How Homeopathy (Supposedly) Works Illustrated
September 17th, 2009
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Homeopaths believe that “like cures like,” but that this only works when the substance in question has been diluted repeatedly. The more times the substance is diluted, the more powerful the preparation. Some preparations may have a few molecules of the original substance present, but those are only the mild ones. The more powerful homeopathic preparations have none of the original active ingredient present and may not have for several iterations of the dilution process.
Make sense? No? Of course it doesn’t, but here’s the theory behind how it works.
The first step is finding a substance that causes the same symptoms as what is being treated. For example, an itchy rash might be treated with an extract of poison ivy, heartburn might be treated with a food acid like vinegar or citric acid and eye irritation might be treated with something like hot pepper extract, since that would normally cause irritation. To the homeopath, the underlying cause does not matter, only the symptom. An itchy rash, for example, might be caused by an allergic reaction, a bacterial infection, an irritating substance or any number of other things. To a mainstream doctor, the cause is important, as that is what will determine how the condition is treated – antibiotics would clear a bacterial infection but would be useless for allergies. But for homeopaths, this is not an issue of concern. It’s only the symptoms.
The homeopath now selects a substance that produces the symptoms in question. The substance often has a cryptic or exotic sounding name. For example, if treating insomnia with caffeine, the homeopath won’t use “caffeine” but rather “Coffea Cruda” which is just a coffee extract, the active ingredient being caffeine.
A small amount is then added to water to make the preparation. It can actually be added to other solvents, such as alcohol, but that would make this even more nonsensical, since that has effects of its own and also would have to figure out which substance was the solvent and which was the solute. Thus in this example, we’ll just use water.
The substance being used for the homeopathic preparation now somehow communicates its properties, especially its physiological properties in humans (or whatever species is being treated) to the water molecules. It’s not clear whether the substance communicates only its physiological effects of the species being treated to the water molecules or if it communicates all its properties for every species, and the water just decides which one to use when it gets to its host. In either case, the water remembers the properties. Homeopaths claim that the water is somehow “energized” or that “information” is stored. It would look something like this.
Not only is the water good at remembering things, it is also very concerned with who it will listen to. In any sample of water, there are bound to be some other chemicals, if only in trace amounts. Even the highest analytical grades of water will pick up a tiny amount of environmental contamination when exposed to the atmosphere or placed in a new container. The water knows better than to bother with them.
Notice, however, that the water has only remembered the properties of the substance added, but has not actually started to oppose the effects it has in the body. That’s because it’s not dilute enough. One dilution will not do it. So the preparation is then diluted into another container of water.
Each time the water is diluted, it caries the information about the substance it had been exposed to several dilutions back. The original molecules may not be in the new sample, but that’s okay, because the new ones always remember the information and are sure to pass it on. After a few dilutions, however, they don’t only remember the information, they start to decide to do something with it.
However, the potency of the waters response is low. This is because it has not been diluted enough. The preparation gets more and more powerful with each dilution.
The water continues to get stronger and after a given number, the homeopath decides the preparation is powerful enough. Too many dilutions and the preparation might not just help one fall asleep, but it could put you into a coma and we would not want that! Note that the water has a very good memory and never messes up the information. With humans, a rumor can be passed between six or seven people and by the time it gets to the end, it sounds nothing like the original story. Water does not have this problem. The information remains totally accurate throughout the preparations.
(This goes on and on but you get the idea)
Now that the preparation has gone through enough preparations, the individual with the health problem simply drinks the water (or places it on a rash or drizzles it onto pills and then lets it evaporate and takes those pills) Once in the body, the water knows what to do and is not stopped by the fact that it may not have the chemical properties or molecular structure to do so.
Yes, this is really absolutely exactly what homeopaths claim happens in order for their preparations to work. They may not believe that the water molecules actually have conversations with each other, but they do believe that they are able to pass on information and understand its implications in this way. The explanations range from “electrical interactions” to quantum mechanics. Quantum effects are a great way to explain this, since most people know absolutely nothing about quantum physics other than it involves strange and seemingly nonsensical things, which homeopathy certainly is. In reality, quantum physics may be a bit weird and counter-intuitive, but it’s not THAT weird and wacky.
