Homeopathy, does it work?

[jimlews]

Has anyone ever died (ie. been poisoned) from taking Homeopathic pills ? If so, how many?

[ANTONISH]

Has anyone ever died (ie. been poisoned) from taking Homeopathic pills ? If so, how many?

Who knows ? - but people have died after eschewing clinically proven methods in favour of "alternative" medical treatments.
I can't prove that statement as they may have died in any case - but modern breast cancer treatments show a high five year survival rate while an "off the wall" treatment for example "hypothecated insulin therapy" doesn't.

[Oldjohnw]

Has anyone ever died (ie. been poisoned) from taking Homeopathic pills ? If so, how many?

Presumably people have not died from taking smarties either. Could you clarify the point you are making, please?

Certainly, people have died throughdeclining medical interventions.

[jimlews]

Has anyone ever died (ie. been poisoned) from taking Homeopathic pills ? If so, how many?

Presumably people have not died from taking smarties either. Could you clarify the point you are making, please?

Certainly, people have died throughdeclining medical interventions.

I'm not trying to "make a point". I am requesting information.

[pjclinch]

Has anyone ever died (ie. been poisoned) from taking Homeopathic pills ? If so, how many?

Presumably people have not died from taking smarties either. Could you clarify the point you are making, please?

Certainly, people have died throughdeclining medical interventions.

I'm not trying to "make a point". I am requesting information.

To all intents and purposes an homeopathic pill is whatever your basic pill-filler is, some combination of powdered binding agents which I'd guess are basically non-harmful or they wouldn't be using them as filler in pills. There may be a sugar coating to make them taste a little nicer. Maybe if you had a whole load go down the wrong way you could feasibly choke to death, but from the biochemical effects? Nah.

Acid indigestion tablets like Rennies are basically chalk (alkaline, to take off the worst of the acid), and you need to munch a lot of those to do their stuff, to the point where it's pretty damn boring chewing your way through a packet. If that's safe (and it is) then I can't see how eating a similar volume of homeopathic pills would kill you, aside from possibly a heart attack when you saw how much money you'd spent.

I don't buy in to homeopathic "theory", but even if you do there's nothing I've written above that assumes it's wrong. You're looking at trace quantities (to the point where there is an outside chance of a single molecule of the notionally active ingredient), so even if you pop hundreds of the things you're well inside what the body could deal with easily (you breathe in more toxins riding along a main road with traffic than you'll ingest through homeopathic pills). The rationalisation is the body is learning from the substance (or a shadow of it encoded in to water molecules, or something) how to deal with it and the less you have the more effective that is (no, me neither). The outright quantities from having thousands of times as much will still be basically nothing you can't deal with.

Caveat: I'm not a doctor.
Addendum to caveat: nor are a significant number of homeopaths

Pete.

[Paulatic]

Looking at how Prince Charles and Boris have reacted to the CV might it be fair assume Charlie has looked after his body compared to Boris. Maybe homeopathy has something going for it.

[NUKe]

homeopathy has a placebo effect which shouldn't be under estimated. medically does it have any effect extremely unlikely.

[thatsnotmyname]

homeopathy has a placebo effect which shouldn't be under estimated.

How do you measure the clinical effect of a placebo?

[Oldjohnw]

Presumably it works well enough for the people who flog it.

[NUKe]

homeopathy has a placebo effect which shouldn't be under estimated.

How do you measure the clinical effect of a placebo?

plenty of studies out there, no I can't point to any of the top of my head, but something that was in the New Scientist last year sometime looked at this and showed that in blind trials there will always be a number who react favourably to the Sugar Pill and out of those a number will still get a positive effect after being told it is the Placebo. That programme Trust me I am Doctor , showed the effect in group of people suffering back pain, although this isn't a scientific trail they were only demonstrating what the studies had shown and they came up with a very similar result to the real studies as covered by the NS.

[roubaixtuesday]

homeopathy has a placebo effect which shouldn't be under estimated.

How do you measure the clinical effect of a placebo?

Clinical trials designers are very clever.

Just for instance, here's a study of placebo knee surgery(!)

https://www.painscience.com/biblio/fasc ... ritis.html

[geomannie]

Has anyone ever died (ie. been poisoned) from taking Homeopathic pills ? If so, how many?

Mass drug overdose – none dead

No ill effects were reported by hundreds of volunteers who took part in a mass-overdose stunt around the world to demonstrate that homeopathic remedies are nothing more than sugar pills.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn ... none-dead/

[mikeymo]

Has anyone ever died (ie. been poisoned) from taking Homeopathic pills ? If so, how many?

Mass drug overdose – none dead

No ill effects were reported by hundreds of volunteers who took part in a mass-overdose stunt around the world to demonstrate that homeopathic remedies are nothing more than sugar pills.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn ... none-dead/

To be fair, that's kind of missing the point of homeopathic remedies, isn't it? I'm not a doctor or pharmacist, but isn't the idea that homeopathic treatments aren't drugs like conventional pharmaceutical drugs? So there isn't the possibility of "overdose"? It just emphasises that homeopathy isn't the same as normal drugs.

When I get ill, if I seek medical help I go to an NHS doctor, or for some things a suitably qualified physiotherapist, podiatrist etc. Homeopathy sounds fairly crackpot to me, and it's highly unlikely I'm ever going to seek out homeopathic treatment. But now I've read this, I might investigate some more. See? It's the Streisand Effect, again.

[Paulatic]

Presumably it works well enough for the people who flog it.

That’s an opinion which equally applies to Homeopathy and Drugs, complete with side affects, I suspect.

[Oldjohnw]

Presumably it works well enough for the people who flog it.

That’s an opinion which equally applies to Homeopathy and Drugs, complete with side affects, I suspect.

Oh yes ! People fleece governments when selling drugs. OTH, someone has to pay for the years of R&D. And some drugs really do save lives.