twistedmosaic

I was about to link my mother (a firm believer in homeopathic healing, but an otherwise extremely intelligent woman) to some James Randi youtubes about homeopathy, and I ran into a conundrum: Is the benefit of reducing someone's ignorance (and wasted money on sugar pills) worth the cost of destroying their faith in a placebo?

She only uses homeopathy for nuisance remedies (colds, allergies, etc), not as a replacement for modern medicine, and in this capacity, she seems pleased in their 'effectiveness'. Should I rob her of that in the name of enlightenment?

edit: For the purpose of this thread, plz assume that it is proven that homeopathy is placebo only. I do not wish to debate water vibration memory.

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Mantus

When my mom got sick she spent thousands of dollars trying to get better. Most of it was scams. Some of it made her feel worse. However it has been determined that what a person believes greatly influences how their body reacts. I never attacked my moms beliefs but simply slipped her enough information to find her own way.

Eventually she found her own way to believe in, and sustain, her personal health. Now she balks at homeopathic medicines believing them to be a complete scam but knows that it helped her form the beliefs she needed to live a healthy life.

pan6467

I am reminded of the one M*A*S*H episode where they ran out of morphine and had to give sugar water out.

It was based on a true study that found if people believe that something works, even if it is a placebo, the placebo will work for a certain percentage.

I am a firm believer in the powers of the mind and that if you truly believe something will work, it will work, maybe not to the full effect you need it to, but enough to make a slight difference.

If your mom believes this stuff works for her colds and allergies and to her the results are what she desires..... then let her. As long as she isn't spending her life savings and she is happy with the results, why worry?

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Hain

Instead of informing your mother of her ignorance, congratulate her on power to her herself. She only needed to think she was getting better and she did!

ratbastid

You don't need to change her thinking, you need to change yours.

If she thinks something works, and then it does... then guess what? It works! So why would you lie to her and tell her it doesn't, when it obviously does? Just because it works via some mechanism you disapprove of? How silly is that?

The_Jazz

Given that she's using it for minor ailments and not replacing modern medicine for the major stuff, what's the harm? As long as she's not using the usually recognized dangerous stuff (efedra/pseudo-efedra, St. John's wort, etc.), then there's little problem. Let her believe what she wants to believe. Any victory wouldn't be worth the battle.

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Johnny Rotten

After having my share of colds and allergies... I would actually prefer a non-pharmaceutical solution the next time I need relief. That stuff can make you feel weird, give you headaches, mess with your sleep patterns, and cause drowsiness and fogginess.

Personally, I think homeopathy is crap. But if it makes her feel better, well I'd argue that it's safer than OTC or prescription drugs.

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Willravel

The placebo effect can only do so much. When people start suggesting homeopathic medicine for cancer or pneumonia, they need to stop talking.

Wouldn't your mother be better off doing something about her medical issues that actually works because it works? Thinking away sneezing can't stop the release of histamines as a response to exposure to an allergen. I mean there are alternatives to Benadryl or Claritin, like local honey or air filters, but the placebo effect is really only relative.

Put me under the "tell her the truth" option.

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Ustwo

I had this come up here a while back and I left the thread rather then making it clear to someone that what they think was so good was total bullshit.

I've written two replies to this one to tell her and one not to, and deleted both.

The obviously easy one is to not tell her, and let her feel better because she took her magic pill.

The other is to tell her because she is being ripped off. They are selling snake oil and she is buying it. If your mother was being sold a service she thought she needed but they weren't really doing anything for her you would tell her and this is the same thing.

So I'd say it comes down to the kind of person your mother is, and how she reacts to this kind of knowledge. I personally would tell her, no reason to spend money on perpetuating the snake oil industry.

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Jinn

I echo Ustwo's sentiment that it really depends on your mother. I've got a hard-on for dispelling myths and quack science, but it really helps people to believe in something.

It's the same reason that I wouldn't tell people, even if I found some incontrovertible truth that God didn't exist. Some people need to believe in something bigger than themselves, or that what they're doing really helps.

