Opinion: Homeopathy: Dilutions and Delusions

Written by Daniel Sprockett Monday, 28 February 2011 20:23

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When most people hear about “homeopathic” medicine, they usually assume it’s roughly a synonym for naturopathic or herbal medicine, but that is far from the truth. Actually, homeopathy is a very specific type of alternative medicine based on three bizarre principles, none of which are supported by scientific evidence.

“Homeopathy” comes from the Greek words “homeo,” which means “similar,” and “pathos,” which means “suffering.” The name represents homeopathy’s “Law of Similars.”

“The Law of Similars” proposes that anything causing a symptom in a healthy individual can cure a sick person displaying that same symptom. This is completely unfounded, of course, but when Samuel Hahnemann was making up homeopathy in 1796, it was considered a novel approach to medicine.

Hahnemann came across the claim that the bark of the Cinchona tree could treat malaria. We now know that Cinchona bark contains the anti-malarial drug quinine. However, when Hahnemann tried administering it to himself, he found that it caused symptoms similar to those of malaria, and concluded that “like cures like.” From this single spurious association, Hahnemann projected a similar casual relationship on all illnesses.

Hahnemann began investigating which herbs, minerals and extracts would elicit symptoms in healthy people, a process he called “proving.” After “proving” a substance, Hahnemann made a highly dilute solution of it, which he administered to patients. Luckily for them, Hahnemann also believed that the more dilute a solution, the more effective it was.

In fact, Hahnemann developed the centesimal (C) scale for this purpose. A dilution of 1:100 is 1C, but to get a 2C dilution, you need to make a 1:100 dilution of a 1C solution, or a 1:10,000 dilution of the original substance. At 12C, it is likely that not one molecule of the original ingredient remains in solution, yet Hahnemann routinely recommended using 30C dilutions. Still worse, some modern-day homeopaths administer dilutions up to 200C. As a result, many homeopathic “remedies” are so extremely diluted that a person would need to ingest many times the mass of our galaxy to reliably consume just one molecule of its so-called “active” ingredient.

But homeopaths rationalize this blaring fact using their third principle, “dynamization.” Hahnemann thought that by shaking a dilution in a specific manner, you cause the active ingredient to somehow become imprinted on that solution. For example, he thought that shaking a vial of water and a tiny amount of onion juice would cause the water to retain the “memory” of the juice long after all material trances of it were gone. However, as many skeptics have pointed out, homeopaths have not explained how water might retain the “memory” of a given active ingredient, yet forget all of the other unsavory substances it has come in contact with while traversing the oceans and sewers of the world.

Many large, well-controlled, investigations into the efficacy of homeopathy have showed that homeopathic remedies are no more effective than a placebo. Despite this, you can still buy homeopathic treatments like Zicam, HeadOn and Oscillococcinum (a remedy for flu-like symptoms) at pharmacies across the country.

Recently, a group of science-based skeptics of homeopathy gathered across the United Kingdom to participate in a mass homeopathic “overdose.” The demonstration was organized by the 10:23 campaign in an attempt to educate the public about homeopathy and bring attention to the fact that their National Health Service wastes £4 million annually on homeopathy.

Homeopathy is based on dangerous and completely unfounded assumptions about the way the world works, but I think the 10:23 campaign’s slogan does a good job summing things up: Homeopathy — there’s nothing to it!