Homeopathic or not...I say just give me the drugs that work!

I’ve had what is apparently incurable progressive nerve damage for 6 years.  I am 36 years old and there are a few days a week I can’t climb my own stairs.  It’s cost me my job and my friends and my hobbies and basically my life.  My logical nature and skepticism render me fairly immune to the placebo effect.

My mother has medical ‘issues’ that get resolved perfectly when she sees her homeopath.  From my point of view, she just needs someone she regards as an authority to tell her she is going to get well, and she gets well… the placebo effect is 95% effective on her.  (5% of the time she actually has something wrong with her, things that time and rest will cure.)

The question, as I see it, is this: who has the better quality of life?  In black and white terms, is it her, with her blissful ‘ignorance’, or me, with my ‘enlightened’ misery?

Cypher, from ‘The Matrix’:

I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? ... Ignorance is bliss.

And I’m vegetarian, too :/ Dammit.

Religion is the opiate of the masses.  Medicine, in some of its aspects, has become a religion in itself.  So what’s an atheist to do?

I say take it where you can get it, if you’re fortunate enough to have a solution that works.  I don’t think I’d have said that before I became glitched.

I think, foobario, that’s the point of the second recommendation from the Lancet article—that if doctors don’t consider the personal touch, engaging their patients, then those patients will tend to go to where they can find that interaction, regardless of the quality of the medical care (and especially since the placebo effect can “cure” so many things).

I guess the question is, though, given that you have a very real nerve damage problem, would the placebo effect of a homeopathic advisor actually do you any good? It sounds like your mom’s “solution” only “works” because she doesn’t have much that it won’t work on.

First let me say that I am not a user of homeopathic medicines, nor have I ever profited from them.

However I would like to make 2 points against the Lancet article, which I think has been over-hyped:

(1) The placebo effect is real, but it applies to both conventional and homeopathic medicines. Red antibiotic tablets are more effective than white ones, and so on. This is very well documented.

(2) The Lancet study was one that set out to prove a particular hypothesis (the one it found) and it did this in a particular way: It took a few hundred existing research studies into homeopathic medicine efficacies. It then selected a smaller number of these, and applied statistical methods to the results of these. The result was the finding that homeopathic medicine performs no better than placebo.

The method is important, because it is almost the same as what the drug companies do to prove that their patentable drugs are efficient miracles and wonders: they run a series of trials and the select the trials that give the result sought. Despite the fact that they manipulate the “controlled trials” method, they also act as if this is the only scientific way to prove the efficacy of a drug. In fact there are other scientific methods: single patient studies, long term studies, etc. not to be sniffed at.

Note too that the Lancet magazine mentioned that a draft report on homeopathy by the World Health Organization says the majority of peer-reviewed scientific papers published over the past 40 years have demonstrated that homeopathy is superior to placebo in placebo-controlled trials.

There is a lot here to unpack, and I for one am keeping an open mind.

I don’t want to be a smartass (that’s not entirely true) but I can’t help but wonder what your mother’s medical “issues” are. A condition such as nervousness, lethargy, vapors or heebie-jeebies might very well be helped by anyone’s sympathetic ear, even a quack homeo. If, however, you cut off a hand, have a heart attack or suddenly go blind, I suggest you seek the attention of a real doctor....the kind with schoolin’ and all.

prolotherapy- if your disease is having more money than you know what to do with, I have no doubt that homeopathy will help cure it.  But it’s demonstrably not much good for anything else.

Sorry Zilch, but Prolotherapy was just another comment spammer and I’ve removed his comment.

Les- so I’ve criticized a comment spammer in vain.  Story of my life.

No wonder Zilch doesn’t make sense half the time- I thought it was just senility.

Hussar- my senility is the reason for the other half of the time I don’t make sense