I was in the chemist recently and looked at the homeopathic remedies to see what was actually in them (I suspected alcohol like in the Bach flower remedies).
I was surprised to see that the arnica one actually contained 10% arnica (whatever that is - a plant extract?). So I owuldn't be at all surprised if it works.
One issue with homeopathy is the word is used to cover two different concepts: first the idea that symptoms can be cured by a substance that produces the same symptoms, which is a perfectly testable hypothesis and with all the substances out there I'd expect a few to be useful. The second is the idea that diluting the remedy so there's none left makes it work better, and people talking about homeopathy usually but not always mean this - and the subset of homeopaths who refer to the former being successful in trials and claim that therefore the latter work, are particularly annoying.
As you say, there's no reason why homeopaths couldn't say they don't know why X works, and it shouldn't matter if it's a placebo - if we knew how to create effective placebos, medicine would have made a great step forward.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-10-20 04:08 pm (UTC)I was surprised to see that the arnica one actually contained 10% arnica (whatever that is - a plant extract?). So I owuldn't be at all surprised if it works.
One issue with homeopathy is the word is used to cover two different concepts: first the idea that symptoms can be cured by a substance that produces the same symptoms, which is a perfectly testable hypothesis and with all the substances out there I'd expect a few to be useful.
The second is the idea that diluting the remedy so there's none left makes it work better, and people talking about homeopathy usually but not always mean this - and the subset of homeopaths who refer to the former being successful in trials and claim that therefore the latter work, are particularly annoying.
As you say, there's no reason why homeopaths couldn't say they don't know why X works, and it shouldn't matter if it's a placebo - if we knew how to create effective placebos, medicine would have made a great step forward.