When you or your child is sick and all you care about is relief, you’ll perk up at any promise a pill bottle makes. But some of those packages hold no medicine at all, just homeopathic “remedies.” Their makers are legally allowed to lie to you and say these products cure disease, even though they absolutely definitely do not.


Offenders include brands like Hyland’s, Boiron, Cold-Eeze, and Zicam. Before you start scrolling to the comments to tell me I should be more open minded, let’s make something clear. The word “homeopathy” may not mean what you think it means.

How We Know Homeopathy Is Useless

Homeopathic doesn’t mean natural, or herbal, or home remedy. Drugs labeled homeopathic adhere to a specific eighteenth century theory, that is since very much disproven but still in use thanks to a loophole in Food and Drug Administration policy. The idea is that you can treat a disease with a drug that would cause the same symptoms (“like cures like”) so long as you reverse the drug’s effect by diluting it to infinitesimal quantities.


Take coffee, for example. Coffee keeps you awake. So homeopathic company Hyland’s mixes one part of a raw coffee bean preparation (“Coffea cruda”) with one million parts water, and uses this in their Hyland’s 4 Kids Cold ‘n Cough Nighttime as a sleep aid. A preparation of red onion (“Allium cepa”) is in there too, to counter runny eyes and noses.

Caffeine doesn’t work this way. Even if it was 1 part per million caffeine (rather than one part per million raw coffee bean, which is not pure caffeine), there is no way that diluting it would turn it into a sleep aid.

This theory comes from the days before we knew that bacteria and viruses cause disease, and before we knew that substances are made of molecules. It turns out that some homeopathic dilutions are so extreme that your chances are better at winning the lottery than at finding a single molecule of the original substance in the bottle you buy at the drugstore.


Homeopaths recognize this, shrug, and say “something other than molecules” (i.e., magic) must be at work. So when you buy a homeopathic medication, you’re paying ten dollars or so for a tiny bottle of mostly water. Or sometimes it’s a little packet of sugar pills, or sometimes 40 proof alcohol. If this stuff is prepared according to FDA regulations, it has absolutely no medicine in it—but can still say on the package that it will cure your cough and cold.

It Is Totally Legal for Homeopathic Drug Makers to Lie to You


These products are legal because back in 1938, the main author of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act was a physician trained in homeopathy and wrote the definition of “drug” to include homeopathic medications.

The government maintains a database of homeopathic ingredients and how to use them, but you have to pay $110 a day to look at it. Fortunately, FDA regulations also allow you to use this freely available 1902 medical text, as long as you “[review it] in conjunction with other available literature.”


That text, and others like it, are based on “provings” that describe what the drug does to healthy people. If a homeopath says that something is clinically proven, they don’t mean that they’ve tested whether it works against disease; it means that they have collected data on what it does to people who don’t have the disease.

This means that the symptoms a drug causes in healthy people, and the symptoms it is meant to cure, are conveniently the same. So our 1902 text describes coffee extract as both causing and curing sleeplessness. It also says that coffee is good for exciting sexual desire, relieving toothaches, quieting labor pains, and curing diarrhea “in housewives who have much care and trouble in managing their households.”


Unlike supplements, which cannot say that they treat, prevent, or cure any disease, over-the-counter homeopathic drugs are required to list at least one indication. Homeopathic drugs are also allowed, unlike supplements, to declare on the package that they are “safe and effective.” Remember, these contain no active ingredients, so they are arguably safe, but there’s no way they can be effective unless we’re considering a placebo effect where you feel better because you think you’ve taken medicine.

If this sounds like bullshit, you’re right, and the Federal Trade Commission agrees with you. Last year, the FDA announced that they were considering changing the regulations on homeopathic drugs, and asked for comments from interested parties. The FTC, which regulates advertising, sent the agency a brutally honest letter. Some choice quotes:

The FTC staff is concerned that the FDA’s existing regulatory framework may conflict with the Commission’s advertising substantiation policy in ways that may harm consumers and create confusion for advertisers. Section 5 [of the FTC act]... prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, such as the deceptive advertising or labeling of over-the-counter (OTC) drugs. Section 12 prohibits the dissemination of false advertisements in or affecting commerce of food, drugs, devices, services, or cosmetics. For health, safety, or efficacy claims, the FTC has generally required that advertisers possess “competent and reliable scientific evidence”...Neither the FTC Act, nor any FTC rule or policy statement, exempts advertising claims for homeopathic drugs from these standards.


