This post is part of our Home Remedy Handbook, a tour of the landscape of home remedies from the iffy to the doctor-approved. Read more here.
Thanks to a loophole in the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic act of 1938, some of the “drugs” you can buy at pharmacies are actually nothing but magic water. I am, I promise, not exaggerating. I don’t mean supplements, which are legal because they are considered to be not drugs. And I don’t mean foods that make iffy or overblown health claims (nothing as boring as that). I mean that you can walk into a pharmacy and pay seven dollars of legal tender for a bottle of a “natural” kids cold & cough remedy and walk away with a bottle of mostly water—or at least what is hopefully mostly water.
That bottle may bear a Drug Facts label and a seemingly factual statement that it “temporarily relieves symptoms of common cold in children.” And it does not contain any medicine. That’s because it isn’t formulated with modern medications, nor with medicinal quantities of herbs that are believed to have healing properties. Homeopathic drugs are just water (or alcohol or sugar) that have been imbued with the magical vibrations of substances that, if used straight, would make your symptoms worse.
My friends, homeopathy is not only nonsense, it is some of the wildest nonsense you will read about today.
What the hell is homeopathy, really?
Table of Contents
Let’s step back in our time machine to 1796. A German physician, Samuel Hahnemann, was disappointed with the state of medicine at the time. This was the age of bloodletting, when doctors responded to illnesses by trying to balance the body’s “humors.” The treatments of the time often did more harm than good, so Hahnemann wasn’t necessarily wrong for wanting to find other ways of doctoring. But his alternative didn’t work, either.
Remember, this is well before anybody knew that germs could cause illness, or that operating rooms should be clean, or that vitamins existed, or what made herbal medicines work (when they did). Clinical trials, as we know them, were not a standard tool of science or medicine.
So, one day, Hahnemann ate some cinchona bark. This is the tree bark from South America that is now recognized as one of the first modern pharmaceuticals. It’s where we get quinine, the “tonic” in tonic water. We now know that a chemical found in the bark can kill the parasite that causes malaria. In the understanding of the time, though, all anybody knew was that taking this bark would cure your recurring fever.
Hahnemann did not have malaria. He reportedly took notes on the symptoms he experienced from mildly overdosing on cinchona, which included weakness, trembling, and fever, among others. These sounded to him like the symptoms of malaria itself, and this observation led to the “law of similars” that forms the basis for homeopathic medicine.
According to this so-called law, the way you treat an illness is to find a substance that causes the same symptoms of that illness in healthy people. So how is that not making the sick person’s illness worse? Well, you separate the substance from the healing properties of that substance. You put the healing properties into water. Then you have magic water.
How homeopathy is supposed to work (I promise I am not making this up)
First, you find a substance that can produce the same symptoms as the condition you are trying to treat. For example, coffee can give you jitters and sleeplessness, so a homeopathic medicine made from coffee is supposed to be an appropriate treatment for a hyperactive child, or a person with insomnia. Onion makes your eyes water and your nose run, so onion extract is used in homeopathic remedies with the intention of stopping your eyes from watering and your nose from running.
Onion is actually one of the ingredients you may find in homeopathic children’s cold medicines—“Allium cepa 6X HPUS” means that a preparation made from onions was diluted in water at a ratio of 1:10. Then a small amount of that preparation was diluted at a 1:10 ratio, and so on, a total of six times. The result, if I have done my math right, is an onion-to-water ratio of one to one million.
To be clear, we are not just diluting the onion water. We are “succusing” the water, or shaking it in a particular way, to transfer the memory of the onion into the water.
Homeopaths—who, yes, exist today—are convinced that water does indeed have memory, and to them, the only question remaining is how to convince real scientists that this must be true.
Since the water remembers the onion, we don’t need to worry whether or not there is any onion in the finished cold medicine—although the preparation is statistically likely to include a good bit of it. The dilution is only 6X. Homeopaths consider this number of dilutions to make a weak or mild medicine; to get the extra-strength stuff, you would need to dilute it more.
This is no secret. The American Association of Homeopathic Pharmacists is happy to tell you that homeopathic preparations often contain none of their supposed active ingredient. In their FAQ, they answer the question “Can I take an overdose or too much of a homeopathic medicine?” by saying:
Because of the extremely small amount of highly diluted active ingredients, you need not worry about suffering an overdose by taking more homeopathic medicine than the recommended dosage. In dilutions above 8X or 4C, any toxic properties of the original substance have disappeared; the medicine is safe and sold over-the-counter (OTC).
And yes, that means “over-the-counter” as in something you can buy at your neighborhood pharmacy or your favorite big-box store. Look next to the regular cold medicines and pain relievers, and you’ll find homeopathic products from brands like Hyland’s and Boiron.
And yet, they can be dangerous
Homeopaths love to point out that the dilution keeps their products safe. But many homeopathic medicines are not diluted to extremes. We have already seen that there are products that are less diluted, like the 6X ingredients in our example. If that were something more toxic than onion, we might worry.
And then there are products sold as “homeopathic” even though they contain a substantial amount of the active ingredient. I’ve seen arnica gel, for example, that is offered at a “1X” dilution. Sambucol sells elderberry products to treat colds where some are supplements (containing substantial amounts of elderberry) and others are homeopathic (containing little to no elderberry).
You can tell the difference if you know how to read a Supplement Facts label versus a homeopathic Drug Facts label, but the fronts of the packages both seem claim the same benefits. The law of similars would seem to dictate that these two products cannot possibly treat the same condition; in homeopathy world, if homeopathic elderberry cures a cold, then non-homeopathic elderberry would give you cold symptoms. But there is no FDA regulation requiring your marketing strategy to stick to a single theory of medicine.
