generalsemanticist wrote:Look at statin drugs. Yes they lower chloresterol but they deplete CoQ10 and can actually cause heart failure. Now there is some irony for you. If you want to take that poison, be my guest. It is so retarded to develop a drug that lowers chloresterol without finding out why it is elevated in the first place. This is the main problem with modern medicine - it treats symptoms instead of causes. At least orthomolecular medicine attempts to form a theory about what is happening, like the theory about the breakdown of collagen in the blood vessels and the susequent increase of Lp(a) in the blood to attempt to patch the lesion. Is it possible that proper levels of Vit C can stop this and even reverse it? Who is going to pay to find out? If I was a Vit C manufacturer I would like to increase sales but if I fund expensive research then any other manufacturer can take advantage of it so why would I bother? The health business does not work the same as the sickness business.

generalsemanticist wrote:I'm afraid this is "woo", as you people like to say. You can't get a patent on vit C, how many time do I have to say this? If it suddenly became known that Vit C can treat atherosclerosis better and safer than statin drugs the pharmaceutical companies would lose billions of dollars - you have it ass backwards my friend.

generalsemanticist wrote:I find it hard to believe that drug companies could get patents on vitamins, even in mixtures or for uses, but I am no patent lawyer. But maybe the this is problem in the first place - to have health care driven by profits.

Moridin wrote:
Public funding of CAM research exists. The US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has spent more than 1 billion dollars on CAM research.

Darkchilde wrote:

Moridin wrote:
Public funding of CAM research exists. The US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has spent more than 1 billion dollars on CAM research.

And where are the results of some form of alternative medicine actually working? There are none. The NCCAM is just a black hole sucking money and not producing any result, because there are none to produce. That billion dollars would have been much better spent in actual research and not on a wild goose chase.

No substance is intrinsically toxic. Toxicity depends on dose.

Yes, all medications have risks associated with them. There is no such thing as a risk free medicine (or food item). This is an illusion. Even something basic as aspirin can cause bleeding ulcers if used regularly for a long time.

You have to compare the risk of keeping the drug on the market (in your example, this was a slight elevated chance of hearth failure) with the risk of keeping the drug off the market (related disease and deaths caused by high levels of cholesterol). In many cases, you might find that the risks of keeping it off the market is much greater than the risk of keeping it on the market.

Also note that this is a tightly regulated industry, with the precautionary principle being applied frequently (such as in the case of Vioxx, silicone breast implants, thimerosal etc.)

Modern medicine actually treats both symptoms (various painkillers) and causes (antibiotics), as well as act preventative manner (such as vaccines). Your assertion is based on no real knowledge of the field of modern medicine.

If it is possible that a certain level of vitamin C can help, then this will be revealed in controlled, double-blind scientific studies. If there is even a slight chance that vitamin C can help, big pharmaceutical corporations would immediately be interested, because that means that they would be able to sell many new brands of drugs on the market, patenting formulas and names and make a fortune, especially if vitamin C actually treated something that there was no treatment for before. They would make billions of dollars.

GenesForLife wrote:
2) Double blind clinical trials that have shown any kind of statistically significant efficacy (I can cite papers from Lancet which suggests that the field per se is bunkum, and since these are peer reviewed papers with available data supplements, one cannot get away by crying "bias")
3) Double blind studies that indicate an efficacy that is better than conventional medicine (anything worse and homeopathy is tantamount to denial of more efficacious therapy)

generalsemanticist wrote:It is truly sad to see this obsession with "double blind" studies. It seems like a futile attempt to establish a one cause => one effect model which is very simplistic. It is, however, very useful for companies with drug patents to make large amounts of money. There have been over a thousand "double blind" studies of statin drugs, for example. You will not see these studies done (by private companies) if there are no patents involved so please stop using this irrelevant argument ad nauseum. You need to look at the larger picture of health and realize that you cannot separate the brain from the body and if healing can be accomplished by any means that is what is important.

angelo wrote:Could you perform a small operation, like say, removing a lesion or a biopsy Doc ? A person with acute appendicitis could end up dead if instead of consulting and getting treatment from a real doctor, they came to you instead. Isn't that so?

Darkchilde wrote:I would not use a drug that has not been tested. I would never take any homeopathic crap, as it does not work. If I take a medicine, I want it to be tested, and to have in the box, the little paper informing me of its contents, what it does, and what are probable side-effects.

generalsemanticist wrote:The human body is complex - some things work on some people sometimes but not others. This is a fact, deal with it.

Dr. Nancy Malik wrote:

Darkchilde wrote:I would not use a drug that has not been tested. I would never take any homeopathic crap, as it does not work. If I take a medicine, I want it to be tested, and to have in the box, the little paper informing me of its contents, what it does, and what are probable side-effects.

Only 13% of conventional medicine is evidence-based http://drkaplan.co.uk/2009/11/homeopath ... -emphatic/

Only 13% of conventional medicine is evidence-based http://drkaplan.co.uk/2009/11/homeopath ... -emphatic/

Due to the study design, the findings of IIPCOS-1 and IIPCOS-2 do not provide firm data on the comparative efficacy of homeopathic and conventional treatment in acute diseases but rather underline the potential value of homeopathy in every day clinical practice.

