When I hear someone extolling the virtues of homeopathy, I am often reminded of a quotation from the TV show 30 Rock. “There are many kinds of intelligence,” Jack Donaghy tells a particularly stupid employee. “Practical, emotional … and then there is actual intelligence, which is what I’m talking about.” Similar, and perhaps correlating, are the many kinds of medicine. Natural, complementary, alternative, homeopathic, herbal, traditional. And then there is actual medicine, which works.
It is strange that homeopaths can still find employment in 2023, but somehow they do. In 1853, Queen Victoria’s doctor was already calling the practice “an outrage to human reason”. In the following 170 years it has been debunked repeatedly and comprehensively. After all, its principles run in complete opposition to science, based as they are on “curing 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 championed such things as “thought field therapy”, “Christian healing” and an Indian herbal cure “ultra-diluted” with alcohol, which claims to kill breast cancer cells. Methods like these might be “unfashionable”, he once wrote in an article submitted to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, but they should not be ignored.
Homeopaths are fond of calling their ideas “unfashionable”, as if by some inverse law of popularity this makes them more likely to be correct. But in fact 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 $11bn (£8.6bn).
It was after all only in 2021 that the Society of Homeopaths lost its government accreditation, and only a year earlier that its members were asked to please stop offering Cease therapy, which is predicated on the idea that vaccines cause autism, and that the cure is a huge dose of vitamin C. Meanwhile, in August this year the World Health Organization sent a series of tweets praising traditional medicine, including homeopathy, which it said “has been at the frontiers of medicine and science” – in much the same way, I suppose, that flat Earthers were once at the frontier of physics.
Why is homeopathy so useless and yet still so prevalent? 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 doctor 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 favoured remedy.
The Queen Mother, meanwhile, was something of a maniac for arnica – she coated her dogs with it and pressed it upon her friends. “I think arnica the most marvellous medicine and every doctor, including those not trained in homeopathy, should use arnica,” she once said, madly. 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 Tower of Pisa, slightly off balance”.
The royals are no longer the fashion influencers they once were. But another bunch 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 for education, and nor are 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 suck-ups. They are themselves exceptions to the rules that govern others. If a gut feeling leads them to “thought field therapy”, rather than modern medicine, they might be more inclined to believe it.
And the second is something first observed by Charles Percy Snow in his famous remarks about the “two cultures” in the west. Ignorance of literature and the arts will exclude you from “highly educated” circles, but it is perfectly acceptable to have no grasp 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.
In any case, it is bad news. Alternative medicine is useless but not always harmless – when cancer patients put their faith in tinctures, and chanting can cause fatal delays to proper treatment. It needs to be resisted.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
