Monday 6 January 2014

My Homeopathic Boost - lea los instruciones y consultar al farmaceutico.

We decided to travel to Spain for Christmas using the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander. We were a bit nervous because in the summer the crossing had been a bit rough in Biscay and in the winter it was going to be bad, especially as the shipping forecast was for gales and "high" seas (6-9m waves). So we took plenty of sea-sickness tablets. We were all pretty rough but we made it.

My problem was when we were on dry land as everything kept moving. I have proper vertigo. So I went to the pharmacist with my wife to get some tablets as I was feeling bad 24 hours after getting off the ship. My mother-in-law (a retired doctor) had suggested something beginning with Dog??? but we could not remember and so we asked the pharmacist who put out four boxes of tablets on the table. One was Dogmatil the box we wanted, one was Dogamtil fuerte - extra strength and I forget the third.

But the first of these boxes the pharmacist pointed out was a homeopathic medicine. It was a booster that could be taken with any of the other sets of tablets. It was homeopathic and so there was no need to worry about side effects but it would make the other tablets much more effective. This is just complete nonsense, there is no need to worry about the effects at all as there aren't any. Homeopathic remedies are sugar pills. The only effect they have is placebo effect and as you are already taking a medication there is no more placebo boost than telling a patient that a spoon full of sugar would help the medicine go down. My wife was trying hard not to laugh and explained that we were chemists and so there would be no need for the homeopathic remedy.

She was in fact so incensed she wanted to report his behaviour to the authorities. This is a pharmacist who is supposed to be providing intelligent advice who is obviously working for the homeopathic companies pushing their product as, required with whatever treatment you take. This is even worse than the drug companies and from my experience of them they are pretty bad at pushing poor treatments.

To make matters worse, he also didn't seem to know which medicines needed a prescription. Dogmatil - Fuerte he read out from his computer screen is for the treatment of psychosis. We asked if it was usual to just give out anti-psychotic drugs without prescription and he agreed it wasn't. It is vertigo not schizophrenia. Anyway my visit makes a mockery of the warning given at the end of every TV commercial for medication in Spain - read the instructions and consult a pharmacist. Because they don't read the instructions and the pharmacist is giving bad advice and promoting quack treatments anyway.

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