Yes |
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90.5% (105) |
No |
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1.7% (2) |
I don't know much about it |
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6.9% (8) |
Poll: Homeopathy - Please help inside Pages 1 2 NEXT | |
I will take the first line out of wikipedia as my remark
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Homeopathy is the biggest scam out there today. That is all I will say with out getting angry about it. | |
Sorry, Iron, you're never going to convince him that homeopathic remedies are a crock of shit. If he hasn't figured it out by his age, he never will. | |
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If it wasn't bollocks it wouldn't be homeopathy. It would be medicine. | |
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What? Tim Minchin? Who said anything about Tim Minchin? That's simple logic | |
I was talking about this one- | |
Homeopathy is, at best, rubbish. At worst its dangerous. It was calculated (by me Ben Goldacres ban science) that homeopathy at its 3 most dillute settings contains LESS than 1 molecule of water per vial they sell. Its SO dilute. So dilute. That it has a 50% chance or greater of not being present in the water. It doesnt work. It makes no scientific sense. Its garbage. Utter garbage. People are making money selling MAGIC HEALING WATER. I cant believe it either. | |
Homeopathy works in the same way sugar pills do; as a placebo. People who believe in it will swear that it is a miracle cure, where someone that doesn't believe in it will get nothing out of it. | |
Oh, right. Well I've never seen that before that was just my opinion. | |
I believe he's referring to this video, which includes the line "You know what alternative medicine that been proved to work is called? Medicine." It's a pretty good little movie, well worth your 10 minutes. EDIT: sonofabitch, somebody beat me to it. OP: Does your father actually know what homeopathy is? I mean, some people just take whatever they think might work. If you actually explain to your father what the process of homeopathy is (literally, dilute your medicine until it's a drop in the bucket) then maybe he'll come to his senses. When homeopaths openly admit that 99.9% of the active ingredients is water, it's not hard to realize that they're full of shit. But if that doesn't work, well, I don't know what will. | |
I remember a group of skeptics all taking a mass overdose of homeopathic medicine in public, and it had no effect whatsoever. Anyway, I'd suggest a practical experiment over a couple of weeks. Pour one glass of water, and one glass of squash, and then do several serial dilutions on the glass of squash so he can't tell the difference. Then ask him to taste both, and say which one is which (on basis of what tastes better or something). Get someone neutral to record his answers, then after about a month or so (which should get rid of random chance shifting it either way) get that person to show him that it was exactly 50-50, which is what you'd expect by just guessing. | |
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What exactly is he using homeopathy for? If he's using it for something for which there aren't any particularly effective therapies (colds, flu, etc) anyway, just let him continue. I flat out told my mother that "Emu Oil" was a health scam. She still bought some, only real downside is she's a few dollars poorer. | |
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First, make sure you father understands what homeopathy is. Does he understand the homeopaths claim that diluting things makes them more potent? If he understands and agrees with this, then you can move on to demonstrating the falsehood of this claim. And you can do so very easily, with experiments if you like: Does your father drink coffee, tea, or anything similar? If he has a cup that is too weak for his tastes, what does he do to make it stronger? Homeopathy says he should add water. Or what if he had a cup of this drink, and he took a single spoonful and mixed that with a glass of water. Would that be stronger or weaker than the original cup? How do both cups compare with the original material (coffee grounds, tea bag, etc)? For homeopathy to be right, basic chemistry--and cooking--must be wrong. | |
Homeopathy is no better than getting your dad to take sugar pills... Sugar pills are the common placebo. The placebo effect (simplified) is when your body reacts how it thinks it should react. If you believe you are drinking alcohol then you will suffer the effects of alcohol even though you are not drinking. The placebo effect can be acted upon with various alternative medicine. A person takes a pill for back ache and... they suffer less pain, however it was just sugar. They merely believe it would help them. As far as homeopathy goes... its bollocks... scientifically, its bollocks and has no real effect. However it can serve a small purpose. If sugar pill placebo's don't work... here have some magic water xD Any significant illness should be addressed with real medicine. | |
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Well... other people have said it but: All herbal remedies and treatments that worked to cure illnesses in the past that worked, had their component parts extracted and turned into pills. Alternative medicine that worked then is now called... medicine... Other than that you'll need to give him science lessons. I taught my dad atomic structures up to a basic point of hydro carbons. If you can get him to understand that, and the concept of mole density within water then he'll very quickly say homeopathy is bollocks. captcha: errr... did it watch the youtube video? xD | |
1) The most stupid thing about homoeopathy is that actually, the degree to which most homeopathic remedies are diluted means there's unlikely to be a single molecule of the active ingredient in what you're taking on a day to day basis. This is because homoeopathy predates the modern understanding of matter. Homeopathic remedies are literally just overpriced pure water or sugar. You'd have to take millions of doses to get a single molecule of active ingredient. 2) Many of the things which are diluted in homoeopathy are poisonous. The principle of homeopathy is based on an idea that if you're suffering from an illness, exposing you to trace amounts of something which causes similar symptoms will magically cure you. Tap water also contains highly diluted traces of poisonous substances. Why isn't it curing people? 3) Homeopathy is incompatible with germ theory. It views all illnesses as internal to the body and caused by nebulous "imbalances". By believing it, you are basically denying that this image exists.
