Ariel VA Feinerman

The Inquisition is working.

This article was originally published here.

In his text, the scientific writer asks his readers: how else can we keep people from believing in homeopathy, what else can we write to keep them from using it?

Before answering the original question, you need to answer another one: why do people even believe in homeopathy and buy it? People do not buy homeopathy because they are ignorant, uneducated or know nothing. The real reason is the inability of current medicine to cure their diseases!

A person who is informed by physicians that he has an incurable disease — even though it does not reduce the quantity of life, but significantly reduces its quality — falls into despair. But a person in despair thinks completely differently, his critical thinking turns off, and he is ready to believe in any nonsense.

A person in despair clutches at any straw, and homeopathy or other pseudo-medicine becomes such a straw. But what the person refuses to believe is the fact that a civilization that spends trillions on wars, launches ships to Mars and discovered the Higgs boson is unable (and is not particularly trying) to cure his disease. And he is right!

Alas, this undoubtedly correct belief in our civilization plays a cruel joke on him. The success of homeopathy lies in the fact that skillful scammers easily exploit his belief, offering him treatment, which does not work, but right now. Thus, homeopathy is not the cause, but the consequence of the inability of current medicine to treat many diseases. For example, almost all treatment of ageing pathologies at the present time is compensatory, aimed not at their causes: molecular and cellular damage, but only at their manifestations.

So, without the development of truly effective therapies that eliminate the very causes of pathologies, the fight against homeopathy or other pseudo-medicine is meaningless.

For example, alchemy disappeared not because it was specifically fought, but because chemistry and chemical engineering offered better explanations and better results! An intelligent reader, of course, will say that this analogy is not entirely correct, because alchemy was a proto-science, not a pseudo-science.

However, our current medicine can be called a proto-engineering (for any mature medicine is an engineering), since we still do not know the mechanisms of many diseases and do not know how to treat them. Yet, it is within our reach to transform our current medicine into full-fledged engineering in the near future, just like software or aerospace engineering. I call it human repair engineering.

A better, but less thorough analogy can be taken from ufology: for example, contrary to all logic, we still have no clear images of UFO precisely in an era when many people have inexpensive and easy-to-use photo and video cameras, and then smartphones! Many such examples can be given.

Likewise, homeopathy will disappear or become marginal, not at all because some “scientific inquisition” is fighting it in the information or legal arena, but because regenerative medicine of the near future will offer better, truly working solutions.

Most often, the fight “for” is better than the fight “against”, because the fight “against” does not offer anything in return, while the fight “for” is clearly aimed at improvements. Thus, the fight against homeopathy is aimed only at reducing the use of homeopathy, without offering anything in return, while the fight for better medicine not only brings closer the time without disease and ageing, but also implicitly includes the fight against pseudo-medicine (including homeopathy), because the presence of truly working therapies that cure currently incurable diseases will make pseudo-medicine unnecessary.

For example, with the advent of effective antiretroviral therapy, cases of HIV treatment using various “folk” methods have practically disappeared, and there is now much less speculation around HIV.

Many physicians and officials, unfortunately, have a desire to solve the problem using brute force — explicit prohibitions and increased regulation. What a stupid decision! Never in the history of humanity this led to anything good. Increased regulation will only create problems for regenerative medicine (including gene, immune, cell therapies), while scammers will still find a way to enter the market.

For example, ban homeopathy — and its place will immediately be taken by “release-active” drugs; ban them, too, and scammers will take over the “wave genome” or “water memory”, ad infinitum.

What we really need is not more regulation, but less regulation for emerging therapies. And some countries have already given the green light to regenerative medicine. For example, the Fast-Track Approval system in Japan, which was introduced in 2014. The system aimed to increase access to regenerative medicines by introducing laws that allow for emerging treatments to be used so long as they have been proven safe, with only hints of their effectiveness.

The idea is that as patients receive these safe treatments, more conclusive data on their efficacy can be gathered thereafter. This negates the need for large-scale clinical trials that take place over several years and cost hundreds of millions.

As a counterexample, in the USA, because of insane regulation, it is almost impossible to release emerging therapy to the market, and the cost of the process — including clinical trials — is at least $2.5 billion. In spite of the big number of inventions by American scientists and engineers, only a few of them have entered human clinical trials, and only several of them have reached the market.

On the other hand, prohibitions force people to be inventive: biohackers arose in the USA, after all.

Thus, in answer to the original question, there are three key points in the fight for better medicine:

1) Development of regenerative therapies and treatments, whose mechanism is the elimination of molecular and cellular damage that causes genetic diseases and ageing pathologies.

2) Reduction of regulation of emerging therapies in regenerative medicine.

3) Education in regenerative medicine, so that people — including physicians and policymakers — know about emerging therapies and can help in their implementation and entering the clinics, at least by fulfilling these key points.

I hope you understand, the fight against homeopathy is clearly not worth the effort and time spent on it, because the result of this fight is completely predictable. In spite of many years of fighting, pharmacies are still overwhelmed with homeopathy, and various scammers continue to sell the “cure for everything”, while actual working therapies cannot reach the clinics because of excessive regulation.

Links

Bioengineering longevity: call for open source approach by Eleanor Garth. February 18, 2021. Updated August 12, 2024.

Defying Ageing with Ariel VA Feinerman — A Radical Exploration

Japan moves to fast-track innovative stem cell therapy with first trials on human hearts by Nick Lavars. June 1, 2018.

The Price of Progress or the Waste of Regulation? by Reason. September 7, 2018.

Ariel VA Feinerman is a researcher, author, and photographer, who believes that people should not die from diseases and ageing, and whose main goal is to improve human health and achieve immortality. If you like Ariel’s work, any help would be appreciated via PayPal: arielfeinerman@gmail.com.