Tried Everything Else Try Homeopathy
A large chunk of the problem is that many common self-selection and over-the-counter medications are only by a doctor's prescription in German speaking countries.
Low risk medications, which in other countries a consumer can safely select and administer, are only available over-the-counter at pharmacies, other low risk medications require a script - examples of these include basic pain medication(OTC), NSAIDs(RX), PPIs(RX), skin treatments(OTC), anti-fungals(RX), anti-biotic drops(RX). Pharmacies also generally have short hours on Saturday, and are not open on Sundays.
Combining these factors leads to people seeking out a "solution", and those "solutions" are either homeopathic or merely just alcohol, since neither require a health care professional's assistance. There is also no shortage of homeopathic stores that promise therapeutic benefits, such as addressing fertility issues and chronic pain. Regulators regulate medicine, so non-medicines often fly under the radar, even when they're promoting medical therapies.
There's so many ways that this system fails in comparison to modern approaches:
Should a woman not have a sufficient stock of pain killers on a sunday during period cramps, her options would be to either beg a neighbour, or got to the emergency department of a hospital. In other countries, she could simply visit a supermarket or convenience store.
Children with head lice can't receive a treatment without a doctor's prescription, but there's no shortage of proven ineffective products stocking pharmacy shelves, hoping that some desperate parent will buy it just to see if it works.
A person with conjunctivitis needs to first visit a doctor, potentially waiting hours just to get the script, then hope that the pharmacy is still open. (Doctor's offices are frequently bogged down with people visiting for minor ailments because they can't get basic medications without it.)
In the realm of sexual health: While other countries have dispensing sexual health clinics with easy access to treatments and prophylactic medications, those afflicted in Germany and similar are often needlessly waiting, or worse simply spreading disease. With some medications and inoculations only available via a hospital appointment.
Overall it breeds distrust in the medical system and promotes unhealthy, worthless, scammy "alternatives".
It’s like, at some point we discovered the placebo effect, which has got to have been a pretty shocking result, right? I just can’t fathom that the entire scientific community just went “ah, hm, right, placebo. I see. I guess we need to do our random-controlled-trials with a placebo control group now”. Wait, that’s it? Nobody went “wtf woa we can cure a % of people with empty pills, how does that work and how can we up the %?”
I just don’t get it, it seems to me that the existence of the placebo effect is hard evidence that there’s a mind-body connection and we can cure body stuff with mind stuff (and vice versa, probably), so why does nearly all of that remain firmly in alternative woo-woo land?
> I just can’t fathom that the entire scientific community just went “ah, hm, right, placebo. I see. I guess we need to do our random-controlled-trials with a placebo control group now”. Wait, that’s it?
see that's because they didn't go like that - there's even an section on the ethics of using them in medical practice on the wikipedia article for placebo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#In_medical_practice
Plus it's a pretty important topic of discussion when it comes to pain management/opiod crisis. Unsurprisingly, a large group of professionals did not, in fact, randomly decide to ignore a very large and obvious question in the field
I mean that I don’t understand why there isn’t more research into how the placebo effect works and whether there’s ways to make it work better. Reading other sections of the wikipedia article you linked, it seems to me that researchers have been stuck at “is the placebo effect even real?” for decades and few try to figure out how it works and why, and whether it can somehow be amplified. The answers to such questions might well influence the ethics discussion but “we really don’t get how it works so better not prescribe placebos” is a very unsatisfying stance to me.
You might be interested in the work of Ted Kaptchuk and Kathryn Hall [1], for example. (Kaptchuk is a trained acupuncturist with a degree in Chinese medicine, but basically re-educated himself in western medicine, and is a highly regarded scientist.)
One of their insights is that placebo effect comes from neural modulation of pain receptors, and that the placebo effect has specific limitations. For example, the placebo effect cannot cure cancer or make a cold go away, but it can lessen pain and reduce inflammation through hormone signaling.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4GzMizVAl-0&pp=ygUTc2ltcHNvbnM...
