No. Plant medicine is plant medicine; homeopathy is homeopathy. Plant medicine, by and large, doesn’t work, but some of it does, although generally not as well as “Western medicine,” the product of repeated testing and refinement. Homeopathy is something specific that is Western, modern, and never anything but a placebo.

Specifically, homeopathy is the invention of an eighteenth-century German named Samuel Hahnemann, based on notions from ancient Greek medicine that anthropologists call “sympathetic magic.΅ He would give small doses of poisons that mimicked the symptoms his patients presented with, and due to the placebo effect, this would work, and the less poison he gave them, the better it would work. Even in his day, others balked, so he did placebo-controlled trials, and they seemed to work, but they were single-blind (i.e., he knew what he was giving). As it became clear that less of the substance was found in most preparations that would be found in the water by pure chance (in many cases, if the water were pure, not a single molecule), proponents decided that Hahnemann’s method of mixing thoroughly, beating the water against a hard surface, was what was really doing the work, giving the water a “memory” of the toxin that made it a good antidote. This doesn’t stand up to experiment, and if it did, it would essentially be Maxwell’s demon.