How Homeopathy Works
This site contains all the grains of knowledge accumulated by the long-term works of scientists from different countries and peoples, and summed up in a single, but absolutely correct thesis, formulated briefly and concisely: nothing.
The full content of the site. In the pictograms at the bottom left –
links to much more detailed resources dedicated to this issue – VM
By and large, there was no doubt that "homeopathy works in any way" since it became clear that the homeopathic remedy does not contain any active substance molecules. The classic homeopathic dilution of 30C (30 consecutive dilutions of 1 to 100) is enough for one gram of the substance to leave no molecules of the original ingredient.
(There are 1060 water molecules per one molecule of the starting substance.
Ie 1 on 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000!
All the water on Earth is not enough even to get a dilution of 15C from 1 ml of the initial solution – VM.)
How is the chemical law of active masses violated, which states that the greater the concentration of a substance, the faster the reaction proceeds? And it is not violated, because homeopathy does not work in any way.
Despite this, humanity has already spent millions of dollars on homeopathy research and countless hours of work of researchers who could be invested in the study of something worthwhile. All this to confirm the obvious thing: the perpetual motion machine does not exist. Oh! Well, you get it. Indeed, generalizations of studies of the highest quality (in Cochrane reviews) clearly indicate that homeopathic medicines do not have an effect exceeding the placebo effect [1].
The only unsolved mystery is the appearance of completely absurd articles about the benefits of homeopathy, including in the central media, such as the Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which do not hesitate to promote outright nonsense, acting as a hotbed of pseudoscience:
"Let there be a Cantharis 30 S in your home medicine cabinet. There was a burn, take five peas and dissolve them under the tongue. The pain will disappear, the bubbles will "go away". If the effect is insufficient, then the drug can be repeated twice. Most often, children suffer from burns at home: they grabbed the iron, then they tipped over hot tea. Our recommendations in these cases are the same."
Kantaris. 30C. Children. For burns. Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Holy shit! And homeopathy treatment after a tick bite is especially enchanting and dangerous.
It is impossible, without feeling that you are being bullied, to read the caption to the photo given in the article:
"Before taking a place in the home medicine cabinet, the peas undergo weight control."
Weight control! Wow! Well, if the weight control is passed, then this is definitely a serious enterprise, and not a bunch of charlatans! What a quality control! What a thorough efficiency check! Indeed, what else is there to check in the balls, in which there is nothing but sugar? They can only differ in mass. By the way, what is cantharis? Cantharis is a homeopathic remedy that is prepared from a Spanish fly. In order to make a tincture, take the whole fly and grind it to a powdery state. Fresh fly powder is used for rubbing.
Wow! That is, it is a powder from a beetle. By the way, an interesting question: how, from the point of view of the homeopathic principle of the treatment of "like like", does the fact that the powder of the Spanish fly, presumably, is an aphrodisiac (though rather toxic) affect? However, this is still nothing. After all, there is also a powder from a tyrannosaurus bone, oil and even dust from a vacuum cleaner. Fortunately, as we have already established, the ingredient does not matter, because it is not in the preparation.
However, recently it turned out that homeopaths still secretly mix active ingredients into some drugs, which caused concerns from the FDA, the American Food and Drug Control Service. For example, the antibiotic penicillin was added to some homeopathic medicines, which can sometimes cause allergies. Usually people know that they are allergic to an antibiotic, but when its presence is hidden, an unforeseen complication may occur.
It is clear that homeopathy can be advertised:
a) people who do not even have a school level of knowledge;
b) charlatans who want to make money on pacifiers (the market of homeopathic products in Russia is billions of rubles);
c) people who have never thought about what homeopathy is, but still write about it.
What are the sellers of pacifiers counting on, working in any way? Yes, there is a placebo effect. And apologists of homeopathy will say: well, it works like a placebo, it's wonderful, it helps someone, it won't make it worse! But the placebo effect helps primarily with all sorts of minor sores. For example, it eliminates pain. Only now the advertising of homeopathy leads to the fact that this nonsense begins to treat everything in a row (from a runny nose to cancer), and this can have serious consequences. The article in the Russian Newspaper is very indicative in this sense. Therefore, the placebo effect does not justify the existence of homeopathy. In addition, the placebo could be distributed for free. Yes, the effectiveness of a placebo is higher if people think that it is expensive [2], but nothing prevents us from saying that it is an expensive medicine purchased by the state to take care of citizens. This lie for the good, unlike a billion-dollar business on pacifiers, can be understood.
One of the most important effects that makes people believe in the imaginary effectiveness of homeopathy (and other stuff) is called "regression to the mean." At different times, our well-being can jump from very bad to very good. But on average it is normal. Normal well-being is therefore called that. This is the most probable condition of our body throughout life. Illness is not the norm. Our body fights the disease through the immune system. And most often it ends with recovery. We often get the flu, but most often we don't think that our life is hanging by a thread and depends on taking the drug, that we will never get better. But we have no idea how many potential diseases our body reflects before the situation comes to the appearance of at least some tangible symptoms or consequences.