In the worst case scenario, they accept lack of mechanism because "there are things science doesn't know", especially if their personal experience (random charlatan demonstration) is duped into belief.
You're right that no further study is needed for homeopathy, it simply cannot work at these kinds of dilutions.
Engineers and logical types take everything too much at face value (e.g. astrology and personality types, as well as health and fitness). The reality is usually that neither camp /really/ knows what they're doing, but have plausible (to them) explanations. Though empiricism is much more mentally rigorous than woo-woo/sham.
Generally, if the treatment achieves the patient's desired goals -- I don't think it matters (barring severe ethical concerns like body integrity dysphoria). People not generally educated in a Western background are more likely to be susceptible to placebo or "magic" (this includes the less educated in the anglosphere but also the majority in foreign countries).
Barring life-saving procedures, most elective medicine is -- imco -- on a similar, if not slightly higher standing compared to homeopathy et al.
It also does affect people for sure... For things like a very real ear infection... the a-holes will leave kids in agony for weeks before parents see a proper physician for antibiotics.
Note Psychoneuroimmunology is also interesting, but a more legitimate area of scientific study. It takes a deep scientific look into induced immune system disorders, and unlike cult nonsense it has quantifiable scientific studies (usually done with rodents) that can be replicated in your own institutional labs.
Cult Homeopathy is just expensive child neglect in my opinion... offering the worst outcomes for the naive and superstitious.
I find this interesting because it was a German example a few years ago that demonstrated that homeopathy could be ethical in a specific case.
My mother in law (in Germany) had cancer, and eventually things reached the point where any further chemotherapy was pointless. So she went home. But they stocked her up with homeopathic "therapies" and she was quite diligent in taking them in the morning and thropugh the day. At first I was appalled, but then I realised that they gave her a sense of agency over her care. I think this had important psychological value over the beginning of the terminal phase of her life.
Now I can't believe this works for everyone -- I can't imagine I would waste my remaining time on such nonsense. But I don't think she had a good grasp of science (she always wanted one of her kids, or me, to go with her to the doctor and to explain things to her) and she never had any access to the Internet to look things up, so she was probably the ideal candidate to benefit from this nonsense. Drinking water out of tiny bottles isn't any different from praying at that stage of your life and that's considered acceptable and even unremarkable in certain circles.
PS: The Ukraine war made me think of her cancer -- it was a very unusual one and I have always believed it was due to some Chernobyl fallout.
I briefly considered selling a device that would "reverse" those consequences so the water from your tap would be homeopathically neutralized. But it just seemed unethical to take advantage of the poorly educated. It's bad enough there are people selling crystals, bibles, and magic charms -- selling a scam-device like this is just as unethical.
But then, the next concept is "like cures like". Why do you think people are so immune to fish piss?
If you make bad choices, take responsibility and bear the consequences. That's the American Way. It ain't my problem, Jack!
If they really worry about these issues they can simply move or turn to the private sector. If the private sector can’t help them, that’s clearly due to the jackboot of unelected bureaucrats — congress needs to juice the supply side by cutting taxes on the job creators.
(BTW there’s an earthquake fault running right down Water St in lower Manhattan!)
You see plenty of examples of this on the market already as-is in different sectors. A part for a Ford GT could cost 500 bucks where the same part for a Ford Fiesta could cost 50.
Unless the part is something like a window-opener switch, yoi WANT that part to have all the extra engineering, higher spec materials, tighter-tolerance machining, and higher-level finishing that goes into making a high-performance machine actually perform at such high levels.
Moreover, even if the parts weren't fundamentally different despite occupying similar roles in the car, the mere difference in volume of production will dictate a far higher cost for the "same" part in a car made only in quantities of only a few hundred per year vs thousands per month ...
Race and supercar components will have entirely different design, engineering, materials specification, manufacturing, testinng, assembly, and QA processes. Just a gear in the transmission, a piston, body panel, or even the bolts and fasteners will often be as alien from an econocar part as are jet engine parts (in fact, it is not uncommon for racecars to borrow tech from aviation & space technology).
