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Homeopathy gets scientific boost

  
 
grant
13:32 / 09.11.01
Dilute! Dilute! Dilute!

From The New Scientist article:

quote:What he discovered was a phenomenon new to chemistry. "When he diluted the solution, the size of the fullerene particles increased," says Geckeler. "It was completely counterintuitive," he says.

snip

Dilution typically made the molecules cluster into aggregates five to 10 times as big as those in the original solutions. The growth was not linear, and it depended on the concentration of the original.

snip

But the finding may provide a mechanism for how some homeopathic medicines work - something that has defied scientific explanation till now. Diluting a remedy may increase the size of the particles to the point when they become biologically active.


[ 09-11-2001: Message edited by: grant ]
 
 
Chuckling Duck
15:23 / 09.11.01
Different snips, same article.

quote:... the finding...echoes the controversial claims of French immunologist Jacques Benveniste. In 1988, Benveniste claimed in a Nature paper that a solution that had once contained antibodies still activated human white blood cells. Benveniste claimed the solution still worked because it contained ghostly "imprints" in the water structure where the antibodies had been. Other researchers failed to reproduce Benveniste's experiments...

Geckeler and Samal are now anxious that other researchers follow up their work. "We want people to repeat it," says Geckeler. "If it's confirmed it will be groundbreaking".
 
 
Hush
08:33 / 15.11.01
And several weeks earlier, same publication, different research (can't find it know - I will look on the web site)

Statistical indications of the efficacy of homeopathic treatment, based on test use.
 
 
grant
13:18 / 15.11.01
One of the really fascinating things about this finding is that it's about something chemists and alchemists have been doing for thousands of years - diluting solutions with water.

You'd think we know everything there is to know about that by now....
 
 
grant
14:35 / 30.01.02
I'm bumping this up to avoid littering the free energy thread.

As far as two minutes of searching on google can tell, there hasn't been a repeat experiment yet (although I wouldn't expect one so soon anyway).

It's also worth pointing out that Louis Pasteur - a chemist, not a doctor - was operating on homeopathic principles when he invented the vaccine.
 
 
MJ-12
14:58 / 30.01.02
Yes, but you need to have molecules present to cluster, which in typical homeopathic dilutions, is not the case.
 
 
grant
16:03 / 30.01.02
Beg pardon?
 
 
MJ-12
16:20 / 30.01.02
Homeopathic dilutions often end up to the point of one part active ingredient per 10^15 or more parts of what they're disolved in. It's pretty unlikely you're taking in much of the advertised substance. So,
quote: Diluting a remedy may increase the size of the particles to the point when they become biologically active.
and/or homeopathy may work quite well indeed, but one does not follow from the other.
 
 
Lionheart
17:25 / 30.01.02
MJ-12: Explain what you just said.

What do you mean by "one does not follow the other". What doesn't follow the other?

And explain your first statement in which you said that homeopathic solutions have no molecules left to cluster.


Also, off topic. Water might be able to contain "essense". I remember Michio Kaku going on about how physicists now believe that there's a shitload of dark energy in the uinverse. Energy that's there but which we can't detect with modern instruments. It might be possible that water does get encoded with essense of other matter because of some energy interaction.

Or maybe it has something to do with some, maybe ass-of-yet unknown effect of Bell's Theorem.
 
 
MJ-12
17:32 / 30.01.02
The initial article suggests that more diffuse solutions lead to interesting clustering effects with some particle sizes.
However, at homeopathic dilutions, one would have to consume a swimming pool worth of solution to reliably have contact with anything other than the suspending medium, so the effect described is essentially irrelevant to a discussion of homeopathy.

Which is not to say that homeopathy doesn't work, but that the one can't draw the conclusion that this effect has anything to do with it's efficacy.
 
 
The Monkey
19:57 / 30.01.02
MJ-12:

At 10^15, think less "swimming pool" and more "the Pacific." Consider further that typically homeopathic solutions are dripped onto dextrose or some other sugar.

general:

anyway, going back to the original post, barring the movement over to more modern homeopathic theory of water imprint....
let's say the efficacy--biological activity--of the molecules is the product of clustering due to dilution.

in homeopathy, that entire vat of water with one drop of "active agent" is parcelled out as medicine...constituting hundreds of doses.
given only the statement of the original article, aren't you shit out of luck if you don't have the drop with the clusters in it?
Ethical question start here...

This is part of why the "afterimage" theory was invented...someone did the math of dilutions versus quantity of medicine versus Avagadro's number. Mathematically, yours odds of getting one molecule of medicine was tiny....

