Ilango Arasiyal

ஹோமியோபதி! ஹோமியோபதி!
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopathy.shtml#top
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Homeopathy was pioneered over 200 years ago. Practitioners and patients are convinced it has the power to heal. Today, some of the most famous and influential people in the world, including pop stars, politicians, footballers and even Prince Charles, all use homeopathic remedies. Yet according to traditional science, they are wasting their money.

"Unusual claims require unusually good proof"

James Randi

The Challenge

Sceptic James Randi is so convinced that homeopathy will not work, that he has offered $1m to anyone who can provide convincing evidence of its effects. For the first time in the programme's history, Horizon conducts its own scientific experiment, to try and win his money. If they succeed, they will not only be $1m richer - they will also force scientists to rethink some of their fundamental beliefs.

Homeopathy and conventional science

The basic principle of homeopathy is that like cures like: that an ailment can be cured by small quantities of substances which produce the same symptoms. For example, it is believed that onions, which produce streaming, itchy eyes, can be used to relieve the symptoms of hay fever.

However, many of the ingredients of homeopathic cures are poisonous if taken in large enough quantities. So homeopaths dilute the substances they are using in water or alcohol. This is where scientists become sceptical - because homeopathic solutions are diluted so many times they are unlikely to contain any of the original ingredients at all.

Yet many of the people who take homeopathic medicines are convinced that they work. Has science missed something, or could there be a more conventional explanation?

The Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is a well-documented medical phenomenon. Often, a patient taking pills will feel better, regardless of what the pills contain, simply because they believe the pills will work. Doctors studying the placebo effect have noticed that large pills work better than small pills, and that coloured pills work better than white ones.

Could the beneficial effects of homeopathy be entirely due to the placebo effect? If so, then homeopathy ought not to work on babies or animals, who have no knowledge that they are taking a medicine. Yet many people are convinced that it does.

Can science prove that homeopathy works?

In 1988, Jacques Benveniste was studying how allergies affected the body. He focussed on a type of blood cell known as a basophil, which activates when it comes into contact with a substance you're allergic to.

As part of his research, Benveniste experimented with very dilute solutions. To his surprise, his research showed that even when the allergic substance was diluted down to homeopathic quantities, it could still trigger a reaction in the basophils. Was this the scientific proof that homeopathic medicines could have a measurable effect on the body?

The memory of water

In an attempt to explain his results, Benveniste suggested a startling new theory. He proposed that water had the power to 'remember' substances that had been dissolved in it. This startling new idea would force scientists to rethink many fundamental ideas about how liquids behave.

Unsurprisingly, the scientific community greeted this idea with scepticism. The then editor of Nature, Sir John Maddox, agreed to publish Benveniste's paper - but on one condition. Benveniste must open his laboratory to a team of independent referees, who would evaluate his techniques.

"Scientists are human beings. Like anyone else, they can fool themselves"

James Randi

Enter James Randi

When Maddox named his team, he took everyone by surprise. Included on the team was a man who was not a professional scientist: magician and paranormal investigator James Randi.

Randi and the team watched Benveniste's team repeat the experiment. They went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that none of the scientists involved knew which samples were the homeopathic solutions, and which ones were the controls - even taping the sample codes to the ceiling for the duration of the experiment. This time, Benveniste's results were inconclusive, and the scientific community remained unconvinced by Benveniste's memory of water theory.

Homeopathy undergoes more tests

Since the Benveniste case, more scientists have claimed to see measurable effects of homeopathic medicines. In one of the most convincing tests to date, Dr. David Reilly conducted clinical trials on patients suffering from hay fever. Using hundreds of patients, Reilly was able to show a noticeable improvement in patients taking a homeopathic remedy over those in the control group. Tests on different allergies produced similar results. Yet the scientific community called these results into question because they could not explain how the homeopathic medicines could have worked.

Then Professor Madeleine Ennis attended a conference in which a French researcher claimed to be able to show that water had a memory. Ennis was unimpressed - so the researcher challenged her to try the experiment for herself. When she did so, she was astonished to find that her results agreed.

Horizon takes up the challenge

Although many researchers now offered proof that the effects of homeopathy can be measured, none have yet applied for James Randi's million dollar prize. For the first time in the programme's history, Horizon decided to conduct their own scientific experiment.

The programme gathered a team of scientists from among the most respected institutes in the country. The Vice-President of the Royal Society, Professor John Enderby oversaw the experiment, and James Randi flew in from the United States to watch.

As with Benveniste's original experiment, Randi insisted that strict precautions be taken to ensure that none of the experimenters knew whether they were dealing with homeopathic solutions, or with pure water Two independent scientists performed tests to see whether their samples produced a biological effect. Only when the experiment was over was it revealed which samples were real.

To Randi's relief, the experiment was a total failure. The scientists were no better at deciding which samples were homeopathic than pure chance would have been.

