Homeopathic Medicine is an Oxymoron

http://friendlyatheist.com/2010/05/30/homeopathic-medicine-is-an-oxymoron/

Next week, the British Medical Association may “lobby for homoeopathy to be banned from the UK National Health Service.”

It’s a long overdue move.

Homeopathic medicine is nothing but a placebo that gullible people choose to take. The government shouldn’t be paying for their delusional thinking.

Pratik Kanjilal writes in the Hindustan Times that this would be a foolish move. Here’s just one excerpt from his irresponsible piece:

… homoeopathy is routinely denounced because no one knows how it works. But a physician should be asking a simpler question: does it work for my patient? The doctor’s primary concern is to offer a cure, or at least comfort. Ruminations about its scientific basis come later. Many patients turn to alternative schools when mainstream medicine fails and leaves them facing chronic disability and pain, or the inscrutable mystery of death. Unless homoeopathy is unequivocally proven to be quackery, which is not the case, it is irresponsible of doctors to bar access to it. It smacks of scientific fundamentalism.

It. Is. Quackery. Unequivocal quackery.

Nothing happens to them. Because there’s nothing in those pills.

As if it ought to be the last word, Kanjilal finishes his piece with this:

And by the way, did I mention that Queen Elizabeth II has a personal homeopath?

Wow…. who cares.

I would think the Queen also has a real medical staff to look after her.

This whole article is representative of the homeopathic side: the pills make them feel good, so there must be some science involved.

Strong Words for Homeopathy

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/alternativemedicine/7728281/Homeopathy-is-witchcraft-say-doctors.html

Let's hope this message gets through:

"Hundreds of members of the BMA have passed a motion denouncing the use of the alternative medicine, saying taxpayers should not foot the bill for remedies with no scientific basis to support them.

The BMA has previously expressed scepticism about homoeopathy, arguing that the rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence should examine the evidence base and make a definitive ruling about the use of the remedies in the NHS.

Now, the annual conference of junior doctors has gone further, with a vote overwhelmingly supporting a blanket ban, and an end to all placements for trainee doctors which teach them homeopathic principles.

Dr Tom Dolphin, deputy chairman of the BMA's junior doctors committee in England told the conference: "Homeopathy is witchcraft. It is a disgrace that nestling between the National Hospital for Neurology and Great Ormond Street [in London] there is a National Hospital for Homeopathy which is paid for by the NHS".

The alternative medicine, devised in the 18th century by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann, is based on a theory that substances which cause symptoms in a healthy person can, when vastly diluted, cure the same problems in a sick person.

Proponents say the resulting remedy retains a "memory" of the original ingredient – a concept dismissed by scientists.

Latest figures show 54,000 patients are treated each year at four NHS homeopathic hospitals in London, Glasgow, Bristol and Liverpool, at an estimated cost of £4 million.

A fifth hospital in Tunbridge Wells in Kent was forced to close last year when local NHS funders stopped paying for treatments.

Gordon Lehany, chairman of the BMA's junior doctors committee in Scotland said it was wrong that some junior doctors were spending part of their training rotations in homeopathic hospitals, learning principles which had no place in science.

He told the conference in London last weekend: "At a time when the NHS is struggling for cash we should be focusing on treatments that have proven benefit. If people wish to pay for homoeopathy that's their choice but it shouldn't be paid for on the NHS until there is evidence that it works."

The motion was supported by BMA Chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum, though it will only become official policy of the whole organisation if it is agreed by their full conference next month.

In February a report by MPs said the alternative medicine should not receive state funding.

The Commons science and technology committee also said vials of the remedies should not be allowed to use phrases like "used to treat" in their marketing, as consumers might think there is clinical evidence that they work.

In evidence to the committee, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain said there was no possible reason why such treatments, marketed by an industry worth £40 million in this country, could be effective scientifically.

Advocates of homoeopathy say even if the effect of the remedies is to work as a placebo, they are chosen by thousands of people, and do not carry the risks and side effects of many mainstream medicines.

A survey carried out at England's NHS homeopathic hospitals found 70 per cent of patients said they felt some improvement after undergoing treatment.

Crystal Sumner, chief executive of the British Homeopathic Association (BHA), said attempts to stop the NHS funding alternative medicines ignored the views of the public, especially patients with chronic conditions.

She said: " Homeopathy helps thousands of people who are not helped by conventional care. We don't want it to be a substitute for mainstream care, but when people are thinking about making cuts to funding, I think they need to consider public satisfaction, and see that homoeopathy has a place in medicine."

She said junior doctors' calls for an end to any training placements based in homeopathic hospitals ignored the lessons alternative medicine could provide, in terms of how to diagnose patients.

Estimates on how much the NHS spends on homoeopathy vary. The BHA says the NHS spends about £4 million a year on homeopathic services, although the Department of Health says spending on the medicines themselves is just £152,000 a year.

