The trend corresponded with the rise of the New Age movement, and may be in part due to chemophobia, an irrational aversion to synthetic chemicals, and the longer consultation times homeopathic practitioners provided.

[35] An account of the effects of eating cinchona bark noted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, published in 1861, failed to reproduce the symptoms Hahnemann reported.

[36]: 128  Subsequent scientific work showed that cinchona cures malaria because it contains quinine, which kills the Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes the disease; the mechanism of action is unrelated to Hahnemann's ideas.

[42] The relative success of homeopathy in the 19th century may have led to the abandonment of the ineffective and harmful treatments of bloodletting and purging and begun the move towards more effective, science-based medicine.

Sir John Forbes, physician to Queen Victoria, said in 1843 that the extremely small doses of homeopathy were regularly derided as useless and considered it "an outrage to human reason".

[57] James Young Simpson said in 1853 of the highly diluted drugs: "No poison, however strong or powerful, the billionth or decillionth of which would in the least degree affect a man or harm a fly.

"[58] Nineteenth-century American physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes was also a vocal critic of homeopathy and published an essay entitled Homœopathy and Its Kindred Delusions (1842).

[42] According to academics Paul U. Unschuld [de] and Edzard Ernst, the Nazi regime in Germany was fond of homeopathy, and spent large sums of money on researching its mechanisms, but without gaining a positive result.

[29] Bruce Hood has argued that the increased popularity of homeopathy in recent times may be due to the comparatively long consultations practitioners are willing to give their patients, and to a preference for "natural" products, which people think are the basis of homeopathic preparations.

[74] In 2019, CFI brought a similar lawsuit against Walmart for "committing wide-scale consumer fraud and endangering the health of its customers through its sale and marketing of homeopathic medicines".

[75][76] They also conducted a survey in which they found consumers felt ripped off when informed of the lack of evidence for the efficacy of homeopathic remedies, such as those sold by Walmart and CVS.

[89] Examples include arsenicum album (arsenic oxide), natrum muriaticum (sodium chloride or table salt), Lachesis muta (the venom of the bushmaster snake), opium, and thyroidinum (thyroid hormone).

[93] Tautopathy is a form of isopathy where the preparations are composed of drugs or vaccines that a person has consumed in the past, in the belief that this can reverse the supposed lingering damage caused by the initial use.

[citation needed] In 2012, the Allahabad High Court in Uttar Pradesh, India, handed down a decree stating that electrohomeopathy was quackery and no longer recognized it as a system of medicine.

[38]: 322  To counter the reduced potency at high dilutions he formed the view that vigorous shaking by striking on an elastic surface – a process termed succussion – was necessary.

They were forbidden from consuming coffee, tea, spices, or wine for the duration of the experiment; playing chess was also prohibited because Hahnemann considered it to be "too exciting", though they were allowed to drink beer and encouraged to exercise in moderation.

[122] Provings are claimed to have been important in the development of the clinical trial, due to their early use of simple control groups, systematic and quantitative procedures, and some of the first application of statistics in medicine.

[127] For James Tyler Kent's 1905 Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica, 217 preparations underwent provings and newer substances are continually added to contemporary versions.

[143] Jack Killen, acting deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, says homeopathy "goes beyond current understanding of chemistry and physics".

[144] Homeopaths often prefer to ignore meta-analyses in favour of cherry picked positive results, such as by promoting a particular observational study (one which Goldacre describes as "little more than a customer-satisfaction survey") as if it were more informative than a series of randomized controlled trials.

[150][151] Existence of a pharmacological effect in the absence of any true active ingredient is inconsistent with the law of mass action and the observed dose-response relationships characteristic of therapeutic drugs.

[8] The methodological quality of the early primary research was low, with problems such as weaknesses in study design and reporting, small sample size, and selection bias.

"[160] The European Academies' Science Advisory Council (EASAC) published its official analysis in 2017 finding a lack of evidence that homeopathic products are effective, and raising concerns about quality control.

[177] While some articles have suggested that homeopathic solutions of high dilution can have statistically significant effects on organic processes including the growth of grain[178] and enzyme reactions, such evidence is disputed since attempts to replicate them have failed.

After investigation the team found that the experiments were "statistically ill-controlled", "interpretation has been clouded by the exclusion of measurements in conflict with the claim", and concluded, "We believe that experimental data have been uncritically assessed and their imperfections inadequately reported.

[210][211][212][213] The Russian Commission on Pseudoscience has said homeopathy is not safe because "patients spend significant amounts of money, buying medicines that do not work and disregard already known effective treatment.

In 2001 homeopathy had been integrated into the national health care systems of many countries, including India, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom.

[240] The Swiss government withdrew coverage of homeopathy and four other complementary treatments in 2005, stating that they did not meet efficacy and cost-effectiveness criteria,[241] but following a referendum in 2009 the five therapies were reinstated for a further 6-year trial period.

[287][290][291] A 2016 review of peer-reviewed articles from 1981 to 2014 by scientists from the University of Kassel, Germany, concluded that there is not enough evidence to support homeopathy as an effective treatment of infectious diseases in livestock.

[292] The UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has adopted a robust position against use of "alternative" pet preparations including homeopathy.