Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Homeopathy

My Positions

  1. I reject homeopathy as a valid theory of medicine.
  2. Homeopathic remedies have no effect beyond placebo, and homeopathy should not be funded by, or offered through, public health services.
  3. Homeopathy is not "alternative medicine". Medicine that works is called medicine. Homeopathy is a ritual with pharmaceutical packaging.

Notes

  1. Homeopathy has no basis in chemistry, biology, or clinical evidence. Its core principles, "like cures like" (a substance that causes symptoms in a healthy person will cure those symptoms in a sick one) and extreme serial dilution (the remedy becomes more potent the more it is diluted), are scientifically implausible and unsupported by rigorous trials.
  2. The dilution problem. A typical homeopathic potency of 30C means the original substance has been diluted by a factor of 10⁶⁰. Avogadro's number is about 6 × 10²³. Beyond roughly 12C there is, on average, not a single molecule of the original substance left in the remedy. The patient is taking water, or a sugar pill that has had water dripped on it. Homeopaths respond that water "remembers" the substance, for which there is no evidence and no mechanism, and which would in any case mean the water also remembered everything else it had ever been in contact with.
  3. The evidence. Numerous studies and systematic reviews have found homeopathic remedies to be no more effective than placebo. The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council reviewed 176 studies across 61 conditions (2015) and found no reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective for any condition. The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee reached the same conclusion in 2010 and recommended that the NHS cease funding it, which it did in 2017. Shang et al.'s meta-analysis in The Lancet (2005) found that the apparent effects of homeopathy in trials were explained by small trial size and poor methodology, and vanished in the larger, better-conducted trials.
  4. Why it seems to work. Placebo, regression to the mean (people seek treatment when symptoms are at their worst, and would have improved anyway), the natural course of self-limiting illness, and the long, attentive consultation that homeopaths offer and the NHS cannot. Of these, the last is the only genuine benefit, and it does not require the sugar pills.
  5. The harm. Homeopathy is not harmless, because its harm is indirect: people substitute it for effective treatment. There are documented deaths from the use of homeopathy in place of real medicine for cancer, malaria, and childhood infections, and homeopathic "vaccines" (nosodes) have been promoted as alternatives to real ones (see Anti-Vaccine).
  6. It is therefore a pseudoscience without medical validity, and I regard its continued sale in high-street pharmacies as a failure of consumer protection.

Sources

  • National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia), Statement on Homeopathy and Evidence Review (2015)
  • House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, Fourth Report of Session 2009–10
  • Shang, A. et al., "Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects? Comparative study of placebo-controlled trials of homoeopathy and allopathy", The Lancet 366 (2005)
  • Ben Goldacre, Bad Science (2008), chapter 4, which remains the clearest short account

Also see