What Is Homeopathy?

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By Merseyside Skeptics Society

The 10:23 Campaign

Contrary to popular belief, 'homeopathy' is not the same as herbal medicine. Homeopathy is based on three central tenets, unchanged since their invention by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796.

The Law of Similars

The law of similars states that whatever would cause your symptoms, will also cure those same symptoms. Thus, if you find yourself unable to sleep, taking caffeine will help; streaming eyes due to hayfever can be treated with onions, and so on. This so-called law was based upon nothing other than Hahnemann's own imagination. You don't need to have a medical degree to see the flawed reasoning in taking caffeine - a stimulant - to help you sleep; yet caffeine is, even today, prescribed by homeopaths (under the name 'coffea') as a treatment for insomnia.

The Law of Infinitesimals

Following on from his 'law of similars', Hahnemann proposed he could improve the effect of his 'like-cures-like treatments' by repeatedly diluting them in water. The more dilute the remedy, Hahnemann decided, the stronger it will become. Thus was born his 'Law of Infinitesimals'.

Taking a single drop of caffeine and diluting in ninety-nine drops of water creates what is known to homeopaths as one 'centesimal'. One drop of this centesimal added to another ninety-nine drops of water produces a two-centesimal, written as 2C. This 2C caffeine potion is 99.99% water and just 0.01% caffeine. At 3C the dilution is 0.0001% caffeine, at 4C it's 0.000001% caffeine, and so on. Homeopathic remedies are commonly sold at 6C (0.000 000 000 1%) and even 30C (0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1%) dilutions, which homeopaths will often drip onto little balls of sugar to sell.

When these numbers are written out, it's easy to see how absurd they are. At 12C you pass what is known as the Avogadro Limit, the point at which there is likely nothing of your original substance left.

By the time you reach 30C, you have more chance of winning the lottery five weeks running than you have of finding a single caffeine molecule in your homeopathic sleeping draft. It's just ordinary water, dripped onto ordinary sugar.

The Law of Succussion

While transporting his remedies on a horse-drawn carriage, Hahnemann made another 'breakthrough'. He decided that the vigorous shaking of a homeopathic remedy would further increase its potency. This shaking process was named 'succussion'. When ritually preparing a homeopathic remedy, the homeopath will shake or tap the preparation at each stage of dilution, in order to 'potentize' it.

Samuel Hahnemann

Modern homeopaths believe that this 'potentization' process allows the water to retain the 'memory' or 'vibrations' of the original substance, long after it has been diluted away to nothing. Of course, there is no good scientific evidence to suggest that water has such an ability, nor any indication of how it might be able to use this 'memory' to cure a sick patient.
Does it work?

Despite being rooted in supersition, ritual and sympathetic magick, the laws devised by Hahnemann are still in use by homeopaths today.

For Hahnemann's Laws to be correct, we would have to toss out practically everything we have learned over the past two centuries about biology, pharmacology, mathematics, chemistry and physics. Illnesses are not effectively treated by administering substances which cause similar symptoms; serial dilution and succussion does not 'potentize' a remedy. Water has no memory, nor any way of using one if it did! Homeopathy could never work in the way Hahnemann described it, but does it work at all?

The most comprehensive review of homeopathic treatments ever conducted was published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2005. The paper analyzed every clinical investigation then published into the effects of homeopathy, and concluded that any apparent benefits from homeopathic 'treatments' were simply placebo effects. Homeopathy does not work. This conclusion was supported by the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent global network of medical professionals tasked with examining medical research to determine exactly which treatments are effective.

Why You Can't Trust Homeopathy

It doesn't work

When tested under rigorous conditions - when neither the patient nor the doctor knows whether they're using homeopathy or not until all of the tests are done - homeopathy has shown to work no better than a sugar pill. That doesn't mean people do not feel better after taking homeopathy; only that those feelings aren't related to the homeopathy. This is known as the placebo effect and is often misunderstood. Conventional medicine also has a placebo effect, on top of its other benefits.

The choice between medicine and homeopathy comes down to a simple question: would you have a placebo, or a placebo plus a treatment that has been proven to work?

It couldn't work

The theoretical principles that underpin homeopathy lack any scientific credibility and the so-called 'laws of homeopathy' do not tally with anything we know about the world around us. Only a basic understanding of chemistry is needed to demonstrate that that homeopathic tinctures can only be plain water.

