Government Policy on Homeopathy is...

...bullshit.
My summary of the report: 

• Yes we know homeopathy is worthless bullshit, but some people don't know or don't believe it's bullshit, so we'll let individual regions' trusts decide whether they want to spend public money on it. 

• We promise to tell people it doesn't work though, but we'll still buy it for them with your money if they still want it after we've told them. 

• It's too difficult to find out how much we're currently spending on it, so we won't bother. 

• We'll continue to allow people to put indications on remedies, because it's better to have something rather than nothing on the label (even if that something is wrong), because at least then we can regulate how they are made. 

• It's OK to lie to people about how these pills can cure minor self-limiting illnesses, and that probably won't lead to people thinking it works for Malaria or AIDS.

Fucking moronic cowards.

Please read the sci-tech evidence check report, if you haven't already.

Homeopathy: it's natural.

Short answer:

• No it isn't - it's extremely artificial and contrived.
• Even if it were, something being "natural" is no guarantee of either effectiveness or harmlessness.

A little more:
As with the claim that homeopathy is an ancient tradition, I suspect the reason some make this assertion is due to a confusion of homeopathy with herbalism. It's important to remember that homeopathy is not herbalism; herbalists can at least genuinely claim that their treatments are "natural", for what it's worth, and unlike homeopathy many of them even have active ingredients.
All kinds of ingredients are used at the start of the homeopathic process, many of which may be considered natural, but the process of dilution and succussion is anything but. For a full description of the manufacturing process and it's origins, see my earlier post. And in any case, the idea that because something meets some arbitrary definition of "natural" does not necessarily mean it will work, or that it's somehow more in tune with your body and hence safer than any lab produced chemical. Go eat a handful of nightshade berries or fly agaric if you don't believe me¹. This fallacy this particular claim falls under is the Appeal to Nature.
The only other things that could be meant by this claim of naturalness is that the remedy somehow stirs the body's natural defences into action, and I have dealt with that claim here.

---

¹ Do not do this under any circumstances.

Homeopathy: Activates the body's own natural healing processes.

Short answer:

• No it doesn't - there is no biologically plausible method for this to occur, and there is no credible evidence for it having ever occurred.

A little more:
This little number is often explained as operating a little like a vaccine; e.g. the remedy somehow tells the immune system "look for things that cause symptoms like this" and that stirs it into action. Of course this a completely false analogy, and it wouldn't work even if the analogy were valid.
Vaccines work by introducing a harmless form of an actual microbe into the body. The immune system produces antibodies against that microbe and this enables it to be prepared for invasion of the genuine microbe (or ones very like it) should it encounter it at a later date.
Homeopathic remedies with "potencies" beyond 12c do not contain anything other than water, and even below that the content is negligible. There is nothing present for the immune system to learn from. Even if there were still some of the original preparation present, this would not stir the immune system into life when encountering a genuine illness-inducing microbe. Most of the the "mother tinctures" for those homeopathic remedies that are used for microbial diseases bear no structural relationship to the actual cause of the malady, and thus immune system will not recognise the real thing when it arrives. Additionally remedies are rarely prescribed as preventatives (with the exception of "nosodes" like the one idiotically prescribed for malarial prophylaxis), there are usually given when the disease is already present and the immune system is already fighting the disease, and has no need of such activation.
Add to this the fact that homeopathic remedies are also prescribed for disorders where the immune system has little or no involvement (like anxiety or type-2 diabetes), and for auto-immune related disorders (coeliac disease, rheumatoid arthritis) where the problem is that the immune system perceives part of the sufferer's own body as an enemy, and all that is left is a supernatural explanation for homeopathy's supposed mechanism of action. Some would attempt to counter these arguments by saying the immune system thing is just an illustrative analogy. They are then hard pressed to described any plausible actual mechanism by which their claims may be substantiated. Homeopaths' talk of vital forces and miasmas is just medieval thinking, and this whole argument of activating the body's own natural defences is simply superficially plausible nonsense.

Homeopathy: it worked for me! (or someone else of my acquaintance)

Short answer:

• No it didn't - You got better on your own, or as a result of some other intervention.

