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Homeopathy is the low-hanging fruit of alternative medicine debunking. It's just so self-evidently silly. Molecules have no memory, dilution doesn't potentialise anything, scientific medicine isn't based on an "allo-" principle it's based on evidence and tests, it will readily use the "homo-" principle when it works. The foundational binary is wrong, the assumptions are all wrong. Homeopathy is very obviously quacks preying on the uninformed, scammers selling them magic water.
It actually works, though.
Now you (my hypothetical sceptic materialist foil) is about to throw at me a long list of double-blind placebo studies you've only skimmed the conclusion section of, but before you do that, please read my little story.
My kid used to have terrible itches while sleeping. "Idiopathic atopic dermatitis". That's just Greek for "skin gets inflamed with allergies, dunno why"; medicine has a way to feign authority by rewording things in opaque languages. Studies on this condition are inconclusive: i.e. nobody knows why it happens or how to cure it. My kid would carve lines onto their skin every night, bleed. It made it impossible for them to have true rest, which brings a whole lot of life-long health issues (for *that* we have plenty of reliable evidence; the way our society normalises sleep deprivation is obscene). It made it impossible for me to rest, too, because I sleep with my kids. I would be on alert all night; sometimes I tried to hold them from scratching themself, but that was torture for them; but allowing it was to allow injury; scratching makes it more itchy which is a feedback loop. Nothing we tried helped, not the (low-evidence) scientific palliatives, not trying to control allergens or diet or environment. No alternative medicine treatment worked either, and oh yes I tried.
(One doctor said "it'll get better when they're older"; he was right, and aging is the only thing that ever helped.)
My neighbour had a little girl of the same age with the same problem. One bright summer morning the kids were playing together and I realised only mine had the nightmare wounds on their arms. Turns out my neighbour had cured her girl with homeopathy. Instead of screaming at her that homeopathy is nonsense to grift $ableist_slurs, I asked for more details on how it went. And I listened.
Oh he's so good, he's so nice, so much better than the clinic. You know? He actually treat you like a *person*. He asked my girl all about how she's doing, what she eats, how she's doing at school. If she's happy. We talked a lot about $bully1 and $bully2 and that problem with the teacher. Then he told me that these allergies are from emotions, it's because of stress, and we're doing breathing exercises and he gave me these recipes so we're taking better care of her eating, and we're going to bed earlier too we have this practice where we turn off the lights and light up these nice candles and I read to her and...
I distinctly noticed how she didn't even mention the magic water. I'm sure the guy sold her expensive magic water at some point. That's incidental. It could as well have been crystals, or tarot readings, or, yes, thoughts and prayers.
The next time you find someone into homeopathy, try to actually talk to them, not at them. You'll quickly notice it wasn't ever about the power of diluting chemicals to nothing. They'll talk like twenty seconds about the homo- principle, and then you realise their real point is the holistic principle.
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"That's not homeopathy, that's folk therapy. That's just commonsense advice masked in a wise guru soothing voice." Yes.
The interesting question is: Why do people resort to alternative medicine to have that? Why didn't my neighbour take her girl to the psychologist?
I'm being a jackass I know, sorry, but I swear these aren't gotchas, I don't want to win an argument here. (Winning is for losers.) These are questions I've been pondering for years. I think they're very important and underrated questions. Why could *I* never get the same solution for my kid, even after I understood how and why homeopathy works? (Because my kid was forced to wake up too early to go to school; because I was forced to wake up too early to beat the traffic; because both of us had a zillion other things going on and no space to stop and experiment and *think*; because despite the overvalued salary of programmers it always feels like one can't spend; because we're kept busy and obedient all the time, terrorised with artificial scarcity; because because... I failed my kid, and I am ashamed.)
I would argue that the pageantry, the soothing guru voice and the warm tasteful décor of the clinic, are important tools in getting someone to actually engage with that commonsense advice. But if you hate alternative medicine, if you've built an aversion to its culture and æsthetics, nothing I say will make you feel otherwise. So if you have to think of it as disgusting, then think of it a kind of fungus; it thrives on long-abandoned spaces where establishment medicine isn't reaching. Think of alternative medicine as a market niche: it's popular because it's selling people *something*, and I'm not talking about the powers of molecular water memory.
I used to be a sceptic materialist debunker too. I find that when you stop looking down at people, when you genuinely try to understand why they act the way they do, there's always good reasons. Debunker culture loves to say stuff like, “one person is smart, a crowd is $ableist_slur.” I propose this is exactly backwards. One person buying magic water can be a scammer predator issue. Two hundred million people buying magic water points to an issue with the system.
We hate mould but it's there for good reasons. It breaks apart that which should be destroyed, so that life may thrive again.
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The holistic criticism of establishment medicine is a cliché by now, heavily associated with the patchouli æsthetics, but to recap, it goes like this: Modern medicine focus too much on eliminating isolated symptoms. Health is a whole-deal sort of thing, involving body, mind, social circle, environment. We can't live well unless we fix all these together.
Did you notice my weasel words? Somewhere along the line I swiftly changed “scientific medicine” to “establishment medicine”. Because none of this presupposes mystical cosmologies. Full disclosure I'm not exactly materialist anymore, but all of the stuff I pointed so far is purely material, it falls under the purview of evidence-based medicine. Not only that, it's actually well-supported by evidence. Take a look at the primary source for authoritative scientific conclusions (Wikipedia), read the list of side effects from sleep deprivation, the effects of chronic stress hormones, of pollution, of lack of exercise, bad eating, depression anxiety discrimination. Read about the effects of being socially isolated, of living away from plants and animals. Would you say that you have a good sleep schedule? Are you well rested right now? If not, why not? I really mean it, why? How do we *solve* this?