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inBOIL

If she continues to believe in snake oil, then there's a chance that one day she'll use something that really is dangerous. For this reason alone I'd tell her.

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ratbastid

See, you've got two things to consider here. Your mom's health is one. Your relationship with your mom is the other. You MIGHT improve the former by barging in there and telling her that her beliefs are wrong, but I guarantee you WILL damage the latter.

Here's my advice: subscribe to the scientific method. If something works--even if it doesn't seem to you like it should work--then it works. I don't see why homeopathy should work, in fact it seems entirely bogus to me. But if she sees results she's happy with, then it's not our place to argue with her results.

If she were diagnosed with cancer (way to play the scare tactic there, by the way, guys) and wanted to do a homeopathy-only response to it, I'd want to follow the same philosophy. Do an experiment. Try it for a brief time--long enough to let it show results if it's going to, but not long enough to endanger her recovery in any significant way. I'd work with her doctor to figure out how long that is. If at the end of that period it's producing sufficient results (as had been defined prior to the experiment), then great, carry on, and continue to monitor it very closely for ongoing results the same as you would with any course of treatment. And if not, then switch to something else--probably something more traditional--and see if that produces results.

Ustwo

It would be a mighty fragile relationship for it to be damaged by saying homeopathic medicine doesn't work.

You don't try a known worthless treatment for a time for cancer, most cancers are not better treated by not treating them for a worthless experiment in order to show whats already known.

And if her doctor agreed to this in a non-terminal case, they should lose their license.

For the OP, telling/not telling, minor, as nothing is being harmed besides her pocket book a little, but I just can't even fathom letting my mothers cancer progress untreated (and homeopathy = no treatment) just so I don't have to explain to her why its worthless.

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ratbastid

Well, Ustwo, you're right. Damn the consequences and to hell with anyone--including loved ones--who disagree, but hey: at least you're right.

OBVIOUSLY I'm not saying to allow her to endanger herself by trying placebo-based treatment in the case of really serious illness. I guess it went without saying that I'm talking about dealing with a situation where somebody really had their heels dug in.

vanblah

If you have absolute proof that it is a placebo then it probably wouldn't hurt to present that evidence.

However, please keep in mind that not all homeopathy is bullshit.

Medicine itself is pretty much bullshit when you get right down to it. There is a lot of guess work in it ... however educated those guesses might be. Medicine (and homeopathy) are NOT exact sciences. Nothing to do with the human body is an exact science.

twistedmosaic

This? This is what I did not want. The part of homeopathy that isn't bullshit is the part affected by the placebo effect.

Anyways, thanks for the advice guys...I think I'm going to email her a link to a vid and see what she thinks. Not taking sides with it either way. She has her master's degree, and does some radical treatments on kids with autism...I think the fact that she is on the cutting edge of research that mainstream medicine doesn't understand (but that she can document works) makes her more likely to believe other fringe stuff. If she still wants to believe that water dilluted to such an extreme that it isn't statistically likely that even a single atom of the preperation is present in the dilution after knowing the facts, I'm not going to push the point.

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Jinn

Since vanblah opened the can of worms..

I must say that yes, homeopathy is bullshit. You're right that nothing is an exact science, but homeopathy is not science at all.

It does not work.

Experiment after experiment after test after test has shown that homeopathy in its current form does absolutely nothing for the human body beyond drinking a similar quantity of water would.

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ratbastid

Except that the placebo effect DOES work (or at least CAN work). It has been tested and proven to work--enough so that there's concern among the medical community that not controlling for placebo effect in randomized double-blind placebo-controlled studies may be causing an under-reporting of the actual efficacy of tested medicines. It's hard for people to accept, because it doesn't work via any mechanism that medical science can currently explain. But dismissing snake-oil out of hand simply because it's snake-oil begs the question.

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vanblah

So what was the purpose of asking? You basically said ...

"Hey, should I say something to someone that they may not agree with? Oh, by the way, only respond to this thread if you agree with me."

You must have missed the part where I said that if you have definitive proof that the product is a placebo then it probably wouldn't hurt to bring it up.

