Already in 1842 Homeopathy was debunked. I came over this old essay written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a poet and physician that lived from 1809 to 1894. His essay Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions was two lectures presented to the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1842.
The essay gives us a quick introduction to the principles of Homeopathy and its inventor Samuel Hahnemann’s original written work published in 1806. Even to the educated of his own days the principles he suggested were logically and scientifically unsound as they even more so are today.
Holmes describes the principles and suggest 3 consequences of these principles that ought to be true if these principles were. He picks them apart thoroughly. An examples is his comment on the first principle, namely that “like cures like”, or that a remedy that causes some given symptoms will cure a disease with the same symptoms.
Let us look a moment at the first of his doctrines. Improbable though it may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved in the proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that, under certain circumstances, the very medicine which, from its known effects, one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief. I may be permitted to allude, in the most general way, to the case in which the spontaneous efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by the agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon any terms. But that every cure ever performed by medicine should have been founded upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a physician; that the Homeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, “the sole law of nature in therapeutics,” a law of which nothing more than a transient glimpse ever presented itself to the innumerable host of medical observers, is a dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant novelty, that it demands a corresponding breadth and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its vast pretensions.
Then he looks at the absurdity of the claim that the more the remedy is diluted, the more effective it is. This is the most common argument anyone arguing that Homeopathy is humbug will first use. A commonly used dilution is 30C, which means that the dilution is of the order 1 to 100^30, or a one with 60 following zeros. This is of course absurd to anyone with some knowledge of chemistry or physics. As Holmes notes, even a schoolboy can see the flaw in that logic. Homeopaths claim there is some mystical effect that “copies” the information of the remedy unto the dilution. The way this is supposed to happen is purely magical and has no scientific plausible explanation. For more info on the process see here.
Holmes also note that the three basic principles of Homeopathy are derived with no logical connection. The idea that “like cures like” has absolutely no relation to the method of dilution they use, the last original principle, which apparently weren’t even well accepted by Homeopaths back then, is that all diseases have their origin in an itch! In any case, as his main arguments Holmes look at three implications of the argument that “like cures like” and go through them in great detail. The argument are as follow:
I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of Hahnemann and his school.
In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curantur (or like is cured by like), to be the basis of the healing art—”the sole law of nature in therapeutics”—it is necessary—
- That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy persons should be faithfully studied and recorded.
- That drugs should be shown to be always capable of curing those, diseases most like their own symptoms.
- That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases when they do not produce symptoms resembling those presented in these diseases.
The arguments themselves are lengthy, and are best read in the original essay. Which is well recommended reading for those who are interested in the subject.
Related links:
- Homeopathy is NOT medicine, Unfiltered Perception