The quantum world of subatomic particles may be strange, but homeopathy is just stupid.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Bad Science, History, Misc, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation, Quackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 25th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Tim said:
If medicine is a belief system then so is everything else. I am a round earth believer and a conventional medicine believer.
If I have a health problem I’ll go to an accredited MD who will use science to evaluate my condition and approved and proven treatment methods to deal with it. This has a tendency to actually work. Of course, there are conditions where even the best medicine has its limits, but there are many conditions it can cure and many more it can at least relieve the symptoms of or provide some kind of treatment. Homeopathy never effectively treated any condition except for a severe case of fat wallet syndrome.
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September 26th, 2009 at 12:05 am
“Each time the water is diluted, it caries the information “
Umm, gives the information cavities?
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September 26th, 2009 at 1:08 am
You forgot to mention the important bit where you shake the mix up and down and then side to side for the required number of times. Thats how the molecules get the info knocked into their heads. How can you expect the spell to work if you forget the most important bit?
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September 26th, 2009 at 1:52 am
For all you MD believers we are having an epidemic of autism caused by over use of vaccines. MD’s used to do blood letting. They used to do lobotomies. They now do plastic surgery and gastric by-pass. Oh, what belief can do. I am sorry to inform you that under the guise of science, MD’s do many stupid things. Which is not to say MD’s don’t a good job of putting broken bones back together or cutting out tumors and such.
At one time MD’s advertised that certain cigarettes were healthy.
The MD health model has three cures: 1. Cut it out. 2. Poison it. 3. Talk about it. The most effective is of these three techniques is talk. MD’s have a miserable record with prevention of disease, but there is no money in prevention as opposed to the cure.
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September 26th, 2009 at 8:14 am
Tim said:
When I was diagnosed with bladder cancer I talked at my groin for weeks. “HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?” I cried. No luck. Strangely enough, “cutting it out” — a/k/a transurethral resection of the bladder tumour — worked REALLY well. I’ve also found that talking at my lungs when I have a bacterial infection isn’t NEARLY as effective as … antibiotics.
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September 26th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Bob said:
Actually, that was my point exactly. There are certain illnesses that the medical model is very good at curing. However, most patients don’t come in for curable illnesses. Most come in with a cold or flu and there is no cure. So the doctor talks with the patient, perhaps gives them some drugs that attenuate the problem, and the patients feel better for the attention. However, many doctors also give antibiotics to the patient which are worse than ineffective for viral diseases, they stimulate the evolutionary process whereby bacteria becomes immune to antibiotics.
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September 26th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Tim said:
The overuse and missuse of antibiotics is certainly a valid point and it’s something that the medical establishment is aware of and has been trying to deal with. That said, there is some reasoning why a patient with a viral infection might be given antibiotics. About a year ago I had a bad case of a flu like virus and I ended up developing one hell of a bacterial infection in my lymph nodes. It’s not that uncommon for an opportunistic infection to occur during another illness.
Even with viruses, there are things that modern medicine can do. It can’t provide something that can cure viral infections like it can with bacterial infections. With influenza there are things like Tamiflu that can help by inhibiting the reproduction of the virus. There are other anti-virals for other diseases as well.
Symptomatic control can also be an important part of aiding in recovery. This summer I had a bad viral infection and one of the biggest problems I had was that I was coughing so continuously that I could not get a good nights sleep. It was a huge help when I got a prescription cough syrup to control that and help me sleep. Also, fever reducers made things a lot easier, and my doctor advised me to use them because research has proven that reducing the fever does not impair the immune response.
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September 26th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Homeopathy works! The mechanism is known as the placebo effect. In fact that’s how most alternative medicine works. If only homeopaths would stop trying to explain their goofy fairy tale as a mechanism of action!
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September 26th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Ralph said:
The placebo effect can produce some surprisingly powerful effects, but it does not actually treat the illness. Nobody is going to claim that the placebo effect is an effective way of sending cancer into remission or cure AIDS. Homeopaths do claim that their produce can be effective on this and charge a lot of money for that.
