Health Canada has this thing where it solemnly approves homeopathic stuff as safe, effective and of high quality. What kind of stuff? you ask with your inquiring minds. Oh, nothing much. Just insulin and things.
Insulin?
Yes.
Pharmacist Scott Gavura tells us about it:
The Natural Health Product Regulations, under Canada’s Food and Drugs Act, regulate products such as nutritional supplements, probiotics, traditional Chinese medicine, vitamins, herbal remedies, and homeopathy. They are a deliberate shadow of the regulations that govern drug products — requiring some manufacturing quality and safety standards, while effectively removing the standards for product efficacy claims. Standards were dropped because there was no possible way that many of these products could ever meet the rigorous standards established for drug products.
So they dropped the standards to match the quality? That’s scary.
The most problematic in the group was homeopathy. Homeopathy is an elaborate placebo system, where the “remedies” lack active ingredients. As would be expected with inert products, clinical trials confirm what basic science predicts: homeopathy’s effects are placebo effects. Yet Health Canada insists that this doesn’t compromise quality, safety, or efficacy:
Through the Natural Health Products Directorate, Health Canada ensures that all Canadians have ready access to natural health products that are safe, effective and of high quality, while respecting freedom of choice and philosophical and cultural diversity.
Oh dear god are you kidding me. Never mind philosophical and cultural diversity! Inappropriate! There isn’t useful diversity in medical standards and regulations. Poison doesn’t become not poison in a different culture. A glass of water doesn’t become insulin because cultural diversity. If you’re certifying something as effective then you have to use the right – universal – standards.
The consequence? Regulation of the absurd. Health Canada reviews every remedy, and explicitly attests their safety and effectiveness. In Canada you can purchase Health Canada approved (Search each product by number here):
- homeopathic sea water — DIN-HM 80017767
- homeopathic insulin — DIN-HM 80016480
There it is – homeopathic insulin. How many diabetic comas has that caused?
There’s also a homeopathic insect repellent.
For many of us, insect bites are an occasional annoyance that we can largely avoid. Yet insects can transmit over 100 diseases, including malaria, West Nile virus, yellow fever, Dengue fever, Lyme disease and even plague. Malaria alone kills 1.2 million people, mainly African children, annually. And now that we have West Nile and Lyme disease in Canada, there is a bigger impetus to minimize bites.
Yes but respect for freedom of choice and philosophical and cultural diversity is even more important than preventing malaria or West Nile virus. Apparently.
Under like makes like, I assume that’s you would dilute sugar to make homeopathic insulin. But aren’t homeopathic remedies usually sugar pills? How does this work?
At least homeopathic sugar pills have a measurable effect on diabetics, I guess?
I especially like the DIN-HM numbers. Makes it look very scientific, so it must be effective. /sarcasm
Stop the presses. I thought all y’all were no longer interested in pointing out awful hoaxes like homeopathy (and these really neat government regulations which make no sense).
Yes, that was snarkasm.
Really, Canada? How is the US supposed to aspire to anything if you keep lowering the bar?
Is there a homeopathic remedy for blunt force trauma? I need to know whether the placebo effect will prevent a broken nose when my face hits the desk.
Homeopathic sea water?
I wonder if homeopathic LSD would be a problem. I could probably prove there was no actual LSD in it anymore, but it’d blow everyone’s minds, right?
I know. Homeopathic sea water – what??? And why?????
Dehydration? Seasickness?
To br fair, it looks as if these products won’t do any good, but the regulations mean they won’t do any harm in themselves. If I remember rightly, before such regulations were introduced in the U.K. it turned out that some imported Chinese mrdicines had large amounts of arsenic in them.
Surely homeopathic seawater is a cure for drowning?
Cures drowning.
Bah they both beat me.
Do they take regular sea water and dilute it with fresh water?
How about homeopathic water? It would beat lugging a bottle around.
What would you dilute it with? Whisky?
My cousin is diabetic.
Her husband convinced her to stop taking her meds and instead rely on chiropractic.
Result? Coma.
Reportedly he has eased up on the chiropractic stuff a bit and has been reassigned to a place where he can do less harm.
He now works for the TSA. And my, how he adamantly believes in the mission of the TSA!
That’s called breathing and yes, duh, that prevents drowning. Gosh, do I have to explain everything to you?
In Germany, all the homeophatic stuff has to carry the label “This is a homeopathic remedy and therefore does not have any specific indication”. Or in other words, it’s useless. People still buy it.
I was once standing at the Pharmacist’s waiting for my stuff when the pharmacist tried to explain the homeopathic principle to a 65ish yo woman who’d heard about that miracle cure and wanted the highest dosage possible. Her answer was “but that’s bullshit” in lady-like.
What’s really scary in Europe is the amount doctors and pharmacists buy into that stuff and give you the homeopathic nonsense even when you don’t ask for it but ask for, well, standard medicine like cough potion or eye drops.
homeopathic LSD…
…my city gets its tap water out of a local bay. (with appropriate purification, yes.) now all i have to do is talk to a few old-timer locals and see if anybody ever heard of anyone ever losing (intentionally or otherwise) any LSD into that bay, and i have a supply of the homeopathic stuff all set.
well, actually, for the higher “potencies” i may have to dilute the tap water out a bit first. it’s not all THAT big of a bay.
Homeopathic sea water…if sufficiently dilute it could be used to raise the Titanic.
If cattle manure gets washed into a stream and the stream goes to the sea where it is diluted many times over and the water goes through the vapour cycle to end up in our drinking water then….
You can mock all you like the homeopathic bullshit, but you’re still drinking it.
Ahh, but that’s not how homeopathic medicine works. It’s all in how you dilute and shake it to mix the solution. Otherwise a single teaspoon of sea water would be the most powerful cure-all ever found, and we couldn’t have that.
Kevin:
I don’t understand your point.
There are trace elements of all kinds of stuff found in drinking water?
Homeopathy *is* BS.
As I haven’t seen this fun factoid yet, I put in in a comment: The homeopathic potency 1M is the same as 1000C which is one to (100 to the power of 1000) which can also be expressed as 1 / (10^2000). This universe holds about 10^80 atoms and a bit fewer molecules. You would have to search 10^1920 (a one followed by 1920 zeroes) universes like this one, to find the original molecule.