Billions for zero efficiency

Homeopathy: A billion-dollar Placebo Industry

marks, Geektimes based on Ars Technica: Homeopathy successfully turns water into a placebo

According to a number of studies conducted by scientists from Australia in relation to 68 different diseases, a special commission made the following conclusion: homeopathy is a placebo industry (and with billions of dollars in revenue). A total of 176 separate studies were conducted, with an additional assessment of 57 scientific reviews. The project leader, Professor Glasziou, published the results of his work in the British Medical Journal blog (Still no evidence for homeopathy).

In particular, he pointed out that with the help of homeopathic remedies aimed at treating 68 different diseases, 0 people were cured, and 0 diseases were effectively treated.

According to Wikipedia, homeopathy is a type of alternative medicine involving the use of highly diluted drugs that supposedly cause symptoms similar to those of a patient's illness in healthy people. The concept of treatment according to the pseudoscientific principle "like to like" (Latin: similia similibus curantur) is opposed by homeopaths to the principles of rational pharmacotherapy. The founder and author of the term is the German physician Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843).

Proponents of homeopathy claim that if you have a substance that causes symptoms of the disease characteristic of a certain patient, then if you dilute this substance, we get a cure for the disease. The content of the starting substance in the solution of a homeopathic remedy is calculated not even in percentages, but in molecules, and it is not a fact that such a molecule will come across in a bottle with a "medicine". But supporters of homeopathy appeal to the "memory of water", which somehow acquires the properties of a dissolved substance.

All these ideas are more than a hundred years old, scientists have repeatedly refuted the medicinal properties of homeopathic medicines. But this does not stop the supporters of homeopathy. People actively buy "medicinal" products of this kind, and every pharmacy must have a counter with "homeopathic remedies". In 2007 alone, about $2.9 billion dollars were spent in the United States on such drugs.

Doctors are trying to fight homeopaths, although, at first glance, there is nothing wrong here – after all, what harm can water do to a person? But there is harm – after all, supporters of homeopathy who are ill with something, first try homeopathic remedies, missing the time needed to treat the disease at the initial stage. And only then, when nothing helps anymore, a person begins to use conventional medicine, but in some cases it is too late. The same positive moments that occur during homeopathy treatment are a manifestation of the natural processes of recovery of the body.

Professor Glasi says: "I can well understand why Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, was dissatisfied with the state of medicine of the 18th century, for example, bloodletting, and tried to find an alternative to such methods."

But now it's not the 18th century, and it's worth to stop believing in such miracles. Nevertheless, in the same UK there are officially two hospitals where homeopathy and other dubious alternative medicine practices are used.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru 02.03.2015