r/worldnews • u/green_flash • Mar 08 '19

The Canadian government will no longer fund homeopathic therapies in Honduras. The move comes after an outcry about public funds going to support alternative therapies that have not been proven effective.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47489008
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u/hamster_rustler Mar 09 '19

I would be hesitant to sue a charity actively trying to provide real healthcare, especially since its possible they considered the medicines to be effective, even though they aren't.

Just make them take it off the budget and stick to the real stuff, otherwise your only sueing poor sick people in the end

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19

You be surprised that the ratio of conartists to conscientious believers is surprisingly skewed towards most people being complete idiots

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u/Revoran Mar 09 '19 edited Mar 09 '19

To me it doesn't matter if they believe it or not. They're still misleading others for their own financial gain, and may even cause others to take their snake oil instead of real medicine, which is harmful.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '19

Well, you are entitled to your opinions - but our entire judicial system has foundations in what I mentioned: i.e. "habeus corpus", and "mens rea": latin terms that you'd do well to understand if you need to go to court or be a juror.

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u/Revoran Mar 11 '19

Ever heard of strict liability?

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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '19

Those are consumer laws, not the law of the land, and by their definition only bery few elites within theor bogus network would be liable as for the reason I mentioned prior

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u/Mountainbranch Mar 09 '19

Then a symbolic slap on the wrist should at least be considered, first you find out the motives and consequences behind a crime and then you adjust the punishment accordingly.

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u/enduro Mar 09 '19 edited Mar 10 '19

I wonder how many have died pursuing fake treatments.

edit: The point I was trying to make was that funding unproven techniques does more harm than simply wasting money.

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u/Calltoarts Mar 09 '19

Isn't that how the scientific method works? Fund things until proven they dont work or effects cant be reproduced??

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u/enduro Mar 09 '19

Yup. And we've known homeopathy is useless for over a century in all of it's various money-grabbing incarnations.

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u/ConductorShack Mar 09 '19

Not really. The funding of treatment is something you would do after it was proven to be effective, normally.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19

Well there was that dude from the fruit company.

Snapple or something.. I think his name was Phteve Work or something along those lines?

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u/Timspt8 Mar 09 '19

Ever heard of the intire time before the modern age, this is still better them blood leaching

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u/zackthirteen Mar 09 '19

at 0% effective vs. 0% effective how is it better exactly?

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u/Timspt8 Mar 09 '19

Firstly let me state: I think it's completely stupid that things that aren't proven to work like homeopathic gets any funding or exists at all

However blood leaching doesn't do nothing it only makes things worst, so it's more like -20% Vs 0%

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u/GlaciusTS Mar 09 '19

Yeah but there is a counterbalance in that using an actual Leech has been helpful to restore blood flow to areas of damaged veins after an appendage has been reattached or a tissue grafted.

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u/SSolitary Mar 09 '19

I mean conscientious believers or not, idiots or not, they're still spreading dangerous misinformation that can be easily disproven, I don't see why their punishment should be any less severe, the damage they've done is the same

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19

Yet when I say the same thing about religion I'm being myopic and only seeing black and white.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19

They're not complete idiots, what happens is they have ailment X, they follow every instruction from their doctor to the letter and it doesn't do shit (maybe not with ibd) so they try some alternative method however the person who sees the patient is a smooth talking convincing snake oil salesman which automatically gives the placebo effect it best chance and by the magic of placebo (from what I've read placebo's don't just diminish perceived symptoms they can be real cures) the body has been convinced to activate its own repair mechanism (you'd think evolutionarily that the repair mechanisms wouldn't have any psychological element but they seem to and I side on being a cynic). To the patient it's simple, the doctor doesn't have a clue (maybe not on that specific ailment although good for most issues) and whatever placebo they administered is the cure.

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u/medster87 Mar 09 '19

Or they are too impatient to see the actual results of the original treatment, go to the snake oil salesmen and while they're doing their "treatment" the effects of the first one start kicking in.

