Why People Still Believe In Homeopathy
Homeopathic medications often contain zero molecules of their "main" ingredient, but there's a reason people find this 18th-Century pseudoscience appealing.
A while back, Silicon Valley congressman Ro Khanna got dragged Twitter for sending a letter to the FDA about ensuring that “genuine homeopathic products remain accessible.”
Among the hundreds of critical replies, many pointed out that homeopathic remedies are just sugar pills or plain water:
I was intrigued by this, because while I knew homeopathy was one of many alternative-health pseudosciences, I wasn’t quite sure what it was specifically about, or how it related to other approaches to medicine—evidence-based or otherwise.
Vox has a tremendous explainer: In the 1790s, German physician Samuel Hahnemann
defined several so-called laws; two are guiding principles of homeopathy today:
Like cures like:Homeopathy posits that a substance that produces a disease’s symptoms in a healthy person is a cure for that disease.
…Law of minimum dose: The lower the dose, say homeopathic practitioners, the more potent the remedy. To that end, homeopathic remedies are extremely diluted. Many are so diluted, in fact, that they contain no detectable molecules of the “mother tincture.” Hahnemann intended to avoid poisoning, as many of the substances that he introduced as remedies were toxic. But soon his rationale became less, well, rational: “Vital energy” was transmitted during dilution, Hahnemann believed, so none of the original substance needed to remain.
For example, one of more than 1,000 homeopathic products sold on Walmart.com, “Equate Children’s Homeopathic Daytime Cold & Cough Liquid,” contains “Natrum Muriaticum 6X HPUS.”
What’s that?
HPUS means Homœopathic Pharmacopœia of the United States, meaning the ingredient is a standard one in homeophathic remedies.
The 6X refers to how diluted the ingredient is. 6X means 10⁻⁶., or 0.0001% concentration.
Oh, and what’s Natrum Muriaticum? Table salt—good old sodium chloride.
Now, here’s where homeopathy goes in precisely the opposite direction from pharmacology: the lower the dose, the more potent the homeopathic remedy is purported to be, according to the “law of minimum dose.”
In fact, the homeopathic preparations considered to most potent, 400X or 200C preparations, contain not even a single molecule of their active ingredient. Wikipedia explains:
A popular homeopathic treatment for the flu is a 200C dilution of duck liver, marketed under the name Oscillococcinum. As there are only about 10⁸⁰ atoms in the entire observable universe, a dilution of one molecule in the observable universe would be about 40C. Oscillococcinum would thus require 10³²⁰ times more atoms to simply have one molecule in the final substance.
The full article at Vox is worth a read, because it puts homeopathy into context and makes it a little more understandable how such obvious quackery became fairly well-established.
One key factor is that mainstream medicine was full of quackery in the 1790s, and for a long time afterward. Not until the 20th century did it become largely evidence-based, rejecting such harmful practices as bloodletting.
Homeopathy does absolutely nothing, but at least it won’t actively kill you—which wasn’t always the case for mainstream medicine.
What about minor ailments, like cold symptoms? Cold and flu remedies seem to make up the bulk of the $1.2 billion US homeopathic market, and are sold in most stores like CVS, Walmart, and Whole Foods.
People don’t like doing nothing, but often, that’s the best course of action for minor ailments.
But it can be deadly as a form of inaction. Natalie Grams, an MD who was once a homeopathy true believer, told Vox:
[T]his is the biggest risk — that people will forgo conventional, proven treatments in favor of homeopathic remedies which, she says, are nothing more than sugar pills. “You might think, ‘Oh, if that remedy doesn’t help me, I’ll use another, I’ll use another.’ And you lose time. If you have cancer, time is life.”
It’s not the 1790s any more, and ignoring proven treatments has real downsides.