Homeopathic everything should be removed from the market.
James Randi was amazing on the topic for people who don’t understand the problem:
It utterly boggles the mind that it’s legal to sell homeopathic products. The word scam comes to mind, but it’s so much worse than that because it’s a scam that doesn’t merely do nothing; it actually causes harm by confusing people and causing general distrust of actual treatments.
Labeling doesn’t help either. Apparently the FTC understands the general public is dumb enough that we need “don’t drink this” labels on bleach, but they credit them with being able to see through the confusing mumbo-jumbo that homeopathic products put on their labels to disguise the fact that it’s just water.
In fairness… have you seen Fabuloso bottles? :)
yummie joose :3
That was the first product that made me want to post in the forbidden snacks community back in the dark years
Mmmm! Jungle juice and Covid cure all in one!
Sweet Jesus that looks good. I want to use it as a cleanser after eating tide pods.
Is this… homeopathic cleaner? So like… just water? I notice they didn’t dilute the dye for some reason. I wonder why homeopathic theories don’t seem to work on color and scent additives…
Fabuloso is real cleaner, parent comment is just saying it looks tasty.
Ah ok! Whoosh! Thanks for explaining that.
Yes, it does look like some kind of juice drink!
We need a Forbidden Snacks community.
Or magazine or whatever.
Some things labeled as homeopathic do work… because they have real stuff in them that does work…and perhaps does have side effects known and unknown not to mention interactions.
I used the original formula Snore Stop which was originally marked as homeopathic snore help, and it worked. It also was slowly slowing down my tongue and making talking trickier. The FDA decided it had actual levels of plant extract that was lightly paralytic. The newer formula didn’t work as well for me plus I worried about cumulative consequences.
Isn’t the rule that if it’s really homeopathic then it won’t do anything and if it really does it’s a medicine?
If what you had was effective, it wasn’t homeopathic. Homeopathy requires very large amounts of dilution, to the point there aren’t even two molecules of the active ingredient present in a dose.
Not quite. Homeopathy is a medical belief structure consisting of certain practices that attempt to cure “like with like”. It has shown no benefits over placebos or other medical treatments, and on certain occasions, has been shown to have serious consequences.
There are many parts to homeopathy that are widely criticized, such as “potentisation”, a process of diluting a substance to such a degree that there contains little or none of the beginning ingredient. Additionally, since the goal is to treat symptoms by using like symptoms, the causes are never truly addressed, especially since the underlying philosophy of homeopathy is that the body can cure itself.
Thus, if you were helped by a homeopathic medicine, it was more than statistically likely a placebo effect. Please do not rely on homeopathy for medicine.
That’s the point. The product DID things. In fact it raised the attention of the FDA and they changed it. Theres all kinds of products trying to fly below radar.
Not how that works, and also not true. If it’s marked as homeopathic, it’s NOT approved by the FDA. There are FDA guidelines for homeopathic medicines, including the use of active ingredients, but they are specifically not approved by the FDA. And looking at Snore Stop, it never stopped being homeopathic, so no idea what you’re talking about.
We’re you able to find reference to the composition change 20ish years back?
Used their website, which would definitely have stated as such. I feel like you want to suggest that homeopathic medicine is good, but homeopathic medicine doesn’t have to prove it is effective nor that there aren’t any side effects. Labeling as homeopathic is just a way to put products out and avoid the FDA or having to prove it works.
In this particular case, being labelled as homeopathic IS typically a sign that it does not work and might actually cause harm.
because they have real stuff in them that does work
No. Don’t confuse homeopathy with herbal remedies. Homeopathic preparations are diluted, must be diluted to be homeopathic, to a degree where you don’t have an atom left of “active” ingredient in the mix, insert some gross unscientific explanation about the “memory of water”. That then is either taken directly, or sprinkled on sugar.
The effects of homeopathic preparations, any of them, is not distinguishable from placebo. If you look at them under a spectrograph they are exactly placebo: Water or sugar.
