People interested in homeopathic medicine are well advised to read some standard, objective descriptions of its principles and history, such as
its wikipedia article. Because the term “homeopathic” is so widely used in advertising to mean, vaguely, “good for you”, it’s important to understand the actual claims of homeopathic medicine, and be able to distinguish them from advertising and enthusiast hype.
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Originally Posted by hallenrm
Similar is the case with Homeopathy, although allopathis practitioner pooh pooh the claim that a substance that is in a very dilute concentration can be effective, no one can dispute its growing popularity around the globe.
Can there be a scientific rationale for all these?
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Yes, in addition to many very supersticious, unscientific, explanations, there are some serious scientific ones. The scientific controversy arises because these explanations are extraordinary, and over claims that they have been experimentally demonstrated.
Early in the history of homeopathy, it shared many similarities with the modern mainstream medical practice of inoculation. Homeopathy’s central “principle of similars”, which states that a substance that causes symptoms of a disease in a healthy individual can cure the disease in a sick one, sounds very much like the modern idea of “training” the immune system to respond to a pathogen, as is done with inoculation (eg: against polio). Much as vaccines must be careful designed to cause a very minor infection, not cause a full-strength case of the disease it is intended to prevent, according to homeopathic principles, the suspected disease-causing substances in homeopathic medicine must be
very dilute.
Homeopathy became controversial, in part, because the “active” substance (eg: belladonna extract, quinine) in most modern homeopathic medicines is so dilute that a dose of it is almost certain to contain not even 1 molecule of the substance. In other words, the medicine is, chemically, pure water, or sometimes another “carrier”. Modern explanations in support of the homeopathic effect being pharmacologically real, not psychological suggestion propose that the diluting substance – usually pure water – is affected in some physically real and measurable way that causes it to “remember” having been in contact with the active substance, allowing it to pass on information about the substance to the patient’s body. There’s no convincing experimental evidence that water has any such “memory” ability, and many negative experimental results and logical arguments suggesting it does not.
Many supporters of homeopathy cite various supposedly well-controlled clinical studies that showing anything from minor to dramatic effectiveness of homeopathic medicines in treating various diseases (in particular, asthma). However, attempts to reproduce these results outside of research institutions founded explicitly to promote homeopathic medicine have been unsuccessful. Another often-cited work is an experiment by Demogeot, Gries, and Poitevin published in their 1994 paper
”NMR Relaxation in Very High Diluted Aqueous Solutions”. This research attempted to find evidence of the alteration of water in a homeopathic medicine by examining it using Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Although this paper is typically described in pro-homeopathic literature as “scientific proof” of all the claims of homeopathic medicine, the linked-to paper’s conclusion actually states, as do many scientific papers, that the experiments do not disprove these claims, and that further, better-controlled experiments are needed.
Note that many of the substances used to prepare homeopathic medicines are of known benefit in higher concentrations than their effectively zero concentration in the homeopathic medicines. The controversy, and general rejection of homeopathy by scientific biology and pharmacology, is due to these effectively zero concentrations, not, in most cases, the pharmacological properties of substances like belladonna, digitalis, and Echinacea.
Note also that, due to being effectively pure water, good-quality homeopathic medicine is almost certainly harmless at worst, unless a patient rejects needed mainstream medical treatment if the belief that it is unnecessary because of the homeopathic medicine.
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Re: Diseases and Cures
Some background on homeopathy
