Homeopathy is at best a placebo. It’s rare that there’s no better medical way to help someone.
I disagree—at least with the part about “it’s rare that there’s no better medical way to help people”. It’s depressingly common that there’s no better medical way to help people. Things like back pain, tiredness, and muscle aches—the commonest things for which people see doctors—can sometimes be traced to nice curable medical reasons, but very often as far as anyone knows they’re just there.
Robin Hanson has a theory—and I kind of agree with him—that homeopathy fills a useful niche. Placebos are pretty effective at curing these random (and sometimes imagined) aches and pains. But most places consider it illegal or unethical for doctors to directly prescribe a placebo. Right now a lot of doctors will just prescribe aspirin or paracetamol or something, but these are far from totally harmless and there are a lot of things you can’t trick patients into thinking aspirin is a cure for. So what would be really nice, is if there was a way doctors could give someone a totally harmless and very inexpensive substance like water and make the patient think it was going to cure everything and the kitchen sink, without directly lying or exposing themselves to malpractice allegations.
Where this stands or falls is whether or not it turns patients off real medicine and gets them to start wanting homeopathy for medically known, treatable diseases. Hopefully it won’t—there aren’t a lot of people who want homeopathic cancer treatment—but that would be the big risk.
I disagree—at least with the part about “it’s rare that there’s no better medical way to help people”. It’s depressingly common that there’s no better medical way to help people. Things like back pain, tiredness, and muscle aches—the commonest things for which people see doctors—can sometimes be traced to nice curable medical reasons, but very often as far as anyone knows they’re just there.
Robin Hanson has a theory—and I kind of agree with him—that homeopathy fills a useful niche. Placebos are pretty effective at curing these random (and sometimes imagined) aches and pains. But most places consider it illegal or unethical for doctors to directly prescribe a placebo. Right now a lot of doctors will just prescribe aspirin or paracetamol or something, but these are far from totally harmless and there are a lot of things you can’t trick patients into thinking aspirin is a cure for. So what would be really nice, is if there was a way doctors could give someone a totally harmless and very inexpensive substance like water and make the patient think it was going to cure everything and the kitchen sink, without directly lying or exposing themselves to malpractice allegations.
Where this stands or falls is whether or not it turns patients off real medicine and gets them to start wanting homeopathy for medically known, treatable diseases. Hopefully it won’t—there aren’t a lot of people who want homeopathic cancer treatment—but that would be the big risk.