In Europe, homeopathy is not enjoying the best of times. Firtst, the English NHS stopped reimbursing it, then France followed suit, and later the Germans too started thinking about it. Now it might be Spain’s turn.
For several years, Spain has taken a critical stance towards so-called alternative medicine (SCAM) in General and homeopathy in particular:
- Spain wants EU law changed that classifies homeopathy as medicine. HERE IS HOW YOU CAN HELP
- Spain no longer tolerates quackery
- HOMEOPATHY: A letter to all MEPs
- Chiropractors worry about the Spanish ‘Health Protection Plan against Pseudotherapies’
- Homeopathy masters degree to close because of lack of scientific basis
Now, it has been reported that Spain’s Health Minister Mónica García Gómez – on X, she describes herself as follows: “Minister of Health. Spokesperson for Más Madrid. Doctor and mother of three children. With her sights set on public health and the common good (my translation) – was highly critical of homeopathy on her X account on Wednesday 2 October.
Wikipedia tells us that Mónica García Gómez, born 16 January 1974, is a Spanish anesthesiologist and politician, current coordinator and spokesperson of the political party Más Madrid in the Madrilenian Assembly. She was an elected deputy during the X legislature of the Madrilenian Assembly under the Spanish political party Podemos, and is currently a deputy in the XI legislature as part of Más Madrid. Since 2015, García has combined her political work with her job in health care, with a 50% reduction in working hours. She was appointed Minister of Health in the third government of Pedro Sánchez following the 2023 Spanish general elections.
Her post stated this (my translation):
Homeopathy is a scam at the expense of patients’ money and health. We do not evaluate insults to scientific evidence. On the contrary: we are working to combat pseudo-therapies on various fronts, for example with the reform of the RD of health establishments.
To cure disease, you need more than water and sugar! In 2019, the Spanish government launched a campaign against homeopathy entitled ‘To treat yourself, you need more than water and sugar.’ At the time, the authorities demanded that homeopathic laboratories carry out efficacy tests similar to conventional medicine.
There are about two million users of homeopathic products in Spain. Thus, there will be poweful lobby groups, and the battle is by no means over yet. I do wish Mónica García Gómez all the luck she needs to win it.
51 Responses to Spain’s Health Minister denounces homeopathy
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I wish the Homoeopathy lobby groups all the luck they need to win the battle.
The war between Allopathy and Homoeopathy has been going on for over two hundred years now but Homoeopathy has always managed to survive, and it will continue to survive well into the future.
yes, I will probably survive – but not on the public purse!
If you know of any credible evidence that any homeopathic treatment has proven reliably effective in improving the course of any health condition better than placebo, please share it.
There is no “war”. Homeopaths want you to simply believe they have effective treatments on the strength of their assertions, and get angry when you don’t just accept the assertions.
Do you think that instead of doing clinical trials with ultra-dilute Homoeopathic preparations Homoeopathy would fare better by having trials done with lower attenuations where active ingredient is still present in solution, for example by using potencies in the low decimal range such as 2X, 3X, 4X ? Do you think Homoeopathy would work better than placebo at these low dilution levels?
And yes there is a war, there always has been a war since the inception of Homoeopathy. The American Institute of Homeopathy was founded in 1844 and in direct response in 1847 the American Medical Association (AMA) was established and it has done everything it can to supress the growth of Homoeopathy.
Mutus Bellator,
If you know of any credible evidence that any homeopathic ‘medicine’ has reliably improved the course of any health condition to an extent greater than placebo, please share it here.
I don’t think you understand what I’m asking. I realise that Homoeopathy fares poorly when only ultra-high dilutions are put to the test. Please try to address what I wrote properly instead of deflecting.
“I don’t think you understand what I’m asking. I realise that Homoeopathy fares poorly when only ultra-high dilutions are put to the test. Please try to address what I wrote properly instead of deflecting.”
I understood your question perfectly well. It was an attempt to deflect.
