h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Surely butterfly flapping territory would mean that adding then diluting out the solute would have a catastrophically different effect every time, and so would be no use for medicinal purposes?

Assuming there could be long-range order would open up many other questions.

How many *forms* of order are necessary?

Why is the order more intense the less solute there is, even to the extent where parts per billion of a particular molecule effectively *prevent* full expression of the order induced by those very molecules?

Is there a hierarchy among the numerous different forms of order - if two different potentiated 'solutions' (with no solute molecules in either) are mixed, which one 'wins', or do they both lose?

Just how pure can water be made in the first place?

How long is the solute-free order meant to survive in the body after ingestion?

Is the effect of the ordered water meant to be in any way biochemical, or simply one of changing 'energy levels' within the body?

That's one of the major tenets of chaos theory as I understand it too bouncybleep. Nonlinear systems are inherently unpredicatable at long time scales. Another key point is that just because the motion of individual water molecules is nonlinear, and we can't predict their individual motion on long times scales, doesn't mean our thermodynamic, statistical methods that *do* work should be tossed. Those methods specifically don't require detailed knowledge of the exact motion of every molecule.

I was reading about string theory today, just enough to have a picture in my mind of all those little, tiny bitlets humming and vibrating along, making energy and interacting with each other in ways that can't be proven but make a potentially useful theory. It got me to wondering if maybe homeopathy is working something like that, and whether there might be a common vocabulary of sorts to use in the discussion.

My understanding of string theory was that it operates on sub-atomic levels, not anything that could affect compounds in water. I'm a geologist, so huge Theory of Everything stuff is a bit beyond me in that respect. I could be wrong.

Why would something have no effect if it were subatomic? Doesn't science think that every cause has an effect?

I think what S&T is getting at is that String theory could explain why/how sub-atomic particles form/exist. But it doesn't change any of the existing theories/laws we have regarding how those particles behave with respect to each other in atoms and molecules. So then it doesn't change what we know about atomic/molecular structure. It just is a "deeper" explanation.

See, back in the day, electrons, protons, neutrons were the fundamental constituents of matter. Basic quantum theory explained their behaviour. Now we know that those particles are made up of more fundamental particles, and we have more advanced theories to explain their behaviour.

But that doesn't mean the previous theory explaining the behavior of electrons, protons, neutrons are wrong. Those are still right. It's just that now we know where e-, p+ and n0 come from.

Its worth pointing out that none of the string theories, nor M-theory as a whole, are theories or even hypotheses in the classical sense. M-theory probably can't even be formulated in that way, and they're all on very fuzzy footing still.

I'm sorry to hear that. That one was actually making *sense* to me.

If that M Theory or Superstring Theory makes sense to you MoG, you are a far better hitchhiker than I!

it is a good idea though, and string theory has been around for quite a while.

I believe there *is* some experimental evidence for a 5th dimension, from some of the supercollider results (I think).

"... string theory has been around for quite a while."

Didn't mean that to sound like longevity bestows any degree of truth on something. What I meant was, it seems to go in and out of fashion as new discoveries and ideas come about.

<>

No. If you dilute something in the amounts homeopaths do so, you get a solution that should have one molecule of the solute in a quantity of solvent greater than the number of particles in the known universe. So there isn't actually any solute in these things--it's just pure water.

And if the water somehow maintains the properties of the solvent when the solvent molecules are all gone, then they've discovered something that ought to get them a Nobel in chemistry or physics--if they had any evidence of it.

S&T, string theory 'making sense' would almost certainly not mean the same to you as it does to me. I read something about it that I was able to envision, and then, just as I was dozing off I heard the lil bits, softly, softly, making music in my mind. It was lovely.

"Myth or magic?"

http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/news/0,8363,1538993,00.html

"A new report claiming to prove that acupuncture relieves pain has reopened the debate over alternative therapies, which are becoming increasingly popular. Devotees swear by a range of practices, but criticism surrounds their efficacy and the lack of regulation of the market."


