Every Homeopathic Eye Drop Should Be Pulled Off the Market, FDA Says 177
An anonymous reader shares a report: This year has been marked by many terrifying things, but perhaps the most surprising of the 2023 horrors was ... eye drops. The seemingly innocuous teeny squeeze bottle made for alarming headlines numerous times during our current revolution around the sun, with lengthy lists of recalls, startling factory inspections, and ghastly reports of people developing near-untreatable bacterial infections, losing their eyes and vision, and dying.
Recapping this unexpected threat to health, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released an advisory titled "What You Should Know about Eye Drops" in hopes of keeping the dangers of this year from leaking into the next. Among the notable points from the regulator was this stark pronouncement: No one should ever use any homeopathic ophthalmic products, and every single such product should be pulled off the market. The point is unexpected, given that none of the high-profile infections and recalls this year involved homeopathic products. But, it should be welcomed by any advocates of evidence-based medicine.
Recapping this unexpected threat to health, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released an advisory titled "What You Should Know about Eye Drops" in hopes of keeping the dangers of this year from leaking into the next. Among the notable points from the regulator was this stark pronouncement: No one should ever use any homeopathic ophthalmic products, and every single such product should be pulled off the market. The point is unexpected, given that none of the high-profile infections and recalls this year involved homeopathic products. But, it should be welcomed by any advocates of evidence-based medicine.
Why only eyedrops? (Score:5, Insightful)
Allowing fake medicine to give the appearance of being real medicine is a huge disservice to the rather large part of the population that cannot fact-check for shit.
Re: Why only eyedrops? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't take money from scammers who make political donations.
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Re: Why only eyedrops? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference between "Does nothing" and "Destroys your eyes or kills you".
Re: Why only eyedrops? (Score:4, Informative)
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It's not that the eyedrops were destroying eyes. The safety levels weren't up to standards, so the eyedrops potentially were unsafe.
The standards and safety checks don't apply to homeopathic eyedrops, so the odds of them being safe are much lower. The FDA probably has a reason to suspect the quality isn't good, but they don't have the power to act directly.
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People dying [cnn.com] is not just "potentially" unsafe. But yes, homeopathic products don't get even that level of oversight.
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Ugh, that's from an older recall. Not the most recent recall, which was what the previous poster had linked to. The last I heard, there was no evidence of anything bad happening from the recent recall, it was just precautionary.
Yeah, it's all bad.
Re: Why only eyedrops? (Score:5, Funny)
I tried those eyedrops and now I don't see the difference.
Re: Why only eyedrops? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Why only eyedrops? (Score:4, Informative)
Is your argument seriously that the small-scale production with no regulation can only be safer than the regulated large-scale production?
There will be orders of magnitude more 'real' eye drops made than homeopathic ones. Rule of large numbers says those eye drops are then, on average, also more likely to be in the spotlight for something going wrong. But it's also proof that if something can go THAT BADLY WRONG with the regulated stuff then the unregulated stuff has the potential for at least as bad or worse side effects, and when that eventually happens there's nothing in place to track down where all the stuff went.
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But it's also proof that if something can go THAT BADLY WRONG with the regulated stuff then the unregulated stuff has the potential for at least as bad or worse side effects, and when that eventually happens there's nothing in place to track down where all the stuff went.
My local pharmacy has Homeopathic stuff adjacent to regulated stuff, I don't want fakes in my eyes. I have moderate eye issues and get injections and use drops of various kinds. I don't need bullshit eye medicine in the same department or even store, put it in the pet food isle.
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Re: Why only eyedrops? (Score:5, Informative)
The evidence is that saline is dangerous if it doesn't have added preservatives. Salt alone doesn't do the job. This is exactly why non-preservative saline (which many, but not all, need for various medical reasons) comes in non-resealable containers. It's also why safety is even more important in this case.
Something tells me that homeopathic types believe "preservatives are the hippie devil!" in addition to the other bullshit they're already infamous for, let alone giving two shits about keeping saline sterile. And if they're doing what I think they're doing, then homeopathic saline isn't going to see entire lots contaminated all at once.
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Did you read the story? Because that's not what it said.
Here's what it said: "none of the high-profile infections and recalls this year involved homeopathic products."
The "point" of the story is that homeopathic eyedrops are not the problem and therefore we should ban homeopathic eyedrops.
