The midwife paid a fine and is barred from accessing the state’s vaccine records system.

A midwife in New York administered nearly 12,500 bogus homeopathic pellets to roughly 1,500 children in lieu of providing standard, life-saving vaccines, the New York State Department of Health reported yesterday.

Jeanette Breen, a licensed midwife who operated Baldwin Midwifery in Nassau County, began providing the oral pellets to children around the start of the 2019–2020 school year, just three months after the state eliminated non-medical exemptions for standard school immunizations. She obtained the pellets from a homeopath outside New York and sold them as a series called the “Real Immunity Homeoprophylaxis Program.”

The program falsely claimed to protect children against deadly infectious diseases covered by standard vaccination schedules, including diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (covered by the DTaP or Tdap vaccine); hepatitis B; measles, mumps and rubella (MMR vaccine); polio; chickenpox; meningococcal disease; Haemophilus influenzae disease (HiB); and pneumococcal diseases (PCV).

Homeopathy is a pseudoscience that falsely claims that medical conditions can be cured or prevented by extreme, ritualized dilutions of poisonous substances that cause the same symptoms of a particular disease or condition when administered directly. Homeopathic products are often diluted to such a point that they do not contain a single atom of the original substance. Some homeopaths claim that water molecules can have a “memory” of their contact with the substance, magically imbuing them with healing powers. Homeopathic products work no better than placebos, though if they are improperly diluted, they can be harmful and even deadly.

  • Thorry84
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    8 months ago

    Why is homeopathy still allowed to be sold in 2024? It’s like I’ve taken crazy pills, non homeopathic crazy pills to be exact.

    • Xtallll@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      8 months ago

      Have you tried diluting your crazy pill so far there is only a 50% chance that one of the original molecules is in a sample, then drank that? Do your own crazy pill research, this is the TRUTH big crazy pill doesn’t want you to know?

    • Delphia@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Because in certain concentrations in certain people under certain circumstances there is a non zero chance that it may have a non zero impact and isnt outright poison.

      • Thorry84
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        8 months ago

        Yes the placebo effect is also in play to make people believe it does something. Sometimes even believing plain water is a wonder cure, makes it so.

        It’s also funny the origins of homeopathy are that something that does nothing is better than whatever “cure” the alternative was.

    • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I’m still asking myself how the fuck homeopathy got official recognition by the Health Department in my country. They have their own pharmacopoeia and accreditation. It’s unbelievable.

      • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        In America, homeopathy is sold in pharmacies, right next to actual medications. There are a lot of homeopathic cold meds and pain management that appear to be legit because they’re being sold right alongside real meds. But when you look closely at the label on the back, the “active ingredients” are listed as a multiple (2x, 3x, 4x, etc) instead of a percentage. The multiple shows how many times it was diluted.

        And again, these are being sold right alongside real meds like Tylenol and NyQuil, which only serves to make them seem more credible.

    • CaptainProton@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      If it’s not medicine it’s not regulated like a drug, supplements are treated like food (crushed up berries in a cap basically are that). Negative rights are a good thing: you can make a product and sell it without needing explicit permission from the government for literally everything (and I really mean everything). Trade-off is that by lowering the barrier for entry for legitimate new ideas/competitors, you get charlatans who sell garbage by using language that tiptoes around any actual health promises so it stays unregulated.