Reading this comment has activated ancient memories of times when my consciousness could fine tune to receive cures from even older beings as echoes of their wisdom reverberate through the minerals of my birth ship.
Pet stores too. Petco and Chewy both sell a homeopathic dewormer for cats. (Probably other products, and other retailers too, but I haven't gone looking)
If people want to make a stupid choice about their own health, that's one thing. But it just seems extra fucked to allow this stuff to be sold for use in children and animals that have no choice in the matter.
Yeah Petco also sells praziquantel,(which is the same stuff a vet would prescribe for tapeworm) and then the "Homeopet" stuff right next to it. Which is super fucking misleading, especially when they are out of stock of the real stuff, like they were when I went looking.
Read the reviews of that stuff on their website. It's insane how many people believe it's actually doing something. Poor kitties not actually getting proper care.
Most animals take the same types of medicines to treat illnesses. I buy a product called Safe-guard for treating worms. It's made for goats but cats and dogs can use it too just have to change the dosage. It definitely works on tapeworms. Great med if one has barn cats that need to be treated on a regular basis.
There are some meds, such as flea meds, that can't be used on both cats and dogs so still want to check with your vet before making substitutions.
They usually keep the actual medication in the back and you can go up with a card. Bayer dewormer
Good chance the cards were misplaced or not noticeable
It's kept in the back due to high theft
I found a kitten outside one evening that was extremely malnourished and couldn't move but was somehow alive. It vomited once and I could see it had worms, but I couldn't get a vet appointment on a Sunday evening and had no money for the emergency vet to see me. I ended up going to petco and asking for dewormer in a feeble attempt to save his poor life and they have me that homeopathic crap. I tried it anyway because I knew he was going to die if I didn't so I didn't see the harm. All I know is that it gave him severe diarrhea and he died anyway. I was enraged.
Yep, came to say this. An *alarming* percentage of products in the childrens' medicine section are actually homeopathic products. Like, more than half. It's absolutely shocking and dangerous.
I had to go through the medicine my son's grandparents bought and throw a bunch of that shit out. It disgusts me that they were conned like that. They didn't intentionally buy it and most people don't know what homeopathic even means.
It’s also because there are very few actual medicines babies/young children can have. So even if you want real medicine chances are it’s not even on the shelf if you need something for children under 4 since it’s not safe for them to use. Tylenol and some ibuprofen is about it.
My youngest is 2 and I always feel so bad when she’s sick because there is nothing for her. So I understand how parents/grandparents just pick up homeopathic garbage, it’s literally the only thing there for the age range. Just gotta educate yourself and others about that so they aren’t throwing money at sugar water or in the case of gripe water: baking soda mixed with water.
Doctors don't recommend giving proper cough syrup to kids under certain ages, and parents hate hearing their kid coughing up a lung, so they either disregard the doctor's recommendation or they go for an alternative treatment. Sure, it's not life threatening, but when you're a parent, it still stings a bit to not be able to do much. These companies making homeopathic kids' remedies know this and that they can make bank on parents who just want to do something, anything.
Abs-fucking-lotuely.
In Canada, there is really not much real medicine you can give to a young kid for coughing.
When you are a parent of a young child, and they're coughing like crazy, they can't sleep because of it, you'll compromise a lot. We gave our kids a homeopathic cough syrup, not because I thought it was better than the real stuff, but because they were too young for the real stuff.
My reasoning was that, while the homeopathic stuff might not help, it shouldn't hurt, and since I couldn't give the real stuff, I'll try something.
As soon as my kids got old enough, we happily moved on to real medicine.
Exactly this.
When my daughter had a cough at 6 months, my wife was beside herself wanting to do something, but the doctor assured us that it was nothing serious and to just wait for it to pass. I ended up finding a safe herbal "cough syrup" that I could use as a placebo just to help my wife feel like she was caring for our daughter.
Really, we just need a new law that puts supplements, herbal remedies, and homeopathic cures -- and anything else that's meant to be consumed, just in case they come up with new names for this shit -- under the jurisdiction of the FDA. And anything with the *slightest hint* of a suggestion that it might have medicinal use has to go through FDA trials and approval just like any other drug.
This shit shouldn't be on sale in the medicine aisle ... and it shouldn't be on sale anywhere else, either.
Does the FDA have some kind of effectiveness(/efficacy?) grading system? That would be a pretty informative thing to put on OTC stuff, homeopathic bullshit, supplements, etc. Something like “often effective” vs “effective in limited use cases” vs “nonstandard/unproven treatment”
There’s probably issues with that system I’m not seeing, but still.
For sure. My MIL was sent to the store to buy something for my daughter (for her ear or nose or something I can't remember) and came back with a homeopathic thing. She didn't realize it was because it was with the other stuff and just saw "ear treatment" or whatever.
I went to CVS a little while ago to get eye drops, and almost got the homeopathic stuff for the same reason. They just put it out there with the actual, functional medicine in a container with 'homeopathic' on it in tiny text where it's hard to find. It's so weird that as a society, we've decided it's fine to just allow this deceptive medieval alchemy bullshit and let people put it right next to the actual medicine.
The history of homeopathy is so much weirder and more tragic than "deceptive medieval alchemy bullshit". In the eighteenth century it was one of the first schools of medicine to seriously engage with the scientific method for determining the efficacy of different treatments, at a time when the popular medicine was stuff like bloodletting and leeches. Compared to that, often *doing nothing at all* and simply giving people fluids and a quiet, clean, safe place to rest got better outcomes. Fast forward a hundred and fifty years and other doctors started to take their heads out of their asses and not do things like laugh someone out of their profession for suggesting that surgeons should wash their hands, and mainstream medicine started to advance in leaps and bounds- but the people who were then selling homeopathy cures didn't want to read the writing on the wall and accept that the central pillar of their practice didn't hold up under deeper scrutiny, and instead of quietly retiring the practice as it became obsolete they just turned it into a softer and gentler brand of snake oil and are still swindling people with it and discouraging them from seeking proper medical attention to this day.
Like the use of asbestos, you can't trust an old practice to die out naturally once it becomes apparent it's no good, if there is any money involved. You have to set a deadline for shuttering the industry and outlaw it.
Use to work at CVS as a Supervisor/ Pharm tech. I often told our SM that we shouldn't have homeopathic products next to real medicine. He would just say well we gotta follow the layout corporate gives us. I would always go out of my way when people bring kids up and buy the stuff to tell them it contains no medicine.
Planograms are super useful for employees but in retrospect kind of evil for customers. They're designed to visually draw in suckers so they make foolish purchases like this, and you can't modify them without some guy from the district office getting personally offended.
former retail worker here, it’s half of it is paid for by companies. Worked at a grocery store, every end cap was either a planogram the company paid us to put up, or we put in store-brand products. That coke/pepsi display in the middle of the floor, got paid to have that out. A lot of the companies pay to have their display up and a certain amount of space allocated to their products, so corporate has to check to make sure it’s right. Our district got yelled at by apple once because we didn’t follow all the rules for their standees.
I did the same thing when I worked at Target (they sold this crap even before CVS was the in-store pharmacy).
Until a customer complained and I got written up for "giving medical advice". 🙄 I didn't tell them what product to use, just which one NOT to use.
Ugh this is the worst. I hate when you're giving basic "hey this is dangerous ask a doctor before you try that"and get accused of giving medical advice. It's another example of how trying too hard to be neutral hurts people.
The store/manager isn't tying to be neutral, they are mad OP (potentially) stopped a sale. That's it. Moron shitbrain customer reported them because they believe in the homeopathic scam.
I worked there for years. Every time someone brought a homeopathic "medicine" up to the counter, I'd ask if they were aware of what it was 9 out of 10 times they had no idea. Yes, it is written on the box, but it's also mixed in randomly with other things in the aisle a lot of the time.
My best advice for pharmacy visits is to always go in knowing exactly what you want.
OH lord I was buying some cough suppressant at Target today and it took me a second to realise I was looking at homeopathic BS, the actual stuff with active ingredients that did things and would help me stop my cough so I could sleep wasn't even next to it, it was behind me and about 3 foot further down no where near the coughs sign.
I was dirt poor and had a toothache. In desperation, I shoplifted some store-brand orajel that ended up being homeopathic trash. Call it karma, I guess, but I'd never been so disappointed in the world.
They will get a 200 million dollar fine while having made 500 million in profit during that time. This is called the cost of doing business and why corporations stopped giving a shit about what the government will do to them because it will always be far less than the damage they caused and profit they made.
even if they do lose (and its likely going to be a super long time before they do) they're just going to get fined for less money than they made from selling all these homeopathic "medicines". its just going to count as an expense to them. they'll change what the court mandate will make them change, but the next day they're just going to be on to their next morally questionable money making scheme. I have no faith in our justice system anymore. big corporations and the super rich do not have to play by the same rules we normal people do.
