Homeopathy

I would say detectable, but minute is more in line with reality. I've quoted just enough of this objective and fair/balanced link to entice interested folks to read. It takes only a few minutes to read the whole thing consisting of one page.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Buz, could you explain what a 13C solution is? or 200C?

Thanks for the reply Buz, I'll answer the second part first if that's all right with you. You appear to have misunderstood what I mean when I say "many times". I do not mean that "many times" as a synonym for "very often". I meant that homoeopathic remedies are diluted and diluted again and diluted again and again and again, so that by the time they get to the shops, they have been diluted "many times". This is not a departure from the norm, it is an essential part of how homoeopathy is supposed to work. I'll explain below. Princess Asgara has asked if you know what a "c-solution" is. From staements like the above, it seems pretty obvious to me that you do not. That's fair enough. Until a few years ago I had no idea either. I just assumed that homoeopathy was some sort of herbalism. Then I learned better.There are three key principles of homoeopathy;Like Cures Like; Oatmeal looks like flaky skin, so oatmeal must be good for eczema. Nettles cause pain and swelling, so nettles must be good at curing pain and swelling. This is the bit that resembles medieval superstition, specifically in its similarity to the principle of sympathetic magic.Potentiation; Homoeopathic remedies must be vigorously shaken or struck against a surface (succussed in homoeo-jargon) to release their effects and "counter toxins" (some homoeopathic ingredients are indeed toxic, but that doesn't matter, for reasons that should become clear...). This is done hand-in-hand with the next step.Dilution; Less is more! In homoeopathy it is supposed that the more you dilute something, the more effective it will become. All homoeopathic remedies are diluted. First a tincture of some herbal or animal compound is prepared. This can be anything from lettuce to the heart and liver of a duck (seriously!). The homoeopath takes one drop of this "mother tincture" and mixes it with 99 drops of water to make a 1/100 dilution. Then they shake it. Then they take the solution (not the original tincture) and mix a drop of that with another 99 drops of pure water. This would be called "2C" because it has been diluted two times. This dilution/shaking routine will be repeated many times, with the dilution getting weaker as we go on. 10C or 20C is fairly standard for homoeopathic practitioners, but dilutions of 200C are not unusual. Don't take my word for it though. This is from the Society of Homoeopaths website;

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How are the remedies made?
There are five regulated homeopathic pharmacies in the UK (see Find a Pharmacy). The raw extracts (from plants or animals) or triturations (from minerals and salts) are made into a ”tincture’ with alcohol which forms the basis of the dilution procedure. Dilutions are made up to either 1 part tincture to 10 parts water (1x) or 1 part tincture to 100 parts water (1c). Repeated dilution results in the familiar 6x, 6c or 30c potencies that can be bought over the counter: the 30c represents an infinitessimal part of the original substance.

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This should be enough to tip us off that something is very wrong about all this, and indeed, it is in the area of dilution that the biggest objection to homoeopathy lies.Avagadro's Number; This has already been explained by Molbiogirl, Rrhain and no doubt others, but I'll give it a go as well, just for good measure. After all, this is medicine we're talking about here. It's important to get things right.The Avagadro's number is the number of molecules of a substance required to make the weight of that substance in grams equal to its molecular weight. This physical constant is the basis for the unit of measure, the mole.Avagadro's number is about 6.02214x10²³, that is 6.02214 x 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.So just to be clear, the molecular weight of carbon is 12. The yellow diamond on the front of the Pahlavi Crown weighs 12 grams. Thus, the diamond contains 1 mole of carbon, a fact that I just shamelessly stole from Wikipedia. This is important because it places a limit on the number of molecules that can be present in a given quantity of water (or whatever else). The repeated dilutions described above push the dilution so far that it exceeds this limit, i.e. there cannot be even one molecule of the original ingredient left.This happens quite early in the dilution process, at abut 12C, or 1 part in 10²⁴. In other words, for there to be a single molecule of our original substance in one mole of solution, we would need that mole of solution to contain 10²⁴ molecules and that can't be true. There cannot be a single molecule of original ingredient in a 12C solution. It's physically impossible.But don't take my word for it. Listen to the homoeopaths themselves. Here's Felicity Lee, former chair of the Society of Homoeopaths;

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By the time homoeopathic remedies have been diluted and succussed or shaken to the potency of 12C (I don't whether I can assume you all know about that, so Ill quickly say that's a one in hundred solution carried out on twelve different occasions, so we're well below Avagadro's number just at that point), there's nothing there materially.

