Another score by natural selection
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Fuck everyone that does this. These are plain criminals in my view. There are tons of problem with the medical system and pharma biz, I'm not cheering for them but the alternative is often way worse and outright dangerous for a lot of people.
Probably, but I'm not at all sure how many. People believe in the weirdest things, and some make a business out of it not to exploit the gullible, but because they actually believe in it as well.
When I talked to Feng Shui consultants I never got the faintest hint of them suppressing laughter and about to burst out what a great gig it is and how stupid the clients are. I see no reason why that shouldn't be similar in the "alternative medicine" field. There are certainly some that exploit it, but I'm absolutely not sure that they are the majority or even a sizable minority. People believe in the weirdest things.
It's good buisness and that's why it's popular. In germany (at least in the west, in the GDR no such thing existed) there is a special job below a physician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heilpraktiker
These are hugely popular, you can become one pretty fast with just taking a test (they basically test that you are able to know when to call the real doctor) and all of them I've known make their money with quack cures.
Pharmacies also making good money selling and advertising that stuff because of higher margins.
Also real physicans have very tight budget limits since a few years back - if you have a problem that's not a broken leg the physican can't get money for talking with you - or it's something like 20€/3months without further diagnosis. So people - especially middle aged, rather high educated (not scientists but usally buerocrats, teachers, etc.pp) are very prone to this. Also the anti-vaccination movement is i.e. popular not in the poor parts in Berlin but instead where the well educated, good earning people are living.
Take the rise of the internet where you can read up almost everything and convince yourself that you have superiour knowledge and probably a healthy dose of skepticism against anything "non natural" whatever that means...
But there are real economic incentives that make this popular and even major parties are in support of this (Green pary for example).
There is a movement to fix the payment of doctors and reform the medical system to better accomendate for the patients and forbid this insanity but it works well enough as it keeps patients aways from physican offices.
But the quack theory spreads and not everyone recognises their own limits and delegates patients to real physicans.
It's something that should be fixed but it's working well enough for everyone involved that it's seen as the lesser evil. As you can imagine I think it's a huge mistake but voices like mine are really a minitory.
A friend of mine in medicine had a different perspective on it, his stance is basically that as long as they redirect the actual cases to the actual doctors, homeopathy is fine. It keeps the people who really just want somebody to talk to out of the doctor's offices and they will find help there, because the real doctor doesn't have time to do psycho-therapy light with them. At least from personal experience (my mother believes in it as well), it works. She knows very well what problems call for a doctor and what are okay to try homeopathy on.