Homeopathic remedies are very expensive water. Homeopathic “medicine” is snake oil and bullshit.
Don’t hold back Tim. I am an extremely skeptical person as well when it comes to these things but this honestly worked. I can’t speak of other homeopathic remedies or medicine though.
Maybe you got better because you believed you were going to get better. Maybe you got better because it had just run its course. But there is zero evidence that homeopathy is any more than expensive quackery.
The bigger issue is it’s largely an unregulated field. I know. I know. We’re supposed to hate regulation and lack of regulation will bring us all roses and wealth… but it means these companies can make any kind of claim they want and any negative responses from these products is a reactionary response… aka enough people died so a regulating body is now making them take it off the shelf or clarify the label.
Belladonna isn’t just some homeopathic bullshit. It’s a medically recognized potent pharmaceutical and poison. In the right preparation, it can be an effective prescription sedative. Some modern medicines use an artificial alternative to Belladonna. Non-prescription uses are controversial because the doses are so small that lab effects are impossible to produce, but in most cases they are considered medically harmless.
It is also a popular ingredient for homeopathy because it’s cheap, legal, and it’s easy to mix up the science-backed pharmaceutical uses with the unproven cures.
Edit: I’m not saying @Chappers endorsement is right, I just needed to set the record straight on Belladonna being the sole realm of homeopathy.
I am not easily influenced but it worked is all I can say. Next time you feel a heavy cold coming on or flu like symptoms try it and if it doesn’t work I’ll send you a refund. I have no idea if anything else works.
Edit: @Telefrog don’t forget that Richard Garriott showed that you could make spells from it as well.
Bear in mind, Chappers, that if it was actually a homeopathic remedy, your kids did not actually ingest any belladonna at all. Like, not a single molecule. Are you sure you’re not talking about a herbal remedy?
Yeah, many people conflate homeopathy and phytotherapy into one big “homeopathy” thing, when they’re in fact (very) different things. Since some plants do have beneficial active ingredients, they can be effective as remedies, with scientific validation in many cases.
Now, if you take them and dilute them until there’s not one molecule of the active substances left in the solution, and sell them as remedies because apparently water has memory, that’s homeopathy. So yeah.
The tube says 30c and you are supposed to take 3 of those little sugar pellets, so a total of 90c of Belladonna, whatever that means.
To be exact, this stuff: https://www.amazon.com/Boiron-Belladonna-30c-80-pellets/dp/B001286GZC
Please read this and you’ll understand what 30C means.
So in 90C there are 4.5 molecules per litre, so very subtle amounts of nightshade.
Guys, quit it. The placebo effect has been getting stronger and is more potent than some pain relievers now (vs when they were first introduced). It’s a powerful thing. Belief is relief, I guess. Chappers is feeling better, so leave him alone.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-placebos-getting-stronger/
Confidential to non-Chappers: Wow, I had no idea how bad homeopathic stuff was… holy crap. I’ve never had any of this stuff before, it’s sort of fascinating how you need to track it down to the molecule to even see if any is present at all.
Yeah, that’s homeopathy, not herbal medicine. Sorry.
What’s the difference? The amount of the active ingredient?
The wiki page on homeopathic dilutions posted earlier explains it best. It literally has an entry for what 30C of something means.
[quote]
Dilution advocated by Hahnemann for most purposes: on average, this would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient.[/quote]
Here’s an herbal remedy version. (First one that came up in Google.) Note that it’s for external use only, meant for muscle pain etc.
No, there aren’t. I can’t remember at what dilution you run up against Avogadro’s number, but it’s well below 30C. To quote that Wikipedia article for 30C: “Dilution advocated by Hahnemann for most purposes: on average, this would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient.”
In practice, the fact that a herbal remedy at least purports to contain the active ingredient. Homeopathy has a whole load of woo behind it, such that a remedy is supposedly stronger the more dilute it is. As a result, most commercially available homeopathic remedies are so dilute as to contain no active ingredient at all. Supposedly the water in which the active ingredient is diluted retains the “memory” of the active ingredient even when there is no active ingredient. The other main principle of homeopathy is “like cures like”. So you give a poison to treat a condition which has similar symptoms to that caused by the poison. So it’s a good thing there isn’t any actual “medicine” involved.
Unsurprisingly, it performs no better than placebo. The good news is placebo works pretty well for some things.
You guys are just ruining placebos for everybody. :P
Luckily, the placebo effect is robust to knowledge of it.
Guys there’s a “homeopathic medicine is bullshit snake oil and you’re a fuckwad for believing it!” thread ***right over there***.
I come to Everything Else to laugh at people enjoying sporpsball and hear about your trips to foreign countries, not get my heart rate up over indirect-murderers peddling bottles of ineffective water to the under-informed :P
So it turns out the holistic bullshit thread is actually in EE. MY POINT STILL STANDS
Unrelated:
I bought a Note 4 on T-Mobile’s 2-year 0% APR financing deal (I think most of the major carriers do this now) 2 years ago. Almost to the day. Like, as in, I got a text with my first bill in two years without phone-payoff-charges on it this morning.
So of course my phone plunged into an unrecoverable bootloop state over my lunch break and is now completely toast.
God fucking dammit.