Homeopathy

[Safe-Keeper]

Nice podcast on homeopathy here.
After watching that one, you will be able to truly appreciate this one, in which he really drives the point home.

The whole prospect of the "all-natural", "evil Big Pharma" fad scares me. It's just not how gullible people shell away money on stuff that either doesn't work, doesn't work as well as conventional medicine, or has adverse side-effects they don't tell you about -- it's the sheer lack of logic used to support all this that gets to me. For example, how people are so busy slinging mud at conventional medical practice that they forget that alternative remedies have side-effects just as conventional remedies. Or how disturbingly effective anecdotes are, when in reality they're utterly worthless to prove anything. What frightens me is how apparent it is that so many lack the required critical thinking skills to cope with the avalanches of conflicting information we are buried under in today's Information Age.

My favourite is the people who are terrified of vaccines because they contain microscopic amounts of some kind of mercury (far less than in, say, sea food), and say they would rather take natural remedies.
Um... guys? Mercury is natural. It's a chemical element. How much more natural can something get? Oh, and the Chinese had great faith in it as medicine 3000 years ago. Oh, and Big Pharma says it's dangerous. I thought that was all the alternative crowd needed; All Natural, Chinese Wisdom, and shunning from evil Big Pharma?

May I ask how many of the quackery guys here have already taken homoeopathic medicine?

Doesn't matter, as we're not discussing some brand of ice cream, coffee, or submarine combat simulator. Whether homeopathy works is a scientific question that can be, and has been empirically tested. If tests reveal -- and they have -- that it doesn't work as good as, or any better than, a placebo, then it doesn't change anything if I try it -- if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

One example for humans:
A friend of my mother has had problems with a tooth. There was a painful swelling in the upper jaw. After some days she took some homoeopathic pill and the swelling was gone within hours.
Even if this should have been only a placebo effect it definitely did cure the problem.

Sorry to be an ***, but how do you know that? Swellings have a tendency to go away by themselves, often within a couple of days.