You are correct that at least some of standard medicine entered practice without the tests that would now be required. Partly because some interventions are difficult to do RCTs to test (for example surgery) and also because some interventions predate recent ideas on how products should be tested. Hopefully we will fill in some of these gaps over time.

However there is no reason to give homeopathy a free pass solely because we havent tested all conventional medicine as fully as we would like for the following reasons:

1. Unlike untested procedures homeopathy HAS been tested — and shown not to work better than placebo in well controlled trials.

2. Homeopathy doesnt even have any prior plausibility to back it up — it would require a lot of what we know about physics and chemistry to be wrong and yet it offers scant evidence that we should accept it.

I asked the question: What is the normal self cure rate for mastitis when left untreated? The answer.…. about 40%. Suddenly a product that was looking ok, turned into something that was completely useless.

However I would point out the questions that were asked of NYR you could ask of traditional western medicine.…. only about 1/3 — 1/2 of medical procedures have good science backing them up — the others are just done this way because it has always been done this way.….. and if you track it back there is no evidence for why people do it this way.….

So as much as I loath quackery in the health field we must maintain the same standard between “traditional” and “complementary” medicine.

Only kidding!

Here’s why:

1. The products I sell do something if they’re consumed, unlike homoeopathic “medicines”. I’ll remind you (and everyone else) that homoeopathic doesn’t mean “herbal” or even “alternative” — it means there’s no fucking medicine in their medicine, and not surprisingly, no results to show it works better than placebo.
2. The products I sell aren’t to heal people. No one would buy Salvia divinorum from me instead of visiting a doctor, for example.
3. Whenever I talk about any of the products I sell, it’s always from a pharmacological perspective, or I mention what the culture that originally used it believed it did. I make no mention of any kind of “Energy” (that can’t be quantified in Joules) or anything else unsubstantiated.
4. I know what I sell isn’t 100% safe — I don’t see myself as an alternative to medicine, like these guys do. Instead I see it like working in a pub or off licence (a shop that sells booze, if you’re not from the UK). Alcohol and tobacco are much worse for you than most illegal drugs, never mind the legal ones. Please read JWH-018, Spice & Me for a bit more in-depth discussion about my opinions on the relative safety of these things. (That pissed off a lot of kratom vendors, btw, despite everything I said being a fact. I like to think that makes me a bit more transparent than most, including Neal & chums.)
5. I know more about the products I sell than most people. Not because I’m big headed, but because not everyone has a pharmacology related degree. As such, if anyone asks me about a product, I’ll answer as best I can. Even if I have to go away and do some research first, I’m capable of sifting through lots of crap to find the relevant stuff. Neal ‘n’ pals have nothing to say about their own products.

Hope that clears things up a bit. If not, please comment again.

Not watched that video yet, but thanks for the link.

Dont get me wrong, i dont think its wrong to sell any of the products you do, i think it should be the responsibility of the user to do their own research and assess the risks themeselves before trying a product. But your stance on this “Neal’s Yard Remedies” issue seems completely hypocritical to me.