So the FDA wants to ignore actual evidence and instead ban salt water.
Honestly, that reasoning sounds kind of normal for American politics.
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Homeopathic eye drops are pretty much whatever, because how would you know what is actually in them when there's no oversight of how they are produced?
It can be demineralized water, it can be saline, it can be runoff from the chemical factory ... no one checks. That's the whole problem.
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The point is that without being produced in a regulated environment, you really have NO way of knowing what's in them. Could be harmless, could be harmful. There's no way for you to know.
I, for one, would never ever trust a homeopathic 'doctor' to prescribe me anything. He could have made the 'magic water' in his basement last night and god only knows what he may have used for the 'base', or what other contaminants might have been introduced.
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Even if that were true (it isn't), marketing a placebo to people makes them less likely to seek actual treatment.
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Exactly, and then it may be too late. For reference, see 'Cancer'.
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The homeopathic remedies that the FDA wants to ban contain no medicine and do not claim to have any therapeutic effect.
Bullshit. Homeopathic nonsense is packed in such a was as to be difficult to distinguish from real medicine. The often use the same colors, similar imagery, even including what appears to be an ordinary "Drug Facts" label listing the "active" ingredients, uses, and even warnings!
The intent is very clearly to deceive people into thinking that these products are no different from the real stuff.
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Mainly because homeopathic remedies are essentially water. Whatever you think of the theory, it involves dissolving stuff into water to the point where none of the original supposedly active substance probably remains in any given sample of the product.
Contamination would make it not a homeopathic remedy.
I suggest that the FDA statement is projection; the regulated eye drops were crap, so let's deflect and attempt to extend our power to ineffectually regulate. The ineffectual part is not in question; the
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Mainly because homeopathic remedies are essentially water. Whatever you think of the theory, it involves dissolving stuff into water to the point where none of the original supposedly active substance probably remains in any given sample of the product.
Contamination would make it not a homeopathic remedy.
I suggest that the FDA statement is projection; the regulated eye drops were crap, so let's deflect and attempt to extend our power to ineffectually regulate. The ineffectual part is not in question; the presence of the crap eye drops on the market is not in question.
Could be worse. Could be ayurvedic eyedrops with arsenic and other heavy metals.
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That's the whole point - there will never be a safety recall on the homeopathic ones because there are no safety standards or checks on them.
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"Especially big pharma" - I think you seem to be confused, it's Big Parma that wants to put microchips in your body [yahoo.com]. Simple spelling mistake!
There's very, very few of those (Score:2)
Hell, the FDA just made stores take Benadryl off the market because it does fuck all (tylenol is still sadly still around even though it screws your liver and at best is a mild fever reducer).
The FDA's biggest problem is they're not given enough power. They've actually got enough laws in place from Congress but the courts have been so completely packed by pro-corporate judges from the Heritage Foundation th
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He was trying to make a comment about what was being marketed as Sudafed PE, but like always he doesn't know anything about what he is talking about.
He just parrots whatever John Oliver or Rachael Maddow told him to think. Except unlike an actual parrot does not even get that right.
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Don't take money from scammers who make political donations.
But that would destroy American politics!
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Not so much an avoidance of facts as a rejection of them. It is a matter of faith that they work and they are really into the idea of "having control over their health" regardless of the facts and that somehow the path to health is outside of conventional medicine. I point out to them that alternative medicines are also in the money making business.
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Hear hear.
Re:Why only eyedrops? (Score:5, Informative)
False. Straight from the FDA [fda.gov]:
"some of these products have been found to contain measurable amounts of active ingredients and therefore could cause significant patient harm"
The homeopathic theory is that you can take something that IS harmful, dilute it to the point of no longer being harmful, and then put it in a human body to provoke an immune response. Well, if you don't dilute the harmful thing enough, then the homeopathic is still harmful. Its exactly the kind of mistake that humans are prone to make.
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Yeah, there's horror stories with some homeopathic products, like Hyland's teething product made from nightshade. Not just a one-off incident, but repeated incidents.
