What the hell, people.
I am having an actual argument with someone on Facebook who is apparently a fan of homeopathic remedies. My saving grace here is that she seems to be sort of reasonable and is not completely crazy. She hasn't thrown out the "big pharma is keeping natural remedies down!" argument yet, which means that I can approach this as an opportunity to teach people something instead of a shouting match. Which is way, way more productive.
I am reproducing an edited version of my little lesson here in case anyone is interested in knowing why homeopathy is bullshit and learning a little bit about pharmaceutical drugs in the process.
What is Homeopathy?
I'm not going to go into the history of homeopathy too deeply, but it was invented by a guy named Samuel Hahnemann and his colleagues as a response to the "heroic" medicine of the day. Leeches and bloodletting and purging whatnot often killed people instead of fixing them. So they came up with a system based on the "principle" that "like cures like." This came out of Hahnemann's ass and has to do with sympathetic magic and nothing to do with physics or chemistry at all, but they called it "the law of similars" and decided that if ingesting a substance caused a symptom than taking that same substance and diluting it in a thousand parts of water and then drinking the result would cure that symptom.
This makes no sense, but even today people claim it's an idea with merit--they just dress it up. This is supposedly true even if there is no detectable amount of that substance in the preparation because according to homeopathic principles water remembers having been in contact with a particular compound. If this is true, then drinking city lake or river water (or even tap water) should cure cancer, because there are extremely small amounts of industrial chemicals present in unfiltered water, and those same chemicals are known to cause cancer.
This doesn't happen, and homeopathy's proponents claim that there's a good explanation. They often reply that the reason for this is that homeopathic remedies must be prepared. It isn't the contact with water, and it isn't the low concentration that gives homeopathic remedies their power--it is the process of repeatedly diluting and shaking them when they are made, coupled with the "intent" of the maker. That's right, you can only make real homeopathic remedies if while preparing them you think really hard about what you want them to do. Otherwise, they will get confused and not work.
Protip: This is not science. It is witchcraft. I actually periodically hang out with a lot of people who might identify themselves as witches and none of them would dare call homeopathy anything other than "magic." Some people try to explain it with appeals to "quantum physics" that do nothing but demonstrate that those people do not actually know anything about quantum physics.
Like cures like?
If homeopathy is true, everything we know about modern pharmacology is wrong. EVERYTHING. If homeopathy is true, giving higher doses of blood pressure medicine shouldn't lower blood pressure further, it should arbitrarily start raising it.
Some claim that homeopathy is plausible because it supposedly works the way vaccines do. The idea that vaccines are related to homeopathy is...tenuous. The fact is that we actually understand how vaccines work. A vaccine stimulates the immune system in ways we have defined and measured. We know which cell counts are increased and why, and we understand what substances those cells secrete to communicate with each other. The immune system is extremely complicated and yet we have mapped out the majority of its functions.
Allergy "desensitization" treatments aren't homeopathy, either. In desensitization treatments, you start out giving very small doses of the allergen and gradually give larger and larger doses. Eventually even a "large" dose of the substance will not provoke an allergic reaction. This is the exact opposite of how homeopathy claims to work! Homeopathy says that substances have a greater curative effect the more you dilute them. If homeopathy were true, you would not gradually increase the dose--you would give extremely diluted preparations of the allergen and that would be sufficient to prevent full exposure from causing an immune response.
No one knows the mechanism of action of homeopathy. I would argue that before we try to explain how something happens we have to make sure it actually did happen, but to each their own. A homeopath can't tell you why you need to take super-dilute bee pollen to cure your allergies except that "bee pollen causes allergies." They might dress it up with a nice bedside manner, but the fact is that no one can even propose how homeopathy is supposed to work beyond stuff about "quantum energy fields" and "the power of intentions" and "the memory of water."
While it's true that we have pharmaceutical drugs with mechanisms of action that are not entirely explained, we at least have theories as to how they work that jive with our overall understanding of how the human body functions.
They're allowed to sell this stuff?
