At around $10 a teaspoon, homeopathic remedies are an expensive way to buy water, writes Vicki Hyde, chair of NZ Skeptics. Despite this, some pharmacists seem relatively uninformed—or indifferent—about the homeopathic products on their shelves.
Are you getting informed advice from your pharmacist on homeopathic remedies? Vicki Hyde, chair of
NZ Skeptics, puts a few pharmacists to the test.
Like many Kiwis, I presume that I will get informed, credible advice from my local pharmacy when I ask them about a possible purchase. I expect the “health professional [I] see most often”, to know what they are selling, whether it is appropriate for the condition I’m trying to treat, and how effective it is. But that can be a dangerous assumption.
When it comes to homeopathic products, pharmacists need to be up-front that they are flogging off water for $10 a teaspoon. After all, homeopathy involves diluting a material until there isn’t anything left of it—the NZ Council of Homeopaths recently admitted that in public, even if the product information sheets are very careful not to spell this out.
But 94 percent of homeopathic customers aren’t aware of this massive dilution. They think their expensive bottle actually contains the ingredients on the label—not water which once upon a time had some of that in it, the same way it once had chlorine and beer and urine …
So people are buying “remedies” from pharmacists that consist of water, or plain sugar pills. They don’t know and aren’t told that the industry is relying on the well-known placebo effect to ensure return custom. Anyone in the health business knows that around 70 percent of what ails us will get better within a week, regardless of whether we take evidence-based medicine, alternative therapies or do nothing at all. Homeopathy exploits this fact and takes unwarranted credit for the body’s ability to self-heal.
Many people mistakenly equate homeopathic products with herbal products. ‘Nux Vomica 12C’ sounds like it has 12 times something of the vaguely scientific-sounding substance in it, right? Presumably, the manufacturer wants to avoid any possible customer alarm by using ‘nux vomica’ instead of the better-recognised term ‘strychnine’. You don’t want to frighten the punters. But of course, you don’t have to worry about actually ingesting any strychnine because 12C is a dilution factor of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or the same as you’d get from putting a pinch of it into the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s bad enough to have misleading product labelling—it’s far worse when they misuse a real medicinal term, as one Auckland pharmacy did in marketing homeopathic “meningococcal vaccine”. Fortunately a public outcry saw that product pulled, but I know of a case where a mother chose to treat her sick baby with homeopathic ear-drops, strongly resisting offers of orthodox treatment or hospitalisation. Sadly her infant died of meningitis after considerable suffering. You can pay a hefty price for this diluted water, but you can pay a much bigger price if you use it in place of stuff that actually works.
When I bought a batch of homeopathic products from a major pharmacy chain, all I was asked was “do you want vitamins with that?” Another said that they didn’t know much about the product but “people bought it, so it must be good”. When another was asked about the ethics of selling water as a health remedy, he replied that he “didn’t care if it was the placebo effect”.
That doesn’t sound very well informed or very ethical—is that the kind of health professional you want to see most often?
Further Information
- NZ Skeptics Homeopathy Campaign
- NZ Skeptics Guide to Homeopathy (A4 flyer, PDF)
- ‘Survey of homeopathy customers reveals they don’t know it’s just water’ Pharmacy Today (26 May 2009):1
- What’s the Harm.net
- 1023: Homeopathy, there’s nothing in it (UK-based campaign)
