Placebo Pills vs Drugs
Placebo Pills vs drugs is a common debate in almost all healthcare areas.
‘During my time as a community pharmacist, the most common question I’d get asked was “Have you got a magic pill for this?’
The silver bullet
The idea of a ‘silver bullet’ to cure us of all our ills goes back a long time and is very appealing.
The drug companies spend billions of pounds trying to convince us that their drug is ‘the one’. Nobody likes being ill, and taking time off to rest may not always be practical if you have dependants or a busy job to do.
‘Our product will magically get rid of your fungal nail infection and make you irresistible!’ Sound familiar?
But quite often the drug you take has side effects, which are not wanted but accepted as a necessary evil. Some side effects are not always immediately obvious.
Conventional drugs do save lives and can act quickly. However, they are not always the answer. Side effects are when you have negative effects from a drug.
Placebo Pill vs The Nocebo effect
Homeopathy is often passed off as only having a placebo pill effect. Placebo pills can have up to a 24% positive effect.
There is also the Nocebo effect, where a placebo pill can cause a negative effect. This may be due to the patient’s expectations of the outcome, so it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.
Conventional medicine doesn’t deal with how to keep yourself healthy in the first place. Please see my other blogs on this, like my January Health Month
Harry Potter and the magic pill
So did eczema vanish or was it put under an invisibility cloak? Neither.
Homeopathy finds and treats the root cause of the problem rather than just treating the symptoms alone. Some may argue that my daughter was given placebo pills which made her eczema heal.
Homeopathy is an energy medicine so they are not a placebo. Even if they are a placebo, they have no negitive side-effcts.
By finding the root cause, homeopathy aims to fix the issue properly, not just put a sticky plaster on a broken leg.
We can’t avoid being ill, but we can take steps to maintain our health and not rely on drugs to make us better all the time. Your health is your responsibility. Chronic conditions always have a root cause and often an emotional component that needs to be addressed.
Do you want the magic pill or do you want to be fixed properly?
Feel free to contact me for acute solutions to your hayfever and eczema issues.
Not a fairy-tale
I use eczema here as an example, but the principles apply to any disease.
You begin to suffer from eczema and your pharmacist/GP prescribe a steroid cream. So far, so normal. The steroid cream ‘magically’ makes eczema disappear. Problem solved!
However a few years (and a few tubes of steroid cream) later, you develop asthma.
You would commonly be prescribed an inhaled steroid (brown inhaler) and bronchodilator (blue inhaler) for these symptoms.
Asthma, eczema and hayfever are all expressions of the same dominant gene.
The steroid creams have pushed the issue deeper into an internal organ, i.e. the lungs. In Chinese medicine, the skin-bowels-lungs are all linked.
When my oldest daughter developed eczema at 14months old, I used a mild steroid cream on her delicate skin. It didn’t work and it also started to bleach her skin. She has an Asian skin tone, like myself and this was not something I was happy with at all. I found my homeopath and she managed to find the root cause of the eczema.
Homeopathic remedies then started to work on her skin and it was cured. She is now 13yrs old and the eczema has never returned. Not only that, she doesn’t suffer with hayfever either, which her father suffers terribly with.
