Home Remedies and Homeopathy Are Not the Same Thing, and One of Them Is Bullshit

This post is part of our Home Remedies Guide , a review of home remedies from dubious to doctor-approved. Read more here .

Thanks to a loophole in the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, some of the “drugs” you can buy at pharmacies are actually nothing more than magic water. I promise I’m not exaggerating. I don’t mean supplements that are legal because they are not considered drugs. And I don’t mean products that make dubious or exaggerated health claims (nothing that boring). I mean, you can walk into a pharmacy and pay seven dollars of legal tender for a bottle of “natural” baby cold and cough medicine and walk away with a bottle of mostly water – or at least whatever, hopefully mostly water.

This bottle may have a “Drug Facts” label and a seemingly factual statement that it “temporarily relieves cold symptoms in children.” And it doesn’t contain any drugs. This is because it does not include modern medicines or medicinal amounts of herbs that are believed to have healing properties. Homeopathic medicines are simply water (or alcohol or sugar) imbued with magical vibrations of substances that, when taken directly, can aggravate your symptoms.

My friends, homeopathy is not only nonsense, it is one of the wildest nonsense you will read about today.

What the hell is homeopathy?

Let’s go back in our time machine to 1796. The German physician Samuel Hahnemann was disappointed with the state of medicine at the time. This was the age of bloodletting, when doctors responded to diseases by trying to balance the “humors” of the body. The treatments of the time often did more harm than good, so Hahnemann was not necessarily wrong in wanting to find other treatments. But his alternative didn’t work either.

Remember, this was long before anyone knew that germs could cause disease, or that operating rooms had to be clean, or that there were vitamins, or what makes herbal medicines work (when they knew). Clinical trials as we know them were not the standard tool of science or medicine.

So one day Hahnemann ate some cinchona bark . It is the bark of a tree from South America and is now recognized as one of the first modern pharmaceuticals. This is where we get quinine, the “tonic” in tonic water. We now know that a chemical found in the bark can kill the parasite that causes malaria. However, in the understanding of the time, everyone knew only that taking this bark would cure a recurring fever.

Hahnemann did not have malaria. He reportedly took notes on the symptoms he experienced from a mild overdose of cinchona, including weakness, trembling, and fever, among other things. This sounded to him like symptoms of malaria itself, and this observation led to the “law of similarities” that formed the basis of homeopathic medicine.

According to this so-called law, the cure for a disease is to find a substance that causes the same symptoms of the disease in healthy people. So how does this not aggravate the disease of a sick person? Well, you’re separating a substance from the healing properties of that substance . You are putting healing properties into the water. Then you have magic water.

How homeopathy should work (I promise I’m not making it up)

First, you will find a substance that can cause the same symptoms as the condition you are trying to treat. For example, coffee can cause nervousness and insomnia, so a homeopathic remedy made from coffee should be an appropriate remedy for treating a hyperactive child or person suffering from insomnia. Onion watery eyes and runny nose, so onion extract is used in homeopathic remedies to prevent watery eyes and runny nose.

Onion is actually one of the ingredients you can find in homeopathic children’s cold medicines – “Allium cepa 6X HPUS” means the preparation made from onion has been diluted 1:10 with water. Then a small amount of this drug was diluted in a ratio of 1:10 and so on, a total of six times. As a result, if I calculated correctly, the ratio of onion to water is one to one million.

To be clear, we’re not just diluting onion water. We ” shake ” the water or shake it in a certain way to convey the memory of the bulb to the water.

Homeopaths – yes, those that exist today – are convinced that water does indeed have a memory , and the only question left for them is how to convince real scientists that this must be true.

Since water remembers onions, we don’t have to worry about whether or not a cold remedy contains onions, even though it is statistically likely that the remedy contains most of it. Dilution only 6X. Homeopaths believe that this number of dilutions gives a weak or mild remedy; to get extra strength, you need to dilute it more .

It’s not a secret. The American Association of Homeopathic Pharmacists is pleased to inform you that homeopathic preparations often do not contain any of the supposed active ingredients. In their FAQ, they answer the question “Can I overdose or take too much homeopathic medicine?” saying :

Due to the extremely small amount of highly diluted active ingredients, you do not have to worry about overdosing by taking more homeopathic medicine than the recommended dosage. At dilutions above 8X or 4C, any toxic properties of the original substance disappeared; the medicine is safe and sold without a prescription.

And yes, it means “without a prescription,” like what you can buy at your local pharmacy or your favorite big box store. Look next to common cold medicines and painkillers and you’ll find homeopathic products from brands like Hyland’s and Boiron.

And yet they can be dangerous

Homeopaths like to point out that dilution ensures the safety of their products. But many homeopathic medicines are not diluted to the extreme. We have already seen that there are products that are less diluted, such as the 6X ingredients in our example. If it was anything more toxic than onions, we’d be worried.

In addition, there are products that are marketed as “homeopathic” despite containing a significant amount of the active ingredient. For example, I have seen arnica gel that is offered in the “1X” dilution. Sambucol sells elderberry products for colds, some of which are supplements (contain significant amounts of elderberry) and others are homeopathic (have little or no elderberry).

You can tell the difference if you know how to read a supplement fact label and a homeopathic fact label, but the fronts of both packages seem to claim the same benefits. It would seem that the law of similarity dictates that there is no way these two products can treat the same condition; in the homeopathic world, if homeopathic elderberry cures the common cold, then non-homeopathic elderberry causes cold symptoms. But there is no FDA regulation requiring your marketing strategy to adhere to any one theory of medicine.

