Samuel Hahnemann and “Like Cures Like”

If Samuel Hahnemann had remained a linguist and translator, or even a physician, rather than moving into experimenting with a new type of medical treatment, he and the world could have saved themselves a lot of headaches and other ills. As it was, the German Hahnemann became the founder of homeopathy (Homöopathie in German) around 1796.

Born in Meissen in the Electorate of Saxony (Kurfürstentum Sachsen) in 1755, Hahnemann showed a talent for languages, becoming proficient in English, French, Italian, Greek and Latin. To help support his medical studies in Leipzig, Hahnemann worked as a translator of medical works and a language teacher. Before long he had added Arabic, Chaldaic, Hebrew, and other languages to a collection of exotic tongues that eventually totaled over 20 languages.

Homeopathic globules (Globuli in German) are made from an inert substance (usually cane sugar, sometimes lactose), upon which a drop of liquid homeopathic preparation is placed and allowed to evaporate. These sugar pills are not just ineffective but actually dangerous when used instead of legitimate medical treatment. Homeopathic remedies are typically biochemically inert, and have no effect on any known disease. PHOTO: Dr. Moumita Sahana (Wikimedia Commons)

In fact it was Hahnemann’s translation work that got him started with the pseudoscience of homeopathy. Around 1784, while translating a work in English by William Cullen titled A Treatise on the Materia Medica, he noticed Cullen’s claim that cinchona, the bark of a Peruvian tree, was effective in treating malaria. In the process of doing his own experimentation with that bark and other natural substances Hahnemann stumbled onto the theory of “like cures like” (similia similibus curentur in Latin). Homeopaths (Heilpraktiker in German), believe that a (diluted) substance that causes symptoms of a disease in healthy people can cure similar symptoms in sick people. But in practice, homeopathic remedies are so extremely diluted that their effectiveness is virtually zero. At most a homeopathic patient may experience a placebo effect.

Which is why some people claim there is little harm from homeopathy and other “alternative” treatments. But in truth there is harm. People who turn to homeopathy may suffer no harm from the treatment itself, but by delaying real medical treatment, they risk not getting curative care that could prevent or alleviate serious diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and other ailments. And in fact, self-treatment with homeopathic “cures” or the actions of quack homeopaths does sometimes lead to bad outcomes. One example: A mother brought her young daughter in to see a medical doctor for an ear ailment that was not responding to homeopathy. To his astonishment, the physician discovered that the child’s ear canal was packed with sugar pills placed there by a homeopath. The jammed-together pills had caused a severe infection in the child’s ear.

“It is time for the scientific community to stop giving alternative medicine a free ride. There cannot be two kinds of medicine — conventional and alternative.” – Marcia Angell, then editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, September 1998
“…there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective.” – National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Australia, March 2015

Ginger Root and Meteorite Dust
Recently another bizarre homeopathic cure came to light – at a hospital in Berlin-Kladow associated with one of Berlin’s oldest and most respected hospitals, Charité. Media reports revealed that doctors devoted to the “spiritual science” of the Austrian Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), had actually treated seriously ill patients for Covid-19 with ginger root and meteorite dust at the Havelhöhe intensive care hospital! It’s rather extraordinary for a university teaching hospital, and demonstrates that quack medicine is firmly established within Germany’s health sector. It was probably in response to a bizarre claim that the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the cause of Covid-19) arrived on earth from outer space via a meteorite! The treatment is made by a German company named Wala. The pills contain elements of ground-up iron collected from meteorites that have landed on earth. As with most homeopathic “cures,” the tincture of iron is diluted down by a factor of one drop to 100 billion. See the photo of a related Twitter post below.

A Twitter post by The Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief Philip Oltermann with a photo of the German-made WALA brand globules of heavily diluted meteorite iron that were administered to Covid patients in a Berlin intensive care hospital. PHOTO: Twitter

Why do Germans keep turning to quack medicine?
So why do Germans keep turning to the snake-oil, smoke-and-mirrors practices of homeopathy in such great numbers? For one thing, homeopathy is big business in Germany, an estimated $750 million worth in 2020. Worldwide, homeopathy is a multibillion-dollar global industry with hundreds of tincture and globule makers, led by France’s Boiron SA, which reported sales topping $600 million in 2020. India is another big source of online homeopathic remedies. Part of the problem in Germany and elsewhere is that consumers can avoid the local Apotheke (pharmacy) and order homeopathic pills and tinctures online. Because they are deemed “harmless” few if any homeopathic remedies are regulated in any way in Germany. The vast majority of homeopathic products are widely available without a prescription. By most accounts, roughly half of Germany’s population has used homeopathic preparations.

Although many countries have moved to restrict homeopathy by law and regulation, Germany stubbornly clings to the bogus practice invented there. But even France, Switzerland, Spain, and some other European nations have only very recently taken limited steps to discourage homeopathy by reducing or eliminating health insurance coverage, banning the sale of homeopathic remedies by pharmacies, and publicly discouraging homeopathic treatments. In a 2010 report, the Science and Technology Committee of the United Kingdom House of Commons recommended that homeopathy should no longer receive National Health Service (NHS) funding due its lack of scientific credibility. Yet, as mentioned above, alternative medical practices (homeopathy, naturopathy, eurythmy, and others) are still firmly entrenched in German medicine.