A specific example that I work on is body panels and suspension components, which are just stamped steel for econo-cars, but for race and supercars are highly designed carbon fiber panels or components. They have literally zero in common except for ending up on the same general area of the car. Even when converting an econo-car to a low-level race spec, the new part will be entirely different. E.g., I've made parts for championship-winning pro rally and pro road racing cars. Every single component is stripped off the original frame, and then new parts are designed and built. E.g., when I build a carbon fiber hood, it will look a lot like the original, but in fact, not a single molecule or process will be the same as the original hood, but they might use an original hinge bracket to mount it to the frame.
Source: Worked on racecars, drove several championship wins, own high-performance composites design & fabrication biz that does work for race teams, among other customers.
My problem is I am uncomfortable bilking the uneducated. There's enough of that going on already.
I thought about doing the same during COVID when people were believing ludicrous claims about nanobots in the vaccine.
I was thinking that you could make a nice chunk of coin selling those old acam magnetic bracelets that 'deactivate the nanobots so that you can get the vaccine protection without the bots'
That way people would be helped by your scam product. And another way to look at it is that these people are going to be scammed by someone, it might as well be you, some with morals and not someone who is going to use that scamoney to move onto a bigger and bigger scam until they scam their way into the office of president.
Hard to believe that anyone scamming others has acceptable moral scruples. Rather a case of "Yes, he killed a bunch of people but at least he was kind to his dog and kept to a strict vegetarian diet for moral reasons".
But I have to confess I had some pleasurable Schadenfreude thinking of this idea.
Unless one of the big names in naturopathy gives your widget the thumbs up, the whackos won't buy it. In order to get them to give your widget the thumbs up, you'd have to give them a take.
Once you get 1-2 big names on board - now all the others have to decide whether to go with the flow (while not getting paid), try to shake you down, or go against the big names.
Reiki is a good example of this bullshit. You can get "certified" to a certain level, but the first question that people want to know is "who trained you", and they essentially follow a flowchart to see if your training came from the "good" reiki practitioners.
Of course the water picks up the imprint of the filters. My device would use magnets! Moving magnets so it doesn't bias the water.
I vote for the rationalist robots.
I'd like to suggest that starting a thread based on "${specific_religion} is false" won't go well on HN.
Or was your point more about the selling of them? Sorry if I misunderstood.
One believes in /something/ when there is no scientific evidence for it - against all odds.
You can rest assured that other people definitely did and indeed are still doing it. Ask me how I know.
(A couple of late-night rabbit holes, of course. From positive crystals you’re supposed to put in a water filter to magic pots that turn dead, sterilised water into the pure, living good stuff. The Internet can be very depressing).
https://theoncologist.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10...
He even got caught modifying the procedures of his study part-way through: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9470608/
What infuriates me is that health insurers in my jurisdiction are required to pay for "naturopathy." yet if I ask for the non-generic version of a medicine because the generics only have to deliver between 80% and 120% of what the non-generic does, different non-active ingredients, and different delivery / time release mechanisms...I get denied!
1. Under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, homeopathic products are subject to the same requirements related to approval, adulteration and misbranding as other drug products. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-drug-class/homeopathic...
2. Homeopathic products are "classified as either over-the-counter (OTC) or prescription medicines." https://www.chpa.org/about-consumer-healthcare/faqs/faqs-abo...
> There are no FDA-approved products labeled as homeopathic; this means that any product labeled as homeopathic is being marketed in the U.S. without FDA evaluation for safety or effectiveness.
A friend of mine is an orthopedic surgeon, and they explained to me that for mild problems, which would normally heal on their own, it's cheaper to cover a placebo rather than real medication.
If you have "mild problems, which would normally heal on their own", buying no medication at all would be even cheaper.
And from an ethical point of view, the idea of financing a whole (homeopathic) industry that uses your money to produce fake science, even with a single cent, should make one shudder, shouldn't it?