A little more:
I'm afraid you have fallen for the fallacy known somewhat ostentatiously as "Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc" (after this therefore because of this) or "false cause". It was not the homeopathic remedy that effected your cure. It is likely that your ailment was of a trivial nature such as a cold, flu, headache, bruise, mouth ulcer or somesuch. These things go away on their own. It is also possible that your ailment is one of a cyclical nature, that has periods when it is severe, and intervals where it is less so. If you took the remedy during a bad stretch, a moderate period is sure to follow, and you will attribute the improvement to homeopathy. Homeopaths even have a get out clause for when you take their remedy and the affliction has not yet reached its peak; they call this a healing crisis, claiming the action of your body, triggered by the remedy to fight the disease temporarily causes symptoms to appear worse, before they get better. This ensures that whether your symptoms increase or decrease, you still think it was the remedy that did it, when in actual fact it was simply the natural course of the ailment.
Perhaps you have benefited from the placebo effect, where you feel better simply for believing you have been given a treatment and the attention you received from an apparently qualified physician.
If the disease you recovered from was more serious, then perhaps you were also receiving conventional treatment but were frustrated with the speed of results, or believed it has failed, and so took a homeopathic remedy, and you subsequently recovered. It was the conventional treatment that worked, you just hadn't waited long enough. If you weren't receiving any other treatment, then you were very lucky; sometimes seemingly miraculous recoveries occur by purely natural, if hidden or inexplicable means.
If you still think homeopathy cured you, try to think how you would tell the difference between a natural self-effected cure, or one brought on by the remedy your homeopath gave you?
If you were using homeopathy as prophylaxis, say for malaria, then you were unknowingly exposing yourself to risk while completely unprotected, and were simply lucky.

Homeopathy: it's an ancient practice/it's been in use for hundreds/thousands of years!

Short answer: 

• It's not an ancient practice, it was invented by a failed German Physician in 1796, only just over 200 years ago.
• So what? People in the past were wrong about a lot of things.

A little more:
The ancient practice argument would be invalid if it were true, but also is just plain wrong. Here's my full post on the history of homeopathy. I suspect the reason that some people attribute homeopathy with a much longer history is that they mistakenly equate it with herbalism, which is a whole different kettle of bullshit, but that parts of which might have at least some basis in truth.
The fallacy at work here is The Appeal to Tradition. To paraphrase Tim Minchin, just because ideas are tenacious it doesn't mean that they're worthy. Our predecessors were wrong about a great many things for a very long time: the earth is at the centre of the universe; powdered tiger penis will make you virile; the universe is only 8000 years old; fires, floods, earthquakes and volcanoes are the acts of angry gods or spirits. The longevity of an idea or practice gives no credence to its veracity. Samuel Hahnemann, the inventor of homeopathy, quit medicine largely because he saw that the practice of bloodletting was killing more than it saved, and bloodletting had been standard practice for nearly every illness for around 2000 years. Among his faults Sam clearly did not count susceptibility to the this particular error of reasoning.  The fact is that homeopathy was never properly proven to work in the fist place; the many people since then who have believed homeopathy helped them or others were just as deluded as modern practitioners/patients, and their opinions should not influence us now.

A new approach to homeopathy.

No it's nothing radical, it's just that my articles were getting a bit long (I've got about 6 unfinished ones here all with pages of text) and it wouldn't have been the punchy answers I wanted. The answers to the homeopathic drivel were getting lost in all the explanation and required interpretation. Plus I spent Ages writing an article about what makes a good clinical trial and then the NHS go and publish one before I get around to finalising it. Mine was funnier ;) and had more about bias, but theirs is more authoritative.
So what I've decided to do is a series of punchy little articles each of which starts with a common homeopathic canard (no not the duck they use to make oscillococcinum), then a short response, and then a slightly longer response and some background info.
Hopefully, with an index, it should prove to be a slightly better resource.

Homeopathy 101.

This is Part II of a run of posts about homeopathy. Here's Part I, which is really just an intro and will become an index to the other posts as they become available. This post is a primer in the history and theory of homeopathy, which I will try to without too much criticism. The debunking will follow in subsequent posts.

One common claim of those who endorse homeopathy, although rarely by practitioners, is that it has been in use for thousands of years and therefore must be effective. There are two things wrong with this statement: the first is that it is a shining example of the Appeal to Tradition, a logical fallacy exemplified by the fact that is plainly possible (née likely) for our ancestors to be wrong about many things for a very long time; longevity is no guarantee of veracity. The other objection is that not only would the claim be invalid if the statement were true, but also that it is just plain false. Homeopathy is not part of some ancient tradition or folk-wisdom; it was invented in Germany in 1796.

Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), a German physician, became understandably disillusioned with the state of 18th century medicine; claiming, quite rightly, that it often did more harm than good. Double-blinded, randomised, controlled (placebo or otherwise) trials would not come into standard use for many years yet, so no reliable mechanism of testing treatments was available; the germ-theory of disease was not yet completely synthesised and its budding principles were not accepted by most. Medicines with unknown effects were often administered to patients with unknown diseases with little idea of the consequences. Bleeding, the practice of draining people's blood, was still the favoured technique for many conditions; this frequently killed patients who would otherwise have survived without intervention, and accelerated the demise of many others. Early medicine was so fraught with problems that it caused Hahnemann to retire from practice to focus on writing and translation. He later explained why thus:

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.

I think this passage illustrates to some degree that the scorn heaped upon poor old Sam is unjust; he was clearly a man who wanted to help but rightly felt that medicine did not have the tools to enable him to do so. He also obviously had an eye for when he was harming more than helping.

Some while after his retirement from medicine, while translating William Cullen's Materia Medica into German, Hahnemann encountered a claim that cinchona bark, from which the anti-malarial quinine was later isolated, worked against malarial fevers due to astringent properties acting as a "tonic to the stomach"; a claim of which he was sceptical¹, and during his investigations decided to experiment on himself. Shortly after taking his first dose he experienced symptoms that he described as "ordinarily characteristic of intermittent fever", and repeated doses had a similar effect. This lead him to the following reasoning: If a substance that can relieve a disorder causes the symptoms of that disorder in a healthy person, then it is also true that other substances that causes symptoms in a healthy person, will cure diseases that have similar symptoms². Our Sam calls this principle Similia Similibus Curentur (like cures like), while modern homeopaths sometimes refer to the "law of similars". He writes:  

The curative power of medicines, therefore, depends on their symptoms, similar to the disease but superior to it in strength, so that each individual case of disease is most surely, radically, rapidly and permanently annihilated and removed only by a medicine capable of producing (in the human system) in the most similar and complete manner the totality of its symptoms, which at the same time are stronger than the disease.

Calling his new system of treatment "homeopathy", from the Greek for "Similar Feeling", or "Similar Disease" he then embarked on a series of experiments he called "Provings", so named from "Prüfung", the German for "Test". These experiments consisted of taking groups of healthy individuals and administering a substance purported to have some effect on the body of a period of time and recording any symptoms suffered by the subjects.

There is no other possible way of correctly ascertaining the characteristic action of medicines on human health, no single surer, more natural way, than administering individual medicines experimentally to healthy people in moderate doses...³

The symptoms experienced by these subjects were meticulously noted and studied after the experiments to determine what the substance would purportedly cure. In this manner, Hahnemann assembled his own Materia Medica, laying the foundation for those still in use by homeopaths today.

When administering his new found cures to patients, he discovered that some suffered from complications and unpleasant side effects from the remedies. He found that diluting the base remedy ameliorated the side effects, and eliminated them after sufficient dilution had occurred. Remarkably, the more dilute the solution, the faster the patient's recovery. This lead him to another principle of homeopathy: that dilution actually makes the curative powers of the base substance grow; that it is, somewhat counter-intuitively made more potent by the dilution process. This is often referred to as the "law of infinitesimals". The process followed is to drop 1 part of the active ingredient (or mother-tincture) into either 10 or 100 parts of water, and then take 1 part of the resultant solution and put that in 10 or 100 parts of water, repeating until the desired potency is reached. The nomenclature for the potencies is 1X for 1 part in 10, or 1C for 1 part in 100. 2C does not mean 2 parts per 100, but rather 1 part in 100 in 100 or 1 in 10,000. Today remedies are commonly between 10C (1 part in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000) and 30C ( 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), although mother-tinctures and potencies up to 1000C (such as carcinosin, a nosode⁴ made from cancerous cells and purported to cure cancer⁵) are available. Modern science has taught us that at dilution beyond 12C there virtually no chance of their being a single molecule of the mother tincture in a litre of water, at 30C to have a reasonable chance of getting a single molecule you would need a sphere of water the same diameter as the distance from here to the sun, and at 100C you would need around twelve times more molecules  of water than there are atoms in the entire observable universe to expect to see a single one of the original substance with any certainty. Homeopaths tell us that these absurdly large numbers are irrelevant, and that the water somehow retains a "memory" of the original substance, or that the physical structure or arrangement of the H2O is altered by the presence of the substance, and it is this memory that can effect cures to diseases. This memory is ostensibly aided by another principle of homeopathy that we shall come to next.