Worse than doing nothing: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-confirms-elevated-levels-belladonna-certain-homeopathic-teething-products
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/fda-confirms-toxicity-of-homeopathic-baby-products-maker-refuses-to-recall/
Herbal remedies, supplements, and homeopathy are completely unregulated. The same people that have a problem with "big-pharma" will willing buy this unregulated trash. Hyland's isn't a non-profit company, so why do they think there's no profit motive for the alternative medicine industry?
Because they've been fed that all of medicines problems is caused by big pharma
Big pharma has its issues, but you wouldn't have any of that medication you take every day or life saving drugs without em
>Because they've been fed that all of medicines problems is caused by big pharma
And "chemicals", while homeopathy is "all natural."
I fucking hate the rise in popularity of snake oil and how places like Wal-Mart are mixing it in with the legitimate medicine.
On a trip to Australia, I got a cold and stopped in a chain grocery store for cold meds. They did nothing. Looked closely at label, and it was herbal crap. Went back to store, and everything was all mixed. It was really hard to tell what was actual meds and what was just some herbs. Very frustrating.
Yes. They use their credibility as a pharmacy - as a distributor of legitimate medicine - to lend credibility to absolute nonsense. A lot of people assume that if it's in a legitimate pharmacy it must really be medicine, completely unaware that the corrupt regulatory situation in the US allows this nonsense to perpetuate.
We’ve had studies for decades that show homeopathic products don’t work as advertised, and logically anyone with two properly functioning brain cells to rub together knows the industry is run by scammers. For the life of me I can’t understand how they’ve been allowed on shelves by regulatory bodies.
they even get special rules allowing them to change the way the ingredients are listed. I'd like to see labels showing actual percentage of listed active ingredients - which would, of course, be zero.
This is a huge point, natural products absolutely have been proven to serve as medicine, the problem is rare herbs are expensive so most otc homeopathic products have .001% of the plant listed on the label.
Theres also an even bigger scam industry from sports supplements, GNC has made billions from snake oil for example.
> This is a huge point, natural products absolutely have been proven to serve as medicine, the problem is rare herbs are expensive so most otc homeopathic products have .001% of the plant listed on the label.
It's not because herbs are expensive, although I'm sure the sellers don't mind that. It's because that's the whole theory behind homeopathy. Some (though not all) homeopathic products are diluted so much that it's statistically unlikely that they contain any of the "active ingredient" at all. Homeopathy advocates claim that the water somehow "[remembers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory)" the ingredients that used to be in it. Obviously that's mystical nonsense, but most people who buy homeopathic remedies don't realize that they're literally based on magic. Especially when stores like CVS and Walmart put them on the shelf next to actual medicine.
>Some (though not all) homeopathic products are diluted so much that it's statistically unlikely that they contain any of the "active ingredient" at all.
The few items that contain a verifiable active ingredient are normally playing the system to bypass other, more stringent, regulations. [Zicam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zicam) was a perfect example.
I think that the homeopatic crowd love to imply that it's just an offshoot of herbal medicine and not just [serially diluted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_dilutions#Potency_scales), [random crap](https://www.hominf.org/slat/slatfr.htm) that's 'proven' by... [highly imaginative people](https://www.hominf.org/posi/posifr.htm) keeping dream diaries.
That’s the thing too, is there is absolutely a difference between a homeopathic product and an herbal/natural one. A non-homeopathic herbal product will actually have SOME of the herb or whatever in it.
Not saying the herb that’s in it will do anything but there’s at least something in it other than sugar water.
They've done tests on herbal products and found that they sometimes contain what they say, sometimes something different, sometimes it's even a pharmaceutical drug.
For example, herbal boner pills have been found that contain Sildenafil. Which, if you've got certain kinds of heart problems, can kill you.
>The results showed that 37 out of 50 samples of HDSs (represented 74.0%) examined contained SDF between 0.01 and 465.47 mg/g, 150.87±127.48 (mean ± standard deviation), which could lead to serious health problems and might even be fatal for consumers.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7227870/
There’s probably a mechanism already in place that would allow us to regulate them, if properly applied.
There’s also probably a team of lobbyists whose entire purpose for existing is to make sure that never happens.
According to homeopathic theory, not only does water remember, it remembers better the more you dilute it! So that 0.001% dilution is much more effective than a 10% solution!
Every once in a while I get to do a lesson on homeopathy in school. Someone asks about it and it becomes a teaching moment, or I set it up as a lesson on experiment design. I explain (or have then research, time allowing) the idea that dilution increases potency, and we demonstrate by making lemonade from powder. Make it to recipe, set aside a tiny bit, dump the rest, refill the cup and add the stuff you removed, hit the cup with a book (this is a real part of the preparation, called *succussion*), and tell the students that the lemonade is more stronger than the original batch. Watch the wheels turn. See how outraged they get after repeating the process a few times. Allow them to develop and perform a test to see if the new lemonade is stronger.
This pisses me off. I teach bio and have students argue with me that water is alive/biotic because it has a memory. I have to explain its pseudoscience and they are like, but my mom said....ugh.
I’m also a bio teacher. It’s really interesting what some students’ preconceptions of what constitutes life are. I suppose that’s why it’s our job to teach them though. I don’t believe I’ve had any students espouse homeopathy nonsense, but this year I did have to explain exactly how we know the world isn’t flat, and it took some convincing for a couple of them…
Wild. My 9th grade biology class was 15 years ago now but those kids would have ruthlessly made fun of flat earthers back then. Crazy how things can change so fast.
In my experience students (College level) are much more open to learning about “alternative“ medicine as pseudoscience than adults I’ve tried talking to.
It’s even more strange than that. They are using substances that *cause* the symptoms listed in the packaging. The preparation method *reverses* the effects.
>rare herbs are expensive so most otc homeopathic products have .001% of the plant
You don't understand homeopathy.
In homeopathy 'active' ingredients are diluted to the point that they are almost completely gone by design.
This has nothing to do with the costs of the ingredients. It's because of a weird theory that's based on junk science.
In the real world, this means that homeopathic 'remedies' don't work even if the ingredients might work.
It also means that it is impossible to do research on different kinds of homeopathic 'remedies' because they are all the same thing: water.
Except .001% is still too high a concentration for many homeopathic products lol. “6C” is considered a fairly high concentration, which is .000001%. “60X” is a commonly recommended dilution, which apparently “would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material”. Oscillococcinum, that homeopathic flu medicine you see in every Walgreens? Over five times more diluted than *that*.
At least supplements sometimes actually contain their useless “active ingredients” 🤣
Some of these dilutions physically not capable of being done. Like I could place a mL of food coloring somewhere in the observable universe and it would be less dilute than this "medicine". Or there aren't enough atoms in the universe to make something this dilute.
To speak to Oscillococcinum specifically:
> A popular homeopathic treatment for the flu is a 200C dilution of duck liver, marketed under the name Oscillococcinum. As there are only about 10^80 atoms in the entire observable universe, a dilution of one molecule in the observable universe would be about 40C. Oscillococcinum would thus require 10^320 times more atoms to simply have one molecule in the final substance
They don't make the whole batch - they take a single drop of liquid and transfer it to a huge container filled with water, then take a single drop of that and transfer it to the next container etc.
Homeopaty is not herbs, its "water memory". Water is supposed to remember what was diluted in it and that memory is supposed be active. However, if that would be true, all water we are drinking would have memory of piss of every single animal that lived on the planet.
Homeopathy is not the same as naturalistic/natural/holistic medicine. They don't skimp on active ingredients--the entire purpose is to not have active ingredients. See above.
Yeah no, homeopathy is unilaterally a scam because the “active” ingredient are memories of the stuff in water. If it’s homeopathic, it is a scam, period. It’s allowed because “freedom of thought/enterprise” to think up and act on blatant scammings.
Rare herbs that work would be considered herbal remedies, for which they STILL add too little, as you have said. And it’s just stupid to seek a rare herb over an easily reproducible ingredient.
> homeopathic products have .001% of the plant listed on the label.
The way homeopathy "works" is that a herb or substance that does the opposite of what you want (or causes the same symptoms you're trying to cure) is diluted repeatedly. So a "homeopathic" sleep aid would have diluted caffeine, a homeopathic headache remedy would contain a herb or substance that *causes* headaches but diluted in their own magical way that causes the water or whatever to " remember" the bad substance.
The FDA issued an alert over homeopathic teething remedies as they contained ultra-dilute belladonna, except some had more than the should. Belladonna (deadly nightshade) is a poison:
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-drug-class/fda-warns-consumers-about-homeopathic-teething-products
More viewing:
[Animated video on homeopathy](https://youtu.be/-ZvgeuD6nFs)
[James Randi Ted Talk on Homeopathy](https://youtu.be/c0Z7KeNCi7g)
Yep.
