Profit from suffering

Homeopaths want to make everyone happy, and in this good deed, every barrel will come in handy. Including an unscrupulous journalist. For an ordinary reader, and after him, for a journalist, areas are always interesting, bordering that common sense, for the last 300 years in accordance with science, believes usual. But sometimes the journalist goes beyond common sense, and it turns out an article similar to appearing in the Rossiya newspaper. Yes, announcements on the “treatment of all types of cancer without surgery and chemistry” are hung on the fences around the cancer center in Moscow, but this is done by crazy and/or scammers. A journalist printing in the “RG” clearly does not eat. So, we almost certainly deal with jeans, and with the most cynical, addressed to people who are ready to pay a lot in the last hope. For what?

Homeopathy is a product of the XVIII century, when scientific medicine only rose to the feet. Then it was possible to imagine that a simple dose law - the larger the dose, the stronger the effect of the drug (effect) is not quite a general law. One could figure out how it was done by Haneman, that with a very strong reduction in the dose of the drug, “other” effects appear. This idea, like everything in medicine, does not exist without business surgery and does not develop without other components of the social practice of medicine. Dear bloodletters in India still treat hundreds of thousands of patients with bloodletting. Europe and North America overcame such practices at the end of the 19th century. Why? Because sustainable edition of profit (with the correct organization of work with patients, they can sell everything) contrasted scientific, academic principles.

It was not easy, but by the middle of the 20th century, homeopathy, with its bizarre tirelessly repeated quotes from Ganeman and the inability to demonstrate bright therapeutic effects, was pushed from the mainstream of scientific medicine. She remained crypto practitioners such as the self -supporting clinics in several cities of the USSR.

Nevertheless, since scientists, including in medicine, are curious, and they are found even among the hijacking horsemen, studies of homeopathic remedies were conducted, including methodically rather perfect. They showed that homeopathic remedies do not have a significant effect, i.e. They do not change the course of the disease as “normal” medicines of scientific medicine. They do not affect the symptoms noticeably - this is also important, since even without a therapeutic effect, softening of suffering is a worthy task of medicine.

In an attempt to fight back from scientific verification, homeopaths put forward the objections of allegedly insurmountable: homeopath does not use standard treatment, as a scientific doctor does (their homeopaths call vialpates). Homeopath for each patient prescribes treatment taking into account his individuality. Therefore, ordinary randomized controlled tests (RCTs) are not applicable for assessing homeopathic remedies. This, of course, is a false objection. In RCTs you can check any intervention, no matter how comprehensive it may be. And in RCTs they checked the results of patients with homeopaths (the whole complex, with their “individualization”) and did not find a significant effect different from the placebo effect. A detailed analysis of the entire set of RCTs of homeopathic preparations shows that if the effect of treatment is noticeable in some examples of RCT, then this effect is completely explained by the so-called publishing displacement. The latter is called a well -understandable fact: if the study gives an unpleasant result, then its results are less likely to publish than the results of a study that confirmed the effectiveness of the product being sold. This feature is inherent in any publications. Conventional, non -meopathic pharmaceutical companies traditionally hide the results unpleasant for their products. Only in the XXI century it is possible to force them to disclose information more or less fully. We will be fair: scientists in general (even those who work quite disinterestedly) are in no hurry to publish the results of studies that do not confirm their favorite ideas. Of course, a more general conclusion follows from this: only the drugs proven in independent studies with a good ratio of benefit and harm should be used in medical practice.

Homeopathic drugs do not meet this criterion. With safety, they create the illusion of treatment, and people using such funds do not receive normal medical care.

Of course, someone cynically laughs at how fools eliminate themselves with homeopathy, improving the human breed. But doctors understand better and feel the vulnerability of people and their weakness in the face of the disease. That is why doctors insist that medical care is safe and affordable for everyone, and not a free service market. If my assumption about the custom nature of the article in the RG is fair, then I would like to know which company “bought” an unscrupulous journalist, since it crossed the limits of the permissible profit from suffering.