What makes me stabby is that Samuel Hahnemann, the doctor who invented homeopathy, was actually trying to practice a sort of evidence-based medicine, back when that wasn’t a thing. When he started experimenting with his “like cures like” idea, doctors were still doing things like prescribing carrots for impotence, cause, y’know, and bleeding, and purging people. Hahnemann actually kept notes on treatments, and didn’t use things that appeared to have a statistically null effect.
Of course, just the fact that sick people were being dehydrated and starved by conventional medicine, and Hahnemann’s treatment rehydrated them (not to mention, he allowed them to eat), could have made his treatment statistically much more effective than conventional medicine of the time.
Hahnemann was not a stupid man. But he lived before the germ theory. I think (this is the stabby part) if he came back to life today, and saw the state of modern medicine, learned its scientific basis, and then found out people were still following his theories from 1800, unchanged he would scream “You fools!”
And yes, people are that fucking stupid. I know people who are very picky about their preparations, and know about the “concussions” (the shaking that “tells” the water to remember what it’s exposed to right now as opposed to yesterday, or July 4, 1776), and they are so serious about the tiny amounts, that they scrutinize food labels, lest an ingredient in something cause an “overdose” in a medication, and make it not work.
There are some people who misunderstand the name, and just hear the first syllable, and think “homeopathy” means “home remedies,” like gargling with salt water, but there is a sub-group of cult-like adherents who practically have degrees in stupidity.