This is the clinical efficacy claim on which the whole system stands: that the potentized remedy, chosen by the law of similars, exerts a specific curative action and not merely the comfort of expectation and attention. Hahnemann’s own evidence for it was testimonial in character, the drug ‘provings’ (symptom records from dosing healthy volunteers) and individual cured-case narratives reported in the Organon, neither of which can separate a specific effect from the natural course of illness or from placebo. The claim is classified as refuted. The earliest controlled, blinded test of a homeopathic high dilution, the Nuremberg salt test of 1835, found no effect distinguishable from water (Stolberg 2006). A 2005 comparative meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials in The Lancet concluded that the finding was compatible with the clinical effects of homeopathy being placebo effects (Shang et al. 2005). The case treats the evidence for a specific, beyond-placebo action as insufficient, and as having been actively contradicted where tested.