In this issue, Paris et al.[1] report a clinical trial showing that homeopathy is not better than placebo in reducing morphine consumption after surgery. Proponents of homeopathy would object to this statement. Even though the study was well-made, it did only suggest that a certain homeopathic remedy fails to be effective for a certain type of pain. Other homeopathic medicines might be effective and other types of pain might have produced different results. There are hundreds of different homeopathic remedies which can be prescribed for thousands of symptoms in dozens of different dilutions. Thus we would probably need to work flat out for several lifetimes in order to arrive at a conclusion that fully substantiates my opening statement.
This seems neither possible nor desirable. Perhaps it is preferable to simply combine common sense with the best existing knowledge. These two tell us that 1) homeopathy is biologically implausible, 2) its own predictions seem to be incorrect and 3) the clinical evidence is largely negative. Let me explain.

The main axioms of homeopathy are that 1) ‘like can be cured with like’ and that 2) less is more. According to the first axiom, a substance that causes certain symptoms in healthy volunteers is a cure for such symptoms in patients. The ‘less is more’ axiom posits that, if we dilute and shake a remedy, it becomes not weaker but stronger. The process is therefore aptly called ‘potentation’ by homeopaths. Homeopaths believe that the most potent remedies are those that have been potentized to the point where no ‘active’ molecule is left. Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy, might be forgiven for developing these concepts some 200 years ago. Today, however, we know a lot more, and comprehend that they are not in line with much that science has taught us. Yet today's followers of Hahnemann's doctrines seem to prefer mystical thinking to science.

Even homeopathy's own predictions seem to be incorrect. In order to know which remedy is effective in which situation and to apply the law of similars, homeopaths need to test each of their medicines on healthy volunteers and minutely record the symptoms it may cause. This process is called ‘proving’. During the last 200 years, many such provings have been reported. A remedy is given to a group of volunteers who then record their experience. One may well ask whether the results are reliable. One could, for instance, investigate whether the symptoms reported are different from those caused by a placebo. Assessing the totality of these provings in a systematic review, homeopaths were recently surprised to find that ‘the central question of whether homeopathic medicines in high dilutions can provoke effects in healthy volunteers has not yet been definitively answered’[2].

Another prediction homeopaths believe in is that of homeopathic aggravations. These are acute exacerbations of the patient's presenting symptoms after receiving the optimal remedy. Homeopaths expect these phenomena to occur in ∼20% of all patients. When we scrutinized placebo-controlled trials of homeopathy, however, we found that aggravations did not occur more frequently in the verum than in the control group [3]. The likely explanation seems to be that this prediction is based on a myth.
The acid test, of course, is a clinical trial of the type conducted by Paris et al.[1]. Is the patients' response to homeopathy truly more than a placebo effect? Many investigators have asked that crucial question. As one might expect, the answers are far from uniform. Some trials are negative, some are positive, but very few are rigorous. In this situation, it would be foolish to rely on the results of just one or two studies. What is needed is a systematic review of all studies of acceptable methodological quality. Dozens of such reviews are available today. The vast majority of those that are rigorous conclude that homeopathic medicines fail to generate clinical effects that are different from those of placebo [4–6].
Yet many patients swear by homeopathy and homeopaths insist they witness therapeutic success every day of their professional lives·[7]. The discrepancy between the trial and the observational data continues to be hotly debated. Personally, I find this somewhat puzzling. The explanation seems obvious: patients often do improve for a number of reasons unrelated to any specific effect of the treatment we prescribe [8]. Amongst all the placebos that exist, homeopathy has the potential to be an exceptionally powerful one – think, for instance, of the individualized remedies or the long and empathic encounter between patient and therapist.
So the conundrum of homeopathy seems to be solved. ‘Heavens!’ I hear the homeopathic fraternity shout. ‘We need more research!’ But are they correct? How much research is enough to show that any treatment does not work (sorry, is not superior to placebo)? Here we go full circle: should we really spend several lifetimes in order to arrive at a more robust conclusion?
Perhaps one should ask the proponents of homeopathy and the best minds in medical research to design a comprehensive but finite research programme to determine the truth. As long as both camps agree at the outset to accept the results, this might be a feasible way of ending a 200 year old dispute. Most readers and even many homeopaths will be surprised to learn that that has already happened! During the Third Reich the (mostly pro-homeopathy) Nazi leadership wanted to solve the homeopathy question once and for all. The research programme was carefully planned and rigorously executed. A report was written and it even survived the war. But it disappeared nevertheless – apparently in the hands of German homeopaths. Why? According to a very detailed eye-witness report [9–12], they were wholly and devastatingly negative.

Dr. Nancy Malik wrote:

Darkchilde wrote:I would not use a drug that has not been tested. I would never take any homeopathic crap, as it does not work. If I take a medicine, I want it to be tested, and to have in the box, the little paper informing me of its contents, what it does, and what are probable side-effects.

Only 13% of conventional medicine is evidence-based http://drkaplan.co.uk/2009/11/homeopath ... -emphatic/

Moridin wrote:

If the discovery of new forms of medicine was not driven by profits, some important forms of medications might not have been developed. The thirst for profit need not always corrupt the value of medicine in itself. Sometimes it may even complement it.

Worse, the current system becomes complicated as drug companies file patent upon patent to try to extend the life of a single drug--turning to litigation to try to stifle generics. Big pharma's biggest loophole: When a generic drug is challenged in court, the FDA is forced by law to freeze its approval for 30 months unless the case is settled before that. As a result, generic companies are constantly suing to invalidate extra patents and brand name drugmakers sue to keep generic versions off the market.

Such patent shenanigans slow medical innovation. The knowledge that current drugs will go off patent should in theory help spur big pharmaceutical companies to license or develop new and better drugs. In theory, we pay more for branded drugs to finance the massive research needed to develop them. But long battles over dozens of patents can simply distract pharmaceutical companies from their job: making new medicines.