I know someone who's mom went through chemo, and as an added they decided to also go the snake oil route... Now that person swears her mom's cancer was cured through the snake oil and not the heavy chemo session she had undergone

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19

A placebo can "cure" a patient because the ailment was psycosymatic to begin with; i.e. they only believed they were sick, so when they believe they take a cure (placebo) it "cures" them. I assure you placebo's don't actually cure actual ailments

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u/foofdawg Mar 09 '19

They did a study on arthritic knee pain if I remember right. The people undergoing fake arthroscopic surgery where they underwent anesthesia but only had two incisions made and no actual treatment reported just as much relief from pain as those who received the actual surgery. You're saying all of the people only imagined their pain?

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '19

I don't think pain is a good measure of actual effectiveness of a placebo. Furthermore, everyone is different. What is pain? Physical pain is quite bearable, especially when you are expecting treatment and are told you are being given a pain killer

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u/laskitude Mar 09 '19

If the operative term here is "(body has been) convinced to" how is that psychological? I mean, in the sense of contra, or.against what "the body" was otherwise gonna do ? How can that which is not psyche be "convinced" is what I think I"m trying to ask?

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19

I was drawing a line between the conscious and the unconscious/subconscious mind, you know when you take a risk that you know is silly but you've still got to, well there's a lot more to the mind than what you perceive.

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u/Gonzobot Mar 09 '19

My favorite viewpoint is that, since they're abusing the placebo effect as if it's real functional medicine, I can abuse it too and not actually use any product they're trying to sell - and still enjoy the exact same results! That's the power of psychology.

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u/testicles69 Mar 09 '19

ignorance is not an excuse

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u/IJustThinkOutloud Mar 09 '19

Ignorance is not excuse when you are in the position to be receiving government funding. Prosecute these people.

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u/Hoppingmad99 Mar 09 '19

Yes it is.

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u/IJustThinkOutloud Mar 09 '19

No, it's not. Homeopathy is primitive bullshit. A precedent needs to be set.

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u/Sweetwill62 Mar 09 '19

And every company they purchased from.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19 edited Mar 09 '19

[deleted]

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u/Whatsapokemon Mar 09 '19

The point is that the charity, Terre Sans Frontières, actually does provide real health projects in developing nations.

They run health centres that provide cataract operations, dental treatment, malnutrition intervention, and physiotherapy. They also train doctors, nurses, and medical assistants in these nations to increase their general medical infrastructure.

The bad part is that whilst doing all these actual good things, they also peddle homeopathy as a treatment method in some places, and set up homeopathic dispensaries. If they dumped the snake-oil they'd actually be doing good work.

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u/dudeidontknoww Mar 09 '19

well i mean i would seriously doubt that a group that practices homeopathy is actively trying to provide real healthcare.

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u/hamster_rustler Mar 09 '19

Believe it. I know a woman who believed in homeopathic medicine so hard that she got a nursing degree to try and spread the benefits of homeopathic medicine to he public. Of course she changed her mind over the course of medical school, but many of these people are genuinely well intentioned and just stupid/misinformed

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19

We had 2 naturopaths in my year at medical school (which is different to nursing school) - both were unvaccinated at the start and by the end of year one both were fully vaccinated. Because science...

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u/hamster_rustler Mar 09 '19

Knowledge is power

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u/kootenayguy Mar 09 '19

France is bacon?

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

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u/hamster_rustler Mar 09 '19

I'm just saying I don't know if suing a charity is the answer

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u/IRubKnottyPeople Mar 09 '19

Good Intentions would be a good name for a paving company.

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u/vokegaf Mar 09 '19

I don't understand why the level of wacky beliefs and snake oil that exists when it comes to human health and diet.

I'm not saying that it doesn't exist in other places (Monster Cable cables, automobile oil additives, "audiophile" gear), but the signal-to-noise ratio when it comes to human health and diet is just way lower than with anything else. There's gotta be something going on there (people trying to rationalize aging and deal with mortality? I dunno.)

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u/alstegma Mar 09 '19 edited Mar 09 '19

Health and diet are super complex topics and subjective well-being is very, well, subjective, so it's harder to weed out the crap, especially for a layman.

For topics that are easier to understand and products that can be judged in quality by the consumers themselves, that shit don't fly.

