Is the Tiny Sugar Pill Mightier than Cannon Ball?

SREEKUMAR RAGHAVAN
I am of the tribe that was made
to believe that pen is mightier than the sword.
After several years in the profession, I have seen many cursing
themselves for believing so! But in the
same wavelength, can we say that the tiny sugar pill that your neighbourhood
homeopath gives is mightier than the difficult to swallow cannon balls that the
modern medicine practitioners give to their patients?
There are many reasons why
patients especially children love to see a homeopath. For any disease, all the
doc prescribes is two or three different types of sugar pills of course
containing some medicine which is diluted several million times and according
to modern medicine or evidence- based practitioners, no traces of any medicine
will be left in it.
But visibly upset or surprised at
more people popping up pills, the Lancet a reputed UK medical journal fired a
cannon ball at homeopathy way back in 2005 stating that it was a pseudo
science and it never had anything more than a 'placebo' effect. And what is
this placebo effect? It is giving a pill without medicine in it and consumed by
a patient or volunteer either knowingly or unknowingly. The pharma industry
does placebo trials by giving a set of tablets or capsules containing
the new molecules they discovered to one group of people and another set of
empty tablets or placebos to another group of people. The changes in the
metabolism of each group is studied, compared and analysed to find out the
efficacy of the medicine.
The homeopaths had a tough time to counter Lancet because the arguments seemed so logical and convincing- https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(05)67177-2/fulltext. Such bombshells would have easily destroyed any one but not homeopathy with a loyal following across the globe. And, Prof Chathurbhuja Nayak, Director of Central Council for Research in Homeopathy, issued a strong rejoinder against Lancet and Ben Goldcare, an evidence based activist, who was quoted in the article. All these years, the anti-homeopathy movement often said there was no scientific evidence in support of homeopathy and the Lancet article came handy for them.
https://www.homeobook.com/pdf/benefits-homeopathy.pdf
Recently the Ministry of Ayush
had recommended Arnica Arb, a homeopathic medicine as a prophylactic against
Covid-19 and which again was dismissed as nonsense by the allopaths. The Ayush
Ministry also recommended Unani and Ayurvedic medicines as prophylactic. How can
homeopaths claim to have developed a medicine long ago against a virus that
was only detected six months back? Very logical no doubt!
The Power of Placebo
However, there is some reason to
cheer for the homeopaths and some soul searching needed by allopaths. New findings from a team of researchers at Michigan State University (MSU),
University of Michigan and Dartmouth College seems to give some ammunition to
the homeopaths to fight with. For many 'evidence based activists', homeopathy was
just a placebo but now new research shows placebo could be the real
medicine! The researchers have concluded
that use of non-deceptive placebos where a patient is told that he or she is
being given one, had a great impact on reducing emotional brain activity.
According to Jason Moser, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at
MSU, "Placebos are all about 'mind over matter'". Nondeceptive
placebos were born so that you could possibly use them in routine practice. So
rather than prescribing a host of medications to help a patient, you could give
them a placebo, tell them it can help them and chances are-if they believe it
can, then it will."
The researchers concluded in an
article in the renowned journal Nature Communications that non-deceptive
placebos reduced participants self-reported emotional distress. It may also
reduce electrical brain activity reflecting how much distress someone feels to
emotional events and the reduction in emotional brain activity occurred within
just a couple of seconds. "These findings provide initial support that
nondeceptive placebos are not merely a product of response bias – telling the
experimenter what they want to hear — but represent genuine psychobiological
effects,” said Ethan Kross, co-author of the study and a professor of
psychology and management at the University of Michigan.
The researchers are already following up on their data with a real-life nondeceptive placebo trial for COVID-19 stress.
More details here:
https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2020/placebos-prove-powerfuleven-when-people-know-theyre-taking-one/
Is the anti-homeopathy and indigenous systems of medicine campaigns genuine or due to a lack of understanding of the philosophy behind it? I leave it to the enlightened readers to ponder over.
Tailpiece
In my childhood, my mother's
shelf had all sort of half-consumed medicines from allopathy, homeopathy and even
ayurvedic kashayams or arishtams all bought for the same type of ailments. I found she never
had faith in any and hopped from one after the other not seeing any immediate
results! The Bible talks about your faith that can move mountains. Am I not
also hearing Nat King Cole sing ,"Faith can move mountains, Darling, you
will see, I can move mountains, If you have faith in me."
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