It's kind of sad, because, while homeopathy has always been a quack, it started out among the least harmful quacks. Samuel Hahnemann was operating in the late 1700s / early1800s, where most doctors had little to no training and just operated on their personal pet theories or "what they heard" worked, most medicines and treatments were quack m
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No it didn't. Homeopathy's core idea is "like cures like." Originally that meant that you should treat the patient with the something that causes symptoms like theirs. And that's it. No dilution. Preferably you chose a dose that didn't kill them. That proved to be a bit unpopular with patients. Diluting away any active ingredient made for a much more pleasant experience.
Other forms of medicine at the time might help you or hurt you or do nothing, but OG homeopat
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Not me...I'm sticking with Theodoric of York [youtu.be].
Once you find a good barber, you stick with him!!
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The homeopathic theory is that you can take something that IS harmful, dilute it to the point of no longer being harmful
No. That is not what homeopathic theory says. The active ingredient is not diluted until it is harmless. It is diluted until it no longer exists at all.
The standard dilution is a 100-fold dilution 100 times. That is a total dilution of 10^200. For comparison, the number of quarks in the universe is 10^80.
Well, if you don't dilute the harmful thing enough, then the homeopathic is still harmful.
If it still contains active ingredients, then it is NOT homeopathic. That's not what homeopathic means.
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"It is just sterile saline."
Well...
The problem is that, if you're a scammer who wants to make money off of something that doesn't work in the first place, it's a very small step from "actually sterile saline" to "filtered water with some salt in it" or "just tap water." "Sterile" is just a marketing feature.
Even the people who think they're selling something that works tend to have minimal training, and will often make boneheaded mistakes - such as ordering their entire supply from somewhere with not-too-st
Re:Why only eyedrops? (Score:5, Informative)
But there is also no evidence that they cause any harm. Why would they? The whole point of homeopathy is that there's nothing in it. It is just sterile saline.
The problem is 1) they are not just saline as they can contain different "home" ingredients like castor oil (hence the term homeopathic) 2) they are not always sterile enough for the eyes. They might be sterile enough for ingestion but anything that goes into the eyes requires a higher level of sterility.
The purpose of FDA regulations is to prevent harm, not to impose conformance on irrational people.
The FDA is talking about eye drops that are being sold to the public. If you want to mix your own concoction at home for your eyes, the FDA has less concern about that.
Homeopathy is basically a religion. The government should not be banning harmless products any more than they should be closing churches.
Except for the parts where there is great potential for harm and the FDA is specifically concerned about products that are sold to the public, you would have a point. Ignoring those points really undermines your argument.
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Minor correction: it comes from "homoeo-", meaning "similar to", from ancient Greek hómoios, meaning "similar, the same". Same root as, for example, homeostasis, homeomorphism, homeokinesis, etc.
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If the FDA wants to require efficacy, they're going to have to crack down HARD on a lot of existing pharmaceutical products. One recent ones is the various nasal congestion products that replaced the actually effective ones containing pseudoephedrine.
Not to mention the crazy expensive drugs that are no better than the merely very expensive drugs they replace.
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None of the homeopathic eyedrops say that they actually work. That would be illegal since they don't.
I worked for a company that made personal medical alarms. It's illegal to say the alarms save lives unless the company has them certified as class 1 medical devices. Homeopathic products are sold as "supplements" thus aren't regulated by the FDA. Some homeopathic products may work, but without paying for the certification, they can't legally claim specific benefits. I also worked for an essential oils company. This company did their own research to test for purity and and effectiveness, but because essentia
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Pull ALL the homeopathic products (Score:3, Insightful)
It's *all* bullshit - even if it doesn't directly physically harm you, it's harming you financially (you wasted money on it), and it's indirectly harming you physically because you're not seeking an actual treatment that will work for your condition. Yank 'em all until "proven SAFE and EFFECTIVE".
Re: Pull ALL the homeopathic products (Score:2)
Homeopathic liquids are essentially just water. There's no reason for them to go through safety studies because there is a provision for basic foods to be assumed safe.
Homeopathy (Score:5, Informative)
Thing is, "homeopathy" isn't a recognized regulatory category, so it can mean literally anything. The "Homeopathic" Zicam nasal spray had so much zinc in it it cauterized your nasal cavity.
Also, even purely homeopathic water-based products are going through an industrial process. There can be bacterial growth in the distilling vats, or dirty containers. If you are putting this stuff in your eye it could cause problems.
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I have a bachelor's degree in pharmacy, but have not practiced in almost four decades, since I switched careers to the newfangled computer stuff.
