The recent (and very entertaining) video on the main page, lampooning homeopathy, prompted me to ask something I've been wondering about for quite some time.

Namely, just what is the rationale behind homeopathy, and more specifically homeopathy in regards to water? From what I've gleaned from mainstream media and blogs such as this one, the idea is that if you take some substance and dilute it in water, the water will 'remember' the properties of the substance. Then if you take the 'memorized' water and continually dilute it, it will always retain the memory of the full-strength substance, and you can use that super-diluted mixture exactly as you would the full strength mixture.

This sounds so utterly crazy that my first question is: am I misinterpreting the idea here? Exactly what is it that homeopaths are claiming in re dilution of substances in water?

My second question (assuming the assumptions in my first question were at least somewhat close to the mark) is--so what? Why not simply use the original full-strength substance rather than diluting it to get the equivalent 'memorized' full strength substance? I realize the video on the main page was meant as satire, but at one point it was suggested that a one in ten-million dilution would be preferable to a one in one-million dilution. Do homeopaths actually claim that a substance becomes more effective the more it's diluted?

My last question--and this is the big one, the reason I made this post in the first place: what is the reasoning behind all of this? Why would water memorize substances it dilutes? Why would diluting a substance make it more effective? Even if supporters of homeopathy are completely off-base on their claims, I assume they must have some sort of rationale for making those claims. What are they?

Homeopathy is based on a theory of disease in which illness is caused by imbalance's in the body's vital force. Agents are supposed to have their own influences on this life force, and that influential power can be imparted on a diluent such as water or lactose. The actual process that imparts it is the shaking (called 'dynamization'), and Hahnemann held that physicians should be very careful about that - if a vial is kept in one's pocket, then the constant shaking from just walking could make the preparation dangerously potent.

So it's the shaking that makes it strong. . . the purpose of dilution, on the other hand, is primarily to remove any influences that might cause harmful side effects. The more you dilute the remedy, the less risk there is of side effects or toxic reactions. (Granted, this is true.) The healing power, however, should remain the same as long as you've been shaking it.

As to the root question, "Why?", I'm not sure that there's a satisfactory answer to that. Homeopathy is an idea that is firmly rooted in magical thinking, and in essence the supposed mechanism behind it is magic.

As far as I can make out, there is no reasoning other than wishful thinking. There is a general conception that chemicals are bad for you. (As an aside, my ex-wife was convinced of this, and knew that sodium chloride was dangerous. Salt, however, was natural, therefore good for you.) Given that this is obviously true, there is then the spectacular logical conclusion that the absence of chemicals must be good for you. Even if this is not the rational which homeopaths use, I suspect this is why others believe in it.

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γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Diluting it doesn't just keep it at the same strenght as undiluted. The entire idea is that the more you dilute it, the stronger it is.

And yes, it is as stupid as it sounds. and all bollox

At least according to classical homeopathy, the dilution doesn't make it stronger. It's actually supposed to weaken the primary effects. The underlying principle of homeopathy is that like cures like, but at strong concentrations the agent might exacerbate the symptoms in the short term, thereby making the cure worse than the disease.

So the agent is serially diluted in order to get rid of those effects*, meanwhile the curative aspects of the drug are somehow selectively imbued on the diluent through the dynamization process, and it's the shaking that is supposed to improve the remedy's curative aspects. Hahnemann apparently believed that the symptoms that an agent causes at higher concentration were related to its curative aspects, but were somehow separate so that you could isolate and magnify the one while eliminating the other through the process of dilution and succussion.

Homeopaths refer to more dilute remedies as being more potent, but it's important to keep in mind that 100C doesn't just mean "1 part mother tincture to 100¹⁰⁰ parts diluent" to a homeopath. It means 100 serial repetitions of a process that includes both 1:100 dilution and ten whacks against the striking board. It's the latter part of the process that imbues the potency, not the former.

* To paraphrase James Randi: Step 1: Find out what the pharamacological effects of an agent are. Step 2: Give the patient something that causes the symptoms they're already experiencing. Step 3: Wait, no! Don't do that!

And to answer the second half of the question in the thread title (why should it work?): It shouldn't. So it doesn't.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

Yeah, I think the idea is supposed to be something like vaccination. And if it's all a complicated placebo effect, some homeopathists would probably say, "Well, it works". Some remedies on the apogee of holsitic care are truly strange, eg, moonlight-activated medicines and such.

