who: homeopaths are a health hazard
Many of us who live in the West tend to think of homeopathy as a very liberal, earthy, New Age, naturist form of pseudoscience easily overshadowed by conventional hospitals and doctors. However, in developing nations which face serious epidemics of everything from malaria to diarrhea, homeopaths have become enough of a menace that the WHO had to make a strongly worded rebuke to their claims, a rebuke not dissimilar from this Futurama clip.
As a skeptic who commented on alternative medicine in unflattering terms, I had plenty of people ask me what’s the harm in just letting people drink some water and make themselves feel better solely by the placebo effect. And this is a prime example of how such an approach to health is dangerous. Rather than go to a doctor with proven medicine, a patient will go to a quack with water or potpourri, feel better for a little bit and succumb to a disease that could’ve been easily treated by a real physician. Or as the WHO puts it:
Homeopathy does not protect people from, or treat, these diseases.
Those of us working with the most rural and impoverished people of the world already struggle to deliver the medical help that is needed. When homeopathy stands in place of effective treatment, lives are lost.
For the WHO which desperately tries to raise the millions of dollars necessary to keep medicine flowing into areas facing major outbreaks of malaria and TB, having patients refuse drugs and pass on their infections, as well as alarmingly effective disinformation from homeopaths and folk healers, is a major blow to their efforts. Even worse, going to a homeopath often tends to be much more socially accepted than going to a doctor in places which need the most help from actual, qualified doctors with real medicine.
Oh, and here’s something else to think about. Homeopaths often use remedies diluted in vast amounts of water. In developing nations where they claim to offer cures for malaria, diarrhea and dysentery, access to clean water isn’t very reliable to put it mildly. So, um… what sorts of things you could be ingesting in those few drops you’ll be putting under your tongue once or twice a day?
