The physical world follows some inviolable laws that were discovered using scientific methods. By physical world, I mean the world that can be sensed and perceived and objective measurements and interpretations made and shared with clarity. Irrespective of affiliations and disciplines and also WITHOUT contradictions, these laws serve as the foundation for any scientific enquiry. These laws are dependable because they have not contradicted applications in one field AGAINST another field. These laws have been repeatedly used to explain and predict with near certainty the interactions that exist in our physical world. It is only with these laws that the outcomes of manipulations of matter or energy can be reliably predicted and understood, and new discoveries about the physical world itself made, subject to the usual expense of time and intellect associated with scientific methods.
Science is not its infancy anymore to allow one discipline that contradicts everything else to bring it down. No discipline can any longer work by some mysterious principle that we do not know yet that will bring down everything else known in science in its entirety and solely in favor of that discipline the moment it is discovered. Common sense should tell us that such a wish or hope is scientific fallacy. This is because the INHERENT PROPERTIES OF MATTER AND ENERGY REMAIN THE SAME WHETHER WE ARE AWARE OF IT OR NOT, MEASURE IT OR NOT OR INCORPORATE IT IN OUR CALCULATIONS OR NOT. Because of this, one will never ever be able to find a mysterious principle that works for solely for one artificially created section of the physical world to the exclusion of every other artificially created discipline- whether it is allopathic medicine, traditional medicine or homeopathy or even prayers.
Clearly, in the case of Homeopathy, the carriers are inert and have been shown to not undergo any changes in their electronic configurations. One theory that water carries memory from the mother tincture was published in a top scientific journal- Nature- and later retracted, as the results could be never replicated. When it was published, it was done with a request from the Editor of the journal to the readers to “suspend judgement” until it could be replicated by others as the editor himself knew that it was contrary to everything else we know. In the author’s own words the observed effect was “like agitating a car key in the river, going miles downstream, extracting a few drops of water, and then starting one’s car with the water”. No kidding! The plain question is whether we should entertain fallacies such as this. As scientists we know the rational standards we apply while reviewing manuscripts and grant proposals. We should ask why many of us are willing to suspend judgment, when we subject a homeopathic remedy to rational analysis or use it to cure an ailment.
It could be argued that the inert carriers mediate their roles purely through an energy currency. For medical use, chemicals can be made to accept, store and release a finite amount of energy at a later time. In order to do this, energy has to be provided from some source that forces the chemicals to acquire a different state. Medical use of chemicals relying of changes in energy states has to exploit those occurring over large time scales due to the practical time demands of manufacture, marketing and consumption. Therefore, the types of energy that can be tapped to achieve this are limited. The types of energy that can have an observable impact on matter are also limited to a certain range of the light spectrum. These are established physical and chemical laws from which there is no escape and as such limitations for exploiting energy as a medium for storing information in drugs while they are manufactured for therapeutic use later on. Even if we were to narrow down to such a form of energy, irrespective of its nature it has to be universally applicable. The common sense question is how could it be that a traditional medicine that shows a dose response shows a reverse dose response as soon as it becomes a homeopathic remedy? Through friction and dilution? Don’t we mix and shake things regularly in other fields? For Homeopathy to enter the realm of science, it cannot have a wholly separate set of rules that contradicts everything else including traditional medicine.
If we were to assume that during potentisation, some form of energy mediated the transfer of the remedial properties of mother tincture to the inert carrier, the question remains how this energy simultaneously eliminated the side effects? If this were to happen with such specificity with thousands of remedies that homeopaths use for different ailments, we will also have to assume that nature selected and conserved a common chemical signature for the desirable effects and another one for the side effects for all these thousands of remedies that is also specifically recognizable and transferable without loosing information through two inert carriers. The probability of this happening in nature could be in the neighborhood of finding a single molecule of the mother tincture in a 200C dilution!
A simple test to verify whether homeopathic remedies get more potent as they get diluted would be to attempt to overdose on a homeopathic remedy that started off with a toxic material. Expectedly, a PubMed search turned up nothing. Therefore, I thought maybe I should experiment it on myself. Thankfully I did not have to spend on homeopathic remedies as this experiment has been already done in different parts of the world with expected results. Hundreds of people who took these challenges called “10:23, Homeopathy, there is nothing in it” survived without any effects of the “drugs” and proved that one cannot overdose on properly made homeopathic medicines. Apparently, here is a class of medicines from which one can never overdose. If one cannot overdose, there is no meaning in a dose or potency or remedy. Thus, homeopathy is contradicting everything fundamental in all other scientific disciplines including traditional medicine.
The Australian Government’s National Health and Medical Research Council recently concluded that “there is no good quality evidence to support the claim that homeopathy works better than a placebo” after subjecting 1800 peer reviewed manuscripts that studied the efficacy of homeopathic remedies for a variety of medical conditions to their expert committees review (National Health and Medical Research Council. 2015. NHMRC information paper: Evidence on the effectiveness of homeopathy for treating health conditions. http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/publications/ attachments/cam02a_information_paper.pdf). Their remarks were scathing: “People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness. People who are considering whether to use homeopathy should first get advice from a registered health practitioner and in the meanwhile keep taking any prescribed treatments”.
Insane ideas should be welcomed in science and subject to further tests and validation. Fallacies that contradict every established principle should be rubbished as such. Evidence and testable hypotheses are fundamental requirements for entertaining ideas. Homeopathy lacks evidence. Its hypotheses contradict everything else we know. When exploiting science for anything, it is essential to remember that we can tinker, but we cannot violate.
Syam Prasad Anand, PhD
Founder, Mainline Intellectual Property LLC
Ardmore, Philadelphia, USA
This work by ClubSciWri is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