From what I remember (Industrial Pharmacy courses), all eye drops and ointments should be sterile, just like any injected medicine or
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I disagree (as covered elsewhere). As long as they're not making a specific claim, I think it's fundamentally wrong to ban commercially available homeopathic treatments.
"This product will absolutely cure your stage 3 lymphoma1" - Ban that fucker.
"I've been taking this product for three months, and I feel better. Things seem clearer to me, I can focus more easily, and my life is improved." - Don't ban. (Stolen from an add for something that rhymes with "Revagen").
Homeopathy shouldn't be banned, because that
Re: Homeopathy (Score:2)
I think a good middle ground, that may satisfy both parties here, may be a certification of some kind that can be displayed on the product. That would give the consumer information (oh, this product is certified by the FDA) and let them decide, without limiting freedom of choice.
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Like "Certified Organic"? :)
Don't forget it's poison (Score:2)
Every now and then they don't dilute enough and kill a bunch of babies. Adults survive because the dose ends up being low enough but the babies aren't so lucky. Happens about every 10 yea
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What? The F in FDA stands for "food." The D gets all the attention, but the FDA, and other agencies in the US and around the world, enforce food safety standards. Bottled water is regulated by the FDA in the US.
Its the placebo effect (Score:2)
Which is a real effect. Obviously homeopathy is scientific BS but its also harmless (unless people take it in preference to real medicine) and if the placebo does kick in them it can have positive effects.
A few people in my family are into it but when they got really ill they didn't reach for a pot of diluted jasmine pills, they headed to the real doctor for real medicine. Homeopathy seems more like recreational medicine to me for hypocondriacs who arn't actually sick but think they are.
Why just eye drops? Should ban all homeopathics (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sometimes homeopathic "remedies" are poorly mixed so they contain an even higher percentage water than they are supposed to, except a few bottles which contain a deadly dose of whatever-it-is. Like, say, aconitum... which is "prescribed" for people with anxiety. You know what they should be anxious about? The chance of the shit they're taking as a remedy paralyzing or killing them.
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Then again, since it's just water they have a better safety profile than several completely ineffective drugs that have real side effects.
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It is possible, yet the non-homeopathic eyedrops are the ones that caused terrible infections, loss of vision, and a death or two. So we have one group of risks that all drugs and homeopathics are subject to and an additional set of risks that only the non-homeopathic drugs carry. If the 'drug' is no more effective than homeopathy (as is the case for several 'drugs' now), then the risk-benefit is notably WORSE than homeopathic.
Re: Why just eye drops? Should ban all homeopathic (Score:2)
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Since I EXPLICITLY stated that there is a category of risk both are subject to, I can only conclude you've been using some of those bad non-homeopathic eyedrops. Or at least you are over due for a visit with your optometrist.
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Contaminated water is harmful. Contaminated drugs are harmful. Clean water is never harmful (at least not in the amounts you might take as a drug). Clean drugs may still be harmful (and often are for some people).
Fen-Phen for example is pretty damned worthless for lasting weight loss but nasty side effects caused a few deaths and others needed a lung transplant. No homeopathic diet drops would have caused that (of course they wouldn't have caused weight loss either).
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Why do we allow the equivalent of snake oil salesmen inside CVS, Walmart, etc.?
Probably for the same reason they allow liquor and tobacco sales: Profit Baby!
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Hyperpathics. (Score:2)
Liquor and tobacco aren't riddled with homeopathic liquor that contains no alcohol but imperosnates liquor, or homeopathic tobacco that contains no nicotine but impersonates tobacco.
Considering alcohol has plenty of toxic capability to harm or kill by consuming far less than you could walk out the door with by the unregulated gallon-jug case, along with the other 200+ chemicals and known carcinogens wrapped up with a few shreds of tobacco leaf in every cigarette, perhaps the term hyperpathic needs to be realized; for products formerly naturally diluted that have been amplified instead to maximize addiction and harm.
I'd say today's cigarette is quite the warped impersonation/abomination
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Wow - a CEO who did something very decent (Score:2)
Have I just entered an alternative reality ;)
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Indeed.
And why just homeopathy? Faith healing, magic crystals, reiki, "energy" therapies, and about a thousand other such quackeries should all be pulled, or, at the very least, made to display in large prominent letters something to effect of "THIS PRODUCT DOES NOTHING."
