What Is Homeopathy and Faith-Based Healing?

Homeopathy is a pseudo-scientific system of faith-based medicine created more than 200 years ago by Samuel Hahnemann.

Homeopaths believe that an illness can be cured by consuming something that causes similar symptoms in a healthy person. Rather than addressing the disease directly, homeopathy attempts to treat the symptoms.

For example, seasonal allergies cause itchy and watery eyes. A homeopath would look for a cure by finding something that causes itchy eyes in someone without seasonal allergies. They’d see that chopping onions gives similar symptoms and, based on that vague connection, make a solution from onions.

The homeopathic solution would be made by diluting onions in water over and over again, to the point where there wouldn’t even be a single molecule of onion left in the solution. All you’d have is water.

Regardless of how much onion actually exists in the water, advocates of homeopathy believe that it’s the water’s memory of the onion that will cure the illness.

Scientific knowledge about physics, chemistry, biochemistry and biology confirms that homeopathic remedies have no active content and no biophysical effect.

Homeopathy is not effective for treating any medical condition.

Why are faith-based cures harmful?

If someone has seasonal allergies and takes a solution based on diluted onions, what’s the harm? It may not cure the allergies but it won’t make things worse, right?

Well, for something like seasonal allergies, that’s true. You’d simply continue to suffer from the discomfort.

However, the harm comes when a more serious illness is treated with only faith-based cures or when the faith-based solution uses something harmful, like bleach.

Yes, bleach!

Child-Friendly Faith

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Faith-based healing poisoning

We’ve seen some dangerous religious rituals and practices involving children since we started the Child-Friendly Faith Project (CFFP) in 2012. We learned about how one church may be harming children and justifying the practice with religious doctrine.

The Genesis II Church of Health and Healing promotes itself as one that offers congregants a product that cures most illnesses. The church calls it a miracle solution, as well as chlorine dioxide therapy.

Another word for the product? Bleach.

In fact, the FDA is now warning consumers who were given or sold the solution to “stop using it immediately and throw it away.”

We were first alerted to the church’s practice when a friend of the CFFP pointed us to a Facebook event that promoted a 2-day seminar. For $450, attendees could learn about an “effective alternative healing” that “could save your life or the life of a loved one sent home to die.”

The entrance fee included membership to the church and the bleach product or “sacraments.”  Participants were promised to also acquire the “knowledge to help heal many people of this world’s terrible diseases.”

But, according to The Guardian, the solution “consists of chlorine dioxide, a powerful bleach that is used both on textiles and in the industrial treatment of water. It has been banned in several countries around the world for use as a medical treatment.”

Alarmed that children would be fed the bleach at the seminar and thereafter, we contacted the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office. We spoke to Sgt. Jerry Moore, who attended the seminar. He let us know that there were no children there and no one sampled the toxic product.

While the seminar itself didn’t seem to pose a threat to children’s safety, The church posted a video showing an infant in Uganda being fed a cup of the bleach and screaming as it was swallowed.

We are continuing to track the practices of this church and its customers and report abuses to local and federal authorities.

 

Who We Are

The Child-Friendly Faith Project envisions a world in which no child suffers abuse or neglect as a result of religious belief, doctrine, or practice.

As an advocacy nonprofit, we share knowledge and build communities around the issue of religious child maltreatment and advocates for those whose lives are impacted by it.

Why our work is needed

Genesis II’s use of poison as a so-called medical cure is just the tip of the iceberg. Children across the country suffer child abuse or neglect enabled by religious ideology every day.

The effects of this maltreatment are serious, long-term, and even fatal. Religious child maltreatment can occur in any religious environment but it’s important to learn which children are at the greatest risk.

We report on religious child maltreatment cases and share memoirs written by survivors who grew up in just about every religious, spiritual, or cultic group.

 

How you can help

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