There are some huge ethical problems that arise from using placebos to treat people with real illnesses. It destroys the idea that the patient can trust their doctor to be upfront and honest about their condition. By their very nature, placebos do not allow for informed consent.
Also, if the message is simply “Don’t ask how it works. Just trust that it does. We’re not going to tell you how it works.” then that’s a very bad thing as well. That kind of mindset can lead to all kinds of scams and destroys the entire idea of being skeptical and having curiosity about the way things work in general. If something is going to be put in my body to do something, then I want to have at least a basic idea of what it’s supposed to do and how it will do it. If I had a doctor who just told me that he wouldn’t give me a basic explanation of how a medicine I was prescribed works, I would find another doctor.
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September 26th, 2009 at 11:53 am
drbuzz0 said:
Precisely! My point was that any percieved results from homeopathy are just the placebo effect. I neglected to comment on the danger of delayed diagnosis and treatment.
Suppose someone is suddenly drinking and urinating more frequently. The homeopath looks up these symptoms, finds that they can be caused by excesss sugar, and makes up a super dilute glucose solution for you to drink one time.
Meanwhile the good ole family MD is treating these symptoms with insulin after doing a complete physical work up and exam. Now that’s holoistic!!
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September 26th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Placebo works, and placebo is useful.
To state it does not cure the illness, is just a partly true. It for sure helps many symptoms. It can stop allergies, reduce pain, lower blood pressure.
But the patient must not know. And this is the hard part.
Homeopathy is good way to hide the fact. I would not have problem with it as long as the ‘real’ treatment is not dropped because of placebo, and if the price is reasonable (however high price is known to increase effect of placebo).
Placebo pills are being made, and labeled as placebo. They are of course used only in hospitals, where patient does not know what exactly is he taking. I have actually one seen homeopatic anti-allergic pills sold and it was the SAME flask of placebo pills, only with different label.
If I was a doctor (I’m not, despise my nick), I would be interested in placebo, and if I had patient who it could help, I would ask him ‘do you believe in homeopthy ?’ .. if he said ‘hell yes, it helped me last year a lot’ I would give him placebo pills with homeopatic story .. if he said ‘hell no, it’s bull**** !’ I would say ‘here is new pill, which our institute is just developing, it is very sophisticated biochemistry, it took yeas, and cost millions, and it has just been approved for clinical use. The pill would be the same. And it may happen that the first patient would not want the ‘chemical’ pill because he detest ‘chemistry’.
So yeah, sure .. homeopathy is woowoo .. but you need some woowoo story for placebo to work.
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September 26th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Dr.Sid said:
This is so wrong on so many levels.
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September 26th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Dr.Sid said:
For one thing, it does occasionally displace real treatment. What you are doing is misleading a person about how medicine works and how their body functions and what is being done to them. I have a huge problem with this. There needs to be openness. I don’t like the idea that there is some seceret that is being kept from everyone being treated. Medical decisions are ultimately made by the individual, not their doctors. Doctors can suggest courses of action, but in most cases, the patient can decide what treatment they will receive. If they are badly mislead about things this breaks down.
There is the big issue of informed consent. As far as I am concerned, there are only two circumstances where a placebo is something that would be okay to explicitly administer:
1. The person knows they may be getting a placebo. Obviously they can’t know it is a placebo, but in a study someone might sign up knowing that there is a 50% chance they will be randomly assigned to the placebo group and a 50% chance they’ll be assigned to the active group.
2. If a person is so mentally unstable and completely delusional that they can’t make their own decisions and they are screaming from their padded cell that they need a pill to kill off the bad implants that the government put in them or something like that
Of course there’s a gray area. There might be hypocondriacs who come in to a practice complaining of pain all over and lacking anything else to give them, the doctor suggests that a vitamin might help. In that case, it’s not a complete lie. However, giving someone something like a homeopathic product is, in my opinion, entirely wrong.
If I found out my doctor had been giving me a placebo I would never use that doctor again.
Dr.Sid said:
At the risk of invoking the “slippery slope” argument, I generally do not want to be lied to by my doctor nor do I want the medical establishment to condone the practice of actively lying to patients or keeping them in the dark about their treatment.
