Homeopathy is the wellness world’s Schrödinger’s cat: simultaneously ineffective and beloved. In the U.S., most of us file it under “polite placebo.” In Europe, however, it’s practically embedded into civic infrastructure. Under the cool green glow of a neon cross, pharmacies display homeopathic pellets as proudly as cold medicine, and entire generations swear by sugar spheres diluted into cosmic irrelevance.
So what gives?
Part of it is cultural inheritance: European medicine has long embraced botanical and folk traditions alongside science. Another part is regulatory—homeopathy is simply more institutionalized there, treated as a harmless supplemental option rather than a renegade pseudoscience.
That seems to be changing in some countries. In 2019, France began to “phased out” public healthcare coverage for homeopathy, stopping reimbursements entirely by 2021. Germany’s state insurance plans currently cover homeopathy, although in January 2024 the government announced plans to withdraw reimbursements.
However, Switzerland reinstated its nationally subsidized insurance funding for homeopathy after public outcry and a national referendum in 2009. (Switzerland, Germany, and Austria are the strongholds of homeopathic practice, which I find strange considering their cultural reputations for punctuality, efficiency, and stoicism.)
In a 2020 study published in Wiener klinische Wochenschrift, the Central European Journal of Medicine, researchers argue that homeopathy is a pseudoscience despite its popularity and note:
Homeopathy has also been invoking a hodgepodge of non-Euclidean mathematics, quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, Schrödinger’s cat etc. [sic] for the past 70 years to account for its special approach. Advances in quantum mechanics have been translated into outlandish theories. Particle entanglement, for instance, serves as a theoretical background for the “weak quantum theory”, which posits a double entanglement: the original homeopathic drug is entangled with its dilution and the individual symptoms of a patient are entangled with the general symptoms of a “remedy picture”, which account for the principle of potentization/potentiation and for the simile principle, respectively. An alternative is to postulate a triad, patient-practitioner remedy (PPR) entanglement. The approach and the verbiage are reminiscent of Lacan’s attempt to establish the scientific foundation of psychoanalysis in Riemann space, set theory and torus mathematics.
That’s academic for sick burn.
The largest factor in homeopathy’s persistence may be narrative. Homeopathy tells a soothing story: tiny, elegant remedies tailored to your personal constitution. It’s the anti-industrial fantasy, the idea that gentleness can fix us.
Even if the mechanism is nonsense, the ritual can still be meaningful. We like remedies that make us feel seen. We like thinking our medicine is “natural,” whatever that means.
In the end, homeopathy thrives not because it works chemically, but because it works psychologically — and sometimes, that’s enough to keep the pellets selling.