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Natalie Grams (born 12 April 1978 in Munich, Germany) is a German physician and author. Formerly a practicing homeopath, she became known throughout Germany as a whistleblower for her 2015 debut book Homeopathy Reconsidered — What Really Helps Patients. In 2016 she joined the German Council of Science and Humanities and in January 2017 became Communications Manager for the skeptical Society for the Scientific Investigation of Parasciences (GWUP). She also serves on the advisory board of the humanist Giordano Bruno Foundation since May 2017, and as vice president of the Humanist Press Foundation in Germany since October 2017. In May 2017 her second book, Gesundheit — A Book Not Without Side Effects, was published.

Biography
Grams grew up in Bavaria, where she graduated high school in 1997. She studied medicine at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Technical University of Munich, and Heidelberg University, where in 2005 she gained licensure as a physician in Germany. In 2007 she received her doctorate as a medical faculty member at the University of Zurich. Until 2009 she was an intern at a private religiously-affiliated hospital in Heidelberg, where she specialized in geriatric and palliative medicine.

In 2004, in parallel with her medical education, Grams began pursuing education in traditional Chinese medicine and homeopathy. She completed her homeopathic education with an additional professional designation in that area, and was active exclusively in private homeopathic practice from 2009 through 2015.

In May 2015 her first book Homeopathy Reconsidered — What Really Helps Patients was published by Springer Verlag in German (German title Homöopathie neu gedacht – Was Patienten wirklich hilft). She abandoned her homeopathic activity the same year. Grams is currently active as a science communicator.

Criticism of homeopathy and alternative medicine
Grams is an authority, and a leading participant in public debate, on the subject of homeopathy. As a practicing homeopathic doctor she was interviewed by journalists Christian Weymayr and Nicole Heißmann for their book The Homeopathy Lie (German title: Die Homöopathie-Lüge). Upon reading that book's criticism of homeopathy, Grams wanted to write a rebuttal from the homeopathic perspective.

Instead, her research on this rebuttal and her intensive consideration of scientific findings on the subject of homeopathy led Grams to revise her own views. Rather than the planned defense, her first book Homeopathy Reconsidered — What Really Helps Patients, published in May 2015, turned out to be a critical examination of the discipline. The book is especially critical of claims that homeopathy constitutes a specific drug therapy. Grams tried to be empathetic in her writing style, intending for the reader to "feel [her] agony, discovering these facts about homeopathy."

At the end of this learning process, Grams decided to abandon her own private homeopathic practice, and with it her previous economic livelihood, because she no longer wanted to offer therapies that she could not fully stand behind. In explaining this decision, she draws a contrast between the lack of scientific support  for homeopathy and the positive aspects of a homeopathic setting, including the approachable and attentive style of patient care sometimes termed talking medicine.

Although Grams fundamentally opposes homeopathy as a discipline, she wishes to see mainstream health systems embrace the idea of better medicine — an effort to enable intensive attention to the patient in daily medical practice.

The impact of Grams' position in print media,      radio, and television    was an essential factor in the intensified German public discourse surrounding homeopathy since 2015. She delivered a talk at SkepKon 2017 titled Enlightenment about pseudomedicine: What have skeptics achieved?

Along with author and homeopathy critic Norbert Aust, Grams co-founded the Information Network on Homeopathy (Informationsnetzwerk Homöopathie — INH) in 2016.

She lent her expertise as an author in support of the Münster Memorandum on Practitioners of Alternative Medicine, which aims to mitigate the potential for patient harm from therapists who lack academic medical education (Heilpraktiker — literally healing practitioners) by proposing a German regulatory framework to balance the concerns of patient autonomy and freedom of therapy against fairness to health insurance providers and insurees.

Reaction
Grams took up the publication of her 2015 book with the intention of stimulating self-reflection among those in the homeopathic orbit. She has expressed regret that this introspection had not yet happened. Homeopaths who reviewed her first book have questioned the motivation behind her conversion and expressed astonishment that Grams did not "wash out" of her homeopathic education relatively early, given her doubts.

she was working on a book collecting and examining the many angry e-mails and comments she has received in response to her writing and activism. She hopes to reach people who hold the popular perception of homeopaths as "lovely, … empathetic, and good people" and prompt them to re-examine that opinion.