To me, this is no better than all the teachers and professors of the world getting together and deciding that they will tell their students that the earth is flat, because it makes geography and map making so much easier. They will keep the fact that it is really round as obscure as possible and avoid mentioning it to anyone outside their profession.
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September 26th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Dr.Sid said:
The benefits of using homeopathy as a placebo are outweighed by the costs of promoting ignorance and misinformation. That is my two cents on that.
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September 26th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
So the shaking of the homeopathic product is also an important part of the preparing? That’s strange and even more ridiculous, if you ask me. When something is being diluted or dissolved into a solvent, the purpose of shaking it or stirring it (apologies to James Bond) is that it mechanically disperses the substance and gives a uniform distribution much faster than just allowing it to diffuse on its own. If something is being dissolved in a solvent, then the action is going to help expose it to more solvent molecules and speed up the dissolving of the substance.
Assuming you want it fully suspended and homogeneous, then it’s just a good way of distributing everything. Also, agitation can speed up some reactions.
Think of putting sugar in your coffee. Most of it might settle to the bottom, but you give it a stir and it gets back in suspension and most of it dissolves.
This makes everything in homeopathy all the more screwy. saying that shaking makes the molecules “bump into each other” and that gives them “information” or something is crap. Molecules always bump into each-other because the ambient thermal energy makes them vibrate.
(note that by “bump into each other” I don”t mean to imply the actual particles come into contact. The molecules area of influence comes closer and then is repelled, but they never actually touch, because of repulsive forces of the charges. That is how it generally is, except in narrow cases like nuclear fusion, where they heat overcomes the Coulomb barrier)
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September 26th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
One thing I’ve always wondered about and have not seen any good information on is whether the placebo effect is reduced in groups that know they may be receiving a placebo. I mean as in clinical studies, where the participants are given either a placebo or the medicine randomly and without their knowledge. If the participants are aware that the pill they take has a 50% chance of being nothing then it would stand to reason there would be less placebo effect. I don’t know though.
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September 27th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
I’ve always wondered. When designing a double blind experiment to test the placebo effect , what placebo control would one use?
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September 27th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
There are two good books that discuss placebos – Trick or Treatment and Snake Oil Medicine. It is true that for alternative medicine such as acupuncture, a placebo is hard to devise. In one study where the patients knew that half would be placebo, they consistently tried to guess which group they were in. This definitely altered the outcome because many dropped out if they were certain that they were receiving a placebo.
For a placebo to work ya gotta believe!!
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September 28th, 2009 at 12:19 am
Dr.Bill said:
In that circumstance, you’re testing the effect, so there would be no placebo group. The variable is the presence of the placebo. Your control group would get nothing and know they are getting nothing and they would report if they got better from whatever ailed them. Your experimental group would take the placebo and be told it was some kind of effective medication.
This has been done and related things like that have been done. It shows that it definitely has a huge effect.
Ralph said:
Perhaps not a true placebo, but there are studies that compared acupuncture, where the needles are stuck in the various points and supposed lines of energy on the body versus just sticking them random places. The results is that it works just as well either way. Thus the theory that there are points and regions on longitudinal lines is disproved.
Ralph said:
That surprises me. I would think anyone who signed up for a study would know that it included a placebo group. Even if they don’t tell you, if you sign up for a study, you can assume that there will be a placebo group if it is for a medication. If it’s not listed, I’d ask. What could they say? Maybe say they could not comment. However, if they said “No, all persons who sign up for this get the real drug” then that’s either lying or it’s a very badly administered study.
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September 28th, 2009 at 3:48 am
Taking it as read that homeopathy is no better than placebo, and that in some cases serious harm has been done by persisting with homeopathy when real symptoms are present. Is there a case for homeopathy?
Modern drugs are powerful and effective. If a doctor prescribes them incorrectly they WILL do more harm than good. Some cases are hard to diagnose, and in the U.K. we have “free at the point of use” health services. This is an open invitation for the worried well to clog up doctors time when all they want is a chat with an authoritative figure in a white coat. Prescribing a placebo i.e. homeopathy, may be exactly what is required for the mental heath of the patient and the doctor can be certain that whatever happens his prescription has not caused futher harm. In cases of depression the effective medicines can be addictive, and Dr Phil Hammond cites research that shows that in many cases placebo is as effective as drugs in depressive cases.
