Homeopathy

A critical analysis of homeopathy's scientific impossibilities, from Avogadro's number to the myth of water memory. Explore why this 18th-century pseudoscience, debunked by modern research, maintains a powerful hold in Calcutta and Bengali culture, and the real dangers it poses when chosen over evidence-based medicine.

7/22/2025

There is a certain, almost sacramental, ritual to homeopathy in a Bengali household. The tiny, identical white globules, dispensed from a slim glass vial, tasting faintly of sugar and alcohol. The solemn instructions: don’t touch them with your hands, tip them into the receiving palm, place them under your tongue, and avoid eating or drinking for thirty minutes. It’s a scene replayed across Calcutta, from the grand old houses of North Sinthee to Ballygunge and everywhere else in the city of joy I can’t afford to stuff in a sentence. It feels gentle, ancient, and profoundly… well, ours as with astrology and star-signs it doesn’t matter what you take, nux vomica or arnica it seems to work. But behind this comforting facade lies a story of historical happenstance, scientific impossibility, and a collective delusion that a city of reason should have shed long ago—yet it hasn’t.

The tale begins not in Bengal, but in late 18th-century Germany, a time when medicine was a theatre of horrors. Physicians, armed with little more than misguided conviction, would bleed, purge, and blister their patients, often hastening what might have otherwise been a recovery. Into this maelstrom stepped Samuel Hahnemann, a physician rightfully appalled by the brutality of his peers. His quest for a gentler alternative led him to an idea, an observation that would spawn a global movement. He noted that Cinchona bark, used to treat malaria, induced malaria-like symptoms in him when he was healthy. Similia similibus curentur—“let like be cured by like”—became his first principle.

So far, so… intriguing. But it’s his second principle, “potentization,” where the whole enterprise spectacularly departs from reality. Hahnemann believed that by repeatedly diluting a substance in alcohol or water and striking the container at each step (a process called succussion), he could not only remove its toxicity but actually amplify its “spirit-like medicinal power.”

This wasn’t science; it was alchemy dressed in a lab coat. Yet, when this German idea washed up on the shores of 19th-century Bengal, it found fertile ground. In the crucible of the Bengal Renaissance, a time of electrifying intellectual exchange, figures like the esteemed Dr. Mahendralal Sarkar championed homeopathy. It was seen as a sophisticated, modern, yet gentle system—a perfect antidote to both the perceived barbarism of colonial allopathy and the perceived stagnation of traditional Ayurvedic practices. Its affordability and non-invasive nature sealed the deal. And so, homeopathy became woven into the cultural fabric of Calcutta.

But here’s the unvarnished, scientific truth, the part that gets lost in the nostalgic haze. Homeopathic remedies are diluted to such astronomical extremes that they contain, quite literally, nothing of any medicinal value—if you are diabetic or have a fatty liver you should be concerned because it’s sugar and ethyl alcohol. The standard “30C” potency you see on vials in Kolkata pharmacies signifies a dilution of one part of the original substance to $10^{60}$ parts of water.

Let’s pause to comprehend that number. A one followed by sixty zeroes. There are estimated to be around $10^{50}$ atoms in the entire Earth. To achieve a 30C dilution, you would need to dissolve one molecule of your “remedy” in a volume of water vastly larger than our entire solar system. The chance of finding a single molecule of the original substance in that little white pill you just placed under your tongue is mathematically indistinguishable from zero.

This is not a matter of scientific debate; it’s a matter of fundamental chemistry, governed by a constant discovered by Amedeo Avogadro. Avogadro’s number, $N_A$, tells us how many particles are in one mole of a substance, roughly $6.022 \times 10^{23}$. Once you dilute past this point—a mere 12C potency—you have effectively run out of molecules.

The homeopathic retort to this inconvenient fact is the notion that water “remembers” the properties of the substance it once contained. This is a bewitching idea, but it has no basis in physics. Water molecules are in a constant state of flux, forming and breaking hydrogen bonds on a timescale of picoseconds. They hold no memory. To believe they do is to abandon the principles of chemistry in favour of magical thinking, which people in the world have in bucket full..

Decades of rigorous, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies—the gold standard of medical evidence—have confirmed this. A landmark 2015 meta-analysis by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, which scrutinised over 225 studies, delivered a blunt verdict: homeopathy is no more effective than a placebo. A sugar pill.

So why does it persist, especially here, in the city of Jagadish Chandra Bose and Satyendra Nath Bose? The answer to the first question is—these luminaries never represented the backwater that is Calcutta, the answer to why homeopathy sometimes seems to work is more complicated and hidden in a tangled web of culture, muddled economics, physiology and hard to pin down human psychology.

Mainly the reason is neither physiology (normalness) nor pathology (illness) is entirely emperical (that is easy to design or test with experimental setups), homeopathy works for the same reason placebo work, or that in their appearance our human body under the hood self-repairs. Homeopaths often do not provide a wrong allopathic treatment (in India where doctors are often fake or half baked) or provide something their allopathic counterparts, constrained by time and patient load, do not: a long, empathetic consultation. They listen. This act of being heard is powerful, and it is the engine of the placebo effect—the well-documented phenomenon where belief in a treatment can elicit a perceived or real improvement.

But empathy is not a substitute for medicine, at least not if the disease is serious or needs immediate remedy. The placebo effect cannot shrink a cancerous tumour, it cannot neutralise a virus, and it cannot correct a metabolic disorder like diabetes. The real, pernicious harm of homeopathy lies in this deception. When people turn to these sugar pills for serious ailments, they delay or forego evidence-based treatments that could save their lives. They waste precious months while a manageable condition becomes critical. The World Health Organization has explicitly warned against using homeopathy for life-threatening diseases like HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria—illnesses that remain a stark reality for many in our state.

Calcutta, a city that prides itself on its intellectual ferocity, its torko (debate), and its scientific heritage, deserves better than to be in the thrall of an 18th-century fantasy. The institutional support from government councils and homeopathic colleges lends a veneer of legitimacy to what is, at its core, a pseudoscience.

I must also point out, that although in a world fractured by dogma, where religions often stand in stark and sometimes violent opposition, pseudoscience achieves a strange and quiet ecumenism. Homeopathy, it turns out, is a remarkably broad church. There are staunchly Muslim homeopaths, devout Hindu homeopaths, Orthodox Jewish homeopaths, and fervent Christian homeopaths. On the nature of God, the path to salvation, or the meaning of life, they may find no common ground and will happily bomb each other to smithereens. Yet on the magical memory of water and the curative power of nothingness? On that, a startling global consensus is reached. It’s a testament, perhaps, not to the power of the pills, but to the universal human capacity for belief of the pious, especially when it flies in the face of all evidence. Homeopathy, it turns out, transcends all these boundaries with an ease that diplomats might envy. It is practiced with the same conviction in Paris as it is in Pakistan, in Tel Aviv as it is in Tokyo.

We must find the courage to hold our cherished traditions up to the light of reason. It is time to gently unweave homeopathy from our cultural identity and relegate it to the museum of medical history, alongside bloodletting and phrenology. Let us reserve our faith for that which is proven, and our health for medicine that is grounded in the elegant, astonishing, and verifiable reality of science. Our lives depend on it. As it is life in calcutta is hard.