The Great Homoeophatic Challenge....I dusted the heavy cannons.?

Question

The Truth about Homeopathy

Anyone treated by a homeopath can attest to its efficacy. It works on animals, babies and unconscious people. Hardly what we would call the "placebo effect"! Yet that is what most traditional medical people would call it since they can't find material substance in homeopathic remedies beyond 12C potency. In 1996, Shui-lin Lo of the California Institute of Technology, who neither is a homeopath nor wants anything to do with alternative medicine, discovered an odd characteristic of water. When he diluted a substance to the extreme, exactly as Hahnemann did 200 years earlier, Lo found that unusual crystals formed in the water when it was shaken. These "ice" crystals had bizarre electrical forces. In addition, they did not "melt" at room temperature. Lo dubbed the crystals "IE" -- ice with an electrical field. Not much relevance to homeopathy. Yet.

About one year later, UCLA immunologist Benjamin Bonavida discovered that biologically active IE crystals boosted immune systems components up to 100 percent. The homeopathy connection was made. No matter how dilute the solution got, the special ice crystals would form. A very dilute substance definitely could affect the body.

In spite of 200 years of therapeutic success, homoeopathy has been maligned, vilified and homoeopaths have been charged as liars and frauds. Chased and ridiculed like the first martyrs of Christianity they prevailed and stand. In 1841, England was ravaged by cholera. Statistics showed that four times as many lives were saved by homeopathic medicines than by other conventions of the day. Having succeeded in quashing two serious cholera epidemics in Europe, public acceptance of homeopathy grew. Homeopathy remains tremendously popular in England to this day. So much so, that the Queen herself carries homeopathic remedies when she travels and is attended by homeopathic physicians. (Dr. Ronald W. Davey, Homeopathic Physician to Her Majesty the Queen of England) The Queen of England and the Royal Family have always used homeopathy. In fact, the Prince of Wales coined the term “complementary medicine”. Over the Channel in France, over 7.000 MD’s, 700 Veterinarians and 2.000 dentists prescribing Homoeopathic medicines!! In 1970 there were fewer than 200 practitioners in America. At present it is estimated there are over 3500 in the United States. Homoeopathic remedies are found on shelves of national chains like Walgreens, CVS and Wal-Mart. The public spends over 300 million dollars a year on homoeopathic remedies. Considering the cheap price of homoeopathic preparations, it would translate to about three billion US $ in pharmaceuticals medicine per year. So now guys STOP trolling and challenge this article.

Answer 1

Could you provide resorces for study of research on IE and the mechanisms of effects of biologically active IE on the human immunological system?

If any sustance,after intense research  , double blind studies, prospective or retropective analysis ot the results, is found to be medically useful to cure or heal any ailment, should be accepted as a standard cure, be it homeopathic or allopathic.

Citing names like the queen of England as proof of efficacy of  any system is ,I am afraid is not a valid reason.



The good looks and long life of the members of the royal family , in all probability ,can be attributed to the wonderful genetic pool they belong to and the moderate lifestyle they have adapted.

Answer 2

Selim Senkan, PhD., professor and chair of UCLA's Department of Chemical Engineering, has also discovered significant effects from IE crystals but in a completely different application. Dr. Senkan tested IE crystals as a fuel additive and found a 20-40% reduction in carbon deposits on engine piston tops.

Soooo... I dumped a bunch of homeopathic remedies in my gas tank; oddly enough I got no improvement in my fuel economy and my car is now junk.

A tongue-in-cheek answer; but none the less a consideration.  There is no link between homeopathic remedies and the formulation of IE crystals.  To imply that homeopathic remedies form these crystals; or to imply an effect on the body based on an unproven and theoretical branch of research is folly.  

Do homeopathic and alternative medicines have a benefit and their place in therapy?  Yes; I agree.  The danger becomes relying on them IN PLACE OF conventional medicine or in believing that they are all "safe" because they are herbal and natural.  They are, and should be, an adjunct to conventional therapy.  Advising anything else is dangerous and irresponsible.

No problems with homeopathic medications per se;

Answer 3

doctrine: this is just more anecdotes, more logical fallacies and more evidence that you have no idea what the placebo effect and observer bias actually are.

As has been explained to you many times, there is a difference between a solution which contains molecules - no matter how few - and one which does not (homeopathy).