We can also adapt to external factors that negatively affect our health and well-being over time. Some diseases go away with age. Even some very serious diseases, such as cancer, in rare cases can go away by themselves, without treatment. This is called "spontaneous remission." The culprit is again the immune system, which does not give up until the last. This does not mean that it is not necessary to be treated – it is necessary if clinical trials show that the proposed medicine increases the chances of recovery. Just single cases of recovery after taking a homeopathic pacifier do not allow us to establish the cause of the improvement in health and are not a reason to recognize all the knowledge of mankind in the field of chemistry, physics, biology and medicine as false.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc – after means due to. A common logical error. A happened after B. Do you think it follows from this that A was the cause of B. It doesn't really mean anything. A: The rooster crowed. B: The sun has risen. Does crowing cause the sunrise? No, of course not. In the case of homeopathy, people mistakenly associate A: acceptance of a homeopathic pacifier and B: recovery. This is one explanation for the popularity of the myth that homeopathy works.
There is such a property of people's thinking, which is called apophenia. This is a search for relationships in random data. A man saw a black cat cross his path, and then a misfortune happened to the man. And he connected these two unrelated things and formulated a prejudice. Homeopathy is the same prejudice. People associated the improvement of well–being - a return to normal, with some arbitrary factor, the reception of a dummy ball. That's the whole secret.
There is another interesting property of the human psyche described in the book "Religion Explained" by anthropologist Pascal Boyer. We are talking about the fact that people of completely different cultures have a built-in concept of "contagiousness" from birth. Even before the discovery of the existence of microbes, people felt that objects may have invisible properties that can be transmitted from object to object (or person) through contact, and that these properties are not subject to dilution. One dead cockroach can ruin a whole pot of borscht, moreover, we will think twice before kissing a person who will try a spoonful of such borscht. The concept of contagion is generally clear: it protected us from epidemics long before we understood what it was. The side effect was "cursed objects" and "people of lower caste", which can not be touched, so as not to get infected. Homeopathy, apparently, uses this innate idea as a kind of Trojan horse to firmly establish itself in our psyche. We abandon knowledge in favor of instincts that say that even after an infinite number of dilutions, some "invisible essence" of a certain substance still remains.
A very interesting study was published on the topic of "pollution concepts" in 2011 [3]. It is known that people are willing to pay a huge amount of money for items that belonged to celebrities. For example, the rocking chair of the murdered US President John F. Kennedy was sold for $ 453,500, and the desk on which Kennedy signed the ban on nuclear tests in 1963 for as much as $ 1,230,000! Of course, it's not that this table or chair is of some exclusive quality or utility.
There are three reasonable explanations for why people are willing to pay so much for an item that belonged to a celebrity. First, objects can remind us of people, just as souvenirs remind us of beautiful places where we once visited. In this case, the objects of those people who cause admiration and positive emotions should be very expensive, but the objects of people whom everyone hates – hardly. Secondly, someone may buy items for purely mercantile reasons, realizing that there is a demand for them and that in the future they can either be resold more expensive, or impress other people with the possession of such valuable items. Finally, the concept of pollution: objects carry some invisible "essence" of the former owners, which we want to join.
In the study under discussion, it was possible to show that if the subject treats a celebrity well, the more the celebrity physically contacted the item of clothing, the greater the desire to buy or try on this object. But if a celebrity causes the subject to dislike, then the opposite is true: the more contact, the less desire to buy or measure an item. For comparison: if we emphasize that there is a high demand for an item on the market, the desire to buy it increases regardless of the attitude to the celebrity, and the desire to try it on practically does not change. I also liked the reference to the study, where it was shown that in stores men willingly measure a sweater that a pretty consultant girl tried on, but are embarrassed if a stranger tried on a sweater. That's the kind of "magical" thinking people have. How much the "concept of pollution" has to do with the popularity of homeopathic dilutions among believers in homeopathy (and those who know about these dilutions) is a controversial question, but, in my opinion, this is an interesting hypothesis in the piggy bank of explanations.
Today we understand whether homeopathy works (no), how homeopathy works (no way) and we have explanations for why people think it can work. So isn't it time to put a big fat cross on this terry pseudoscience, which costs humanity so much? Maybe it's enough to spend the limited resources of our species on the production, transportation and trade of outright garbage? Maybe it's time to ban the advertising of a quack treatment method? Maybe it's enough to allocate money for the study of complete nonsense? They stopped issuing patents for perpetual motion machines. I will emphasize that this is a problem not only for Russia, but also for the whole world. How many more scientific publications should appear in which the absence of the effect of homeopathy will be shown, so that, finally, people stop believing in it? It's time to come to our senses if we don't want to become victims of natural selection.
List of literature:
1. Ernst E: Homeopathy: what does the "best" evidence tell us? The Medical journal of Australia 2010, 192(8):458-460.
2. Waber RL, Shiv B, Carmon Z, Ariely D: Commercial features of placebo and therapeutic efficacy. JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association 2008, 299(9):1016-1017.
3. Newman G, Diesendruck, Bloom P: Celebrity contagion and the value of objects. J Consum Res 2011, 38:215-228.
PS: they gave me more bonus nonsense from a Russian Newspaper. Journalist Irina Krasnopolskaya and the chief physician of the Clinic of Classical Homeopathy named after S. Hahnemann Irina Kuzmina just burn.
PPS: and sympathy for homeopathy and non-traditional (i.e., quack) medicine in general appeared in the WG, apparently, a long time ago: for example, a note that, under public pressure, the Swiss authorities agreed to allow payment from the state insurance policy for "treatment" with homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine methods, Chinese herbal medicine, anthroposophical medicine and neurotherapy, published in February 2011.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru18.08.2014