Homeopathy is stronger than antidepresants/antipsychotics

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I think you may have forgotten my original premise. Stramonium is not a harmless placebo.

I think the others here believe it is a moot point because they do not beleive that there is any active ingredient in homeopathic medicine. It is just distileld water and snake oil.
Harmful or not, you would actually have to ingest some to have any effect at all. It is just a name on the bottle.

I was surprised to find that Belladona is still legally sold in the USA as a eye drop remedy for pinkeye. I recall in the 1970s it was very popular among young girls in Australia to induce dilation of the pupils to give one the impression of big gorgeous eyes.

If the homeopathic medicine contains even a dilute concentration of hallucinogenic alkaloid, that purports to have side-effects then it can't be a placebo. But if you wan't to call it snake oil that's fine by me.

One of those fun Victorian hold overs. Personally, I think I'd trust the belladonna for eye dilation over the cocaine derivitives they use now. Again, it is all in the usage. I still curse the damn addicts that got ephedra taken off the market. It was one of the few allergy relief herbs that was completely effective on my asthma/pneumonia prone husband.

If you buy organic produce definitely check your produce well when washing. I've found belladonna leaves mixed in occassionally in crops harvested close to the ground - like string beans. It's a widely dispersed, common weed. A few leaves shouldn't do harm, especially cooked, but better safe than sorry.

Ok two things one....if homeopathic medicine is just water, why would they bother using any ingredients at all? that makes absolutly no sense, that would just be a waste of time and money.

Also, they sell Datura? that is certainly not a ingredient with out effects.....it is a hallucinogen and a fairly dangerous one. Hopefully they put a warning on the lable at least because not everyone spends their free time looking up all the natural plants that are drugs and what the effects are.

Homeopathy does not put the actual ingredient in the bottle - they work with 'plant essences'. It's a bit too esoteric to be considered medicine - as most here have so eloquently pointed out. Its widely considered to be ineffective and purely a sham. But, some people contend that it does work for them. There is no chance of getting the hallucinogenic effects from homeopathic Datura even if you swallowed the whole bottle.

If it works for some people - even if it is purely a placebo effect - I see no problem with it.

And datura doesn't really need to be sold. Its a very common weed in waste places. I've seen it growing in inner city abandoned lots, near train tracks and in wild stands along major highways. It's easy to find for free if someone is dumb enough to tempt fate that badly.

Well its ridiculous to sell water to people as medication, I suppose its somethign to look into but I just really dont think they would bother using any ingredients if none of them end up having any effect whatsoever in the end product. But I guess there are a lot of scams.....I do however believe natural plants in general can be used to help with some things....but yeah you have to use enough for it to have an effect or it wont do any good.

Okay, this needs explaining.

1) A common belief about homeopathy is that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease can leave behind an imprint of its spiritual energy that can give us the power to fight against that substance because it attunes our own spiritual energy to its vibrational pattern, and serial dilution and shaking in the three dimensions of physical space attunes water to this pattern and thereby enhances the ability of the homeopathic remedy to cure us of diseases that cause similar symptoms.

2) However, the original idea was well-intentioned but based in forgivable ignorance. The original theorist believed that the artificial induction of the symptoms of a disease would cause the "vital force" to react in a manner that is counter to the disease itself, thereby giving the human body the ability to fight off that disease. It may sound weird, but it made as much sense to people in that time as vaccination.

3) Here is what James Randi has to say:

-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U

4) Or I could give it to you in the form of a history lesson:

-- The easiest way to understand homeopathy is to pretend for just a moment that the past three hundred years of scientific progress did not happen, and it's still reasonable to believe that your body is able to breath and pump blood through it not because of chemical changes but because of an unseen "spiritual energy."

-- Now, in the context of the time, physicists such as Sir Isaac Newton have just recently begun to contemplate the concept of an electromagnetic wave, and people are as excited about these ideas as they were later about general relativity and the so-called "Space Age." Believe it or not, people's reactions to new scientific knowledge haven't changed a whole lot. Because it's such a new and exciting abstract notion about how the universe works, the various thinkers out there are understandably--even commendably--like a kid who has just been given a brand new toy: they want to try it on everything. LITERALLY EVERYTHING.