Quotes

 * "The doubt came when I learned that, in evaluating the efficacy of a therapy, the decisive thing is not one's experience but rather the results of clinical studies."
 * "The fact is: We have no cause to believe that homeopathic medicines have an effect which goes beyond the placebo effect. If a group of doctors staunchly asserts that homeopathy works, one must — for the sake of patients — object."
 * "I first understood, through a book by Kahneman that deals with 'fast and slow thinking', that I attached to homeopathy with my fast, intuitive thinking, perhaps 'thinking with my gut', although I was otherwise capable of rational, analytical — 'slow' — thinking. I avoided cognitive dissonance by rationally questioning homeopathy at a very late stage."
 * "The trigger was a book that I wanted to write in defense of homeopathy — as a reaction to the book The Homeopathy Lie. In the research I sought arguments to justify scientifically the successes I experienced every day with homeopathy. But as much as I looked, I had to realize: there is not much left."
 * "Homeopathy works because we homeopaths and our patients have the idea that it works."
 * "It was hard for me, I was so deep inside myself."
 * "...Hahnemann was very clever, he questioned everything, and the medicine he rebelled against in those days was dominated by superstitions and by therapies that were perilous to the lives of the patients. Homeopathy was, at the time, the lesser evil... "
 * "Hahnemann deceived himself."
 * "Homeopathy is itself a patient. It lacks data and facts, it hallucinates, it does not want to admit its illness. But insight into illness can be a first step to recovery."
 * "In homeopathy efficacy is no greater than a placebo. Which is not surprising, since their medicines contain nothing."
 * "Homeopathy always seemed to me like some sort of 'parallel knowledge', that is just as admissable and legitimate as scientific knowledge. It was hard to see how much I had deceived myself."
 * "Among homeopaths there is often a wholly distorted picture of science and scientific work. Science is considered to be a kind of worldview which, as a homeopath, it is best to resist. Thus it remains unclear what kind of arduous, detailed work and thinking is required in science in order to arrive at a result. Science is not a worldview, but a method. ...The practical part of homeopathy, that of attentiveness to the patient, is unbelievably valuable. We must carry this over into everyday medical and clinical life — but without the magic part involving succussion and potentization."

Writings

 * Homöopathie neu gedacht – Was Patienten wirklich hilft (Homeopathy Reconsidered — What Really Helps Patients). Springer-Verlag, Berlin/ Heidelberg 2015, ISBN 978-3-662-45336-0.
 * Gesundheit – Ein Buch nicht ohne Nebenwirkungen (Gesundheit — A Book Not Without Side Effects). Springer-Verlag, Berlin/ Heidelberg 2017, ISBN 978-3-662-54798-4.

TODO at publication
Image:Fullsizeoutput 2a23.jpg||Natalie Grams, German physician, author and science communicator, was a student at LMU Munich. * Natalie Grams, German physician, author and science communicator
 * Move categories out of pre-block
 * Edit comment Created new page. Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at de:Natalie Grams; see its history for attribution.
 * Link this article via wikidata to the German source article
 * Add subject to following pages Natalie Grams (born 1978), German physician, writer, scientific skeptic, former homeopath
 * Natalie (given name)
 * List of scientific skeptics
 * List of books about skepticism
 * List of authors by name: G
 * List of German women writers
 * Add subject to following pages
 * Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
 * University of Zurich
 * DYK (hooks < 200 characters)
 * Hook (187): * ... that German author Natalie Grams set out to write a scientific defense of homeopathy, but instead became a prominent expert critic of the discipline after penning Homeopathy Reconsidered?
 * ALT1 (199): * ... that German author and anti-homeopathy campaigner Natalie Grams advocates "better medicine", in which mainstream health systems adopt elements of alternative medicine's focused attention to patients?
 * ALT2 (199): * ... that German author and physician Natalie Grams wants health systems to adopt a key aspect of homeopathy — elevated attentiveness to patients — but not its scientifically implausible theory of action?