If you are aware of any credible evidence that any homeopathic ‘medicine’ AT ANY POTENCY can reliably improve the course of any disease condition, please share the information.
I am glad you agree that there is no such evidence for centesimal potencies.
@Mutus Bellator
No. Because this whole concept of ‘like cures like’ (and thus the very foundation of homeopathy) is nonsense. It is just a manifestation of sympathetic magic.
Of course lots of substances can have measurable effects when ingested in significant amounts, but those effects will generally not be therapeutic for any condition. Most substances used in homeopathic dilutions are not particularly beneficial in any dosage. Many will simply be toxic (e.g. strychnine, atropine, arsenic compounds), and most others won’t do anything much (e.g. sodium chloride, calcium phosphate and other inorganic salts) unless in very high doses.
Summarized:
– ‘Like cures like’: nonsense,
– ‘Higher dilution = more potent medicine’: even bigger nonsense,
– ‘Potentization’ (shaking dilutions): nonsensical ritual with no effects whatsoever,
– ‘Proving’: very dumb nonsense, as it involves no diseases or sick people,
and of course
– there is no plausible mechanism; all aspects and claims with regard to homeopathy boil down to magic when examined from a scientific point of view. If homeopathy actually works, then huge parts of our scientific knowledge would have to be wrong. There is not even the tiniest whiff of a hint that this is the case.
All this is of course supported by the notion that not a single homeopathic preparation with clear, consistent and repeatable effects beyond placebo was ever identified.
So any ‘war’ that homeopaths are still fighting is in fact a religious war, as in: belief over substance. In terms of objective science, they lost this war long ago already.
And oh, I forgot one important aspect of homeopathy: the role and definition of ‘symptoms’, which is not just nonsensical, but plain dangerous.
Homeopaths don’t use symptoms as a means to diagnose what is actually wrong with a patient, but just as a criterium to select their nostrums. What this means is that homeopaths are in fact profoundly incompetent in any medical and scientific sense.
This problem is compounded by the homeopathic notion that a health problem is resolved when symptoms have vanished. This is dangerous nonsense. Many conditions are associated with symptoms that flare up from time to time and disappear again, sometimes for months on end. Several very nasty infectious diseases (syphilis, anyone?) progress through several stages, each with specific symptoms, interspersed by long, symptom-free periods.
Naturally, homeopaths would not be homeopaths if they hadn’t devised a cop-out clause that (once again) turns everything upside down: they claim that regular medicines ‘just suppress disease’, which as a result will then return later in a worse manifestation. In contrast, their homeopathic treatments supposedly ‘address the root cause’. All without a shred of actual evidence of course, or even the vaguest explanation what that ‘root cause’ might be. (It is of course real doctors who actually search for and treat ‘root causes’ of disease – often with great success.)
So in reality, this is yet another vacuous assertion from dumb but extremely arrogant quacks, who couldn’t be trusted to tell an arse from an elbow even with a map.
Why do you think Sam Hahnemann introduced the dilutions?
Samuel Hahnemann’s good friend Dr Constantine Hering used low dilutions in the decimal scale. In the early days Homoeopaths split into two camps, the low dilutionists and the high dilutionists.
Mutus Bellator, do you know of any credible evidence that any decimal potency homeopathic ‘medicine’ can reliably improve any health condition to an extent greater than placebo?
There was a time when German doctors were able to organise a professorship in Spain:
“Die Akte Walter Koester”
https://www.allaxys.com/~kanzlerzwo/index.php?board=67.0
The ‘lectures’ were in Spain. Nobody here knew what was happening there. The title in turn enabled exorbitant homeopathic ‘doctor’ fees to be collected: 500 Mark per hour.
A few years ago, the University of Seville somehow removed Köster’s ‘honorary professor’, who had – however he had done it – bought his way in there. He continued with his ‘quantum logic’ in Germany. But not only he, but also those he homeopathically bleached… A search for ‘quantum logic’ or similar terms reveals frightening results.
