[Closed] MP claims homeopathy can cure Autism.

On the bright side, with a bit of luck the anti-vaccination brigade might get wind of it.

Perhaps he could try it for a severe kick in the face....

The homeopathy mob are good at trawling obscure forums looking for threads to spout on.

I wonder if we could get a few on here - just repeat 'homeopathy is fraud' three times and they may appear!

The main story goes to show that crystal-botherers can come from all strands of society. Credulous half-wits are everywhere.

Wonder if homeopathy is any good for treating ignorance?

Some [s]muppets[/s] crystal-botherers earlier

[img] [/img]

Repeat homeopathy is fraud three times, then tap it on some wood.

DrP

Surely the less funding and attention homeopathy gets, the more effective it should be?

[i]Surely the less funding and attention homeopathy gets, the more effective it should be? [/i]

I've always thought the same about homeopathy practitioners.

Just one of them ought to be able to treat the entire population very effectively?

Repeat homeopathy is fraud three times, then tap it on some wood.

Preferably oak, with mistletoe previously blessed by a druid.

Preferably oak, with mistletoe previously blessed by a druid.

Only on Tuesdays, bless it on a Thursday and you old man will shrivel up and fall off.

Too late 😳

jam bo - excellent.

The speaker's response:
“...but I make the general point that it is always important for us to base our decisions and expenditure on evidence”.

That was the minister's response. The speaker is far too much of an idiot to find such an elegant paraphrase for 'what a load of bollocks!'

Ah. I stand corrected.

This forum thread is way bigger than necessary. A single post on the matter in another much larger thread would have sufficed.

Its difficult not to be wound up by these superstitious idiots

I mean what are we living in, the ****ing dark ages?

When they trolled the Below the Line comments of some obscure local rag were they using homeopathic electrons in their laptops?

Do they drive crystal powered cars?

Do they use astral projection to go on holiday?

NO because none of that mumbo jumbo has any practical use in the real world yet despite this obvious non sequitor they are willing to believe a lot of superstitious nonsense when it comes to medicine

****ing idiots the lot of them

midlifecrashes - Member

This forum thread is way bigger than necessary. A single post on the matter in another much larger thread would have sufficed.

Boooooom!

Homeopathy is fraud.
Homeopathy is fraud.
Homeopathy is fraud.

[url= http://www.homeopathicmoney.com/article1-How-to-Make-Homeopathic-Money-at-home ]Pay for it with this...[/url]

My mum believes in homeopathy. I can deal with folk having their own beliefs etc.. Its hard to bite my tongue when she goes on about it. I think its a load of old bollocks.

I've placed a single pixel of each letter of what was going to be a very long post across 1,500,000 separate web pages.

It's the only way to get my point across and I hope it makes interesting reading.

^very good 🙂

Homeopathy is fraud.
Homeopathy is fraud.
Homeopathy is fraud.

I wonder how little oxygen these fraudsters can survive on.

I believe you have to keep diluting the phrase until there are no letters left for it to work

Homeopathy is Fraud
H m e p t y s r u
H e t s u
H t u
t

There, that should do it.

Anyone remember the Horizon homeopathic pharmacology experiment?

I went to school in Hinckley but escaped.
I believe the mp in question represents my sister in our wonderful democracy.
She is going to dilute her vote one million times then on voting day single handedly vote in the green candidate.

www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/

It's just as effective as any other placebo but I don't think there's much argument for a placebo in autism treatment. I figure people can do whatever daft thing to themselves they want but the boy's an MP, talking about a subject where quite reasonably there are parents waiting for any straw they can grab, we should throw him in a volcano as I'm pretty sure that'll appease the elder gods that cause autism.

there are parents waiting for any straw they can grab

It's not just the parents either, those with the condition but classed as "higher functioning" are also often looking for a solution and will often struggle to rationalise this kind of mis-information.

I'm increasingly tired of people proposing "cures" for autism. It's not an illness, it's a state of being. What do people expect, a bit of super diluted elf piss is going to turn someone with profound autism, who has made little social developmental progress since being a toddler, into a person with fully developed social and learning skills...
There is more that needs curing in the people that propose this sort of nonsense than anyone who has autism.

