the 4 rules of homeopathy:
That would be ok, except that it is a very lucrative industry, with practitioners charging small fortunes for their services and pharmaceutical companies charging inflated prices for these glorified vials of water. I call into question the ethics of these practitioners of homeopathy. These are people who financially take advantage of people who are suffering from all kinds of real medical conditions who don't know that they are being ripped off from the git-go by quack doctors. They have faith that the "doctor" knows something about their condition. Afraid and desperate, they blindly accept the regimen of remedies the "doctor" prescribes. (A drowning man will reach out for even the edge of a sword).
Shame on homeopaths for not being able (or willing) to rationally or scientifically recognize the discipline for what it really is (i.e. bullshit). Any doctor for whom the mystical (or "unexplained") aspects of homeopathy would trump empirical analysis is either not terribly bright, or is otherwise a mountebank, an exemplar of greed and avarice.
Take your pick.
1 - The proving - consists of taking a substance (we'll call it substance Z) and giving it to a patient who is "well". That person then would show symptoms a, b, and c resulting from the ingestion of the solution . . .I could go on, but I think this suffices for me to conclude that homeopathy is, to borrow a phrase from Penn & Teller, just so much bullshit. At best, it can be categorized as some kind of "placebo" medicine.an example: let's say substance Z is some extract from the milkweed plant. The patient is given a dose of this extract after which the person develops symptoms: maybe his face turns all red and he develops a massive headache and every half hour or so he has a fainting spell (this example is just a theoretical one to show the reasoning for how homeopathy "works"; i.e., I don't know what the effects of milkweed on a "well" person would be, but it makes no difference for my illustration).The practitioner then writes the resulting symptoms down in his database for later cross-referencing.
The first red flag that goes up for me is the description of a "well" individual. What criteria is being used here?
A second concern is: how did practitioners once upon a time determine what substances were to be tested in provings? I mean, could I give a mercury compound or arsenic or some other such nasty stuff to a patient to see what symptoms they develop? You could conclude that I'm being cynical in asking this, but in pre-modern times, when we had an incomplete and superstitious understanding of toxicology and pathology, such experimentation would not seem as sinister as it would to us; it would be simple trying-out of remedies. In this light I ask myself how many people were essentially poisoned to death by their well-meaning killers in the early stages of the development of this technique.
2 - A patient walks into the homeopath's office and complains of having symptoms which include: face turning red, headache, and regular fainting spells. The practitioner then consults his list of "provings" and finds that a substance that caused such symptoms in a "well" individual was an extraction of milkweed, and thus chooses this substance as the homeopathic treatment to try on the patient. A question that asks itself here for me is: being that there are probably many substances that are known to cause headaches and fainting and reddish complexion, what criteria is used to determine which of these will be selected as the subtance to try in any particular case? Will another substance work equally well if the symptoms it causes are similar to those that extract-of-milkweed affect in an individual?
3 - The patient is given an "attenuated" (diluted) solution of the substance chosen. How diluted? Well, to get an idea of the magnitudes involved will necessitate a little math. First, we take one part of the milkweed extract and mix it in ten parts of water. Then we "succuss" the solution by vigorously shaking the vial containing the solution ten times in each of the three dimensional axes, that is, up and down ten times, right and left ten times and finally forward and back ten times (they call this "succussion", I call it "shaking"). This solution is not an X1 solution, which simply means that it is one part in "10 to the power of 1". This solution is way too strong, however. So we take this X1 solution and dilute it into ten parts of water again, shake it in the three directions again, and we now have an X2 solution (one part in 10 to the 2 - or one in 100). This dilution is still much too strong for homeopathic use.