Richard where did you get the idea that ‘like cures like’ is nonsense? The ‘like cures like’ principle is applied in conventional medicine. The herb Digitalis from which the cardiac drug Digoxin was originally made from can cause arrhythmia in high doses but in low doses it is used to treat the condition. The stimulant amphetamine-based drug Ritalin is used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Small doses of allergens and peanuts are used to desensitise patients to them. Immunotherapy has been used to treat Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD), by fighting cancer with cancer scientists inject cancer cells into Devils to treat the tumours.
I realise that some substances are poisonous at low dilution levels. More studies need to be done on low potency Homoeopathics, you just assume they won’t have a therapeutic effect, what are you scared of Richard, that Homoeopathy might be proven to work in low dilutions?
“The ‘like cures like’ principle is applied in conventional medicine”
It sometimes happens to apply
BUT IT IS NOT A NATURAL LAW!
Mutus Bellator, I think you are saying that you know of no credible evidence that any homeopathic preparation, centesimal or decimal potency, can reliably improve any health condition to an extent greater than placebo. Is that correct?
@Mutus Bellator
The amusing thing with those ‘like cures like’ examples you bring up is of course that they do NOT stem from homeopathy, nor has homeopathy played any role in the discovery of said medicines. There is not a single homeopathic preparation for which the ‘like cures like’ principle is actually proven, regardless of its dilution.
Which of course is not strange, as there is not a single homeopathic preparation with consistently proven effects for any condition or in any dilution.
And no, regular medicine also did NOT apply the principle of ‘like cures like’ to arrive at those medicines. The fact that some substances sometimes may exhibit opposite effects depending on the dosage (also see ‘hormesis’) is usually an accidental (and pretty rare) finding.
I didn’t say anywhere that ‘like cures like’ stems from Samuel Hahnemann’s version of Homoeopathy. The idea that ‘like cures like’ can be traced back to the Corpus Hippocraticum. The French medical historian Jacques Jouanna writes in his book Hippocrates (Medicine and Culture), “Another principle is the following: a disease arises because of similars, and, by being treated with similars, patients recover from such diseases”. He goes on, “therapy by similars was already sufficiently known in the fifth century b.c. to have found expression in the theater with Sophocles: physicians: ‘evacuate bitter bile with a bitter clyster'”
Richard what evidence do you have that, “regular medicine also did NOT apply the principle of ‘like cures like’ to arrive at those medicines.”?
Professor Edzard replied to my comment saying that, “It sometimes happens to apply BUT IT IS NOT A NATURAL LAW!”
Who am I to believe, Richard, you, a nobody or the great professor Edzard Ernst?
Now that we know that like can indeed cure like I never want to see you spreading the misinformation that ‘like cures like’ is nonsense ever again. Have I made myself perfectly clear?
Mutus Bellator on Tuesday 08 October 2024 at 03:23
Basis of use: law of similars.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3760822/
this “law” is misnamed: it is not a law of nature but an assumption that homeopaths believe without sound reason or proof.
Edzard on Saturday 12 October 2024 at 13:27
“it is not a law of nature but an assumption that homeopaths believe without sound reason or proof.”
Which venom is used as antidote in case of a snake bite by cobra or by a viper and why? Are the 2 antidotes inter changeable? This is not natural law?
No!
Anyway, antivenom (or antivenin, if you prefer) is neither the venom itself, nor is it administered in homeopathic doses.
@prl
Snakebite is of course yet another medical problem where water-shaking frauds such as Krishna are completely clueless. In India, over 45,000 people die from snakebite each year, and, as expected, homeopathy can’t do anything about it.
Yet no doubt, Krishna will pop up here again with his homeopathic(*) wisdom to arrogantly claim that of course homeopaths can treat snakebites, and that the high death toll is the fault of regular doctors, who only make things worse.
*: Read: fully absent.