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Taken from the audio file of a debate on homoeopathy found here.There's also this, from the Society of Homoeopaths website I cited above;

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"Homeopathic remedies are a unique, potentised energy medicine, drawn from the plant, mineral and animal worlds. They are diluted to such a degree that not one molecule of the original substance can be detected (after the 12c potency).

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So there are no molecules of original ingredient in homoeopathic "medicines". No molecules, no active ingredient, no medicine. That's why homoeopathic potions can be made from poisonous ingredients; by the time you take them there is no poison left, just water!So how does homoeopathy work? Well the short answer is that it doesn't, at least not beyond its power as a placebo. After all, it gets trashed in clinical trials, where it consistently fails to perform better than placebo. The homoeopaths answer? Taken from the Society of Homoeopaths website again;

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It is thought that this process {dilution/succussion} imprints the healing energy of the medicinal substance throughout the body of water (the diluent) as if a message is passed on. The message contains the healing energy.

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What rubbish, I mean, "healing energy" indeed! They don't even have the honesty to admit that their explanation is "Oh, I don't know how it works, it's just magic water, okay!".Of course this is not something that most homoeopaths tend to shout about, after all, if people knew that they were forking over their hard earned cash for little sugar pills with nothing added but a drop of water, they might just get a bit pissed off. So I don't blame you for taking homoeopathy more seriously than it deserves. But now you know better eh?

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Mutate and Survive

Thanks very much, Granny for going to the trouble of explaining this all to me.What would be your responses be to the following from the link I cited? For example, things like the petuitary gland analogy, vaccinations and allergy shots? Just today I took a double dosage (2) of my homeopathic allergy pills. I took two since we were heading out on a highway through lots of vegetation for about 20 miles to church. We came back home via a longer scenic route. Interestingly, shortly after dissolving the pills in my mouth I had a brief allergic reaction sneezing three times and appearing that a significant allergic day was ahead. However after this initial reaction I had no more allergic symptoms the rest of the day, even taking the long route home later in the day.Before I discovered this homeopathic product, nothing worked as efficiently as this product for me.My notion is that the dosage triggered the brief early reaction and enhanced my immune system's ability to take over from there. I've been on this product nearly all summer. Here in upstate NY we've had a great growing season with lots of pollen and this product appears to be doing quite well. I do avoid wheat gluten for the most part which helps also, but this is not the first year that I've done that.The product is called BioAllers, Ferndale WA. I have it in both liquid and pill form. It has 20 active ingredients, 14 of which are 12X and 6 of them 6X. Most of these are various pollens.As noted, there are aspects of this methodology which are somewhat mysterious and little understood, but hey, noted theoretical physicist Richard Feynman has admitted that this is also the case with some aspects of QM and theoretic physics.Talk about throwing money away, at least with homeopathy, some of which is likely quakery, one need not worry about side effects like stroke and death which is all too often the case with the pharms as one throws away their hard earned $$$.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Granny Magda has been helpful by explaining this. The magnitude of the numbers brings to mind the acceptable magnitude of numbers applied in science relative to the BB, evolution, probabilities of abiogenesis, etc.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Really Buz? What agency regulates the alternative health industry and keeps track of complications, side effects and deaths due to alternative treatments?

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soon I discovered that this rock thing was true
Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil
Jesus was an architect previous to his career as a prophet
All of a sudden i found myself in love with the world
And so there was only one thing I could do
Was ding a ding dang my dang along ling long - Jesus Built my Hotrod Ministry
Live every week like it's Shark Week! - Tracey Jordan
Just a monkey in a long line of kings. - Matthew Good
If "elitist" just means "not the dumbest motherfucker in the room", I'll be an elitist! - Get Your War On
*not an actual doctor