-- Now, given these thinking tools, take this concept of a wave, and pretend that you believe that all of the living and breathing systems of your body can work only because of the spiritual energy that is flowing through them. If this spiritual energy might be like light in a way, it might have a sort of wave-like property, too! And just maybe we can somehow manipulate it in similar ways to how we manipulate light and sound! If you are living during this time period, this was the most modern thinking that was even possible. This is on a level with our modern ideas about electro-chemical reactions in the brain and all of that. To have this idea in your brain, you had to be the top intellectual elite.

-- Of course, it was proven wrong, and real scientists shrugged their shoulders and moved on to greener pastures. But this process is a good thing: we have ideas and truly love those ideas, but we don't grow so attached to those ideas that we can't let them go and move on. It's a sort of beautiful intellectual fornication that allows us to in the fullness of time arrive at the truth, and the trick to it is being able to LET GO as well as we can GRAB ON. This is the simple process of discovery.

But anyone who tells you that homeopathy is anything but a useless crock is either ignorant or intent on getting both a profit and a good ol' braying horse laugh at your expense.

If I understand the theory, the process of hyper dilution captures some essence of the original chemicals in the water. You have to believe that there is something more than just the physical properties of the substance involved - that there exists some metaphysical properties that persist through the dilution.

This is what makes scientific validation impossible. You cannot scientifically validate properties that are essentially supernatural. The placebo effect can be measured - somehow, some people get better because they believe this stuff works. But the mechanism of the placebo effect cannot be so easily explained. They have made some progress in identifying certain regions of the brain that are involved in this. But it does not explain why belief alone would induce healing. Then there is the problem that belief often does not work at all.

The brain is a very weird thing without being autistic. Add in autism and it is a total mind blower.

@WilliamWDelaney

Thanks for the thorough explanation. Given all that, I can see how it would be an effective placebo. (I am going with placebo rather than poison on the hopeful grounds that none of the original plant chemicals got in the bottle.) I have heard that a placebo works best when the person handing it over believes in its' efficacy. There is so very much woo here that there is plenty for a practioner to get entranced by and this would make the stuff a more effective placebo than from somebody who is secertly thinking "suckers!".

Let's all be careful not to confuse "Homeopathic" with "Herbal." Homeopathy relies on the strange principle of extreme dilution. In homeopathy it is believed that if a substance directly causes something - such as vomiting - then taking an extremely small amount of it will cause the reverse to happen. "Like cures like" is the principle in Homeopathy. And scientifically the principle is totally unfounded, superstitious. The dilution is so extreme, it would be like homogenizing a single Tylenol into lake Erie.

There is a joke that goes "Did you hear the one about the Homeopathic suicide assistant? He killed his patients by administering a most extremely diluted dose..."

"Herbal" medicine refers to medicines found in their natural matricies - some of which are made into pharmaceuticals (willow bark = aspirin, foxglove = heart medicine, opium poppy = morphine, codeine, percocet, etc...) A great deal of Herbal Medicine tends to have some basis in science (in pharmaceutical industry terms, it is known as Pharmacognosy), as many natural compounds cannot be captured and/or copied to sufficiently mimic and patent for profit - the medicines remain effective in their natural forms nonetheless. Only 1 in 10 researched natural compounds will be developed into a drug of some sort.

Well that does sound like a load of crap....too be honest I thought it was just a type of natural remedy, not that it was a load of crap they try to pass off as one.

So do I. Ephedra was good for stopping my hyperactivity (if only for a little bit - and I didn't need to go to the doctor=s office every month to get a prescription).

Another James Randi video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WyzM_TsIXc[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JspvtK-_WZc&feature=related[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1UJ_qGZ24k&feature=related[/youtube]

Homeopathy as a Cure for Homosexuality.

Homeopathy Can Also Cure Autism Apparently

A Video About a Homeopath. The Argument is Over at 1:50.

The Nobel Prize Winner and His Unethical Experiment on Children with Autism. Please note that the Autism Research Institute and a Defeat Autism Now! doctor are involved. Both are very sketchy towards autism treatment.

A Question: If homeopathy works, why can't you just dilute that one box more and stop paying for continued treatments?

Exactly. Or mix a few drops in a gallon container and sell the surplus at huge profit.