But placebos actually outperform no intervention.
But then, why prescribe the most expensive placebos where you co-finance societal harmful behavior, rather than just prescribing the "harmless" placebos that are not homeopathy, which are usually even cheaper and don't have any ideological overhead?
It's a psychological effect, so things like price or flavor or packaging likely affect its strength.
Color matters: placebo colored pills work better than white pills.
Delivery mechanism matters: placebo injections work better than pills.
Idk about price, packaging, or flavor specifically. But delivery mechanism, color, number of pills, etc I remember from a study.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners...
No medication is even cheaper, but the placebo effect works, so if people were to take something, might as well have them take something cheap and harmless. In my opinion, it doesn't justify supporting homeopathy, but health insurances may see it differently.
Placebos are an interesting ethical issue. Doctors are not supposed to deceive you, they are people you trust with your life and very personal issues and they are therefore held to very high standards. But even if it is for your own good, the placebo effect is based on deception, so is it ethical for a doctor to give you a placebo? And is fake science that still help people ethical? The consensus seems to be "no" for both and I tend to agree, but I still think it is worth debating.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even-kn...
American culture loathes the idea of not treating a disease. Problems are expected to be dealt with, even if it harms society (see overprescribing antibiotics or opioids).
When confronted with people that don't understand the impacts of medicine, it's easier for an insurance company to give them fake medication than nothing at all.
The Chinese Communist Party had billions being raised out of incredible poverty and that populace started demanding medical care. There was no possible way to supply enough clinics, doctors, nurses, etc - and not just because Mao whipped the Red Guard into an anti-intellectual froth than then slaughtered much of China's academic/scientific community.
So Mao waved his hands and invented TCM, which basically said "oh yeah, most of these traditional Chinese medicines work. We did some research and figured out which ones and how to apply them!"
Hilariously people argue TCM doesn't work not because it's complete bullshit, but because it's a modified, corrupted version of actual Chinese medicine...
"If you get into a car accident in China," I say, "an ambulance will take you to a hospital where they will treat you with western medicine. Why do you think that is?"
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/walgreens-tes...
> "The safety of our patients is very important, but we also have to do what our customers are requiring us to do," Walgreens CEO Stefano Pessina told the WSJ. "We see that when we don’t sell tobacco, we have a lot of [negative] reactions."
They need to avoid making claims that they can treat or diagnose some condition. They do their best to hint at it without crossing the line, and frequently blatantly do cross it. The FDA does not have anywhere near the manpower to enforce it. And when they do finally get around to it, the brand vanishes, and a new one appears with exactly the same product lineup.
The sector has long lost any entitlement to benefit of the doubt. They are knowingly making illegal claims and using a disclaimer as a fig leaf even though everything else on the package contradicts it.
It's not a manpower issue, it's not a legal issue. It's not against the law because they wrote the law. There is no line they try to avoid crossing because that line was erased by lobbyists in 1994.
The reason that these get to make health claims and stuff without regulation, and get special treatment, is lobbying resulting in that act. Otherwise they would have been regulated.
It works even when you know it's a placebo.
This is why clinical studies don't tell neither group (neither the treated group nor the control group) who is in which group, to not spoil the results.
And also, this is why homeopathy puts so much effort into spreading the belief they are effective despite all odds, up to the point of trying to convince people to abandon basic scientific principles.
Also, contrast this with psychotherapy, which usually does work even better if the patient understands how it works, because it enables them to become an active and more effective part of the therapy.
At the end of the day, people are allowed to buy dumb shit. 50% of my local CVS is make-up, which is way more egregious than echinacea root extract.
This is the dominant harm, yeah. As we know from infosec, few things are more dangerous than a false sense of security, and that's exactly what ineffective drugs provide.
Many cold medicines have side effects, some are even abused recreationaly. Given that human bodies tend to recover with or without cold medicine (and given the shaky legs that Phenylephrine stands on), what is the issue with people using "fake medicine"?
