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Originally Posted by alach11
I'd love if someone could give me a very brief scientific explanation of how homeopathy works. I'm taking chemistry and high school now and at first glance it doesn't make any sense to me for a few reasons:
1. Diluting a substance to a greater degree should reduce it's effects, not increase them.
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Actually, this is a bit of a misunderstanding. It is very common among skeptics to say that homeopaths claim that diluting a substance makes it stronger, but this is not what homeopathic doctrine says. It says that potentization (which consists of serial steps of dilution and vigourous agitation) will purify the effects.
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2. When I look at the substances being used/diluted I don't see scientific reason as to why that particular substance would cure a disease.
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Well, no, because a "scientific reason" implies a dose-dependent pharmacological effect, and such effects vanish at or around the PPM level for all but the most potent substances (way below the Avoadro limit). However, homeopathic doctrine works in another way: It expects the medicine to mimick the disease. While the founder, Hahnemann, does not actually mention this, present day homeopaths tend to assume that there is some kind of resonance phenomenon at play.
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3. When looking at things that are diluted to a ratio of 1 x 10^24 or higher wouldn't that mean you likely have only a few molecules of the substance in the actual treatment/medicine? How could this be enough to cure someone of a disease? And if it's diluted significantly higher like around 100, the odds of there being a single molecule of the substance in your treatment are incredibly small.
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Most homeopaths assume that some kind of essence of the original substance is transferred to the carrier. That is why many call it an "energy based" medicine.
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I've only just taken an interest in this today and may have a lot of things wrong. Right now the only reason I can think of it working is a placebo effect, but any simple further explanation of how homeopathy works would be greatly appreciated.
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Besides placebo effect, there are several other rational explanations for why homeopathy is perceived to work:
- Reporting bias: If you read the extensive base of case accounts, you will soon notice that homeopaths tend to attribute all positive observations to the remedy, and all negative observations to other things.
- Cherrypicking: Even the more extensive collections of case acounts are obviously incomplete. For instance, Hahnemann himself only describes a few hundred cases, that from several decades of practicing. Obviously, even if he treated jsut a single patient per day, he must have hanlded thousands of cases. This begs the question: Did he leave out all those that did not show a positive result?
- Concurrent treatment: Since homeopathy has always been an alternative treatment, we have to assume that many patients were receiving conventional or other treatment concurrently.
- Malpractice by conventional practitioners: Sad as it is, various degrees of malpractice occurs, and not that infrequently. People get the wrong medicine, they get too much, or they get it for too long. Such patients are very likely to get disenchanted with conventional medicine, and look to alternatives. If they have their faulty prescription replaced with effectless homeopathic medicine, they are likely to get better.
- Poor side effect management: Related to the group mentioned above are patients who may get he right conventional medicine, but experience strong side effects. For some patients, the side effects may be perceived worse than the disease. If they change to homeopathy, they will report an improvement.
- Self-limiting conditions: Remember the old joke: "This will cure your cold in 7 days, otherwise it could take a whole week to get well." After all, most diseases are neither fatal nor chronical; even left without any treatment at all, most people will recover from most diseases. Homeopathic treatment often takes quite some time; a remedy is prescribed, and if it doesn't help, the patient gets another, etc. Sooner or later, the patient recovers, and the homeopath writes up another homeopathic cure.
- Fabrication: Unfortunately, some homeopaths will fabricate cures. I have caught some in doing that. I think very few totally fabricate reports, but I have seen homeopaths report cures of e.g. cancer, and when you start to go into the details, it turns out that there was no positive diagnosis of cancer, and in fact the symptoms reported could easily be something else.
Hans