Take 2 Herbs, Call Me in the Morning : Pharmacies: The popularity of homeopathic drugs grows as patients seek alternatives to traditional medicine.

For a pharmacy manager, Shane McCamey cares surprisingly little about how many prescriptions are filled in his store.

That’s not because of a lack of business acumen, he says. Simply put, the majority of his customers are more interested in other remedies he stocks.

“More and more, we’re seeing people whose immune systems have been compromised by allopathic medicine--or conventional prescription medications--and they’re looking for another answer,” McCamey said.

“They reach the point where they’re convinced that allopathic medicine is just treating the symptoms and not the causes. That’s when they come here.”

“Here” is Capitol Drugs in Sherman Oaks, one of two homeopathic pharmacies in the San Fernando Valley. Although the exact number of similar pharmacies throughout the state isn’t known--the regulating state agency for pharmacies has no statistics on them--their popularity in Southern California appears to be growing. Within the last few years, homeopathic pharmacies have opened in Glendale, Santa Monica and, just a few weeks ago, West Hollywood.

The reason isn’t hard to understand. Until recently, homeopathic drugs--highly diluted substances found in herbs, plants and a spectrum of other natural sources--were marketed on a limited scale by only a few manufacturers, most of whom served a small number of licensed homeopathic practitioners. As a result, homeopathic drugs historically have had little or no labeling for consumers.

Today, things are different. Although there is continuing controversy within the medical community, a significant increase has occurred in the importation and domestic marketing of homeopathic products. This has resulted in far greater access for consumers.

The homeopathic drug market is now a multimillion-dollar industry in the United States, according to the federal Food and Drug Administration. Despite fears that the products might be used inappropriately for serious ailments, homeopathic drugs are legal and can be obtained without a doctor’s prescription.

Promoting itself as a New Age pharmacy, Capitol Drugs has row upon row of small plastic bottles, each containing homeopathic pills or solutions. It also sells herbal remedies, Chinese tinctures, negative ion generators, electromagnetic field detectors, Qi Qong machines to “balance the life force” in the body and crystal jewelry for the undecided or overwhelmed.

For more traditional customers, there is a counter in the back of the pharmacy where prescriptions for antibiotics and other such medicines can be filled.

“We don’t downgrade the medical profession at all, and no one here would ever suggest a homeopathic remedy if the person described a condition that sounded as if it required medical attention,” McCamey said. “But we also recognize that there is a host of illnesses--such as yeast infections, chronic fatigue syndrome and allergies--that allopathic medicine doesn’t seem to be able to treat.”

Pharmacy employees give recommendations when asked, although they emphasize that they are prohibited from prescribing. Customers who come in and describe a condition are led to a shelf that contains several hundred books and brochures. Each describes a set of remedies and the symptoms for which they are most beneficial. McCamey said he might then suggest several options, allowing the final decision to be made by the customer.

Alice Shephard, a Hollywood accountant who said she doesn’t mind the longer drive to come to the pharmacy, is convinced that homeopathics are the answer to her problems. For years, she said, she suffered from gout and recurrent yeast infections as well as food and environmental allergies. She said she saw doctor after doctor--and took prescription drug after prescription drug--with no relief.

“You take all this medicine to deal with the disease, but in the end you just reduce your body’s ability to deal with the disease on its own,” she said. “I kept getting worse until I tried homeopathics. They help the body heal itself.”

Sandy Parsons, a former customer at the store who became so intrigued with homeopathics that she now works as a part-time clerk, said she became a believer after a bad bout with bronchitis.

“I was given a prescription for antibiotics, but they are so strong,” she said. “They kill all the good stuff, too. I ended up keeping the prescription--just in case--but I got some homeopathic pills and took them. They cleared it right up.”

Homeopathy, which is derived from Greek words meaning “similar suffering,” isn’t new. Developed in the 1700s, it involves enhancing the body’s natural reactions to a disease, rather than suppressing them.

Using the same principle as a vaccination that promotes an immune response in the body, original substances--usually from herbs or plants--are diluted with water or alcohol as many as 10,000 times. Thus, a person suffering from nausea may take a homeopathic solution that in larger doses would actually cause nausea, and a person with allergies may take a remedy that in a stronger form would cause allergic responses.

“Arsenic, for example, is a poison, but if you dilute the original tincture . . . it is good for just about every organ and tissue,” said Sandra Seither, manager of Merit Homeopathic Pharmacy in Mission Hills. “It’s good for exhaustion, restlessness, nightly aggravation, the eyes, stomach, throat, abdomen, female problems, the heart and respiratory systems.

“We can’t prescribe or say arsenic is what you need, but we can let you read about it and then decide for yourself.”

Since homeopathic remedies have been diluted so many times and contain so little of the original substance, most medical doctors consider them to be safe. Nevertheless, many have expressed worries that people with serious medical conditions may ignore potentially dangerous symptoms and waste time using a worthless cure.

Dr. Joshua Leichtberg, a physician and medical director of the Summa Medical Group in Woodland Hills, said he is somewhere in the middle. On one hand, he said, many physicians are too quick to prescribe “an ever-increasing array of pharmaceutical chemicals” when gentler, perhaps more natural options are available.

On the other hand, Leichtberg said he is not fully convinced that homeopathics alone are the answer. “There has to be a balance between medical science and the innate healing power of the body,” he said.

For Seither of Merit Pharmacy, Leichtberg’s reaction is mild. In her experience, she said, most physicians take a strongly negative stand.

“The doctors in this building call homeopathics placeboes,” she said. “They hate us because they are losing money and they want people to come and see them.

“The AMA fights us, the FDA fights us and the pharmaceutical companies don’t like us. Homeopathics work, and they don’t like it.”

A spokesman for the state Board of Pharmacy said his regulatory agency has no jurisdiction over non-prescription products and lacks any authority to have “anything to do” with the sale of over-the-counter drugs. And, although both the American Medical Assn. and the FDA have taken skeptical positions on the issue of homeopathics, both reported that they have taken no steps to curtail their sale by pharmacies.

“People have to understand that they can only cut corners so much when it comes to self-diagnosing,” said Jeff Moulter, an AMA spokesman in Chicago. “After that, they take their chances.”

Ray Wilson, a scientist and spokesman for the FDA in Sacramento, said his agency has, to his knowledge, never undertaken an active investigation of homeopathic pharmacies. The FDA is concerned only with prescription drugs and the manufacturers of homeopathic products, he said, and would take an interest only if the pharmacies that sold them made medical claims about an unproven remedy.

“The same thing would be true if a person with diabetes wanted to take aspirin,” Wilson said. “A person with diabetes is free to do that, but the makers or sellers of aspirin can’t promote their product for diabetes.”

But for customers such as Diane Linth, who was browsing through Capitol Drugs the other day, having an alternative to strong medications is all that matters. Her 3-year-old son had come down with a bad cold and cough, she said, and she dreaded giving him the cold liquids and cough syrup she’d used in the past.

“The other stuff made him so hyper,” she said, holding up a homeopathic product for cold and flu called oscillococcinum, a microdose of duck heart and liver.

“I just knew there had to be another way.”