Every homeopathic eye drop should be pulled off the market, FDA says

return2ozma@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 521 points –
Every homeopathic eye drop should be pulled off the market, FDA says
arstechnica.com
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Not quite. Homeopathy is a medical belief structure consisting of certain practices that attempt to cure "like with like". It has shown no benefits over placebos or other medical treatments, and on certain occasions, has been shown to have serious consequences.

There are many parts to homeopathy that are widely criticized, such as "potentisation", a process of diluting a substance to such a degree that there contains little or none of the beginning ingredient. Additionally, since the goal is to treat symptoms by using like symptoms, the causes are never truly addressed, especially since the underlying philosophy of homeopathy is that the body can cure itself.

Thus, if you were helped by a homeopathic medicine, it was more than statistically likely a placebo effect. Please do not rely on homeopathy for medicine.

That's the point. The product DID things. In fact it raised the attention of the FDA and they changed it. Theres all kinds of products trying to fly below radar.

Not how that works, and also not true. If it's marked as homeopathic, it's NOT approved by the FDA. There are FDA guidelines for homeopathic medicines, including the use of active ingredients, but they are specifically not approved by the FDA. And looking at Snore Stop, it never stopped being homeopathic, so no idea what you're talking about.

We're you able to find reference to the composition change 20ish years back?

Used their website, which would definitely have stated as such. I feel like you want to suggest that homeopathic medicine is good, but homeopathic medicine doesn't have to prove it is effective nor that there aren't any side effects. Labeling as homeopathic is just a way to put products out and avoid the FDA or having to prove it works.

In this particular case, being labelled as homeopathic IS typically a sign that it does not work and might actually cause harm.

No, I wanted to point out vaguely herbal remedies masquerading as homeopathic.

If some things labeled as homeopathic actually aren't as in they actually contain ingredients that have actual impacts it could give false credit to the whole genre, right?

Memory of water bullshit - no argument there from me. Some chemicals can be very dilute, but still present, and can still aid or harm. Fentanyl is a great current example, or the crazy tiny amount of peanut it takes to hurt someone highly allergic etc.

Those? They can say homeopathic on the label but if they contain enough of anything to work or harm medicinally then they are lying.

So you have products labeled as homeopathic that might work or hurt people, and then placebo stuff.

If I take 1 grain of fentanyl powder, and sell it diluted in an entire liter of water, it might sound like homeopathy, I might label it as such, but it isn't because there's enough powerful chemical present to have consequences if consumed.

Perhaps you are confused that two things are called homeopathy?

Homeopathy is a medical belief system. Homeopathic medicines originated from this. But other (unregulated) medicines wanted to use this, too. That's how these medicines can be labelled like this, but this labeling is not restricted to the homeopathic system, and is used by ANYONE that doesn't want to be regulated the same way.

Homeopathic medicine is unlikely to help you because it is unregulated. If there were studies that showed effectiveness and safety, they wouldn't hide behind the homeopathic label. That doesn't mean that they don't do anything, because they are allowed to contain active ingredients.

Please just read about on the FDA's website: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-drug-class/homeopathic-products

If I take 1 grain of fentanyl powder, and sell it diluted in an entire liter of water, it might sound like homeopathy,

The standard dilution is 1:10^60^. Wikipedia helpfully did the maths:

Dilution advocated by Hahnemann for most purposes: on average, this would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient.