Why You Can't Trust Homeopathy

1. It doesn't work

When tested under the most rigorous of conditions - where neither the patient nor the doctor knows whether they're using homeopathy or not until all of the tests are done - homeopathy has shown to be no better than a sugar pill. That's not to say that people do not feel positive benefits after taking homeopathy - just that those positive benefits aren't related to homeopathy. The placebo effect is often misunderstood but very real, and we're all subject to it. Fortunately, proven medicine also carries with it a large dose of placebo, along with its other benefits. The choice between real medicine and homeopathy comes down to a simple question - would you rather opt for a placebo plus a treatment that has been proven to work, or just a placebo?

2. It couldn't possibly work

The theory behind homeopathy, when subjected to even basic scrutiny, simply doesn't stand up. The underlying 'laws' of the treatment do not conform to anything we know about medicine, mathematics or chemistry - instead, it's clear that homeopathic tinctures are simply water, and homeopathic pills are simply sugar. For more on the theory behind homeopathy, see our What Is Homeopathy section.

3. It's a waste of your money

The homeopathy industry is worth around £40million in the UK, and around €400million in both France and Germany. While this may seem small compared to the pharmaceutical industry, real drugs have to be proven to be effective before being licensed in the UK - something the homeopathy industry does not have to prove, and something they would be entirely unable to prove. £40million is a lot of money to spend on something that doesn't work. Homeopathic pills are being sold at a cost of around £4.95 for less than 20g of sugar pills. If these pills don't contain any active ingredient and have been proven not to work, then it ultimately amounts to a lot of money for not a lot of sugar.

4. It's a waste of everyone's money

In the UK, the NHS spends around £4million every year on homeopathy and the British government supports four NHS Homeopathic Hospitals - Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London. What's more over 400 GPs in the UK regularly refer patients to homeopathic clinics. With homeopathy having been conclusively proven to work no better than placebo, there is no place for it in the National Health System, and no reason to support it with money that would otherwise be used to support real, proven treatments with genuine efficacy.

5. It's a waste of your time

By promoting homeopathy as a genuine alternative to real medicine, patients may delay seeking expert medical assistance while using homeopathy to treat their condition. This is a real cause of concern: for relatively mild ailments, the risk is minimal; but for more severe conditions, the sooner a disease is caught, the greater the chance of recovery. Until recently, the website for Boots pharmacy even went so far as to tell patients that "after taking a homeopathic medicine your symptoms may become slightly worse." This kind of advice directly encourages patients to wait before seeking real medical attention, even when their condition deteriorates. Time wasted due to belief in quack therapies becomes even more significant amongst those with terminal conditions. A patient given false hope by the claims of therapies such as homeopathy can be distracted from making the most of the time they have left, as well as being given an unrealistic view of their condition - causing more heartache when the treatment proves futile, and the time spent on it proves to be wasted.

6. It's a waste of everyone's time

To date, thousands of studies have been conducted into the effectiveness of homeopathy and its various 'laws' - so far, none have proven to be conclusively positive, and most have proven to be conclusively negative. If a conventional drug or treatment had the track record of failure which homeopathy has, it would have been dropped a long time ago - in fact, many conventional drugs, treatments and interventions HAVE been dropped in the time that we've been doing more research into homeopathy. If we weren't spending time discovering, yet again, that homeopathy doesn't work, then we could be spending that time finding new treatments that really DO work.

7. We have better alternatives to this alternative

One point is often overlooked in discussions about homeopathy: we don't need it. Real medicine works. Modern vaccines help keep diseases like measles, whooping cough and polio at bay. The severe pandemic posed by swine flu was kept at bay by modern disease management, understanding of the necessity of good hygiene habits and effective isolation and treatment of individual cases. Modern antiretroviral drugs help HIV patients manage their condition so that AIDS isn't the short-term death sentence it once was; homeopathic AIDS cures lead vulnerable, sick people to their deaths, paying for the privilege. Real medicine works.

8. It's not what it says on the label

In a full vial of homeopathic sulphur pills at 30C strength, there's significantly more chance of winning the lottery than there is of finding a single molecule of sulphur - yet the label on the side of the vial still reads 'Sulphur'.

9. It detracts from real medicine

Giving legitimacy to unproven - or rather, proven to be ineffective - treatments does not come without a cost. The cost of allowing the promotion of homeopathy as an 'alternative' to real medicine comes where patients are unable to distinguish between a self-limiting condition which will cure itself given time, and a more serious illness which will become life-threatening if incorrectly untreated. Stories of people abandoning real medicine in favour of quack cures, with disastrous results, are not hard to find. By allowing the promotion of a therapy proven to be both ineffective and entirely implausible, we encourage people to turn their back on the treatments that can help them, in favour of quackery.

10. It has abused its placebo privileges

From time to time, it's understandable that a simple-to-administer placebo treatment might carry some benefit for doctors, where no medical intervention has a particular, proven effectiveness. In these scenarios, it could be argued that homeopathy might have had a role to play, providing a harm-free, effect-free placebo to help manage the otherwise unmanageable. However, due to the abuse of the legitimacy leant to homeopathy by real medicine, this treatment has stopped being harm-free - it wastes money and time, and can discourage people from getting genuine medical help when they most need it. It's time to stop giving support to the ineffective and illogical quackery that is homeopathy, and time to give people the facts to evaluate its use before they choose to rely on Hahnemann's 200-year-old theories over the up-to-date, constantly-improving medical practices of today's world.