Furthermore--the first post mentions they used fullerenes--molecules made entirely of carbon lattices (with the occasional hydrogen), which have incredibly unusual electrostatic (and pretty much everything else) properties.
Most of the agents used in homeopathic dilutions are organic molecules--composed primarily of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen--and, in terms of ionic attraction and electrostatics, are an entirely different kettle of fish than a fullerene. That both have carbon doesn't say a lot.
So the original article could be a legit discovery about fullerenes, but doesn't necessarily carry over to homeopathy, unless the prescription happens to be for buckministerfullerene.

Furthermore, if I remember my biochem correctly, lipids (carbon-hydrogen chain-based molecules) nonpolar, thus are hydrophobic (due the sum configuration of the electron shells, bonding, etc.)
Dropped in water, lipids form miceles (sp? basically a hollow sphere) to minimize contact between the nonpolar carbon-chain and the covalent-but-polar water (h2o)

This is the basis for the cell wall of pretty much all eukaryotes...a phospholipid--a really polar molecule (po4) glued to the end of a nonpolar chain of carbon, forms a double-side micelle.

fullerenes are also carbon aggregates with a wee bit o' hydrogen , and should thus be nonpolar, barring alteration through chemical rxn (addition of a oxygen, phosphor group, etc.). Hence their "clustering" may be a product of a similar function to micelle-formation in chain-lipids.

Will try and find/make molecular diagrams for some of what I'm talking about.

[ 30-01-2002: Message edited by: [infinite monkeys] ]
 
 
The Monkey
20:03 / 30.01.02
Would like to hear more about "dark energy" theory, espe if relates directly to water-encodation theory.

must admit that Mason Lang's homeopathic Grail idea has great allure...PhD in a can! especially alluring given completely shite environment of Unviersity of Chicago....

already have awkward question, though: if we can't detect "dark energy" isn't it a wee bit of an empty set?

[ 30-01-2002: Message edited by: [infinite monkeys] ]
 
 
The Monkey
20:24 / 30.01.02
More homeopathic questions/skepticism:

Okay on to the "water encodation" theory:

If water somehow retains the shape of molecule that was in it, what about the ghosts of the last time the water was piss? No, I mean this seriously.

What is the extent of the "molecular echo" effect? Do ions leave traces, or only organic molecules? Is the effect permanent or of limited duration? Can the afterimages be removed from water, and how? Would boiling (agitation of the molecules of h2o)? How would the introduction of other chemicals affect the afterimage? can an afterimage solution contain more than one molecular afterimage?
How does one measure the concentration of such an afterimage in h2o? if the afterimage, as is purported, has the same effect as the molecular agent, and the agent has efficacy because of its great dilution, how does one control the dilution of the afterimage (yet this ghost is supposedly present in every dose)? Considering that many of the active agents in homeopathy are, in fact, poisons, wouldn't the after-image be just as poisonous as the real thing in administered in the wrong concentration?

Now the bigger question: explain how the afterimage is biologically active.

The cell communicates with its environment and other cells via three or four simple mechanisms, all of which involve chemical exchange. Think in terms of ions channels, chemoreceptors, and hormones (which cross the membrane and enter the nucleus). Water, it should be noted, passes through the cell membrane constantly.

Where is the sight of homeopathic action, then? Since the various agents in their atomic forms act at radically different sites in the cell, is this also true of the infused h2o? if so, how does the "absence" of a molecule bind with a chemoreceptor site (which functions by deformation of the receptor protein by the agent's Van der Waals forces and electrostatic bonding/attraction/repulsion)?
 
 
MJ-12
09:32 / 31.01.02
quote:Originally posted by [infinite monkeys]:
MJ-12:

At 10^15, think less "swimming pool" and more "the Pacific." Consider further that typically homeopathic solutions are dripped onto dextrose or some other sugar.

[ 30-01-2002: Message edited by: [infinite monkeys] ]

yes, but when you say "pacific ocean" no one believes you. "swimming pool" is a concept people can grasp. Similarly some solutions are closer 1 pp 10^40, but no one can get their head around that.
 
 
Lionheart
09:32 / 31.01.02
now the other thing I don't understand is the 10*15 number. Where'd you get it from?

Oh, and if energy is encoded then maybe it's decoded in evaporation and/or freezing. (Change of state.)
 
 
The Monkey
09:32 / 31.01.02
10^15 is short-hand for a homeopathic dilution of:

1 part active agent

per

1,000,000,000,000,000 (ten to the fifteenth power) parts water.

Hence the swimming pool/Pacific ocean cracks.
10^15 is standard operating dilution for a homeopathic tonic...or maybe it's only 10^10.
Some tonics go up to 10^40.

Homeopathic pharmacists end up spending most of their time doing the same thing over and over:
mix 1 part agent, ten parts water...take one tenth of product, dilute nine parts water...[repeat fifteen times].

On top on which, many homeopathic medicines are lozenges of sugar, atop which is dripped a single drop of a 10^15 agent solution.

