When to Use it: An Open Letter to the Homeopathy Community

By the time we’re up late cramming for an exam or putting the finishing touches on a term paper, we’ve learned that caffeine will help us stay awake, and that the more we take, the stronger the effect will be. It’s less chemistry 101 than reality 101: More is more, less is less, up is up, and down is down.

You might or might not know that the principles of homeopathy brazenly violate these simple rules of reality. Nevertheless, there is one situation in which you should undeniably consider using it.

In the late 18th century, German physicist Samuel Hahnemann developed homeopathy as a method of treating his patients according to two main principles. Homeopathy’s first principle is called the Law of Similars or “like cures like”: the idea that a substance that would cause a certain set of symptoms in a healthy person would cure those same symptoms in a person suffering from them. For example, the key ingredient in a homeopathic remedy for insomnia, Coffea cruda, is caffeine.

You might want to stop here and ask some questions. Why would caffeine help you sleep? Up is down? Black is white? Proponents of homeopathy often argue that “like cures like” is akin to vaccination. There are obvious surface similarities, but there are profound differences fatal to this comparison. Vaccines contain small doses of often dead but sometimes living and weakened disease-causing microorganisms that generally don’t cause the symptoms in healthy people, administered to a healthy patient for the preventative purpose of allowing the body to build antibodies and immunity to that disease. “Like cures like,” by contrast, involves no antibodies and immunity, but a straight cure of already existing symptoms by a substance known to cause those symptoms. Taking caffeine to help you sleep is not a vaccination. (Sometimes homeopathy is recommended as a prophylactic rather than as a cure, which violates “like cures like.”)

Wondering how caffeine might help you sleep is pointless, because of appropriate questions about homeopathy’s second principle, called “potentization”: the idea that the more diluted and less potent the substance, the stronger its therapeutic effect — i.e., less is more. Homeopathic substances are diluted with alcohol or water (or a mixture of both) over and over, until there isn’t a significant or even reliable amount of the key ingredient left. A sugar pill is dipped in the inert solution and deemed a remedy.

Oscillococcinum (also known as Oscillo), for example, is a popular homeopathic substance said to relieve symptoms of the flu. It takes a tincture of one part anas barbariae hepatis et cordis extractum (a fancy way of saying extract of duck offal: i.e., liver and heart) and 99 parts water, and dilutes the substance to the eventual factor of 10 to the power of 400, which is a number worth seeing:

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That’s four hundred zeros. It’s also the number of doses of Oscillo you’d need to take to guarantee ingesting the original amount of duck offal. To put this dilution of grandeur into perspective, a low estimate of the total number of atoms in the observable universe is a mere 10 to the power of 78.

Obviously, medicine during Hahnemann’s time was primitive. Many treatments did more harm than good, and sometimes they even killed the patient. With nothing or very little actually in them, homeopathic substances perhaps seemed a wise alternative because they did no harm.

It’s silly to have to point out that what causes side effects is also what causes effects. There’s nothing in such substances to cause any effects, whether they be side or front or back. As Gina Casey, a spokeswoman for Boiron, the world’s leading manufacturer of Oscillo, said when asked about the safety of the substance: “Of course it is safe. There’s nothing in it.”

Despite homeopathy’s basis on two dubious premises that seem contradictory (even if like did cure like, wouldn’t like have to be, like, present?), homeopathic products have a seemingly neverending list of defenders. As we’ve seen, they will admit that homeopathic substances don’t actually contain their most important ingredient. In their view, the products work because of a third premise, called water memory.

In 1988 an immunologist named Jacques Benveniste published a controversial paper in Nature, the implications of which suggested that H2O molecules can form a memory, for lack of a better term, of the ingredient that’s been diluted away. This memory of the missing ingredient seems to know to affect the body in only the right way (effects) and not the wrong way (side effects). This memory is implanted by way of ritual stimulation of the water. In between dilutions, the homeopathic substance’s vessel is shaken and sometimes banged against a solid or elastic object, a process called “succussion.”