And what difference should it make that the Royal Family use homeopathy? Prince Charles talks to plants to help them grow for god's sake.

victimof....: animals and babies only "get results" from homeopathy when the person administering and judging those results knows that they have given them homeopathic remedies. This IS the placebo effect (or observer bias) at work. (e.g. if you give your dog a quack remedy, you will credit any improvement in his condition to the quack remedy. But this may not be correct - your dog may have got better naturally or for some other reason).

For this reason only double blinded trials are useful.

Answer 4

"A baby will respond to its parents' expectations and behaviour, and the placebo effect is still perfectly valid for children and pets. Placebo pills with no active ingredient can even elicit measurable biochemical responses in humans, and in animals (when they have come to associate the pill with an active ingredient). This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting areas of medical science ever."

What I want to know is, how have those babies reached a cognitive stage of development where they can respond to their parents "expectations"? Last I heard, babies operated on a system of reflexes and immediate rewards, called sensorimotor intelligence, and thus wouldn't be able to reflect on what their mother is giving them and whether or not it will help.

Also, pets. I dissoved homeopathics into my mother-in-law's dog's water bowl. He never saw me do it, yet he drank his water and his infection (which he had had for 2 years with no help from any veterinarian) was gone in a matter of weeks. Coincidence? possibly. But there was no way he was actively analyzing that I was giving him something and it would make him better. If that was the case, why did the pills they had been giving him for years not have the same effect?

If homeopathic medicine works, and it works on the placebo effect, then how come conventional medicines that don't work aren't working on the placebo effect as well?

Answer 5

wow lots of info!  but i agree,  the drug companies dump alot of money into the media and the government, so we never hear the other side. we have always used the "old wives tale" or "grandma's cure".  works great and is vitually "free" cuz you already have the stuff around.  thanks for the info

Answer 6

If you're looking for some reliable, information on homeopathy, you might want to check out this article:

http://www.naturaldatabase.com/ce/ceCour...

It gives alot of information on the history of homeopathy, the theory behind how it claims to work and how it (and other alternative modalities) fit into the medical practice and regulatory industry.

Answer 7

thankyou for that information i am going to read up on it....it's always interested me how animals and babies can get results from homeopathy...obviously not placebo :P

cheers.

Answer 8

Once is a lab accident ... twice is promising, and until it can be repeated in the other guy's lab, it's not science. If you have to believe in it before it works, it's not science.

The NIH remarked, "there was clear evidence that studies with better methodological quality tended to yield less positive results."  In other words, when you treat homeopahty in the same manner as mainstream medicine, and hold it to the same standards in testing, if doesn't pass the tests.

The problem with Lo's work is that it was published in a "letters" journal intended for rapid publication of new results, no details of the experiments were given, and the peer review was lax. He hasn't published how he got his results with enough detail for anyone to even try to replicate them. And there has been no follow-up, no one has replicated his experiments ... not even him. It has all the earmarks of a high-tech scam. See the Carnegie Mellon link below.

Bonavida ... I searched PubMed found no publications by him during that time frame that involved "IE" (of the 320 publications with a Bonavida B as an author). He doesn't list it on his faculty page. Where was this research published? Do you perhaps mean Beneviste?

As for the cholera epidemic success of 1841 ... it wasn't hard to do better than the early 1800s medicine, because they were still in the bleeding and purging and emetics stage. What we now call "supportive care" did better than what passed for treatment 167 years ago.

A doctor - not a homeopath - made the connection between cholera incidence and contaminated water. Dr. John Snow  was a skeptic of the then-dominant miasma theory that stated that diseases were caused by pollution or a noxious form of "bad air".

Mainstream medicine has changed since then, starting with the discovery of epidemiology, the bacteria that caused cholera, antibiotics, and the relatively recent therapy for cholera that just replaces fluids and electrolytes until the body overcomes the bacteria.

What has homeopathy changed since Hahnemann, except dropping the "miasms" and "psora" from their vocabulary, and trying desperately to find some crumbs of evidence that they can flout the laws of Chemistry and Physics.

As for the British Royal Family ... what can I say except that popularity does not equal effectiveness.

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Adding: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/ATG/bittenson... has an analysis of Lo's work by a physicist.