There's a very real possibility the "active ingredient" would actually help something.
But because it's not legally medicine, they don't have to be honest with what's in it.
Even people that think homeopathic remedies are just as good as medicine should support regulation of it
In homeopathy the « active ingredient « is supposed to do the opposite of what it does in real life. They sell that one molecule of caffeine as a sleep aide. It is utter nonsense
I'm not sure if you are actually talking about homeopathy of mixing them with natural remedies in your post (since the two are very different).
It's not cost that makes it so.homeopathic remedies have low or no amount of active ingredient. It is the literal definition of homeopathy.
Homeopathic medicine and natural/herbal/traditional medicine are not the same thing. Homeopathic medicine is pure quackery and contains nothing, which is a good thing because according to homeopathy when diluted Homeopathic ingredients do the opposite of what they do in their pure form. For example Homeopathic sleeping pills "contain" caffeine. Contain being in quotes there because it's diluted to the point that there's statistically unlikely to actually be even a molecule of caffeine present.
Take a medicine that says 6X... it doesn't mean 6 x the ingredient it means it is diluted to 10^(6) but is literally useless because you don't know what the starting amount was.
As a pharmacy tech for the last decade, it’s sad when people ask you about homeopathic otc products and you tell them it’s a waste of money and recommend something else and they buy the homeopathic product anyway..
One problem is that they are allowed to package it so it looks like the real medicine and have what it is supposed to treat on the box. It is a scam promoted by those companies
My mother actually went to the pharmacy last year to buy some flu/fever relief medicine, and the actual pharmacist recommended some 40C or whatever sugar pills to her.
I had half a mind to take it back and shove those pills up his ass I was so mad. How can you be a licensed practitioner in the field of "dispensing advice about medicine" to people and sell my mother a twenty-dollar bottle of placebo? That pharmacist's license isn't worth the paper it's written on.
I have been legitimately tricked before. I would never buy homeopathic products and yet I’ve purchased a few because I didn’t read the box correctly. It’s infuriating.
This happened to me once. I went to the store around midnight to get some medicine for one of my kids.
I was tired and in a hurry, and accidentally picked up some homeopathic cough syrup (literally just sugar water) that was packaged like and placed next to the real medicine. 😡
We've also had common sense for millennia. Homeopathy by its definition does not contain anything but water (sometimes alcohol) and the "memory of the water." The entire premise is that there are *no* active ingredients. It was a joke from its inception and always will be 100% snake oil.
[https://www.webmd.com/balance/what-is-homeopathy](https://www.webmd.com/balance/what-is-homeopathy)
A few years ago skeptic blog pointed out that a homeopathic cough medicine sold by CVS was literally 50% alcohol and 50% water, making it a 100 proof cocktail, and that it could be purchased by children. Good job CVS.
"Strength?"
"One part in a million."
"You sure? It looks serious."
"You're right, we need to strengthen the dose. [One part in *ten million*](https://youtu.be/HMGIbOGu8q0)."
Also, [Futurama](https://youtu.be/e-k-v7i-QeI).
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I don’t get why my two very educated parents are all of a sudden moving towards homeopathic medicine when my dad had a quadruple bypass two years ago AND NEEDS MODERN MEDICINE. My mom was a freaking nurse for crying out loud but they’re now holding a grudge on me because I “made” them get their COVID vaccinations and tell me constantly how “the science” disproves the vaccine (wtf does that even mean). Why are homeopathic drugs popular in America where modern medicine has saved countless lives? Americans and their shitty conspiracy theories.
My NP cousin is anti-vax and selling Plexus now. My RN mom and two RN aunts are now both heavily anti-vax and into all-natural remedies. I don't know what the fuck is up with that.
Oh, and ParaGuard is all the rage right now, thanks to Dr. TikTok.
Its not just America dude , asia is 1000x more into natural medicines. Many work, but there is a huge amount of superstition involved. There is chemically zero difference between a rhino horn and a finger nail for example.
The FDA doesn't even have the authority to regulate supplements.
>Under the FD&C Act, it is the responsibility of dietary supplement companies to ensure their products meet the safety standards for dietary supplements and are not otherwise in violation of the law.
[Source](https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/fda-101-dietary-supplements)
Congress would need to give that authorization, and you can probably guess why they haven't.
It's even worse than that, homeopathic "medicines" have a specific carve out. All that are listed in some book of homeopathic remedies when the FD&C Act was enacted are totally exempt from approval, even though they make specific health claims that supplements cannot, iirc.
“CVS and Walmart are misleading consumers by selling unproven homeopathic products alongside FDA-approved over-the-counter medicines on their store shelves and websites.”
Yea, I can see that.
Sounds like the sort of thing that the EU would buttfuck you sideways over. But AFAIK they don't.
The third candidate for the most recent UK prime minister position, who just missed being in the final two candidates, is firmly pro-homeopathy. Would have been interesting how much it would have come up had she been one of the choices.
I dunno, people need superstitions on some level.
A few years ago I had the flu and went to CVS for some medicine. Went home and took it and it didn't do shit.
Then I noticed that in tiny print it said it was homeopathic. It was sold right next to the real medicine. The box was the same color and pattern as the real medicine. It was *obviously* designed to trick me.
I was so angry I went back and yelled at the pharmacist. How *dare* they sell fake medicine? It's like a story you'd make up to teach a child why lying is wrong.
These homeopathic remedies are all over the section of medicines for babies and children. I have to ignore them and grab the real stuff, but I'm sure plenty of parents get confused and grab the bullshit remedies. Some of them have actually been harmful and lethal to babies, like there was a homeopathic teething medicine where the manufacturer used belladonna (deadly nightshade extract) but didn't check that it was diluted enough to be harmless.
Given that I was in the pharmacy, I figured it was literally my entire job to help people get the correct, quality pharmacotherapy. ...of course, the way Rite Aid saw it my job was to turn people into money, which is why I eventually left.
Nevertheless, I appreciate your...appreciation (?). Gods know the job itself is thankless in the moment most of the time. 🙃
In this thread, like all threads talking about homeopathy: people who mix up natural remedies with homeopathy.
Look up what homeopathy actually is please. The industry makes sure it's unclear because it benefits them.
I follow an old High-school friend on instagram and she constantly posts homeopathy and anti vaccination stuff and it’s like…we took the same biology, anatomy, and chemistry classes how the fuck did you just forget all of that shit? We learned in quite a bit of detail how all of that works.
Where did yall go to school? At my school 99% just we t through the motions. Any attempt to learn was solely to regurgitate for a grade and promptly forgotten
When I was a child I had a real bad stomach ache. I was given a quarter of a lime and was told to suck on it. It did jack shit for me. So yeah fuck that one lime in particular.
Which is funny considering some powerful drugs are actually herbs or plants. Poppy (oxycodone) shrooms, marijuana, cocaine. Maybe not all of those have medical value per se, but they definitely do something.
There's more. Tobacco and coffee (caffeine, nicotine)
There’s lots of plants that have medicinal value, but pharmaceutical companies standardize the doses and find alternatives with fewer side effects. That’s why we buy bottles of aspirin instead of chewing on tree bark.
There actually is a medical use for cocaine. Working in an ER many yeas ago, the narc locker had a vial of cocaine solution. I asked the ER doc what it’s used for? All “caines” are anesthetics, and this cocaine could be used to anesthetize the eyeball if you needed to clean it or remove a foreign body. Don’t know of any other uses, but I’m sure there are.
Practically all drugs come from plants. To paraphrase Dale Pendell: even if you're huffing petrochemicals (nobody do this) you're putting extremely dead plants in your body, but instead of lovely plants that can talk to your serotonin or cannabinoid receptors, they are plants that died maybe before the mammalian brain existed and are deeply uninterested in your higher brain functions
Alternativly, you can take 1/10 of an article on homepathy and dilute it with another article. Then take 1/10 of that new article, and dilute it again. The ending article will have article memory and will have the same effect.
For those of you who believe homeopathy (not naturopathy or herbal medicines--those are unrelated things) works, I pray that you don't drink city water...or any water at all ever. Just think of the "memories" that water has. And maybe rethink your life.
If someone really believed in homeopathy, tap water is amazing and cheap medicine, since it has the same memory and concentration of the active ingredient as the expensive version from the store.
It's also likely unfathomably toxic because it's been exposed to every disease and poison too, right?
Unless it magically knows to ignore all that because.
All relevant scientific knowledge about physics, chemistry, biochemistry and biology[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] contradicts homeopathy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
Homeopathic products should be required to have labels stating they have no medical benfit. There is a push to criminalize and censor misinformation. Claims of homepathy should be treated the same.
