www.incontinentsupport.org

Yes and no - I know, many who feel like you and yes - if you know how homeopathic preparations are produced it might be obvious to come to the conclusion that it's just suggar... But I just can tell you about my own experiances. I'm allergic against birch pollen and at last for me it works. I don't now why - and to be honest I don't care as long as it works. I'm a bit afraid that this is like the fable with brownies - when you see them they will never come back - so it's maybe also a bit psychology...

But anyway - if it comes to studies and statistics... Just have a look to the standard medication agaist OAB, you my find studies that found a "sigificant improvment" with preparation a,b,c. If you ask what "significant" mean you may find statements like 10 or 20% percent of the sample had answered that the treatment had helped - this is indeed significat. But this means also, that you can say it's useless in 80% of the other cases. So would you try it - I guess yes, because it's much better then lottery. So why not give other things a try as long as they would't cost the earth and can't hurt.

I mean - compared to the "standards" you can't do anything wrong and the mentioned homeopathic preparation cost round a bout the same as a small pack of pads. So this would't ruin nether your healthness nor eat up your savings but there is a small chance that it will work.

@icgirl: I'm with Wedgey - check also your liquid intake. You should drink at last 2 liters _over the day_. If you drink less this is very risky for many reasons and can also cause OAB symtoms, because the concentrated urine is much more aggressiv and can cause bladder irritations that let you think you need to go even if the bladder is't full. And yes - caffeine can cause this also.

@michael_dahlke and @wedgey I don't drink anything after the green tea until nighttime. Perhaps I am dehydrated, but I don't feel thirsty unless the weather is really hot and humid in the 80s to 90s F (in which case I drink plenty of fluids). Outside of hot weather, sometimes I do have an extra cup of water, and then I just pee that out. It's like my body does not retain fluids. But I am planning to switch out my matcha green tea (which has as much caffeine as instant coffee) in the morning for a caffeine-free herbal tea. So that should provide some hydration. We'll see if this change helps. Thank you guys for your responses.

There is a major difference that you're missing. In a controlled drug trial, that 10-20% (I don't know which drug you're talking about specifically) is as compared to a control group receiving a placebo. In this type of study, the significance comes from the fact that the distribution of effect in people receiving the treatment is different enough from the distribution of effect in people receiving no treatment that you can be certain with a probability equal to 'p' that effect is not due to random chance alone. The threshold for p is set at 0.05 for almost all scientific studies. What this means is that the 10-20% is a real effect, with a high percentage chance of being correct. A greater than 95% chance of being correct for almost all studies.

With homeopathy, when you do double blind studies, with placebo, as they are required to do for actual medicine, the difference in effect isn't different from random change. Basically homeopathy is indistinguishable from getting no treatment.

This is exactly what one should expect given what homeopathy actually is. It's a process of taking a natural compound, known to cause the exact symptoms you're trying to prevent, and repeatedly diluting it in water until there is none left. The concept is flawed to begin with, as there is no reason to expect a diluted diuretic to cure urinary frequency, but that's exactly what the, "like cures like" basis of homeopathy says should happen. Beyond that, homeopathic dilutions are often so extreme that there is almost zero chance there is any of the "active" ingredient left in the final product. As a example, homeopathic remedies often come in solutions such as 10C, 20C, and 50C, where C indicates how many times the solution has been diluted at a ratio of 1:100. This means a 10C solution had been diluted 10 times, at a ratio of 1 part medication: 100 parts waters, 10 times, or a ratio of 1:100,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's 100 quadrillion to 1. According to homeopathy the effect of the treatment gets stronger, the more you dilute it. So, by that logic, a 50C dilution is 5 times stronger, but a 50C is actually diluted at a ratio of 1 part active ingredient to a googol of water. That's right, a googol is a real number, it's a 1 with 100 zeros after it. Given that Avagadro's constant is 6.022x10²⁴ this means that if you drank a liter of the 50C solution, you would have less than a 25% chance that you swallowed even 1 molecule of the active ingredient. That's totally bonkers. To make matters worse, the recommended doses are usually a few drops under the tongue, or they use the solution to dampen a lactose tablet (literally a sugar pill), and you take that as a dose. The quantities are so small that the change of even having a trace of active ingredient in the final dose is effectively zero.

When I say homeopathy is nothing, this is what i mean. It is very likely that when you take a homeopathic treatment you are getting only water, it only sugar pills, and none of the purported medicine at all.