It really is not fair for critics of homeopathy to say that these medicines are “just” water, since they are often not. And by the same token, it does not follow that homeopathic medicines are “safe” because they are diluted.
In fact, products labeled as homeopathic have allegedly killed people. In 2016, the FDA investigated a brand of homeopathic teething tablets that was linked to the deaths of 10 infants and another 400 reports of adverse events like seizures. One of the ingredients was belladonna, or deadly nightshade. The FDA’s lab testing found that the tablets contained significant amounts of belladonna, often more than stated on the label, and warned people not to buy them. The company issued a recall in 2017, just like it had in 2010 when the same damn thing happened.
Or to take another example, homeopathic nasal gels and nasal swabs contained enough zinc to cause people to permanently lose their sense of smell. The FDA issued warning letters, saying that even though the product is labeled as homeopathic, it does include zinc and the FDA is not aware of any trials showing zinc in the nose to be safe and effective. The dilution in that case was 2X, meaning the products had 0.1% zinc.
I’m sorry, how is any of this legal?
Well, it’s sort of not. But the FDA also isn’t trying very hard to stop it.
Homeopathic “drugs” got a carveout in the 1938 law that defined what, exactly, the FDA exists to regulate. Over the years, the FDA has struggled with the fact that drugs are defined as either drugs that work or remedies that were grandfathered in for being homeopathic.
Homeopathic medicines aren’t tested with clinical trials. They rely on “provings,” in which the raw ingredients are given to healthy volunteers and their symptoms documented. According to homeopathic theory, no clinical trials are needed. And this isn’t just a loophole for over-the-counter drugs: There exist schools of homeopathy and private-practice homeopaths who will customize remedies to your particular temperament. (Remember, homeopathy is all about matching symptoms to symptoms; the cause of the illness, homeopaths will tell you, is irrelevant.)
Over the years, the FDA has slowly come to terms with the fact that drugs are required to be safe and effective, and homeopathic drugs are not. I think my favorite moment—perhaps my favorite government document of all time—is when the Federal Trade Commission sent the FDA a spicy letter pointing out that it is, in fact, illegal for companies to lie about their products.
The FDA finally decided in 2022 that they can, in fact, boot products off the market for being unsafe or ineffective. But instead of a blanket declaration that homeopathic products were thenceforth illegal, the agency stated that it would “focus its enforcement authorities” on products that seem to be particularly dangerous. Which means that a lot of this nonsense is still on store shelves and will stay there probably forever.
How can I avoid this stuff when I’m shopping?
First of all, beware the stuff that seems too good to be true. For example, a lot of real medications that are appropriate for adults and older children aren’t OK for babies or toddlers. (Cough medicine, for example, is not for children under the age of 4.) So homeopathy companies have pounced on this market because they know you want to buy some kind of cough medicine for your baby. And since most people don’t know what homeopathy is, you’ll probably look the box over and figure it must be legit.
So here’s how to read the label: First, see if it’s a Drug Facts label or not. (Some of the products you’ll find in the drugstore are supplements, which may or may not be useful in some way. But supplements are not medicine.) Next, if it’s a Drug Facts label, look for these signs:
- Dilutions listed with a number and letter, like 6X or 20C
- The acronym HPUS next to an ingredient, which refers to the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States (a government-recognized giant database of bullshit)
- Ingredients with (usually) two-word Latin names, like “natrum muriaticum” (that one is sea salt)
Some homeopathic products will include a disclaimer like, “Claims based on traditional homeopathic practice, not accepted medical evidence.”
A lot hides behind that Latin, by the way. Sometimes ingredients are plant extracts or chemical elements, and sometimes they are common items like onions or salt. In other cases, they are eye-of-newt caliber preparations, like the “Hepar Sulph Calc” in one cold medicine that is the inner layer of oyster shells, ground finely and cooked with sulfur. That’s a special recipe from Hahnemann himself.
And to leave you with just one more “what the hell” moment for today, I’ll tell you about oscillococcinum, a homeopathic product you can commonly pick up at any neighborhood pharmacy. The ingredient is often listed as Anas barbariae, which is meant to refer to the Muscovy duck. (The Muscovy duck is now known by the scientific name Cairina moschata, so this isn’t even its scientific name, just a Latinized version of the common name.)
Anyway, the reason this is sold to treat “flu-like symptoms” is because of a breathtakingly fantastical hypothesis, long disproven, about the cause of the flu. Today we know that influenza is caused by the influenza virus. But in 1920, viruses had yet to be discovered. Bacteria were known, though, so scientists were constantly looking through microscopes at blood and tissue samples from sick people, hoping to find the germ that would explain everything. As McGill University’s Office of Science and Society tells it:
[Dr. Joseph] Roy naturally took a great interest in the flu and sought to solve its mysterious cause by examining the blood of victims under the microscope. He described seeing tiny microbes that darted or “oscillated” quickly back and forth. He named these “oscillococci” and claimed that they were also to be found in the blood of patients suffering from diseases as diverse as cancer, tuberculosis and gonorrhea. This “universal germ” as he called it, was responsible for many illnesses! If these oscillococci were causing the symptoms of disease, Roy concluded, then a homeopathic solution of the same should be curative.
Yep, a vibrating microbe that causes all illness. Make a homeopathic preparation of that, and Bob’s your uncle! Now, how do you make a homeopathic preparation of that? Well, Roy thought he had found the same vibrating microbes in duck livers. (To this day, nobody knows what he actually saw. There are no vibrating microbes in duck livers, you can go look.) So you make a preparation from duck organs, dilute the heck out of it, infuse the resulting water into sugar pills, and sell those pills for $27.49 at Target. (A real price I just confirmed. God, I wish I were making this up.)
You know what actually works for cases of flu that are mild enough to treat at home? Fluids. Rest. Maybe a little saline to flush out the mucus in your nose. You know: home remedies.