Read more questions and answers about homeopathy.

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Second article on homeopathy 

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/homeopathy-and-nanoparticles/

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I had never heard of Dr. Shantaram Kane, a chemical engineer in Mumbai, India. I don’t know how he heard of me, but he apparently knows I am critical of homeopathy. He e-mailed me out of the blue to tell me about a study he had published in 2010 in the journal Homeopathy: “Extreme homeopathic dilutions retain starting materials: A nanoparticulate perspective.” The full text is available online here.  It was lauded in an accompanying editorial.  Incredibly, it is an uncontrolled study.

Kane recognizes that a major objection to homeopathy is that, at high potencies, not a single molecule of the starting material is present. He says his study found nanoparticles of the parent metal in 200C dilutions of metal-based remedies. He says his findings represent a paradigm shift. In other words, there really is something there when we assumed there wasn’t.

The Study

They purchased samples of 6 homeopathic medications from market sources.  The labels said they contained either 30C or 200C dilutions of gold, copper, tin, zinc, silver, or platinum. They analyzed these medications and found nanoparticles of the corresponding metals. They identified them with TEM (Transmission Electron Microscopy), SAED (Selected Area Electron Diffraction), and ICP-AES (inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrophotometry). I don’t understand the technology, and the published pictures just look like meaningless blobs to me, but for the purposes of this discussion I’ll accept that they reliably identified the presence of the metallic elements.

The Speculation

How to explain the presence of nanoparticles?  They speculate:

1. Shearing forces could have produced them during the manufacturing process, both from mechanized lactose triturations and human-powered succussion.
2. Acoustic cavitation during the manual succussion process could have produced localized bubbles with temperatures high enough to melt metal particles.
3. The nanoparticle-nanobubble complex rises to the surface and forms a monolayer, and it is this top 1% that is collected and used for the next step in the dilutions.

Problems

• They didn’t really know what they were studying. They didn’t verify that the contents of the products they purchased actually conformed to the labels or were prepared by the methods they speculate about.
• They didn’t use any controls. Ideally, they would have used two kinds of control samples: one prepared by the same dilution methods but without any starting material, and one prepared with the same starting material but without succussion. And maybe another homeopathic remedy not based on metals.
• They didn’t rule out contamination of the original products during the manufacturing process or subsequently from something in their lab (airborne contaminants, improperly washed equipment, etc.).

Biggest Problem

Even if nanoparticles are found in homeopathic remedies, the amount is too tiny to expect any effect on human physiology, and the remedies have not been shown to have any therapeutic effect.

He Offers to Answer Any Question

In his e-mail, Dr. Kane said:

I will be deligted to answer any question.i do hope you forward this finding to both the eblievers and sceptics. [sic]

I did have some questions, and I asked them in an e-mail:

1. Why no controls? Without them, can you be sure that there was not some contamination in the manufacturing process that would give the same findings for other homeopathic remedies or that some unrecognized contamination during your experimental preparation might give the same finding for non-homeopathic control samples?
2. How do the amounts you detected compare to the trace presence of other contaminants, such as minute particles suspended in the air that might fall in?
3. Even if your findings are replicated in other labs, what would that have to do with the claims of homeopathy to affect human health?

His Offer Retracted

It seems he had lied: he was not delighted to answer my questions. In fact, he flat out refused, saying 

Yur response is typical of a sceptic who has a totally closed mind and refuses to see any new information. I have coe across many such and in my experience, it is best to leave them alone. [sic]

His attitude says it all. This is not the response of a scientist.

Another Opinion

I asked Dr. Joe Schwarcz,  McGill chemistry professor and science popularizer, to review the paper. He said:

It certainly doesn’t prove that homeopathy works…the question is …does it prove anything?  Frankly I don’t believe the data.  They found some sort of experimental artifact…  

Conclusion

This is just another pathetic effort to validate homeopathy by showing the remedies are more than water, similar to the recent effort by Luc Montagnier. Such studies never seem to get confirmed in other labs or to build towards any coherent body of knowledge. Publishing an uncontrolled study like this says a lot about the editorial and peer-review standards of the journal. Anyway, whatever anomalies proponents might discover in homeopathic remedies, that’s a far cry from establishing that homeopathy has any clinical effects

Harriet Hall, MD also known as The SkepDoc, is a retired family physician who writes about pseudoscience and questionable medical practices. She received her BA and MD from the University of Washington, did her internship in the Air Force (the second female ever to do so),  and was the first female graduate of the Air Force family practice residency at Eglin Air Force Base. During a long career as an Air Force physician, she held various positions from flight surgeon to DBMS (Director of Base Medical Services) and did everything from delivering babies to taking the controls of a B-52. She retired with the rank of Colonel.  In 2008 she published her memoirs, Women Aren't Supposed to Fly.