The FDA regulation of homeopathy is extremely weird. There is a whole thing called the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States, which is a list of ingredients that homeopathic remedies are legally allowed to contain and what they are legally allowed to say they can be used for. This exists because in 1938 one of the congressional representatives who was involved in the bills that created the FDA really liked homeopathy and wanted to make sure it didn't go away.
The ingredients listed in the HPUS are not listed there because they have been subjected to rigorous scientific studies. They are listed there because Samuel Hahnemann and his colleagues did things like eat belladonna and then write down, stream-of-consciousness style, everything they experienced after eating belladonna. They decided that all of these "symptoms" were caused by the belladonna ingestion, so you have listings like "after consuming this substance, the subject experienced itching, headache, nausea, and a desire to eat salty foods." Not even kidding. They then decided completely out of nowhere that if taking a lot of belladonna caused nausea that taking a super-dilute formula of belladonna would cure it.
So the FDA's regulation of homeopathy is quite seriously "not at all," because the FDA isn't allowed to regulate homeopathy. They aren't allowed to demand that any homeopathic product prove that it works. Instead, if the ingredient is listed in the HPUS formulary for use at a specific dilution, it's "approved" for marketing. It's as bad as, if not worse than, herbal supplements. Companies don't have to prove that either is safe OR effective before they can be sold, and the only way to get them off the market is to prove they're UNsafe...likely after people have been seriously hurt.
Working "with" the body instead of "against it?"
Proponents of homeopathy claim that it works "with" the body whereas drugs work "against" it. This is both meaningless and untrue.
The fact is that 95% of pharmaceuticals work by activating (or blocking) the same receptor sites that are normally activated by chemicals your body makes on its own. The compound histamine is released by your cells during an allergic reaction; in order to cause unpleasant effects (itching, sneezing, watery eyes, etc.) histamine must first bind to "histamine receptors" located throughout the body. Antihistamines work by blocking the door--they sit on those histamine receptors and prevent histamine from turning them on. The histamine is still in your blood, but you don't suffer the symptoms of allergies (at least, not as badly) because it can't do anything if it can't bind to receptors.
If you don't think that counts because the drug is "blocking" something instead of activating it: The drug calcitonin, which is used to reduce and prevent both bone loss and bone pain due to osteoporosis, does so by binding the same receptors as the natural hormones responsible for regulating the calcium balance in the blood versus the amount in bone.
Homeopathy has no side-effects!
One of homeopathy's supposed benefits is that it has "no side-effects." But if homeopathic remedies work, then their actions change the function of the body somehow.
Pain, for instance, doesn't just magically go away--it stops when the chemicals that trigger pain receptors go away or when other chemicals trigger different receptors that specifically relieve pain. Drugs like ibuprofen do the former--they shut off pain chemicals. Opioids like morphine do the latter--they push the "relief of pain" buttons in your brain. So if homeopathy is going to have any effect at all, it must change something that's going on inside your body.
Pharmaceutical drugs have side-effects because in addition to activating or blocking the receptors we want, they often unintentionally activate or block other similarly-shaped receptors (which is why Benadryl fixes your itching but dries out your mouth). Any change can go too far. So what happens if you take the wrong homeopathic remedy? Or you overdose by taking too much?
The answer is, of course, "nothing." Homeopathy's proponents claim this is because homeopathy "works with the body," which, as stated, means nothing. What they are really claiming is that your body has some default "healthy" state and that homeopathic remedies encourage your body to return to that state, but that they somehow do so without actually causing your body to change the way it works at all. These same people probably wonder how aspirin "knows" you have a headache. (I am not joking, someone actually used that as a "gotcha" question in an argument I read on a blog once.)
Medical science is amazing and complicated enough that if you don't understand it it might as well be magic. So proposing that homeopathy magically fixes your body with zero chance of screwing up the balance of things in the process doesn't seem any more unreasonable than the idea that you can put drugs in your stomach to make a headache go away--as long as you word the argument correctly and are talking to people who don't know better.
Anything that has "no side-effects" must have actually no effect on the function of your body, which means it cannot possibly work!
tl;dr: Homeopathic remedies are magic water prepared by sorcerers who are not subject to FDA oversight as long as the ingredients they want to use are already listed in the Big Homeopathy Spellbook (the HPUS). Vaccines are not homeopathy. Neither are allergy desensitization treatments. Anything that claims not to have side-effects doesn't have effects.
