General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Switzerland to recognise homeopathy as legitimate medicine [View all]D Gary Grady
(133 posts)I bought something over the counter for an earache at a drugstore and didn't even notice it was homeopathic until after I'd tried it. As it happened, my earache didn't get better, but that proves nothing. Illnesses get better or worse for a variety of reasons, and in an individual case it's hard to be sure of the cause.
It makes more sense to test drugs in a way that takes into account the fact that various things, even our own positive and negative expectations, can throw off the results. Unfortunately, on the rare occasions that homeopathic remedies are tested that way, they don't do very well.
Many people think that homeopathy has something to do with natural remedies, but it's actually something invented in the late 1700s based only theory and possibly an erroneous guess about how inoculation worked. The theory is that (1) somehow "like cures like" (illnesses can be treated by substances that cause the same symptoms), (2) high dilutions make a drug more effective (homeopathic dilutions are often so extreme that literally none of the original substance is found in a given dose), and (3) the underlying disease is irrelevant; just treat the symptoms (even though very different diseases can produce almost identical symptoms, such as hemorrhagic and ischemic stroke).
If homeopathy really worked, we'd all be taking homeopathic medicine all the time every time we eat or drink something with water in it. All water has been through a vapor phase then had something diluted in it that was then naturally percussed and re-diluted multiple times.