Homeopathic remedies cannot be abused recreationaly. They aren't precursors to meth. They are better in every way (except the don't work better than a placebo). But, if all a patient needs is a placebo (people recover from the common cold just fine without medicine), homeopathic remedies are perfect.
Remember the hippocrattic oath: First of all, do no harm. Safe, well prepared homeopathic remedies shouldn't do harm. Many cold medicines do.
Because people are being tricked into thinking they’re taking medicine, preventing them from seeking out medical care.
over the counter cold medicine
vs
homeopathic "remedies".
Neither of these cure diseases. Neither of these prevent the seeking of medical care. Both of them may make people feel better (the placebo effect can be powerful). Only one of these is frequently abused by teenagers as a recreational drug.
I actually had someone at a pet store try to sell me homeopathic medication instead of dewormer because they were out of actual dewormer. Do you think that's harmless to someone who doesn't know the difference between giving their pet real medication vs. magic woo water?
True
But worse people use homeopathic remedies because they do not trust modern medicine
Harmless for cold cures, not harmless for infectious diseases
Your examples are cases where homeopathic remedies should not be marketed beside real medicine.
Sounds like a business plan
Of course having a "healer" present with a "prescription" may make people feel better. So maybe prescribing crystals is better than pharmacy homeopathic remedies.
However, none of this needs to cost $400. Given that these are all placebos, they should cheap and safe.
But at the end of the day I feel like all medications should basically be handled like homeopathy products. They should be available to anyone, barring some kind of competency ruling or disagreement by the pharmacy over what they want to sell to whom, and the FDA should basically ensure that they are what they say they are on the label.
I'm glad there's skeptics out there calling BS on homeopathy but where I diverge from them is in somehow preventing it from being available. It's water, it's labeled accurately, so let people do what they're going to do. If they weren't doing this I doubt they'd be doing something more "mainstream" anyway, or complying with it. They might even be doing something even more actively harmful.
I guess I see it as a slippery slope from banning homeopathy to something much murkier where reasonable experts disagree. Real medical science can get very grey really fast and I'm not sure I trust regulatory authority figures to always make the best decisions about what to do. Better to leave it to the consumer and whichever provider they trust most.
Demand product purity, prevent health claims on the label, whatever, but I think my question is "why aren't more medications sold in American pharmacies?"
Honestly don't really see the economic or societal argument for deregulating medicine. If you want a system where to get an fda stamp you have to prove it works but can sell whatever otherwise with no consequences until you kill someone or destroy their gallbladders (https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2024/05/fda-determines-that-t...) - well that's what we already have now so given it hasn't changed in decades, even with recent attempts to do so after all the strip mall stem cell clinics and GRAS issues and all, I don't think your opinion is that out of the mainstream.
And in terms of why aren't more sold in pharmacies - no clue what you're talking about there lol. Have you not seen the A-Z supplement whatever aisles full of all this unregulated crap? You can buy whatever you want unless the DEA has an issue with it.
Over the counter? No, you can't. You can buy a lot of stuff that doesn't work over the counter. But, for example, if I want a decongestant that actually works (pseudoephedrine HCl), I have to go to the pharmacy and show them my driver's license and make a record of the purchase because the government is afraid I might start a meth lab.
And that doesn't even get into all the market failures with prescription drugs. What if I have the same bacterial infection for the umpteenth time and I know that antibiotic X will fix it? Can I just walk into the drugstore and get a course of antibiotic X? Of course not. (At least, not in the US. But in Mexico, I can.)
Even if the argument is that I might be misdiagosing my symptoms (which, if it's the umpteenth time I've had the same thing, is not a very good argument), why isn't there a machine in the drugstore that can check my diagnosis? It's already been shown that expert systems can outperform human doctors for many diagnostic tasks. In a functioning market for health care, we would see that technology in wide use. But we don't, because we don't have a functioning market for health care.
and you can buy the other stuff as reagents/third party suppliers etc, for 'research' use.
