HOMEOPATHY for dummies

THE CASE

Homeopathy has a long history. It was invented in the late 1700s by German physician Samuel Hahnemann. He based it on treating "like with like", his theory being that a condition can be cured by a substance that produces the same signs and symptoms in a healthy person. But this is where it becomes scientifically problematic, because a necessary corollary of this is that the weaker the medicine, the more effective it becomes.

With the blossoming of physics and chemistry in the late nineteenth century it became obvious that the basic tenets of homeopathy did not stand up to scientific scrutiny. Put simply, if you keep diluting a solution there will become a time when there is no active ingredient left, and most homeopathic products can be shown mathematically to exceed this limit.

Remember the less that isn't there, then the more beneficial the homeopathic remedy!

Another problem is that homeopathy has never been shown to be any more effective than a placebo. The Lancet dated 27/08/2005 published the results of a study that concluded that there was no evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy, and went on to say:

"doctors need to be bold and honest with their patients about homeopathy's lack of benefits"

Or as the National Advisory Council for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NACCAM) website says:

"Overall, clinical trial results are contradictory, and systematic reviews and meta-analyses have not found homeopathy to be a definitively proven treatment for any medical condition."

It is hard to think of any other group of products that so successfully avoids the scrutiny of consumer protection legislation. Not only is there no hard scientific evidence that it works, but homeopathy actually claims to contravene the basic laws of physics and chemistry. Most homeopathy practitioners no longer pretend that the extreme dilutions they use contain any active ingredients. They instead rely on magic, claiming that the water somehow remembers the chemicals that have been diluted away, and the preparation institutes a healing process as if they were still there. The real question is, how come the water remembers the beneficial effects of the substance but forgets the side effects and the toxic effects. Water must have selective memory loss. I will reiterate, there are no laws of physics, chemistry or biology that support this highly imaginative theory.

I recently wrote:

Homeopathy is to pharmaceutics as astrology is to astronomy, in each case the former is fantasy and the latter is scientific. Time and time again homeopathy has been proven (yes proven!) to be exactly as effective as a placebo.

Usually homeopathy is just a piece of harmless junk pseudo-science. The only loss is financial, but ocasionally it gets dangerous. For example up to 2002, homeopathic "vaccines" for meningococcus, hepatitis B and influenza were being sold, these were banned by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) on 9/09/2002. This ban remains in place. The danger is that naive, well meaning parents were allowing their children to be given these non-therapeutic "vaccines" in the mistaken belief that they would be protected from diseases.

Until someone proves that dilution beyond Avogadro's number is meaningful, or can even present a cogent argument on how it could possibly be meaningful, I believe that any pharmacist who practises homeopathy is guilty of fraud, if not professional malpractice. They have the scientific training to know better. If they really must practice homeopathy, it should be away from a pharmacy so that this daft money and time waster is not given a false credibility that it does not deserve.


MY VERDICT

Please don't accuse me of having a closed mind. There have never been any reasons, of physics, chemistry, biology, logic, mathematics, or medicine, given for how homeopathy could possibly work(see below)*. Any perceived benefits are either fraudulent, imaginary or the placebo effect.

DO IT YOURSELF HOMEOPATHY

According to homeopathic principals "like treats like", so if a severe blow to the head with a hammer causes a headache, then it should be possible to treat your migraine with some very light hammer blows. Try it at home sometime, but don't blame me if it doesn't work.

*there is no support for homeopathy in physiology, pharmacology, anatomy, biochemistry, common sense, herbalism, pharmaceutics or statistics either.

FURTHER READING

The Cognitive Dissonance of Homoeopathy
http://sciencebasedpharmacy.wordpress.com/?s=homoeopathy

“Did you hear about the patient that was taking homeopathy?"
"He forgot to take a dose and died of an overdose.”
(thanks for the nice joke Scott)