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Does homeopathy work?
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Successful clinical trials show homeopathy works

Despite what the conventional scientific media has reported to the public, there are plenty of clinical studies and scientific papers showing the efficacy of diluting medicine in water and increasing the health of patients.

The Argument

The 19th Century saw a huge spike in independent hospitals using homeopathic treatment to cure illnesses, and those hospitals, during European and American epidemics like cholera, were shown to produce a much lower rate of continued disease than other hospitals. In recent clinical environments with patients, "they reviewed 186 studies, 89 of which met their pre-defined criteria for their meta-analysis. They found that, on average, patients given a homeopathic medicine were 2.45 times more likely to have experienced a clinically beneficial effect."[1] Those results are significantly in favor of homeopathy, even from an unbiased, purely scientific perspective. There is also a multitude of encouraging scientific data regarding the effects that water dilution has on the potency of medicine, yet the mainstream scientific community greatly misinforms and misleads the general public on these studies.

Counter arguments

In the exact same article noted here, the writer states, "When reviewing only the highest quality studies and when adjusting for publication bias, the researchers found that subjects given a homeopathic medicine were still 1.86 times more likely to experience improved health."[1] These effects are clinically minimal at best - so small that they could simply chalk it up to coincidence. There is a reason that the respected scientific community has no place for homeopaths. Their idea that mainstream science misinforms the public conveniently disregards the mountains of evidence against homeopathy, citing how unscientific of an approach to dosage it is to assume that water can make medicine more potent, is just misleading or impossible.

Proponents

Premises

[P1] Clinical studies are the scientific basis for the efficacy of certain medicinal practices and drugs in actual human bodies. [P2] Homeopathy has repeatedly proven to work in its patients, as opposed to patients given other, more conventional means of healing. [P3] Homeopathy works and should be encouraged.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] There is a mountain of evidence against homeopathy's efficacy on humans, and science dictates that if a hypothesis is proven wrong, that hypothesis cannot possibly stand. Mainstream medicine is not misleading people about homeopathy, they are simply telling the truth. [Rejecting P3] Homeopathy has not proven to work overall clinical studies, so it should not be encouraged.

References

  1. https://homeopathic.com/why-homeopathy-makes-sense-and-works-3/
This page was last edited on Tuesday, 10 Nov 2020 at 18:35 UTC

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