4 ms·
Well, the body does overreact to things: look at the Spanish Flu. If a policeman told you that your family were all killed in aeroplane crash, you'd react in a
by adrianwaj 15y ago
Well, the body does overreact to things: look at the Spanish Flu. If a policeman told you that your family were all killed in aeroplane crash, you'd react in a certain way, even though it wasn't true and they injected no chemicals into you. To me, homeopathy is a way of hacking the body. Anyway, I've mentioned homeopathy once before on HN and was also downvoted, so probably not a great place to bring it up.
Add: if a doctor said you only had 5 months to live, you'd probably start doing all these things you'd never got around to doing, or thought you could do, the bucket list - then in 5 months when you're still around, you realize it may have been a lie, but your depression has lifted and you have a new lease on life: that's what I think homeopathy is supposed to be: tiny signals on certain levers, accepted as true, leading to massive effects.
- prodigal_erik 15y agoOh, the immune system's function is to sequester and kill pathogens, so it's no surprise that it has the right tools to attack the body if it gets confused (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm). I just don't see any demonstrated or plausible way to distinguish a 12C (1:10^24) dilution of anything from a plain water placebo.
- adrianwaj 15y agoI am not out to defend homeopathy, but if you take a remedy (and I'm not suggesting you do), see if it has any effects on your mind or body. If it does, then accept that you don't know how or why it is doing so, but it is. In my experience, homeopathic remedies are very powerful and absolutely do work in evoking a reaction, but in terms of curing illness, it becomes more difficult to work out the remedy and dosage: and within such difficulty a skepticism is born. According to my research, homepathic remedies often contain no molecules of the source substance.