In other words: FDA, you’re telling companies they can lie to consumers, but the law says we can’t let companies lie to consumers, so this is really awkward.

In the same letter, the FTC also describes some testing they did, including two focus groups, showing consumers have no idea real drugs and homeopathic drugs are regulated differently, or that one is tested for efficacy and the other is not.


The FDA is mulling this over and has not yet announced any decisions about whether to change how they regulate homeopathic drugs.

Shop Carefully to Avoid These Useless “Drugs”

The children’s cold medicine section at a Target in Pittsburgh, PA. (The supplements include probiotics and honey-based cough syrups.)


Some areas of the drugstore have more homeopathic remedies than others. The children’s cough and cold section has a lot (and they put them at eye level, as you can see above), because actual cold medicines are not safe for children under four years old. It’s nice to be able to buy something when your kid is feeling bad, so makers of homeopathic drugs and of dietary supplements make sure to market products for babies and children. The fact that homeopathic drugs are “safe” is probably also a selling point.



​Don't Bother With Cold Medicines for Toddlers Your kid has the sniffles. You figure you'll stop at the drugstore to pick up something to make him Read more


In truth, these fake remedies are only safe if the ingredients are actually at homeopathic doses, and if the makers haven’t snuck any herbal medicines into the “inactive ingredients” list. Some of the cold medicines include a licorice root extract, amount not specified.

A few homeopathic products are a sort of double scam, in that they’re not actually homeopathic at all. Zicam nasal swabs used to contain a significant amount of zinc, and zinc actually might have some benefit in shortening the duration and severity of cold symptoms. Awesome, except that putting zinc in your nose can cause you to permanently lose your sense of smell. Zicam reformulated their swabs*.


The homeopathic drugs were priced between $7.39 and $11.49. You can get water out of your tap for pennies.

It’s best to avoid homeopathic remedies entirely. They might be harmful, and even in the best case they’re a ripoff. In the store shelf in the picture, the homeopathic drugs were priced between $7.39 and $11.49. You can get water out of your tap for pennies.


Here’s how to know if something is homeopathic:

It says “homeopathic” (look for small print)

The back lists scientific-sounding ingredient names with “HPUS” next to each

The back lists number/letter combos after each ingredient like “6X” or “200C”. These refer to dilutions: 6X is one part per million, and 200C is one part per...well, here’s what Google told me that works out to:


If you’re not used to reading the backs of medicine boxes, both the regular and homeopathic drugs look very scientific. For example, the coffee extract is described as “Coffea cruda” (fake Latin for “raw coffee”) and a flu remedy called oscillococcinum is “Anas barbariae hepatis et cordum,” which means muscovy duck heart and liver. This is also fake Latin, because the muscovy duck’s actual scientific name is Cairina moschata. Don’t let the jargon throw you; it’s all garbage.


Besides children’s cold medicines, you can actually find homeopathic drugs hiding in many areas of the drugstore. There are even cases where the same product will be available in a homeopathic and a non-homeopathic version. Arnica tablets, for example, contain no arnica, but arnica gel from some manufacturers actually has a little bit (“1X 7%” means the gel is 0.7 percent arnica). Does the gel work, then, to reduce pain and prevent bruising? We don’t know; maybe, but it hasn’t been tested the same way real drugs have been tested. Good luck with that.

The placebo effect is a real thing, but if you feel the need to invoke it, go for some chicken soup or lemon tea instead of giving money to people that are lying to you for profit. It’s ridiculous that our drugstores are full of this garbage, and that adherents of an obsolete medical theory get a special carve-out in the drug laws of 2016. Don’t buy this crap.


Illustration by Sam Woolley. Snake oil salesman photo by Carol Highsmith .