Stress and Health 447APA Goal 2: Scientific Reasoning and
Critical Thinking
Homeopathy: An Illusion of Healing
Addresses APA Objectives 2.1: Use scientific reasoning to
interpret psychological phenomena; and 2.3: Engage in innovative
and integrative thinking and problem solving.
In the late nineteenth century, conventional medicine still made use of extremely
questionable—and often harmful—practices such as bloodletting, purging (giving the
patient enemas and substances meant to induce diarrhea and vomiting), and the use
of mercury (Hall, 2014). It is no small wonder that many patients died. Into this arena
came a doctor, Samuel Hahnemann, who truly wanted to find a safer way to treat his
patients. The birth of the alternative medicine technique called homeopathy, the treat-
ment of disease by introducing minute amounts of substances that would cause disease
in larger doses, came from a series of events in Hahnemann’s own experience. He took a
dose of cinchona bark, used to treat malaria, and developed symptoms of malaria. From
this one incident, he reasoned that if a substance causes a symptom of a disease in a
healthy person, that substance can also be used to treat the same symptom in a sick
person (Hahnemann, 1907; Hall, 2014). This was the first law of homeopathy, “like cures
like.” Notice that he is clearly making an assumption here based on one experience and
no actual research whatsoever—remember the first criterion for critical thinking? “There
are very few ‘truths’ that do not need to be subjected to testing.” to Learning
Objective 1.12.
His second law, the law of infinitesimals, came from the need to dilute his treatments
to levels that would not actually cause symptoms, which he believed would make it not
only safer but also more potent. Again, this was his belief, not a tested and carefully exam-
ined result of research. From these two laws the field of homeopathy was born, and even
though famed nineteenth-century physician Oliver Wendell Holmes debunked the practice
in the latter part of that century (Holmes, 1892), it is still going strong and has become big
business.
There is ample evidence that homeopathy does not work (Ernst, 2002, 2012;
Maddox et al., 1988; Sehon & Stanley, 2010; Shelton, 2004). The so-called substances
that are supposed to effect a treatment are diluted to the extent that people using
homeopathic remedies are simply using water, sugar pills, or glycerin—there is no effec-
tive medicine in these remedies at all. As Dr. Harriet Hall points out in her discussion
of homeopathy in her column in Skeptical Inquirer, according to the reasoning used in
homeopathy,
If coffee keeps you awake, dilute coffee will put you to sleep. The more dilute, the
stronger the effect. If you keep diluting it until there isn’t a single molecule of coffee
left, it will be even stronger. The water will somehow remember the coffee. If you
drip that water onto a sugar pill and let the water evaporate, the water’s memory will
somehow be transferred to the sugar pill, and that memory of coffee will somehow
enable it to function as a sleeping pill. (Hall, 2014).
Sounds pretty ridiculous when put that way, doesn’t it? By the same reasoning,
you don’t need to fill your car’s radiator with antifreeze because any water you put
in must have at some point been in contact with ice, and all humans who have ever
drunk water must be resistant to cholera, as all drinking water has at some point been
tainted by that disease vector (Atwood, 2001). And while there are studies out there that
homeopathy
the treatment of disease by
introducing minute amounts
of suDstances that would cause
disease in larger doses.