IS HOMEOPATHY ABSURD ? - homeopathy360

IS HOMEOPATHY ABSURD ?

HOMEOPATHY! IT”S PATEINLY ABSURD.

This is such a common medical/ scientific exclamation

SO WHY WON”T IT TO GO AWAY?

This is my humble submission

Lets understand the scientific/ medical view
If you know the weight of a sample of some chemical – let’s say carbon – the basics of high school chemistry tell you how many atoms you have in your sample. A gram of Carbon, for instance, contains  5 X1022 atoms. That sounds like a lot – and it is: it’s followed by twenty-two zeroes.
In a 30CH homoeopathic dilution, however, there’s not a lot left; if you take fifteen drops of liquid, you‘ll have no more than one ten-millionth of an atom. And since you can’t spilt the carbon atom up (at least, not this way), it’s safe to say you’ve got no carbon in there.
In standard practice, medicinal effects come through interaction with the body’s biochemistry, which means you need molecules of the remedy to be present in the body. With homeopathy, there’s nothing, no molecule except alcohol and water. By any law known to science, the remedy cannot interact with biochemistry of your body in any meaningful way. The obvious conclusion is that if a homeopathy remedy has an effect, it can be no better than placebo.
Sameul Hahnemann, the founding father of homeopathy, knew this 200 years ago, Lets see what he opines in his magnum opus The Organon,  footnote Aphorism 10:
Every special medicinal substance alter the well-being wholly without communication of material parts of the medicinal substances that is it acts dynamically. Far more healing energy is expressed in a case in point by the smallest dose of the best dynamized medicines, in which there can be, according to calculation, only so little of material substance that its minuteness cannot be thought and conceived by the best arithmetical mind, that by large doses of the same medicine in substance.
        The smallest dose can therefore contain almost entirely only the pure, freely-developed, conceptual medicinal energy, and brings about only dynamically such great effects as can never be reached by the crude medicinal substance itself taken in large doses.
        It is not in the corporeal atoms of these highly dynamized medicines, nor their physical or mathematical surfaces (with which the higher energies of the dynamized medicines are being interpted but vainly as still sufficiently material) that the medicinal energy is found.
        More likely, there lies invisible in the moistened globule or in its solution, an unveiled, liberated, specific, medicinal force contained in the medicinal substance which acts dynamically by contact with the living animal fibre upon the whole organism (without communicating to it anything material however highly attenuated) and acts more strongly the more free and more immaterial the energy has become through the dynamization.
HOMOEOPATHY IS PLACEBO
The first scientific counter to this point of view came from the laboratory of French immunologist Jacques Benveniste. In 1988 Benveniste convinced the journal Nature to publish the details of an experiment that showed water was permanently altered by molecules that had once been dissolved in it. The publication was on the condition that a return of the experiments be carried out in independent laboratories. That was done, in Marsielle, Milan, Torantoand Tel Aviv. After publication (with disclaimers), Nature requested that experiments be done again, this time in the presence (and Under the intense scrutiny) of three independent  witnesses. Nature’s then –editor John Madddox, the magician and professional skeptic James Randi, and Walter Stewart, a chemist and an expert on scientific fraud, spent a week in Benveniste’s Paris lab. The full tale is an extraordinary one; the short version is simply that the visitors discovered how Benveniste had been duped by his assistant, who was cherry-picking data to support her belief in homeopathic medicine.
Nature’s published a critique of the original paper. Benveniste fought back, citing a McCarthy witch-hunt, but his goose was cooked. The following year, his employer, the French National Institute of Health, criticized him for credulousness, cavalier reporting of his results, and abuse of his scientific authority. Two years after the Nature fiasco began Benveniste was sacked.
That essentially, was that- until Madeleine Ennis got involved. Ennis, a professor of immunology at Queens University, Belfast, says she was a hard-nosed skeptic of homeopathy and Benveniste work. When she expressed this in the face of a published homeopathic trial, a manufacturer of homeopathic remedies asked her to join a team that make another attempt to replicate that result. She agreed, expecting to add to the evidence against homeopathy. After the end of the trial, she declared herself “incredibly surprised” by the result. Quoted in the Guardian, she says “despite my reservations against the science of homeopathy, the results compel me to suspend my disbelief and to start for a relation explanation for findings”.
