Does homeopathy work

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Residents of Russia continue to use homeopathy and believe in its effectiveness. The life hacker is figuring out if there is at least some scientific basis for this.

What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is a whole branch of alternative medicine, created by Samuel Hahnemann in the 18th century, in which it is believed that all diseases can be treated with several principles.

• Like cures like.
• The minimum doses of drugs are needed.
• It is necessary to treat not a disease, but a person.

This is the theory behind which homeopathic medicines are made.

In the 18th century, the popularity of homeopathy was understandable, because official medicine at that time was not far from it, and the process of treatment looked more like torture and experiments than helping a patient. But for some reason, they still believe in it.

How are homeopathic medicines prepared?

A substance is taken that causes symptoms similar to those of the disease. After all, like needs to be treated with like. Important: the symptoms that the person himself experiences are taken as a basis, the analyzes have nothing to do with it. For example, a symptom is a cough. We need to find a cough-inducing substance. Ordinary book dust will do just fine with this.

So, let's take a conventional book dust. To turn it into a homeopathic pill, you need to perform several rituals. First you need to dilute it.

Especially high dilutions are used in homeopathy. X stands for tenfold dilution, C for centesimal. Take the standard dilution of 30C. It means that book dust should be placed in a test tube with water in a ratio of 1: 99. Then take a drop from the resulting solution and put it back in a test tube with water (or alcohol, which is somewhat more fun), where there are already 99 drops. And so 30 times.

Each tube must be shaken 10 times. This is also an obligatory part of the ritual, without which the medicine will turn out to be wrong.

The final solution will be water and nothing else. Not a single molecule that was in a lump of book dust will be in a test tube. In the 18th century, when Hahnemann invented homeopathy, this was already guessed. After the discovery of atoms, the guesses were confirmed.

Where does the active effect come from if there are no molecules of the substance?

Nowhere. Research that there is no effect and cannot be. Homeopaths answer that information or a charge from a molecule of a substance is transferred into water, which "remembers" this information, and then translates it through the medicine into the body. This raises a lot of questions for which there is no exact answer.

• How does the water know what to transfer?
• There are a lot of impurities in the water, why doesn't it transmit information from them?
• Why does water "remember" a molecule of a substance, but not the glass walls of a test tube?
• When water is applied to sugar to make a tablet, it evaporates altogether. Remains "memory"?

Homeopaths admit that they have no idea about the exact mechanisms of charge transfer. But the tube is shaken because it charges the water better. And they also hope that science will definitely discover how the "memory of water" works.

And there is something to discover?

No. If homeopathy worked, scientific research would show it. And they demonstrate. And the World Health Organization homeopathy.

There are studies that show the benefits of beads and solutions. Only when they do it turns out that they do not meet scientific standards.

An individual approach also plays a role here. It is very convenient to say that homeopathic treatment cannot be verified by evidence-based medicine, because homeopathy is not for statistics, these are individual medicines (which does not prevent manufacturers from stamping and selling hundreds of drugs in pharmacies that supposedly will save everyone).

Homeopathy - is it harmful?

For your wallet. It is impossible to harm yourself with something that does not exist.

Homeopathy can do harm only in two cases.

• If you abandon the official treatment in favor of sugar grains soaked in "memory of water".
• If homeopaths decide not to dilute the active ingredients to the desired condition and the ingredients are in tablets.

Why is homeopathy so popular?

Because it is money and there is a demand for it. Medicine does not help everyone and not always, simply because it is impossible otherwise. But people want to believe that a good doctor will come, sew on the legs torn off by tram, like Aibolit, and we will again ride like bunnies.

A real doctor can't do that.

And then a homeopath appears on the scene, who says that these doctors do not know anything, one heals, the other cripples (in the latter, homeopaths are right: medicine is far from perfect). But the homeopath will cure you according to a specially designed one.

In general, there is a lot of magic in homeopathy, because it is impossible to explain without magic how starch and sugar can cure a person.

But there are herbs

Sometimes herbal ingredients are added to homeopathic medicines in therapeutic doses. And this is no longer homeopathy in the strict sense of the word. Sometimes pharmacies have separate shelves for homeopathic remedies, on which both homeopathy and preparations with herbal extracts are located.

This is a deception that only plays into the hands of homeopaths. A logical chain is activated: with herbs, it means natural; means harmless; means it will help and not harm. There are many holes in this chain (not all herbs are equally useful, and their uncontrolled intake can kill, herbal medicine is generally more complicated than chamomile tea). But the main thing is that quite a working herbal medicine is mixed with absolutely insane homeopathy.

In homeopathy. If they were there, then nothing was left of them by the final breeding. Except for the notorious "memory of water", which does not exist.

But I was prescribed homeopathy by a doctor, she is treated in Europe

Change your doctor. In theory, a medical representative cannot be a homeopath. But in practice, there are many homeopaths who were physicians in the past.

The reasons why initially sane people fell into charlatanism are sad. This is either hopeless poverty, because of which a person is ready to sell pacifiers to patients, or absolute incompetence. It is not known what is scarier.

Homeopathy is indeed treated in Europe. Only.

Some homeopathic medicines were officially supported by our Ministry of Health. This is also not a reason to pay for them.

And it helped me

We congratulate you. You have a strong body that coped well with the disease. Or your case is a manifestation of the placebo effect, which still exists.

And in double-blind, placebo-controlled, placebo-controlled people, there are people who get cured. You are one of those.

What is the life hack?

Nothing, we just care.

We are read by adults who can decide for themselves whether to take homeopathic remedies or not. But for some reason it is homeopathy that is advised as a medicine for children.

While on the playground, parents will say that they refused vaccinations because the homeopath advised so, they will take the children to church, not to, and their fashionable diets, we will talk about this.