Consider a world in which water memory were true. The hydrologic cycle — after millennia of repeated evaporation, condensation, precipitation, storage in ice and snow, infiltration into and storage in the ground, and collection into large bodies — has brought the world’s H2O molecules into contact with just about everything, even pharmaceutical substances that have a proven effect. The H2O molecules, according to the water memory theory, would remember all these substances. We could take tap water, ritually shake and bang it over and over400, and have a veritable panacea, a remedy in all directions for everything from dreams about being too tall (homeopaths recommend iron iodide diluted into Ferrum Idolatum) to fear of bathing (ammonium carbonate diluted into Ammonium Carbonicum); from too much indecisiveness (barium carbonate diluted into Baryta Carbonica) to too much decisiveness (cuttlefish ink sac pigment diluted into Sepia); from myopia (Calabar bean diluted into Physostigma) to youropia.

Perhaps tap water doesn’t cure everything because all the cures cancel out. But if the key ingredient that’s missing in homeopathic remedies knows to do a particular job on the body because that’s the job that needs to be done, so should diluted, shaken, banged tap water’s key ingredients know to grow hair for a bald guy or retard hair growth for a wookie.

Or perhaps tap water doesn’t cure everything because the hydrologic cycle doesn’t shake the water molecules in the right way. Precise aspects of the succussion ritual vary between practitioners, leaving an absence of a standardized method. There is no right way. This is arbitrariness of astrological proportions.

We don’t have to wrench our brains around this pretzel logic, because science has looked into these claims, and there’s no compelling evidence for water memory (or carbon dioxide memory or ozone memory) or for homeopathy. Anyone with the patience to review the research will find that the aggregate tells us there’s no effect. For every study suggesting a small effect, two or three, run much more rigorously (and without someone linked to homeopathy), suggest no effect above placebo. And like so many other dubious claims, it has failed to pass James Randi’s One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge.

Some deny this lack of evidence and overrate the flawed studies. Others point out that there are conventional remedies — cough medicine, for example — that aren’t backed by impressive clinical evidence. This might be true, but an argument against a flimsy conventional medicine isn’t in favor of an unsubstantiated unconventional one.

Others argue that this lack of evidence is the result of everyone’s “vital force” being unique, each person requiring custom-made homeopathic treatments that wouldn’t show effects for the general population. For example, a homeopathic substance called Pulsatilla can relieve menstrual cramps and labor pains for women who have a “gentle, yielding disposition,” with no explanation for why it wouldn’t work for Nurse Ratched types.

We do know that certain conventional treatments work for some and not others, perhaps based on personality. For example, some people seem to respond better to cognitive behavioural therapy than traditional psychotherapy, and vice versa. But we learn about these therapeutic nuances by examining evidence, not by guesswork.

Still others accept the lack of evidence but use the popular pseudoscientific argument that homeopathy must be the result of something mysterious going on at the subatomic level. Physician Deepak Chopra, a popular lecturer and author of Quantum Healing, explains:

“Quantum healing is healing the bodymind [sic] from a quantum level. That means from a level which is not manifest at a sensory level. Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence and energy. Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information, so as to bring about a correction in an idea that has gone wrong.”

In the spirit of correcting an idea that has gone wrong, quantum mechanics is not hocus pocus. Though its laws seem counterintuitive, and though, like the rest of science, it continues to hold mysteries, we’ve applied our understanding of quantum physics to invent lasers, GPS, semiconductors, transistors, and computers, which have spawned the Internet age.

Common sense and evidence be damned, homeopathy has endured for over 200 years. Boiron alone took in over 534 million Euros in 2023 sales. It’s not just the masses. In his book, The Homeopathic Revolution, Dana Ullman, whom TIME magazine, in an apt choice of words, called “the leading proselytizer of homeopathy,” makes his case that many respected figures over the years have used homeopathy, including Mother Teresa, Coretta Scott King, Vincent Van Gogh, and Mark Twain.

What of these and the millions of others who swear by homeopathy? First, remember how many millions of people ardently claim to have been abducted by aliens, to have seen the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot, to have interacted with a ghost or deity.

Second, even extremely intelligent people aren’t immune to irrationality. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health and the physician-geneticist who headed the Human Genome Project, became a born-again Christian some years ago because on a hike he saw a waterfall frozen in three parts, which he took to be a divine message, a representation of God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. Noam Chomsky, a brilliant linguist and idolized intellectual of the Left, seems to think that America is comparable to Nazi Germany, and that Walmart and McDonald’s are to blame for the world’s most serious ills. Isaac Newton, one of the brightest human beings who ever lived, a man who invented calculus so he could lay down the laws of motion and gravity, was into alchemy.