It's a waste of your money

The homeopathy industry is worth around £40million in the UK, and around €400million in both France and Germany. While this may seem small compared to the pharmaceutical industry, pharmaceutical medicines are required to show clinical effectiveness before they are licensed for sale. Homeopathy bears no such requirements and £40million is a lot of money to spend on something that you haven't proved works.

Homeopathic pills are being sold at a cost of around £5.95 for less than 20g of sugar pills. Without any active ingredient, that ultimately amounts to a lot of money for not a lot of sugar.

It's a waste of everyone's money

In the UK, the NHS spends an estimated £4million every year on homeopathy. The British government also supports four Homeopathic Hospitals using taxpayers money, in Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London. The evidence is very clear: homeopathy does not work and therefore has no place within the National Health Service. Despite the recent heavy cuts in public expenditure, the British government still refuses to cut funding for homeopathy, even when advised to do so by top scientists.

It's a waste of your time

When homeopathy is accepted as a viable alternative to medicine, patients waste time taking useless pills and potions instead of seeking expert medical attention. For mild ailments, like a cough or a cold, the risks are minimal; but for patients with more severe conditions, time can be a significant factor in their recovery. Many homeopaths even directly encourage patients to wait before seeking medical attention, even when their condition deteriorates, claiming that worsening symptoms are a sign their potions are working.

Moreover, patients with terminal conditions are left with an unrealistic view of their condition and may be distracted from making the most of the time they have left. This ultimately leads to more heartache and suffering when the bogus treatment proves futile.

It's a waste of everyone's time

Thousands of studies have been conducted into the effectiveness of homeopathy and its various 'laws'. So far, none reliably shown homeopathy to be effective and most are conclusively negative. Any conventional treatment with a similar track record would have been dropped a long time ago. In fact, many treatments have been dropped, even with a stronger evidence base than exists for homeopathy. If we weren't wasting time proving, yet again, that homeopathy doesn't work, we could be looking for treatments that do.

There are alternatives to this alternative

The thing about homeopathy is, we don't need it. Medicine works. Diseases like measles, whooping cough and polio are effectively prevented by vaccination. Modern anti-retroviral drugs help HIV sufferers manage their condition so effectively that AIDS is no longer the death sentence it once was.

Homeopaths offer bogus 'cures' for AIDS, which leads to vulnerable people, sick to death, paying for the privilege.

It's not what it says on the label

Buy a vial of 30C homeopathic sulphur at your local pharmacy and one thing you can be sure you won't find in the bottle is any sulphur. You have significantly more chance of winning a triple rollover on the lottery than you have of finding even a single atom of sulphur in that tube; but the label still reads 'Sulphur'.

It detracts from medicine

Giving legitimacy to unproven and ineffective treatments does not come without a cost. The cost of allowing the promotion of homeopathy as an 'alternative' to medicine comes when patients are unable to distinguish between a self-limiting condition which will cure itself given time, and a more serious illness which will become life-threatening if incorrectly treated. Stories of people abandoning medicine in favour of quack cures, with disastrous results, are not hard to find. By allowing the promotion of a therapy proven to be ineffective and implausible, we encourage people to turn their back on the treatments that can help them.

It has abused its placebo privileges

From time to time, it's understandable that a simple-to-administer placebo treatment might carry some benefit for doctors, where no medical intervention has a particular, proven effectiveness. In these scenarios, it could be argued that homeopathy might have had a role to play, providing a harm-free, effect-free placebo to help manage the otherwise unmanageable. However, homeopaths abuse this minor level of legitimacy to make claims about conditions the placebo effect could not possible treat. Cancer, HIV, malaria, yellow fever, autism, tuberculosis. They discourage people from seeking medical help when they most need it. It's time to stop lending support to quackery; time to give people the facts about this 200-year-old snake oil, before they choose to use it instead of the ever-improving and reliable interventions of modern medicine.

Citation

"What Is Homeopathy? | The 10:23 Campaign | #ten23." Homeopathy: There's Nothing in It | The 10:23 Campaign | #ten23. Web. 14 Feb. 2011. <http://www.1023.org.uk/what-is-homeopathy.php>.

"Why You Can't Trust Homeopathy | The 10:23 Campaign | #ten23." Homeopathy: There's Nothing in It | The 10:23 Campaign | #ten23. Web. 15 Feb. 2011. <http://www.1023.org.uk/why-you-cant-trust-homeopathy.php>.

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