 0.000000001% Thing. You’ve now made a “10C” homeopathic product, and homeopathy says that this makes the Thing much stronger than it was to begin with, and all the water has learned to be just like the Thing.
Now find someone who thinks that *any part of that* makes sense, and sell them your 99.999999999% water at a super-premium price.
It’s used as a placebo so it does have positive effects on some person. For the majority though it’s a waste of money and time but people usually don’t know they don’t have medical benefits so you cannot really blame them
Does it work: No. Unreservedly no.
Does it make people THINK that its working: Sometimes. People take a placebo and feel better. Its like when you get home from a long car trip and finally relax. No real difference between sitting in a car seat or your couch, but your couch just FEELS better.
The real issue here: Greedy bastards. The Companies that make this crap know it doesn’t work. The stores that sell this crap know it doesn’t work. The people who market it know it doesn’t work. All of these people who profit from someone buying a bottle of this stuff are immoral, greedy, dirty, bastards and are being enriched by people who think “well maybe?” No, not maybe, they know not maybe, and they use the money they get to try and convince more and more people to forgo effective medical treatments in favor of their bullshit.
It is horrifically immoral conduct on the party of companies that sell this crap. Its burn in hell level immoral.
Reasons homeopathy doesn’t work:
It’s literally just water. A 30C dilution for example means that whatever was originally in the water has been volumetrically diluted 30 times in sequence, leading to a reduction in concentration of 10^30 times what it originally was. This means that there won’t even be a single molecule of anything but water in the final product. There are only about 10^20^24 water molecules in a cup of water for reference. How can something possibly have an effect on your body, if you aren’t even ingesting any molecules of it.
Reasons people think it works:
1. Return to the mean: People generally use homeopathy for mild ailments that will get better of their own accord. People will often take a homeopathic remedy, and find themselves getting better. They would have got better anyway, but they attribute it to the homeopathy rather than the body’s natural immune system.
2. Placebo effect: Pretty self explanatory, it’s been demonstrated in countless studies that if somebody thinks they are taking something which will have an effect, they will get an effect from it purely due to psychological reasons. Combine the placebo effect with marketing, and the fact that they spent money on it, so ‘want’ it to work, and the placebo effect can actually be very powerful.
3. Upbringing and culture: People who have been brought up to believe that something like homeopathy works are much more likely to unquestioningly believe it as it has been imprinted on their mind as a fact from a young age when they were forming their worldview. Belief in homeopathy is very common in places like India, China, and Eastern Europe.
4. Homeopathy is often grouped with other forms of traditional medicine, that although may not be proven to work to the standard that we require for modern medicine, it does often have an effect. A good example of this is herbal medicine. If someone has taken herbal medicine and have felt it have an effect previously, they may group homeopathic medicine together with this in their mind, and expect it to have an effect.
There are some “natural” remedies proven to work for different things… there’s been a lot of studies on coffee, peppermint and lavender essential oils and weed.
However, Homeopathy lives in the realm of anecdotal evidence. Typically someone will get a following to try their celery juice (as an example) by saying “it worked for me” and that’s enough.
interestingly enough when you get into homeopathic therapy someone who’s convinced people but not good at lying to them long term will end up saying something like “it’s not medicine, it won’t work immediately. It just doesn’t have the bad stuff that medicine has” but then they struggle to actually explain the bad stuff in medicine and lean on the big pharma arguement.
Homeopathy is the idea that:
(1) The more you DILUTE a drug, the STRONGER it gets. So many of the most powerful remedies are so diluted there are literally ZERO MOLECULES of the original drug. Homeopathy says that the “water remembers the drug” as such.
(2) Law of similars – if you are vomiting, give a medicine that makes you vomit. Two things cannot make you vomit at the same time, so the medicine will knock out the first thing.
So, it’s crazy, no way that would work. As for your dad, based on your broken English, paternal advanced degree and homeopathy interest — I’m guessing you’re Indian? Indian homeopathy, I don’t know a lot about it other than 99% of them love homeopathy. Seems more a cultural thing than medical . Anyone who has an advanced degree over there also does a bit of homeopathy too. I also don’t know if their “homeopathy” is the same as American homeopathy (above).
Folks who believe in homeopathy – it’s a religion more than a science.
Once someone who is inclined towards religious beliefs adopts them it’s phenomenally difficult to persuade them of anything else. You’re not dealing with the brain’s logic centers, this is running full steam on emotion and fear responses. Past a point their reaction to evidence contrary to their beliefs is almost always to reject the evidence and double down on their belief
Whilst we know placebo’s work, I haven’t seen ‘regression to the mean’ mentioned in the thread.
This is a rule where everything returns to average/normal. So, if you have a chronic illness (such as multiple sclerosis), or a self limiting illness (viral chest infection), you seek out healthcare when you are at your absolute worst.
If you take a placebo or homeopathic treatment, the disease returns to normal (if a chronic illness) or resolves (if self limiting), and you attribute that change to the treatment. People have bad days with chronic illnesses and viral illness resolve on their own.
It doesn’t work, but it also does. There is this thing called the ‘placebo effect’ when the fact that you know or believe that you are being treated helps you independently of whether or not the actual treatment is directly doing anything. That is why new drugs are tested by giving half the subjects something innocuous like sugar pills and not telling anyone who is or is not getting the real drug. If you just gave half your test subjects the drug and gave the other half nothing, you would see a positive effect out of drugs which are ineffective. So you make it that both groups experience the placebo effect and only attribute whatever improvement happened on top of that to the drug.
Now this placebo effect works only if you actually believe in the ‘drug’ you are given. Homeopathy is very good about selling the idea that the sugar pills you are taking are special. They have specialized stores, they have practitioners who act like they are doctors, the pills have fancy names, they look vaguely drug-like, in some countries homeopathics are even sold in regular pharmacies alongside actual medicine (which is extremely shady and should be illegal, but it often isn’t). This provides for a strong placebo effect and because of their widespread use there will always be plenty of people to ‘back up their effectiveness’, because ‘they worked for me’, which enhances the placebo effect even further and also prevents any legislation against them from being passed. Sometimes it get’s really ridiculous. In the EU, you can’t advertise a positive health effect of a drug or supplement unless you have actually proven it, so what they do is that they just play an advert in which there is the sound of a sneeze, then they say the name of their homeopathic ‘drug’ and say ‘ask about it in your local pharmacy’. Which obviously strongly implies to anyone that their ‘drug’ treats colds and stuff, but they didn’t outright say it, so they avoid legal action.
What is crazy is the body’s potential to create drugs inside of itself. Especially pain killer opiate like stuff. When they administer ppl a placebo, but tell them it’s a painkiller, they don’t feel as much pain. OK, so it’s subjective, they’re kidding themselves. Right? Nope. When they administer an opiod blocker, they DO feel pain again! All tested double blind. So the placebo triggers a real effect in a person’s body. Real opoids are beeing produced. And it’s just ppl brains that trigger it, a concious idea of “I’m going to feel less pain now”. So based on that, yes, I think homeopathy can “work”. Whether it’s just tapwater or magic in the bottle doesn’t matter, you just have to believe in it. The “believe” is also relative I think. I’m scared of ghost movies even though I don’t believe in ghosts. Somewhere I apparently do though, otherwise I wouldn’t be scared. Homeopathy/placebo might work the same way, you can’t really NOT believe in it. Getting it at a store, seeing it in a medication bottle, paying money for it (very important!) all prime your subconsciousness into thinking it’s real.
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