Something that troubles me about this technique of preparation of homeopathic remedies is the adoption of euphemistic language and mystical implications to lend creedence to the effectiveness of the resulting product. Two brief examples will suffice for now:a - Why use the word "succussion" instead of "shaking" or "attenuation" instead of "diluting" to describe the mixing process? I think this is based on guile, in order to make it seem more important, more mystical, than merely shaking or mixing it up. (I am reminded of a Frank Zappa tune in which the main character who is a charlatan fortuneteller, proclaims, "I wrapped a newspaper around my head {a makeshift turban?} so it looked like I was deep)."
b - I ask myself if there is any statistical difference regarding what direction a substance is shaken in determining the concentration of dilution. Is there any statistical evidence for determining how many times it should be shaken to produce a better solution? In light of this, the method of succussion seems to me like a use of applied numerology, just so much obsfucation in order to make the method seem systematic and therefore somehow more "scientific".
4 - It thus turns out that the fourth rule of homeopathy is that the more dilute the homeopathic preparation is, the more effective it will be. In fact, homeopaths prefer solutions of 20X or more as treatments. This means 10 to the power of 20, 30 or considerably more! (that is, a 1 followed by more than twenty zeroes).
This is a huge problem statistically (and even ethically, I will add).
Here I have to use a little elementary chemistry to illustrate my point:
In the field of chemistry, it was determined by a man named Avogadro in 1811 that the pressure excerted by a gas in a system is proportional to the number of molecules of that gas contained in that system. I won't go into great detail here, but the conclusion was that equal volumes of different gases contain pretty much equal numbers of molecules of those gases. A special term was coined to denote the number of molecules of a given gas in 1cm³ (1 CC or centimeter squared). It was called a "mole" of a substance and this quantity was calculated to be 6.0221367 multiplied by 10²³. This constant was then subsequently used to measure different chemical qualities such as dilutions (molarities, molalities, et al) of substances other than gases.
What does this means in terms of homeopathic "attenuation"?
Well, say you have a 24X homeopathic preparation. This means that in such a dilution, there is a one in ten probability that there remains even one molecule of the original pathogen in supension in the solution.
But a 24X attenuation is not as powerful as a 30X solution according to homeopathic theory. One homeopathic remedy for flu symptoms that is sold "over-the-counter" in my neighborhood pharmacy claims to be a 30X preparation.
Let's see, this means that the probability of there being a molecule of whatever relevant substance (in this case, arsenious acid) remaining in solution would be a one-in-one-milllion chance (or 10 to the 7th power).
But such a solution is STILL not powerful enough for some homeopathic preparations! One remedy that is also sold over-the-counter is a sleep aid which is categorized as a 1500X (!!!) attenuation. Wow! That must be some truly powerful stuff!
But what does this mean statistically? That the chance of there being one molecule of the relevant substance (in this case caffeine - think about it) remaining in solution is about one in ten to the 1477th power. It is difficult to get a mental idea of this kind of magnitude, so an analogy is in order:Imagine that you took a single grain of rice, ground it up, and then mixed it in a volume of water the size of our solar system (before Pluto was demoted as a planet, even!). I'm serious. Not only is the magnitude of the solution breathtakingly ludicrous, but this also means that it underwent fifteen hundred "succussions" in the process of being prepared, which means that, statistically, 44310 of the shakes it got en route to becoming such a powerful remedy were pretty much superfluous, for it was just water that was being shaken after the first 690 shakes were done.
That would be ok, except that it is a very lucrative industry, with practitioners charging small fortunes for their services and pharmaceutical companies charging inflated prices for these glorified vials of water. I call into question the ethics of these practitioners of homeopathy. These are people who financially take advantage of people who are suffering from all kinds of real medical conditions who don't know that they are being ripped off from the git-go by quack doctors. They have faith that the "doctor" knows something about their condition. Afraid and desperate, they blindly accept the regimen of remedies the "doctor" prescribes. (A drowning man will reach out for even the edge of a sword).
Shame on homeopaths for not being able (or willing) to rationally or scientifically recognize the discipline for what it really is (i.e. bullshit). Any doctor for whom the mystical (or "unexplained") aspects of homeopathy would trump empirical analysis is either not terribly bright, or is otherwise a mountebank, an exemplar of greed and avarice.
Take your pick.
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