Thanks for the replies here. I think I have a little better understanding about questions one and two now, though of course the answers given just raise more questions. (Why would 'dynamization' (aka 'shaking it up') aid the process? Would other means of adding energy to the mixture such as 'heating it up' (thermonization?) be effective? Have any controlled experiments actually been performed to test either of these possibilities? And how in the world could the processes of dynamization and dilution somehow distinguish between toxic elements (eliminate through dilution) and beneficial elements (retain through dynamization)?

I won't ask for any answers to these new questions since the answers to the final question have pretty much stuck a fork in this subject as far as I'm concerned. I was actually a little surprised here--I'd expected a bit of technobabble that basically boiled down to 'it works magically!'
Do homeopath supporters really have nothing better to offer than 'dynamization'? I'm perplexed by the idea that any hospital would give any credence to this idea.

You are not alone.

Well, considering that no controlled experiment to date has succeeded in finding any difference between a homeopathic preparation and ordinary water, I'm going to guess that it's not a question anyone has spent much time on. It seems safe to assume that dynamized water would be precisely as effective as thermonized water - that is to say, excellent for the treatment of symptoms associated with thirst, but not much else.

Accredited hospitals in North America don't, as far as I know. My ex went to the hospital for major surgery, but before they could begin, her blood clotted every line, including the wide tubes, even clotting within the saline bags. The doctor (Australian, I believe), who wrote a well-known book on similar surgeries and is one of the most respected in the US, said that he had never encountered that before. She had been taking a relatively large dosage of the popular homeopathic arnica montana, and, although nothing official was said, with nothing else to go on, it was clear that that was thought likely to be the culprit. Of course, herbal medications can interact with standard medications, and apparently homeopathics are also thought to be liable for interactions. I'll bet doctors are upset they are expected to learn about possible interactions with such esoteric treatments. Well, her homeopathist (a good friend of ours with an MPH) did not seem very responsive when I called to let her know about the problem. I spoke to the homeopathist again later that day, and she basically said, "Oh yeah, they always blame the homeopathics". Maybe she suspected its ineffectiveness. During the entire course of events, I really didn't know what to think; I didn't really know whether it was possible that the homeopathic was having an effect. If anything, arnica montana is said to prevent coagulation. But, I thought, maybe if she was taking it for a while and then stopped, her body was overcompensating to regain homeostasis. She was under anaesthetic and in no condition to offer advice; we weren't even certain what dosages she had been taking, not to mention anything about preparation methods. Long-winded story short, weeks later the patient was tested again, and her blood was perfect. Now not thought by her and myself to be homeopathic-related.

She is basically protesting that the medical community wields a double-edged sword-- they claim homeopathics are just placebos, but blame them whenever there's a problem. However, a similar double-edged sword is what really skewers homeopathy: the homeopathics claim that their medicines are so dilute they couldn't do any harm, but of course something that could never harm could also never help. They can't have it both ways-- either the medicines do something, or they do nothing. If the former, they need to be studied carefully and under controlled conditions (and they are not) because anything that does something, and you don't know what that is that they do, could do harm. If they do nothing, well....

I have to say, though, that a true homeopathic remedy could not have any negative effect on a person's health any more than it would have a positive one.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

To play devil's advocate, I think it's important to remember that there is a wide range of homeopathics. There are trace elements in the body that have been well implicated in human health for various reasons: selenium, chromium, possibly arsenic, etc. Depending on who you ask, tungsten at only 1 nL may be essential. While such elements are not normally missing, who knows in a particular case? Arsenic is toxic, but a little isn't. In the case of a possible need, "like" might cure "like" - "toxin" might cure immunodeficiency. Or it might kill off bacteria in the gastrointestinal system. Johannes Agricola did give arsenic, as did Hahnemann. They may have been onto a profound biochemical truth, at least in part, in an age before biochemicals had been analyzed.

It's also possible that, in Hahnemann's day, placebo was better than whatever else patients may have been given.

Linus Pauling believed dietary minerals were at the root of most illness. Do Hahnemann's research notions apply to today's biochemical medical world? Maybe best to make sure we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Not to mention that some homeopathic remedies do have substances in them, but are not required to pass any type of testing required by the FDA. Here's one cold remedy that was recently taken off the market.

A quote from the article:

I find it frightening that the homeopaths and woo followers will decry the evil pharmaceutical industry, but blindly ingest anything that the woo doctors push on them. Not tot mention the amount of money there is in woo medicine.