The doctor should have the option of prescribing placebo/homeopathy when appropriate, as long as that does not get in the way of treating clear symptoms with proper medicine.
Most people on this board are rational and critical in their thinking. Unfortunately for most other people most of the time, being rational and critical are not high on their priorities.
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September 28th, 2009 at 10:41 am
There is no picture of the vital force. I thought that homeopathy worked via energy resonance or sumfink. It’s teh vibrations.
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September 28th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Warhelmet said:
Sure there is. The last image explains that since the chemical properties don’t make the substance a medicine it simply uses magic. Vital force = magic.
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September 28th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Mister Fisk said:
I have been on several double-blind studies for new drugs (I have cystic fibrosis, so I get to spend a lot of time around doctors and hospitals), and in all of them I was told that their would be a placebo control group (but obviously I wouldn’t know which group I was in).
One of them, which was conducted probably a good 10 years ago was a 12 month study, 6 months on the drug, 6 months on the placebo, with fortnightly interviews/blood tests to see the effects.
The doctors in charge of the study were very upfront and honest with any questions. The paperwork I also had to sign pretty much laid it all out too, what effect the drug was meant to have, the presence of a placebo and so forth.
My experiences with drug trials and doctors in general have all been very positive and very transparent. Any questions I ask (and being a curious fellow, I tend to ask a fair few) have been met with honesty and enthusiasm.
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September 28th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
The Curtains said:
I assume that they would not answer the question “So is this the real one or the placebo I’m getting?” at least, not until the, end of it. I would have assumed it would be something like that. They would tell you of the existance of a placebo group but not which one you’re assigned to. In a double-blind study, the doctors who you interact with wouldn’t even know that.
Did they tell you afterward which one you were in? Or in the case of the 12 month study, I assume they’d assign you to take the placebo in the first or second 6 months randomly?
By the way: good luck with dealing with your condition and everything. I have to admit I’m not very knowledgeable about it.
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September 29th, 2009 at 12:23 am
Awesome post, delicious’ed! Another typo in one of the pictures: “we shouldn’t be a strong a very potent depressent”
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September 29th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Over 100 000 scientists worldwide reject evolution said:
Uh… So we’re in agreement that homeopathy is bull. Well… that’s… good… or … something
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September 29th, 2009 at 1:36 am
drbuzz0 said:
Huh? Is that a new form of thanking someone for pointing out a typo? The “critic acid” guy had an easier time.
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September 29th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Dan Dascalescu said:
No. It was because someone was complimenting the post in general and seemed to also find homeopathy to be a bogus idea. Yet this was coming from someone who is apparently anti-evolution.
I never really know how to deal with people who are helpful on one subject but totally opposed to me on another. It’s like wondering if I’d ever consider it a compliment to be invited to an “astrologers against Greenpeace” rally or be cited on a website called “psychic healers against inflated claims of RF health dangers”
I’m just not sure what to do with that…
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September 29th, 2009 at 2:09 am
drbuzz0 said:
“Apparently” is key. The hyperlinked post also mocks a creationist argument that goes like this: “100k scientists reject evolution, and even though that only represents 5% of the scientists, it means evolution is bogus”.
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September 29th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Gordon said:
No .. I don’t mean ‘using homeopath as ..’ .. I mean using placebo at all. There are cases where only placebo works. And the patient MUST be lied, otherwise placebo would not work.
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September 29th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Dan Dascalescu said:
Sorry. I saw the name and I thought “Oh brother, one of those” I probably should have read it, but the very name was fairly missleading. OOps.
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September 29th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
What a terrible bunch of lies and non understanding this all is! homeopathy is far from stupid and works nothing like it is shown here.
The truth is that there are things we do not know about how it works. Homeopathy most certainly works, but what happens inside each cell science has yet to reveal completely. We have a basic idea and it is nothing like this. Water does not talk to itself. Homeopathy is not directed at receptors or organs in the body. It is directed at the whole body and the whole being. It is a matter of revitalizing the fluids in the body and restoring the balance of forces. The body will then heal itself once this happens. We work with the body.
