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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Not entirely true. Some homeopathic remedies do absolutely not work this way. Additionally, there are plenty of studies indicating that at least some homeopathic adjuncts and treatments do, in fact, yield a positive result.
For example: Black elderberry (Sambucus nigra) supplementation effectively treats upper respiratory symptoms: A meta-analysis of randomized, controlled clinical trials J. Hawkins, C. Baker, L. Cherry, E. Dunne https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0965229918310240
Well i looked up the paper referenced in your link, did a ctrl f search and didn't find homeopathy mentioned in the paper. So this is not an example of homeopathy having a therapeutic outcome, it's herbalism. I don't know how robust the body of evidence is for elderberry but based on the paper you' ve shared, it's not a homeopathic preparation of elderberry which is said to have an effect. I'm quite happy to accept that an intervention which contains an active ingredient could produce a measurable outcome.
Homeopathy doesn't work. Not only does it have no mechanism of action, it also shows no efficacy. In fact, the more tightly controlled the study and the more participants...the less of an effect homeopathy appears to have.
I'm not parsing words. You advocated for homeopathy and submitted an example which bore no mention of homeopathy. I understand that many people conflate homeopathy with any "natural" remedy but that is simply wrong. Homeopathy is a specific sort of intervention. It is not the use of herbal remedies, it is specifically the use of incredibly dilute substances to cure the symptoms that the " active " ingredient would produce. You can look it up if you don't believe me.
Wouldn't vaccines work under the dilution principle?
Absolutely not. Vaccines contain portions of the virus which the immune system can recognize. There exist many molecules of the pathogen within the vaccine. Homeopathy on the other hand contains virtually no active ingredient to LITERALLY no active ingredient. For example, a very common preparation of homeopathy is 6C (a dilution which contains just 0.0000000001% of the original substance, there is a 50/50 chance that ONE SINGLE MOLECULE of the "active" ingredient remains. At the common dilution of 30C there is literally not even a single molecule of the " active" ingredient which remains.
Homeopathy is magical thinking and deserves to be treated the way you would treat any other example thereof.
@Pikachu I was thinking about this yesterday. While in my line of work we consider herbal medicine and homeopathy to be the same, they are, in fact, not. It's a technical distinction, but one I should've made.
Gotcha on the vaccines. And that makes sense; just didn't know if introducing inactive portions of a virus would be considered the same thing, but there's also a distinction there, I assume.
I'm not a particular follower of homeopathy and I know most of it is junk science (though I do like seeing the placebo effect at play); but now there's a personal challenge to find any evidence of research suggesting it's effective. I'm just completely curious now.
Yeah, colloquially homeopathy gets lumped in with various other remedies. Always good to investigate for oneself! I think you'll find largely what i described earlier: The better the trial, the smaller the apparent effect for homeopathy.
