Homeopathy: Bogus Medicine

Homeopathy, that most bogus of medical practices, is based on two basic principles:

1. Like cures like.

At first blush this might seem like something akin to a vaccination, where one receives a small dose of a virus (often a dead virus) to help prevent one from falling ill with the viral infection. But a vaccination works by triggering the immune response so that your body will fight against that viral infection when it's encountered in the environment.

Homeopathy is nothing like this. If you have a skin infection whose symptoms might vaguely resemble poison ivy, then ingesting a small dose of poison ivy would be the cure for you. Do you have seizures? Ingesting large quantities of plants from the nightshade family can also cause seizures. Therefore, the cure for you is to ingest small quantities of plants from the nightshade family.

2. The smallest effective dose.

According to homeopathy, you want to ingest a very diluted quantity of the "medicine." In fact, the more diluted the substance the better it is. Most homeopathic remedies are so diluted that not even one molecule of the active ingredient remains in the "medicine." It's nothing but water. But this is special water. This water somehow has a memory of the active ingredient, and it is this memory in the water that acts as a cure. That's right, the memory of the water. Or as a homeopath might describe it: An imprint of the substance has been retained in the water.

Is there any scientific evidence for such an imprint or memory in water? None. But that doesn't stop homeopaths. Science, they say, hasn't figured out how to identify or measure this imprint yet. Homeopaths don't require observational evidence of imprints or memories in water. They just know that these imprints exist. But how they know is anyone's guess.

This sounds like it was made up by some 18th century quack, before the rise of modern medicine. And in fact that's the case. Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) came up with homeopathy. And while scientific medicine has improved over the years through research, studies and evidence, homeopathy hasn't changed one drop since the day of Hahnemann.

What's more disturbing is that homeopaths claim that their "cures" actually work. But every properly designed scientific test of homeopathy has shown that it works no better than a placebo. All experiments of homeopathy that show otherwise have been proven to use flawed methodologies in their experiments.

Save your time and money. Don't waste it on homeopathy. It's only water.