I briefly dated a woman from France that regularly took homeopathic “medicine”. It hold her that it didn’t do anything and her counter argument was that it was paid for though the French government health care system so it must be efficacious. I then said that just because some people believe the Moon affects our clouds doesn’t mean that it does; her reply was “everyone knows the Moon brings the rain.”
I'm french and I believe there's at least 3 good reasons to have homeopathy in a state and reimbursed even if you don't believe in it:
- Placebo effect always works, (improving by around ~ 20% your recorvery / curing process depending on the studies and metric). More importantly, and something which is often overlooked, it works EVEN IF YOU DON'T CONSCIOUSLY BELIEVE IN THE DRUG.
- Homeopathy was given quite often at times where Doctors were generally prescribing too many antibiotics, especially to children, which we found later was generally detrimental to the immune system and promoting virus mutation. In general I believe there's way too many 'drugs' which are taken by the general population in mild cases which has the same effect.
- There are a lot of people who sometimes are vaguely sick but don't really need something (like cold or some vaguely psychological stuff) who ARE going to take some shitty drug for the sake of feeling better, and such drugs are in general a lot more expensive than a tube of homeopathy is. So it also makes sense in the economic / healthcare viewpoint.
Personally I had a lot of homeopathy young at a time when my general practitioner was super heavy handed an antibiotics and my parents wanted to try something else, and believe it or not it coincided to an quick improvement of my state. (from asmathic to not asmathic, from having heavy allergic reactions to mild ones later etc..).
After that homeopathy was always the first line stuff I've took most of the time except for stuff like anginas which obviously require antibiotics (which funnily, that general practicioners are sometimes reluctant to give because "hey it could be viral").
Now, I'm honestly rarely sick in general, when I am it's super mild or invisible (ex: COVID) to the point I was shocked at the age of 27 that it was even possible to take a day off work or not being able to go do sport or party because you 'had a flu'. I literally though it was a joke when my collegue said that. Also I've recovered super fast from stuff which are supposed to take longer.
Not sure how linked this is to the kind of treatment I had younger but I wouldn't change a bit now