Two weeks ago, a charity founded by the Prince of Wales to promotes alternative medicines announced plans to shut down, days after a former senior official was arrested on suspicion of fraud and money laundering.

The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health said its plans to close had been brought forward as a result of a fraud investigation at the charity.

George Gray, a former chief executive of the organisation, and his wife Gillian were arrested by Scotland Yard officers last month in an early-morning raid on their home in North London".

Homeopathy is a massive waste of taxpayer money and that talk about it being better than mainstream medicine is your typical, "we can't trust big-bad pharma" bullshit.

Nature Doesn't Always Equal Good

http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/05/05/naturopathic-medicine-be-aware-of-what-you-eat.aspx

Time to start moving away from this idea that naturopathic medicine is always a viable alternative to tried and true methods:

"Naturopathic Medicine Week is taking place from May 3rd to the 9th, and one of its aims is to promote the use of so-called "natural" medicines. Naturopathic products have gained a huge market in Canada and the US during the past decade. In a survey published by Health Canada in 2005, seven in ten Canadians reported that they have used natural health products; of this group, 38% reported that they have done so on a daily basis.

A study by the Canadian Health Food Association and Statistics Canada in 2007 showed that Canadians spend $3.6 billion annually on natural health products. But are we really getting what we paid for?

According to the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine (CCNM), naturopathic medicine is a system of primary health care that uses natural, vitalistic, and holistic methods and substances to support and stimulate the body's "inherent self-healing processes."
Naturopathic practitioners are trained in a variety of complementary/alternative therapies, such as herbal medicine,
homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, nutrition, as well as some forms of manual manipulation and lifestyle counseling.

Naturopathic medicine may sound appealing to the growing number of people interested in developing a more natural way of living. The promise of more gentle medicines with few if any side effects is a compelling one, especially for people dealing with chronic illness. However, it is important to note that not every plant in nature is gentle and harmless.

Many compounds found in plants are toxic, even in small doses. One herbal medication, Laetrile, an unproven cancer cure obtained from crushed apricot pits, contains large quantities of cyanide. Siberian ginseng, which is commonly prescribed as an "immune booster", contains male-hormone like substances, which could cause hormonal imbalances and liver problems. Any substance that can affect the body positively also has the potential to harm the body, and calling something
"natural" misleads the consumer into believing it is also safe.

A potentially lethal danger exists when mixing naturopathic substances with medically prescribed drugs. Most physicians are uninformed about which natural compound their patient is taking, leaving them unaware of how it may interact with other medications. In the past year both B.C. and Ontario naturopaths received permission from their provincial governments to prescribe mainstream medications, such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, opiates and anti-biotics.

After arguing against the use of these medications in the past, how can naturopaths argue that they should have prescribing rights for the same medications?

Patients must be better equipped to choose and distinguish between conventional medicine and non-evidence based alternatives. The widespread use of the term "alternative medicine" gives many people the impression that it is a valid alternative to conventional medicine, but this is very misleading. Most of the therapies that are labeled "alternative" or "complementary" are minimally effective and, in most cases, have no reliable evidence to support them. They are not
alternatives: they were abandoned by modern medicine when it was discovered that they did not work.

In contrast to conventional medicines, the mechanism through which a drug works in the majority of the naturopathic compounds is not clear. Claims about the dosage, application, timing, interactions, or efficacy of the ingredients are vague and, for the most part, uncertain and unpredictable. These and other issues surrounding naturopathic practice, which may jeopardize patient care and integrity of our health care system, are of a concern to many health care professionals and the scientific community.
Only five provinces have legislation governing Naturopaths: British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia. There are councils set up in these provinces to regulate the profession and they are charged to do so as per any other provincial regulatory health council.

In B.C. the main problem cannot be clearer. As stated directly in the Health Profession's Act: "The college must not act against a registrant or an applicant for registration solely on the basis that the person practices a therapy that departs from prevailing medical practice unless it can be demonstrated that the therapy poses a greater risk to patient health or safety than does prevailing medical practice" The B.C. government is not concerned if the naturopath's claims of efficacy are unfounded, and they can even cause harm to the patient, as long as it is no more harm than the current standard of
care in mainstream medicine. Risk assessment without taking into account the benefits of a given treatment is a questionable health policy.

The Natural Health Products Directorate (NHPD) is the regulating authority for natural health products, ensuring their safety, efficacy and quality. We have to hold natural health products up to the same standards as conventional drugs and demand that the manufacturers provide solid evidence of the product's effectiveness, not just a safety profile. This is the only way to ensure that the public will not be duped into purchasing ineffective products or abandoning proven mainstream interventions"

Acupuncture and Labour Pains

http://www.irishhealth.com/article.html?id=17233

Are you thinking about using acupuncture to reduce labour pains? According to a new study, you’d be best to think again:

“Acupuncture does not appear to help with labour pains, according to new research.
The use of acupuncture to manage pain in labour started in the 1970s, however evidence of its benefits remains unconvincing. Despite this, its use and that of other forms of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) continue to be popular in pregnancy.

