Homeopathic remedies are often diluted until no original molecule remains
Homeopathy rests on two ideas from 1796: that like cures like, and that diluting a substance makes it stronger. Many remedies are thinned so far that not one molecule of the starting ingredient is likely to survive. Trials show no objective effect, and several countries have stopped paying for them.
The German physician Samuel Hahnemann devised the system, holding that a substance which produces symptoms in a healthy person can cure similar symptoms in someone ill, a principle known as similia similibus curentur. He coined the word homeopathy, which first appeared in print in 1807, and also the term allopathic medicine as a jab at conventional practice. His motivation was partly reasonable: late 18th-century medicine was often useless or harmful, and he favoured single drugs at lower doses, though alongside a vitalistic, immaterial view of how bodies work.
Remedies are prepared by repeated dilution until the product cannot be told apart from the water or other diluent, with shaking or striking between stages that practitioners say lets the liquid remember the original substance. Established physics, chemistry and biology contradict this. Hahnemann's theory of disease, built around what he called miasms, also clashes with the later discovery that bacteria and viruses cause illness. The remedies are typically biochemically inert, which is why the scientific and medical establishment has labelled homeopathy quackery.
It thrived in the 19th century, arriving in the United States in 1825, where the first homeopathic school opened in 1835. Compared with harsh mainstream treatments it could look successful. It faded by the century's end, and America's last purely homeopathic medical school closed in 1920. A revival came in the 1970s, when some product sales rose tenfold alongside the New Age movement, possibly helped by fear of synthetic chemicals and by longer, more attentive consultations.
Meta-analyses in the 21st century have found no scientific basis for its claims. Official reviews in Australia, Switzerland, France and the UK have judged it ineffective, and so has the Russian Academy of Sciences. England's National Health Service stopped funding remedies, France removed funding in 2021, and Spain has moved to ban such pseudotherapies from health centres.
Source: Homeopathy
