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Eskinazi's encomium on homeopathy starts from a flawed premise and ends with a wrong conclusion.¹

First, he ignores the checkered history of the homeopathic corpus. The doctrine of homeopathy arose from 18th-century German physician Samuel Hahnemann, who first observed, through self-experimentation, that high doses of quinine caused fever as well as other manifestations of cinchonism.² Without knowledge of the true antimalarial and antipyretic function of quinine, he wrongly concluded that "like cures like," ie, that the therapeutic effect of quinine was a result of its pyrogenic properties. In a further leap of logic, he hypothesized that massive dilutions of a compound would enhance that effect. He conducted hundreds of similar "drug-provings" on himself, his family, and other persons that were just as invalid in a modern scientific sense.

Eskinazi's strained attempts to align classical homeopathic ideas with conventional pharmacology also miss the mark. While pharmacological agents may cause different effects . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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Some Gaps Cannot Be Bridged
van der Smagt and Eskinazi
Arch Intern Med 2000;160:3495-3496.
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