It is not that the water has knowledge and speaks. The water is empowered because it starts off stagnant and empty like a blank canvis and what we do is introduce special materials to the water and shake it repeatedly to put the water into a state that contains the kind of energy the body needs. The body tells us by its symptoms what kind of energy and fluid it needs and we make the fluid for the body to do good.
Homeopaths are different than alopathic doctors because we do not see our job as healing directly. We are just helpers to the body. The body heals itself but it needs someone to provide it with the fluids to do this. We work with the body to empower it to do that which it is striving to do. We listen to the symptoms and the body tells us what it needs. We use water to convey the vital forces to the body. All living things have energy and that is a big part of homeopathy. When energy becomes lacking we refresh it and then all can return to health.
Please remove this post of ignorance. it makes you look like a fool. Do the right thing and listen to your heart. You may find that some greedy means had caused you to insult homeopathy. Think of the health of others and the good in the world and do the right thing. Do not misinform. Misinforming serves no good.
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September 29th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Bheru Patel you are a fraud and a quack, your explanation is superstitious and unscientific rubbish without a shred to truth or fact.
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September 29th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Bheru Patel, inject yourself with HIV and cure yourself with homeopathy. Drop the bull**** and put your money where your mouth is. Idiot.
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September 29th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Dr.Sid said:
A rational person should not be lied to about their medical care. I can see cases where a non-rational person may be given a placebo to at least shut them up. Even in that case, it bothers me to think that there would be doctors handing out sugar pills (or whatever pills are made of that is inert). They could at least give out a B-12 shot or an asprin or something. At least that way there’s some plausible deniability to it.
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September 30th, 2009 at 12:40 am
drbuzz0 said:
In two of the studies, which were rather short (only a few months) I obviously had no idea if I was on the placebo or not. In the larger 12 month one, I was told up front that it would be a 6 month course of the drug and a 6 month course of the placebo, but wasn’t told in what order. The doctors who I dealt with, and who took the blood tests and so forth also didn’t know if I was on the drug or placebo. Pretty much standard double-blind test.
When I said my dealings with doctors were transparent, I wasn’t referring to the doctors saying “Oh sure, you are on the placebo this month!”, but when dealing with them they have always been completely honest about my treatment, side effects of the medication I am on, why I am on it and so forth. I have never experienced the conspiracy theorists “Big Pharma” spooky doctors who are always withholding cures for money, never treat you like a patient just some symptoms and all those other accusations that get thrown at the medical profession from the loony crowd. They have always been very honest and open.
As a fun fact: It was very easy to pick when I was on the placebo over the drug being tested, as the drug was pretty much the worst tasting thing I have ever had, where as the placebo tasted like sugar.
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September 30th, 2009 at 12:43 am
Q said:
Even irrational people should not be lied to about their medical care. If you lie to them, and just give them a placebo treatment to shut them up and keep them happy, if they ever somehow find out that you lied to them, it will only serve to fuel their irrationality.
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September 30th, 2009 at 12:59 am
The Curtains said:
Hmm. That’s not good. I know this has been known to happen, but they should try to either make the placebo taste equally bad or put the medication in a capsule that is swallowed whole in order to make it difficult to tell which is which.
Poorly implemented placebo pills are a known shortcoming of many studies. If they can’t make the pills the same they should at least both be equally medicine-like so that neither sticks out as being the more likely one to be the medication.
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September 30th, 2009 at 1:02 am
The Curtains said:
The only time it is ethical to lie outright is when the results of the lie will be hilarious. In such cases, the lie usually becomes apparent very quickly anyway.
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September 30th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Dr. Bheru Patel said:
What a brilliant mix of humor and satire!
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September 30th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Tell me something. What’s the number of dilutions that you need to make with the dangerious poison that we have/know of today, to make it unable to damage any life-form “body” in our world? I’m sure everyone knows that amount, if you have done any university chemistry-like classes and you feel like asking the teacher(s). If i’m not wrong, homeopathy goes A LOT beyond that amount of dilution…so, it makes no sense for ME. Teach me if i’m wrong, oh thy great wisdom, please!
