Tragically, antibiotics are often used as a placebo. For example, prescribing an antibiotic is a good way to get the flu patient to leave your office in a happy mood, secure in the knowledge that Something Is Being Done, even though antibiotics are useless against flu.
That's a big problem, because sugar pills don't breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria. There's a serious argument to be made for homeopathy here: homeopathic treatments don't have side effects.
Actually, now that you mention it, I suppose it is possible to overdose on homeopathics.
Moreover, there is a significant side effect: A financial one. That's why I prefer to advocate DIY homeopathics. If yours don't seem to be working, try making them by the light of the full moon. No kidding.
It would be pretty hard to overdose on homeopathics. They are basically sugar, and they are tiny. Add in the cost, and it would cost a fortune to overdose. You could probably clean out an entire store's inventory and not overdose.
"Prescribing" homeopatic treatments in mock cases instead of real drugs is actually an incredibly neat idea. I can't believe the doctors didn't already think of it. It makes everyone happy. (Except sometime down the road, when someone attempts to heal something serious with homeopatic medicine...but I suppose that is already a problem.)
I can't believe the doctors didn't already think of it.
Oh, they have. Homeopathy is much more popular in Europe than in the USA, and according to Wikipedia some European health insurance actually covers it:
Covering homeopathy with health insurance strikes me as smart. For one thing, it saves everybody money. Sadly, an over-the-counter homeopathic remedy is more effective if it costs $25 per dose than if it is sold at cost (keep in mind how the treatment works). But an Officially Sanctioned Government Treatment, the true cost of which (5 cents, for the formal-looking box) is hidden from you, is probably almost as good as the $25 stuff. Especially if the box has lots of testimonials and some impressive-sounding Latin words.
It also encourages people to get their homeopathy from an actual doctor, who is able to make use of actual medical science when it proves necessary. This helps discourage the problem of overenthusiastic entrepreneurs cutting out the middleman by convincing people to treat their diabetes and Stage I cancer with nothing but an extremely dilute, patent-pending snake oil solution.
Indeed, all sorts of faith healing (homeopathy, Jesus-powered medicine, crystal energies, etc) would be useful in this regard. Faith healing has the advantages of being cheap and free of side effects. Medicine has the advantage that it sometimes works.
For the cases when medicine doesn't work, faith healing wins. It's cheaper, and equally effective. Of course, it will never happen, due to irrational faith in doctors.
Robin Hanson is an interesting read on this topic.
Sounds like a needed service: we need something that the doctors can prescribe and get from a pharmacist that actually is a harmless placebo instead of antibiotics. Maybe it can go under many different technical sounding names.
Would anyone happen to know some of these "facade" drug names? (If anyone here is on meds right now, please don't look at the replies--you might decrease their efficacy!)
