Magic Water...

[Maj]

I agree. I don't have to try Magic Water to know that it is a crock of shit. But that's more because someone actually went and did controlled experiments to CHECK... not just because the idea of homeopathy is inherently stupid and anti-scientific (which it is).

I am unable to dislike you, thanks to this statement. In my course, someone from Braurs, a company that uses homeopathy-based products, gave a speech on their products. I wasn't the only one to be convinced that it was utter bullshit.

I realize that the realities of homeopathy are largely BS, but reading the description Rapanui linked to, I couldn't help but get the sense that the philosophy behind homeopathy seems similar to the philosophy behind vaccination.

So why is one idea so blatantly bunk, while the other idea is something that people around the world not only readily believe, but readily act on?

[Username17]

Because living creatures grow and adapt, and puddles of water do not.

When you expose a living creature to a biological threat, the living creature responds by creating cells that are specifically matched to the intruder and then copies them. It copies them again and again. After ten doublings, it has a thousand such cells, after twenty doublings it has a million, after thirty doublings it has a billion. Because it grows. And adapts. And specifically reproduces the immuno-competent cells which are capable of interacting with the foreign body.

And water... does not do that. It doesn't proliferate, it just fucking sits there.

-Username17

[K]

The funny thing is that part of the basic idea behind homeopathy is correct.

You can, in fact, become partly immune to some kinds of poisons by ingesting or injecting them in small amounts and increasing those amounts over years.

The problem is that lots of poisons don't work that way and just damage your body and organs.

Also, having an acquired resistance to one thing doesn't make you more resistant to something with similar symptoms. That's where the magic logic comes in that says "like things work on like things" which is fine in symbolism, but crap for real life.

Now, the amounts of poison in most homeopathic solutions are very small and often is exactly like drinking tap water (which does contain trace amounts of deadly things like arsenic), but that's another issue.

[Shiritai]

One of the crazy things about homeopathy is that the remedies are diluted so greatly that not a single molecule of the "active" ingredient remains. So, only the water or alcohol is left. Because of this no one, not even the homeopaths, can distinguish between unlabled homeopathic remedies, or even between the remedies and tap water. Unsurprisingly, the human body can't distinguish between a homeopathic remedy and a placebo.

Vaccines, in contrast, have actual stuff in the water, which measurably react with our immune system.

[Maj]

And water... does not do that. It doesn't proliferate, it just fucking sits there.

I understand the words you typed and their meaning, but I'm obviously missing some crucial piece of information because I'm not sure how what you're saying applies to my question.

The funny thing is that part of the basic idea behind homeopathy is correct.

So I'm not totally on crack when I recognize the similarity in philosophy?

You can, in fact, become partly immune to some kinds of poisons by ingesting or injecting them in small amounts and increasing those amounts over years.

And/or diseases - which is the basis for vaccination, yes?

Also, having an acquired resistance to one thing doesn't make you more resistant to something with similar symptoms. That's where the magic logic comes in that says "like things work on like things" which is fine in symbolism, but crap for real life.

So basically, if I understand correctly, homeopathic philosophy includes the notion that if you - as a completely whacky example - vomit excessively because you've swallowed ipecac that you'll be "immuner" to the vomiting caused by the flu?

Now, the amounts of poison in most homeopathic solutions are very small and often is exactly like drinking tap water (which does contain trace amounts of deadly things like arsenic), but that's another issue.

Yes, it is another issue. I understand that the actual homeopathic "remedies" are glorified water, but looking at the basic philosophy behind homeopathy - that a little bit of the problem can be the solution - it reminded me of vaccination, and I didn't understand why the idea was dissed so hard on one end, but supported on another.

I think the answer lies in the "like things work on like things" notion - which is logically fallacious.

[Koumei]

So basically, if I understand correctly, homeopathic philosophy includes the notion that if you - as a completely whacky example - vomit excessively because you've swallowed ipecac that you'll be "immuner" to the vomiting caused by the flu?

Basically, yes. Not only this, but it claims you can stop vomiting by drinking magic water that contains the magic essence of ipecac. These are the sorts of people who used mercury to "treat" silver liver syndrome (but to be fair, "how could something as awesome as mercury NOT be good for you?")

So it's partly a hokey form of immunisation that ignores "wasp venom does not immunise you against wasp venom, it just builds up and makes the next ting more likely to kill you or cause an allergic reaction", partly a mind-numbing idea of "all things that cause X are the same, so immunity to one of them is immunity to X" and partly using the cause of a syndrome, in tiny amounts in water, as a form of antivenin.

