Homeopathy: the billion-dollar placebo industry

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According to a number of studies conducted by scientists from Australia regarding 68 different diseases, a special commission made the following conclusion: homeopathy is a placebo industry (with billions of dollars in revenue). A total of 176 separate studies were conducted , with an additional rating of 57 scientific reviews. The project manager, Professor Glasziou, published the results of his work on the British Medical Journal. In particular, he pointed out that with the help of homeopathic remedies aimed at treating 68 different diseases, 0 people were cured, an effective effect was achieved on 0 diseases.

According to Wikipedia, homeopathy - a type of alternative medicine, involving the use of highly diluted drugs, which are supposed to cause symptoms in healthy people, similar to the symptoms of a patient’s disease. The concept of treatment according to the pseudoscientific principle “similar to the like” (lat. Similia similibus curantur) is opposed by homeopaths to the principles of rational pharmacotherapy. The founder and author of the term is the German physician Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843).

Proponents of homeopathy claim that if you have a substance that causes the symptoms of the disease that are characteristic of a particular patient, then if you dilute this substance, we get a cure for the disease. The content of the starting substance in the solution of a homeopathic remedy is calculated not even by percentages, but by molecules, and it is not a fact that such a molecule will be caught in a bubble with a “medicine”. But the proponents of homeopathy appeal to the "memory of water", which somehow acquires the properties of a dissolved substance.

For all these ideas for more than a hundred years, scientists have repeatedly refuted the medicinal properties of homeopathic medicines. But this does not stop the proponents of homeopathy. People are actively buying "medicines" of this kind, and every pharmacy must have a counter with "homeopathic remedies." In 2007 alone, the United States spent about $ 2.9 billion dollars on such drugs.

Doctors are trying to deal with homeopaths, although at first glance there is nothing wrong with this - after all, what harm can water do to a person? But there is harm - after all, supporters of homeopathy who are ill with something, first try homeopathic remedies, missing the time needed to treat the disease at the initial stage. And only then, when nothing helps, does the person begin to use conventional medicine, but in some cases it is already too late. The same positive aspects that occur during treatment with homeopathy are a manifestation of the natural processes of healing the body.

Professor Glazy says: "I can well understand why Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, was unhappy with the state of 18th-century medicine, such as bloodletting, and was trying to find an alternative to such methods."

But now is not the 18th century, and it is worth stopping to believe in such miracles. Nevertheless, in the same UK, two hospitals officially use homeopathy and other dubious practices of alternative medicine.