I hate to say that, but in defense of homeopathy:
A lot of medicine is value projection and/or placebo. We give kids sparkly bandaids on minor abrasions not to help the symptoms or risks of infection, but so that the kid feels cared for.
We sometimes take daily medication not because it helps or we think we need it, but because our grandma raves all about this new cure-all that fixed all her issues.
We overindulge in paracetamol and ibuprofen even in the cases it clearly doesn't work because we need to feel like we took something that will help.
Homeopathy that tries to replace standard treatment is evil. But there is value in having a readily available, socially valued, thing you take when feeling bad, that does absolutely nothing.
In the 20s they just did heroin instead, it wasn't better.
So there's this thing called informed consent that is kind of super duper important and the use of placebo to treat illness is a major violation of informed consent.
Everybody likes the gifset from the Birdcage with the Aspirin with the A and the S scraped off because it's cute and funny, but it's cute and funny in a movie; if a "medical professional" is giving you sugar pills because they don't actually know how to treat you and want to offer you comfort instead, they're saying "you're too fucking stupid to handle the fact that you're ill so I'm going to hold your hand for a moment and hope that makes you feel better."
Your attitude is both fatalistic and tremendously paternalistic, and people with complex illnesses and chronic pain deserve to be treated better than kids getting a sparkly bandaid and a pat on the head.
People overuse painkillers because they're in pain; NSAIDs have effects, even if they aren't treating the root cause of pain, and people often take them because even though they won't stop a spasm, they'll make it less painful for a few hours and if that's what you've got, that's what you take.
The huge, regular doses of ibuprofen I used to take to help my migraines when I didn't have health insurance didn't stop the migraines, but they made it so I could work. What DID help was getting medically diagnosed with celiac disease and no longer triggering my autoimmune disorder on a daily basis.
You know what wouldn't have helped? A sympathetic listener and a sugar pill. Or worse, yet another sympathetic listener telling me about some fucking lead-contaminated turmeric supplement that cured their granny's headaches.
Shit on the heroin cures all you want, they at least included a legitimate cough suppressant and had a mechanism of action more effective than a patronizing lecture about how we've all got to get on somehow, so we might as well pretend we feel better.
Fuck your shitty, shitty attitude. Sick people deserve better than you.