It's a bit ridiculous that pharma companies spend upwards of $1 billion to bring a new drug to market, whereas any idiot can sell chalk dust as a magic cure-all, so long as they don't actually make any explicit claims.
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CVS and Walmart are not the guardians of health care. If you want to put that responsibility on them, I'd suggest that desire is woefully misplaced.
And what's wrong with snake oil? Unless it's got actual venom in it, there's nothing wrong with selling it. Just don't claim it does something verifiable.
Just use the fraud laws already in place. No need to ban a whole class of products for being ineffectual - there's massive spillover into almost every part of life. Imagine holding religions up to the standard
Re: Why just eye drops? Should ban all homeopathic (Score:2)
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The world would be a better place if we COULD do that.
Some do work though (Score:2)
There should be a requirement that the health product actually contains something that helps your health. Homeopathic products do not actually contain any medicine and are equivalent to magic water (or powder or whatever)
Some of them actually do what they are supposed to though.
As an example, during peak covid I ended up with pink eye. Not wanting to go to the doctors during a disease epidemic I decided to try colloidal silver dropped in the eye with an eye dropper for a few days which I had heard of as being a viable remedy from a few sources and there is decent enough data on its anti bacterial properties. Worked great although apparently what we call pink eye can come from either a bacterial or viral source and I'm prett
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Ah my mistake. I looked it up to verify and I most definitely was not using the proper definition of homeopathic there. Thanks for the correction.
As for the rest, I believe those negative symptoms are all from prolonged use, at least if I'm remembering them correctly from when I looked them up prior to trying colloidal silver several years ago. Given that I used the drops for less than a week I didnt feel too concerned especially since quite a lot of FDA approved modern medicine isnt meant for prolonged use
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I didn't give a crap abou
FDA just recalled all medical saline and sterile w (Score:2)
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning consumers, health care providers, and health care facilities not to use recalled saline (0.9% sodium chloride) and sterile water medical products manufactured by Nurse Assist, LLC, and sold under various brands.
On November 6, 2023, Nurse Assist, LLC announced a recall of the following water-based medical pr
Missed the window.. chiming in anyway. (Score:3)
Only the first post that says some version of "fixed that for you" deserves the nod.
Naturopathic treatments should always be looked at with suspicion. Most are just safe placebos. Some small number of them actually do something medical, but often not what you expect them to. Homeopathy is just plain fucking stupid. But in general, it's not the relative efficacy or usefulness of the product that's problematic here... it's the cleanliness.
The items shouldn't be recalled because they are homeopathic - they should be recalled because the factories are dirty. That would be the same suggestion if the eyedrops were made by Bausch in a contaminated facility.
Nobody should ban a homeopathic substance on the basis that it's just water. It's perfectly fine to sell people snake oil, so long as it's "clean" oil, and you don't say exactly what it does. Fleecing the gullible is a tradition as old as time, and it shouldn't be eliminated. Otherwise you'd have to address it in politics too... imagine that.
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People got a lot of things wrong for thousands of years. Chinese traditional treatments are no different. Every time you look at them in detail, they come up short on actual, measurable efficacy, and sometimes they're just flat out bad for you.
Some traditional Chinese medicines have value - and those things or their derivatives have been adopted into standard medicine. But you probably shouldn't run out and snort rhino horn to get an erection.
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What exactly is "successful" about it? That it didn't kill off the Chinese? Hell, even our version of quackery during the middle ages didn't accomplish that.
Electric Water? (Score:3, Interesting)
Years ago I dated someone who believed in a lot of, well, hooey. She came home excited one day because she had met someone selling "enhanced water" in mini-bottles with miracle-like healing properties. I expressed my skepticism, so she gave me the URL and I reviewed their website.
"See?" she said. "It's all very scientific. They transfer the healing charge into new batches just by mixing in a few drops of the previous batch." (Sound familiar, homeopathy fans?).
But there was no science on that website. Just a bunch of pseudo-science that would trick some non-science-literate readers. She spent months washing bottles, bringing them back to scam-central for reloading, and trying to sell these bottles of to others. She didn't make any money, and certainly wasted a lot of time. Finally, thankfully, she got wise and moved on.