At some point during the formulation of the principle of dilution, Hahnemann hit on the idea of "succussion". Succussion is a process whereby the bottle containing the solution is struck firmly a number of times on a firm but elastic body which, Hahnemann said, increased the potency of the remedies. Some have suggested that he hit upon this idea after transporting some of his remedies on horseback, and later found these remedies to be of greater effectiveness. This is hotly disputed amongst homeopaths, and there is nothing directly referring to the discovery in his writings. We do however know two things that are pertinent to this. The first is that the "elastic surface" against which Hahnemann struck his phials of solution was a pad made of leather and stuffed with horsehair, which he  had specially commissioned from a saddler. The second is that his writings cautioned against taking remedies on long journeys because the remedy "receives an enormous number of additional succussions during the transport, and they are so highly potentized during a long journey, that on their arrival they are scarcely fit for use"[ref]. Whatever the origin, modern homeopaths claim that the succussion is integral to transferring the potency of the original ingredient to the water; that the knocking causes the water to somehow pick-up or resonate with the energy⁶ of the solute; this memory remains, and in fact strengthens, long after there ceases to be even the tiniest part of the solute remaining in the solvent. Hahnemann even claimed that after a period of rest, a remedy could be shaken to reinvigorate its powers. Luckily, when the remedy is in pill form, no amount of extra transport succussion will render the the remedies any more unfit for use than they were when they left the factory.

What's that? Pill form you say? Yes, although Hahnemann did make solid matter into remedies by grinding them down with lactose, this is rare today. Many modern homeopathic remedies come in the form of vials of "pillules". Pillules are tiny balls of sugar, onto which has been dropped some water from the diluted remedy, which are then allowed to dry out. I haven't actually heard any homeopaths explain how this is meant to work. Presumably the sugar retains the memory of the memory of water? Whatever the mechanism of action, it is apparently imperative for the effectiveness of the pillules that they do not come into contact with the hands, as the acids or other impurities on the skin are alleged to inhibit the remedy.

Hahnemann's theory of diesease, is that disorders are caused by something called Miasms, which are often described as a "peculiar morbid derangement of vital force". He also claims that allopathy⁷ fails because it treats only the symptoms of the disease, while failing to address the miasms that are the root cause. Homeopathic remedies however are believed to go deeper and address these miasms directly. It is this belief that causes many homeopaths today to continue using phrases like "it treats the disease not just the symptoms".

And that's just about it. More than any non-homeopath ever needs to know about the principles and practice of homeopathy except for one small thing: it just doesn't work. And it's mechanism of action is implausible. OK two things. Oh and there is no scientific evidence for any of its principles. OK three things. And there is no good evidence that it is effective against any disorder. OK, among the things any non-homeopath ever needs to know are such diverse elements as: it's worthless, unbelievable and has no scientific evidence for it's principles or its efficacy⁸. Subsequent posts will give more detail on all of the above, in case the stupidity of it all isn't quite obvious to the reader at first glance.

---

¹ Incidentally, Samuel was wise to be sceptical; the proposed mechanism of action was implausible, and other treatments with similar properties did not show similar effects. the question of how quinine does what it does is still not fully resolved, however we do now have significant empirical evidence of it's effectiveness, although other more effective drugs are now available.

² We will deal with the logic of this reasoning in a later post.

³ It's getting harder not to take the piss. Again these claims, which are made based on what may superficially appear similar to clinical trials, will be addressed later.

⁴ A remedy prepared from diseased tissue or other matter (blood, faeces, urine, etc.) which homeopaths tell us have an action much like a vaccine but without any of the associated risks.

⁵ A claim which, by the way, it is illegal to make in the UK. Which I think this lady may fall foul of were someone to report her for directing people to her website not moments after claiming homeopathy can cure cancer. Also note that she claims she has 2000 years of evidence for homeopathy.

⁶ AAARRRRGH!!!!

⁷ From the greek for "other feeling" or "other disease", this is Hahnemann's term for 18th/19th century mainstream medicine, which still persists today as a derogatory term for evidence-based medicine 

⁸This doesn't really work does it? I'm now starting to think I should have gone with the "What has homeopathy ever done for us?" instead of the "main weapons of the homeopathic inquisition are..." Oh well it's too late now ;)