Can We Drop Homeopathy?

Evidence is not a reliable differentiator of conventional and alternative medicine. By the standards that now prevail, more than 50 percent of conventional medical practice is not truly “evidence based.

To the extent that evidence does differentiate conventional and alternative medicine, it’s often because — in the pursuit of evidence — cart and horse routinely swap positions and money cracks the whip.

Evidence is not black or white. It comes in shades of gray. Clinical decisions are easy if a treatment is known to be dangerous and ineffective, or known to be safe and uniquely effective. But what if a given patient has tried all the remedies best supported by randomized clinical trials, but has “stubbornly” refused to behave as the textbooks advise and failed to get better? Or what if a patient just can’t tolerate the treatments with the most underlying evidence? One option is to tell such a patient: See ya! But I think that is an abdication of the oaths we physicians took. When the going gets tough, we are most obligated to take our patients by the hand, not wave goodbye.

The belief that treatments are intrinsically better just because they are “natural” is fatuous and misguided. Smallpox, botulinum toxin and rattlesnake venom are natural. Nature is not benevolent.

But the belief that conventional medicine is reliably evidence-based is equally fatuous. Much of what we do is simply tradition. And much of the evidence we get is more about money than other imperatives. Often in the world of alternative medicine, the problem is not evidence of absent effects — but a relative absence of evidence, in turn engendered by an absence of patents and financial incentives. The history of coenzyme Q10 is a precautionary tale if ever there was one.

archangle wrote:Maybe I can start selling homeopathic apnea air. I'll collect a sample of your exhaled air, mix it with 100x as much air, shake up the air container thoroughly, then repeat the process 20 times, and then sell it back to you. You then let a little bit of it out every night into your room air and then run a special machine I'll sell you that succusses the air in your room. Of course, you'll have to replace the special homeopathic air succussion filters every month or so.

49er wrote:http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/05/hol ... icine.html

ChicagoGranny wrote:"Then they came for the natural healers,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a natural healer
and I believed the government when they said natural healers were
dangerous, radical quacks because they don’t support the pharmaceutical industry."

brendastarr wrote:Daggone, CG, you hit it outta da' park again!

Despite his diagnosis, Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months,[180] instead consuming a pseudo-medicine diet in an attempt to thwart the disease. According to Harvard researcher Ramzi Amri, his choice of alternative treatment "led to an unnecessarily early death."

the chief of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department,[215] said "Jobs’s faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life.... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable.... He essentially committed suicide."[216] According to Jobs's biographer, Walter Isaacson, "for nine months he refused to undergo surgery for his pancreatic cancer – a decision he later regretted as his health declined."[217] "Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic. He was also influenced by a doctor who ran a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproven approaches, before finally having surgery in July 2004."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_issues

brendastarr wrote:I think everyone is talking apples and oranges here.

brendastarr wrote:I think everyone is talking apples and oranges here.

brendastarr wrote:Daggone, CG, you hit it outta da' park again!

ChicagoGranny wrote:"Then they came for the natural healers,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a natural healer
and I believed the government when they said natural healers were
dangerous, radical quacks because they don’t support the pharmaceutical industry."

archangle wrote:

49er wrote:http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/05/hol ... icine.html

Complete drivel.

There ARE problems with conventional medicine. Assume for the moment that there's some error in the science for some conventional therapy called "Able" therapy, and it actually doesn't work.

Does that mean you should use the alternative "Baker" therapy, which has been investigated scientifically and shown not to work? Or has no scientific investigation at all in terms of whether it helps and what side effects it has?

BlackSpinner wrote:

archangle wrote:

49er wrote:http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/05/hol ... icine.html

Complete drivel.

Then you obviously didn't read it because he doesn't say that at all.

brendastarr wrote:

ChicagoGranny wrote:"Then they came for the natural healers,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a natural healer
and I believed the government when they said natural healers were
dangerous, radical quacks because they don’t support the pharmaceutical industry."

I still like it.

ChicagoGranny wrote:

brendastarr wrote:

ChicagoGranny wrote:"Then they came for the natural healers,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a natural healer
and I believed the government when they said natural healers were
dangerous, radical quacks because they don’t support the pharmaceutical industry."

I still like it.

Yeah, government is involved in too much controlling of our lives and is continuously taking on more.