Is Homeopathy Stupid?

Homeopaths believe and their patients believe, and that combined fantasy works great until the body can’t heal itself.

Or so I believed. . .

- Deborah Gordon, MD

One sunny fall afternoon during my second year of medical school (1976 in San Francisco), the weekly brown bag lunch talk was not given by a faculty member but rather by a rogue homeopath from that radical town across the Bay. Half my reason for attending was my fond defense of my hometown, Berkeley, actively insisting that its citizens were not all halfwit hippies. The handful of attendees behaved well, but I believe we all shared the same impression: “Homeopathy? Sounds crazy! Who made up this hocus-pocus and called it medicine?”

Our speaker was the infamous Dana Ullman, who at that moment was facing charges of practicing medicine without a license, after being the target of an undercover sting operation. Ullman was obviously a true believer in his healing practice, and I was sympathetic to that. In fact, all these years later Ullman remains a true believer. He settled the charges out of court, retaining the ability to maintain a health practice as distinct from a medical practice, and has been a practitioner and public advocate for homeopathy ever since.

At that first lunch, Ullman explained to us that a homeopathic remedy is selected for a patient’s symptoms, not her diagnosis, and it is dosed in immeasurably small amounts— that seemed to me to amount to nothing at all. The part that stuck with me, however, was the homeopathic principle: that the medication used for treatment would actually cause the same symptoms if given to a healthy person. A German MD named Samuel Hahnemann formulated this principle of homeopathy around 1800 when he observed that the symptoms of quinine poisoning were remarkably similar to those of malaria. Quinine, of course, is a cure for malaria. So Dr. Hahnemann created a list of symptoms caused by different medicines, and then tried those on his complaining patients. When they matched, he observed, the patients were cured.