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"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." - G'Kar

Why frightening? I think Darwin would approve.

Thanks for that. I needed a good laugh.

And yet, the complimentary/alternative medicine industry, with billions of dollars of products sold and remedies given, have yet to produce one solid test or clinical trial that proves that their products actually work. They can afford to run the tests/trials to prove they work. But they don't have to. And they never will, because if they did, the complimentary/alternative industry would have nothing to show for it. That's why alot of scientists are also asking the government to shut down NCCAM. After 20 years of government support, they have not had one test or trial that has shown any success.

Also, being free from the evils of having to show the FDA any information about their products, they can sell whatever they want. That just allows the woo-doctors to make boatloads of cash with little or no fear of government intervention/reprisal.

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"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." - G'Kar

Okay, let's ignore the purveyors and the current industry for the moment. The OP requested any evidence. This would be the interesting idea I might see being salvagable for scrutiny, and I am just the right person to dredge it up, as I have no clear opinion or interest and next-to-no-knowledge of human biochemistry:

A chemical element or compound that in higher quantity causes an affliction is more likely in small quantity to be part of the compound that produces the health of the system so afflicted, than one that does not cause so much harm in higher quantity.

I have no idea whether there is any truth at all to that statement. This is more than simply stating how vaccines might work to produce immune effects. I am trying to find out in an experimentally verifiable way if the biological elements that cause harm are in general the same ones that in trace amounts cause health - and locking these within a particular system.

[addition:]

Come to think of it, there needs to be some relative probability in there; I mean, oxygen is in everything, so it has a higher probability of showing up in a healthy system. But then, maybe it shows up more in the toxin. Okay, I think it's bedtime - whew.

These are not homeopathic by the definition of the term. Oddly, some of them are getting called homeopathic, which is why I was so surprised by the Zicam thing--if it's homeopathic, it can't be having a negative effect! In fact, the issue is that the proper word, "naturopathic," is not being used. "Homeopathy" has a very specific definition involving the aforementioned dilution, shaking, and "like-cures-like." If it doesn't have those three aspects, it's not truly homeopathic.

So okay. Let us, instead, contemplate naturopathy, shall we? There is some evidence that some herbal remedies do actually benefit certain people. However, the drug interactions with other things are not necessarily reliably known. The industry, being unregulated, can put essentially any part of the plant and essentially any strength in their pills and not have it be a problem; this means that, even if you're taking something that has been shown by clinical evidence to be beneficial to your condition, the nature of the supplements industry means it's not doing you as much good as it ought. Vexing, isn't it?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

It's homeopathic to the extent that it's recognized by the FDA as homeopathic for regulatory purposes, that zinc gluconate is listed in the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States, and it's dosage level and manufacture are in accordance with the existing standards governing homeopathy.

There's not really any rule in homeopathy that remedies must be used at extreme dilutions - it's generally preferred but not required. Sometimes even mother tincture (i.e., 0X potency) is administered.

And what is the problem with shaking ? No curative powere ??? Maybe not.

I, for one, feel cured of nothing by that picture!

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I have a friend who buys into pretty much anything that's woowoo. She's into homeopathy, but it's tablets that she takes.

Does anyone know how that relates to the water thing?

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

Usually the pills are made of lactose, which is the other traditional homeopathic diluent.

I've always wanted to do the "take an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills and proceed to not fall alseep" demonstration, but unfortunately I'm horrendously lactose intolerant so I doubt it would be a wise idea.

Thanks for the reply, nauthiz. Are there any known effects of lactose - other than the obvious ones where people like your good self are concerned?

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

And this is the core problem with homeopathy. Once you relax the requirement that a medicine must actually have a demonstrable benefit, established in controlled trials rather than word-of-mouth anecdotes, you really have no way to draw the line anywhere. How does someone who cannot point to any evidence that homeopathy works, other than "it seems to work for me", reject someone else's cure, no matter how preposterous, if they say it seems to work for them? Once you have parted company with critical thinking, you have to accept everything, you have lost all basis for rejecting anything. So homeopaths are forced to give lip service to every imaginable cure that anyone uses anywhere. That's what alternative medicine actually means: everything that is not actual medicine.

You have got to be kidding. Nothing ? Not even boredom ? Or ...

That picture would pep up my grandpa.

OK. If shaking won't do the trick, and you want full-strength chemistry, then clearly homeopathy is not for you.

I don't believe that's prescribed for women!

What about your grandma?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

That would depend on grandpa's specific reaction.