WebMD jumps the shark

[jmowreader]

This is their attempt to legitimize the practice of homeopathy.

https://www.webmd.com/balance/what-is-homeopathy#1

Before you look, the words "pseudoscience," "quackery" and "bullshit" are not in this piece.

[elfin]

1. I have known Europeans who swear by it.

Otherwise, they are very smart. I think of it as the Placebo Practice.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Well, it's not completely unaccepted, so they can't call it bullshit, but...

they don't really endorse it.

And they do mention the placebo effect.

[Sailor65x1]

3. Did you actually read it?

WebMD neither advocates nor condemns it. The article is a description of what homeopathy is. And then WebMD goes on to caution against using it for anything serious. What, exactly, is it you think WebMD has done wrong here?

[TheSmarterDog]

10. Isn't it obvious? They should be condemning it. In no uncertain terms.

Using homeopathy to treat any ailment is worse than doing nothing.

[Codeine]

15. And therein lies the problem.

They should absolutely condemn it as being the pseudoscientific poppycock that it is. Failure to do so is tacit endorsement and wholly unacceptable.

[meadowlark5]

4. I'm curious for those of you who think anyone who uses homeopathy as idiots and taken by "woo"

Do you not take anything unless it's made by a pharmaceutical company? Fish oil has been shown to lower cholesterol. It's a supplement. Glucosamine helps with joint and cartilage damage. Another supplement. Both of these things can also be treated by a pharmaceutical drug. But the supplements are cheaper and have less adverse effects.

I use bio identical hormones made from plants and applied topically, not synthetic pharmaceuticals. I actually get blood work that shows my hormone levels increase with usage. My allopathic OBgyn won't prescribe it, but a homeopathic doctor will.

Just like politics - there seems to be a purity test when it comes health treatments.

[jmowreader]

5. Do you understand what homeopathy is?

If you want to make a homeopathic preparation of sulfur - a very common homeopathic remedy - you take one gram of sulfur, put it in 100 milliliters of alcohol (sulfur won't dissolve in water) and shake it until it dissolves. You then pour out the sulfur-alcohol mix, fill the jar with 100 ml of water, and shake. Dump it out, refill with plain water, and shake. Do this until you've done it 200 times.

By the time you are done, there is no sulfur in the water - not one single atom.

That sounds like woo to me.

[meadowlark5]

6. I have no idea what you're talking about there and what is supposed to do

Homeopathy is the use of non pharmaceutical supplements and tinctures to treat ailments. It's all part of alternative medicine. And most of those are not run through a corporate funded study.

Chamomille is on the list of homeopathic remedies. I wonder how many people find a calming effect from drinking chamomile tea.

[meadowlark5]

7. This is also included in homeopathy

This is a description from nih.gov - they of course say there is no science to substantiate it. But this is included in their description. These are the things I'm talking about.

Homeopathic remedies are derived from substances that come from plants, minerals, or animals, such as red onion, arnica (mountain herb), crushed whole bees, white arsenic, poison ivy, belladonna (deadly nightshade), and stinging nettle. Homeopathic remedies are often formulated as sugar pellets to be placed under the tongue; they may also be in other forms, such as ointments, gels, drops, creams, and tablets. Treatments are “individualized” or tailored to each person—it is not uncommon for different people with the same condition to receive different treatments.

https://nccih.nih.gov/health/homeopathy

[csziggy]

8. Homeopathic medicine believes in the minimum dose approach

That is what jmowreader was referring to. In the extreme dilutions preferred by many homeopathic practitioners, there is nothing left of the supposed active substance. Given that the practitioners like using dangerous substances such as arsenic or belladonna, that is a very good thing - much less chance that they will kill someone with one of their concoctions.

The Minimum Dose Principle

A homeopathic medicine is believed to be more effective when its active ingredient is diluted. This is the minimum dose approach of homeopathy. The purpose of potency is to dilute the active ingredient until it can do no harm and to invigorate the base substance with energy so that the qualities are preserved while the substance itself is diluted out.

