Homeopathy Does Not Work — Sciencebase Science Blog

Homeopathy Does Not Work

What are the origins of homeopathy?

In the 1790s German physician Samuel Hahnemann developed the ancient Greek medic Hippocrates’ idea of curing ‘like with like’. He rejected the purgings and leeches that were common the medicine of the day and when he experimented on himself with quinine - used to treat ‘ague’, now known as malaria - he found that he could induce the symptoms of the disease by increasing the dose.

Hahnemann concluded that it was quinine’s ability to trigger malaria symptoms that made it a cure for the disease and he began to test other substances on patients to ‘prove’ them. He called the practice homeopathy from the Greek homoios (the same) and pathos (suffering). He observed that a smaller and smaller dose, of say the deadly plant belladonna used to treat scarlet fever, or even the poison arsenic, seemed to have a more specific effect on his patients. Bizarrely, to prepare his purported remedies, he had to shake them by bashing his vials against his Bible…

Hahnemann’s ideas spread throughout Europe and North America and by 1844 there was an American Institute of Homeopathy. However, by the twentieth century scientific modern medicine was flourishing and the practice of homeopathy had all but disappeared in the Western world.

In the last few decades or so more and more people have been turning to complementary medicine in general and homeopathy has become one of the most common practices.

What happens during a “treatment”?

As with other complementary health practices when you visit a homeopath they will usually ask you about your lifestyle, eating habits, medical history and state of mind and not simply look for symptoms. the mainstream medical profession, with its time-limited consultations, could do well to adopt this more holistic approach, as it does have the benefit of not only improving doctor-patient relations but may enhance any placebo aspect of conventional treatments prescribed.

With homeopathy, the consultation allows the practitioner to tailor to the remedy to your illness and your personality. After a diagnostic session a ‘classical’ homeopath would prescribe a unique remedy, for you based on your symptoms and your personality and medical history. If that’s the case, then how can any over the counter remedies one might buy in a health store work? Well, to put it bluntly, they can’t.

There are also homeopathic practitioners known as ‘complex’ homeopaths who base their prescription more on the overall disease. Two patients with similar illness might therefore be given the same prescription but rather than being a uniquely selected medicine this would usually be a mixture of substances. Again, more pseudoscientific claptrap.

The remedy may be given in the form of tablets, powders, tinctures, creams and ointments or solutions together with advice on diet and lifestyle. Homeopaths will usually suggest you avoid strong-smelling substances and coffee, while taking homeopathic remedies. They may also advise you not to use certain aromatherapy oils or take herbal remedies while undergoing treatment. A fully qualified and registered homeopath will never recommend that you stop taking a prescribed medicine and would refer you back to your GP first if they think you should. Suddenly stopping a prescribed medicine might cause severe problems.

What disorders might be treated with homeopathy?

Homeopaths claim to be able to treat many illnesses including the following, but none of these actually works in the way claimed any benefits of the treatment can only be ascribed to the placebo effect.

Some practitioners even offer homeopathic alternatives to antimalarials and vaccines for serious diseases. This practice is very, very dangerous. If you visit a homeopath and they offer a preventative for malaria instead of you taking proper antimalarials, then you run the risk of catching the disease if exposed to malaria-carrying insects. Not a good idea, at all.

Where’s the evidence?
There have been lots of tests carried out to see whether homeopathy works, including trials with animals. None of these stand up to scrutiny and those that are more scientific fail to show anything but a placebo effect. The majority of studies cited by homeopaths to support their claims are simply not scientifically rigorous enough to prove anything. The British Medical Journal and the Lancet two well-respected medical journals have published reviews of several trials into homeopathy and have found no support for its effects beyond a placebo.

Fundamentally, preparing a homeopathic treatment involves diluting the supposed active ingredient over and over again to the point where there will be not one single molecule of the ingredient in the final remedy given to the patient.

In the late 1980s, French scientist, Jacques Benveniste, tried to show that although the original drug might not be present it does leave a ‘memory’ in the water in which it was first dissolved and it is this ‘memory’ that causes the effects of homeopathic remedies. Of course, no scientist has succeeded in duplicating his experiments and the consensus now is that he was wrong.

What do doctors think about homeopathy?

Homeopathy does not work. Physicians know this and will not morally prescribe homeopathy to their patients. It is an ethical minefield to consider homeopathy except as a deliberate exercise in placebo of last resort either for hypochondriacs who are actually not ill or for cases for which conventional medicine has no further answers.

Does homeopathy work?

No! There is not a single clinical trial to support claims for anything more than a placebo effect. Practitioners use vanishingly low doses of a compound or drug that if given in large enough quantities would cause the symptoms of the disease they are trying to cure. The homeopathic remedy Allium cepa, for instance, is made from an extract of onions. Onions, of course, make your eyes sting and water and your nose run when you peel and chop them. The homeopathic ‘like for like’ principle says that a disorder with these symptoms would be cured by a small dose of onion. So, homeopaths may use Allium cepa to treat hayfever. But any effect will be purely placebo, as there is not even a single molecule from the extract left in the solution after homeopathic dilution.

The underlying idea is that the symptom-causing remedy kick-starts our body to begin the self-healing process. There are a wide variety of homeopathic preparations, common ones might be made from the deadly nightshade, belladonna, arnica, chamomile, mercury and sulphur, sepia (extracted from squid ink), snake venom and even compounds extracted from bodily fluids. But, again, none of these so-called remedies contain any active component, despite claims about water having a memory of the molecules that were once dissolved in it. If that were the case, then surely we’d all be cured of everything just by drinking a glass of tap water.