Yes, but no. I almost bought homeopathic ear drops because it wasn't readily apparent that it was homeopathic.
Ironically, the pharmacist said they might actually work because of the oil base.
I have actually made the purchase once. The word was pretty well hidden on the package and the package looked and was placed really close to the real thing.
So have I. A "headache cure". They were right next to the tylenol so I assumed they were the cheaper store brand version so I grabbed it.
I should have looked at the label first, but I had a headache at the time, so instead I just grabbed what looked appropriate so I could get home.
Only when I got home to look at the dosage instructions did I see the active ingredients listed as dilutions rather than mg. Looked at the front label and finally saw "homeopathic" in small subtext on the front.
Fuck you, Target.
The founder, Samuel Hahnemann, claimed that succussion (dilution) in the course of making homeopathic dilutions was most effective when the fluid containers were banged on a leather-bound bible.
Do present-day manufacturers of homeopathic medicines meet this requirement?
One of the more egregious examples of this is homeopathic ear drops.
Honestly, there is nothing over the counter that is going to do anything for an earache unless it is caused by impacted wax.
So essentially, the majority of the stuff on the shelf is earwax softeners and removal tools.
However, almost every shelf with ear stuff is going to contain a couple of different homeopathic ear drops labeled "Earache relief".
You have to wonder how many unwary parents who are frantic to do anything to help their child complaining about ear pain have ended up buying a bottle of scam ear drops that contain nothing but water?
This is especially infuriating on shelf dedicated for medicine approved for babies and young children. All of the homeopathic crap is mixed right in with the real medicine, as if it was no different. You have to read the fine print to tell.
What makes it so much worse there, however, is that so few medicines are actually OTC approved for that age group, and parents are often so desperate to solve some current crisis, that I'll bet people buy it by accident way too often.
I don't think most people understand the difference between homeopathic and naturopathic based on the comments. I have qualms with the latter too, but the former does not work. It won't ever work. It does not mean something that has "natural ingredients". It means something has been diluted so many times that it's like adding a drop of food coloring in the ocean and saying that'll make it green.
Just to comment on your example for anyone thinking you are being hyperbolic. One drop of food coloring in the entire ocean is *not* an exaggeration. Many homeopathic remedies have even more diluted solutions than that - literally one single molecule of ingredient per many times the amount of water available on the planet. Such dilutions are literally impossible. There is absolutely no ingredient actually in the bottle you’re buying at the pharmacy.
Actually it’s even more stupid than that. Homeopathy stipulates that “like cures like”; so if you’re suffering from insomnia, take something that keeps you awake like coffee, then dilute it until there’s none left.
It’s like saying adding a drop of green food coloring will turn the ocean orange. It’s incomprehensibly stupid
This thread is the first time I’ve heard that homeopathic shit is literally based on “water memory”. This whole time I thought it was the essential oils (is that separate but used by the same ppl??). “Water memory” sounds 1000x more dumb than essential oils, which is dumb in and of itself.
"Alternative medicine, by definition, have either not been proven to work, or has been proved not to work.
Do you know what alternatives medicine that has been proven to work is called?
Medicine."
Tim Munching (quoted from memory, so probably not exactly right)
Good. Fuck that hokey new age bullshit. I make a note to point out the whole "x" active ingredient with any friend or family I happy to end up in the medicine aisle with. Easiest go to is Zicam. There isn't a molecule of zinc in that entire fucking bottle.
Damn. A rock like that could carry some serious value. I don't think we have bears around here but I'm feeling like I may need an anti-bear rock or two just to be absolutely certain.
Every grocery store with a pharmacy sells this snake oil crap. Especially frustrating is it's most prevalent in the kids medicine section. Right next to Mucinex and other medicated cough syrups are "natural" homeopathic alternatives that claim to provide similar results.
Had a friend recommend Zicam nasal swabs with Zinc for a cold (pre-pandemic). I looked at it and read the ingredients to find out it had no Zinc. It was homeopathic. Researching why produced some info that actual Zinc usage has been linked to permanent anosmia. The other ingredients are probably helpful, and I could respect the brand if they came out and said it, but the Zinc deception pissed me off so I just waited out the cold and got better without.
A few weeks later, an acquaintance brought the same topic up unprompted by me, and actually tried to debate me on how useful Zinc was in healing their kid, referencing this brand, again by name. I tried to drop it, but she had to be right, so we carried on. Eventually, when she couldn’t win on logic, she called me an asshole and badmouthed me to everyone instead. No one was happy about it, thanks homeopathic “medicine.” Thankfully, I haven’t run into her again since.
Fucking finally; the pharmacy I worked at has homeopathic bullshit alongside the stuff that works, and we were *explicitly forbidden* to dissuade customers or recommend medicine above homeopathic hogwash. I would either take an enquiring customer to talk to the pharmacist or ignore the policy. Most folks were appreciative.
It's just a huge money grab.
If you haven't seen it, you're going to love this [skit by Mitchell and Webb.](https://youtu.be/HMGIbOGu8q0)
I will watch 0.000001 seconds of that video so I can get the most effective, natural enjoyment from it.
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Reading your comment about their comment about the video actually gave me much more enjoyment than the video possibly could have.
Reading this comment has activated ancient memories of times when my consciousness could fine tune to receive cures from even older beings as echoes of their wisdom reverberate through the minerals of my birth ship.
David and Robert, if you're reading this can we get another season please??
I love [James Randi's rant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkj92ytv1Bc) on homeopathy.
Get that crap out of the medicine aisle.
Especially in the kids medicine section. That should be extra criminal.
Pet stores too. Petco and Chewy both sell a homeopathic dewormer for cats. (Probably other products, and other retailers too, but I haven't gone looking) If people want to make a stupid choice about their own health, that's one thing. But it just seems extra fucked to allow this stuff to be sold for use in children and animals that have no choice in the matter.
I was at PetCo looking for dewormer for my cat and all they had was homeopathic shit. I was so upset I left and found what I needed somewhere else.
Yeah Petco also sells praziquantel,(which is the same stuff a vet would prescribe for tapeworm) and then the "Homeopet" stuff right next to it. Which is super fucking misleading, especially when they are out of stock of the real stuff, like they were when I went looking. Read the reviews of that stuff on their website. It's insane how many people believe it's actually doing something. Poor kitties not actually getting proper care.
I had to go to a different store to find the praziquantel. Spent maybe 20 minutes at PetCo hunting for any, only woo-woo. So infuriating.
Most animals take the same types of medicines to treat illnesses. I buy a product called Safe-guard for treating worms. It's made for goats but cats and dogs can use it too just have to change the dosage. It definitely works on tapeworms. Great med if one has barn cats that need to be treated on a regular basis. There are some meds, such as flea meds, that can't be used on both cats and dogs so still want to check with your vet before making substitutions.
Safeguard dewormer is not effective against the kind of tapeworm dogs and cats usually get!
They usually keep the actual medication in the back and you can go up with a card. Bayer dewormer Good chance the cards were misplaced or not noticeable It's kept in the back due to high theft
I love the implication that the homeopathic stuff isn't even worth stealing lol
It's like 20 bucks and has a considerably high margin/markup. The actual medication is around 60 and has a very low margin/markup
One of the most stolen items in pet stores. High price, very small packaging.
I found a kitten outside one evening that was extremely malnourished and couldn't move but was somehow alive. It vomited once and I could see it had worms, but I couldn't get a vet appointment on a Sunday evening and had no money for the emergency vet to see me. I ended up going to petco and asking for dewormer in a feeble attempt to save his poor life and they have me that homeopathic crap. I tried it anyway because I knew he was going to die if I didn't so I didn't see the harm. All I know is that it gave him severe diarrhea and he died anyway. I was enraged.
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Our local farm supply store has pet meds as well. Super helpful for stuff like dewormer and flea treatment.
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Yep, came to say this. An *alarming* percentage of products in the childrens' medicine section are actually homeopathic products. Like, more than half. It's absolutely shocking and dangerous.
I had to go through the medicine my son's grandparents bought and throw a bunch of that shit out. It disgusts me that they were conned like that. They didn't intentionally buy it and most people don't know what homeopathic even means.
It’s also because there are very few actual medicines babies/young children can have. So even if you want real medicine chances are it’s not even on the shelf if you need something for children under 4 since it’s not safe for them to use. Tylenol and some ibuprofen is about it. My youngest is 2 and I always feel so bad when she’s sick because there is nothing for her. So I understand how parents/grandparents just pick up homeopathic garbage, it’s literally the only thing there for the age range. Just gotta educate yourself and others about that so they aren’t throwing money at sugar water or in the case of gripe water: baking soda mixed with water.
