Fribromyalgia and Homeopathy

People who suffer from fibromyalgia are desperate for some form of treatment. Modern medicine has few good answers, so this naturally leads many to alternative treatments and therapies.

Homeopathic drugs are sold everywhere, they are legal, and they promise great benefits. Do a Google search and you will find tons of sites praising the amazing powers of certain homeopathic drugs to relieve the symptoms of fibromyalgia, maybe even cure them. You will see reports of scientific research proving their effectiveness.

It is all baloney. If you are using an actual homeopathic drug, it is no better than casting a magic spell or doing anything else that requires belief. It is medical quackery of the basest kind, which becomes obviously clear once you understand the belief system that guides the composition of homeopathic drugs.

There are two parts to creating a homeopathic drug. The first is the belief that like cures like. This is not based on any science. It is just something that the homeopathic believers declare is obvious. If a substance produces certain symptoms in a healthy person, then that substance can be used to treat someone who has similar symptoms. This flies in the face of our entire understanding of how drugs work.

What they consider to be the key ingredient, the like that will cure the like, is pretty random. For example, Walmart sells a homeopathic treatment for flu symptoms called Boiron Oscillococcinum. The key ingredient is liquified duck liver and heart. It is used because homeopaths believe it contains microscopic “oscillococci” bacteria. The problem is, there is no such thing as oscillococci bacteria. It does not exist. That is the level of science that goes into determining the key ingredient.

The second part is even more ridiculous. The component that they believe is the key ingredient is diluted. Diluted so much that it is unlikely that there is even a single molecule of the original substance in any dose. They use the designation C for a 1-to-100 dilution, and X for a 1-to-10 dilution. A drug designated as 6X would have the ingredient in a 1-to-10 solution, and then that dilution would be repeated for a total of six times. This would result in the active ingredient being one part per million. Amazingly, homeopathy promotes the idea that the greater the dilution, the more powerful the drug.

That is why Boiron Oscillococcinum is formulated at 200C, meaning it is a 1-to-100

dilution repeated two hundred times. There is no known scientific analysis that could detect whether any duck liver component was ever added in the first place. Not a single molecule could be discovered by any test. The best science we have can only show that what you are buying is a sugar pill.

There is a homeopathic pain reliever that has been touted on a number of web sites recently. It is called Arnica, and it is supposed to have pain-relieving qualities similar to aspirin. In double blind tests it is no better than placebo, but it is still legally sold as a pain reliever. When you remove belief in the cure, though, it is no longer a cure.

So what is in this pill? It is compounded of 30C of arnica, with a little lactose and sucrose. Basically, it is arnica and sugar- sort of. Arnica is a member of the sunflower family, and if ingested in large quantities, releases enough of the toxin helenalin to produce gastroenteritis, and internal bleeding of the digestive tract. That is going to be painful, so there you have it- a substance that can cause pain being used on that basis to cure pain. Does that make any sense at all to you?

So how much actual arnica is in each pill? The designation 30C means that the arnica is diluted to one part in 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. As PZ Meyers explains on his Pharyngula science blog, this is the equivalent of 1ml of arnica dispersed into a cube 100 light years on a side. Essentially, what you are buying is water bound with sugar.

Sometimes homeopathic remedies do work. For example, there was a homeopathic herbal ED drug that worked just as well as Viagra. When studied, though, it was not actually homeopathic. It had the active ingredients of Viagra in it. It was just an illegal knockoff of Viagra sold as an herbal remedy.

How can they sell this stuff if studies show it does not work? Because the FDA does not regulate over the counter homeopathic drugs in the same way they regulate other drugs. Homeopathic remedies slip through a huge loophole. They do not have to be proven to be effective.

There are continuing attempts to change this, but there are powerful pro-homeopathic forces in Congress and lots of money behind the homeopathic industry. It is pure profit. Their drugs contain sugar and essentially no other ingredients. They don't have to do testing, or prove that their products work in any way. The main reason they slip through the cracks is that because they have no actual pharmacological ingredients, they will never cause a drug interaction or do anyone any harm. A strong appeal to the FDA last year by the CFI does an excellent job of laying out the scientific arguments against homeopathic treatments and why the FDA should regulate them.

Why do people think that homeopathic cures work? There has been a lot of research done lately on the power of placebos. The mind has a lot of control over how we perceive our own symptoms. Taking a placebo might make you feel better.

Faith healing and all sorts of medical quackery have been hugely profitable for similar reasons, along with the fact that symptoms can come and go and people can just suddenly get better despite any outside intervention- credit for which, of course, goes to the quack cure.

Because fibromyalgia sufferers are so desperate, they will try almost anything. This is the perfect opportunity for the hucksters to swoop in and cash in on this population of almost perfect targets. They know how to convince people that their quack cures work and make a lot of money off of it. The constantly changing symptomology of fibromyalgia makes it perfect for quack cures.

Homeopathy has become a huge business. They claim that the scientific community's rejection of it is a conspiracy by big pharma, and almost always use the comparison to aspirin. They state that science did not understand how aspirin worked, but we still used it anyway, and it is the same with homeopathy. There is a big difference, though. There was a huge body of science showing that aspirin did work, we understood how a lot of drugs worked so the basic idea that drugs could reduce pain was not controversial, and scientists did not reject the idea that there was a possible scientific explanation for how it worked.

With homeopathy, scientists reject the idea that there is any mechanism that would allow any homeopathic drug to work. There is no evidence that a molecule can transmit its healing power through vibration to water and then magnify that healing power. There is no evidence that like heals like, and it makes no scientific sense. In order for homeopathy to work, we would have to turn our understanding of pharmacology and biology upside down.

I write a blog on bad science and research, and there is a lot of it out there. A single study showing the effectiveness of any homeopathic treatment is meaningless until other researchers are able to replicate those findings. That is how science works. While there have been a lot of studies done on homeopathic drugs, there has not been a lot of replicated studies using tight controls. Whenever tighter controls are used, the supposed healing ability of homeopathic drugs seems to disappear.

You have to control for bias. In 2005 the medical journal Lancet looked at 110 homeopathic drug tests. What they found was that these tests introduced significant bias, and when you removed that bias from the studies, the results fell apart. In other words, the poorly done tests were basically reporting a placebo effect.

Often quoted on pro-homeopathic sites is a 1997 meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials of homeopathic drugs. That study concluded that patients receiving homeopathic drugs were more likely than patients receiving placebos to show signs of improvement. (Linde, K., et al., “Are the clinical effects of homeopathy placebo effects? A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials.” Lancet, 1997). What they fail to mention is that the authors of that analysis later took a second look and wrote a follow up paper that found that when better methodologies were used, the results were much less conclusive.

I have listened to homeopathic lectures by so-called experts, and they use scientificy words, but it is all gibberish. There was no grounding in any recognizable science. You don't just get to make up your own science and run with it. Science does not work that way.

You may believe in homeopathy, but do not for a minute confuse it with any form of science. It is a spiritual belief wholly dependent upon faith.