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[wrong1]

Have to admit I didn't know much about homeopathic medicines before.
I've actually seen these on sale in Boots and other chemists.

What a ridiculous scam!

I love the vey logical:

High dilutionsThe extremely high dilutions in homeopathy have been a main point of criticism. Homeopaths believe that the methodical dilution of a substance, beginning

Comments

[wrong1]

Yeah, I've read some studies about the placebo effect, including one by an Italian guy who treated a terminally ill person with morphine, then replaced blind with saline and the guy was still comfortable, then blindly introduced an opiate blocker and the guy's pain came back, which seemed to point towards the notion that the guy's pain was being mediated either by opiates he was synthesising himself or something else interacting with his opiate receptors.

I don't believe homeopathic medicines work though. It's like any faith based remedy like reiki / crystals etc.. the desire to ascribe efficacy to something is quite high as it makes life more interesting.
Most of the things homeopathy are used to treat are things which can get better by themselves, I just think it's more palatable to romanticise that process. Maybe the doctors prefer to prescribe homeopathy rather than placebos because it just makes people happier to feel like they're treating stuff rather than faking it.

There doesn't seem to be any basis behind thinking that these substances leave an "energy imprint" (no explanation of which is attempted it would seem) other than because someone has said so and others have believed it. It seems to me that there are enough proponents of it that I would expect to see some decently conclusive research to have been done by now, if indeed it has any effect that differs significantly from placebos.

The part I've highlighted in bold above does kind of bring the whole "energy signature" thing into question too. I think for me, the Occam's razor approach here is that choosing between something with no molecules in, working through a process which contradicts chemistry, physics and biophysics; and the placebo effect, which is racking up evidence all the time, is to go with the latter. It makes no sense to me that something with nothing in it can have an actual effect, but it does make some sense that if your body repairs itself while taking something interesting (and the concept itself is an interesting one - bit like a potion), that you might like to reinforce the idea that it was due to the medicine and not through some psychological effect bolstering your immune response etc…

As soon as there's some decent evidence (the reports cited by the proponents on the wiki page have all been considered inconclusive or riddled with bias) to back it up, then count me in as a believer. Just doesn't make any sense whatsoever that it could do anything, and makes perfect sense that it was speciously dreamed up by its creator, then followed by others who took the idea on.

[wrong1]

That is pretty interesting.