When this guy talks its like he moves his moth 2x more than necessary , like he is a sock pupit and doing a voice over but the guy who is moving the puppet is moving it wrong.

I wonder what the doctors' accountability is for things like this.

You've got doctors prescribing a sugar pill and they think the patient might just get well on their own. What if they don't? What if they get worse, or die because the doctor was a fucking know-it-all douchebag who thought there was nothing actually wrong with the patient? Does the doctor get to say "well, that's just how things go," or can he be held accountable for not considering the very real threat that this patient might actually NEED the help?

The guy in this video brings up the moral question, but what about the liability question? You might consider the power of the mind as one tool at the doctor's disposal, and argue that giving a placebo is merely exercising that tool. But if the doctor is wrong, not only have you wasted a patient's time, money, and trust, but if that patient dies, now you've got a death on your hands that you are essentially responsible for.

^ From what I can gather, doctors don't prescribe sugar pills/placebos unless the patient (knowingly) is part of a randomized trial/scientific study. Homeopaths on the other hand...

I don't know about the US, but in the UK, doctors are not allowed to prescribe placebos. So it's not the doctors who are deceitful here, but the frauds and con-artists who call themselves homeopaths.

Exactly... Doctors don't prescribe placebos, homeopaths do. And charge a fortune for them, and are douche nozzles for doing so.

I wonder if anyone has ever studied whether sugar pills *are* good medicine.

Homeopathy is so obviously bulloney. That's why I only go to psychics....and osteopaths.

I seem to be seeing a lot of debunking of homeopathy coming out of Britain/Europe.

New rule: Europeans can not call Americans stupid until they don't need to make these videos anymore.

You know that your homeopath is prescribing sugar-pill placebos when there a lower-case "m" on your "pill"!

As an honorary new-age hippie, I will summarize what a homeopath learns from this clip:

Magic works if you believe in it.

The hyperbole used here is absurd. Even if they started with only one molecule of their homeopathic substance (and they start with much more than that), they would literally need a sphere of water the size of the distance from the earth to the sun in order to achieve the dilution that this guy claims. The amount of water actually used is shown right there in the beakers on the screen. Ignore the numbers.

EDIT: I was wrong. I thought about it some more, and I understand what's going on now. His math may well be right.

But I think the point is that there wouldn't even be a single molecule of the substance in the final container. As the odds of you picking up the ever reduced amounts of it in the later containers becomes smaller and smaller. At least that is what I imagine it was meant to convey.

So to guarantee that you have you have a single molecule of the substance every time, you would need the absurdly large amount of water...or maybe I am as crazy as the homeopaths

Placebo's demonstrate "the amazing power of the mind". Who's invoking magical effects now? More science please.

>> ^ForgedReality:

The guy in this video brings up the moral question, but what about the liability question? You might consider the power of the mind as one tool at the doctor's disposal, and argue that giving a placebo is merely exercising that tool. But if the doctor is wrong, not only have you wasted a patient's time, money, and trust, but if that patient dies, now you've got a death on your hands that you are essentially responsible for.

Rather than scaring medics into not making mistakes, wouldn't it make more sense to allow different kinds of medics to compete for quality care?

I'm guessing it only makes sense to make the doctor responsible for the death if he makes some kind of guarantee about his treatment, like it will save the patient's life or is undeniably the best possible (fraud?) or if he commits murder.