For more on why homeopathy is nothing but snake oil, quackery and seriously bad medicine, check out Singh and Ernst’s - Trick or Treatment and accompanying website, which at the time of updating this page (June 6, 2008) is still under construction.

6 Comments »

  1. Steph said,

    January 20, 2008 at 9:37 am

    Last month’s Scientific American has a brief note about some researchers that created a “pipette” capable of loading zeptograms (that’s 10 to the minus 27 grams). Anyway, it works out to somewhere between 10,000 to 1,000,000 atoms per “droplet”.

    It occurred to me this could be a boon to the homeopathic trade. Put one drop of this in 1ml of water, add to a litre & repeat. They’d be guaranteed 0.01 to 1 atom per ml after only 2 dilutions. The efficiency of this, if passed on could significantly lower the cost of their remedies & make them even better value!

    S


  2. David Bradley said,

    May 20, 2008 at 7:39 pm

    This item was commissioned as an unbiased round-up for a general health magazine to go along side items covering other forms of alt med. Personally, on the basis of basic unyielding chemical principles I believe homeopathy to be nothing more than a con trick and a scam, there is even evidence that a placebo will work better than homeopathy on the right conditions.

    db


  3. Prashant said,

    June 7, 2008 at 5:56 am

    Excellent post.

    It is sad that Homeopathic institutes in India actually get Govt. funding.


  4. David Bradley said,

    June 7, 2008 at 7:43 am

    Prashant, there were four government funded homeopathic hospitals in the UK, but funding for one of them was recently removed. 1 down, 3 to go.


  5. James Pannozzi said,

    June 8, 2008 at 2:23 pm

    A restatement of comments I posted on another blog:

    I find it rather curious that supposedly scientifically minded people, skeptics if you will, periodically go on excursions of near hysteria to attack alternative medicines such as Homeopathy, ignoring research in numerous scientific journals by dedicated researchers AND ignoring the experiences and beneficial results obtained by genuine dedicated Homeopathists many of whom are also MDs.

    Why not investigate REAL HOMEOPATHY, instead of the nonsense outlined in the absurd article above and REAL RESEARCH concerning Homeopathy instead of indulging in ridicule and hysterical condemnation? Here, for example (see link below), is a video presentation by Dr. Iris Bell, M.D., Phd, a researcher at the University of Arizona which should prove of interest.
    It was presented at a Homeopathy debate and you can see some good anti-Homeopathy presentations in this series too:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYO6nNQGe1M

    “Pre-Clinical and clinical studies demonstrate that there ARE biological effects of Homeopathic remedies” (Dr. Iris Bell)

    Now, if we use our feelings about how curious or unlikely or even how IMPOSSIBLE we feel some phenomena to be, then NO scientific progress is ever going to be made - not in medicine and not anywhere else. I am reminded of the travails of the discoverer of
    H. Pylorii as a causative effect in some pyloric ulcers which flew in the face of “official” theory and which was resolute in opposition to his research… UNTIL, that is, he injected himself with the bacteria and then clearly demonstrated that he now had a pyloric ulcer and eventually proved his point.

    Skepticism is good but UNREASONING skepticism in the face of the unknown will stop all progress. Science is NOT conducted in the media nor by James Randi and magicians, it is conducted by scientists in laboratories.

    In a series of repeated experiments, Madame Ennis, a British pharmacological researcher and herself a homeopathy skeptic, obtained biological results from a substance which seemingly had no molecules of the original substance present to cause such an effect. The experiment was repeated in four other international laboratories with 3 of them getting the same results.

    But all we hear, is the “refutation” of this experiment by BBC, by anonymous scientists who did not follow exactly her protocol and then got negative results.

    I will say it one last time.
    Science by ridicule and unreasoning hysteria will halt all progress. MANY of the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity are completely counter intutive and go against our “common sense”,
    but they are proven and really do happen. Homeopathy awaits the research to either vindicate it or else illustrate the mechanisms of what is or is not happening.
    I refer you to Dr. Bell’s quote above.


  6. David Bradley said,

    June 9, 2008 at 8:14 am

    No, no, no. There are several valid forms of alternative medicine with genuinely observable and repeatable effects. The scientific consensus, irrespective of the odd, small, poorly controlled “clinical” trial of homeoptahy, however, is that regardless of the fact that there is no plausible explanation for homeopathy, it simply fails to show itself anything more than a placebo.

    More worryingly though, it is downright dangerous when it comes to those practitioners who suggest a vial of sugar water could protect someone against a lethal disease, such as malaria or HIV. Even prominent homeopaths, such as Jeanette Winterson, have conceded that homeopathy cannot replace anti-retroviral drugs in the fight against AIDS.

    Homeopaths repeatedly claim some kind of mystical properties of their treatments, something alchemical, almost, that is beyond the realm of current science. And yet, many then hang their arguments on quantum mechanics, and more recently, “nano” explanations. There is nothing mystical. There is probably no form of treatment that cannot be tested using standard double-blind clinical trials. Where are the trials of homeopathy that have been done properly?

    You might like to read Dr Ben Goldacre’s item on the subject in The Guardian in which he explains evidence-based medicine very well and demonstrates exactly why homeopathy does not fit into this category. I see no hysterics in either my nor Dr Goldacre’s article although I do see hysterical responses from homeopathy practitioners every time a refutation is published that might ultimately derail their gravy train.


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