Besides, we aren't really talking about a placebo here. We are talking about a product that contains ingredients which are presumably sold as a treatment. I mean, have you analyzed the product and determined that it is indeed a sugar pill?

Where do you get your evidence that it does or does not work? The internet? Trade journals? Other doctors? Pharmaceutical companies? Pharmacists? So-called "Naturopaths"? All of them have a bias; with the possible exception of the internet which is so full of misinformation on BOTH SIDES that it's laughable.

For instance, there is new evidence that "the power of positive thinking" doesn't actually work either. So everyone who claims that just because a product made the patient "think" they felt better are full of shit according to this study.

Personally, I don't use ultimatums or broad-generalizations such as "all [insert generalization here] is bullshit." I am an open-minded skeptic ...

Ustwo

Actually the question isn't about if the placebo affect is real.

The 'gold standard' for a drug trial is the double blind with a placebo. If the drug doesn't do BETTER than the placebo, then its not a good drug, if it does, than you have a potential winner.

So the placebo affect is already built into the treatment, you ideally should be getting drugs which have already shown they are a better than just thinking you are taking the drugs.

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twistedmosaic

I almost didn't mention homeopathy, but I figured if I just called it 'something I know is a placebo' I'd get a thread full of "what is it?!" I wanted to discuss the philosophical implications, not the medical ones.

However, since I'm satisfied with the philosophical answers that I got, we can move on...

No, we really are talking about a placebo. Homeopathy contradicts everything we know about material, and specifically what we know about atoms and molecules. A 5 gram bottle of a 30X dilution (pretty much par for the course) means that it has been diluted to 1 part per 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. (10^30). Which is unfortunate, because 5 grams of sugar only has 8.8 x 10^21 molecules in it. This means that for every 5 gram bottle of homeopathic preparation, you have approximately one chance in 100,000,000 (one hundred million) of getting a SINGLE MOLECULE of the 'preparation'

Another example, from the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy

Go read the sources in that article if you are still curious curious.

Open minded I'll grant you, but if you're still not willing to admit that homeopathy is anything but snake oil, you're not much of a skeptic.

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ratbastid

It's worse than that. It's not just that the homeopathic preparation is vastly unlikely to contain any of the so-called "active" ingredient. It's that the active ingredient CAUSES the symptom that the preparation is intended to cure.

You take a substance, you give it to a person, and you see what happens to them. Say they get nauseated. Fine, so then you take some of that substance and put it in water. Then you dilute it like crazy. The more diluted it gets, the more powerful it "is". Now that water retains a vibrational memory of the substance that causes nausea--and the less there is actually IN that water, the more strongly it "wants" that substance. When someone experiencing nausea takes this preparation, the water will pull from their body the substance that causes that symptom.

Which, from a scientific point of view, is perhaps marginally better than holding a vibrating tuning fork against your head and whistling for UFOs. There's no reason at all that that should work.

I'm sticking to my guns on this one: if somebody's taking it, and it seems to be helping, and there's no reason to think they're harming themselves by taking it, then it's helping, and it's an act of purest egotism to try to talk them out of it.

vanblah

I never said that homeopathic remedies work or didn't work. I just said that not ALL homeopathy is bullshit. The "theory" behind it is sound (antibiotics and other inoculations) ... these compounds exist in nature therefore we should be able to take advantage of them in natural remedies (if you discount the spirituality side which is a whole other argument).

While I AM skeptical of almost all homeopathic remedies on the market I don't ever discount anything just because somebody says it's bullshit. I'm somewhat of a radical materialist when it comes to this kind of stuff--I need to see it to believe it (or disbelieve it). Would I use a homeopathic product? Probably not. Unless someone really had irrefutable proof that it worked.

Perhaps I should refine my stance ... I assumed (my bad) that you were lumping naturopathic "medicine" in with homeopathic remedies. While I am still skeptical of naturopathy I find the evidence for its success somewhat stronger than in so-called homeopathic remedies.

So it probably comes down to an argument of semantics and is pointless beyond entertainment. I also don't put a lot of stock in Wikipedia as a source ... especially in an article with an obvious bias starting as early as the second paragraph.