It is indeed unfair that critics of homeopathy say that these medicines are “just” water, as often they are not. Nor does it follow that homeopathic medicines are “safe” because they are diluted.

In fact, products labeled as homeopathic have allegedly killed people. In 2016, the FDA investigated a brand of homeopathic teething pills that was linked to the death of 10 infants and another 400 reports of side effects such as seizures. One of the ingredients was belladonna, or belladonna. FDA lab testing found the pills to contain significant amounts of belladonna , often more than what was listed on the label, and warned people not to buy them . The company issued a recall in 2017, as it did in 2010 when the same thing happened.

Or, for example, homeopathic nasal gels and nasal swabs contained enough zinc to cause people to permanently lose their sense of smell. The FDA issued warning letters , stating that while the product is labeled homeopathic, it does contain zinc, and the FDA is not aware of any testing showing zinc in the nose to be safe and effective. The dilution in this case was 2X, which means that the products contained 0.1% zinc.

Excuse me, how is this legal?

Well, somehow not. But the FDA isn’t trying very hard to stop it either .

Homeopathic “medicines” were excluded from the 1938 law, which determined what the FDA should regulate. For many years, the FDA has struggled with the fact that drugs are defined as either drugs that work or remedies that have been inherited as homeopathic.

Homeopathic medicines do not undergo clinical trials. They rely on “trials” in which raw ingredients are given to healthy volunteers and their symptoms are documented. According to homeopathic theory, no clinical trials are required. And this is not just a loophole for over-the-counter medicines: there are schools of homeopathy and private homeopaths who will match medicines to your particular temperament. (Remember, homeopathy is about matching symptoms with symptoms; the cause of the disease, homeopaths will tell you, is irrelevant .)

Over the years, the FDA has gradually come to terms with the fact that drugs need to be safe and effective, while homeopathic medicines do not. I think my favorite moment—perhaps my favorite government document of all time—is when the Federal Trade Commission sent a spicy letter to the FDA stating that companies were effectively prohibited from lying about their products.

In 2022, the FDA finally decided that they could effectively take products off the market for being unsafe or ineffective. But instead of a general statement that homeopathic products are now illegal, the agency said it will “focus its law enforcement” on products that appear particularly dangerous. This means that a lot of this nonsense is still on store shelves and will probably remain there forever.

How can I avoid this when I shop?

Above all, beware of things that seem too good to be true. For example, many real medicines that are suitable for adults and older children are not suitable for infants or toddlers. (For example, cough medicines are not intended for children under 4 years of age .) So homeopathic companies have jumped into this market because they know you want to buy some kind of cough medicine for your child. And since most people don’t know what homeopathy is, you’ll probably look at the box and realize that it should be legal.

So here’s how to read a label: first, see if it’s a drug fact label or not. (Some of the products you find at the drugstore are supplements that may or may not be helpful in some way. But supplements are not medicine.) Then, if it’s a drug fact label, look for the following signs:

• Dilutions are indicated by a number and a letter, such as 6X or 20C.
• The abbreviation HPUS next to an ingredient refers to the US Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia (the government-recognised giant database of bullshit).
• Ingredients with (usually) two-word Latin names, such as “natrum muriaticum” (that’s sea salt)

Some homeopathic products will include a disclaimer such as: “Claims are based on traditional homeopathic practice and not on accepted medical evidence.”

By the way, a lot is hidden behind this Latin. Sometimes the ingredients are herbal extracts or chemical elements, and sometimes they are common items like onions or salt. Other times, they are newt-eye-sized preparations, such as “Hepar Sulph Calc” in one of the cold medicines, which is the inner layer of oyster shells finely ground and cooked with sulfur. This is a special recipe of Hahnemann himself .

And to leave you for one more “what the heck” moment for today, I’m going to tell you about oscillococcinum, a homeopathic product that you can usually buy at any local pharmacy. The ingredient is often referred to as Anas barbariae, meaning Muscovy duck. (The Muscovite duck is now known by the scientific name Cairina moschata , so that’s not even its scientific name, just a Latinized version of the common name.)

In any case, the reason it’s being marketed to treat “flu-like symptoms” is because of a breathtaking fantasy hypothesis, long debunked, about the cause of the flu. Today we know that the flu is caused by the influenza virus. But in 1920, viruses had not yet been discovered. However, the bacteria were known, so scientists were constantly looking through a microscope at blood and tissue samples from sick people, hoping to find a microbe that would explain everything. According to the Office of Science and Society at McGill University:

[Doctor. Joseph] Roy naturally took a great interest in the flu and sought to unravel its mysterious cause by examining the victims’ blood under a microscope. He described tiny microbes that quickly darted or “wobbled” back and forth. He called them “oscillococci” and stated that they could also be found in the blood of patients suffering from diseases as diverse as cancer, tuberculosis, and gonorrhea. This “universal microbe”, as he called it, was responsible for many diseases! If these oscillococci were causing symptoms, Roy concluded, then their homeopathic solution must be curative.

Yes, a vibrating microbe that causes all diseases. Make a homeopathic remedy out of it and Bob will be your uncle! So how do you make a homeopathic remedy out of it? Well, Roy thought he found the same vibrating microbes in duck liver. (To this day, no one knows what he actually saw. There are no vibrating microbes in the duck liver, you can go look.) So, you make a preparation from duck organs, dilute it the fuck, pour the resulting water into sugar pills. , and sell those pills for $27.49 at Target . (The real price I just confirmed. God, if only I made that up.)

Do you know what actually works for flu cases that are mild enough to treat at home? Liquids. Rest. Maybe some saline solution to flush the mucus out of your nose. You Know: Home Remedies .