The trial, which was essentially a replication of Benveniste’s experiment, took place in four different laboratories in Italy, Belgium, France, and Holland. Ennie’s skepticism wasn’t the only safeguard. The homeopathic solutions (and the controls) were prepared by three independent laboratories that made no other contribution to the trial. Inside those solutions were or rather, had been – molecules of histamine.
Anyone who suffers from hay fever knows the power of histamine; it’s an immune system response that produces hives, pain, and itching, swelling, constriction of breathing, runny nose and streaming eyes. All these symptoms happen due to some tiny molecules that form a small part of your bloodstream. Every drop of blood contains approximately15000 white blood cells; around 150 of those cells are known as basophils/ Mast cells.These Mast cells contain n tiny granules an biological substance called histamine. Histamine is responsible for all the above stated symptoms of Hay Fever
Histamine once released in blood stream has a strong effect on its own containers that is the Mast cells. After the mast cells releases histamine, its presence in blood stops the mast cell from releasing any more histamine this is a classic example of negative feedback phenomenon, which in this case is called as The mast cell stabilizing effect of Histamine. This effect was central to Ennis’s experiment.
The labs that prepared the ultradilute histamine solutions sent test tubes of water and test tubes of dilute histamine to the labs carrying out the experiment. The histamine dilution was at the kind of level homeopaths routinely used, where there would have been no molecules of histamine in the vials. There was no way to tell which was water and which was the homeopathic solution. In the experiment, basophil granules were stained blue, then these colored granules were put into the test tubes, along with a substance called anti-immunoglobulin E. Anti-immunoglobulin E causes a degranulation reaction, in which the color disappears and the Basophils release histamine.
In water, this is exactly what happened. But when the researches put the colored granules and the Anti-immunoglobulin E into the ultra dilute histamine solution, the degranulation didn’t happen. The “ghost” precence of histamine in the homeopathic solution was enough to stop the process in its tracks and histamine did not release which means that homoeopathic solution lead to mast cell stablization effect without containing any molecule of histamine.
The results were statisticlly significant at three of the centers. The fourth center had a positive result; the histamine solution did suppress degranulation more than the pure water, but it was not different enough to count.
Ennis was not satishfied by the results; there could have been bias in identifying which basophils still had their blue colour because the researches did it by eye. So she demanded they make a different measurement, one that could be automated. That way, a believer among them would not be able to skew the results-even unconsciously. She had the basophils “tagged” with an antibody that would make them glow if their histamine secretion was being suppressed. A light-sensitive probe then did the counting. The result was the same.
The record of the experiment, published in Inflammation Research, concluded that “ histamine solutions, both at pharmacological concentrations and diluted sub-molecular ultra-dilute homoeopathic solution lead to statistically significant inhibition of basophil activation by anti-immunoglobulin E”.
This experiment has proven that there is a strange scientific anomaly here:
1.   Biological effects are not only due to molecules but they can be due to sub molecular diluted solutions
2.   homeopathic dilutions are not placebo.
Robert L.Park of the University of Maryland uses the same argument he goes on the record to say “ If the infinite-dilution concept held up, it would force a re-examination of the very foundations of science”.
In his book Placebo, Dylan Evans attributes any success of homeopathy to the placebo effect. However, he also admits that a 1997 meta-analysis published in the Lancet shows it is, on average, Homoeopathy is significantly more effective then a placebo. How does Evans square this circle? By saying that “it would be foolish indeed to cast aside the whole of physics, chemistry and biology-supported , as they are, by millions of experiments and observations-just  because a single study yields a results that conflicts with their principles”.
The collective clinical experience of two centuries of Homoeopathic existence has shown that homeopathy is in demand and increasingly so. It also works.  Physics and Chemistry as science have grown and entered the domain of the invisible; in physics we have moved from the Newtonian materialistic mechanics to the Quantum dynamic worldview. In chemistry we have moved from the molecular to nano molecular realm. In biology we do not consider animals to be linear machines but now understand them as non-linear complex biological systems. When will medicine grow up and realize that the sub molecular science of homoeopathy is not irrational or absurd but it is an extension of mainstream ,medicine and the next revolution in medicine. Medical men need to wake up and take the call.

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Team Homeopathy 360