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People spend billions on homeopathy, so... is it?



The placebo effect is real.


And why would you need to spend billions then? And why would you need to buy anything but a sugar pill instead of some unproven bs which is completely unregulated and might be something from glass clippings to something that could genuinely hurt you?

These same arguments get trotted out every time someone wants to defend very stupid practices and they have no teeth.


Maybe the placebo effect works even better if you spend more money (?)


Let's try it, you send me all your money and tell me how you feel.


Identifying homeopathy as a case where less freedom would benefit someone is not sufficient to argue that it's a better policy.

Everyone who laughs so confidently at homeopathy, would likely do the same for a cutting edge treatment, which has yet to be widely recognized as effective. And in that case a lack of freedom would lead to a worse outcome.


That's complete hogwash. Homeopathy's core idea is that you can magically negate a poison by diluting it billions or trillions of times into a cure usually to the point where there's no detectable component anyway.

Experimental treatments definitely invite skepticism, and should. Humans can generally contain more than one level of skepticism - this treatment has a certain rate of failure, this treatment is unproven, and important, this treatment has no mechanism that could work and is a scam meant to separate a fool from his money.




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