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10:23, boots, homeopathy, Merseyside, O.D., overdose, protest, sceptic, skeptic, UK
This Saturday January 30th at 10:23am, more than 300 homeopathy skeptics and consumer advocates will be staging a mass ‘overdose’ to protest UK health & beauty chain store Boots‘ sale of, and England’s National Health Service continued endorsement of homeopathic remedies while raising awareness about the overwhelming inefficacy of such remedies.
So you can't die from it!
The homeopathic argument when they get sued for false advertising, or the products are continually proven to be ineffective goes something like “Since there’s no active ingredients, the remedies certainly can’t harm anyone”. That’s the mantra of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, organizers of the 10:23 event where participators will swallow entire bottles of homeopathic pills to show what millions of folks in the western world may be spending their hard earned cash on doesn’t do anything.
What if what you’re taking helps ?
If you suffer from asthma, restless leg syndrome, migraines, arthritis, depression, IBS , PMS or whatever and you take some all natural remedy that your cousin’s girlfriend told you about or heard of on a late night infomercial and you find that ‘remedy’ helps despite lack of any documented scientific evidence- well that’s great! No one can deny the power of, or be immune from the placebo effect. If someone sneakily replaced all your Hairy Elm Bark* pills with identical looking sugar/sawdust pills without your knowledge, you would continue to reap the benefits of the placebo response as you continued to use them- bet on it. One can only hope you’re not spending income you’d otherwise be using for food, music or actual health care.
What’s the harm of homeopathy ?
The harm is caused by what is sometimes not done by hardcore homeopathy enthusiasts. When effective conventional medical treatment is eschewed in favor of something unfounded and wacky- people needlessly die or experience a worsening of the condition. The whole ‘anti-immunization’ movement comes out of this sort of thinking as well. Know anybody with Polio or Smallpox? Thought so. Know anybody who’s a cancer survivor? They didn’t put it into remission by talking Hairy Elm Bark pills (yeah I know your cousin’s girlfriend’s yoga instructor’s uncle did). Extraordinary claims still require extraordinary proof, and I hope to get in on a piece of the 10:23 action here in New York.
* “Hairy Elm Bark” I just made up, but expect to see on the shelves of GNC and Vitamin Shoppe soon
Real (homeopathic) medicine cures even when Conventional Allopathic Medicine (CAM) fails
Cures what?
Now I’m not a fan of homeopathy, don’t knowe much about it in fact other than the inane rantings of Ben Goldacre in The Guardian.
But surely this protest is irrational. If the homeopaths say the stuff doesn’t harm anyone what is the point of eating loads to prove it is not effective.
And there are many conventional medicine products that cure in small doses but taken in larger amounts will not harm.
Are these sceptics really just publicity seekers?
Massive Overdose Protest
Gee what makes you think they’re looking for publicity? Certainly not to draw attention to the ineffectiveness of a million pound industry.
If you don’t “know” about it then you should do some more reading or attend more schooling. There is science behind the flight of bees by the way- it’s not a religion but a systematically organized body of knowledge. Science just is.
I’ve been sceptic about homeopathy back in 1989. Me and 3 colleagues decided to consume homeopathic pills BUT we were responsible enough to get in touch with a doctor. The homeopathy doctor subscripted 3 different remedies after a one hour session of examination for each one of us. So we divided each medicine into three parts. We consumed one part. Then we took one part to a laboratory for analysis. The analysis from the laboratory showed that the three different medicines had the same ingredients (lactose etc). The third part was for us to examine the way we wanted! If you want to be thorough about homeopathy you must understand that homeopathy has to do with energy. So we decided to take pictures of the energy of each one of the medicines with a Kirlian machine (more about Kirlian here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirlian_photography). Well the result was that those three homeopathic medicines had different colors and shapes of energy!
This is science…
What is a homeopathy doctor? What conditions were you attempting to treat? Are you saying homeopathic remedy manufacturers cast some sort of magic energy spell over different pills in the factory and not others? Your reply started out OK, but then got a little wishy-washy, but I thank you for taking the time.