4 ms·

"like cures like" is a dangerous oversimplification. Vaccines and immunotherapy work by giving the body small amounts of the actual thing that is harmful (usua

"like cures like" is a dangerous oversimplification. Vaccines and immunotherapy work by giving the body small amounts of the actual thing that is harmful (usually dead, in the case of vaccines). It's easy to see why this is a reasonable approach - it's giving the body "sparring practice" against the disease or substance. Antivenom works similarly, except that the antibodies are grown in another animal, probably because by the time someone is bitten, there isn't time for their bodies to learn how to produce it themselves. Homeopathy is based around finding substances which cause similar symptoms. They have no relation to the actual cause of the condition that they're supposed to treat. Is the "cure" for Ebola any random chemical that happens to cause humans to bleed out of every orifice? Is the "cure" for Alzheimer's any random chemical that causes people to lose their memory? How many conditions cause headaches, or nausea, or lack of energy? Are we supposed to believe that anything which can cause those symptoms is a universal cure for all of those conditions? If so, why bother with snake oil at all? Just make sure that one is exposed to a variety of cold/flu viruses, and they should (according to the "like symptoms" "theory") cancel each other out. The whole concept didn't make sense in the 19th century, and it certainly doesn't today.

Alex3917 10y ago
> The whole concept didn't make sense in the 19th century, and it certainly doesn't today. The reason it doesn't make sense is because you're mischaracterizing it. Most homeopaths didn't believe that every substance that caused similar symptoms would be a cure, but rather they believed that these substances would be a fertile ground to look for treatments. It's basically like how today we consider drugs that cure diseases in rats as being promising to study further in humans. It was homeopaths who introduced the idea of clinical trials to mainstream medicine, and if they believed that like cured like in every instance this obviously wouldn't have happened.
- nathan_f77 10y ago
  > but rather they believed that these substances would be a fertile ground to look for treatments That's still based on a pretty bad misunderstanding of how the body works. The action of a virus or bacteria is usually pretty undetectable. If you had no immune system, you wouldn't even get a cough or a runny nose. A runny nose, a cough, vomiting, and diarrhea are the body's response mechanisms. They aren't caused by any one disease in particular, they are the body's way of trying to flush out the infection. If you look for the cure in something that also makes your body angry and tries to flush it out, well you're not going to get very far. You're just going to make the problem much worse, and weaken your immune system further. So the whole idea of homeopathy is flawed from the very beginning. This is completely different to testing cures in rats before human trials. I don't even really see the connection, to be honest.

Alex3917 10y ago

> The whole concept didn't make sense in the 19th century, and it certainly doesn't today. The reason it doesn't make sense is because you're mischaracterizing it. Most homeopaths didn't believe that every substance that caused similar symptoms would be a cure, but rather they believed that these substances would be a fertile ground to look for treatments. It's basically like how today we consider drugs that cure diseases in rats as being promising to study further in humans. It was homeopaths who introduced the idea of clinical trials to mainstream medicine, and if they believed that like cured like in every instance this obviously wouldn't have happened.

nathan_f77 10y ago
> but rather they believed that these substances would be a fertile ground to look for treatments That's still based on a pretty bad misunderstanding of how the body works. The action of a virus or bacteria is usually pretty undetectable. If you had no immune system, you wouldn't even get a cough or a runny nose. A runny nose, a cough, vomiting, and diarrhea are the body's response mechanisms. They aren't caused by any one disease in particular, they are the body's way of trying to flush out the infection. If you look for the cure in something that also makes your body angry and tries to flush it out, well you're not going to get very far. You're just going to make the problem much worse, and weaken your immune system further. So the whole idea of homeopathy is flawed from the very beginning. This is completely different to testing cures in rats before human trials. I don't even really see the connection, to be honest.