You should be skeptical of homeopathy.
Everybody is, at least at first, including myself. Your can read the biased Wikipedia article controlled by the self-styled “Skeptics” whose criticisms mostly are the common ones:
- Homeopathic remedies are so diluted, even sometimes far beyond the point where any of the substance is left, that they cant work. They violate known rules of chemistry, biology and physics.
- The scientific studies of homeopathy that they consider valid don’t show that it works and no other evidence is worth considering.
- The homeopathic “law of similars” has no evidence to support it.
- All the perceived benefits of homeopathy are due to placebo effect and/or spontaneous remissions.
These conclusions imply that all the millions of medically trained doctors and others who have practiced homeopathy over the last 200+ years are frauds and/or deluded like their many millions of patients.
The response to these criticisms is obvious, in brief:
- Homeopathy works using an unknown energy that somehow interacts with life force. Chemistry, biology and physics have not identified and certainly have not explained all the phenomena of the universe – just to name three: gravity, dark energy and the life force. What is the difference between a living being 2 seconds before death and 2 seconds after?
- There is plenty of evidence for homeopathy. The Skeptics always find some issue with any of the hundreds of studies showing homeopathy’s effectiveness, just as homeopaths find issues with the studies supposedly showing its ineffectiveness. Usually the latter studies are not actually following homeopathic protocol. There are also 200 years of carefully documented clinical case histories of cures, which Skeptics dismiss without investigation as merely anecdotes.
- The Skeptics are not looking for any evidence of the law of similars. Homeopaths see it operating routinely in their practice. Allopaths use the law of similars inadvertently in a crude way for some of their treatments which sometimes actually cure or temporarily palliate: radiation for cancer, Ritalin (an amphetamine) for hyperactivity in children, etc.
- Homeopathy has documentation showing successful use for the entire range of illness (even for babies, comatose people, veterinary medicine and plants) whereas placebo effect has mostly only shown temporary effectiveness in humans. Spontaneous remission is extremely rare for chronic conditions in allopathic (conventional) medicine. Why would it be so much more common for homeopathy?
So who do you trust?
You can trust your own experience! Your own natural skepticism for homeopathy will circumvent any possible placebo effect, which relies on confidence in the practitioner and treatment.
How to experience it?
- Get treatment, preferably for a condition for which you know your normal prognosis: perhaps sunburn, insect bites, poison oak or ivy, or a minor injury. With a little bit of study you can even treat yourself.
- Do a “proving” either alone or preferably by joining one being conducted. Taking an unknown homeopathic remedy daily for a few days will cause temporary symptoms that you have never had before, something a placebo wont do. (Note: its best to have a homeopath take your case beforehand to verify your normal state of health and help you identify changes that occur during the proving. It can be hard to be objective about your own state of mental, physical and emotional health)
- If you have a chronic condition seek treatment from a well-recommended homeopath. Its safe and low cost when compared to years of conventional medicine’s drugs, tests and professional fees.
It can open your eyes to the amazing healing system of homeopathy!
Of course you should be skeptical of a lot of conventional medicine as well. Many of the treatments used have no science to support them, despite claims that they follow Evidence Based Medicine (EBM). One study found that almost half of the time diagnoses were false.
Does the following quote fit with your experience of conventional medicine?
“I went into medicine with the idea that I was going to save all of these lives with all the tricks and tools that medical doctors learned. And what I found was that very few of my patients got well. I often did harm to them. This was quite disturbing to me as a young doctor. What was even more disturbing was to find out that this failure had been fairly well documented in the scientific literature – but it doesn’t fit anybody’s advertising campaign. Science says one thing and the public believes another because the public relations machine benefits the economics of the drug industry and the medical industry. …Mammography is a fraud. The January 8, 2000 issue of the Lancet carried an article stating that mammography is unjustifiable. Of the eight studies done, six of them show that mammography doesn’t work-and yet the American public believes it this is a time honored, definite way of saving their lives from breast cancer.”
– John McDougall, MD