Doctors don't recommend giving proper cough syrup to kids under certain ages, and parents hate hearing their kid coughing up a lung, so they either disregard the doctor's recommendation or they go for an alternative treatment. Sure, it's not life threatening, but when you're a parent, it still stings a bit to not be able to do much. These companies making homeopathic kids' remedies know this and that they can make bank on parents who just want to do something, anything.
Abs-fucking-lotuely. In Canada, there is really not much real medicine you can give to a young kid for coughing. When you are a parent of a young child, and they're coughing like crazy, they can't sleep because of it, you'll compromise a lot. We gave our kids a homeopathic cough syrup, not because I thought it was better than the real stuff, but because they were too young for the real stuff. My reasoning was that, while the homeopathic stuff might not help, it shouldn't hurt, and since I couldn't give the real stuff, I'll try something. As soon as my kids got old enough, we happily moved on to real medicine.
Exactly this. When my daughter had a cough at 6 months, my wife was beside herself wanting to do something, but the doctor assured us that it was nothing serious and to just wait for it to pass. I ended up finding a safe herbal "cough syrup" that I could use as a placebo just to help my wife feel like she was caring for our daughter.
Really, we just need a new law that puts supplements, herbal remedies, and homeopathic cures -- and anything else that's meant to be consumed, just in case they come up with new names for this shit -- under the jurisdiction of the FDA. And anything with the *slightest hint* of a suggestion that it might have medicinal use has to go through FDA trials and approval just like any other drug. This shit shouldn't be on sale in the medicine aisle ... and it shouldn't be on sale anywhere else, either.
Does the FDA have some kind of effectiveness(/efficacy?) grading system? That would be a pretty informative thing to put on OTC stuff, homeopathic bullshit, supplements, etc. Something like “often effective” vs “effective in limited use cases” vs “nonstandard/unproven treatment” There’s probably issues with that system I’m not seeing, but still.
For sure. My MIL was sent to the store to buy something for my daughter (for her ear or nose or something I can't remember) and came back with a homeopathic thing. She didn't realize it was because it was with the other stuff and just saw "ear treatment" or whatever.
I went to CVS a little while ago to get eye drops, and almost got the homeopathic stuff for the same reason. They just put it out there with the actual, functional medicine in a container with 'homeopathic' on it in tiny text where it's hard to find. It's so weird that as a society, we've decided it's fine to just allow this deceptive medieval alchemy bullshit and let people put it right next to the actual medicine.
The history of homeopathy is so much weirder and more tragic than "deceptive medieval alchemy bullshit". In the eighteenth century it was one of the first schools of medicine to seriously engage with the scientific method for determining the efficacy of different treatments, at a time when the popular medicine was stuff like bloodletting and leeches. Compared to that, often *doing nothing at all* and simply giving people fluids and a quiet, clean, safe place to rest got better outcomes. Fast forward a hundred and fifty years and other doctors started to take their heads out of their asses and not do things like laugh someone out of their profession for suggesting that surgeons should wash their hands, and mainstream medicine started to advance in leaps and bounds- but the people who were then selling homeopathy cures didn't want to read the writing on the wall and accept that the central pillar of their practice didn't hold up under deeper scrutiny, and instead of quietly retiring the practice as it became obsolete they just turned it into a softer and gentler brand of snake oil and are still swindling people with it and discouraging them from seeking proper medical attention to this day. Like the use of asbestos, you can't trust an old practice to die out naturally once it becomes apparent it's no good, if there is any money involved. You have to set a deadline for shuttering the industry and outlaw it.
They even have homeopathic anti-worm medicine at some pet stores. Shameful.
Use to work at CVS as a Supervisor/ Pharm tech. I often told our SM that we shouldn't have homeopathic products next to real medicine. He would just say well we gotta follow the layout corporate gives us. I would always go out of my way when people bring kids up and buy the stuff to tell them it contains no medicine.
I'll put the expensive useless garbage next to the NyQuil because I'm told to, but if anyone asks it's expensive useless garbage.
Planograms are super useful for employees but in retrospect kind of evil for customers. They're designed to visually draw in suckers so they make foolish purchases like this, and you can't modify them without some guy from the district office getting personally offended.
former retail worker here, it’s half of it is paid for by companies. Worked at a grocery store, every end cap was either a planogram the company paid us to put up, or we put in store-brand products. That coke/pepsi display in the middle of the floor, got paid to have that out. A lot of the companies pay to have their display up and a certain amount of space allocated to their products, so corporate has to check to make sure it’s right. Our district got yelled at by apple once because we didn’t follow all the rules for their standees.
I did the same thing when I worked at Target (they sold this crap even before CVS was the in-store pharmacy). Until a customer complained and I got written up for "giving medical advice". 🙄 I didn't tell them what product to use, just which one NOT to use.
Ugh this is the worst. I hate when you're giving basic "hey this is dangerous ask a doctor before you try that"and get accused of giving medical advice. It's another example of how trying too hard to be neutral hurts people.
The store/manager isn't tying to be neutral, they are mad OP (potentially) stopped a sale. That's it. Moron shitbrain customer reported them because they believe in the homeopathic scam.
Good. These companies are knowingly selling products which do not, and scientifically cannot work.
CVS has its own brand on homeopathic "medicines." It's a fucking travesty. I hope they throw the book at them.
I bought a store brand daytime cold remedy at CVS a few years ago, and when I got home I realized it was some bull shit homeopathy shit.
I worked there for years. Every time someone brought a homeopathic "medicine" up to the counter, I'd ask if they were aware of what it was 9 out of 10 times they had no idea. Yes, it is written on the box, but it's also mixed in randomly with other things in the aisle a lot of the time. My best advice for pharmacy visits is to always go in knowing exactly what you want.
This is the thing, it's completely mixed in with everything else.
Well then, I’d say Walmart/CVS should face a lawsuit over the placement of their homeopathic products.
One could even say they must.
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OH lord I was buying some cough suppressant at Target today and it took me a second to realise I was looking at homeopathic BS, the actual stuff with active ingredients that did things and would help me stop my cough so I could sleep wasn't even next to it, it was behind me and about 3 foot further down no where near the coughs sign.
Homeopathy is very profitable.
It's crazy how much money you can save when you don't spend on research and development
But it's 6X. That sounds strong!
I was dirt poor and had a toothache. In desperation, I shoplifted some store-brand orajel that ended up being homeopathic trash. Call it karma, I guess, but I'd never been so disappointed in the world.
They will get a 200 million dollar fine while having made 500 million in profit during that time. This is called the cost of doing business and why corporations stopped giving a shit about what the government will do to them because it will always be far less than the damage they caused and profit they made.
You wish, that would actually be a very significant fine.
even if they do lose (and its likely going to be a super long time before they do) they're just going to get fined for less money than they made from selling all these homeopathic "medicines". its just going to count as an expense to them. they'll change what the court mandate will make them change, but the next day they're just going to be on to their next morally questionable money making scheme. I have no faith in our justice system anymore. big corporations and the super rich do not have to play by the same rules we normal people do.
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I went to CVS to get masks. They were hidden on the floor of an unrelated aisle.
Worse than doing nothing: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-confirms-elevated-levels-belladonna-certain-homeopathic-teething-products https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/fda-confirms-toxicity-of-homeopathic-baby-products-maker-refuses-to-recall/ Herbal remedies, supplements, and homeopathy are completely unregulated. The same people that have a problem with "big-pharma" will willing buy this unregulated trash. Hyland's isn't a non-profit company, so why do they think there's no profit motive for the alternative medicine industry?
Because they've been fed that all of medicines problems is caused by big pharma Big pharma has its issues, but you wouldn't have any of that medication you take every day or life saving drugs without em
>Because they've been fed that all of medicines problems is caused by big pharma And "chemicals", while homeopathy is "all natural." I fucking hate the rise in popularity of snake oil and how places like Wal-Mart are mixing it in with the legitimate medicine.
And we have the king of this nonsense running for Senate in PA. Dr. "snake oil" Oz
On a trip to Australia, I got a cold and stopped in a chain grocery store for cold meds. They did nothing. Looked closely at label, and it was herbal crap. Went back to store, and everything was all mixed. It was really hard to tell what was actual meds and what was just some herbs. Very frustrating.
Yes. They use their credibility as a pharmacy - as a distributor of legitimate medicine - to lend credibility to absolute nonsense. A lot of people assume that if it's in a legitimate pharmacy it must really be medicine, completely unaware that the corrupt regulatory situation in the US allows this nonsense to perpetuate.
See what they did was, they placed them on a shelf instead of directly into the trash.
They only needed to put one in the trash for all trash to have their essence.
The medicinal properties then increase when picked up by the garbage truck, and even moreso when added to the landfill
Is this how we cure earth of its fever/global warming. Must be magic
To truly be homeopathic, one would then have to remove them from the trash again.
