Not as bad as leechesIT MAY not be as ancient as acupuncture, but homeopathy is the closest thing Germany has to a native alternative-medicine tradition. Practitioners line the high street. Upper-class Germans swear by it. Unusually, Germany gives homeopathy a privileged legal status. Whereas other medicines must meet scientific criteria, homeopathic remedies need not, and health insurers are explicitly allowed to reimburse for their use. This bothers sceptics such as Norbert Schmacke, a professor of medicine and the author of a book explaining why homeopathy is nonsense. “If you believe that water has memory,” as homeopaths do, you “might as well also believe in unicorns”, he says.
Such objections have been raised for much of the two centuries since Samuel Hahnemann, a Saxon doctor, invented homeopathy. He believed that “like cures like”—ie, that tiny doses of a toxin can heal the patient. And he did mean tiny: homeopaths dilute their chemicals into water or sugar to concentrations of 1 part to billions or even trillions. Usually not a single molecule remains in the preparation. Yet believers claim that this...Continue reading
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