Just how can you bridge the abyss that separates these pseudo scientific quacks and real science? They wouldn’t know science if they tripped over it.

“Serious opponents of homeopathy do support research into whether it works, and they have done the research over and over. It is the homeopaths who oppose the research.”

You mean like the Shang study, for example? (Shang A, Huwiler-Muntener K, Nartey L, Juni P, Dorig S, Sterne JA, Pewsner D, Egger M. Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects? Comparative study of placebo-controlled trials of homoeopathy and allopathy. Lancet. 2005; 366 (9487):726-32.)

You know, the one that claims to compare 110 allopathic studies and 110 homeopathic studies, but actually compares only 6 allopathic studies and 8 homeopathic studies, without even saying which ones were used…

Have you even read this paper? And if so, can you say with a straight face that you would give it a passing grade in an undergraduate medical research seminar? And can you explain why the editors of Lancet say this “study” heralds the end of homeopathy?

On the other hand, have you read Bell Rheumatology study? (Bell IR, Lewis DA, 2nd, Brooks AJ et al. Improved clinical status in fibromyalgia patients treated with individualized homeopathic remedies versus placebo. Rheumatology 2004b; 43 (5):577-82.)

The only criticisms I have seen of this one are that it wasn’t on a large enough scale to be definitive. So how are you working to get funding for a large-scale study that uses the same design — or alternatively, what should the authors do to make the study worthwhile, and if they do, will you be working to help them secure funding?

Gilad was on the right track, as I mentioned above, but I don’t know of any study carried out by opponents of homeopathy that embodies the kind of design I mentioned in response to Gilad. And that kind of design is absolutely essential if you want to refute the actual claims of classical homeopathy.

If you know of such a study, please send me the reference!

This is exactly the problem. Homeopathy is not some new, untested treatment. It has been around for 200 years. It predates modern medicine. It is not new. It has been thoroughly tested and found to not work. You are making it sound like nobody has seriously looked at the question of whether homeopathy actually works. They have, over and over again. You are making it sound like medical researchers oppose the idea of testing homeopathy. They don’t, they have done it countless times already. The ones who oppose the testing of homeopathy using legitimate methods are the homeopaths. They are the ones who always come up with excuses for why it can’t be tested, or why the most recent negative test failed to find any effect.

You are painting a picture of the brave homeopaths being held down by the medical community that is blocking proper research into the subject, when the reality is it the homeopaths themselves are the ones that are hampering testing of their own field. If they were really that confident in their treatments they should be working to find ways to test it properly. As it stands they have refused to test it and refused to provide enough specific information that other people could test it. So it has been left to real medical researchers to come up with tests as best they can based on what the homeopaths say about how their treatments work. This of course leaves the homeopaths an easy out, they consistently say the test is flawed in some way. But they don’t make any attempt to fix the flaws in a reasonable manner. Serious opponents of homeopathy do support research into whether it works, and they have done the research over and over. It is the homeopaths who oppose the research. The ball is now in their court. If they want to show that their treatments actually work then they should develop scientifically-valid protocols to test them. They have been asked over and over, even begged by the medical community to do so. They have refused.

And there is nothing that needs to be explained about why people think they feel better sometimes after homeopathic treatments. There is nothing profound at all. It can easily be explained by well-known effects such as the cyclical nature of disease, placebos, subjective validation, selective reporting, confirmation bias, lack of post-treatment monitoring, reliance on anecdotes, and spontaneous remission. There is no indication that there is anything out of the ordinary that needs to be explained. But if there is some effect then it is up to the homeopaths to show that it exists. Medical researchers have done all they can do to test it. It is clear that homeopaths will never accept any properly-controlled experiment that contradicts their position no matter how rigorous and valid the methodology. If they want to show that homeopathy works then they need to test it, or the very least explain how it can be tested. But they won’t do that.

(Not sure if you are still there. As I mentioned, I had extreme deadline pressure last week, and am just now catching up.)

As I said before, I am not a homeopath or a medical researcher, so I can’t answer your questions directly. But I would like to point out a couple of things.

First of all, these are great questions, and if homeopathy actually works as claimed, we should be able to find out more about them, once serious research efforts are underway. At this point, most of the researchers who could answer these questions either know nothing about homeopathy or don’t have the funding it would take to seriously pursue the answers.

But first things first.

Since we haven’t even established to everyone’s satisfaction whether homeopathy works or not, serious opponents of homeopathy should support research that can prove — one way or the other, once and for all — whether it does. That is, people on both sides of the controversy have to work together to get real answers to this most basic question. Anything less is just speculation, informed or otherwise.

If it turns out that homeopathy does work, then give yourselves some time to let the facts sink in, as scientists generally have to when reality trumps theory. And once you have caught your breath, start digging into these questions, as well as the many others they will lead to.

And if it turns out that homeopathy doesn’t work, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people will want to know what actually did cause them to have such profound results with homeopathy. And that, too, will be worthy of serious investigation.

‘science has yet to see ‘beyond placebo effect,’

Water’s memory just make their nipples erect.

‘Purposeful life spirit’ is a necessary belief [3],

Kent followed Hahnemann, homeo.’s founder and chief.

-r.c.

I love this: “Second a material scientist, not interested in homeopathy but water structures, presenting the LATEST, like a few months ago, research on water patterns to support water has memory, organization, etc that in turn can support homeopathy claims. ”

If people really think that is there any point debating with them?

What is the nature of this “missing information”, how does the body recognize it, and what are the mechanisms it uses to do “what it would do on its own”? And why would the missing information need for the body to fight, say, a cold and an allergy attack, which have the same symptoms but completely different biological causes, be the same? What is more, all of the known healing effects the body uses have their own side effects. For instance fighting off infection causes a fever. Repairing damaged tissue results in scar tissue formation. Fighting off respiratory pathogens causes excess mucous to be produced. Healing broken bones results in the formation of a temporary connective tissue covering and imperfect replacement bone replacement. And improving the body’s healing ability can have its own problem. Autoimmune diseases are a major and common problem. There is evidence that the reason the 1918 Spanish flu was so deadly was that it caused the immune system to destroy the lungs. Saying that the body is just healing itself does not eliminate the issue with side-effects at all.

Practitioners of quack medicine love to throw around ideas of the body “healing itself” or “enhancing the body’s natural healing powers” or something like that, but they never explain why the body isn’t healing itself already, how exactly it would go about healing itself, why the particular quack treatment aids this process, why no conventional medicine can tap into this healing ability, why the healing ability itself has never been directly observed, why evolution would preserve these latent but unused healing abilities, why the normal side-effects from natural healing are not present, nor any of the numerous other questions that arise from these claims. It is just thrown around as a defense for using a treatment that cannot possibly have any physiological effect and only has positive effects.

Cells are encased in lipid membranes which are impermeable to water. Water only goes into and out of cells through pores or transporters, or attached to ions and other molecules. A hypothetical collective property of water is necessarily destroyed if that water is divided down into molecular sized units. Once water molecules are isolated, they become indistinguishable and any “memory” is necessarily lost.

If you had a cd, and took it apart down to the individual bits, the collective information would be lost. Similarly if you took a book apart down to the individual letters, the collective information would be lost. If you take water apart down to individual molecules, any collective information that may have been present is lost.

In order for water to get to cells, it has to be absorbed though the gut, which means traversing through multiple cell membranes. There is simply no way to deliver water to cells that has not been disassociated into molecular sized units which can’t carry any collective information.

Homeopathy could still work via the placebo effect.