I would like you to explain me why placebos also works too, when tested with homeopathy. Because if homeopathy(water) is more expensive then sugar….i can stick with sugar eating for healing purposes and economy saving. We shouldn’t be wasting water with homeopathy, you know water is getting rare nowadays.
“The truth is that there are things we do not know about how it works. “
Thats mainly because it probably doesn’t.
“It is a matter of revitalizing the fluids in the body and restoring the balance of forces.”
This is not Starwars! And everytime we pi or popo, we already do a balance of “forces”.
“The body will then heal itself once this happens.”
Point is, our body does that with or without homeopathy stuff…so, what’s the point on wasting money on something our body already does? If you are really sick, real medicines are sure better.
” The body heals itself but it needs someone to provide it with the fluids to do this.”
I think we do this while drinking water, juices and eating food, don’t we? Don’t see where homeopathy takes place.
“All living things have energy and that is a big part of homeopathy.”
Wrong, that sentence is a big part of physics.
“Please remove this post of ignorance. It makes you look like a fool.[2]” Do the right thing and listen to your brain. You may find that some greedy means had caused you to insult the science.
“Think of the health of others and the good in the world and do the right thing. Do not misinform. Misinforming serves no good.”[2]
P.S: Do you know ANYTHING about the avogadro constant? you should, since you are a “doctor”. Take a read on it again and do the math, then ask yourself what’s the meaning of the numbers you will find out.
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September 30th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Whatever said:
That would depend on the poison and also how you define “number of dilutions” if you’re talking about he number of iterations of diluting it on a 1:100 ratio or a 1:10 or if you’re talking about the ratio itself.
As far as I know, there are no substances which are acutely toxic if you ingest a single molecule. Botulism is one of the highest in terms of chemical toxicity. It can be deadly in microgram quantities, although it depends on the path of absorption. It would depend on the quantity, but as long as the final dosage was under the threshold of toxicity by a safe amount, it would be okay.
There are some radioactive substances which are so radioactive they can be toxic at less than microgram quantities, but that’s a special case because they are by their very nature very short lived. Something like Technetium-99m has a half-life of technetium-99m is just about six hours. It’s theoretically possible that a tiny amount could kill you, but the thing about the thing about such short lived isotopes is that they decay so quickly that they’re difficult to ever accumulate in quantities great enough to be deadly. Normally it’s used in picogram amounts.
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October 1st, 2009 at 12:48 am
Ralph said:
I don’t know about that. Any time there is something attacking homeopathy and exposing what it is, it does not take long for someone to come spout that crap. Often they are Indian, as India seems to be where Homeopathy is well established and has the most to lose. From the sound of his name, I’d bet that this “doctor” is probably Indian.
Not to be prejudiced or anything, you understand, but in India, homeopaths get away with using the title of “doctor” and crap like that.
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October 1st, 2009 at 12:57 am
Whatever said:
Well, that’s a little bit of a loaded question. It depends on the poison, since none are really harmful if there are only a few molecules, although I suppose if you say “damage to any life form” then there would have to be zero molecules, since even a single molecule could cause cellular damage which would be bad for a single-cell organism.
If I get this right, you’re invoking Avogardo’s constant, which is basically the number of molecules in a mole, or as originally defined, the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon-12. This is sometimes applied incorrectly when talking about homeopathy. Avogardo’s number applies to a single mole of a substance, so if your quantity is not a mole, you have to multiply it accordingly.
For the sake of argument, lets say we have one mole of water. Diluting a substance into it, you would eventually hit the point where the dilution was one over Avogardo’s number. At this point, assuming the dilution is perfectly distributed, there is one single molecule in your sample. Once you go past this you then have a probability of less than 50% that there is a single molecule. There *might* be a molecule left. Actually, there *might* be more than one even, but the probability goes down.
It’s a little bit like half-life. If you have a large sample of unstable atoms, they are divided in half each half-life cycle, but then you get down to just a handful of atoms and it becomes less constant because now you’re really just talking about probability. Like a tritium atom, it might be here after 12.3 years or it might have turned into helium-3. There’s a 50/50 chance of either. So, this one given atom might last 12.3 years or 50 years or five minutes. You can’t tell.