Herbal remedies, though? It’s a hit and miss, some have been tested to not have an effect or not really the assumed one, a metric fuckton do have effects exactly as traditional use tells us (random examples: Valerian for nervous excitation, elderberry for colds), others very much do have effects but are not used because they’re too dangerous (e.g. fern against tapeworms: Fern contains a neurotoxin and getting the dose wrong is easy, and easily fatal, nowadays we have synthetic stuff that’s toxic to tapeworms but harmless for humans).
There’s one single thing that’s proven to be clinically effective about homeopathic treatment (compared to standard practice): The way doctors talk to patients, not just hearing reports about a particular symptom and then digging down into that, but taking stock of pretty much their whole life situation, it’s a very broad interview. Because, yes, many people are indeed better helped by someone being visibly interested in their well-being than swallowing clinically active pharmaceuticals against their stomach bug which is actually a symptom of stress or such.
There’d be nothing whatsoever wrong with introducing that in standard care, it’ll probably even save tons of money in the long run, as well as prescribing placebo – the patient knowing that it’s placebo doesn’t mean that placebo effects don’t get triggered, there’s still a very good chance of an effect happening, the bodymind is funny like that. If in doubt, flank with hypnotherapy you’ll have a regime that’s not just more effective at triggering placebo effects than homeopathy, but is also ethical.
Isn’t the rule that if it’s really homeopathic then it won’t do anything and if it really does it’s a medicine?
Not quite. I don’t know anything about the labeling on the particular product you used, but homeopathy is a magical process and not a chemical one. It relies on the theories that “like cures like” and that “water has a memory”. A homeopathic remedy for a cold might use black pepper since it makes you sneeze, and then a tiny bit is added to water, and then that water is shaken to make it magical and diluted 50%. The shaking and diluting is allegedly performed tens or hundreds of times, because in homeopathy the LESS “active” ingredient there is, the stronger it is.
You’re correct that an herbal or other traditional remedy becomes medicine once it’s proven. However homeopathy has been conclusively disproven, and in fact never proven to work better than placebo (because that’s all it is - there’s intentionally nothing actually in it)
God, all these people ignoring “labeled as homeopathic”…
Because yeah, there are “homeopathic” remedies on the market that actually contain significant quantities of their ingredients, they’re just using the word for marketing. Most of them do nothing, or are just a slightly higher dose of what you’d get from sleepytime tea. A very well-known muscle relaxant in that niche says it contains something like the equivalent of half an ounce each of valerian root, lemon balm, etc once you break down the obfuscation.
Homeopathy is total bunk, but it seems like there is no shortage of companies happy to defraud the believers, going so far as to actually give them what they think they’re buying.
If homeopathy had a different name it wouldn’t be nearly as popular. People see it and they think “Oh, it’s a home remedy because it says HOMEopathic.”
There’s plenty of home remedies that are at least marginally effective against colds: Hot water with honey, ginger, and lemon, for example. But homeopathy is not that. It’s diluting something over and over again until there’s nothing left of the original substance, and then selling it to gullible and/or desperate people like it’s going to work.
Yup, and people see the “ingredients” listed as 6x, 8x, 10x and don’t realize that’s how many times it’s been diluted.
It’s diluting something over and over again until there’s nothing left of the original substance, and then selling it to gullible and/or desperate people like it’s going to work.
It’s crazy, like, a child can see right through that, yet you have millions of desperate adults falling for and hawking that obvious bullshit everywhere. It’s really sad.
It’s desperately popular in France (Boiron is French) and home doesn’t sound the same at all.
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Genetically Modified Skeptic intensifies
I swear I just heard drew screaming from atop a building somewhere.
Probably, but I’d wager it’s a timesaving way to treat hypochondriacs.
