The plot thickens. At my daily visit today to the clinic, in the small, “auxiliary” waiting room, all the magazines and brochures were removed long ago, probably due to the COVID situation.
But there was one brochure box, with a quantity of a single brochure, a tri-fold about Boiron’s Calendula, obviously designed for patients. I have been unable to find an image of it online, so I will scan and post it here later, and I will take a picture of the room tomorrow if it hasn’t changed.
But here are two paragraphs of interest. This is an exact quote.
What are Homeopathic Medicines?
Homeopathic medicines are made from plants, animals, or minerals at various degrees of dilution. They help relieve the same symptoms they cause at full strength i.e., a microdose of the coffee bean helps to relieve nervousness.
About Boiron
At Boiron, we believe there’s more than one way to feel better. Since 1932, the Boiron family has been committed to providing quality medicines. As world leader in homeopathy, our passion is your health. Our promise is your satisfaction.
So here we have the major premise of homeopathy, “like cures like,” in no ambiguous terms. Strange, since the dilution doesn’t suggest the premise. One can only wonder if Boiron’s technicians banged each dilution 10 times against a leather pad as Hahnemann required.
I too have had reputable mainstream medical professionals recommend calendula cream as a topical for post-radiation skin treatment. Though not any specific brand and not homeopathic.
Our experience with OTC non-homeopathic whatever percent calendula topical cream it was that it was nothing special; Aquaphor was more or less equivalent and much easier to find.
In our case the advice was more like: “There is some weak evidence that it’s better than the usual stuff, and it’s not expensive; give it a try and you may be pleasantly surprised.” We did and we weren’t; nothing wrong with it, but nothing extra right about it either.
I suspect Boiron in cashing in by being one of the few US-based suppliers / distributors of calendula. Conversely, calendula is an ordinary mainstream product in Latin America, much like “aloe” is an additive to everything “healthy” for skin in the USA. It’s easy to find, cheap, and plentiful down there.
Acetaminophen isn’t patentable, either, nor a thousand other things, but a lot of manufacturers still get FDA approval to sell it.
As to the OP I don’t think “homeopathy” kicks in at any particular level of dilution. The idea is just that there’s a small amount of stuff in the water and the water molecules remember it somehow. Any level of dilution counts, technically, so going by griffin1977’s link that is a 1D level.
There’s a big difference between getting approved to sell an existing drug with known characteristics and getting a new drug approved. To sell a known out-of-patent drug, you just have to prove that you’re making the drug the same way it’s been made to a certain safety standard. To sell a new drug, it’s a much higher (and more expensive) bar.
Acetaminophen preexists the FDA, and whatever approval of it as a drug happened long ago when the process was significantly less rigorous (given the issues with liver failure, it seems pretty unlikely that acetaminophen, if discovered today, would make it through the FDA approval process). No one who sells acetaminophen has to prove that acetaminophen is an effective and safe painkiller. They just have to prove that they put acetaminophen in the pills.
But there’s no institutional recognition that caledula does anything medicinal. To prove that you need very expensive studies, and at the end of it, anyone else can go through the much cheaper process to just prove that they put calendula in their cream and you spent all that money for nothing.
My reaction would be to find another clinic that is committed to evidence-based care.
Such a decision may be difficult if the care one receives is otherwise sound. I haven’t experienced significant embracing of woo at any medical establishment I’ve consulted, with one exception. The veterinary cancer center where we took our Lab when she developed lymphoma offered several quacky modalities including acupuncture, in addition to recognized standard-of-care therapy. We didn’t go elsewhere in protest, but it made me more careful about evaluating their proposals.