But…
Once you get past the point of Avogado’s number, then with each dilution the probability that a single molecule exists in a single mole of the finished substance decreases exponentially. A few dilutions more and the probability is effectively null.
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October 1st, 2009 at 7:21 am
Chem Geek Gregor said:
My point was that I think that response was totally made up and there is no actual Dr. Patel. It would be almost (but not quite) impossible for a doctor to be that clueless and uneducated.
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October 2nd, 2009 at 4:45 am
Ralph said:
In India, it is common for homeopaths to have the title of doctor even if they’ve never attended a day of legitimate medical training in their life.
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October 2nd, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Isn’t one of the reasons why homeopathy became widespread the fact that it emerged at a time when most “mainstream” medicines were worse than useless (so that homeopathic remedies — which at least weren’t actually dangerous — looked good by comparison)?
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October 3rd, 2009 at 10:01 pm
George Carty said:
Yeah I’ve heard that, but at best that argument is over 100 years obsolete.
Medicine circa 1800 was hit or miss. There were certainly some things that medicine was starting to understand and begin to provide treatment for that was better than nothing. There were also some things that medicine was really causing more harm than good on. But medicine progresses and it got better and still continues to get better. Homeopathy doesn’t.
One big thing that really changed everything was germ theory. Medicine was really in the dark when they didn’t even realize that it was a good idea to clean your surgical instruments of the last patients blood before using them. That all started to come together in the 1880’s.
The thing about Homeopathy is that it was just one of the many ideas that was not evidence-based and ranged from semi-useful to harmful before evidence based medicine really took over. Germ theory was only one aspect of what became an age of medical enlightenment. The late 1800’s saw the end of many practices because they were not supported by evidence. Why did homeopathy survive? Perhaps because it wasn’t quite as harmful directly?
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October 3rd, 2009 at 10:08 pm
One of the best put downs of homeopathy to date:
Homeopathy & Nutritionists vs Real Science!
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October 8th, 2009 at 5:54 am
Great post, drbuzz0, but it does contain a misconception, albeit one that homoeopaths themselves do not seem to make any effort to dispel:
“Notice, however, that the water has only remembered the properties of the substance added, but has not actually started to oppose the effects it has in the body” (my emphasis).
It isn’t actually a claim of homoeopathy that the dilute remedies produce opposite effects to the undiluted substances. This is a popular misconception, and one which homoeopaths make no effort to dispel (see, for example homoeopaths invoking hormesis) because the reality is even sillier.
Homoeopaths believe that symptoms are part of the body’s healing process (something to do with the mythical “vital force”). Homoeopathy therefore involves administering remedies which will intensify the symptoms and thus stimulate healing. Hence “aggravations” (i.e. worsening of the symptoms) is seen by homoeopaths as a sign that they have chosen the correct remedy.
Hahnemann at first used material doses of substances to treat patients, having also “proved” (i.e. determined what symptoms they caused) the remedies using material doses. However, he found that this had a regrettable tendency to poison the patients, or as a recent book about homoeopathic pharmacy puts it, cause “aggravations that, in some cases, amounted to dangerous toxic reactions” (see Kayne SB (2006) Homeopathic pharmacy: theory and practice, Elsevier Health Sciences, p.52). Hahnemann therefore decided to dilute the remedies in the belief that this would reduce the toxic effects while somehow preserving the healing properties by the magic shaking.
By the 5th edition of the Organon Hahnemann was prescribing carrying out “provings” using 30C remedies in the belief that this dilution would exhibit the full power of the remedy (see aphorism 128), and pretty much all provings nowadays are carried out using remedies so dilute that they no longer contain any of the active ingredient (see Kayne, p. 52). The remedies are given to healthy volunteers, who then record all their feelings and symptoms over a period of days to weeks, and then a homoeopath (who is aware what remedy they have been given) decides which symptoms or feelings are characteristic of the remedy. The remedies are then used to treat patients reporting the same symptoms that they are alleged to cause. the idea that the remedies cause the opposite effect is a myth.
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