“By definition”, I begin “Alternative Medicine”, I continue “Has either not been proved to work, Or been proved not to work. You know what they call “alternative medicine” That’s been proved to work? Medicine.”

— Tim Minchin, Storm

Right, but that can never be true for Homeopathy. It’s pseudoscience bullshit through and through. That said, many people conflate homeopathy with “natural remedies”, but that’s not what homeopathy is.

Homeopathy is built on the concept of “like cures like” and that as a solution becomes more dilute it becomes stronger. A newer idea (at least compared to homeopathy’s history) is that water has memory and that it “remembers” whatever it was mixed with in the past. They added this on to explain why diluting a solution so much that there’s virtually no chance of there being even a single molecule of the “medicine” left in it doesn’t actually make it not work because water remembers what you mixed it with.

So, say a person is suffering from poisoning. A typical homeopathic “cure” would be to take an amount of the poison, mix it with water, shake and stir it in a specific way, then dilute it with more water. Repeat lots of times, since the more dilute it is the stronger the “medicine” is.

Practitioners prey on the ignorance of their customers to swindle them out of their money for something that amounts to nothing more than a placebo. And while it’s possible that the placebo effect can have some beneficial effect, that doesn’t justify the existence of homeopathy.

God I hate this pseudoscience bullshit.