UNPOPULAR OPINION ALERT
Feb. 5th, 2014 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timSomething that I hear a lot in my peer group is "homeopathic medicines are dangerous because people use them instead of effective medicines."
I have no doubt that there's a small sector of the population that thinks clouds are chemtrails and ignores effective medicine out of spite. There's probably not much we can do about that sector of the population.
For the most part, though, I suspect people turn to things like homeopathy for problems that they've already sought advice from a real doctor for, and not gotten effective treatment. So who is being harmed, exactly? I mean... we're living in a world where it's legal for "real" pharmaceutical manufacturers to sell generics that don't actually do anything, and the FDA doesn't do anything about it (source: my former psychiatrist, who said, "I complained to the FDA [about a medication I was taking that a pharmacy tried to hand me a placebo generic "equivalent" for], but I might as well go home and play video games, since it does as much good and is more fun.")
So if you want to improve access to health care, why not... you know, work for a single-payer system and stop making access contingent on having money? (If you live in the US, anyway; if you're in another country, maybe your priorities are fine :-) Somehow I suspect that that's stopping a hell of a lot more people from getting health care that would improve their lives than homeopathy is. Or would that be no fun because you wouldn't get to laugh at "stupid people" and feel smarter than them?
I mean, yeah, businesses (both non-drug makers and regular pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens) make plenty of money off selling homeopathic crap, and that's irritating and all, but you know who makes a lot more money doing everything except making sure people get health care? Health insurance companies.
(I feel like I've said all this before, but meh, there's nothing new under the sun anyway :-)
I have no doubt that there's a small sector of the population that thinks clouds are chemtrails and ignores effective medicine out of spite. There's probably not much we can do about that sector of the population.
For the most part, though, I suspect people turn to things like homeopathy for problems that they've already sought advice from a real doctor for, and not gotten effective treatment. So who is being harmed, exactly? I mean... we're living in a world where it's legal for "real" pharmaceutical manufacturers to sell generics that don't actually do anything, and the FDA doesn't do anything about it (source: my former psychiatrist, who said, "I complained to the FDA [about a medication I was taking that a pharmacy tried to hand me a placebo generic "equivalent" for], but I might as well go home and play video games, since it does as much good and is more fun.")
So if you want to improve access to health care, why not... you know, work for a single-payer system and stop making access contingent on having money? (If you live in the US, anyway; if you're in another country, maybe your priorities are fine :-) Somehow I suspect that that's stopping a hell of a lot more people from getting health care that would improve their lives than homeopathy is. Or would that be no fun because you wouldn't get to laugh at "stupid people" and feel smarter than them?
I mean, yeah, businesses (both non-drug makers and regular pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens) make plenty of money off selling homeopathic crap, and that's irritating and all, but you know who makes a lot more money doing everything except making sure people get health care? Health insurance companies.
(I feel like I've said all this before, but meh, there's nothing new under the sun anyway :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-17 09:14 pm (UTC)Yeah, this is why the people I know who've used homeopathic stuff have used it. I thought so myself until well past college, and so did other smart people I know.
I know another smart person who just grabs a bunch of stuff from the shelf when he's sick, in the hopes that something will work, and so he's got homeopathic stuff in his medicine cabinet along with the rest. I don't think his strategy is unreasonable; sure, he ends with some duds, but it's worth it to him to not spend ages standing there puzzling over the minute differences between brands like I've been known to do.