To add insult to injury, the homeopathy industry knows the treatments do nothing, so they often cheat. They either don't do the dilutions they claim (in which case you may actually be ingesting a dangerous dose of poison), or they actually include real medicine, but don't put it on the label. There have been cases of people getting Bela Donna poisoning from homeopathic remedies because they didn't actually do the dilution, and the active ingredient is actually a toxin. There have also been cases of people getting acetaminophen toxicity from homeopathic pain relievers, because the companies illegally put in unlabeled acetaminophen to make the product actually do something (because it doesn't do anything on its own), and people overdosed.

This is why homeopathy isn't harmless. It's not even about the cost, or if it might make you think you feel better for psychological reasons. It's about the fact that people substitute this rubbish for real medicine, or they get doses with stuff that will hate them, because an unregulated industry like homeopathy is selling lies.

@MSU: I’m not sure how it is in the USA but at last in Germany it is regulated by the medical products act (to avoid the mentioned problems...). But anyway it seem to be really polarizing... I often wonder why this is the case - it’s not a religion but sometimes people start arguing like it is ones .

And to come back to the statistics: In a DB study where both groups reported 50% success rate the results of the treatment would be not significant. In fact - the treatment would have a 0 success rate. But: In this case 50% of of the members of both groups feel better then before the treatment... The point is maybe to care more about the feeling of people instead of the result of the products study - but that’s just my humble opinion.

The point is, if both groups have 50% improvment, the treatment had nothing to do with how the people feel at the end. If you care about how people feel, then you would favor the version that gives the same result, with no extra time, money, or energy expended.

... Sorry - No. This conclusion wrong, because both groups got the treatment. With this setup you can determine the effect of the product itself (placebo vs. product) but you can't determine the effect of the treatment. This is why you use the delta and not the total values. If you take a look to typical study you will see that also the placebo group shows an effect. This setup assume, that this effect is identical for both groups, and for this reason the delta is used.

And yes - if the right person in the right context give you a sugar pill it might work (you can see this easily in this studies). But if you walk to the next shop and buy some sugar pills it will most likely fail. I think we agree that there's some more "magic" needed and this is where homeopathy set in...

No, this is not correct. Please site your 50/50 study because i want to see that in writing.


If you have an effect where the placebo is causing an apparent effect, it is invariably in an area where the result is subjective. If you measuring reported indicators, get patient bias, that's the only space placebo, and homeopathy, lives in. If you use anything with an objective measure, there is no biologically meaningful effect of those treatments. It's as a psychological effect of tricking a person into thinking they're getting treatment when they're not. Homeopathy works exactly as well at known placebo. It is not more effective than placebo in any study I've ever seen, when a control is also used for comparison. If you can prove me wrong, do it.

Tricking a person into taking sugar pills by lying to them about it being medicine is unethical, if not immoral. In the US Dr's can't even prescribe sugar pills, and the American Medical Association bars Dr's from giving placebo treatments without first informing the patient that a placebo is going to used to their course of treatment.

You're right that homeopathy is like a religion. Where you're wrong is that the opposition to it is not. Homeopathy, when you know what it is, requires a faith in a demonstrably incorrect methodology. It's antithetical to reality. Rejection of homeopathy is actually a rational position.

While we're at it, I'd also like to point out this little tidbit I happened across:

"In Germany, the legislation for homeopathic remedies follows European Union (EU) regulations. Homeopathic remedies are subject to registration, but they need not be tested."

If they aren't being tested, you have no idea if your penis claim that regulation in Germany prevents homeopathic treatments from including real medications, unlabeled, just as i described.

That entire industry is predicated on deceit. It's just plain old fashioned snake oil. It's frankly embarrassing that Western governments still allow this practice.

Maybe our understanding of “treatment” is different. The treatment of cause include the product, but it’s more then the pills. It’s the method of the treatment that causes the “side effect” that the placebo shows also some measurable biological effects. A doctor give you the sugar pils in a clinical setup beside of other physical examinations that are necessary to make sure that your sample is correct and the test persons don’t know if they get the placebo or the real product. Of cause this is a psychological effect - but this matters little because this effect can be strong enough to ruin the results of your study if you don’t do the math to exclude him. For this reason you use the delta to exclude this effect from your study.


Ehm... sorry - No. Please read the Medical Products Act - chapter 39...

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/engl ... html#p0851

You are right, that the _effectiveness_ of the product not have to be tested for reasons that you all-ready perfectly explained. But of cause the manufacturers have to show that there product includes no harmful substances and they are subject to the same laws that a “normal” pharmaceutical manufacturer have to follow. The only difference is, that they are not allowed to marked the effects and therapeutic indications.