PSA: HOMEOPATHY IS FAKE. It's not real medicine. It's water or sugar and nothing more. Do you want to know how homeopathy "works"?
Homeopathy "works" on the principle that like cures like, that something which causes a symptom will, when sufficiently dilute, cure that symptom in the body.
Let's say you're suffering from insomnia. You might take homeopathic caffeine (or honest to god, homeopathic owl) to help you sleep. That's kind of crazy BUT IT GETS BETTER.
The more dilute a homeopathic remedy, the more potent it is meant to be. So they take the active ingredient and they dilute it in water. Then they take a drop of that water and dilute it in some more water. Then they take a drop of that water and dilute it in more water.....then they do that again and again and again until there is not even ONE SINGLE MOLECULE of the "active" ingredient remaining in the water....and they call that medicine and sell it to you.
Tl;Dr: What homeopaths call "medicine" most of us just call "rinsing"
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There is a phenomenon in toxicology called hormesis.
The standard model of toxicity in animal models is that toxicity is linear with the amount of toxin the animal ingests. This is clearly seen in Hg and Cd toxicity where people eat fish and it slowly builds up and poisons them.
Hormesis is nonlinear and threshold toxicity of an agent. Basically the toxicity is bi- or tri-phasic, with maximum toxicity being at low loads because higher loads inhibit biological responses. So less is more re toxicity.
I bring this up because homeopaths will use this to defend homeopathy, even though no nonlinear response is demonstrated.
Well that's quite an interesting phenomenon. One of those things that was demonstrated through rigorous experimentation. Unfortunately for homeopaths, they have yet to clear that hurdle.