Since food supplements are considered food they are subject to oversight by the FDA, but it is the FDA's responsibility to show that a food or food supplement is unsafe.Unlike prescription drugs, food supplements, over the counter products and food products are not obligated to show that their products are safe. That is the responsibility of the FDA.Comphrey tea, a food product that I grow and consume regularly for health and enjoyment has been banned by FDA and still off the market for decades. Comphrey has many excellent health benefits used both internally and as poultices etc. I believe the root is the only part of the plant one may overdose on. I believe anyone would need to take an exhorbant quantity of comphrey tea to get sick on it.Way back in the 90's a few folks who got carried away taking too much comphrey root product got sick on it. I believe one death was attributed to that herb. However hundreds of thousands of deaths per year are tolerated by FDA via doctor prescribed pharms, not to mention the millions of other terrible side effects allowable by the drug industry products.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Potentially lethal side effects are why prescriptions are required in the first place. Chemotherapy, for instance, isn't good for you...but if you have cancer, the side effects are worth it.I mean, how dare the FDA allow, for instance, a drug that treats HIV but makes the patient incredibly nauseous almost constantly? The nerve of the "medical establishment" giving people antidepressants to prevent suicide and constant misery when those same drugs have a small chance of causing heart problems?There's no magic sugar pill that will treat disease with absolutely no side effects. In fact, did you note the label on all of those food supplements you're so fond of? The snake oil salesmen are forced to put it on their "medication" - "This product is not intended to treat any disease and has not been evaluated by the FDA."Gee, I wonder why homeopathic "medicines" wouldn't want to be tested?Perhaps the same reason James Randi was able to imbibe two entire boxes of homeopathic sleep aids with no ill effects...or even getting drowsy.You've been using flim-flam medicine. You've bought the utterly ridiculous concept that further dilution of a substance actually makes the concentration stronger, an idea any Jr. High chemistry student would be able to tell you is completely fucking stupid. You honestly believe the homeopathic idiocy that "like cures like," as if a highly diluted substance that would make you nauseous in a detectable concentration will actually do the opposite when diluted to the point where it;s unlikely a given pill contains a single molecule of the so-called "active ingredient."Idiot.

I think one of the very goofiest things about homeopathy has to do with water. Let's say, just for giggles, that practitioners of the "art" use only the very purest water they can find to make up their "medicine." Maybe Fluka stock #39253, "water for LC/MS". The stuff that's $28.80 per liter. From http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/...rch/ProductDetail/FLUKA/39253That water is guranteed to contain less that one part per million non-volatile impurities. It's really pure water. So our homeopath wants to only use it, because it won't interfere with his nostrum's active ingredient, which is there at one part per trillion, maximum, in a "6C" formula. The "medicine" is there, in other words, at a millionth of the concentration of the normal other-than-water components of the purest freakin' water you can buy!!And what are the odds that these bozos use water from anywhere other than the kitchen sink?

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

It's my pleasure. As you may have gathered, I feel quite strongly about this. I regard homoeopathy as an attack on real medicine and that really gets my goat. I'll explain why in a bit. OK, from the cited article; That sounds about right. Remember, anything over 12c is just water. So what? Is this suggesting that hormones are responsible for homoeopathic effects? It certainly doesn't apply at or above 12c. Even below this it is misleading. It states that the hormone exists in the blood at 1 part in 10,000. A 6c homoeopathic solution, like the ones in your hay fever potion, has one part in 10¹², which is a hundred times weaker! Of course, if hormones are the mechanism, then the homoeopath's credo of "more dilute=stronger" would be complete rubbish (which it is). What's more, it's not a fair comparison in the first place. Human hormones are specially adapted (or designed if you prefer ) for their jobs. They are always going to be more efficient than some plant-derived chemical which is meant for some other purpose in some other organism. This is why things like side effects creep in, even the most sophisticated chemicals are actually fairly blunt tools in terms of the human body. The fact that homoeopathic potions have no side effects should give us the hint that they simply don't do anything. That's a cheap shot and complete piffle. Vaccinations and allergy treatments work because the agents being used bear a genuine similarity to the pathogens or allergens, indeed, they usually are those very same pathogens or allergens, in a weakened or diluted form. This allows antibodies to develop that have developed the ability to recognise the pathogen/allergen.The "like cures like" similarities invoked by homoeopaths are simply not the same. They are aesthetic similarities, usually based on the similarities between the symptoms of an illness and the effects of the ingredient (nettles cause pain and swelling, so they must be good for treating pain and swelling) or visual similarities between the symptoms of an illness and a plant or other ingredient (snake bites cause wounds that look a bit like a ruptured skin lesion, so they must be good for treating lesions). Take this example, from a homoeopathic treatment guide, found here;

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The patient of Piper Nigrum {black pepper} remains by nature sad and depressed. The patient cannot concentrate on anything. His thoughts become
scattered. The patient is startled by the slightest sound.