Third, there’s ignorance. If you don’t know homeopathy is grounded on nonsensical principles and hasn’t the clinical evidence required to be taken seriously, you don’t know it’s a waste of money. This is especially true of the historical figures, like Twain (“Having faith is believing in something you just know ain’t true”), who didn’t have the advantage of modern science to highlight homeopathy’s problems.

Fourth is the confirmation bias: the psychological principle whereby we focus on and remember examples that seem to support what we believe while we discard the rest. For example, you might take Oscillo five times with no effect, but then a sixth attempt, which seemed to work, might lead you to forget about the five failed attempts, the way you might forget all the times Advil didn’t quite cure your hangover.

But perhaps the most significant factors that lead to a belief in homeopathy are two types of misattributed causality. First is simple coincidence. If you make that sixth Oscillo attempt when or after your flu has peaked, the illness continues to run its natural course, you get better as you would have without the pill, and it seems like Oscillo worked. If you take Oscillo before the flu peaks, the peak can be explained away by what American homeopathy pioneer Constantine Hering called a “healing crisis,” a side effect (!) considered a natural part of the healing process whereby you temporarily get worse. Then the illness continues to run its natural course, you get better as you would have without the pill, and it seems like Oscillo worked.

The second misattributed causality is of course the placebo effect. If you believe the pill will work, there’s a solid chance you might experience the desired relief — not because you took that pill, but because you took any pill, even one containing nothing but sugar. The phenomenon is so significant that Harvard Medical School is offering a course called Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter.

With so much inconsistency, dogma, and resistance to rational criticism, and with the requirement of a supernatural component, belief in homeopathy leans on blind faith and can be categorized as an unrecognized religion. If you’ve read this far and accepted homeopathy’s dearth of reason, and since — my fault — you likely no longer qualify for the placebo effect, I hope you’ll stop wasting your money. But many of you will continue to not only waste your money and sing homeopathy’s praises, but, perhaps, might do so more strongly than ever, likely because of, in my estimation, the only thing you have left to cling to: distrust of medical science and the pharmaceutical companies (some of which, in fact, sell homeopathic substances).

The idea of profiting from illness is off-putting. And medical science is far from perfect. There is much to learn, and mistakes are made. Outrage over such infamous cases as Vioxx, and a feeling that the population is overmedicated, have spawned a current of opinion that prefers to believe that it’s pharmaceutical companies and doctors, in cahoots as an evil drug-peddling machine, who are actually the ones duping us out of our money, rather than those making millions of dollars on what they admit are mere sugar pills dipped in water. When emotions run this high, wishful thinking and denial have a dangerously nutritious Petri dish in which to thrive. This is where we find Vitamin C to (not) cure cancer, vaccine refusal because of a (nonexistent) link to autism, cures so miraculous you can learn about them only from late-night infomercials, and whatever Steve Jobs did for nine months before seeking conventional treatment: in a word, sorcery.

Reaping the gullibility of the relatively wealthy and healthy is one thing. But in Kenya, an NGO called the Abha Light Foundation — funded by numerous UK charities, and by one, the Global Fund, that’s partly funded by Bill Gates — has been accused of touting homeopathy as a competitor or even replacement for malaria vaccines and essential anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV. Confusing sick poor people about what might or might not help them is sinister. It’s impossible to know exactly how many have died and how many more might die as a result. Even Saudi Arabia recognizes the dangers of fantastical healing claims. In December 2011, a Saudi court convicted a woman of peddling false cures, deemed sorcery. She was beheaded.

I promised to offer remaining enthusiasts a situation in which you should use homeopathy. This is a situation in which you’d be irresponsible, in fact, if you didn’t consider using it. Science makes a miraculous discovery. New evidence suggests we were wrong; there is a therapeutic effect. Big Pharma jumps in like never before, launches significant ad campaigns, and starts to make billions from homeopathic remedies, because science can finally demonstrate that they work.

But then you wouldn’t want to use them anymore, would you?