Is homeopathy placebo?

As a medical science, homeopathy is not placebo.  Homeopathy requires complex analysis and draws on clinical experience and results from homeopaths over the last 200 years.  The long-term success and wide adoption of homeopathy is not due to a placebo effect, and placebo doesn’t explain the lack of reaction that patients have to certain remedies, or the full healing reaction they have to the correct remedy.  Not understanding the laboratory effects of homeopathy doesn’t equate to saying it doesn’t work.

However, this isn’t to say that there can’t be placebo effect at times with any medication—including, but not limited to, homeopathy.  All medicine can create a placebo effect, and some practitioners, even medical doctors, work specifically to employ this effect.  In 2008, the Journal of General Internal Medicine published an article, “Academic Physicians Use Placebos in Clinical Practice and Believe in the Mind-Body Connection” stating that 45% of a surveyed group of physicians employed placebo in clinical practice._[23(1):7-10]  (You may question the ethics of intentionally prescribing placebo, and you’re not alone—there is great debate within the medical field regarding this.)

As humans, we are suggestible, and through our suggestibility we can heal ourselves.  And if this suggestibility means that a person can heal himself or herself partially, with a medication helping to complete the healing process, then this is a medical success.  Physicians who employ the concept of the body’s natural healing ability think of placebo as harnessing a natural healing ability that people inherently have.  But sometimes thoughts and emotions stand in the way of this healing, and placebo can help to remove these thoughts and emotions.  Additionally, placebo can play a role in healing because when we take a medicine by mouth, we are conditioned to believe we are doing ourselves some good.  So, whether a medicine is used intentionally as placebo or not, the placebo effect plays a role in healing.

In the end, science has yet to explain a full understanding of the psyche and biomechanics of living organisms.  And in the health sciences there are still many approaches that work even though we don’t know why they work.  Perhaps what we call “placebo” should actually be called “healing.”  People who dismiss homeopathy by calling it placebo don’t understand the principles, don’t respect clinical experience, and purport that science has explained everything we know to be true.  But to think that life works exactly like laboratory studies is misleading to the public and the medical profession, and it limits our discovery of the human potential.

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