Ok. (Though there is still the question of whether it actualy makes sense for the DEA to care.) How about commonly used antibiotics?
> you can buy the other stuff as reagents/third party suppliers etc, for 'research' use.
Antibiotics? Please enlighten me.
In other words, no, I can't buy anything I want unless the DEA has a problem with it. I can buy stuff that doesn't work or that I can't trust, but I can't buy antibiotics (or many other things I might want) that I can trust. Which of course concedes my point.
You keep bringing up antibiotics but it's the category of drugs with the most widespread use (animal agriculture) with one of the strongest cases for being drastically under-regulated - they stop working if things become resistent to them and we spray them everywhere like candy. Also you keep acting as if getting a prescription is some sort of actual barrier or burden for non-prescription drugs, which is particularly funny after the whole fiasco with wegovy off label prescriptions before the active ingredient was approved for obesity/launched for obesity. These are not real barriers, even when they probably should be.
We're not talking about rights here. You claimed, and I quote, "You can buy whatever you want unless the DEA has an issue with it." I am simply pointing out that that is not true. Whether it should be true as a matter of right is irrelevant to that factual question.
> you keep acting as if getting a prescription is some sort of actual barrier or burden for non-prescription drugs
Um, no, I said no such thing. Obviously having to get a prescription is not a barrier or burden for non prescription drugs. But, as you yourself have pointed out, a huge number of those non-prescription drugs, for which there is no barrier or burden, don't work. And, as you have also pointed out, routing around things like prescriptions to get, for example, antibiotics means you can't trust the product. So there are barriers and burdens in the way of getting things that do work and can be trusted. Which was my point, and which contradicts your original claim that I responded to.
The question of whether there should be all these barriers and burdens in the way of buying things that work and can be trusted is a separate question. Your argument for why there should appears to be that without such barriers more harm would be done. Of course there will always be people who make stupid choices, and giving people more freedom by removing barriers and burdens will increase that. But you are not recognizing the other side of the barriers and burdens, which is that they prevent people from making good choices, choices that could save their lives. For example, look up the harm done in preventable deaths by the FDA's slowness in permitting beta blockers.
The post you responded to that advocated a libertarian approach was saying, in effect, that, on net, the harm done by regulation is greater than the harm done by individual people making bad choices in the absence of regulation. I happen to agree. You apparently do not. But I do not see that you have given any reason to believe that the opposite is true. I certainly don't see anything in what you've posted that makes the opposite claim the slam dunk that you appear to think it is.
And when i say the prescription not being a barrier, i'm not talking about not needing a prescription to get research grade antibiotics. I'm talking about how needing a prescription to get a non-controlled drug is literally a non-issue because of rampant off label prescribing and online prescription mills.
To call this area "under-regulated" is not accurate: the whole food production chain in the US, with all of its dysfunctionality, is a product of decades of regulation and government interference and mismanagement. The best way to stop antibiotic use with animals is for people to stop eating meat and other products from those animals, and if anything is going to facilitate that, it's going to be the market, which is already providing plenty of products in grocery stores that are from animals raised with no antibiotics, and will provide more the more people choose to buy them, as I do.
As an example onions and garlic do nothing to cure or address asthma. They do contain an active chemical that vaporized when they are cut which causes uncontrolled tear production. That same chemical agitates the throat in a way that arrests some amount of night coughing induced by asthma.
Another example is that wild lettuce is a drug like opium. Opium is a thistle, as are artichokes, and thistles are closely related to the lactuca genus that comprises lettuce. The drugs in both opium and lettuce are found in the plant latex containing two analgesics and a depressant. Lettuce drug, lactucarium, is not known to be habit forming and is minor though. It is just recommended as a topical treatment for minor skin injuries.
