The Half Decent Pharmaceutical Chemistry Blog

I have thought of writing about homeopathy since the day I got this blog started, but never found a decent pretext to do it. Sure, while I was doing my internship at the chemist’s I prepared lots of Bach flowers remedies (which are not, strictly speaking, real homeopathic medications). What’s more, I also handled many boxes of proper homeopathic stuff and so realised how quickly this is getting a massive business. This, though, shouldn’t be a surprise because mass-producing them is a thousand times easier than designing, patenting, mass producing, marketing and distributing a traditional, allopathic formulation.

The pretext I was looking for was found here. That short article gave me the inspiration for finally collecting all the things I have learnt over the past four years and sum them up in a post which could clarify my opinion on homeopathy once and for all. Pretty much the kind of thing you would expect from an episode of Big Talk…

I imagine at this point many of  you will think I’ll embark myself on a long tirade against homeopathy-enthusiasts: freaks who blindly trust this sort of alternative therapies because they firmly believe that traditional drugs are the product of Nazi, evil-minded scientists, who work for even more evil big companies, who aim at taking control of the planet or something like that.

What I’m actually going to do is to explain what homeopathy is all about. More or less. For a kick-off, allopathic medicine is the traditional approach towards illnesses. To be more precise, it is the traditional way of considering symptoms and this is a key point to understand the difference between conventional therapy and homeopathy. One of the fundamental concept regulating traditional medicine is that you find what is not working in an organism and choose the appropriate remedy to cure the symptoms. From the point of view of homeopathic practitioners, however, a disease is the way an organism has to regain a lost equilibrium. Therefore, symptoms must be enhanced rather than tackled.

Let’s take excessive stomach acidity as an example. Normally, you’d be tempted to take antacids to counterbalance the overproduction of HCl, coping with the problem symptomatically, at least. On the contrary, homeopaths generally prescribe preparations containing acids to help the symptom increase.

A second difference is that, whatever allopathic drug is prescribed, its concentration has to be equal or higher than the so-called effective dose (ED-50), which is statistically defined as the dose yielding a positive response in half the patients. Anyhow, one of the key assumptions of homeopathy is that, by diluting a substance, you actually increase its effectiveness. In fact, to make homeopathic tinctures, you begin with a concentrated solution and dilute it up to a million-fold. If you think about it for a second, you’ll realise that, bearing in mind the Avogadro’s number, there is a chance the final solution won’t contain ANY active substance at all. And that’s very good because, in the restless quest for symptom-enhancement, this kind of preparation often contains poisons.  
Going back to the example of stomach acidity, your homeopathic, acidic remedy may have a neutral pH. This explains why it so easy for very small company to produce these products: the concentrations of active substances are always so low, that there is almost no regulation the manufacturer has to strictly follow. All it’s asked to demonstrate is the purity of materials and that the quantity of active substances is below a certain threshold (and it always is).
At this point, you might be disgusted with what you’ve read but I have to tell you something that will probably shock you and make you think I’ve gone mad. Homeopathy works. Well, maybe, this is not the correct way of saying that. What I should actually point out is that some types of treatment with a tight bond to some of the principles of alternative medicine just described work perfectly.
What is, for instance, a vaccine? It consists of very diluted bacterial antigens (if inactivated, that’s even better), administered to healthy people so that their body could simulate the response it should be able to provide. Even more shocking is that, statistically, babies and…pigs can actually heal when treated with alternative, homeopathic remedies.

But don’t be fooled. Neither of these two facts could actually provide any scientific, valid support to homeopathy. In fact, you shouldn’t forget about the placebo effect: it is not the cure itself, but the feeling of being cured, treated in a certain, instinctively expected way that triggers an undoubtedly positive reaction.

So, the only, really effective, alternative remedy has to be based on the assumption that the human mind has an incredible and poorly understood, to date, healing power.