Saturday, December 1, 2007

Homeopathy is quackery

BBC NEWS | UK | Concern over HIV homeopathy role: "Doctors and health charities have expressed concern about a conference which will examine the role of homeopathy in treating HIV. The event includes discussion of what have been described as 'healing remedies' for HIV and AIDS."

If they're going to play doctor, then they should be liable for malpractice. It is time we started to hold "complementary and alternative medicine" aka "evidence-free medicine" practitioners accountable for their claims.

Rather than burden you with a long-winded rant, I'll just point you at Ben Goldacre's blog.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A Dog in the manger policy? When you cant cure AIDS then why come in others way? If your evidence based medicine has a perfect cure for AIDS come out with it. It appears the modern medical system is worried about the success of Homoeopathy in a host of ailments and if it succeeds in curing or even controlling AIDS they may be out of business !! Otherwise the fear of this sugar pills or plain water ( as is being made out by its critics) therapy is unfounded if it was not really working. That itself is a proof that Homoeopathy works !!!!

Pigasus said...

Krishna,

Thanks for dropping by and thanks for the comment.

I would first recommend you go to the North American Society of Homeopathy and read their code. http://www.homeopathy.org/code.html

According to the NASH, homeopathy isn't appropriate for treating any disease, not just AIDS.

<--snip-->
3.04 Each patient must be informed that the goal of the professional homeopath is to help strengthen the constitution and thereby raise the general level of health of the patient/client. It is not to treat any particular disease or condition but to stimulate the vital force.
<--snip-->

Promoting ineffective remedies is unethical and wrong. Bringing attention to the fact that homeopathy is quackery is not proof that homeopathy works. That proof would be a large number of peer reviewed studies that showed homeopathic remedies performed better than placebos.

The burden is on the homeopaths to prove that homeopathy works.

As long as homeopaths resort to mumbo-jumbo like "vital force" without ever defining what vital force is or how it would be measured, people are going to point and laugh.

Unknown said...
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