And potentially lifesaving but it doesn’t address the core issue and makes a ton of profits for crooks instead of funding actual research
Some “homeopathic medicine” is just food tho
I think you’re confusing natural medicine with homeopathy. Homeopathy is straight nonsense, always.
No, they just need to stop making claims that they help
Just label that shit for what it is: bottled water.
Maybe but that would involve us trusting the government.
I don’t think it should have ever been a crime to smoke a joint I also don’t think it should be a crime to eat a sugar cube that someone put three drops of water on it.
Legislators and regulators are targeting producers and not consumers.
Would you rather trust companies driven entirely by profit over the government?
Legislators and regulators are targeting producers and not consumers.
The same way the drug war was waged yes? How did that work for us?
Would you rather trust companies driven entirely by profit over the government?
False dilemma. Now are you willing to put down money right now that the government will never try to ban abortion pills? If you aren’t I must conclude that you are the one that doesn’t trust the government. You know the same government that fought a war against cannabis users for 9 decades.
Do you live in USA? If I did, I would be worried about the government too.
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Yes, as water is pretty safe.
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Fucking Christ, and people ask why that shit should be forbidden???
You’re so used to reading bullshit, arm length ingredients lists that the homeopathy industry’s bullshit “ingredients” list is ALL water and you don’t realize it.
Each of the “30c” or above is PURE WATER. The whole bottle is pure water!
At 4c the average distribution of announced ingredients to water is 10 parts per billion of “active” molecules. At 12c you get an average of 0.6 molecule per litter.you most likely have way less than a hundred molecules per billion. That’s pure water.
I’m not saying that it doesn’t work – I’m saying that instead of paying idk what price for it you could just use distilled or even tap water and get the same results, and not fund a bunch of absolute crooks.
Edit: oh and each of the “active” ingredients is not actually active. It’s just a bunch of pseudoscientific bullshit that have been given the chance, thousands of times, to prove its efficiency, and NEVER managed to. Not explaining how they would somehow do it, no, just prove that what they’re offering is in any way better than placebo. They’ve always been entirely incapable of proving it.
Notice the ‘c’ and ‘x’ designations after each ingredient. Those aren’t standard amounts like ml or mg, they designate the amounts of dilution: x means 10 and c means 100. The number is also not an amount, but the number of succussions, which means the times it was shaken before the next dilution.
So 6c means the ingredient was diluted 6:1, shaken, then diluted 6:1 again and shaken again, 100 times.
Homeopathy is the belief that water has memory, and you can activate that memory by diluting an ingredient with water, shaking it, then diluting it again and shaking tens or hundreds of times. By the end of the process, there should be nearly zero molecules of the active ingredient left, but the water will ‘remember’ the ingredients that are now gone.
I’m sorry to say none of the ingredients in the list on that label are actually in that product.
eta: Also, the ingredients are chosen because they cause a symptom the user is experiencing, not because they help cure or lessen a symptom. So they may include pepper for a cold because pepper makes you sneeze, not because it helps with sneezing. This they call ‘like cures like’. So many ingredients in the list will be ineffective, harmful, or fatal if any amount was still in there.
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The fact that you can get around seemingly every FDA reg by just putting “this product not endorsed by the FDA” in tiny text in a corner of the packaging makes me wonder why we even have the FDA. If the laws were serious they’d make it so that you can not sell anything for human consumption that isn’t approved.
I grew up with some of this stuff. We went through a raw milk phase, putting “This product not for human consumption” in big letters on the label it’s not the obstacle you think it is, if anything it’s more enticing to a certain type of person.
The kind of person who overdoses on bovine/equus de-wormer?
That is not true. You can make vague claims and have a disclaimer, think “promotes gut health” but you can’t claim you cure cancer. The FDA will come after you.
That is incorrect, if you read up on the history of “patent drugs” (cure-alls) and the creation of the FDA you’ll understand that there’s an extremely fine line faux “medication” has to follow or risk being pulled from the market. For example you have to list the ingredients and you can’t make claims that your product will cure illness, you can however make vauge claims of health improvements.
