It’s conceivable that current level of belief in homeopathy is net positive in impact. The idea here would be that the vast majority of people who use it will follow up with actual medical treatment if homeopathy doesn’t solve their problem.
Assume also that medical treatment has non-trivial risks compared to taking sugar pills and infinitely dilute solutions (stats on deaths due to medical error support this thesis). And further that some conditions just get better by themselves. Now you have a situation where, just maybe, doing an initial ‘treatment’ with homeopathy gives you better outcomes because it avoids the risks associated with going to the doctor.
Probably not true. But the lack of any striking death toll from this relatively widespread belief makes me wonder. The modal homeopathy fan (of those I’ve personally known) has definitely been more along the lines of ‘mild hypochondriac who feels reassured by their bank of strangely labeled sugar pills’ than ‘fanatic who will die of appendicitis due to complete lack of faith in modern medicine’.
It’s conceivable that current level of belief in homeopathy is net positive in impact. The idea here would be that the vast majority of people who use it will follow up with actual medical treatment if homeopathy doesn’t solve their problem.
Assume also that medical treatment has non-trivial risks compared to taking sugar pills and infinitely dilute solutions (stats on deaths due to medical error support this thesis). And further that some conditions just get better by themselves. Now you have a situation where, just maybe, doing an initial ‘treatment’ with homeopathy gives you better outcomes because it avoids the risks associated with going to the doctor.
Probably not true. But the lack of any striking death toll from this relatively widespread belief makes me wonder. The modal homeopathy fan (of those I’ve personally known) has definitely been more along the lines of ‘mild hypochondriac who feels reassured by their bank of strangely labeled sugar pills’ than ‘fanatic who will die of appendicitis due to complete lack of faith in modern medicine’.