| Summary: | Lactose, a disaccharide found in different concentrations in the milk of mammals and is often called milk sugar. Saccharum means 'sugar' and 'lactis' means 'milk'. The main purpose of this review is to investigate this sugar comprehensively and understand its medicinal properties. In Homoeopathy Saccharum lactis is known as a vehicle and as a placebo. Vehicle is a substance which can carry dynamic properties of a substance without interfering with its action, being harmless, edible, therapeutically inert and chemically neutral. Placebo is defined as low doses of drug which is ineffective, given the severity of the disease where the main concern is not what to prescribe but how to fulfil the patient's desire for a remedy. As Dr. Samuel Hahnemann's method of attenuating remedies had shown that no substance is inert in attenuations, "that no substance is absolutely inert in any form" that is where the idea of understanding the medicinal property of Saccharum lactis arises where some of the great pioneers attenuated and administered it to understand the dynamic power of the so-called homoeopathic placebo.
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