I am reproducing an edited version of my little lesson here in case anyone is interested in knowing why homeopathy is bullshit and learning a little bit about pharmaceutical drugs in the process.
What is Homeopathy?
I'm not going to go into the history of homeopathy too deeply, but it was invented by a guy named Samuel Hahnemann and his colleagues as a response to the "heroic" medicine of the day. Leeches and bloodletting and purging whatnot often killed people instead of fixing them. So they came up with a system based on the "principle" that "like cures like." This came out of Hahnemann's ass and has to do with sympathetic magic and nothing to do with physics or chemistry at all, but they called it "the law of similars" and decided that if ingesting a substance caused a symptom than taking that same substance and diluting it in a thousand parts of water and then drinking the result would cure that symptom.
This makes no sense, but even today people claim it's an idea with merit--they just dress it up. This is supposedly true even if there is no detectable amount of that substance in the preparation because according to homeopathic principles water remembers having been in contact with a particular compound. If this is true, then drinking city lake or river water (or even tap water) should cure cancer, because there are extremely small amounts of industrial chemicals present in unfiltered water, and those same chemicals are known to cause cancer.
This doesn't happen, and homeopathy's proponents claim that there's a good explanation. They often reply that the reason for this is that homeopathic remedies must be prepared. It isn't the contact with water, and it isn't the low concentration that gives homeopathic remedies their power--it is the process of repeatedly diluting and shaking them when they are made, coupled with the "intent" of the maker. That's right, you can only make real homeopathic remedies if while preparing them you think really hard about what you want them to do. Otherwise, they will get confused and not work.
Protip: This is not science. It is witchcraft. I actually periodically hang out with a lot of people who might identify themselves as witches and none of them would dare call homeopathy anything other than "magic." Some people try to explain it with appeals to "quantum physics" that do nothing but demonstrate that those people do not actually know anything about quantum physics.
Like cures like?
If homeopathy is true, everything we know about modern pharmacology is wrong. EVERYTHING. If homeopathy is true, giving higher doses of blood pressure medicine shouldn't lower blood pressure further, it should arbitrarily start raising it.
Some claim that homeopathy is plausible because it supposedly works the way vaccines do. The idea that vaccines are related to homeopathy is...tenuous. The fact is that we actually understand how vaccines work. A vaccine stimulates the immune system in ways we have defined and measured. We know which cell counts are increased and why, and we understand what substances those cells secrete to communicate with each other. The immune system is extremely complicated and yet we have mapped out the majority of its functions.
Allergy "desensitization" treatments aren't homeopathy, either. In desensitization treatments, you start out giving very small doses of the allergen and gradually give larger and larger doses. Eventually even a "large" dose of the substance will not provoke an allergic reaction. This is the exact opposite of how homeopathy claims to work! Homeopathy says that substances have a greater curative effect the more you dilute them. If homeopathy were true, you would not gradually increase the dose--you would give extremely diluted preparations of the allergen and that would be sufficient to prevent full exposure from causing an immune response.
No one knows the mechanism of action of homeopathy. I would argue that before we try to explain how something happens we have to make sure it actually did happen, but to each their own. A homeopath can't tell you why you need to take super-dilute bee pollen to cure your allergies except that "bee pollen causes allergies." They might dress it up with a nice bedside manner, but the fact is that no one can even propose how homeopathy is supposed to work beyond stuff about "quantum energy fields" and "the power of intentions" and "the memory of water."
While it's true that we have pharmaceutical drugs with mechanisms of action that are not entirely explained, we at least have theories as to how they work that jive with our overall understanding of how the human body functions.
They're allowed to sell this stuff?
The FDA regulation of homeopathy is extremely weird. There is a whole thing called the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States, which is a list of ingredients that homeopathic remedies are legally allowed to contain and what they are legally allowed to say they can be used for. This exists because in 1938 one of the congressional representatives who was involved in the bills that created the FDA really liked homeopathy and wanted to make sure it didn't go away.
