Homeopathy: How 200-Year-Old Junk Science Created Junk Medicine and Lasted Until This Day

Not too long ago, homeopathic formulas were only sold in health food stores. You might have seen them: Little blue vials with tiny little pills in them. You might have thought good things come in small packages. Then homeopathy hit the mainstream, and became available in just about every drugstore. One of its biggest selling points is the lack of side effects, the way it works naturally with your body, how clinically effective it is. The lack of side effects is true enough—because there are no effects, other than placebo ones. A recent study out of Australia definitively stated that homeopathy is not an effective treatment for any medical condition.

After reviewing 225 research papers on homeopathy, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has seemingly closed the case for using homeopathic treatments. Although not, it appears for everyone. Those “medicines” are still on the shelves, and there are still people who swear by them. And there are still more people who think that the debunking of homeopathy is likely some plot.

The foundation for the “science” of homeopathy is so bizarre it bears closer examination. The idea is that you treat a disease by ingesting tiny amounts of a substance that in larger amounts will cause those very symptoms. For instance, if you are trying to treat sleeplessness, you might try a homeopathic agent composed of tiny dilutions of coffee or a coffee-like substance. Homeopaths refer to this as treating “like with like,” also known as the law of similars. Samuel Hahnemann, a German doctor, founded homeopathy over 200 years ago. His goal was noble enough; he was searching for a way to treat patients less harshly than the treatments of his day, which often included bloodletting, leeching, purging, and harsh poisons like arsenic. He believed that disease was actually an itch, a disturbance in the ability of the body to heal itself, a suppressed “evil spirit” he called psora. 

Hahnemann and his followers conducted what they called provings. They administered substances to healthy patients, including themselves, and observed the patients over time. These observations were compiled into a book of “provings” called the materia medica, still the basis for homeopathic treatment today.The “provings” do not match substance to disease. That is left to the homeopath to decide, after talking to the patient and discussing the symptoms. Here’s the first clue to homeopathy’s weak foundation: there is no scientific testing of substance to disease, only these so-called provings, observations of a person after taking a substance. 

So, for instance, a healthy individual might be given some homeopathic agent and then be observed over the course of a specific amount of time. During that time, the person might sneeze, catch a cold, become gassy. That observation is now part of the proving. There is no scientific way to match those observed symptoms to the substance other than they happened after the substance was ingested, but now, when the homeopath consults his or her materia medica, that proving is the possible basis for treating a disease. Pretty random.

Since the substances Hahnemann gave his patients were often toxic, he began to dilute them more and more, and as he did, he found that they were supposedly more effective in smaller and smaller doses. This became his “law of infinitesimals.” The more diluted the dose, the more powerful the result. Given there is no modern science behind homeopathy, no controlled patient studies, there is no way to know for sure whether or why Hahnemann’s patients seemed to improve after homeopathic dosing. Likely it was what we now know as the placebo effect, where the mind can trick the body into recovering, or perhaps it was simple recovery on its own merits (most doctors today will agree that many, even most, non-life threatening diseases will eventually improve on their own with little or no treatment). ...