Is Homeopathy a real medical science?

As a pharmacologist, I often meet people who ask me about how "alternative remedies" work, especially Homeopathy. A few days ago a good friend just asked the same thing to me, and I felt compelled to write about it.

Homeopathy was first proposed in 1796 by German physician Samuel Hahnemann. In those years, the pathophysiology of illnesses was not well understood and neither were the mechanisms of action of the medicines available. Hahnemann formulated the idea he called "Law of Similars" which explained that substances that cause a symptom in healthy individuals could be used to treat patients who had those same symptoms. His idea for explaining this effect was that a preparation causing those same symptoms would empower a natural 'vital force' which would in turn eliminate the original disease.

Hahnemann thought that large doses of the drug would be bad, since they would worsen the original symptoms, so he thought that diluting the drug to very small doses would cure the disease. So he devised a centesimal dilution scale, and said that the more diluted a drug, the more effective it would be. In his dilutions he would use a tincture or extract from a plant, then dilute it by a factor of 100 at each stage so a 2C dilution would be one part in a hundred, then he would take one part and dilute it in a hundred to create a 3C dilution and so on. For most remedies he defined that 30C dilutions were the optimal concentration, this would be equivalent as 1 part of original tincture in 1E60 parts of solvent.

Now, let's think about this for a moment. According to chemistry and physics, it is impossible to keep diluting things indefinitely because eventually you'll get to the point where you have individual molecules or atoms, which cannot be diluted further. Avogadro's constant which is 6.023E23 mol-1 indicates the amount of atoms that exist in one mole of any given element or compound. This means that if you diluted a mole of any substance, you'd be reducing the available atoms of the solute in each dilution. If we follow the centesimal dilution scale used by Hahnemann we get that a 12C dilution is 1 part of solute in 1E24, this gives us reasons to understand that there is roughly about 60% probability to find 1 molecule of the original material in the dilution if one mole of the original material was used. If we think about a 30C dilution, it would most likely be only solvent, with no molecules of the original material remaining.

Knowing this, it is very likely that the beneficial effects reported by patients about homeopathy are due to Placebo effect. This has been observed in multiple clinical trials comparing Homeopathy and Conventional medicine against Placebos. In these trials homeopathy has not been significantly different than any placebo. There are few trials that have reported positive results, however these results have not been repeated by anyone. Meta-analyses performed on large groups of studies have also failed to show any positive results by Homeopathy. As for now, there is not any convincing scientific evidence to back any of the claims of homeopathy, therefore homeopathy is just pseudoscience.

Pharmacology is a real multidisciplinary scientific endeavor, which has experimental results that can be independently observed and tested by any other scientist. Its principles have been discovered over centuries of careful research and with the advancement of technology, it will most likely find treatments or cures for illnesses that cannot be treated at the present time.

So, what do you think?
Would you resort to treatments that lack any evidence?