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In the U.S., sometimes a medicine is marked as “homeopathic” just to avoid regulation, and actually does contain a real active ingredient. This is the case with zinc lozenges (for colds), which contain an actual therapeutic dose of zinc but are presumably marketed as “homeopathic” since the FDA doesn’t regulate herbal or homeopathic “treatments.” Not sure if anything like that happens in Germany as well though.


https://www.arnicare.com/about/arnicare-topicals/arnicare-cr... is another example I've seen. The active ingredient is "Arnica montana 1X HPUS 7%", meaning they start at 7% and do a single 10:1 dilution, resulting in .7%. This is a pretty normal strength for a normal non-homeopathic cream but it's pretending to be homeopathic to avoid FDA evaluation.


this should count as false advertising.


Yup. Our doctor recommended "homeopathic" medicine that was actually pretty standard treatment.


Is that "homeopathic" or "herbal / dietary supplement"?


It’s not actually homeopathic, but for some reason it uses the word “homeopathic” on the packaging (I’ve seen it on multiple brands). Example: https://coldeeze.com/collections/lozenges


Weird! Particularly as searching for "homeopathic" on that page doesn't turn anything up. I guess it's one of those things where it might help and can't hurt: anyone who knows enough to know that "homeopathic" is bogus, can look at the ingredients and determine that it's actually got zinc.




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