While counter-intuitive, the potency is higher when the concentration of an active ingredient is lower. In other words, less is more.
What Do Potencies like 6X or 30C Mean?

In a homeopathic drug product, the drug strength or potency appears directly after the name of the active ingredient. Unlike conventional medicines, which typically report drug potency in milligrams, homeopathic potency is indicated by a numeral followed by an X or C. The potency of a medicine, such as 6X or 30C, tells you how many times and by what ratio the base substance has been diluted.
Example: 6X

An X indicates that the active ingredient has been diluted on a scale of 1:10. The numeral indicates how many times it was diluted and then succussed (a precise and vigorous process of shaking). So, 6X means that the active substance was diluted to a 1/10 concentration six times.
Example: 30C

A C indicates that the medicine has been diluted on a scale of 1:100. Again, the numeral tells you how many times the medicine was diluted and succussed. So, 30C means that the active ingredient was diluted to a 1/100 concentration thirty times.

http://www.arnica.com/about-arnica/homeopathy/understanding-homeopathic-drug-potency/

[jmowreader]

9. Let's look at an actual homeopathic remedy

In the spirit of "go big or go home," let's look at the biggest one of all: Boiron's Oscillococcinum. It was created by Dr. Joseph Roy, who believed in the then-popular "universal germ" theory - the idea, since proven false, that one microorganism (his was called Oscillococcus) can cause a LOT of diseases. (This is different from the malicious organism Donaldtrumpus; that one can cause many different maladies but it is a macroorganism and a subject of a different lecture.)

Dr. Roy found Oscillococcus on the liver of a Long Island duckling, leading to the remedy we have today.

This is how it is made, and how it has been made since its introduction in 1925.

First, take a clean one-liter bottle. Place into it a mixture of "pancreatic juice" and glucose - the amount not specified, but I assume they use a full liver.

Secure one Muscovy duck. Behead the poor beast and disembowel him. Cut off 35 grams of his liver and 15 grams of his heart, and add them to the bottle. Let this mixture set at room temperature for a full 40 days.

Next come the Korsakovian potentiations, created by the Russian homeopath Korsakov in 1829. The classical method for preparing homeopathic dilutions is to add 1 millilitre of your starting material to 99 millilitres of water or alcohol, beat it against the table in an approved fashion - this called succussion - then extract 1 ml of that dilution, add 99 ml water and succuss again. Korsakov knew about surface tension; he theorized that one percent of the contents of a container would remain stuck to the walls after you empty the container. The Korsakovian Way is to add a 1 9 mix of material and diluent, succuss, and dump the container, trusting that 1 ml is still stuck to the sides of the jar. Oscillo is diluted 200 times. When it's done, place one drop of it on a sugar pill, box them up and sell them for one dollar per tablet.

Boiron uses one duck per year to supply the entire world's demand for Oscillo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillococcinum
https://www.homeowatch.org/history/oscillo.html

[TheSmarterDog]

11. And just ignore all the shit that has been diluted in that same water.

[meadowlark5]

12. Maybe the term homeopathy is morphing into something else

Because when I look up homeopathy remedies, I find far more supplements or plant botanicals compounded or in supplement form to treat conditions and diseases.

Arnica in topicals for bruises and aches, magnesium in creams to help with muscle aches or restless legs etc.

However, I would never choose homeopathy or alternative treatments like Steve Jobs did for his pancreatic cancer. But I do feel alternative treatments do have a place for some conditions.

[LSFL]

20. sorry Meadowlark

They are correct. Homeopathy is extreme dilution of ingredients. Visit csicop's website and search. I is enlightening.

[jmowreader]

21. The same preparations can be used in both herbal and homeopathic medicine

[Oneironaut]

22. Homeopathy is actually a little different.

Homeopathic "remedies" are solutions that have been diluted. The number of times they were diluted is indicated by their X value. For 1X, the solution is diluted with water. Then, for the next X value (2X), some of that solution is taken out and diluted into more water. This is usually done over a hundred times, as homeopaths believe further dilution increases a remedy's potency.