Homeopathy Arose Before the Discovery of Bacteria or Viruses
Samuel Hahnemann first developed his homeopathic treatments in 1796. It would be 1847 before the Austrian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865) dramatically reduced the death rate of new mothers due to childbed fever by requiring physicians to clean their hands before attending childbirth. But even then Semmelweis was attacked by his professional peers for such a radical idea. Most people, even “educated” people, still believed that infections were caused by foul odors called miasmas (Greek for ‘pollution”) – as did Hahnemann himself.

The British doctor Edward Jenner had developed the first vaccine (for smallpox) in 1793, but he never identified the virus that caused that affliction. Both Jenner and Louis Pasteur (rabies) developed the first vaccines to protect against viral infections without knowing that viruses existed. It was a German doctor who first identified and photographed the anthrax bacterium. Robert Koch did that in 1877, finally bringing an end to the miasma theory. Six years later, in 1883, Koch became the first person to identify the cholera pathogen (in Egypt). Koch later developed the tuberculin test for detecting tuberculosis. In 1905, Robert Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and he (along with Pasteur) is considered the founder of medical microbiology.

It was 1931 before it was possible to actually observe viruses. That was the year when two German engineers invented the electron microscope. Ernst Ruska (1906–1988) and Max Knoll (1887–1969) finally made it possible to see that virus particles, especially bacteriophages, had complex structures.

Vaccines were in part based on the idea of “like cures like,” but unlike the developers of vaccines, Samuel Hahnemann could never prove the effectiveness of his supposed cures. On the other hand, the developers of preventative vaccines were able to demonstrate that they worked.

Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann (1755-1843), the German inventor of homeopathy, in an engraving by L.B. Wellcome. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Bad Medicine
In fairness to Samuel Hahnemann, the former physician was rebelling against the primitive and ineffective medical practices of his day. It was a time when bloodletting and the use of leeches were still common practice by orthodox medical practitioners. Many ointments and medications contained mercury, lead, arsenic, and other harmful ingredients.

Hahnemann himself was persecuted for his new ideas, and he was disliked by apothecaries because he recommended such small doses of medications that they could not earn very much from them. Hahnemann returned the favor by spurning the apothecaries and preparing his own homeopathic treatments. Since that was against the law, he ran into trouble and was arrested. He was forced to move from Leipzig to Kothen, where he was granted special permission to practice and dispense his own medicines by Grand Duke Ferdinand.

By 1825, Hahnemann’s ideas had reached the New World. The first homeopathic school opening in the United States in 1835. The American Institute of Homeopathy (AIH), established in 1844, is the oldest national medical association in the US. Throughout the 19th century, many homeopathic institutions arose in Europe and the United States. During this period homeopathy appeared relatively successful, compared to the above-mentioned often harmful medical treatments of the day.

By the end of the century homeopathy began to fade in the US, with the last exclusively homeopathic medical school closing in 1920. During the 1970s, homeopathy had a bit of a renaissance, with the rise of the New Age movement, and its somewhat misguided preference for “natural” products, and the longer consultation times homeopathic practitioners provided. That is also an attraction for Germans, who enjoy the sympathetic “counseling” and support that a Heilpraktiker can provide compared to what they usually get in a standard medical doctor’s office.

A 1996 German postage stamp commemorating the 200th anniversary of homeopathy and its inventor, Samuel Hahnemann. PHOTO: Deutsche Post AG (Wikimedia Commons)

However, homeopathy has never successfully demonstrated, then or now, in any scientific or practical way, that it does indeed cure anything at all. There are no double-blind studies anyone can point to that prove homeopathic treatments actually work – not in Germany or anywhere else. Nothing.

Speaking of nothing… One of the chief criticisms of homeopathy concerns the dilutions used in the pill and tincture preparations. Hahnemann developed a system that regulated dilutions of the substances used for treatment. According to him, the potency of a given medication increases, the more it is diluted. As illogical as this may seem, it is still a principle of homeopathic preparation today. But critics point out that a typical low-dose, highly diluted preparation has such a minuscule amount of “medication” as to be worthless. Hahnemann’s logarithmic C scale (centesimal scale) dilutes a substance by a factor of 100 at each of multiple stages. Often the dilutions reach into the millions or billions. But there is no scientific method used to determine the “proper” or “correct” dilution.

Here is a typical and factual dilution analogy: A 12C solution is equivalent to “a pinch of salt in both the North and South Atlantic Oceans.” One-third of a drop of some original substance diluted into all the water on earth would produce a preparation with a concentration of about 13C. Critics point out that with these typical dilutions, any homeopathic preparation is basically nothing but water or alcohol. And Hahnemann later used dilutions as high as 30C, meaning that there might not be even a single molecule of the “curative” substance in a drop of the preparation.

The prevalence of homeopathy and alternative medicine in Germany has been linked to the surprising numbers of Germans who have rejected the Covid vaccine. It’s a bit ironic, considering that vaccines are also based on the principle of “like cures like” – but for prevention rather than cure, and with a basis in science and required proof of efficacy. It’s just another example of how, even in the nation of Denker (thinkers, including scientists), there are people who aren’t thinking clearly. We would all be far better off if people would relate more to today’s science than to a pseudoscience from the 18th century.

– HF