It's been almost twenty years since I first wrote about my concerns with the sale of homeopathy, particularly in retail pharmacies. Anecdotally, based on what I've seen walking pharmacy aisles, it feels more widespread and less niche today. Where few chain pharmacies used to even carry homeopathy, I now see homeopathic products shelved amongst actual medicines. While it seemed to have ignored the issue for decades, the U.S. regulatory backdrop for these products has shifted more in the past several years than in decades previously. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approach has become one that's worth watching, not only because of the FDA's outsized influence on medicines regulation worldwide. A recent piece in Skeptical Inquirer prompted me to take stock of where things currently stand with this practice.

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Homeopathy proponents also believe that water has memory, and the more you dilute a substance, the more powerful its effects. The 30C "potency" is a common dilution used in homeopathy - that's a dilution of 10-60. If something has been diluted this much, you would have to give two billion doses per second, to six billion people, for 4 billion years, to deliver a single molecule of the original, pre-diluted material. The explanation for this is that water has a "memory" of the original material. This extreme dilution means that most homeopathic remedies are completely inert, and don't contain a single molecule of the original reference material. And that original reference material can range from table salt to sunlight to vacuum cleaner dust. There is no product so bizarre that a remedy hasn't been created from it. The scientific evidence is clear: No homeopathic product has been convincingly demonstrated to provide actual therapeutic effects.

The regulation of homeopathy in the U.S. differs from prescription or over-the-counter drug products. For decades, despite their regulatory status as "drugs", the FDA long allowed many homeopathic products to be sold under a permissive enforcement posture.

That is changing.

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