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This is magical logic. Pepper is fiery and stimulating, so it must be good for pepping you up a bit. Why? None of this follows, unless one employs the logic of sympathetic magic. Are there really? I think that Goldman is off in a fantasy world here. There is no such "difference in the electromagnetic fields", she's either deluded, or just making it up. If you doubt me on this, feel free to find some evidence for this extraordinary claim.This is actually pretty typical of the way CAM practitioners from different disciplines will support each others fields, even when they are completely unconnected. Homoeopathy and acupuncture have noting to do with one another except that both invoke ridiculous "healing energy" to hand wave away their lack of an explanatory framework. This is the kind of stuff that pisses me off. Is she not in the least bit curious about how homoeopathy works?! Putting results first is all very well, but if we understood the alleged causal mechanisms behind homoeopathy, we would surely be able to do so much more with them. One can't help but suspect that their lack of curiosity is related to their lurking suspicion that there is no underlying mechanism and that digging too deep might just upset the apple cart.Saying "It could be the limbic system" is useless. It could be tiny invisible magic badgers. How about some evidence? Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's right. Islam is very popular, but neither one of us thinks that that makes it more likely to be correct. As for miracles cures... There are two things that make homoeopathy appear to work (and this is true of other forms of alternative medicine and even to some extent of real medicine). They are the placebo effect and "regression to the mean".The placebo effect is well known and I'm sure you have heard of it. Placebos are powerful things, capable of affecting great change in subjective symptoms like pain or tiredness. They can even be manipulated; a big pill has a greater placebo effect than a little pill. The confidence of the doctor prescribing the placebo has a big effect as well. This is why clinical trials work so hard to eliminate the placebo effect by including a placebo group and making sure that the doctors do not know which group is getting the drug and which the placebo until the study is complete ("double blinding").You should approve of clinical trials. The first recorded instance is from the Bible no less (Daniel 1:1-16 of course!). In clinical trials, homoeopathy performs identically to placebo. That's because it is a placebo.The other important effect is regression to the mean. This is a mathematical term that basically states that an extremely unlikely event is likely to be followed by a less extreme event. I'll let Ben Goldacre of badscience.net explain that a little;

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This is an even more fascinating phenomenon: all things, as the new-agers like to say, have a natural cycle. Your back pain goes up and down over a week, or a month, or a year. Your mood rises and falls. That weird lump in your wrist comes and goes. You get a cold; it gets better.

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If you take an ineffective sugar pill, at your sickest, it’s odds on you’re going to get better, in exactly the same way that if you sacrifice a goat, after rolling a double six, your next roll is likely to be lower. That is regression to the mean.

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“Well, it could be that,” says the homeopathy fan. “But I just don’t think so. All I know is, I get better with homeopathy.”

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People do just get better. Even chronic illnesses do just clear up and go away. This may be for many reasons but it is impossible to say which exactly because none of this happens in isolation. We can't single out homoeopathy as a cause when it could be some other factor, especially since we know that homoeopathy is without any basis in theory or evidence. As we have established, the ingredients from the 12c bits of your pill are not even present, so it certainly wasn't them that triggered your immune system response. Even the less dilute 6c ingredients are there in such tiny amounts that they will be drowned out by the uncounted number of pollens in every single breath you take.Ultimately, I don't know what has cured your hay fever, but then neither do you. It certainly wasn't homoeopathy. No-one is trying to sell me pseudo-scientific snake oil based on quantum theory though. Oh wait, they are! http://www.qlink-online.co.uk/ This is exactly why I am so hostile to homoeopathy. When I was a kid, I had to take a lot of medicines. They had bad side effects. They made me gain weight. They made my appetite go through the roof, which made me gain weight. They made me lethargic and depressed. They made my hair fall out. They basically made the latter part of my childhood a fucking misery.But you know what? I'm still alive! Without those drugs I would have died an unpleasant death from nefrotic syndrome, aged ten. I owe the fact that I am able to sit here here now, writing this, is down to evidence based medicine, not homoeopathic woo. That's why I get pissed off when evidence based medicine comes under attack. It saves lives. that's worth suffering side effects for and it's worth a few $$$.If you want to continue to throw away dollar bills in exchange for little sugar pills with nothing in them them of course, you are free to do so. I just wouldn't recommend it.Edited by Granny Magda, : Suddenly realised that I'd missed out a quote that I responded to. Fixed.

