My sugar-frosted Dr. House side says Patients Lie “works” 25% of the
time, but my exact reading side says I could have an all-referral
practice that is masteosis, well child inspection and sugar pill
representatives all day.

Wait a minute, I need to update my spam filter with 1/(10^34) of the internet…ok, success!

Then there are the trepanning angles on homeopathy, mentioned in BoingBoing before. Patch that trauma, patch that CNS!

I could not have helped but consider Chinese Medicine training certification licensed by the AMA, which there is (again not doing 60C dilution foolishness, or stumping for Ayurvedic or Japanese dominance or licensing in the practice.) It is homeopathic by some measure.

Oscillococcinum on-label must have bacteria with oscillating tentac…er, hairs. Fake endings (Oscillococcinibibabimus, anyone?) because tl:dr and it survives a US court? Feh!

While we’re talking water – would also love to see an article on all the hype re: alkaline water – a lot of intelligent people I know are being duped by this…anyone?

Now, I can see that — as with human medicine — there are times when a placebo can legitimately be used to treat the caregiver who insists that something “must” be done even when no treatment is needed or appropriate. But that does NOT justify a wider recommendation, or one which suggests that this is anything but placebo.

And a placebo certainly isn’t going to do the pet any good; the most you can say is that it probably won’t do any direct harm.

So: ASPCA has, in my opinion, adopted a position favoring animal abuse, and will never see another dime from me. Fortunately, despite their name, they are far from the only or even the leading SPCA in the United States and there are lots of better places to donate the money.

Beyond that: This is what happens when we trash our school systems by killing the science tracks.

Why would you want to treat symptoms instead of disease?  Because sometimes that’s all you care about, and sometimes there are diseases for which scientific medicine doesn’t offer cures, just treatment of symptoms.  Until Tamiflu came out, scientific medicine could sometimes prevent the flu with vaccines, but couldn’t cure it.  Similarly, for allergies, the cure is “avoid pollen by staying away from plants and animals”, but if moving to Antarctica is inconvenient for you, there are a lot of scientific and homeopathic treatments for the symptoms, and you may may get more relief from the treatment than annoyance from its side effects (e.g. drowsiness from most of the early antihistamines.)

There are some homeopathic treatments that are only diluted a few times, so they still contain enough non-filler ingredients to be useful.  “Alpha CF” is a homeopathic flu remedy that has a few different ingredients, including enough ipecac to know you’ve taken the stuff (but not quite enough to induce vomiting), and if I actually get the flu, it can reduce the symptoms from “really awful” to “a bit sick”, which is a big win. 

(*Also, there are probably some conditions like hiccups or ear wax which can be treated by sticking your fingers in your ears and loudly saying “I’m really not listening!”, which is the proper response to homeopathic theories…)

Bit of a nitpick, but it’s not only herbs; the very popular (and expensive) homeopathic remedy oscillococcinum has duck heart and liver as its “active” ingredient.

“Real scientists” may be curious but they are also usually pretty skeptical, at least when it comes to their scientific work.

Even if I want to be open-minded I cannot trust a meta-analysis by a homeopathy advocate such as yourself.  Nor am I going to trust one by a CICOPS members.  Despite what you say about people’s ignorance of the evidence base, many people have already posted meta-analyses on this thread and the upshot seems to be that homeopathy has not been found to perform better than placebo.

Isn’t that basically the opposite of science?  Like isn’t this what creationists do?

Is it possible that being science-driven and being profit-driven aren’t entirely mutually exclusive?  Or that medicine isn’t entirely profit-driven in the first place?

The really interesting stuff about placebo: two pills work better than one and they’ll work better if an elderly doctor in a lab coat gives them to you than if a young person in casual clothing gives it to you.  It seems as though a more convincing “performance” results in a more robust placebo effect, which I take to mean that the less skeptical one is of a “cure” the more likely one is to be cured.

It’s interesting to think about this in connection to traditional and magical healing.  Westerners are exposed to an insane amount of beliefs and ideas compared to our ancestors; we get to pick and choose what we believe, and I think as a result we tend to be more skeptical than people ever have been in the past (in the absence of electric monks, it’s simply not possible to believe everything you hear).  So imagine if you lived in a village of 100 or so people and had only ever been exposed to the culture and lifeways of that village.  I bet the rates of placebo effect for healing practices are really high in traditional societies, perhaps even for really severe ailments.

There are some traditional healing practices that I think may have real benefits as well.  For example, I think it’s possible that acupuncture might actually cure some chronic pain by recalibrating the brain’s map of the body (but that’s loose, playful speculation).

You seem to have skipped a few steps.