Interesting that Ben Goldacre was on Newsnight last night talking about evidence-based politics.

My mum's very interested in thi story. She lives in the village where the PhD in autism lady lives and is a retired special school teacher, having taught at the special school in Hinckley. When she worked there apparently Mr trendywig as she calls him used to visit. Not got a good thing to say for him.
She sent me a link to a story in the same local rag about the autistic boy referred to in the piece in the OP
He is doing very well despite no homeopathic cures having being administered...
[url= http://www.hinckleytimes.net/news/local-news/deep-sea-creatures-hold-key-6032322#ICID=sharebar_email ]more hinckley times gold[/url]

He is also keen on astronomy too:
[url= http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-28464009 ]or is it astrology, i get confused[/url]

From the comments on the last bbc article:

From the Big Bang Theory: (tv show)
Penny: I'm a Sagittarius, which probably tells you way more than you need to know.
Sheldon: Yes - it tells us that you participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun's apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality.
Still, it could be worse, he could believe homeopathy is real.

I'm increasingly tired of people proposing "cures" for autism.

There's two separate issues in this story, isn't there.

1) is the suggestion that autism can or indeed should be cured, certainly for those lower on the spectrum. The world would be a very different place if Aspies were the majority; being neurotypical would probably be treated as a learning disorder.

2) is the suggestion that Homeopathy can cure anything (beyond placebo). The Autism thing is an eye-catching headline, but it's in danger of diluting (sorry) the real story which is that an MP is pushing to waste tons of time and money promoting this pish under the NHS.

Sorry Cougar, got so wound up by the Autism stuff I totally forgot to add how thoroughly ridiculous it is that homeopathy not only exists in our society, but that it is debated in parliament and public money spent on it. 👿

Oh, no apology needed, fume away! (-:

unfortunately, there are a lot of people demanding treatment for more or less imaginary ailments.

homeopathy is a cheap and safe way of sending these [s]cretins[/s] mis-guided folk away happy, and occasionally even 'cured'.

yes, we could stop spending money on homeopathy, but i wouldn't be surprised if it ended up costing us more* in the long run.

(*increased spending on actual medicines and treatments, both for the original [i]illness[/i], and the side-effects of un-controlled *alternative* treatment)

i'd be very happy to find out this wouldn't happen, and that we can stop spending millions funding NHS quackery.

Crystal botherers! 😀
I fix punctures using homeopathy. I grind up a thorn, mix it into a swimming pool of water and add a drop through the valve hole. Works every time.

Trendywig's wiki page is a good read.
In summary:
Eton, Oxford, Mba abroad, military, series of short lived well paid jobs in industry (imagine working with him, no wonder he didn't make it) then natural home as Tory politician. Cash for questions, etc etc all present and correct.
And yes I was right he was mp when I was still at school in Hinckley . Been representing the lucky people of Hinckley and bosworth since 1987....

Awhiles, I have some sympathy with your position, we do over medicalise what aren't medical problems at all.
Social issues-debt, poor housing, domestic violence, family breakdown, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, childhood abuse, executive stress, status anxiety, etc all conspire to present people with problems that aren't diseases in the medical sense. Society's solution is to send them to see me, the GP.
My preferred solution would be to look at the cause of their problems rather than support an industry whose main method of operation is to hoodwink people into believing that the can be cured by quackery.
And yesterday I gave the parents of a troubled kid a leaflet for a (non nhs) provider of alternative therapies, relaxation, reiki etc, because there is nothing else I can do about the fact that dad left 4 years ago and doesn't send a card at birthdays etc.
so yes it's a problem.

docrobster - Member

Awhiles, I have some sympathy with your position,

i was just offering an alternative* viewpoint which i understand to have some merit. My position is that anyone asking for NHS-funded homeopathy should be instructed to jump down the nearest well. But then compassion is not one of my strong points.

(*see what i did there?)

