The thing you have to remember about homeopathy is its origins. In the mid and later 18th Century, mainstream medicine was a horror show. No matter what was wrong with you, the prescribed treatments were usually to either bleed you half to death (or all the way), or feed you mercury salts until you foamed at the mouth and your teeth fell out. Often they did both for good measure.
So into this comes Sam Hahnemann, a German physician and a seemingly decent fellow who didn’t have the stomach to do his patients in for profit, so he left practice to work as a translator and went into what was essentially pharmaceutical research. When he tried quinine on himself, he had a bad reaction to it, which is not uncommon. He felt achy and feverish and though “aha, this is just like malaria”. He came up with a theory that was wrong, but intuitively not so crazy: Maybe drugs that cause disease like symptoms in healthy people are the cure for the diseases that cause those same symptoms. Boom, we have the Law of Similars. Now we have to remember that chemistry and biology were pretty primitive. They barely had any idea of how the organs were supposed to work, let alone how they went wrong. Germ theory wasn’t at thing, or was considered fringy, and they didn’t have any idea of chemical structures or even I think a good way to discern empirical formulas at that time.
Of course a lot of those chemicals caused healthy people to feel sick because they were poisonous. So Sam figures maybe we’ll just back the dose way off. Way, way off. So he dilutes these compounds by factors of hundreds and thousands until he has nothing really but pure water or sugar pills. So he developed another theory about how these diluted compounds left some magical trace of energy or chemical property behind and a whole system of medicine around it. Did it actually cure anyone? No, but it was a vast improvement over mainstream medicine because it adhered to the old maxim of “First, do no harm”. People who went to homeopathic doctors didn’t get bled or poisoned. They got a good dose of placebo effect that comes from a “drug” they thought was powerful along with the encouragement of some eminent university man with four names and bunch of letters behind it. Often the doc got them to back off the booze and junk food and otherwise adopt some clean living, and like many conditions do, they get better over time.
Homeopathy is a classic example of how medicine can go terribly astray without rigorous scientific testing, but it’s a relatively benign form of pseudoscience.
That’s why I’m grateful to live in an age where we can figure out the three dimensional structure and chemical composition of drug targets and the drugs themselves.
Doing pharmaceutical research by metaphysics is, to say the least, an imprecise business.
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The thing you have to remember about homeopathy is its origins. In the mid and later 18th Century, mainstream medicine was a horror show. No matter what was wrong with you, the prescribed treatments were usually to either bleed you half to death (or all the way), or feed you mercury salts until you foamed at the mouth and your teeth fell out. Often they did both for good measure.
So into this comes Sam Hahnemann, a German physician and a seemingly decent fellow who didn’t have the stomach to do his patients in for profit, so he left practice to work as a translator and went into what was essentially pharmaceutical research. When he tried quinine on himself, he had a bad reaction to it, which is not uncommon. He felt achy and feverish and though “aha, this is just like malaria”. He came up with a theory that was wrong, but intuitively not so crazy: Maybe drugs that cause disease like symptoms in healthy people are the cure for the diseases that cause those same symptoms. Boom, we have the Law of Similars. Now we have to remember that chemistry and biology were pretty primitive. They barely had any idea of how the organs were supposed to work, let alone how they went wrong. Germ theory wasn’t at thing, or was considered fringy, and they didn’t have any idea of chemical structures or even I think a good way to discern empirical formulas at that time.
Of course a lot of those chemicals caused healthy people to feel sick because they were poisonous. So Sam figures maybe we’ll just back the dose way off. Way, way off. So he dilutes these compounds by factors of hundreds and thousands until he has nothing really but pure water or sugar pills. So he developed another theory about how these diluted compounds left some magical trace of energy or chemical property behind and a whole system of medicine around it. Did it actually cure anyone? No, but it was a vast improvement over mainstream medicine because it adhered to the old maxim of “First, do no harm”. People who went to homeopathic doctors didn’t get bled or poisoned. They got a good dose of placebo effect that comes from a “drug” they thought was powerful along with the encouragement of some eminent university man with four names and bunch of letters behind it. Often the doc got them to back off the booze and junk food and otherwise adopt some clean living, and like many conditions do, they get better over time.
Homeopathy is a classic example of how medicine can go terribly astray without rigorous scientific testing, but it’s a relatively benign form of pseudoscience.
You can see how this ‘Law of Similars’ could really go haywire though… Snow is white. Some rabbits are white. Some rabbits are snow….
That’s why I’m grateful to live in an age where we can figure out the three dimensional structure and chemical composition of drug targets and the drugs themselves.
Doing pharmaceutical research by metaphysics is, to say the least, an imprecise business.