Homeoparty

This should have been my column about self-medication for depression, completely unscientific and frivolous. But when it turned out that this issue was already about pseudoscience, I was somehow embarrassed. It’s one thing when I’m the only troll in the entire newspaper, and another thing when homeopaths come to it.

We popularizers have a complex attitude towards pseudoscience. On the one hand, we hate and despise her. On the other hand, we owe our existence to it. The story of almost every popularizer begins with the fact that one day he meets a homeopath on the Internet (a creationist, a fighter against GMOs, an opponent of experiments on animals.) and is sincerely surprised. “Wow,” he thinks, “there are people like this in the 21st century!” Perhaps they are simply not in the know? Perhaps you can explain it to them?” He starts to explain, gets involved and makes it a profession. His homeopath remained where he was, but witnesses to the dialogue came up and began asking him to continue.

There is an absolutely amazing story with supporters of homeopathy. It is quite possible to explain to them about molecules. They will listen and understand. And then they will say: “Well, yes, there are no molecules, but it helped my neighbor!” You start to figure it out, and it turns out that your neighbor’s illness responded well to placebo treatment. “Well, yes,” says the supporter, “but it helped another neighbor of mine!”

Well, in general, it’s clear that this is some kind of psychological defense. It grows either from a repressed and repressed dislike for science, or, what is even funnier, from a love of medical procedures.

In fact, if a person loves to be treated, then homeopathy is a godsend for him. You can eat whole bottles of it, and nothing will happen for it. She has clever dosage regimens with a certain number of drops per hour, there are different dosage forms, there are different price categories, and most importantly - you can be treated for anything and for as long as you want. And a homeopathic doctor is a thrill, this is psychotherapy for those who are embarrassed by the root “psycho”.

When we were filming a story about homeopathy, they showed us the technique. “What, Rodion, are you afraid of?” - “I’m afraid of the dark.” Depending on whether my correspondent was afraid of the dark, heights or cockroaches, he would be prescribed different sugar balls. I think it's terribly touching.

All these “it helped my neighbor” in the mass consciousness stem from an underestimation of the role of placebo. From not understanding that our brain is a terrible force. He thinks with a few centimeters of the bark, and the rest of the one and a half kilograms are intended to coordinate the processes occurring in the carcass - the level of hormones, immune activity, etc. And those centimeters with which one thinks can somehow mysteriously influence the rest (as well as vice versa). This has not yet been very well studied, but it has been confirmed in experiment. Placebos, yes, can do a lot of things. Even the frequency of asthma attacks can be reduced. And they generally cope brilliantly with impotence or premenstrual syndrome.

From this point of view, trying to ban homeopathy is completely pointless, which is why it is not banned. If people want to be treated with anything, it would be better if they were treated with obviously harmless sugar balls than, God forgive me, with kerosene and intravenous hydrogen peroxide. But the problem with this is that a placebo works best when the person doesn't think it's a placebo, but rather thinks it's a real medicine. And that’s why all homeopaths are absolutely brilliant polemicists; any of their speeches leave the feeling of “I don’t understand a damn thing, but it seems like there’s something in it.” Even I still had it when, as part of preparing the story, I talked with the PR manager of Materia Medica. This highly professional person juggled terms so enthusiastically, praising homeopathic dilutions of antibodies against human proteins, that I was saved only by re-reading the instructions for their preparations (there is a lot of funny stuff there, but I was especially touched by the fact that they make completely different preparations based on completely identical substances and dilutions: one from alcoholism, the other from stress, one from an adult, the other from a child). But there is absolutely no need for a normal person to re-read the instructions and compare dilution with the number of atoms in the Universe. It’s enough for him that he helped his neighbor.

And I am sincerely happy for my neighbor. Because, in fact, the prosperity of homeopathy is a sign that we live in a very prosperous world, where we invent all our diseases ourselves, which means they can be safely treated with sugar peas. Well, until some point.

Anastasia Kazantseva