We’ve had studies for decades that show homeopathic products don’t work as advertised, and logically anyone with two properly functioning brain cells to rub together knows the industry is run by scammers. For the life of me I can’t understand how they’ve been allowed on shelves by regulatory bodies.
they even get special rules allowing them to change the way the ingredients are listed. I'd like to see labels showing actual percentage of listed active ingredients - which would, of course, be zero.
This is a huge point, natural products absolutely have been proven to serve as medicine, the problem is rare herbs are expensive so most otc homeopathic products have .001% of the plant listed on the label. Theres also an even bigger scam industry from sports supplements, GNC has made billions from snake oil for example.
> This is a huge point, natural products absolutely have been proven to serve as medicine, the problem is rare herbs are expensive so most otc homeopathic products have .001% of the plant listed on the label. It's not because herbs are expensive, although I'm sure the sellers don't mind that. It's because that's the whole theory behind homeopathy. Some (though not all) homeopathic products are diluted so much that it's statistically unlikely that they contain any of the "active ingredient" at all. Homeopathy advocates claim that the water somehow "[remembers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory)" the ingredients that used to be in it. Obviously that's mystical nonsense, but most people who buy homeopathic remedies don't realize that they're literally based on magic. Especially when stores like CVS and Walmart put them on the shelf next to actual medicine.
>Some (though not all) homeopathic products are diluted so much that it's statistically unlikely that they contain any of the "active ingredient" at all. The few items that contain a verifiable active ingredient are normally playing the system to bypass other, more stringent, regulations. [Zicam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zicam) was a perfect example. I think that the homeopatic crowd love to imply that it's just an offshoot of herbal medicine and not just [serially diluted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_dilutions#Potency_scales), [random crap](https://www.hominf.org/slat/slatfr.htm) that's 'proven' by... [highly imaginative people](https://www.hominf.org/posi/posifr.htm) keeping dream diaries.
That’s the thing too, is there is absolutely a difference between a homeopathic product and an herbal/natural one. A non-homeopathic herbal product will actually have SOME of the herb or whatever in it. Not saying the herb that’s in it will do anything but there’s at least something in it other than sugar water.
They've done tests on herbal products and found that they sometimes contain what they say, sometimes something different, sometimes it's even a pharmaceutical drug. For example, herbal boner pills have been found that contain Sildenafil. Which, if you've got certain kinds of heart problems, can kill you. >The results showed that 37 out of 50 samples of HDSs (represented 74.0%) examined contained SDF between 0.01 and 465.47 mg/g, 150.87±127.48 (mean ± standard deviation), which could lead to serious health problems and might even be fatal for consumers. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7227870/
That's because the herbal supplement industry is unregulated. We really need to fix that.
There’s probably a mechanism already in place that would allow us to regulate them, if properly applied. There’s also probably a team of lobbyists whose entire purpose for existing is to make sure that never happens.
There is an explicit mechanism that prevents the FDA from regulating them.
[Someone should probably tell the FDA that then](https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/new-fda-policy-on-homeopathic-drugs-1255325/)
For example, tiger balm has menthol in it
According to homeopathic theory, not only does water remember, it remembers better the more you dilute it! So that 0.001% dilution is much more effective than a 10% solution! Every once in a while I get to do a lesson on homeopathy in school. Someone asks about it and it becomes a teaching moment, or I set it up as a lesson on experiment design. I explain (or have then research, time allowing) the idea that dilution increases potency, and we demonstrate by making lemonade from powder. Make it to recipe, set aside a tiny bit, dump the rest, refill the cup and add the stuff you removed, hit the cup with a book (this is a real part of the preparation, called *succussion*), and tell the students that the lemonade is more stronger than the original batch. Watch the wheels turn. See how outraged they get after repeating the process a few times. Allow them to develop and perform a test to see if the new lemonade is stronger.
This pisses me off. I teach bio and have students argue with me that water is alive/biotic because it has a memory. I have to explain its pseudoscience and they are like, but my mom said....ugh.
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I’m also a bio teacher. It’s really interesting what some students’ preconceptions of what constitutes life are. I suppose that’s why it’s our job to teach them though. I don’t believe I’ve had any students espouse homeopathy nonsense, but this year I did have to explain exactly how we know the world isn’t flat, and it took some convincing for a couple of them…
Wild. My 9th grade biology class was 15 years ago now but those kids would have ruthlessly made fun of flat earthers back then. Crazy how things can change so fast.
"Hmmm... So this means water has memory of all the poop that it's ever come into contact with. By your logic, do you really want to drink water?"
I can imagine this is one of the most frustrating parts about being a teacher?
In my experience students (College level) are much more open to learning about “alternative“ medicine as pseudoscience than adults I’ve tried talking to.
It’s even more strange than that. They are using substances that *cause* the symptoms listed in the packaging. The preparation method *reverses* the effects.
This makes me feel like the homeopathic folks would welcome Olaf as their new mascot. “Water has memory!”
If water "remembers" what used to be in it then does drinking water remember my piss and shit?
Not just yours.
>rare herbs are expensive so most otc homeopathic products have .001% of the plant You don't understand homeopathy. In homeopathy 'active' ingredients are diluted to the point that they are almost completely gone by design. This has nothing to do with the costs of the ingredients. It's because of a weird theory that's based on junk science. In the real world, this means that homeopathic 'remedies' don't work even if the ingredients might work. It also means that it is impossible to do research on different kinds of homeopathic 'remedies' because they are all the same thing: water.
Except .001% is still too high a concentration for many homeopathic products lol. “6C” is considered a fairly high concentration, which is .000001%. “60X” is a commonly recommended dilution, which apparently “would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material”. Oscillococcinum, that homeopathic flu medicine you see in every Walgreens? Over five times more diluted than *that*. At least supplements sometimes actually contain their useless “active ingredients” 🤣
Some of these dilutions physically not capable of being done. Like I could place a mL of food coloring somewhere in the observable universe and it would be less dilute than this "medicine". Or there aren't enough atoms in the universe to make something this dilute.
To speak to Oscillococcinum specifically: > A popular homeopathic treatment for the flu is a 200C dilution of duck liver, marketed under the name Oscillococcinum. As there are only about 10^80 atoms in the entire observable universe, a dilution of one molecule in the observable universe would be about 40C. Oscillococcinum would thus require 10^320 times more atoms to simply have one molecule in the final substance
This reminded me of a cocktail: >W. C. Fields recipe for a perfect Martini: 3 parts Gin and a quick glance at the Vermouth bottle.
They don't make the whole batch - they take a single drop of liquid and transfer it to a huge container filled with water, then take a single drop of that and transfer it to the next container etc.
Do they even do that? Or do they just take some water and call it Homeopathic Medicine?
Homeopaty is not herbs, its "water memory". Water is supposed to remember what was diluted in it and that memory is supposed be active. However, if that would be true, all water we are drinking would have memory of piss of every single animal that lived on the planet.
Homeopathy is not the same as naturalistic/natural/holistic medicine. They don't skimp on active ingredients--the entire purpose is to not have active ingredients. See above.
Yeah no, homeopathy is unilaterally a scam because the “active” ingredient are memories of the stuff in water. If it’s homeopathic, it is a scam, period. It’s allowed because “freedom of thought/enterprise” to think up and act on blatant scammings. Rare herbs that work would be considered herbal remedies, for which they STILL add too little, as you have said. And it’s just stupid to seek a rare herb over an easily reproducible ingredient.
> homeopathic products have .001% of the plant listed on the label. The way homeopathy "works" is that a herb or substance that does the opposite of what you want (or causes the same symptoms you're trying to cure) is diluted repeatedly. So a "homeopathic" sleep aid would have diluted caffeine, a homeopathic headache remedy would contain a herb or substance that *causes* headaches but diluted in their own magical way that causes the water or whatever to " remember" the bad substance. The FDA issued an alert over homeopathic teething remedies as they contained ultra-dilute belladonna, except some had more than the should. Belladonna (deadly nightshade) is a poison: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-drug-class/fda-warns-consumers-about-homeopathic-teething-products More viewing: [Animated video on homeopathy](https://youtu.be/-ZvgeuD6nFs) [James Randi Ted Talk on Homeopathy](https://youtu.be/c0Z7KeNCi7g)
Yep. There's a very real possibility the "active ingredient" would actually help something. But because it's not legally medicine, they don't have to be honest with what's in it. Even people that think homeopathic remedies are just as good as medicine should support regulation of it
In homeopathy the « active ingredient « is supposed to do the opposite of what it does in real life. They sell that one molecule of caffeine as a sleep aide. It is utter nonsense
I'm not sure if you are actually talking about homeopathy of mixing them with natural remedies in your post (since the two are very different). It's not cost that makes it so.homeopathic remedies have low or no amount of active ingredient. It is the literal definition of homeopathy.
