Hernando Calla

The rejection of homeopathy has an economic basis, not a theoretical one. Like pretty much all the other therapies rejected by mainstream medicine as crackpot pseudoscience, it doesn’t put money into the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry — most homeopathic remedies passed out of patent protection more than a century ago, and can be made cheaply by any pharmacy with simple equipment. (I’ve read pharmacy textbooks from the 1920s that explain in detail how an ordinary pharmacist can make up homeopathic medicines quickly and easily with equipment on hand.) For the pharmaceutical industry, that’s disastrous, since patent protection of brand new drugs is central to its profit model. Funding pseudoskeptic organizations is thus a necessary bit of marketing for Big Pharma.