Homeopathy Update

Homeopathy, the elaborate placebo system, is having a rough time in 2011. While homeopathic products are deemed “safe and effective” by Health Canada’s Natural Health Products Directorate, the awareness that homeopathic products contain no active ingredients and have no medicinal effects is becoming more well known. Here’s a roundup of what’s happening worldwide:

What’s with the new cough and cold products?

One of my earliest lessons as a pharmacist working in the “real world” was that customers didn’t always act the way I expected. Parents of sick children frequently fell into this category — and the typical vignette went like this for me:

1. Parent has determined that their child is sick, and needs some sort of over-the-counter medicine.
2. Parent asks pharmacist for advice selecting a product from the dozens on the shelves.
3. Pharmacist uses the opportunity to provide science-based advice, and assures parent that no drug therapy is necessary.
4. Parent directly questions the validity of this advice, and may ask about the merits of a specific product they have already identified.
5. Pharmacist explains efficacy and risk of the product, and provides general non-drug symptom management suggestions.
6. Parent thanks pharmacist, selects product despite advice, and walks to the front of the store to pay.

In many ways, a pharmacy purchase mirrors the patient-physician interaction that ends with a prescription being written — it’s what feels like the logical end to the consultation, and without it, feels incomplete. It’s something that I’m observing more and more frequently when advising parents about cough and cold products for children.

Homeopathy: The Comic Treatment

From the same cartoonist that brought you The Facts in the Case of Andrew Wakefield, Darryl Cunningham now brings you The Story of Homeopathy. If you don’t want to read all the prior SBP posts on homeopathy, Darryl’s comic pretty much sums it up.