In Defense of Homeopathy [denialism blog]

Mark Hoofnagle is a MD/PhD Candidate in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics at the University of Virginia. via ScienceBlogs

[Homeopathy for Health]

Why do the rich doctors and pharm companies feel so threatened by homeopathy, it's not like they're not filthy rich already!
http://www.homeopathicremediesfor.com

[Nuggin]

Homeopathy for Health wrote:

Why do the rich doctors and pharm companies feel so threatened by homeopathy, it's not like they're not filthy rich already!
http://www.homeopathicremediesfor.com

They aren't threatened by it. They just don't want their patients to get suckered by conmen.

Homeopathy is WATER. ONLY water. JUST water. NOTHING BUT water.

Forget the fact that it fails all clinic trials.
Forget the fact that it's "sympathetic magic".
Forget the fact that that there's NO reasonable mechanism by which "like cures like."

Let's just focus on the fact that NO HOMEOPATHY can correctly sort out an unlabeled vial of their "medicine" from an unlabeled vial of pure water.

Do you get that? Given the freedom to run ANY test they like with ANY machine they like - they STILL can't figure out which is "medicine" and which is "water".

Heaven forbid you ask them to sort 5 different "cures" from one another.

Do the math! When you dilute something to 30C, you're not left with ANY of the source material.

If you had ONE DROP of dye and diluted it in the ENTIRE pacific ocean, that would be ONLY 12C!

100 Pacific Oceans? 13C!
10,000 Pacific Oceans? 14c!
1,000,000 Pacfic Oceans? 15C!

They are diluting to 30C!

You are talking about more water than exists in the entire milkway galaxy (and likely several other galaxies combined).

[Homeopathy for Health]

I dont think so, they want their patients to pay an arm and a leg and not try anything else, thats whats really happening, greed. Just make sure you dont kill anyone with your "correct" medicine!

[Nuggin]

Homeopathy for Health wrote:

I dont think so, they want their patients to pay an arm and a leg and not try anything else, thats whats really happening, greed. Just make sure you dont kill anyone with your "correct" medicine!

Who wants patients to pay? The homeopaths! They are selling people WATER for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.

And they KNOW that the water CAN NOT help. Ever.

That's criminal!

[Zeria]

Nuggin wrote:

<quoted text>
Homeopathy is WATER. ONLY water. JUST water. NOTHING BUT water.

Homeopathically diluted substances are prepared from the original substance in a series of dilution steps. According to Avogadro's law, for dilutions above about 12C, there is little chance of a single molucule of the original substance being present in the final product.

Nuggin wrote:

Forget the fact that it fails all clinic trials.

Many trials have produced results that support the effectiveness of Homeopathy, just as many have produced results that show no effect.
One ongoing issue is that according to Classical Homeopathy, remedies should be prescribed on an individualised basis according to all the symptomology shown by the patient, however this is rarely the case in clinical trials, which usually group test cases according to a particular disease label, e.g. lung cancer, asthma etc.

Nuggin wrote:

Forget the fact that it's "sympathetic magic".
Forget the fact that that there's NO reasonable mechanism by which "like cures like."

"Like cures like" is not a precept of Homeopathic ideology. The correct form is "drug selection by like symptoms". In other words, the symptoms that a particular drug produces are used as guidelines to gauge the sphere of influence of that drug.

Once a drug has been identified as having action in a particular area, it can be considered as a possible theraputic agent for diseases of this area.

This is seen many times in conventional medicine - for example the cardiac glycosides present in digitalis are used as theraputic agent in heart disease, but can bring down large animals in high enough concentrations (see the Wikipedia entry for "Ouabain"). Another example is ethanol use for methanol toxicity - they may both produce toxic effects that share similarities, however only ethanol is similar enough in structure to methanol to act as an antidote to potential blindness caused by methanol consumption.

Nuggin wrote:

Let's just focus on the fact that NO HOMEOPATHY can correctly sort out an unlabeled vial of their "medicine" from an unlabeled vial of pure water.

To date, there has been no verifiable way to distinguish homeopathic remedies from each other by analysis. This is consistent with the low levels of original substances in the products.

However, Homeopaths do not take issue with the fact that the remedies are extremely high dilutions. The action of the remedy is thought to come about through the specific method of preparation. This involves agitation of the remedy solution at each step of dilution.

This is believed to create new properties in the solution that mimic only some of the properties of the original substance. For this to happen, something unusual must happen during the agitation of the solution. There is currently no explanation about what this might be, however basic research on the very small-scale properties of liquids continues, such as the hydrogen bond lattice in water, so it's not entirely inconceivable that additional physical properties may be found in the future. Berkeley lab has an interesting article about water research here,

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/s...

[Nuggin]

Zeria wrote:

...
This is believed to create new properties in the solution that mimic only some of the properties of the original substance. For this to happen, something unusual must happen during the agitation of the solution. There is currently no explanation about what this might be, however basic research on the very small-scale properties of liquids continues, such as the hydrogen bond lattice in water, so it's not entirely inconceivable that additional physical properties may be found in the future. Berkeley lab has an interesting article about water research here,
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/s...

If the claim is that the water is changed by contact with another substance, then no homeopathic solution should be viable do to the fact that ALL water on Earth has been exposed to COUNTLESS chemicals at FAR greater quantities than 12C.

Hell, the very processes used to "purify" the water before use in Homeopathy would THEMSELVES impart some magical manipulation on the water.

If you prepare water in a glass beaker with a iodine solution to 12C, you are exposing WAY more water to levels of glass than you are to levels of iodine.

[Dr_Nancy_Malik]

Homeopathy is the medicine of the 21st century

[Nuggin]

Dr_Nancy_Malik wrote:

Homeopathy is the medicine of the 21st century

Homeopathy is 16th century sympathetic magic.

For a homeopathic solution to contain one molecule of the original medicinal substance if would have to be held in a container 30 billion times the size of the Earth.

If you inject 0 molecules of something, what effect does it have on your body?