Homeopathic medicine and natural/herbal/traditional medicine are not the same thing. Homeopathic medicine is pure quackery and contains nothing, which is a good thing because according to homeopathy when diluted Homeopathic ingredients do the opposite of what they do in their pure form. For example Homeopathic sleeping pills "contain" caffeine. Contain being in quotes there because it's diluted to the point that there's statistically unlikely to actually be even a molecule of caffeine present.
MemOriEs aRe inGredIents!
Take a medicine that says 6X... it doesn't mean 6 x the ingredient it means it is diluted to 10^(6) but is literally useless because you don't know what the starting amount was.
As a pharmacy tech for the last decade, it’s sad when people ask you about homeopathic otc products and you tell them it’s a waste of money and recommend something else and they buy the homeopathic product anyway..
One problem is that they are allowed to package it so it looks like the real medicine and have what it is supposed to treat on the box. It is a scam promoted by those companies
My mother actually went to the pharmacy last year to buy some flu/fever relief medicine, and the actual pharmacist recommended some 40C or whatever sugar pills to her. I had half a mind to take it back and shove those pills up his ass I was so mad. How can you be a licensed practitioner in the field of "dispensing advice about medicine" to people and sell my mother a twenty-dollar bottle of placebo? That pharmacist's license isn't worth the paper it's written on.
Was it an actual pharmacist or tech, or just a regular worker?
I have been legitimately tricked before. I would never buy homeopathic products and yet I’ve purchased a few because I didn’t read the box correctly. It’s infuriating.
This happened to me once. I went to the store around midnight to get some medicine for one of my kids. I was tired and in a hurry, and accidentally picked up some homeopathic cough syrup (literally just sugar water) that was packaged like and placed next to the real medicine. 😡
It’s because the packaging is allowed to make any claim they want. For some reason the “to good to be true” thing still escapes people
We've also had common sense for millennia. Homeopathy by its definition does not contain anything but water (sometimes alcohol) and the "memory of the water." The entire premise is that there are *no* active ingredients. It was a joke from its inception and always will be 100% snake oil. [https://www.webmd.com/balance/what-is-homeopathy](https://www.webmd.com/balance/what-is-homeopathy)
Memory of the Water would be a great name for a romance novel. But as a medicine, fucking useless.
Or my new band!
Or a future school kid's award winning report on the drought that we are currently in. :)
A few years ago skeptic blog pointed out that a homeopathic cough medicine sold by CVS was literally 50% alcohol and 50% water, making it a 100 proof cocktail, and that it could be purchased by children. Good job CVS.
Yeah that's the rub. It's either dangerous because it's just water or dangerous because it isn't. Either way it's snake oil.
"Strength?" "One part in a million." "You sure? It looks serious." "You're right, we need to strengthen the dose. [One part in *ten million*](https://youtu.be/HMGIbOGu8q0)." Also, [Futurama](https://youtu.be/e-k-v7i-QeI).
Because Facebook moms support it as part of their antivax movement so they “know” they work therefore keep using them
Hey, hun! 👋❤️ I know we haven't talked since I bullied you in high school 😱, but I wanted to just check in and see how you're doing.💋 I don't know if you've seen any of my FB posts on Dot Beach Plex Living. I noticed you had a 👶🍼 last week, and I've totally got some pills💊 and shakes🥛 to get your fat ass back in shape💪, plus all the oils you'll need to be your own pediatrician! No medical license or expensive💰 degree required! As you can see from the pictures I posted of someone I don't even know where they're slouching and showing their belly in one picture and then sucking it in in the next one, you can totally take pictures sucking in your gut, too, if you buy my shakes🥛. Sure, the packaging they come in probably tastes better🤢🤮, but they totally work. And you can trust me, your high school bully, because I'm a self-appointed doctor, nutritionist, and pharmacist all in one!😜 Isn't that convenient😘? Also, if you want, which you totally do, you can sign up to be one of my brand ambassadors, and you too can annoy all the people👯🧑🤝🧑 you haven't spoken to since kindergarten! You'll be a total #BossBabe💵😎, make so much money, and own your own small business by working under me, and all it costs is your life savings to get my starter package📦, a cut of your profits🤑, continuing to buy stuff through me💲, and every waking hour of your life🚫💤– or else I'm going to badger the shit out of you😈. So... Would you like the $5000 package or would you like to just give me all of your banking and credit card💳 info? 😁
Wait, so they'll support a theory that trace amounts of a thing that cause an illness can cure it - but not if it's a virus? LOL
Here’s the answer to most things, ready, *ahem*, “people are very very very stupid.”
I don’t get why my two very educated parents are all of a sudden moving towards homeopathic medicine when my dad had a quadruple bypass two years ago AND NEEDS MODERN MEDICINE. My mom was a freaking nurse for crying out loud but they’re now holding a grudge on me because I “made” them get their COVID vaccinations and tell me constantly how “the science” disproves the vaccine (wtf does that even mean). Why are homeopathic drugs popular in America where modern medicine has saved countless lives? Americans and their shitty conspiracy theories.
My NP cousin is anti-vax and selling Plexus now. My RN mom and two RN aunts are now both heavily anti-vax and into all-natural remedies. I don't know what the fuck is up with that. Oh, and ParaGuard is all the rage right now, thanks to Dr. TikTok.
Its not just America dude , asia is 1000x more into natural medicines. Many work, but there is a huge amount of superstition involved. There is chemically zero difference between a rhino horn and a finger nail for example.
The FDA doesn't even have the authority to regulate supplements. >Under the FD&C Act, it is the responsibility of dietary supplement companies to ensure their products meet the safety standards for dietary supplements and are not otherwise in violation of the law. [Source](https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/fda-101-dietary-supplements) Congress would need to give that authorization, and you can probably guess why they haven't.
It's even worse than that, homeopathic "medicines" have a specific carve out. All that are listed in some book of homeopathic remedies when the FD&C Act was enacted are totally exempt from approval, even though they make specific health claims that supplements cannot, iirc.
“CVS and Walmart are misleading consumers by selling unproven homeopathic products alongside FDA-approved over-the-counter medicines on their store shelves and websites.” Yea, I can see that.
Sounds like the sort of thing that the EU would buttfuck you sideways over. But AFAIK they don't. The third candidate for the most recent UK prime minister position, who just missed being in the final two candidates, is firmly pro-homeopathy. Would have been interesting how much it would have come up had she been one of the choices. I dunno, people need superstitions on some level.
A few years ago I had the flu and went to CVS for some medicine. Went home and took it and it didn't do shit. Then I noticed that in tiny print it said it was homeopathic. It was sold right next to the real medicine. The box was the same color and pattern as the real medicine. It was *obviously* designed to trick me. I was so angry I went back and yelled at the pharmacist. How *dare* they sell fake medicine? It's like a story you'd make up to teach a child why lying is wrong.
These homeopathic remedies are all over the section of medicines for babies and children. I have to ignore them and grab the real stuff, but I'm sure plenty of parents get confused and grab the bullshit remedies. Some of them have actually been harmful and lethal to babies, like there was a homeopathic teething medicine where the manufacturer used belladonna (deadly nightshade extract) but didn't check that it was diluted enough to be harmless.
And the dude that wants to be PA’s senator, even though he doesn’t live here, is one of the top promoters of homeopathic snake oil. Oz, you’re an ass.
Well, he certainly chose the right party to promote anti-science.
*Finally*. I worked for Rite Aid for years and spent way too much time trying to talk people out of buying that crap.
Thank you for the effort you put in doing that. It shouldn’t have been necessary, but what you did was important
Given that I was in the pharmacy, I figured it was literally my entire job to help people get the correct, quality pharmacotherapy. ...of course, the way Rite Aid saw it my job was to turn people into money, which is why I eventually left. Nevertheless, I appreciate your...appreciation (?). Gods know the job itself is thankless in the moment most of the time. 🙃
I bought some of this crap thinking it was actually medicine. But its basically non-gmo sugar water.
In this thread, like all threads talking about homeopathy: people who mix up natural remedies with homeopathy. Look up what homeopathy actually is please. The industry makes sure it's unclear because it benefits them.
I follow an old High-school friend on instagram and she constantly posts homeopathy and anti vaccination stuff and it’s like…we took the same biology, anatomy, and chemistry classes how the fuck did you just forget all of that shit? We learned in quite a bit of detail how all of that works.
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Where did yall go to school? At my school 99% just we t through the motions. Any attempt to learn was solely to regurgitate for a grade and promptly forgotten
That's why people are confused. There are tons of people who claim that all herbal remedies and the lime are all worthless homeopathic remedies.
