Why do people hang on to hope that a remedy will work even after nearly two hundred years of science have proven it won't?
Samuel Hahnemann, inventor of homeopathy. Daguerrotype. Wikimedia Commons
Perhaps they don't know about the science. Perhaps they don't believe it. Or perhaps they have taken such a remedy and gotten better, which was just a coincidence. Belief in this particular remedy has been hanging on for an absurd amount of time.
As this editorial in The Lancet put it:
"The more dilute the evidence for homeopathy becomes, the greater seems its popularity."
Homeopathy is a $7B market worldwide, selling products whose principles were developed in the 1700s by a German named Samuel Hahnemann.
What exactly is it?
Here's how authors Yannick Borkens, Udo Endruscheit, and Christian W. Lübbers explain the theory behind homeopathy in the Central European Journal of Medicine:
"Hahnemann believed that if a patient had an illness, it could be cured by giving a medicine which, if given to a healthy person, would produce similar symptoms of that same illness but to a slighter degree. Thus, if a patient was suffering from severe nausea, he was given a medicine which in a healthy person would provoke mild nausea. By a process he called ‘proving’, Hahnemann claimed to be able to compile a selection of appropriate remedies. This led to his famous aphorism, ‘like cures like’, which is often called the ‘principle of similars’; and he cited Jenner's use of cowpox vaccination to prevent smallpox as an example."
Hm. Similar to vaccination. Sounds promising! But...
"Hahnemann's belief that drugs should be given in a dose which only just produced the slightest symptoms of the disease which was being treated. To achieve this aim, Hahnemann diluted his medical preparations to such an astonishing extent that if one assumes that that the substance he employed was completely soluble, by only the fourth dilution the ratio of the medicine to the solution would be 1:100 000 000."
But wait! There's more.
"...Hahnemann insisted that homeopathic medicines retained their therapeutic power provided you shook the preparation violently during the process of dilution—a process Hahnemann named as ‘potentization’ by which every homeopathic medicine not only retained or even increased its therapeutic power, but persisted as a ‘dematerialized spiritual force’."
A spiritual force indeed.
Critics take on Hahnemann
Critics began to unravel Hahnemann's claims pretty early on.
"At the time, homeopathy had garnered considerable support among the upper classes in the then Kingdom of Bavaria. In Nuremberg…In 1834, annoyed by homeopathy's rising popularity, Friedrich Wilhelm von Hoven, the city's highest ranking public health official and head of the local hospitals, published a devastating critique of homeopathy... suggesting that homeopathic drugs were not real medicines at all and alleged homeopathic cures were either due to dietetic regimens and the healing powers of nature, or showed the power of belief.
He called for an objective, impartial assessment. How? He invited anyone who was interested to meet in a local tavern. More than 120 came. They participated in what was essentially the gold standard of scientific experiments: a double-blind, placebo controlled trial.
The Nuremberg salt experiment
The Nuremberg salt experiment of 1835, described here in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, was a remarkably well designed, citizen-driven test I love so hard I can barely stand it.
"In front of everyone, 100 vials were numbered, thoroughly shuffled and then split up at random into two lots of 50. One lot was filled with distilled snow water, the other with ordinary salt in a homeopathic C30-dilution of distilled snow water... [in other words,] a grain of salt was dissolved in 100 drops of distilled snow water and the resulting solution was diluted 29 times at a ratio of 1 to 100."
"The organizers concluded that the symptoms or changes which the homeopaths claimed to observe as an effect of their medicines were the fruit of imagination, self-deception and preconceived opinion—if not fraud."
Homeopathy can be dangerous
In 2017, the FDA "alerted consumers that some homeopathic teething tablets had excessive amounts of the toxic substance belladonna; in 2015, it warned consumers not to rely on over-the-counter asthma products labeled as homeopathic, because they are not evaluated by the FDA for safety and effectiveness.
(In small amounts, belladonna can regulate the heart rate. It's used in some other medicines. But even small amounts can kill you.)
What’s in homeopathic “remedies?”
These are some typical homeopathic ingredients:
Formic acid
Bark of the West African jungle tree
Moleskin
Lunar light
Common toad
Famous patients, fat wallet
What became of Samuel Hahnemann? He died in 1843, a millionaire in Paris, at the age of 88. Perhaps some of his more famous admirers, such as Edward, Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, and, later, King George VI helped.
Want to learn more? Read this Brief History of Homeopathy or Hahnemann's own Organon of the specific healing art,
Apologies for the double post! I sent this one too early last time. Enjoy!