A large amount of health issues would disappear on sleep and fun body movements and reasonable working hours alone. That's commonsense since forever; and scientific medicine can now tell us, in minute quantitative detail, how and why. How come nobody does anything about it? One person failing to set up a nice daily routine might be a 'laziness' issue, perhaps, if that word even means anything. One *third* of the population not sleeping as much as they need is a social issue.
Among other things sleep deprivation damages decision-making, attention, memory, fine motor skills, and patience. It damages these things a *lot*, it's not a small effect. Chillingly, it also impairs one's perception of one's own ability: you don't feel like it's damaging your mind, you're working at reduced capacity while feeling like you're fine.
List of top % professions that we routinely, systemically put under sleep deprivation: nurse, doctor, truck driver, cook, firefighter, student.
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I'm into herbalism these days. Herbalism is fun because it lets me play with the whole range, from reading meta-analyses on the hormonal effects of various compounds to doing a healthy dose of psilocybin and asking the plants which one banishes ghosts (or, my total favourite, do a healthy dose of psilocybin and ask the plants which ones modulate GnRH). The more you read on the science of it, the more you realise how little we know about how compounds work in the body, much less how they work in different bodies or different social conditions or which feedback loops they create with one another. A perfectly scientific material herbalism is actually possible, but also an herculean task still mostly untackled. The fact that so much is unproven – not *dis*proven, also not proven – leaves a lot of potential for sketchy, possibly dangerous self-experimentation, which is just my kind of jam.
Plus I love the plants. Like, I actually love them. I build a personal individual relationship with each plant, in a way I cannot do with my ADHD amphetamines (don't get me wrong, I love the amphs, but I don't like *love* love them). If this sounds ridiculous to you, hypothetical foil reader who is actually a ghost of my own pretransition self, then consider this: living this way makes me happy.
The other day I was cooking for some girlfriends while listening to herbalism podcasts. I'm specifically looking into tinctures: alcoholic extracts meant to be taking sublingually, for direct blood absorption. Thing is, some compounds extract better on water, others on booze. Nettles is ridiculously nutritious, and the best way to benefit from that is a cold infusion (leave it in water overnight, drink it in the morning). But I'm interested in nettles as a 5α-reductase inhibitor (=free finasteride for after the collapse), and one experimental study showed that it inhibits them five-alphas better when powered by booze. That made me want to learn more about when to use one extraction method or the other, try to build a general intuition for it.
So I found an episode of some holistic nonsense or another, and they listed the following advantages to teas wrt tinctures:
I didn't get the information I wanted (which classes of molecular compounds extract better on alcohol and what do they typically do in the body, if there's even a trend). But do you see it? This stuff matters too. Let's go back to the problem with insomnia. Suppose you want to treat it with herbalism (chamomile, melissa, valeriana, catnip, and lavender/sage btw; get them dried in loose form, not teabags they only put the crappy leftover dust in teabags; steep for 10 minutes; try it and you'll see). There's been some research on actual active compounds but for the sake of argument suppose it's all placebo. Damn if there isn't a whole lot of stuff going on under this word, "placebo". I wouldn't rely on placebos to treat COVID or cancer or being shot by a cop at a protest. To treat insomnia, mood, libido issues? To treat an anxiety crisis after recovering from being shot by a cop at a protest? Selective bias is one thing but if you think you are relaxed you are relaxed; you can't fool yourself that you're feeling better. A whole lot of solutions pop up if you just take a wider shot: *why* are you trying to treat this symptom?
Are rituals silly nonsense for dupes? Oh but doing the same thing every night before sleeping is actually documented sleep hygiene. The extra time it takes to prepare tea is a feature. Since you already stopped doomscrooling to mix all the herbs in the tea caddy, you might as well brush your teeth, right? Then you put on some clean PJs and unexpectedly feel better about yourself, you thought you had no energy but somehow you're *doing things*. Maybe the whole romance of herbal potions adds a bit of colour to your routine. If you feel better you sleep better. And aren't you trying to sleep better so that you feel better?
Teas are cheaper to buy than pre-made tinctures; that doesn't matter much for me since I'll be DIY'ing everything, until my nascent reputation for doing herbs reached a friend on Hartz-IV and they want my help. Tinctures involve alcohol; that doesn't matter for me until I need to help a Muslim friend calm down after a bad break up with her girlfriend.
Compare this kind of folk remedy, compare this kind of mutual, horizontal community care to the official approaches to health. Filling an online form, going to an overworked, overstressed doctor to get a prescription for a sleeping pill, in a social script that (through no fault of any individual doctor) is forced to optimise throughput over personal bonds. There's nothing inherently wrong about sleeping pills, and they certainly pack a punch that no herbal tea can rival. But you're not going to the doctor because you need a sleeping pill, you're going to the doctor because your life sucks and you want it to be a little bit better. That same doctor could be using the amazing skills that only trained doctors have to treat stuff that requires expert medical care, thereby making all doctors a bit less overworked. We rely on doctors both too much and too little; we don't need more peer-reviewed medicaments to sleep better, we need more friends. Alternative medicine shows that there's a big problem with establishment medicine, and the problem isn't the medicine.