Chinese have been using alternative medicine for many centuries. In most cultures in Asia its recognised on an equal footing if not superior to "Western" medicine. The fact is plant remedies have been used and have worked for 1000's of years. A lot of Western medicines are based upon studies of the effectiveness of plant remedies, searching out the active ingredient.

and that's why the tiger, and the rhino, and the etc. are heading for extinction.

Chinese medicine can also jump down a well.

What's the difference between alternative and complimentary?

My patient with an incurable brain tumour a few years ago who saw a private specialist in London and was told to take carrot juice rather than chemotherapy was not helped by alternative therapy. Even though he kept going with his palliative treatment it prevented us from supporting his wife and young family as well as we would have liked at their time of greatest need.
[b]Because he was lied to about the effectiveness of the treatment by someone with a pecuniary interest in him having that treatment. [/b]
Given false hope and not allowed to plan for death.

If alternative or complementary therapists are honest about the effectiveness of their treatments, I'm fine with that.

Chinese have been using alternative medicine for many centuries.

That's not quite the same as homeopathy.

There are hundreds of plants that contain chemicals that are effective for treating certain illnesses.

Homeopathy is just bad shit mental and anyone who believes in it is also bat shit mental.

Chinese have been using alternative medicine for many centuries. In most cultures in Asia its recognised on an equal footing if not superior to "Western" medicine. The fact is plant remedies have been used and have worked for 1000's of years. A lot of Western medicines are based upon studies of the effectiveness of plant remedies, searching out the active ingredient.

When an alternative medicine can be shown to work and is properly tested then it simply becomes "medicine".

See also: aspirin.

There are hundreds of plants that contain chemicals that are effective for treating certain illnesses.

Bingo.

Let me try and untangle the logic bomb that seems to consistently evade the woo-woo brigade and other hard-of-thinking types. Here's Cougar's Top 10 "why it's bollocks" points:

1) Being ancient does not prove efficacy. We spent centuries burning witches, doesn't mean we were right. "We've always done it this way" is the worst reason to do anything.

2) Being popular with the masses does not prove efficacy. Plenty of things are popular with the masses, take One Direction for example. The masses, broadly, are stupid and an unreliable judge of anything.

3) Correlation does not equal causation. I've just had a cold, so I ritualistically slaughtered a toad in my back garden and you know what, just a week later my cold had totally gone!

4) Related to 3), anecdotes are not evidence. The Placebo effect is powerful and many people misunderstand what it means.

5) Of course, [i]some[/i] Chinese Medicine may well work. For instance, the Chinese might grind up some willow bark and make it into a nice cup of tea to make your headache go away, whereas in the West we'd pop a couple of Aspirin. Do the Chinese know something we don't? No, because they're both ostensibly the same thing, a derivation of salicylic acid.

6) Western medicine looked at Chinese medicine. We tested it, kept the bits that work, threw the rest away, calculated accurate dosages and regulated the industry.

7) It's not better because Natural if it's the same active drug, it's the same thing in a prettier wrapper.

8 ) You cannot extrapolate that because something works, it all does.

9) "Fewer side effects" is a smoke-and-mirrors claim. By that argument the best course of action is to do nothing, no side effects at all then!

10) There is no such thing as "alternative medicine." There is "medicine" and "not medicine."

See also: aspirin.

Jinx! I hadn't read that before I typed that post, honest.

Its rather worrying the shit folk will believe

then again, given he is a tory, we know his judgement is fundamentally flawed 😉

(Not the best quality)

homeopathy is a cheap and safe way of sending these cretins mis-guided folk away happy, and occasionally even 'cured'.

Yep. As a legalised cheap placebo it is probably useful.

Though I did laugh when one of the pro-homeos on the comments section pointed to a BMJ article about the huge amount of money that homeopathy saves the NHS as conclusive "evidence" that it works. 😆

It seems the pro-homeos have some difficulty separating cause and effect.

Well done cougar, condensing the antiwoo into 10 decent rules.

a quick google tells me what woo is and now I feel all knoweldgable.

GrahamS - Member

Yep. As a legalised cheap placebo it is probably useful.

Though, generally more expensive than the real unreal thing. (if you want to make a homeopathic placebo, do you have to add [i]more[/i] of the active ingredient?)

