Unnatural Remedies

Never far from the nutter's news, homeopathy has somehow managed to retain a large following who will espouse its effectiveness to anyone unfortunate enough to fall within earshot. Daryl Holland takes a science-eye view of a distinctly unmedical practice.

Acupuncture, naturopathy, aromatherapy, chiropractics, homeopathy. There seems to be a never ending list of alternative medicines available to the discerning or, in some cases, gullible public. Let us turn our attentions to the magical world of homeopathy.

Do you remember the 18th century? You know, the good old days of medicine, when bacteria and viruses hadn’t been discovered, no-one really knew why people got sick, and doctors made a good living by wiping peoples foreheads with a damp towel while they watched them die. It was during this time that Dr. Samuel Hanheman, a German physician, invented homeopathy.

Medical science has since come on in leaps and bounds, with the discovery of antibiotics, routine vaccinations and all kinds of really useful pills and jabs. We are now living longer and healthier lives than we ever have before. Homeopathy kind of got left behind, having not changed much since the late 1700s.

So what exactly is homeopathy? Well, practitioners claim that it works on two major principles: like cures like (the law of similitude), and the more dilute the better (the law of infinitesimals).

Let me give you an example. What do burns, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, absence of thirst and pre-menstrual tension all have in common? If you are like me, you are probably thinking “not much”. If you are a homeopath, however, you are probably thinking “quite a lot”.

Apparently, all of these maladies have symptoms somewhat similar to a bee sting (redness, inflammation, pain etc.) and, therefore, because like cures like, a healthy dose of crushed up bees is the perfect cure. That’s right, crushed up bees, otherwise known as Apis mel, is a homeopathic treatment that supposedly eases the pain of arthritis.

Bee jam: the homeopath's cure of choice for pre-menstrual tension.

Instead of actually catching a bee, crushing it up, mixing it with a teaspoon of honey (how ironic) and gulping it down, homeopaths assure as that by diluting a solution of crushed up bees, and then diluting it some more, and then more still, the effectiveness goes up and up and up (the law of infinitesimals).

So what they do is take a bunch of bees, mix them up in a blender, dilute them in water 1 part in 100, give them a good shake and then repeat this 30 times for a final dilution of 1 part in 10⁶⁰ (that’s a 1 with 60 zeros after it, a rather large number), at which point not a single molecule of the original crushed bee remains. They then make a sugar pill from this water, stick it in a bottle and label it Apis mel 30c. This is one of the more popular homeopathic treatments.

Many homeopathic treatments are based on natural ingredients: crushed bees, snake venom, deadly nightshade, that sort of thing, but some (called nosodes) are made from the diluted excrement of diseased humans (e.g. vomit, faeces, puss). In many ways it is good that none of the active ingredient remains.

It all sounds a bit wacky, but to give this concept some scientific credibility, homeopaths invoke the memory of water effect. This concept was invented by Jacques Benveniste and briefly made it into mainstream science when he published an article in Nature in 1988 that suggested that antibodies retained their effectiveness at dilutions up to 10¹²⁰. He claimed that given the right shaking regime, the water can somehow remember the structure of the antibody, even if the antibody itself is no longer present.

The only problem is that when these exact same experiments were run by the same research group under the supervision of an independent team of investigators using a double-blind trial, no effect was found, and in the very next issue of Nature, a follow-up was published where the editor, John Maddox noted:

“…the hypothesis that water can be imprinted with the memory of past solutes is as unnecessary as it is fanciful.”

Homeopathy is a branch of ‘alternative medicine’, which is so-called because doctors do not think it works and scientists know that it cannot work. If it was proven to work it would be called medicine. Simple. The tenets of homeopathy are the complete opposite of what modern medicine has found to be effective. Medical doctors prescribed antibiotics, antihistamines and anti-inflammatories (i.e. opposites cure), and the higher the dose (the less dilute), the more effective it is.

Fortunately, homeopathic remedies have no side effects. After all, it is just water (or sometimes alcohol).

Famous de-bunkings of the effectiveness of homeopathic treatments include a Belgian group who publicly consumed huge quantities of 30c homeopathic remedies based on poisons with no ill effects, apart from a slight tipsiness, because some of the treatments contained alcohol. Or there is the magician James Randi, who regularly consumes entire bottles of homeopathic sleeping pills before giving a lecture on how ineffective homeopathic sleeping pills are. For those interested, Mr. Randi will also give $1 million to anyone that can prove the effectiveness of homeopathy. After all, it would be proof that there really is magic. Strangely, nobody has claimed the prize yet.

The concept of homeopathy is so completely ridiculous that it is not even worth debating, except for the fact that millions of people use the treatments. Why? Here is an example. You get a migraine, and you take a visit to your local homeopath. He or she sits you down, listen to your problem, ask you lots of questions about yourself, is generally sympathetic and then hands you a packet of sugar pills (with a fancy sounding name) that he or she says will make you feel better. You go home, take your sugar pills and the next day you are fine. The pills worked! Of course you could have done nothing, had a good sleep and the next day been fine anyway. The combination of the placebo effect and anecdotal evidence ensures that homeopathy will continue to thrive.

So, if you have a migraine, an itch, or are feeling a bit down, by all means visit your homeopath and take your sugar pill (unless you are a bee lover). If nothing else, it’s good for the economy. But if your homeopath recommends treatments for malaria or aids or suggests that you don’t vaccinate your children, for goodness sake see a real doctor. We haven’t had 250 years of solid medical advances for people to die from perfectly treatable diseases because of some crazy notion that the opposite of medicine is better than medicine.

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