Homeopathy 1; my skepticism, 0

[kitchen_kink]

So, for all the crazy woo-woo stuff I'm into, I still like science. And Western medicine. A lot. The founder of the spiritual tradition in which I practice used to say, "First perceive, then believe," and it's a philosophy I generally follow, especially when it comes to my health.

Homeopathy, then, was in the group of Things I'd never tried, and I'll admit that one reason I never tried them is because I saw some Science that told me it was a crock. I didn't look into it too carefully, mainly because whenever I try to read the theories on why homeopathy works, they make my brain hurt.

But no shit there I was, at Omega Institute, and my ears were acting up again. I have some kind of chronic condition: I've always had waxy ears, and sometimes they itch a lot. The wax doesn't drain properly by itself, because my ear canals are shaped like hills (I was told this only recently by an NP I saw at a CVS. Seriously. A doctor couldn't have mentioned the odd shape of my ear canals during the 34 years I've been visiting them and having them stare into my ears??). I scratch, I try to clean the wax out, I mess it up, and they get infected. Sometimes they get infected when I do nothing at all.

Usually the cure for this is antibiotic drops, but I was in the mountains of NY for a week and didn't feel like thinking about it. Besides, it felt just like it might come on, not like it was really infected.

So one of the teaching interns came up to me and said she has a chronic ear inflammation problem, and takes homeopathics for it. She heard me say something about it and had an instinct that two of the three medicines she takes, in combination, might help me. She had a couple of tubes about, and said if I liked, I could take them, hold them for a bit to see if they felt right (seriously. But then, I'm a witch, so not so weird, right?), and then take them and see if they helped.

Well, I've done everything imaginable to try and cure my own ear infections or head them off at the pass: soothing ear oil, flushing the wax out, ibuprofen to manage the pain, increased vitamin C - I always end up giving up and going for the antibiotics. So I didn't hold out a lot of hope. But they felt okay in my hand, so 3 times a day after meals for the next day or so I popped 5 little sugar pills from each tube under my tongue and let them dissolve. (Hey, dessert.)

Say what you like about the placebo effect or whatever, but the next morning the swollen lymph node under my ear was down, and the pain was much less. I ran out of the pills, and in the next couple of days it started to threaten again; I bought a couple more tubes and took all of those in the next few days, and it's basically gone.

My one concern is that if I stop taking them it'll just come back again, and I'll ultimately have to go for the antibiotics - which, if that's the case, I should probably skip the $6 a tube process and just get the antibiotics whenever I feel the first twinges. I will offer further reports as I have them.

Anecdotal reports, or otherwise, on homeopathy is welcome here.

Comments

[per-simmon.livejournal.com]

Well, I'll tell ya.

I have an autoimmune disorder (Alopecia) and have had a long and varied relationship with both the conventional and alternative medical routes as a result. It's a condition that is hit-or-miss in terms of treatment- sometimes treatment works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes hair spontaneously grows back and even if hair apparently grows back after treatment you can never really know whether it was because of the treatment- it's just wacky that way.

Homeopathy has been among the different treatments I've tried (and there have been plenty). I didn't feel like it helped much one way or the other. I also found it to be expensive and time consuming- I was taking drops three times a day from something like five different bottles, it was a pain to keep them all straight.

I've had some good luck and bad with both conventional and alternative medicine. The best results I've gotten have been when I've combined the two, thanks going to the amazing medical practitioner I started seeing a couple of years ago.

[dpolicar]

There's a Brazilian expression that seems apposite here, that I can't quite remember in Portuguese but translates roughly to "I don't believe in witches, but that doesn't stop them."

I'm glad the infection went away, even if only temporarily.

And I definitely encourage observing what actually happens in the world, even when theory predicts something different.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I am terribly inconsistent with regard to homeopathy. I have a general disdain for it, and if you say to me "What do you think of homeopathy?", I will tell you that I think it's a crock. However, I put Arnica gel on my bruises, and I observe that when I do this, they go away faster. I don't know why.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Does the arnica gel you use have actual arnica in it, or just water that was once in a room that at some point contained arnica?

Also, have you tried putting vaseline or some such on your bruises? It may simply be the act of massaging that's helping.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

if you use actual arnica cream made from arnica extract, that is not homeopathy. I know there are homeopathic arnica remedies and herbal arnica remedies, although I don't remember the brand names for each.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I am very pro-herbal and natural medicine. I absolutely do not believe in homeopathy, although I recognize the power of the placebo effect, so it's great that this helped you. I wanted to ask, did you ever try putting garlic cloves or tea tree oil drops in your ears to ward off or heal infections?

[dot_fennel]

Adding to the chorus: It's been about five years now since the first time I saw something with herbal ingredients (in measurable amounts) marketed as 'homeopathic', and I no longer have any faith that a "homeopathic medicine" has anything to do with homeopathy.

Which is too bad, because "real" homeopathy, the kind which critics point out is overwhelmingly unlikely to provide patients with even a single molecule of the substance their remedy is based on, is so extreme that the question of whether to give it the benefit of the doubt is easy.

(I could go into detail, but I'm guessing you've heard the arguments already. It boils down to: when scientists say they can't imagine how a thing could happen, the argument from human frailty-- that they're just blinded by their prejudices, etc.-- could make sense. When they say that if a theory were true it would invalidate half of modern chemistry, though, it's harder to see how they could be THAT wrong. Water memory and potentiation fall into the latter category, it seems to me.)

Anyway, why so down on the placebo effect? It's not like placebos don't help you. They just aren't strong or reliable enough to be worth premium prices, nor to entrust with your health when a serious problem arises. Right?

[roozle.livejournal.com]

Scientifically speaking, homeopathy is a crock. The theory, if I can call it that, about the way classical homeopathy works, all that molecular vibrations of molecules that statistically speaking aren't even there -- complete bullshit.

I did some poking through journal articles. It appears that the more rigorously controlled a scientific study of homeopathy is, the less likely it is to show that homeopathy has a statistically significant effect.

Anecdotally, classical homeopathy remedies have produced results in me and, tellingly, in babies and in pets that you'd think would not respond to placebos, that I just can't explain in any way other than "well, its bullshit but it's USEFUL bullshit".

That said, western medicine is awesome.

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

Have you tried heat treatments? Ear candling or using a blow dryer's hot setting to increase blood flow and soften the wax often helps your body clear the buildup.

You hear a lot of BS about 'negative pressure' when people talk about ear candling, but they totally forget that you're applying heat to the area for ten minutes and that's going to have several biological consequences, many of them beneficial. There's all kinds of ways that things can work, and the scientists that only look at the way non-scientists think something works, and then call it a crock because they can disprove that way are missing something. Homeopathic dilution of most non-poisonous herbs does not work, I've seen the evidence. But there are some things that the immune system responds to in even very tiny quantities. For some conditions, homeopathics work when other treatments don't. But because a lot of the treatments don't work, there's little scientific interest in it, and will be years before we figure out why.