Another is that common fruits like pears, apples, and citrus contain drug like chemicals that alter the metabolism. This is super potent in grapefruit and has been known to cause fatal drug interactions in people on prescribed medicine. These chemicals are again magnified in commercial fruit juice since commercial fruit juice represents a high concentration of juice than found in actual fruit and without any fiber to slow digestion. If you find yourself mixing gold flakes with liquor and orange juice you might be inducing long term metal toxicity to your body even though gold is inert under normal dietary conditions.
Grapefruit does not "alter the metabolism." Furanocoumarin binds to a receptor in the gut which causes some medications to pass through the gut much faster than normal which affects the level of the medicine in the blood.
That has nothing to do with "metabolism."
It also only affects some medications.
You might want to refrain from commenting on medicine until you have an actual science-based education in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapefruit%E2%80%93drug_intera...
It worked pretty well for allergies but not the best for teeth. Just building up resistance I would think.
I know you can get similar treatment now from regular doctors.
So my one and only interaction was fairly successful.
I have never sought one out for anything else.
> Homeopathic preparations are termed remedies and are made using homeopathic dilution. In this process, the selected substance is repeatedly diluted until the final product is chemically indistinguishable from the diluent.
If in a preparation there is a measurable quantity of the active ingredient, then it's not an homeopathic preparation.
Uugh. It's really hard to productively discuss a topic when people have different definitions for the terms being used.
An homeopathic pollen formulation would start with 1 mg of pollen in a litter of water, a milliliter of that solution would be diluted in a liter of water and this process would be repeated a few time. In the final solution, it would be impossible to detect even a trace of the original pollen.
I'm not really sure how this confusion arose, but I don't like it. It muddies the waters (heh) in a few ways.
You don't know that it worked. This is an example of the regression fallacy.[1] This is why we have controlled trials.
People get seduced by a somewhat internal logic. They get a fuzzy feeling of superiority in their discovery that the mainstream ignores. If you point out the absolute lack of evidence of any of what they believe in, it's because pharma is silencing them. They are excited to be enlightened, because only they can see how crooked big pharma is: they need you to be sick so you can buy their "allopathic medicine" (derogatory calling of drugs that actually work), so they're trying to kill homeopathy who would really save you ; which to be fair is not helped by the fact that pharmaceutical companies are indeed crooked and want you to be sick.
I don't think there's any volume that can be said on homeopathy that will convince anyone who already believes in it that it's all a scam.
Basically having them "ironman" the opposite side of the argument can cause people to start to think more objectively about the issue. However, if the person says 10/10 there apparently isn't much that can be done.
I've never tried this myself as I don't have any flat earther or homeopathy believers in my entourage, but it does seem to make sense and I've used this to question some of my beliefs myself. Not saying it would work with your family members either though.
The best possible outcome is that you waste a ton of your time (and theirs), and convince them that the Earth isn't flat.
Did anyone benefit? If we chose to try and convince people about everything they are wrong about, we'd be endlessly debating about every minor thing that's already been established and replicated.
I mean, this is the allure of all quackery, conspiracy theories, cults, and other forms of "alternative" facts: The mainstream doesn't want you to know this secret that I'm sharing with you! Doctors hate this one simple trick! Your financial planner is lying to you, but if you buy my seminar, you'll learn the truth! The government is silencing us through mainstream social media, but if you come to Social Network Blah, you will be able to hear the truth! Employment is a scam, but if you join Amway you can learn the real truth about business and your own boss! My religion offers the truth that the rest hide from you!
Somehow, human beings have become vulnerable to "Truth FOMO" and when these guys really get their hooks into you and you start to base your very identity on their truth, well, you can't back out of it without invalidating your entire identity.
There are some medicines that do actually work, but they're advertised toward the people who believe in homeopathy, so they are labeled as homeopathic.
Really?
That is a claim that could be backed with an example
If you make it illegal in the US, they'll just get it from another country. Because some people are just susceptible to this stuff.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499956/
Homeopathy is basically mistake proof compared to real medicine, including a doctor visit. For a sufficiently minor ailment, avoiding risk of a potentially lethal mistake is just safer.