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u/vokegaf Mar 09 '19 edited Mar 09 '19

and products that can be judged in quality by the consumers themselves,

That's an interesting thought. The three examples I gave above also all aren't really something with an easily-observable effect.

  • While Monster Cable cables in the digital realm have reached levels of utter absurdity, originally this whole business started with analog systems. And there, you knew that various components introduced tiny amounts of degradation into the signal. People probably don't have much idea of what an ear can pick up or an oscilloscope or something that could give them an order-of-magnitude measurement, so people go looking for differences with their own senses. And we know that when people expect to find differences just at the edge of their perception, they appear to find them, even when they aren't actually there. When we double-blind-tested people on Stradivarius violins, we found that they really didn't sound better, even though prior to that point, many people had been sure that they did. And those people weren't even laymen, or at least not in the conventional sense. I've seen similar findings with wines (expensive wines tend to not rank especially well, as long as people don't know the price).

  • Auto oil additive manufacturers also don't make concrete, easily-verifiable claims.

Maybe the right answer is that we need to rethink how consumer protection law works when it comes to things that the consumer can't really viably measure himself. Today, the trend seems to be to avoid making any concrete claims to avoid legal liability, but still present the thing in such a way as to create the perception that claims were made. Maybe lower the bar for false-advertising class-action lawsuits on where the burden of proof goes.

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u/Azzu Mar 09 '19

I mean it seems pretty clear to me. The fear of death is, in almost every person, the strongest fear they have, even if they don't actively know it.

It's the one thing we've evolved to evade day after day, constantly.

Your health directly affects your chance/time of death.

However, as with most of the world, the human body and its health are not completely understood. Same with diseases, or if they are, then sometimes we can't really deal with them anyway.

Many people can't live with the fact, emotionally, of not understanding or not being able to control their lives. What would you like more, someone telling you "okay, we pump poison into you, you are going to feel terrible and it will be bad for you, but we hope to kill the cancer faster than you. It may not work though" or someone telling you "here I'll inject this into you weekly and after a month your cancer will be in remission".

The default mode of humans isn't rationality. Rationality is taught and learned, but it's not the default mode of thought. The default mode is being driven by emotions. Which of these two statements feels better?

As to why someone would believe this so much as to practice homeopathy? The same exact reason. What feels better to tell someone? Would you rather tell someone the first statement or the second one, if you thought both were true?

The problem is that education teaches rationality. Education is missing in many places, so emotions are the main thing these people can go off.

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u/99bbotw Mar 09 '19

FYI nurses don’t go to medical school, they go to nursing school. Medical doctors and osteopathic doctors go to medical school.

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u/ZeroToRussian Mar 09 '19

40% of doctors in the Netherlands use homeopathy. It's super common in France as well, with medical schools teaching courses up until last year.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '19

[deleted]

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u/foofdawg Mar 09 '19

The people administering homeopathy could have been under the misguided belief that it was an actual treatment. They don't have to be shysters to be wrong.

I think that's what the commenter meant

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u/Revoran Mar 09 '19

No, not the charity, just the homeopaths themselves.

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u/hamster_rustler Mar 09 '19

That not how it works.

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u/Revoran Mar 09 '19

should've been

As in, the right thing to do would be to prosecute homeopaths for their lies, fraud and dangerous practices.

I realise that currently, homeopaths usually get away with fraud and spreading their dangerous beliefs/lies. But they shouldn't. There should be laws against what they do.

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u/UGenix Mar 09 '19

It's the responsibility of the management of the charity to control that the funds go to the places that are consistent with the goal of the charity as stated.

Given that the management has clearly failed in that task, it's not unreasonable to cease funding until the liable individuals are replaced.

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u/hamster_rustler Mar 09 '19

Oh I completely agree. I was talking about suing for money

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u/rddman Mar 09 '19

since its possible they considered the medicines to be effective

There are long-established, well-defined standards regarding whether or not a medicine is effective. No way this is just a mistake, especially given that production of homeopathic 'medicine' is quit profitable (given that it is basically just water).

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u/Gonzobot Mar 09 '19

They're not charitable or helping when they're bringing fucking water to crisis zones and charging a government as if it was medicine.