this came up last night. i’m not interested in whether it works or not, it still doesn’t work.
it’s to do with the economic imperative.
homeopathy depends on pills which contain a memory of a particular substance. (think one drop of something in a large swimming pool). it is indeed unlikely that there is a single molecule of that substance in the pill that you are taking. but that’s okay if you you happen to believe that water can retain a memory. indeed, for homeopathy the weaker the solution, the stronger the effect.
but all this does matter if you consider the economic imperative.
when you buy your pills at the homeopathic chemist you trust that the pills have been through some elaborate process in which some substance has been so diluted that no discernable trace remains. yes, the pills could be complete blanks. you buy five different bottles of pills, they’re identical. could be. how would you know?
the economic imperative suggests to me that the pills are unlikely to be what you think they are. it just makes no economic sense. someone could make more money by reducing the work it has to do to fill those bottles, and no test could prove that all was not what it seemed. someone could, therefore someone does.
perhaps you lack faith brother, and faith heals
Comment by imo — February 15, 2005 @ 7:34 am
13 things that do not make sense
19 March 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Michael Brooks
4 Belfast homeopathy results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this “mother tincture” in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. “We are,” Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
Comment by imo — March 22, 2005 @ 1:08 pm