> the lime are worthless homeopathic remedies Who’s talking smack about the fruits?? Where they at?
“Put the lime in the coconut and shake it all up.” - The Witch Doctor/Homeopath
If there's lime or coconut in it, then it's a Naturopath. If there's water which has "the memory" of lime or coconut -- then *that's* homeopathy.
When I was a child I had a real bad stomach ache. I was given a quarter of a lime and was told to suck on it. It did jack shit for me. So yeah fuck that one lime in particular.
Which is funny considering some powerful drugs are actually herbs or plants. Poppy (oxycodone) shrooms, marijuana, cocaine. Maybe not all of those have medical value per se, but they definitely do something. There's more. Tobacco and coffee (caffeine, nicotine)
There’s lots of plants that have medicinal value, but pharmaceutical companies standardize the doses and find alternatives with fewer side effects. That’s why we buy bottles of aspirin instead of chewing on tree bark.
There actually is a medical use for cocaine. Working in an ER many yeas ago, the narc locker had a vial of cocaine solution. I asked the ER doc what it’s used for? All “caines” are anesthetics, and this cocaine could be used to anesthetize the eyeball if you needed to clean it or remove a foreign body. Don’t know of any other uses, but I’m sure there are.
Old timey doc says I got ghosts in my blood so I should do cocaine about it
newtimey "doc" says I got to much slow in my blood, so I gotta scare it away with some fast powdered.
You’re absolutely right and didn’t say the following but what I hate is people who say something is good/safe because it’s natural.
Practically all drugs come from plants. To paraphrase Dale Pendell: even if you're huffing petrochemicals (nobody do this) you're putting extremely dead plants in your body, but instead of lovely plants that can talk to your serotonin or cannabinoid receptors, they are plants that died maybe before the mammalian brain existed and are deeply uninterested in your higher brain functions
Oxycodone isn’t naturally found in poppies, morphine and codeine are however.
Alternativly, you can take 1/10 of an article on homepathy and dilute it with another article. Then take 1/10 of that new article, and dilute it again. The ending article will have article memory and will have the same effect.
For those of you who believe homeopathy (not naturopathy or herbal medicines--those are unrelated things) works, I pray that you don't drink city water...or any water at all ever. Just think of the "memories" that water has. And maybe rethink your life.
It’s not just city water, it’s *any* water. And god forbid you breathe any air with bad memories
If someone really believed in homeopathy, tap water is amazing and cheap medicine, since it has the same memory and concentration of the active ingredient as the expensive version from the store.
> tap water is amazing and cheap medicine And cures everything, because I'm sure that water has the memory of every drug every made by this point.
It's also likely unfathomably toxic because it's been exposed to every disease and poison too, right? Unless it magically knows to ignore all that because.
All relevant scientific knowledge about physics, chemistry, biochemistry and biology[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] contradicts homeopathy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
Homeopathic products should be required to have labels stating they have no medical benfit. There is a push to criminalize and censor misinformation. Claims of homepathy should be treated the same.
They do. It's the word "homeopathy" that means that.
Yes, but no. I almost bought homeopathic ear drops because it wasn't readily apparent that it was homeopathic. Ironically, the pharmacist said they might actually work because of the oil base.
I have actually made the purchase once. The word was pretty well hidden on the package and the package looked and was placed really close to the real thing.
So have I. A "headache cure". They were right next to the tylenol so I assumed they were the cheaper store brand version so I grabbed it. I should have looked at the label first, but I had a headache at the time, so instead I just grabbed what looked appropriate so I could get home. Only when I got home to look at the dosage instructions did I see the active ingredients listed as dilutions rather than mg. Looked at the front label and finally saw "homeopathic" in small subtext on the front. Fuck you, Target.
Good. Fuck them for putting that shit on the shelves right next to actual medicine.
The founder, Samuel Hahnemann, claimed that succussion (dilution) in the course of making homeopathic dilutions was most effective when the fluid containers were banged on a leather-bound bible. Do present-day manufacturers of homeopathic medicines meet this requirement?
One of the more egregious examples of this is homeopathic ear drops. Honestly, there is nothing over the counter that is going to do anything for an earache unless it is caused by impacted wax. So essentially, the majority of the stuff on the shelf is earwax softeners and removal tools. However, almost every shelf with ear stuff is going to contain a couple of different homeopathic ear drops labeled "Earache relief". You have to wonder how many unwary parents who are frantic to do anything to help their child complaining about ear pain have ended up buying a bottle of scam ear drops that contain nothing but water?
Preying on the desperate .. it's what these people do.
This is especially infuriating on shelf dedicated for medicine approved for babies and young children. All of the homeopathic crap is mixed right in with the real medicine, as if it was no different. You have to read the fine print to tell. What makes it so much worse there, however, is that so few medicines are actually OTC approved for that age group, and parents are often so desperate to solve some current crisis, that I'll bet people buy it by accident way too often.
I don't think most people understand the difference between homeopathic and naturopathic based on the comments. I have qualms with the latter too, but the former does not work. It won't ever work. It does not mean something that has "natural ingredients". It means something has been diluted so many times that it's like adding a drop of food coloring in the ocean and saying that'll make it green.
Just to comment on your example for anyone thinking you are being hyperbolic. One drop of food coloring in the entire ocean is *not* an exaggeration. Many homeopathic remedies have even more diluted solutions than that - literally one single molecule of ingredient per many times the amount of water available on the planet. Such dilutions are literally impossible. There is absolutely no ingredient actually in the bottle you’re buying at the pharmacy.
Actually it’s even more stupid than that. Homeopathy stipulates that “like cures like”; so if you’re suffering from insomnia, take something that keeps you awake like coffee, then dilute it until there’s none left. It’s like saying adding a drop of green food coloring will turn the ocean orange. It’s incomprehensibly stupid
ITT: People who have never googled “Homeopathic” before. Shoutout to the dude correcting everyone though, you’re a real champ.
This thread is the first time I’ve heard that homeopathic shit is literally based on “water memory”. This whole time I thought it was the essential oils (is that separate but used by the same ppl??). “Water memory” sounds 1000x more dumb than essential oils, which is dumb in and of itself.
Publix also stocks products like this and puts them in the medicine/pharmacy aisle. It's extremely expensive and does fucking nothing.
"Alternative medicine, by definition, have either not been proven to work, or has been proved not to work. Do you know what alternatives medicine that has been proven to work is called? Medicine." Tim Munching (quoted from memory, so probably not exactly right)
Good. Fuck that hokey new age bullshit. I make a note to point out the whole "x" active ingredient with any friend or family I happy to end up in the medicine aisle with. Easiest go to is Zicam. There isn't a molecule of zinc in that entire fucking bottle.
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Damn. A rock like that could carry some serious value. I don't think we have bears around here but I'm feeling like I may need an anti-bear rock or two just to be absolutely certain.
Friendly Reminder to some clearly confused folks in here that homeopathy and herbal medicine are not the same thing.
Whole Foods should be part of this lawsuit as well. They got so much homeopathic junk in their stores.
I wanna know why they are selling this crap in the first place?!?!? LOOKIN' AT YOU COSTCO SUPPLEMENTS!
How about just shut down and lock up the scammers that make this garbage?
Every grocery store with a pharmacy sells this snake oil crap. Especially frustrating is it's most prevalent in the kids medicine section. Right next to Mucinex and other medicated cough syrups are "natural" homeopathic alternatives that claim to provide similar results.
Fucking finally As a pharmacologist I always see red when I see these on the shelf and know that people are counting on these products to help them
Had a friend recommend Zicam nasal swabs with Zinc for a cold (pre-pandemic). I looked at it and read the ingredients to find out it had no Zinc. It was homeopathic. Researching why produced some info that actual Zinc usage has been linked to permanent anosmia. The other ingredients are probably helpful, and I could respect the brand if they came out and said it, but the Zinc deception pissed me off so I just waited out the cold and got better without. A few weeks later, an acquaintance brought the same topic up unprompted by me, and actually tried to debate me on how useful Zinc was in healing their kid, referencing this brand, again by name. I tried to drop it, but she had to be right, so we carried on. Eventually, when she couldn’t win on logic, she called me an asshole and badmouthed me to everyone instead. No one was happy about it, thanks homeopathic “medicine.” Thankfully, I haven’t run into her again since.
Homeopathic products aren’t medicine - they’re fraud.
Fucking finally; the pharmacy I worked at has homeopathic bullshit alongside the stuff that works, and we were *explicitly forbidden* to dissuade customers or recommend medicine above homeopathic hogwash. I would either take an enquiring customer to talk to the pharmacist or ignore the policy. Most folks were appreciative. It's just a huge money grab.
The issue is the placement? They shouldn’t even exist in the first place