David Harris reports that an Italian court has ruled that Homeopathy's claims cannot be supported by science. That's kind of a given. Homeopathy is often associated in with natropathy, but these two alternate health techniques are very, very different. Natropathy uses plant (and in some cases, animal) products that have healing effects. These effects can often be explained by the ingredients working synergistically with each other and the body's biochemistry, as would drugs or natural biochemicals.
On the other hand, homeopathic preparations are explained by first determining that an illness is similar to a toxic reaction, and identifies a particular toxin or group of toxins that would cause those effects. That toxin is then diluted to a very large degree, say on the order of 1:1012 to 1:1030. A typical homeopathic remedy calls for two dozen doses over a week, where each dose is about a drop of the diluted toxin. This, according to the practice, will develop your body's self defence to the toxin, alleviating the ill effects of the disease.
Ok factor-lable fans, here's we go:
Let's take a mole of mercury (I) chloride (472g of Hg2Cl2) and dilute it to a liter. We now have a 1M solution of the substance known as calomel. Dilute this by mixing 1 drop (.050 mL) with 100 mL of water, and repeat the process with the resulting solution six times. The patient is then given one drop of the final dilution. This is a solution that has been diluted 1:2000 six times! Each drop will have about 1.5 X 10-23 moles of mercury in it. The homeopathic dose is a sublingual lozenge made by putting a drop of this solution on a tablet.
Recall that Avogadro's number, 6 X 1023, is the number of atoms in a mole, so the it would take ten drops of the homeopathic remedy to get one atom of mercury! The water used to dilute the solution could contain dozens other metals besides mercury at much higher concentration. Our ability to detect metals is in the 1012 (parts per quadrillion) range which is about ten orders of magnitude less than needed to detect mercury in the remedy solution.
In other words, the solution contains no mercury. Nor could the water hold some sort of chemical memory of the mercury, because it has been exposed to sixty or so other metals, some at much higher concentrations.
Patients will, however report health gains when homeopathic remedies are used. This happens (in my humble opinion) because the patient's trust and belief in the system causes the patients to change their reaction to the cause of the disease. I wonder how much of this effect (often misconstrued as a placebo effect) is responsible for other medical treatments?
[story from David Harris: Science news]