Richard Rasker on Monday 14 October 2024 at 09:16
“…..wisdom to arrogantly claim that of course homeopaths can treat snakebites…”
Are you a professional clown entrusted to make people laugh with senseless statements or is it part time activity?
Where do you find homeopathic literature showing medicine for treating snake bite? These are 2 of the many snake venoms used in homeopathy.
http://homeoint.org/books/boericmm/c/crot-h.htm
http://homeoint.org/books/boericmm/n/naja.htm
@Krishna
Of course I am a professional clown who makes people laugh with senseless statements – just like you are a water-shaking clown who defrauds people by selling them useless nostrums.
In all honesty, I didn’t really believe that homeopaths would recommend treating snakebites with their ‘remedies’, as it’s too obviously clear that it doesn’t work.
Then again, you water-shaking clowns also recommended administering useless sugar pellets to a drowning victim:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160318015208/https://homeopathycenter.org/drowning
I think this must be one of the stupidest as well as most dangerous recommendations of homeopaths I’ve ever come across. If someone nearly drowned and is coughing up water, the absolutely last thing you should do is put stuff in their mouth. They may survive the drowning, only to suffocate in inhaled sugar pellets.
To their credit, they removed this page in 2019 – after it had been up for 6 years. But it still is a very important warning that homeopaths are total imbeciles, who should NEVER be trusted with your (or anyone else’s) health.
Richard Rasker on Wednesday 16 October 2024 at 19:48
“Of course I am a professional clown who makes people laugh with senseless statements ”
I believe you. You at least know yourself. Good for you. Are you in the right place?
“Then again, you water-shaking clowns also recommended administering useless sugar pellets to a drowning victim:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160318015208/https://homeopathycenter.org/drowning”
The understanding of a clown. Foolish people are available in every trade. Did you bother to check the medicine? Where does it refer to drowning? Or consequences there off?
http://www.homeoint.org/books/boericmm/a/ant-t.htm
“…only to suffocate in inhaled sugar pellets.”
Did someone inform you, that sugar pills cannot be inhaled?
“But it still is a very important warning that homeopaths are total imbeciles…”
That shows your understanding or the “mis” of it. The doctors who kill over 400,000 patients in US every year are to be blamed or if it was to be few doctors who ended up harming their patients? If it is few, you blame doctors. If it is numerous, you question the system. To kill 400,000 patients every year, at least 100,000 doctors would be required @ 4 patients/doctor/per year. You don’t blame the doctors here. It is the system at fault.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-america.html
” …who should NEVER be trusted with your (or anyone else’s) health.”
Why are YOU bothered about patients of homeopaths. With enough data generated by doctors from the allopathic system about its failures, YOU should be bothered about YOURSELF and have no time for others. I enjoy discussions with people who paid the allopathic system for their simple health issues in becoming chronic and now pay to live a pill popping life.
“A typical Whac-A-Mole machine consists of a waist-level cabinet with a play area and display screen, and a large, soft mallet. Five to eight holes in the play area top are filled with small, plastic, cartoonish moles, or other characters, which pop up at random. Points are scored by, as the name suggests, whacking each mole as it appears. The faster the reaction, the higher the score.
…
If the player does not strike a mole within a certain time or with enough force, it eventually sinks back into its hole with no score.
…”
— Wikipedia
Hope that helps.
That does help, Pete, thank you.
DavidB, I dont know of any credible evidence that any decimal potency can reliably improve any health condition. Try to read and comprehend what I write properly. I’m pretty sure I mentioned that trials should be done on low dilutions to see if they fare better.
“Try to read and comprehend what I write properly”
I think you mean “Try to read and comprehend properly what I write”. By placing the adverb “properly” at the end of your sentence, you create ambiguity, giving the sense that you sometimes write improperly.
Is there anything in particular that makes you suspect trials on Decimal potencies might fare better?
Yes DavidB I do sometimes write improperly because English is not my first language. I sincerely hope you get over my grammatical errors.
