When actor Anushka Sharma told her millions of followers that homeopathy had played “an important role” in her life, crediting a homeopath, the post was shared, screenshotted and defended within hours. That is the strange power of homeopathy: a 200-year-old pre-scientific system which the British Medical Association called “witchcraft”, with no demonstrable effect on any disease, kept alive less by what it does, and more by health-illiterate sycophants.
Homeopathy survives for reasons that have little to do with effective healthcare. It is woven into India’s medical bureaucracy – taught in government-recognised colleges, dispensed in public clinics, and protected by a framework that treats dangerous placebo as medicine. It carries the falsely comforting aura of being the “legalized” – natural and gentle care, which offers patients unhurried attention that overburdened doctors and overworked hospitals rarely can.
Behind homeopathy’s appeal
People reach for homeopathy when they are confused, frightened, ill-informed about their chronic disease, or tired of a conventional system that feels cold and rushed. For many families it is simply an inherited trust – a remedy a grandparent swore by, handed down as “common sense”. The appeal is human, even though the premise is not true.
The fact is, homeopathy has never cured or controlled or prevented any disease, and the reasons people think otherwise are well understood. This is the part its believers find hardest to accept. Most illnesses we self-treat or go to a homeopathy practitioner for — such as colds, aches, rashes, viral fevers, and allergies — are self-limiting; they end on their own during their natural history. Chronic conditions such as psoriasis and asthma, wax and wane, so symptoms caught at their worst will, on average, improve afterwards no matter what you take – but evidence-based medications are required to prevent disease flares and progression in the long term. Most homeopathy practitioners advise their patients not to stop modern medications.
Testimonial over clinical trial
Add the placebo response, spontaneous remission, and the simple error of “I took it, then I got better, therefore it worked” — the post hoc fallacy — and you have a perfect machine for manufacturing false cures. Post hoc fallacy is the mistaken belief that simply because one event happened after another, the first event caused the second.
Practitioners exploit these illusions, knowingly or not. They take credit for recoveries that would have happened anyway, reinterpret worsening as “aggravation before healing,” and quietly rely on patients also taking real medicines. They offer testimonials instead of trials, anecdotes instead of data, and bespoke “constitutional” prescriptions precisely so that failure can be blamed on the wrong remedy rather than the wrong system. When the world’s major scientific bodies from Australia, UK, Spain, France and now Germany, examined the entire evidence base, each reached the same verdict: no reliable evidence that homeopathy works for any condition.
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Chemistry of homeopathy
The reason is chemistry. Classical high-potency remedies are diluted so extremely that not one molecule of it exists in the final product. That is why classical homeopathy is, at best, an elaborate placebo. But placebos are not harmless when they replace treatment. A diabetes patient who trusts homeopathic remedies for their blood sugar, a cancer patient who delays proven therapy, a child whose pneumonia is “managed” with dilutions – these are not hypothetical tragedies – real doctors see their consequences.
And homeopathy is not always inert. The low-dilution mother tinctures that many practitioners commonly prescribe contain real, measurable quantities of alcohol, toxic botanicals and poisonous metallo-minerals. Homeopathic products have been found contaminated with arsenic, mercury and lead; “natural” tinctures have caused liver injury severe enough to require hospitalisation, and worse.
Finally, the myth that homeopathy is cheap. The pills look inexpensive, but cost is not measured in rupees per bottle. It is measured in disease left to advance, in complications that proper care would have prevented, in months and savings spent on consultations that change nothing, and occasionally in the fatal price paid for an adverse event. A treatment that does nothing is the most expensive medicine of all, because you pay for it twice — once at the pharmacy, and again with your health.
Anushka Sharma is entitled to her beliefs. But her million followers are not a clinical trial, and a celebrity’s testimonial is not evidence. Water remembers nothing. Patients, unfortunately, remember too late.
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(The writer is public health activist, clinical scientist in hepatology at Rajagiri Hospital, Kochi, Kerala and author of The Liver Doctor, published by Harper Collins India)
