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by Elliotte Rusty Harold.
Original Post: Who Says Homeopathy Can't Hurt?
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There’s a popular belief about homeopathy and other folk cures that “It can’t hurt”. You might as well try it. Sadly that isn’t true as this case indicates. It seems that “A chewing gum company turned cold remedy manufacturer” was selling a homeopathic nasal spray that destroyed people’s sense of taste and smell.
For a long time, I didn’t know much about homeopathy, and just thought it was some sort of mild herbal medicine. Then one day while I was waiting for a prescription to be filled at my pharmacist’s I picked up a pamphlet advocating homeopathy and started reading. It very quickly became obvious that it was total quackery.
One reason (of several) that I figured out immediately that homeopathy was bunk were the persistent claims that there were absolutely no negative side effects and no possibility of them. The simple truth is that any medicine that’s powerful enough to do good very likely has the possibility to do bad as well. Real medicines are tested for both good and bad effects to verify that the good outweighs the bad for the intended patients. Many are only allowed to be dispensed under the supervision of a physician and a pharmacist. Sadly homeopathic remedies aren’t real medicines and aren’t subject to the same rigorous tests and procedures that genuine pharmaceuticals are.
As long as alternative medicine (alternative to medicine, really) is allowed it will be filled with fakes and fraudsters, con men and criminals, who prey on the desperate. Some are just in it for the money, but many of these evildoers seem to genuinely believe in what they’re doing. That makes it all the more important to regulate them out of existence. If there’s any truth at all to the wacky ideas that permeate the field, it is drowned in a sea of wishful thinking and incompetent amateur research. There’s a reason it takes years of study to become a doctor or a pharmacist or a Ph.D: medicine is hard. You can’t become a healer just because you want to be. You have to work at it, and these alternative shysters would rather just put out a shingle and make it up as they go along. If they act nice and sound convincing, too many people won’t realize they’re talking out of their posteriors.
Of course, not all M.D.s deserve to be called scientists or even understand basic research principles. I’ve met a few who really didn’t learn anything in Biology class except how to memorize the textbook. They got good scores on the MCATs by memorizing the definition of “double blind” without ever knowing what it was or why it mattered. Some of these are wasting their time and their patients money and lives prescribing homeopathic medicines. But the fact is most people who make it through medical school or vet school or pharmacy school have at least some background in science, and requiring a genuine degree before one is allowed to practice their crazy ideas on unsuspecting patients would at least weed out a large percentage of the wanna-bes and diploma-mill “graduates” that have caused so much pain and suffering.
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