Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

With so many practitioners and so much commercial success, it would be reasonable to assume that homeopathy must be effective. After all, why else would millions of people — educated and uneducated, rich and poor, in the East and the West — rely on it?

Yet the medical and scientific establishment has generally viewed homeopathy with a great deal of scepticism, and its remedies have been at the centre of a long-running and often heated debate. This chapter will look at the evidence and reveal whether homeopathy is a medical marvel or whether the critics are correct when they label it a quack medicine.

The origins of homeopathy

Unlike acupuncture, homeopathy’s origins are not shrouded in the mists of time, but can be traced back to the work of a German physician called Samuel Hahnemann at the end of the eighteenth century. Having studied medicine in Leipzig, Vienna and Erlangen, Hahnemann earned a reputation as one of Europe’s foremost intellectuals. He published widely on both medicine and chemistry, and used his knowledge of English, French, Italian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldaic and Hebrew to translate numerous scholarly treatises.

He seemed set for a distinguished medical career, but during the 1780s he began to question the conventional practices of the day. For instance, he rarely bled his patients, even though his colleagues strongly advocated bloodletting. Moreover, he was an outspoken critic of those responsible for treating the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold of Austria, who was bled four times in the twenty-four hours immediately prior to his death in 1792. According to Hahnemann, Leopold’s high fever and abdominal distension did not require such a risky treatment. Of course, we now know that bloodletting is indeed a dangerous intervention. The imperial court physicians, however, responded by calling Hahnemann a murderer for depriving his own patients of what they deemed to be a vital medical procedure.

Hahnemann was a decent man, who combined intelligence with integrity. He gradually realized that his medical colleagues knew very little about how to diagnose their patients accurately, and worse still these doctors knew even less about the impact of their treatments, which meant that they probably did more harm than good. Not surprisingly, Hahnemann eventually felt unable to continue practising this sort of medicine:

My sense of duty would not easily allow me to treat the unknown pathological state of my suffering brethren with these unknown medicines. The thought of becoming in this way a murderer or malefactor towards the life of my fellow human beings was most terrible to me, so terrible and disturbing that I wholly gave up my practice in the first years of my married life and occupied myself solely with chemistry and writing.

In 1790, having moved away from all conventional medicine, Hahnemann was inspired to develop his own revolutionary school of medicine. His first step towards inventing homeopathy took place when he began experimenting on himself with the drug Cinchona, which is derived from the bark of a Peruvian tree. Cinchona contains quinine and was being used successfully in the treatment of malaria, but Hahnemann consumed it when he was healthy, perhaps in the hope that it might act as a general tonic for maintaining good health. To his surprise, however, his health began to deteriorate and he developed the sort of symptoms usually associated with malaria. In other words, here was a substance that was normally used for curing the fevers, shivering and sweating suffered by a malaria patient, which was now apparently generating the same symptoms in a healthy person.

He experimented with other treatments and obtained the same sort of results: substances used to treat particular symptoms in an unhealthy person seemed to generate those same symptoms when given to a healthy person. By reversing the logic, he proposed a universal principle, namely ‘that which can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual, can treat a sick individual who is manifesting a similar set of symptoms’. In 1796 he published an account of his Law of Similars, but so far he had gone only halfway towards inventing homeopathy.

Hahnemann went on to propose that he could improve the effect of his ‘like cures like’ remedies by diluting them. According to Hahnemann, and for reasons that continue to remain mysterious, diluting a remedy increased its power to cure, while reducing its potential to cause side-effects. His assumption bears some resemblance to the ‘hair of the dog that bit you’ dictum, inasmuch as a little of what has harmed someone can supposedly undo the harm. The expression has its origins in the belief that a bite from a rabid dog could be treated by placing some of the dog’s hairs in the wound, but nowadays ‘the hair of the dog’ is used to suggest that a small alcoholic drink can cure a hangover.