Wwhen I hear someone extolling the virtues of homeopathy I am often reminded of a quote from the TV show 30 Rock. “There are many kinds of intelligence,” Jack Donaghy tells a particularly stupid employee. “Practical, emotional … and then there’s real intelligence, that’s what I’m talking about.” Similar, and perhaps correlated, are the many types of medicine. Natural, complementary, alternative, homeopathic, herbal, traditional. And then there are real medicines, which work.
It’s strange that homeopaths can still find work in 2023, but somehow they do. In 1853, Queen Victoria’s physician already called the practice “an outrage to human reason”. In the next 170 years, this was repeatedly and comprehensively denied. After all, its principles are completely anti-science, based as it is on “healing like with like” – an extract of raw onion, say, to treat watery eyes – “strengthening” by process of dilution, and shaking it all up to “promote quantum entanglement”.
Yet last week we heard that the head of the royal medical household is an advocate of homeopathy. Dr. Michael Dixon has advocated things like “thought field therapy,” “Christian healing” and an Indian herbal cure “ultra-diluted” with alcohol, which it claims kills breast cancer cells. Methods like this may be “unfashionable”, he once wrote in an article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicinebut they should not be ignored.
Homeopaths are fond of calling their ideas “unfashionable,” as if by some inverse law of popularity that makes them more likely to be correct. But actually homeopathy is surprisingly fashionable for all the good it doesn’t do. YouGov found in 2021 that around half of Britons were “open-minded” about the practice – a figure that was slightly higher in the US and slightly lower in Australia and the Netherlands. In 2022 the global market for homeopathic products was valued at $11 billion (£8.6 billion).
After all, it was only in 2021 that the Association of Homeopaths lost its government accreditationand only a year before that its members were asked to please stop offering Cease Therapy, which is based on the idea that vaccines cause autismand that the cure is a large dose of vitamin C. Meanwhile, in August of this year, the World Health Organization series of tweets praise for traditional medicine, including homeopathy, which said “was on the frontiers of medicine and science” – in much the same way, I think, that flat earthers were once on the frontier of physics.
Why is homeopathy so useless and yet so common? Part of the explanation must be that it has always found champions in elite circles. In the mid-19th century, dozens of homeopaths served as personal physicians to monarchs around the world—including in Britain, where the first royal homeopathic physician was a son of the Duchess of Devonshire. Edward, Prince of Wales, was the patron of the London Homeopathic hospital; King George VI named a racehorse Hypericum after a favorite drug.
The Queen Mother, meanwhile, was something of a maniac for arnica – she covered her dogs in it and pushed it on her friends. “I think arnica is the most wonderful medicine and every doctor, including those not trained in homeopathy, should use arnica,” she once said wistfully. And then there is King Charles, who in his first speech as president of the British Medical Association told the assembled crowd of doctors that modern medicine was “like the celebrated Leaning Tower of Pisa, slightly off balance”.
The royals are no longer the fashion influencers they once were. But a host of homeopath-advocating elites have risen to take their place: celebrities such as Helena Bonham Carter, David Beckham, Jude Law, Jennifer Aniston, Chris Martin and Cindy Crawford. They continue to spread the word.
But why? These are not people who want education, nor those who follow their advice: the typical user of homeopathy is affluent and middle class. Why are kings, movie stars and the rich so susceptible to this snake oil?
Two factors, I think, are at play. The first is that elites tend to overestimate the value of their instincts. King Charles and Cindy Crawford spend their time surrounded by suction cups. They are themselves exceptions to the rules that govern others. If a feeling leads them to “thought field therapy,” rather than modern medicine, they may be more likely to believe it.
And the second is something that Charles Percy Snow first observed in his famous comments about the “two cultures” in the west. Ignorance of literature and arts will exclude you from “highly educated” circles, but it is perfectly acceptable to have no understanding of basic science – the second law of thermodynamics, for example, or how to define “acceleration”. Combine overconfidence and an ignorance of science and you get an aristocracy convinced that crushed bees and aconite are the answer to their problems.
This is bad news anyway. Alternative medicine is useless, but not always harmless – when cancer patients put their trust in tinctures, and chanting can cause fatal delays in proper treatment. It must be resisted.
