JREF Swift Blog

Big Homeopathy

"Homeopathy is safe and has no side effects, yet 'Big Pharama' keeps pushing their poisons on us because they're greedy."

Have you heard this before? I have. If modern medicines have side-effects or aren't effective in 100% of cases, the reason doctors don't stop using them is because so-called 'Big Pharma' makes tons of money off of them.

Well, part of that is true. Pharmaceutical companies do make money from the products they make. Just like McDonalds or Home Depot or.... hey, what's this? Companies that make homeopathic products make money too!

Let's consider just one: Boiron.

Boiron makes homeopathic "remedies." They are a corporation, in fact they're the second largest maker of over the counter preparations in France. Here's their page on their 2009 end-of-year market capitalization. Looks like business to me, and yes, looks like a BIG business. They make the common preparation Oscillococcinum, which is a homeopathic preparation of muscovy duck liver supposed to treat influenza. In other words, they're sugar pills that are sold for about $2.50 a pill. During the recent H1N1 outbreak, I noticed that the large display of the product was almost empty in a local "health" food store.

$2.50 a pill isn't unheard of in prescpription medicine, but when you consider that homeopathic remedies require no FDA regulation, no testing, no trials, and apparently very little quality control, their profit margins must be considerable.

All arguments about the "greed of Big Pharma" can be thrown right back at the person making them. There is greed in the pharmaceutical industry and no one is disputing that, but the industry is heavily regulated, and most important of all – they have proven results.

Homeopathy is amost pure greed. Other than the occassional placebo effect, we know it doesn't work, and so must the makers.