NO ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES:

Behind an arched stone facade in Heidelberg, Germany, Natalie Grams spent years welcoming patients into bright rooms with plastered white walls and hardwood floors. As a homeopathic physician, she listened to their concerns and prescribed tinctures, ointments, and little white pills for their ailments. People trusted her, and Grams was certain that these nontraditional treatments (echinacea for colds; arnica for muscle pain) made them better.

For her, homeopathy was more than a profession. It was something she accepted on faith and an essential part of her identity. She treated herself homeopathically and her young family, too. "I was convinced that homeopathy could heal everything, really everything," Grams says.

Then one day in 2013 at a nearby lake, Grams fell violently ill with a viral infection. Under different circumstances, she might have turned to a tincture or those little pills, which homeopaths call globules. But there was no time. Her fever was spiking, and her sense of reality was fading away. Her family called an ambulance. Bumping along the potholed country road, the medics tried to distract Grams by inquiring about her work. When she said she was a physician, they asked what field of medicine. Vulnerable and scared, she couldn't bring herself to tell them. These are real doctors, she thought. They save lives. They were saving her life. She couldn't do what they did. What, then, did that make her? So she lied and said she was a general practitioner.

It would be a few more years before Grams fully turned her back on homeopathy--becoming, practically overnight, Germany's most prominent skeptic of the practice. But that afternoon in the ambulance, she began to question her devotion. "I was, somehow, for the first time, not sure whether it was a good thing to be a homeopath," she recalls.

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