This story demonstrates how easy it is to sell a good-sounding story to folks who are unwilling or unable to do some real digging.
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"folks who are unwilling or unable to do some real digging"
Or are just plain dumb.
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https://www.fda.gov/food/outbr... [fda.gov]
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
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A lot of people are so scientifically illiterate that they can't tell the difference between superstitious magical thinking and reasoned, logical, reproducible results. To a layperson if someone wears a lab coat then they must be doing real science. If the explanation is complicated enough people will buy into it. The con artists that build crackpot theories on a shaky or non-existent foundation get away with it because most people have no idea what a scientific foundation might look like.
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I dated a lady like that too. One month it was crystals, the next magnets, the next diodes(!), and so on. Eventually got tired of it - too bad, she was nice otherwise.
Follow the money (Score:2)
Around 2010, due to popular demand, we made a homeopathic version of our product. In other words, our manufacturing costs went to almost-zero, because people want their diluted product. Imagine homeopathic vitamin C. Cue the La Croix jokes.
Anyway, follow the money. Homeopathy is a manufacturers wet dream.
i used some homeo eye drops and... (Score:2)
Re: i used some homeo eye drops and... (Score:2)
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Lemme guess, it was gone in merely two weeks when it would have taken a whole of 14 days without?
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One time (Score:2)
One time I only took 1/10th of the recommended amount of homeopathic medicine and I overdosed. ;)
(Some of you will get it)
Get with the times (Score:3)
Homeopathetic medicine is so yesterday. I'm doing pizzapathy now. The process is very simple. I get those splitting headaches. Really bad. Every time I get one, I eat a pizza cardinale. And merely 2-20 hours later, my headache is gone. Gone! As if I never had one.
Sometimes, though, I have the pizza and it gets worse. That's how I know the pizza is actually working. That's the so-called aggravation. But I usually take another pizza cardinale and it cures it right away.
The pizza is made by Dr. Oetker [wikipedia.org], so as you can clearly see it's a medical product designed by a doctor. But big pharma, and the homepathetic industry in league with them, still keeps therapeutic pizzas down because they know exactly that nobody would buy their overpriced, worthless chemistry anymore if everyone knew that all they had to do is eat healthy and tasty pizza!
And don't tell me that's just observer bias and I'm imagining things. HE WHO CURES IS RIGHT!
How to judge if a homeopathic treatment worked (Score:2)
You can't. Whether a homeopathic treatment helped or not is impossible to tell. Both possibilities present exactly the same - you didn't die from whatever it is you think you're measuring. You got "better". So whether the treatment helped, or the body just healed as usual, you can never say. That's the beauty of treating something with water. It's innocuous, and you can't prove it didn't work. In a similar vein, I had friends that swore by Cold-FX, a product perfectly marketed. They got a tingle in their th
A triple test would reveal if it's real or placebo (Score:2)
Group one receives and is told they are receiving pure water
Groups two and three receives either the homeopathic remedy or pure water
Maybe group four receives and is told they are receiving the homeopathic medicine.
Our current understanding of the placebo effects suggests that we should see groups 2, 3 and 4 all see a significant and equally positive outcome compared to group 1.
The thing that gives gives ethics committees a problem is that explaining that this bottle of water MAY help you because of the pla
The placebo dilemma (Score:2)
A test of the placebo effect v homeopathic medicine would look something like this
Group one receives and is told they are receiving pure water
Groups two and three receives either the homeopathic remedy or pure water
Group four receives and is told they are receiving the homeopathic medicine.
Our current understanding of the placebo effects suggests that we should see groups 2, 3 and 4 all see a significant and equally positive outcome compared to group 1.
The thing that gives gives ethics committees a problem
Homeopathy has nothing to do ... (Score:2)
... with the problem. The problem is the drops being contaminated. Which shouldn't happen, no matter the ingredients of the eyedrops. Regulations need an update.
That aside, esotheric quasi-magic medicine such homeopathy actually has an overall positive health effect on society. No joke. The reason being that regular medicine and it's prescriptions are to a notable measure so false and off their original indication and required mode of responsible usage and therapy that they do more damage than some homepath
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Everytime I see Seneca the Roman I think of the indians of New York in the US.
Possibly because they lived and still live near me so I recognize them better.
Make homeopathic medicine mandatory (Score:2)