The world of quack medicine has vastly improved since the FDA’s creation as most patent drugs of the time were some mix of opium, cocaine, and alcohol being sold as other made up miracle substances.
So now the government is going to decide what I am allowed to put in my own body? Very well, when the GOP bans vaccines, birth control pills, abortion pills, transitioning medication, and restarts the war on cannabis don’t come crying to me. Because they are doing exactly the policy you advocated for.
Change the words ‘eye drop’ to ‘product’ and it would be a far better thing for the FDA to say.
Bro they make belladona eye drops that will get you high for 4 days straight the FDA works for the cartels exclusively bro
Putting belladonna in your eyes sounds like an extremely bad idea.
its AMAZING for alergias
Not to mention Algeria.
I’m sorry, I cannot agree that belladonna is good for Algeria.
I think they have enough problems.
I said not to mention Algeria!
I cannot stay silent while the Algerians suffer this epidemic of belladonna eye-poisonings!
Top tier pun
If you are feeling anything from those drops, their process is not diluting it properly and there is a good chance of getting poisoned. Homeopathic shit is supposed to be diluted so much that there is almost no chance of it having any belladonna molecules in it at all. So if there is (which you indicate there are), then their dilution process is fucked and there is a good possibility that it is going to give you brain damage at the very least.
That’s not homeopathic.
its just drugs
I work in a lab that often tests these types of things. I can tell you with certainty: STAY THE FUCK AWAY! DO NOT USE!
Bro can’t just drop a warning like that and not explain further
The people in charge of testing for contamination have no idea what they are doing. I have a limited view of this, but from what I’ve seen they don’t know what they need to test for. They don’t have proper procedures in place of they get a positive test. Lastly they don’t seem to have proper monitoring of their facilities to begin with.
Poopoo
💩
Go on…
See my other responses for more elaboration.
Because they are empty or because they are full of contaminants?
It’s both because homeopathic remedies are pretty much useless and the people that make them have no business being anywhere near things people put in their bodies.
I read it wrong,
Every homophobic eye drop should be pulled off the market
I’m so glad I wasn’t the only one.
I was all ready to be upset at eyedrop manufacturers for being homophobic and now I’m upset at them for a whole different reason. Very destabilizing.
Its easy to call out homeopathic medicine as frauds stealing from fools. Same with chiropractors and anti-vaxers. But what we need to acknowledge that the adversarial, inaccessible, rapacious, and Kafkaesque medical systems in Western countries, especially America alienate people and drive them toward this crap.
Mistrust of pharma, hospitals, doctors, and the health department is not irrational.
The best you can hope for is nothing.
Much as I like Arstechnica, this was one of the worse articles I’ve read there in a while. It’s based off of this bullitin.
The author seems to have taken this:
Do not use ophthalmic products that:
- Are marketed as OTC products to treat serious eye conditions such as glaucoma, cataracts, retinopathy or macular degeneration. There > are no OTC treatments for these conditions.
- Are labeled as homeopathic, as these products should not be marketed.
And then the author seemed to imply that ALL eye drops are homeopathic and should be pulled, which is not quite what the FDA was saying.
edit: I hit post before I had finished typing when I had intended to hit preview to check my markdown. edit: And then I missed the typos anyhow. Screw it. Send it.
Are you sure? Neither title nor article appear to suggest such a thing.
After referencing previous scary eye drop news:
No one should ever use any homeopathic ophthalmic products, and every single such product should be pulled off the market.
The point is unexpected, given that none of the high-profile infections and recalls this year involved homeopathic products.
Hear me out, I like Similasan eye drops because they’re just saline with an alternative preservative. The flower magic stories are just for fun. My eyes like their saline blend best x_x
Plz check back in when you go blind from some whack ass contaminant in your unregulated eyedrops made by crazy and/or cynical people who may or may not believe in germ theory.
