It is widely used by doctors around the world, especially in Russia and China
When a child gets a flu in Russia, they can skip school. I was born and raised in Russia. As a child, every time I caught a cold or felt like skipping school and faked having a fever, we went to the local clinic (that could issue a paper saying I should skip school for a couple of days), where a doctor would try to prescribe homeopathy, and I would try to give them a small lecture.
Doctors in Russia are generally unable to distinguish between what works and what doesn’t. Doctors prescribe and pharmacists recommend homeopathy to people. During the pandemic, if you went to a doctor with flu-like symptoms, they would give you three different widely-used-in-Russia drugs for free, all of them homeopathy (though one branded itself as not-homeopathy, though claiming to have a low enough concentration of the active ingredient that the drug would contain less than one molecule of it on average).
Good doctors in the rare good Russian private clinics that try to do evidence-based medicine will follow guidelines that originate from other countries and prescribe medications that went through peer review on other countries.
If a notable property of a drug or intervention is that it is widely used by doctors in Russia, you should have strong priors it doesn’t work.
I had no idea, thanks for sharing!
My mother in law was GP in public hospital in Kamchatka and she’s super against homeopathy so I assumed things there are like things here on Serbia (some private “doctors” deal with homeopathy but no one else). Your comment does explain a thing which I didn’t understand which is why in Russia I saw so much homeopathy sold in packaging very similar to regular medicine.
When a child gets a flu in Russia, they can skip school. I was born and raised in Russia. As a child, every time I caught a cold or felt like skipping school and faked having a fever, we went to the local clinic (that could issue a paper saying I should skip school for a couple of days), where a doctor would try to prescribe homeopathy, and I would try to give them a small lecture.
Doctors in Russia are generally unable to distinguish between what works and what doesn’t. Doctors prescribe and pharmacists recommend homeopathy to people. During the pandemic, if you went to a doctor with flu-like symptoms, they would give you three different widely-used-in-Russia drugs for free, all of them homeopathy (though one branded itself as not-homeopathy, though claiming to have a low enough concentration of the active ingredient that the drug would contain less than one molecule of it on average).
Good doctors in the rare good Russian private clinics that try to do evidence-based medicine will follow guidelines that originate from other countries and prescribe medications that went through peer review on other countries.
If a notable property of a drug or intervention is that it is widely used by doctors in Russia, you should have strong priors it doesn’t work.
I had no idea, thanks for sharing! My mother in law was GP in public hospital in Kamchatka and she’s super against homeopathy so I assumed things there are like things here on Serbia (some private “doctors” deal with homeopathy but no one else). Your comment does explain a thing which I didn’t understand which is why in Russia I saw so much homeopathy sold in packaging very similar to regular medicine.