Homeopathy can't cure anything - but it can keep some very strange and possibly disturbed individuals off the streets. A bit like religion. (I won't call either of these thing's a mental illness - 'cause that's not nice)

(if you want to make a homeopathic placebo, do you have to add more of the active ingredient?)

Nah, you make it exactly the same but you don't tap it on the right sort of leather so that it doesn't have a memory.

Homeopathy does work

It works as well as most other placebos, which is almost unanimously better than no treatment at all. Anyone with a decent understanding of the process will understand that that's not the same as saying it works as well as other forms of treatment which have been developed, or is a suitable alternative for 'conventional' treatment

But to say that homeopathy does not work is just scientifically wrong!

[i]But to say that homeopathy does not work is just scientifically wrong! [/i]

it'll work as well as a placebo for autism, certainly.

it'll work as well as a placebo for autism, certainly.

It works as well as any other drug for autism 😉

Sorry, homeopathy does not work, palcebos work. If you want to say homepathy works because its as good as a placebo then absolutly anything works in your "scientifically" paradgim.

according to wikipedia... " In October 2009, he told Parliament that blood does not clot under a full moon"

someone give him a small papar cut under a full moon!

[i]someone give him a small papar cut under a full moon! [/i]

he's going to be a clot whatever phase the moon's in 😉

From the MPs wiki page (credit to docrobster for mentioning it)

In October 2009, he told Parliament that blood does not clot under a full moon; a spokesperson for the Royal College of Surgeons of England warned his colleagues would "laugh their heads off" at the suggestion.[10] In the same debate, Tredinnick characterised scientists as "racially prejudiced".[9]

advocating that astrology be integrated into the National Health Service (NHS).[13] In 2014 he told MPs: "I am absolutely convinced that those who look at the map of the sky for the day that they were born and receive some professional guidance will find out a lot about themselves and it will make their lives easier."[14]

Tredinnick's views have attracted criticism.

Wow, is that what we're reduced to, picking apart half of a statement? Is that really the big issue here?

The fact is simple: "Homeopathy is not efficacious beyond placebo."

Good? Good. Christ, some of us could have an argument in an empty room.

he told Parliament that blood does not clot under a full moon

WTF?!?!?

Has he not noticed the distinct lack of thousands of people bleeding to death every 29 days?

Cougar, I think some are just having fun lampooning him now.

I'm going to project "top Gun" through thousands of Gallons of water and make a Homoerotic remedy.

dbcooper - Member
Sorry, homeopathy does not work, palcebos work. If you want to say homepathy works because its as good as a placebo then absolutly anything works in your "scientifically" paradgim.

Except...Some placebos work better than others!

So the question is, do placebos work beyond placebo?

I read the title as "MP claims homosexuality can cure Autism"

I immediately had visions of the DM readership's heads exploding 😆

If diluted even more into a much larger volume, it might have a beneficial effect for dehydration.

So the question is, do placebos work beyond placebo?

Only if you dilute them in the right way.

Some placebos will work better than others but that will depend on the subject and their beliefs/expectations (eg if they believe that a red pill will work faster than a blue pill, even if they're both placebos, that's what they are likely to perceive.

So the question is, do placebos work beyond placebo?

If there is a internal mechanism for placebo based on suggestability (perhaps), then I suppose that a woo-woo laden placebo 'may' be more effective in certain people who are pre-disposed to believing that kind of shit.

In the absence of effective conventional medicines for certain conditions, perhaps giving their brains a dose of mystical codswallop would be the best approach...GPs could send out a diagnostic questionnaire asking if the patient believes in astrology/crystal healing/democratic accountability/England's chance of winning the next World Cup etc to assess their level of gullibility and naivety...

I wonder if the rise in distrust of conventional medicine among a section of society has a negative effect on any white-coat placebo that those patients might have been getting?

Placebo is fascinating. 🙂

I read the title as "MP claims homosexuality can cure Autism"

That's a few of us buggered then!

..GPs could send out a diagnostic questionnaire asking if the patient believes in astrology/crystal healing/democratic accountability