For a 100X solution, your remedy would be less like Chamomile tea, and more like (and honestly, looking at the actual surviving particles in the end product) trying to make chamomile tea in lake Erie with one teabag.

In the final product, it is unlikely there will be even 1 microscopic particle left of the original item. Homeopaths believe that water has a "memory," which maintains the effects of the items that were originally diluted. Of course, the major problem with that belief is that we also poop in water in the toilet - does that also mean our drinking water retains a memory of everybody's poop?

This is not to be confused with home remedies or natural supplements. Homeopathy is psuedoscientific nonsense.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

13. Homeopathy is pseudoscientific nonsense.

http://themuse.ca/2016/10/19/why-homeopathy-is-pseudoscientific-nonsense/

Hahnemann, based on the doctrine of “similia similibus curentur,” or “like cures like” – a claim that he apparently pulled directly out of the aether, since it has absolutely no basis in current understandings of physics, chemistry, or biology. It is thought that he extrapolated this idea from Paracelsus, a sixteenth-century pioneer of pharmacology, who claimed that “what makes a man ill also cures him,” based on his readings of Hippocrates (the namesake of the Hippocratic Oath which medical practitioners swear by), who in 400 BC is noted to have prescribed a small dose of mandrake root to treat mania, knowing that it produced mania in larger doses. We should stop here to note that this doctrine is absolutely not the same principal as the basis for vaccinations (which inoculate your immune system to fight off infections by exposing it to inert samples of a disease), and the two should not be conflated; although coincidentally, Edward Jenner did discover the smallpox vaccine the same year that Hahnemann invented homeopathy. But as far we are aware, they did not consult.

Homeopathy teaches that diseases can be treated by homeopathic preparations (called “homeopathics” or “remedies”), which are prepared using a process called homeopathic dilution, in which a given substance is repeatedly diluted in alcohol or distilled water, each time with the container being struck against some sort of elastic material. The dilutions are conducted using a “centesimal scale,” diluting each mixture by a factor of 100 at each stage – thus, a 2C dilution is diluted twice, with the final product containing one part of the original substance per 10,000 parts of mixture. The greatest dilution at which even a single molecule of the original substance might possibly remain is 12C; Hahnemann advocated a dilution of 30C for most purposes, believing that lower doses made a mixture more, not less, potent.

In other words, the solution is diluted to the point where not a single molecule of the supposedly curative substance is present.

The laws of chemistry state that there is a limit to the dilution that can be made without losing the original substance altogether. This limit, which is related to Avogadro's number (6.023 x 1023), corresponds to homeopathic potencies of 12C or 24X (1 part in 1024). Modern proponents claim that even when the last molecule is gone, a "memory" of the original substance is retained. A 30X dilution means that the original substance has been diluted 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. Assuming that a cubic centimeter contains 15 drops, this number is greater than the number of drops of water that would fill a container more than 50 times the size of the earth and a 30C solution would require a container more than 30 billion times the size of the Earth.

For practical purposes, this means that "30X" and "30C" solutions do not actually exist, because it is not possible to create a solution in which one molecule of an original substance is dissolved in a container of water bigger than the Earth.

https://www.homeowatch.org/basic/infinitesimals.html

[meadowlark5]

14. The term homeopathy is being used for a lot more today, even if it is erroneous

If you do a search for homeopathic remedies, you'll find more of what people use today than diluting crap in water and alcohol down to nothing and drinking it. Alternative and homeopathic seem to be interchangeable.

Or maybe those who prescribe true homeopathy are finding it doesn't work so are letting it morph into what is considered alternative medicine so their patients see some improvement.

[Major Nikon]

17. They are interchangeable like fruit and apple

All apples are fruit. All fruits aren’t apples.

[Leith]

16. Homeopathy Is Garbage

It seems to work because a sympathetic person talks to the patient. Here's how I feel about it:

[7wo7rees]

18. Why are you reading WebMD?

[BootinUp]

19. I assume it acts like a placebo

In most cases.