At 08:03 13-05-01, you wrote:
>Yes indeed!
>
>Michael Pugliese wrote:
>
> > Acupuncture has done me some good, others I know, and millions I don't.
> > But, homeopathy?!
>
>Homeopathy is founded on the proposition that nothing can make something
>happen.
>
>Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
Yeah, well. I suppose folks used to sn-word at the idea that invisible bugs might cause disease, too. Everyone KNEW it was ill winds, after all.
I'm as sceptical as the next guy when it comes to new-age cures, but homeopathy's no new-age cure. It's been around for almost two hundred years now, and that's in spite of the resistance of the scientific and medical community, and because of homeopathy's effectiveness. Fur's I can tell.
In the mid-1980s Professor Jaques Benveniste of the French Medical Research Council began to wonder whether we shouldn't look to physics to explain the function of homeopathy, rather than chemistry (the basis for the function of allopathic medicine). He lost his lab and his reputation for his pains. But a couple of months ago he must have found himself in some measure vindicated: looks like it's just possible that he may be right in holding that what a diseased body wants is the right signal.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4152521,00.html
Thanks for the memory
Lionel Milgrom Guardian Thursday March 15, 2001
About homeopathy, Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen's University Belfast is, like most scientists, deeply sceptical. That a medicinal compound diluted out of existence should still exert a therapeutic effect is an affront to conventional biochemistry and pharmacology, based as they are on direct and palpable molecular events. The same goes for a possible explanation of how homoeopathy works: that water somehow retains a "memory" of things once dissolved in it. This last notion, famously promoted by French biologist Dr Jacques Benveniste, cost him his laboratories, his funding, and ultimately his international scientific credibility. However, it did not deter Professor Ennis who, being a scientist, was not afraid to try to prove Benveniste wrong. So, more than a decade after Benveniste's excommunication from the scientific mainstream, she jumped at the chance to join a large pan-European research team, hoping finally to lay the Benveniste "heresy" to rest. But she was in for a shock: for the team's latest results controversially now suggest that Benveniste might have been right all along. [...] The result, shortly to be published in Inflammation Research, was the same: histamine solutions, both at pharmacological concentrations and diluted out of existence, lead to statistically significant inhibition of basophile activation by aIgE, confirming previous work in this area. "Despite my reservations against the science of homoeopathy," says Ennis, "the results compel me to suspend my disbelief and to start searching for a rational explanation for our findings." She is at pains to point out that the pan-European team have not reproduced Benveniste's findings nor attempted to do so. Jacques Benveniste is unimpressed. "They've arrived at precisely where we started 12 years ago!" he says. Benveniste believes he already knows what constitutes the water-memory effect and claims to be able to record and transmit the "signals" of biochemical substances around the world via the internet. These, he claims, cause changes in biological tissues as if the substance was actually present. The consequences for science if Benveniste and Ennis are right could be earth shattering, requiring a complete re-evaluation of how we understand the workings of chemistry, biochemistry, and pharmacology. One thing however seems certain. Either Benveniste will now be brought in from the cold, or Professor Ennis and the rest of the scientists involved in the pan-European experiment could be joining him there.
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There's an excellent analysis of the issues, including those brought up by Benveniste and co., by Paul Callinan M.Sc. N.D. D.Hom. Ph D. at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~daood/paulc.htm. Explaining the theory of the physics of homeopathy he says: "It is proposed that during the collision process, vibratory energy is exchanged between the source drug and the water, and that the water is left with a vibratory imprint of the drug. Further succussion makes the imprint deeper, which explains why the medicines are regarded as acting more strongly as the dilution increases. Furthermore it is not just energy which is being stored, it is proposed, but information, differing from one remedy to another depending on the source substance used, with every substance leaving a different vibratory signature in the water molecule. In this way homoeopathic medicine is seen as carrying information into the body when it is taken in dose form, perhaps as biological instructions."
Check out, too, Rolland Conte (an economist) and Henri Berliocchi, a mathematician (ah yes, the old combo) who are calling the new practice -- hold onto your seats -- "quantal medicine". Medicine Quantale is at www.mql.com/pozier.htm.
In case you find intriguing Benveniste's claim that he can transmit biochemical signals digitally, here's another URL: http://www.digibio.com/. (...Guy's barking mad, and no mistake. Then again, that could probably be said of a lot of the smartest people we know.)
For those who are inclined to attribute all homeopathic cures to the placebo effect, a 1997 study done by a bunch of high-falutin' white coats at the Centre for Complementary Medicine Research, Technische Universität/Ludwig-Maximillans-Universität in Munich, and published in the prestigious _Lancet_, concluded cautiously: "The results of our meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homeopathy are completely due to placebo. However, we found insufficient evidence from these studies that homeopathy is clearly efficacious for any single clinical condition. Further research on homeopathy is warranted provided it is rigorous and systematic." (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/htbin-post/Entrez/query?uid=9310601&form=6&db=m&Dopt=b ) The fact that they found, in their second sentence, no evidence for the efficacy that they reluctantly admitted to in the first may, I say may mean that they were looking for evidence in all the wrong places.
Whatever one may think of it, homeopathy is not to be lumped with herbal, Ayurvedic or any other medical practice that attempts to correct disease by interfering with the disease itself. Homeopathy, for better or worse, aims to trigger the body into performing its own cure. How the practice performs this feat has yet to be proven, true enough, but the reason that (when it works) it appears to work like magic may have to do with this peculiar way of operating. I once used homeopathy successfully on a couple of unsuspecting 3-day-old lambs that were dying of pneumonia, and again on a sheepdog with incipient arthritis; both cures seemed nothing short of miraculous in their speed and permanence. And then there's the story of my eighty-year-old mother, who had been placed on one antibiotic after another over a period of years in a vain attempt to free her of a severe recurrent infection that kept her in bed for days at a time. In the midst of an attack of this ailment she was finally induced by a homeopath friend to try some of his voodoo and, though she huff-huffed at this "nonsense" even while swallowing the new medicine, she was completely cured that afternoon by a few little white pills that as Christopher, with some justification, points out, have nothing in them.
Explain the phenom as you will, I'm inclined to cut the new thinkers a bit of slack.
Naturally there are not-so-good and terrible homeopaths just as there are bad and indifferent allopaths. But it's amazing to me how much pain, financial drain and heartbreak people will put up with, being wrongly diagnosed and treated by a series of traditional healers (MDs), whereas two unsuccessful visits to a single homeopath will persuade them that the entire practice is a fraud. One thing you can be sure of, at any rate: ain't no homeopath gonna kill ya.
And, like it or not, the wonderful thing about the homeopathy is, no one can make a lot of money off of it. (Hey, do you suppose THAT might have something to do with the fact that the pharmo-medical mafia has done so much to discredit it?) Anyone can make homeopathic remedies in their own kitchen. Get a minuscule amount of the right herb, shake it the prescribed number of times in water, dilute by the rules, shake by the rules, dilute, shake, dilute, shake, etc, and voila.
Take that, Glaxo Wellcome.
Joanna S.
www.overlookhouse.com