Homeopathy for ebola

[Jacob(smooth)]

Wouldn't that be nice? Sadly, and I speak from personal experience here, people who take every opportunity to rubbish mainstream medicine are still perfectly happy to avail themselves of that medicine when it suit them!

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Ooooh, yes. And worse.

Let me introduce you to matthias rath
http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/matthi...#more-1088

The most loathsome reptile of a human you may ever choose to meet. Here is a man who successfully convinced governments in Africa that his vitamin supplements cured aids whilst antiretrovirals made it worse. It's a longish read but worth it if you want to know the depths to which humanity can sink.

Whoa, my sister is always recommending vitamin supplements and seems almost paranoid in her suspicion toward western medicine. So now I wonder if that rath is an outlier low life in the homeopath trade and if there are any which do anyone any good at all.

Couple of things. Firstly we ought to separate traditional homeopathy (vis, water) from "naturopathic" medicine which also includes vitamins and shiz. The later are conceivable plausible as having a therapeutic effect on the basis that even a blind squirrel finds the occasional nut. The former are pure placebo.

But as to do they do any good at all? I'd have to say yes. In the West we suffer from overmedicalisation. People see purely normal variants and processes as medical, and if it's medical they need a medical cure. And of course once you're in the medical system, you think of yourself as a sick person, which often makes matters worse.
Enter the woo merchants, who do a Stirling job keeping people who are not really sick out of my office! And of course placebos, for some conditions, gave a bloody good success rate.
So yes, some of them do some good. The problem comes when they start getting their hooks into genuinely sick people who really NEED real medicine.
One of my favourite studies was on chronic low back pain, comparing acupuncture, sham acupuncture and control groups. It showed a 40.%improvement in the sham acupuncture group. 40% is HUGE. For that, they can take all the vitamins they like! For Ebola, cancer etc, no.