Yes there is something that makes me suspect that low decimal potencies might fare better and that is the substantial presence of original starting material.
That’s interesting, thank you. If you feel that the presence of material quantities of the original substance, the similimum, would do the trick, do you think that any serial dilution and succussion of the ‘remedy’ is necessary at all, and if so, why?
That’s a question for the Homoeopathic pharmacists. From my limited Homoeopathic pharmaceutical knowledge I’d say that serial dilution is necessary especially for poisonous substances. As for succussion that may not be necessary for such low dilutions. What are Homoeopathic pharmacists trying to achieve by succussion? The liberation of a particular energy they term ‘The Vital Force’. Succussion may only be necessary if the potencies were carried on beyond Avogadro’s number. The Homoeopathic pharmacists would know better than me.
Can that “energy” of the “Vital Force” be measured in Joules, or is it Newtons, if it’s a “Force”? If not, just what is it?
‘Can that “energy” of the “Vital Force” be measured in Joules, or is it Newtons, if it’s a “Force”? If not, just what is it?’
@prl
We’d all love to know exactly what it is. Perhaps one day we will know. What do you think?
I think it doesn’t exist, and therefore isn’t anything.
I was asking prl.
I know you were asking prl. But I thought I would proffer my own opinion anyway…..
So what?
If you post publicly here anyone can reply to you. If you don’t like that then don’t post.
I know anyone can reply to my comment but my question was directed at prl, what’s your problem?
I have no idea what it is, I’m trying to find out from you what it’s supposed to be. You were the one that brought it up, so it seems perfectly reasonable to ask you what you think it is.
So, is it a force or is it energy; and can it be measured in either Joules or Newtons as appropriate, and how?
If not, what is it?
I’m happy to apply Hitchens’s Razor and say that for now, I think that it doesn’t exist.
The whole conceptual edifice of succussion rests on the all-too-ephemeral foundation of Samuel Hahnemann’s imagination.
He imagined a medicine worked better after being shaken about on a saddle as he travelled on horseback to visit a patient.
There isn’t a shred of evidence that Hahnemann’s imagination was correct.
It is not wrong, of course, for a scientist to develop a theory on the basis of personal observation. But to get anywhere, the scientist must design a way to TEST the imagined theory, reliably and repeatably, and must honestly record the results.
There is little point in only doing “thought experiments” with the theory – it will never be considered fact upon only that basis.
I’m just a bit surprised (not really) that having called for a response from me, I’ve heard nothing back from the “Dumb Warrior”.
The reason why I didn’t respond to the “Warrior” earlier was that I was asleep. I live in UTC+9 territory.
Sorry for my late reply, I already moved on to commenting on another article by professor Edzard. I also have no idea what ‘The Vital Force’ is. Like I said, the Homoeopathic pharmacists liken it to some kind of energy. Maybe we might find out exactly what it is one day. Do you think that day will come?
“I also have no idea what ‘The Vital Force’ is. Like I said, the Homoeopathic pharmacists liken it to some kind of energy. Maybe we might find out exactly what it is one day.”
The “I told you so” fantasy, or: The fallacy of future vindication.
— David Gorski
Pete, I used the words “maybe” and “might”.
I never said we will find out what it is for sure.
“Maybe we might find out exactly what it is one day.”
And maybe you might not find out exactly what it is one day.
You appear to be trolling with vacuous statements.
OK, I’m happy to go with the “Life Force” or “energy” as being something that the OP has no idea what it is, and that no-one else has either, and that there’s no known way to measure it.
Of course, kinetic energy is added to the nostrum being succussed, but that’s quickly dissipated as heat, but that’s a simple, well-known, and in this case not very interesting effect.
So I see no reason to move from my always tentative position that “it doesn’t exist”. Of course, that position could change if convincing evidence of is existence were to appear that might allow me to boil a kettle for a cup of tea with it.