(no subject)

[athelind]

Homeopathy boom threatens plant species

Okay, when did "homeopathy" start getting used as a synonym for "herbal medicine"? I keep seeing it used like that, and that's not what it means.

Comments

[yud.livejournal.com]

That's one of the things that bugs me too.

[foofers.livejournal.com]

I've seen the term abused in this context for maybe three or four years...probably goes back further than that and I just wasn't paying attention.

And yeah, I'm equally baffled by the change.

(Seems about the same time a majority of the population started regularly misspelling "lens" as "lense," and "lose" as "loose.")

[richardf8]

Well, I suspect the confusion might derive from the fact that a large number of the homeopathic remedies on the market are herbally derived. I'm surprised "holistic" isn't being thrown in their too. I mean isn't anything the AMA disdains semantically equivalent?

[ceruleanst.livejournal.com]

When I first heard of homeopathy, this is how it was explained to me: You take some remedy, put it in water, and then dilute it until you have nothing but water again, and the water atoms will now be "in tune" with whatever medicine it was mixed with, and thus somehow will work as if it were a full dose of whatever is no longer present.

Naturally, I wondered why so many people were still taking it seriously.

[richardf8]

Actually whoever explained it to you didn't know what they were talking about.

The way it works is you take a substance that would normally exacerbate the symptom you're trying to cure, put it in a very weak solution. The idea is that your body adapts to the presence of the substance in small quantities and therefore presents the symptom less.

Sort of the same principle as allergy shots, only muted.

[baxil.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, but "a very weak solution" often means, in practice, so dilute that no detectable part of the original active ingredient remains.

Which -- well, I'll abstain from any discussion on its effectiveness. But at least it's certainly counterintuitive.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

It's not counterintuitive if you have the appropriate background. Frazier's Golden Bough, for instance, or Whitcomb's Magician's Companion, or even Isaac Bonewitz's Authentic Thaumaturgy (all available through Amazon, I believe).

Homeopathy as described above (and as I've always seen it described) operates according to the principles found at the core of almost every major magickal philosophy: Similarity and Contagion.

Similarity, the idea that "Like Effects Like", describes the principle that a substance that causes a given symptom will help in the treatment of a similar symptom, despite differences in the underlying condition.

Contagion, the idea that things retain a connection even when separated, encompasses the extreme-dilution principle of homeopathy. That solution may be so dilute that it's chemically indistinguishable from distilled water, but it retains its efficacy from its contact with the efficacious ingredient.

Really, it makes perfect sense, from the proper perspective.

[archteryx.livejournal.com]

And it works, bluntly put. A variation on it saved my life, and I've seen our family dogs treated with it -- successfully -- for years. Placebo effect? How can a dog have a placebo effect?

That being said, it doesn't work for every ailment, either. It's murder on fungus, allergies, and to some extent viruses (my case of the Sledgehammer Flu lasted half as long as many people's...despite being stronger...due to a remedy called osillococcinum).

But it can't even touch my gastritis. For that, it's a lifetime of Prilosec, or watching my stomach get eaten away. :P

-- ArchTeryx

[baxil.livejournal.com]

Apropos of nothing, is your "current music" for this post a reference to Cat Town?