Did you know anything about homeopathic medicine?

The homeopathy is a type of alternative or complementary medicine to treat all kinds of diseases and ailments, using very small concentrations of organic substances similar to those that create the symptoms of a disease. That is, unlike allopathic medicine, which uses drugs that eliminate symptoms, homeopathy uses substances similar to those that create the symptoms to stimulate the body's defenses and that it is he who carries out the healing .

Homeopathy was born 200 years ago with Dr. Samuel Hahneman who, using the Law of Similarity, observed that by administering very low doses of a substance "similar" to the disease, he managed to cure sick people in a much more Respectful with the organism and less aggressive, it is used today in many countries as a form of alternative or complementary medicine. In fact, there are specialists who prescribe more and more frequently homeopathic medicines and numerous pharmacies dispense this form of treatment in an alternative or complementary way.

Why do people believe in it?

The first thing I clarified is that homeopathy is not medicine and neither is it a science. On the contrary: homeopathy is an 'anti-science' centered on hypotheses that nobody has been able to confirm. However, it is a business that moves millions of dollars a year in interventions and treatments that are based on something that homeopaths define as 'the memory of water'.

Homeopaths use substances, mostly unknown and with supposed therapeutic powers, which are diluted in water. More than a decade ago, the Government of the United Kingdom where homeopathy was part of the health system conducted an analysis based on hundreds of studies with which it was a great surprise: homeopathic interventions do not exceed the placebo effect. Now there is a great debate because a child in Italy died from an ear infection that was treated with homeopathy. The parents refused to use antibiotics or to consult a doctor. To this is added the fact that, a few months ago, the US authorities forced the bottles of these medicines to contain a text that explains that they have no guarantee of clinical efficacy.

Nobody can question the advantages that gives us access to all kinds of information thanks to the Internet. But nothing is as good as they paint it: when we talk about health, Google is a double-edged sword. Different authors have calculated that more than 90% of people who have access to the Internet consult about their health in Google before going to the doctor. There are millions of web pages dedicated to these topics. Different studies, such as one carried out recently by scientists from Harvard University, have determined that the vast majority of 'diagnoses' that a person finds on the web coincide with the most complex diseases.

The lack of knowledge about medical terms and the irresponsibility of many of these pages lead people to take unnecessary scares. One of the reasons why this happens is that the symptoms are not easy to describe accurately in the search engine. On the other hand, the Internet tends to talk more frequently about the most serious diseases, so if we look for the causes of a headache, it will be more likely that we will have a tumor than a spasm in the neck. Of course, the fact that there is no physical examination does not allow an adequate discarding of possible ailments.

Because of these findings, I invite you to stay away from Google if you feel sick, the Internet will kill you too much ahead of time. And, if you can not stand it and believe that the web has given you the precise diagnosis, the most important thing is that you never self-medicate.