And it doesn't work like that.

And I think what Frank meant was that "an immunisation introduces a small, hopefully controlled amount of the disease - in some cases even "deactivated". The body quickly learns how to fight it, and makes lots of antibodies. When the real thing comes along, the antibodies kick the crap out of it and steal its possessions. In a sack.

When you put a small amount of a toxin into water, it sits there. It... just sits there. The water doesn't adapt to it or produce things to combat it, so when you then drink it, you're just drinking the water and also the toxin."

Note that if it were a bacteria, then sure, it would probably grow and infect the water (or it would drown and die off, or something else there would interact with it, perhaps), so when you drink that, either you took a risky immunisation or you just infected yourself properly. But homeopathy deals with poisons (mainly "poisons that make you stay awake/excessively tired/have a headache" as opposed to "cyanide, carbon monoxide, arsenic and titanium"). Poisons aren't alive, they just sit there and wait for you to swallow them.

[Username17]

A fight between a living thing and your body is an arms race. The bacteria proliferates. The body tries literally random shit until it find one that works and then that proliferates. And the numbers grow exponentially because we're talking about living things. If you give one side or another a head start of say, ten doubling times, then that side is ahead in the war by over a thousand to one. That's... a big number.

So if you give a body some killed viruses months or years in advance, it will have a chance to get a head start. When an actual war between the body and the real virus breaks out it will come at a time when the body is thousands or millions of times ahead in the question of viruses versus T cells.

But inert substances don't do that. Methyl Mercury is deadly, but it doesn't grow. There's no arms race. The fact that it can kill you despite the fact that it never doubles in number indicates that it isn't really playing the same game as Influenza. There isn't really anything your body can do to survive contact with Methyl Mercury than it is already doing.

---

To be fair, there are some viruses that we can't make vaccinations for. HIV very famously infects the very cells the body makes to fight viruses, so there's basically nothing the body's immune reactions can do to solve that particular problem. And there are some poisons that people can become resistant to over time. If you drink a fair amount of alcohol over a long period you will find that you can drink a crap tonne of the stuff without passing out.

But the basic fact of the matter is that vaccination isn't some kind of magic panacea that works for everything. It works on a specific principle that works on some things. We don't have a vaccine for every virus, and any poison categorized as bio-accumulatory is going to fuck your shit up if you even consider going down that line of attack.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

The proof that vaccination works is evident in African third-world nations right now, as we speak, climbing in polio rates because they neglected on the shots.
They stopped taking the shots because there was no polio for a long time, an absence which has been ironically a result of taking the polio shots.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7037462.stm

Similar incidents are at risk in so-called 'civilized' nations, such as America, because of fears that mercury exposure to infants causes low-functioning autism.

... which, of course, is obviously bullshit if one checks the facts, but since the disturbingly common Religious Right (conservative Christians, that is) insists that science is The Devil, scientific method might as well be written in the Quran to them.

[Calibron]

You know you can just demand a immunization shot without the preservatives to avoid that whole issue.*

*no research was put into this statement

[PhoneLobster]

You know that if it even is an issue (which is frankly bunk) the number of people effected is so insanely small it is utterly impossible to prove a link.

And it could be pretty damn small and a link could be observed so that's pretty damn super small.

The odds of dying of say, tetanus. That's measurable. I know the "gamble" I'd take for my kids.

The REALLY scary part though comes with other things you vaccinate for, like viruses. With the whole virus evolving resistance thing.

See a virus could conceivably evolve to become resistant to or bypass current vaccinations. It's hard. It's unlikely. But the BEST environment for it to do so is probably one where an unvaccinated population is living directly among a vaccinated population.

So the virus thrives and mutates in the unvaccinated until one day some unvaccinated person's virus mutates to bypass the vaccine and BAM. Everyone's kids get polio or TB or something.

Great.

[Username17]

The entire controversy can be found Here.

In the vaccination moratorium period that occurred when Sweden suspended vaccination against whooping cough (pertussis) from 1979 to 1996, 60% of the country's children contracted the potentially fatal disease before the age of ten years; close medical monitoring kept the death rate from whooping cough at about one per year. Pertussis continues to be a major health problem in developing countries, where mass vaccination is not practiced; the World Health Organization estimates it caused 294,000 deaths in 2002.

-Username17