UK and Korean researchers carried out a major review of acupuncture trials that have been carried out worldwide. Their study focused on women who received acupuncture alone or those receiving acupuncture and a conventional form of analgesia (painkiller) for pain relief in labour.

According to the researchers, the large variation in the trial results made interpretation difficult. However overall, they found little convincing evidence that women who had acupuncture experienced less labour pains than those who received no pain relief, a conventional analgesia, a placebo or sham acupuncture.

In the trials that compared acupuncture to conventional pain relief, the researchers noted that the women who received acupuncture required less pethidine - a commonly used painkiller - or other forms of analgesia. They said that a possible explanation for this finding is that the women felt that they were already being treated and therefore did not need another form of pain relief.

The researchers pointed out that a previous review, carried out in 2004, appeared to indicate that acupuncture could help with labour pains. However in this latest, larger review, ‘acupuncture did not seem to have any impact on other maternal or fetal outcomes', although it was not ‘associated with harm' either.

"However, there was no convincing evidence that women receiving acupuncture experience less labour pain than those in the control groups. Acupuncture might reduce the use of other forms of pain relief such as pethidine, but the evidence is limited. To summarise, the current evidence does not appear to recommend the use of acupuncture for labour pain," the team said.

Details of these findings are published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

Commenting on the findings, BJOG editor-in-chief, Prof Philip Steer, noted that ‘pain is a very subjective response'.

"Labour pain can be so intense that the woman feels she would do anything to minimise the sensation of pain. Acupuncture is a drug-free approach and that may explain why some women prefer its use during labour. This research has shown that there were no adverse outcomes to mother and baby for those who had acupuncture to control pain during labour," he said.

He acknowledged that the findings showed that in a ‘very small number of cases', acupuncture may be of help, usually for very short periods of time after treatment. However he said this may be down to a psychological rather than a physiological effect.

"Generally, the consensus is that the evidence does not support its use. In contrast, there is good evidence showing a benefit from emotional support during labour, so we should concentrate our efforts on making sure that all women have the benefit of one-to-one care at this crucial time," Prof Steer added.”

At its’ best it sounds as if acupuncture works well as a placebo.

Colonic Hydrotherapy

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tomchivers/100007943/take-one-sturdy-hosepipe-surely-the-weirdest-alternative-medicine-ever/

Tom Chivers discusses colonic hydrotherapy:

“Bit a propos of nothing, this, but bear with me. Cycling through Islington this afternoon (and feel free to judge me just for typing that phrase) I saw an advert that made me do a double-take. On the front of an otherwise ordinary-looking chemist’s, in foot-high letters underneath an image of a smiling young woman, it said “colonic hydrotherapy”.

Yes: a high street shop cheerfully advertising that, for money, it will stick a hosepipe up your hole and squirt 30 pints of water up there. But in a holistic way, obviously. It is said to cure the usual panoply of ills. I know it’s hardly new – apparently the ancient Egyptians were well into it – but I find the whole idea terrifying.

I can sort of understand the appeal of other alt-med quackery. Homeopathy, in the end, is just taking a couple of harmless tablets and talking to a nice man for three-quarters of an hour. Reflexology and the various other ones, reiki and whatnot, you get a nice massage. Even acupuncture might be quite pleasant, I don’t know.
But “colonic hydrotherapy” sounds like a particularly brutal prison torture. Do people subject themselves to this deliberately? It’s not some sort of dare, or an elaborate hoax I’ve fallen for?

I hardly need add that there’s no evidence that it works, and anyway, it’s based on a fundamentally (so to speak) flawed idea – the colon and lower bowel are pretty good at self-cleaning, and the American Cancer Society says that the evidence “does not support the premise that toxins accumulate on intestinal walls or that toxicity results from poor elimination of waste from the colon”. Worse, it’s not safe – there have been deaths from perforated colons and from amoebic infection.

Of course, a lack of evidence has never stopped people from using weird medicinal techniques before, but it surprises me that the unadorned physical horror of it hasn’t put them off. What next? Holland & Barrett offering to rub chilli in your eye to prevent glaucoma?”

A few more points to add:

“According to the FDA, colonic irrigation systems are Class III devices that cannot be legally marketed except for medically indicated colon cleansing (such as before a radiologic or endocopic examination). No system has been approved for "routine" colon cleansing to promote the general well being of a patient”

(http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/gastro.html).

“Colon therapy has no benefits, and can cause harm. Colonic perforation and electrolyte imbalances can occur. Infection from improperly sterilized equipment (Giardia, C. difficle), and severe cramping can all occur” (http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Colonic#Efficacy_2).

Leave it to the believers of quack medicine to think that squirting water up the rear-end is a good idea.