Curious title - Myth or magic? Nothing to do with science then?


az

A link to the James Randi website. This weeks commentary has got a piece about homeopathy in it recounting a BBC Radio 4 programme about a homeopathic doctor talking about the trials they have done. I did hear the show and she was not exactly giving homeopathy a good image. Read the piece and you will see.

http://www.randi.org/jr/072905beenthere.html#12

From today's Grauniad . . .


"As a fourth study says it's no better than a placebo, is this the end for homeopathy?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,1556831,00.html

"Homeopathy, favoured medical remedy of the royal family for generations and hugely popular in the UK, has an effect but only in the mind, according to a major study published in a leading medical journal today."

"Swiss scientists compared the results of more than 100 trials of homeopathic medicines with the same number of trials of conventional medicines in a whole range of medical conditions, from respiratory infections to surgery. They found that homeopathy had no more than a placebo effect."


az

The end of homeopathy? I seriously doubt it. I'd say by far the majority of people who seek homeopathic treatment do so because they have been unable to resolve their health problem with western medical science. They actually don't care that much what mainstream science has to say about alternative medicine (not least because of the ridiculing attitudes like those expressed earlier in this thread).

Thank-you to Master B and others who have attempted an intelligent science based discussion


Given this is SEx, here's the response of some scientists to the Lancet article:

http://press.arrivenet.com/pol/article.php/685773.html


Prominent U.S. Research Scientists Counter Lancet Claims on Homeopathy

Distribution Source : U.S. Newswire

Date : Thursday, August 25, 2005


To: National Desk

Contact: Peter Gold of the National Center for Homeopathy, 860-674-1500 (office) or 860-874-7743 (cell), [email protected], Web: http://www.homeopathic.org

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 25 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Prominent U.S. scientists today strongly rejected findings on homeopathic medicine to be published in the Aug. 27, 2005 edition of the Lancet. The study in question was the work of Aijing Shang and colleagues from the University of Berne in Switzerland. The U.S. scientists rejecting the conclusions of the study are Dr. Rustum Roy Ph.D. (Penn State University), Dr. Iris Bell, M.D., Ph.D. (University of Arizona) and Dr. Joyce Frye D.O., M.B.A. (University of Pennsylvania).

"Shang et al. have successfully applied a methodological approach to the articles they reviewed that is highly suitable for drawing conclusions about conventional medicine but is incomplete in evaluating homeopathic medicine. They did not include criteria that would apply to high quality homeopathic research reflecting the nature of homeopathic practice. Such criteria include consideration of the quality of the homeopathy provided", said Iris Bell, M.D., Ph.D. "Furthermore, a single remedy selection for a given conventionally-diagnosed condition is not homeopathy, yet there are numerous conventionally-judged high quality studies that were so designed. The analogy would be to test the effects of penicillin for all patients with symptoms of an apparent infection. The quality of the studies would otherwise be excellent in design. However, penicillin will not work for patients with viral infections or bacterial infections resistant to its effects or for persons with fevers from other non-infectious causes -- and it thus might show benefit only for a subset of patients with symptoms of infections, i.e., the ones with true penicillin-sensitive infections. How would penicillin fare in a meta-analysis of studies designed to ignore the intrinsic nature of penicillin in benefiting patients," said Bell.

Joyce Frye DO, MBA commented that the study's authors seemed to begin their work with a bias. "While their analysis clearly showed effects of homeopathic treatment -- they found ways to disregard those. Out of the millions of trials in conventional medicine, their primary outcome relied on the comparison of ridiculously small numbers -- 8 trials of homeopathy and 6 trials of conventional medicine. They began their work with the assumption 'that the effects observed in placebo-controlled trials of homoeopathy could be explained by a combination of methodological deficiencies and biased reporting'. Sound research is not conducted from this starting position."

Among other topics, the Lancet challenges the plausibility of homeopathic effects given that homeopathic remedies are often administered in dilutions in excess of Avogadro's number. Dr. Rustum Roy, Ph.D. distinguished material scientist from Penn State University commented that the chemistry argument made in this study and by conventional medicine in general is false science. "The underpinning of the editorial content of the Lancet as it relates to homeopathy relies on a quaint old idea from the nineteenth century that the ONLY way that the property of water can be affected or changed is by incorporating foreign molecules.

