The article ends as a crazy agressive criticism of homeopathy in general, mixing the issues of manufacturing that also happen to normal medicine with real concerns and conflating the two, but what really ticks me off is leaving in the closing paragraph a phrase that use age of a practice as an insult.
Saying that something should have been left in some old era implies that people of that era are inferior to us, the fact that all past eras are targeted, make me think there is some sort of superiority thinking tied to being in the current age, like if current humans are inherently better.
As someone that has some practices and beliefs that were actually more common in the past, I personally hear that sort of argument a lot, and I think lots people don't realize that when they diss the past, they also diss lots of things important to them ( like, printing press... Created to print the bible no less... )
EDIT: alright, I get it, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, criticising the writing style of someone criticising something you dislike, even if I dislike it too, is reason to get blasted with downvotes.
Unlike some natural remedies which are later proven to be right based thousands of years of use in ancient times, Homeopathy is completely and totally bogus. It's based on absolutely nothing. Not science, not observation, not tradition. It's based entirely on one guy, who, in ~1800, thought that 'like cures like'. So, if you have a fever, why not take something else that causes you to get hot? It's also based on the idea that water has a memory of things it comes in contact with. So, they dilute it thousands and thousands of times until the water or sugar pill has no molecules at all of the thing that is supposed to be treating you. In the end, it's a sugar pill that has a placebo effect on some people. There's no logic, science, or medicine to it at all.
Pro tip: If water really did have a memory and diluting things made them stronger, then all water everywhere would cure everything. Including terrorism since Bin Laden was buried at sea.
I don't disagree with that, I disagree with how the article was written, I am not defending homeopathy, I am among other things criticizing for example the conflating of the issues you mentioned with manufacturing issues that also happen with normal medicine.
Before its formal discovery, people were already treating it correctly (with dissecated thyroid from pigs).
In the 70s it was found how to track TSH and T4 hormones in the blood, and in the light of this discovery there was a push to adopt it, and that diagnosis should be based only on that, not in patient symptoms.
Also the manufacture of synthetic T4 started since then.
This resulted in two problems: One, most doctors now use a protocol where you don't treat the person until the blood test show he HAS to (if you read the official guidelines, the ones that doctors use as "confirmed" disease, in the guidelines are instead listed as critical state and you must treat), the second is that for many patients, the problem does not manifest as T4 production, but in the conversion of T4 to something else, and to that people, synthetic T4 obviously don't work.
The personal result to me, was that I struggled 11 years to find a medic willing to treat me and ignore the blood tests, I've been being treated since 1 month and a half ago, and feel MUCH better, and I am sad that I had to go some extremes (including threatening to beat up a medic if she refused to order the exams I thought was needed).
For others, the result is that people created whole associations of thyroid patients, that has as major ethos defend practices of the 1960s, several countries has groups of patients and lawyers specialized in launching lawsuits to force medics to treat them like people were in the past, in hope that this will fix the problem (And whey they DO succeed in the lawsuit and the medic treat them like in the 60s, the disease DO get fixed).
There are lots of information on this site, mind you, despite the at first seemly crazy conspiratorial tone, I must say from personal experience, and from personal experience of all other people I know with the same disease, that this site is absolutely correct, and modern medicine that is wrong: http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/
I plan in writing a blog post in some months, comparing my coding performance before and after taking the medicine (one of the symptoms of the disease is "foggy mind")
I don't see that paragraph as implying that people of the 19th century are inferior to us. Rather, I see it as stating in a cute and short way that people figured out that homeopathy was bogus long ago, and it should have stopped then.
In other words, it's not "this from the 19th century and therefore stupid," but rather, "this was debunked a very long time ago and it's ridiculous that anybody continues to use it."
This could probably be explained by a sufficiently detailed computer simulation of human society.
Some people, those with the lowest amount of faith in unsubstantiated beliefs, debunked homeopathy according to their own standards. They proved that it did not work better than the placebo effect, one of their existing and well-substantiated beliefs, resulting from a through examination of the simple question: "What if the effects of this treatment are all attributable to the patient believing that it should work?"
A large fraction of humanity, probably an overwhelming majority, has not been trained to examine the world scientifically. Many have been indoctrinated into religions or nonscientific pedagogies from a very early age. For those people, it is not sufficient to prove that a treatment does not work better than placebo to stop using it. It must be proven to not work at all.
Clearly, homeopathy activates the placebo effect. Thus, scientifically minded people reject it as a treatment. For everyone else, they find that it either works for them, or they can move on to a different placebo that does work. They may be wondering why scientific people work so hard to debunk placebos, because they are really just limiting the number of placebos they could be using.
Saying that something should have been left in some old era implies that people of that era are inferior to us, the fact that all past eras are targeted, make me think there is some sort of superiority thinking tied to being in the current age, like if current humans are inherently better.
As someone that has some practices and beliefs that were actually more common in the past, I personally hear that sort of argument a lot, and I think lots people don't realize that when they diss the past, they also diss lots of things important to them ( like, printing press... Created to print the bible no less... )
EDIT: alright, I get it, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, criticising the writing style of someone criticising something you dislike, even if I dislike it too, is reason to get blasted with downvotes.