See the false-coloured red dots. They don't exist. Someone drew them in with MS paint, apparently. 4) People in the past believed incredibly stupid things would make them healthy.
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That is actually very understandable, good medieval logic. The early understanding of vaccination was first to get a diluted (or weak) version of the illness or its cause and apply it in the hope that it results in you not getting the illness. This was tried with Royals during pluage times where the puss of plauge victims was left for a few days to die and then applied to an open wound. A lot of Royals survived via this method. However that said homeopathies logic is... void in the wake of modern day science. ... I just felt like taking about history >.> | |
Youtube James Randi on homeopathy and his other works as well. Hes a great skeptic that debunks alternative medicine and paranormal claims | |
C0nc0rdance has a good video on homeopathy. Actually he has a lot of good science videos... | |
Yes, it's about dilution. Potency, as they refer to it, claiming that the more diluted the substance is (usually employing orders of ten, so 1:100 is a very low potency, while 1:10^24 is a high one), the more powerful it becomes. This is not only counterintuitive, it's also nonsense when higher potencies are actually so diluted that statistically there isn't a single molecule of the original substance left. It is bollocks, but considering I've had arguments with my fellow students on this which, while interesting, did not change anybody's mind, I'm not too sure how to make your father understand. Really, it depends how strong his belief that it works is, how much he already knows of it (i.e., is he aware of the potency-issue?), how open he is to this information and how open he is to learning about placebo-effects. While homeopathy is indeed bollocks, the placebo-effect it is using and the highly detailed anamnesis used are not. | |
Er, that's not how dilution works. But yeah, totally fucking stupid. The whole idea is so amazingly wrong. | |
It is how it works for the higher, supposedly most powerful dilutions. From one of my books (translated of course): | |
Ah, ok, running from their definitions, not real ones, misunderstood. Hey, hang on, does that mean that if I were to drink pure water, I'd simultaneously be affected by every substance in the universe other than water, to an infinite degree? | |
By homeopathic "logic" yes. It's pure and utter bullshit and belongs with such things as faith healing. | |
The only, only way homeopathy can work is as a placebo, but you've really got to believe in it. Basically only gullible fools can get any benefit from homeopathy. What I really object to in the UK is that some of taxes go on treating people with homeopathy. BULL. SHIT. | |
I'd be careful there about "gullible fools". We nearly all experience the placebo effect to some degree, it merely needs to be given in a form and way we trust. Those who mock homeopathy would be equivalently likely to feel better if their conventional medical professional handed them placebo pills, just so long as they believed there was an active ingredient in them. Of course, if it does make some people feel better, then why not use it? At the expense of a socialised healthcare budget, it becomes more questionable, sure. But perhaps we shouldn't knee-jerk reject a means of diverting people who would otherwise be expensively wasting doctors' time with their non-illnesses. | |
I never really bothered researching homeopathy too much, which is why this thread was very informative to me. But I always assumed it was a scam of sorts anyway. Magic water? Really? | |
Well, Dutch/Belgian platform Skepsis, for rational approach towards, well, pretty much everything that incurs the wrath of rational people, has on a sort of demonstration shown that homeopathy's ideas are nonsense. Members ingested powerfull snake poison which would normally kill a person, except they diluted it to a homeopathic degree. Unsurprising, none of their members suffered any adverse effects. If homeopathy worked, they should've died because the heavily diluted snake poison retained it's power in a homeopathic dilutation, but they didn't even notice anything, let alone die. That pretty much demonstrated that even if there's any healing power in what they put in homeopathy (for which there's no evidence) even then it wouldn't have any effects. Original link in Dutch: In addition, everyone can reason to the same conclusion by themselves: Ever had a bad headache so you took a painkiller? If so, how much of it did you take? Take that amount, and divide by several million. You'd probably be left with a tiny grain of the entire pill you took. Do you think that tiny grain would also have suppressed your headache? Homeopathy says it would've worked as good or better as the entire pill/the normal dosage. | |
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Hello fellow escapists. I'm sorry to tell you but this will not be an informative thread, it will be me asking for your help in convincing my father Homeopathy is bollocks.
As I have gathered so far, Homeopathy claims that if you dilute water enough so it would only have a tiny amount of the material it once had, it would gain healing powers...
This might be correct, incorrect or an oversimplification , but I would like to ask for your help and tell me more about this and how I can convince my father it is Bollocks. Sources are advised.