"This is the Avogadro-limit high-school level chemistry argument. To a materials scientist this notion is absurd, since the fundamental paradigm of materials-science is that the structure-property relationship is the basic determinant of everything. It is a fact that the structure of water and therefore the informational content of water can be altered in infinite ways."

http://www.usnewswire.com/

It's certainly an argument against a study that blanket application of one treatment in cases where homeopaths might offer more tailored treatment may not be a fair approach for testing homeopathy as it is practiced.
(As an aside, I wonder how many studies have been done with 'pretend patients' to see how much (or how little) variation there is in precise diagnosis and prescribed treatment across various kinds of regular or alternative medical practicioners?)


I'm kind of unsure about the statements from the material scientist. Certainly, for *solids*, the layout of atoms or molecules can have a great effect on the material properties, but the micro-scale and atomic-scale mechanisms of such changes are at fairly well understood, possible to model and fairly widely agreed on. Much material science examines solid structures at scales way above the atomic, and much of the atomic-scale coverage doesn't need to go beyond a pretty simple ball-and-spring understanding of atomic or molecular interaction. Where it gets deep into atomic interactions, it essentially becomes chemistry anyway.

While the understanding of large-scale (and essentially static) structure in solids is possibly the fundamental aim of materials science, I was under the impression that the dynamic and atomic-level interactions in liquids are rather more the realm of the chemist.

Certainly, if I wanted to understand how water might affect other chemical substances, *I* wouldn't ask a material scientist, and I'm not sure how many people other would, unless they knew the particular material scientist in question would give them the answer they wanted to hear.

Regarding homeopathy, on the chemical side, the fundamental questions still seem to be:

a) How a homeopath could be sure the water they were using was entirely free from the influence of any other substance than the one they were intending it to be influenced by, and sure that it remained so despite seemingly inevitable atomic-scale contamination during manipulation. If weaker solutions are somehow 'stronger', it would seem at first that the tiniest contamination could possibly overwhelm the intended substance during the dilution process.

b) How the 'activated' water maintains its wonderful new structure despite absorption onto a medium of delivery.

c) How the special structure survives the numerous mixings with solutions of far higher concentrations of innumerable substances in its passage through the human body, from ingestion to its place of final action. Since ultimately most (all) chemical treatments rely on a substance entering cells in the body (often one molecule at a time), it is difficult to see how loose supermolecular structures could survive transit trough a cell wall, whether in their passage from the gut to bloodstream, or from the bloodstream to their final destination.

d) What the place of final action is, and how that action is supposed to take place.

e) Whether the effect of homeopathic solutions on the human body is somehow biased towards the positive. Such supposedly effective treatments would seem to have at least the potential for harm if applied wrongly. It is hard to have anything which is both effective and 100% safe.

There do seem to be a whole chain of things which need to be explained much more fully in order for homeopathy to work as suggested.
That *isn't* to say that a failure to explain all or any steps would mean homeopathy would actually change in effectiveness, but the seeming need for a whole set of explanations which seem scientifically implausible to many does explain why many people are deeply and honestly skeptical, even if many would be extremely interested in seeing proof that homeopathy *did* work, regardless of the supoposed mechanisms.

"How the special structure survives the numerous mixings with solutions of far higher concentrations of innumerable substances in its passage through the human body, from ingestion to its place of final action. Since ultimately most (all) chemical treatments rely on a substance entering cells in the body (often one molecule at a time), it is difficult to see how loose supermolecular structures could survive transit trough a cell wall, whether in their passage from the gut to bloodstream, or from the bloodstream to their final destination."

That was my reaction to the idea of supermolecular structures surviving as well. Take this structure and churn it around with hydrochloric acid for a couple of hours, and it's still able to reconstitute itself after passing successively through a number of membrane barriers...

Azara