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Mutate and Survive

Perhaps the purity of the water is one of the determinate factors as to which products work and which don't.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Thanks again Granny, for kindly taking the time for your indepth response to the cited link. You've taught me some interesting things. I can't say I'm capable of a response other than as follows, but I'll continue to delve into this topic and do some back reading on this thread, etc.I would say that the probability of something happening via the intelligently designed extreme dilution of pollens relative to homeopathy are greater than the probability that abiogenesis happened randomly with no ID and progressed into surviving organisms.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Except those two have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and probability really doesn't have anything to do with either (except of course in the sense that in homeopathy the statistical likelihood of actually imbibing a single molecule of the "active ingredient" in a given pill is astronomically tiny).Your red herring attempt to redirect the conversation towards abiogenesis, a subject you know nothing about and argue against only with personal incredulity, is asinine.Let's redirect you back to the topic.Homeopathy involves the use of substances shown to cause the very symptoms they are intended to cure, diluted to the point where for all real purposes the actual substance is no longer in the supplement. For instance, a sleep aid will contain caffein, a substance objectively proven to wake you up, diluted to the point where the caffeine is undetectable.The level of dilution varies, but is typically les than 1 part in 10^20. Some go as high as 1 part in 10^10,000.Let's do some very simple chemistry, Buzz.Do you know what a mole is? A mole is Avogadro's number of molecules of a substance. Basically, it's the total atomic weight of a single molecule, in grams. So Avogadro's number worth of Hydrogen atoms would have a mass of 1 gram, because Hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1. A gram of Hydrogen contains 6.02x10^23 Hydrogen atoms.A mole of water would have a mass of 18 grams (16 for the Oxygen, 2 for the 2 Hydrogen).The compounds typically used in a pill are significantly heavier than water in terms of atomic wight (this is different from density, remember). But let's just use water, because it's really easy for me.If you have a substance diluted 1 part per 10^23, in 18 grams of water you would have only 6 molecules of the substance in the solution.How large are your homeopathic pills, Buzz? I'm betting they're less than a gram. Maybe a few hundred milligrams? And they'll be composed mainly of a substance with an atomic weight much higher than water. This means a single mole, 6.02x10^23 molecules of the substance, would weigh a lot more than 18 entire grams. You're consuming a small fraction of a mole of the pill compounds in a single pill...meaning that, at a concentration of 1 part per 10^23, you didn't take any actual medicine at all.Let's be more specific. Let's assume you're taking a sugar pill. The atomic weight of a molecule of sucrose is 342.3 - so a mole of sucrose, 6.02x10^23 molecules, would have a mass of 342.3 grams. If you're taking a homeopathic pill that contains a concentration of 1 part per 10^23, and you take two 800mg pills (so you've taken just 0.004674 of a single mole, or 2.8x10^21 molecules), you haven't even taken a single molecule of the actual medication. In fact, you have a 1 in 50 chance per 2-pill dosage of actually imbibing a single molecule of the stuff. Aside from the effects of the sugar pill itself, you could take millions of those pills and still not have a concentration of the substance in your body sufficient to have a noticeable effect.Note that this was assuming a 1600mg dose, which is pretty freaking large. If you're taking a 200mg pill, or worse even less...Well, it really doesn't matter. Even with the giant dosage, you're taking a sugar pill with nothing else. You're actually more likely to imbibe some random molecule of a different substance from simple impurities in the manufacturing process (dirt, dust, metal from the manufacturing process, etc) than you are to imbibe the "medicine."So how exactly, Buz, does homeopathy "work" if you aren't actually taking any of the supposed medication?! The homeopaths give flimflam explanations about the "vibrations" and "memory" of water and other chemicals carrying the "vibrations" of the medicine to the body...but this is bare assertion on their part. There is no actual data that suggests this, in fact the data we do have suggests that they're making it all up.Think of it another way, Buz. If homeopathic medication is stronger with more dilution, and you drink groundwater that has come into contact with trace amounts of toxic chemicals in its long residence underground, surely you must be immune to the effects of every super-diluted substance not actually contained in that glass of water!Homeopathy is complete and total bunkum. Flimflam. Garbage. Nonsense. Snake oil. It's a tool for those unscrupulous enough (and sometimes stupid enough to believe their own bullshit) to make scads of money from gullible twits like yourself.

Thanks much, Rahvin, for taking the time to explain these things. I'm still not convinced and unable to respond until I assimilate enough of this info into my thinking to do so sensibly.

So water from the septic tank would make the best homeopathic cures? Or ultrapure water would?And I already know which homeopathic products work. An exceedingly short list of them. none.