The ingredients listed in the HPUS are not listed there because they have been subjected to rigorous scientific studies. They are listed there because Samuel Hahnemann and his colleagues did things like eat belladonna and then write down, stream-of-consciousness style, everything they experienced after eating belladonna. They decided that all of these "symptoms" were caused by the belladonna ingestion, so you have listings like "after consuming this substance, the subject experienced itching, headache, nausea, and a desire to eat salty foods." Not even kidding. They then decided completely out of nowhere that if taking a lot of belladonna caused nausea that taking a super-dilute formula of belladonna would cure it.
So the FDA's regulation of homeopathy is quite seriously "not at all," because the FDA isn't allowed to regulate homeopathy. They aren't allowed to demand that any homeopathic product prove that it works. Instead, if the ingredient is listed in the HPUS formulary for use at a specific dilution, it's "approved" for marketing. It's as bad as, if not worse than, herbal supplements. Companies don't have to prove that either is safe OR effective before they can be sold, and the only way to get them off the market is to prove they're UNsafe...likely after people have been seriously hurt.
Working "with" the body instead of "against it?"
Proponents of homeopathy claim that it works "with" the body whereas drugs work "against" it. This is both meaningless and untrue.
The fact is that 95% of pharmaceuticals work by activating (or blocking) the same receptor sites that are normally activated by chemicals your body makes on its own. The compound histamine is released by your cells during an allergic reaction; in order to cause unpleasant effects (itching, sneezing, watery eyes, etc.) histamine must first bind to "histamine receptors" located throughout the body. Antihistamines work by blocking the door--they sit on those histamine receptors and prevent histamine from turning them on. The histamine is still in your blood, but you don't suffer the symptoms of allergies (at least, not as badly) because it can't do anything if it can't bind to receptors.
If you don't think that counts because the drug is "blocking" something instead of activating it: The drug calcitonin, which is used to reduce and prevent both bone loss and bone pain due to osteoporosis, does so by binding the same receptors as the natural hormones responsible for regulating the calcium balance in the blood versus the amount in bone.
Homeopathy has no side-effects!
One of homeopathy's supposed benefits is that it has "no side-effects." But if homeopathic remedies work, then their actions change the function of the body somehow.
Pain, for instance, doesn't just magically go away--it stops when the chemicals that trigger pain receptors go away or when other chemicals trigger different receptors that specifically relieve pain. Drugs like ibuprofen do the former--they shut off pain chemicals. Opioids like morphine do the latter--they push the "relief of pain" buttons in your brain. So if homeopathy is going to have any effect at all, it must change something that's going on inside your body.
Pharmaceutical drugs have side-effects because in addition to activating or blocking the receptors we want, they often unintentionally activate or block other similarly-shaped receptors (which is why Benadryl fixes your itching but dries out your mouth). Any change can go too far. So what happens if you take the wrong homeopathic remedy? Or you overdose by taking too much?
The answer is, of course, "nothing." Homeopathy's proponents claim this is because homeopathy "works with the body," which, as stated, means nothing. What they are really claiming is that your body has some default "healthy" state and that homeopathic remedies encourage your body to return to that state, but that they somehow do so without actually causing your body to change the way it works at all. These same people probably wonder how aspirin "knows" you have a headache. (I am not joking, someone actually used that as a "gotcha" question in an argument I read on a blog once.)
Medical science is amazing and complicated enough that if you don't understand it it might as well be magic. So proposing that homeopathy magically fixes your body with zero chance of screwing up the balance of things in the process doesn't seem any more unreasonable than the idea that you can put drugs in your stomach to make a headache go away--as long as you word the argument correctly and are talking to people who don't know better.
Anything that has "no side-effects" must have actually no effect on the function of your body, which means it cannot possibly work!
tl;dr: Homeopathic remedies are magic water prepared by sorcerers who are not subject to FDA oversight as long as the ingredients they want to use are already listed in the Big Homeopathy Spellbook (the HPUS). Vaccines are not homeopathy. Neither are allergy desensitization treatments. Anything that claims not to have side-effects doesn't have effects.