And if the patient doesn't respond to the medicine, or gets worse, you're supposed to dilute the agent more.

Hence the central importance of the "water encodation" theory to modern homeopathy. Prior to molecular/atomic models of chemical agents and Avagadro's Number and a couple of other physics/chem discoveries, it was just thought that the active agent dispersed equally throughout the water--perfectly distributed.
Homeopathy was based on that idea that if a lot could kill, a little could cure, which is why you run into all of the active agents in homeopathy being toxins/poisons/irritants of some kind...nettle juice for rashes, etc.
Given the time that homeopathy was invented, these were both clever thoughts. You can even see how this theory sort of flows into Pasteur and Jenner and the principle of innoculation.

Modern homeopaths came up with the idea of the water encoding to compensate for new data, but noone's ever pukka proved the theory. There were serious questions about the white blood cell/antibody fellow and how efficiently he removed the antibody agent, and repititions didn't get the same activation.

Anyway, bravo Geckeler/Samal...i'm a big fan of fullerene chemistry...fascinating molecules. In the Invisibles, when they talk about injecting the Outer Church into someone and "a universe smaller than an atom" it always gets me thinking about buckyballs and whatnot.

Love and Kisses from the Outer Church,
[smack]
 
 
Enamon
09:32 / 31.01.02
Oh this is just too funny. I think that you all (including whoever wrote the New Scientist article) are missing the point. You are debating wether homeopathy is valid or not by examining the given explanation for its principle. A good analogy for this? Imagine a group of literary scholars attempting to criticize a novel's plot by examining its grammar. We are all missing the point! The first question that should be asked is not:

"How can a substance, so highly diluted, have any effect on a biological organism?"

When the question should be:

"In a clinical trial do the effects of an homeopathic remedy significantly outweigh the effects of a placebo?"

Or in plain English:

"Does homeopathy work?"

Now, on that point, I do recall there being a link on Barbelith (possibly in a previous incarnation) pointing to a news article (possibly New Scientist) which tells of an experiment (possibly... just kidding ) that, to everyone's surprise, demonstrated that a homeopathic solution did indeed cause some sort of a biological reaction. I do not remember the exact details, however looking up Homeopathy in the New Scientist index is bound to bring up something.

Still, I must say that the above was not a clinical trial. I have no time now to look for studies portraying the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of homeopathic remedies in patient studies. It is 3am. I must sleep. Still, you have Google! or whatever other search engine you use. Look it up!
 
 
Enamon
09:32 / 31.01.02
Oh I couldn't resist...

quote:Originally posted by [infinite monkeys]:
10^15 is short-hand for a homeopathic dilution of:

1 part active agent

per

1,000,000,000,000,000 (ten to the fifteenth power) parts water.

Hence the swimming pool/Pacific ocean cracks.
10^15 is standard operating dilution for a homeopathic tonic...or maybe it's only 10^10.
Some tonics go up to 10^40.


References please?
 
 
The Monkey
09:32 / 31.01.02
Oh yes you could have.

The reason clinical trials weren't brought up is because we aren't discussing an article about a clinical trial. We were talking about the philosophic/scientific idea of water encodation, as it came up relative to Geckeler/Samal's claim about fullerene particle clustering/growth in an increasingly dilute solution. I asked a lot of open questions about homeopathy to see if anyone would answer...I know the chem position on why it probably wouldn't work, but I'd like to hear the other side of the argument.

And my reference is the man himself, Hahnemann, 1789 and 1796, echoed in "Voodoo Science," Dr. Robert L Park, 2000.
Also, http://www.homeopathyhome.com/reference/articles/homeolist_faq.shtml

Oo, and how 'bout a little history, while we're at it. http://www.homeopathic.com/intro/his.htm

By the way, you can analyze/criticize a book's plot by its grammatical structures.
Go read Dostoyevski in Russian...then we'll talk.
 
 
The Monkey
09:32 / 31.01.02
And you don't get points for utilitarianism or literalism. So there!

Hugs and Kisses from the Outer Church,
[smack]
 
 
grant
14:14 / 31.01.02
quote:Originally posted by [infinite monkeys]:
Furthermore--the first post mentions they used fullerenes--molecules made entirely of carbon lattices (with the occasional hydrogen), which have incredibly unusual electrostatic (and pretty much everything else) properties.
Most of the agents used in homeopathic dilutions are organic molecules--composed primarily of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen--and, in terms of ionic attraction and electrostatics, are an entirely different kettle of fish than a fullerene.


from the article (this link still works):

quote:To make the otherwise insoluble buckyball {i.e., fullerene} dissolve in water, the chemists had mixed it with a circular sugar-like molecule called a cyclodextrin. When they did the same experiments with just cyclodextrin molecules, they found they behaved the same way. So did the organic molecule sodium guanosine monophosphate, DNA and plain old sodium chloride. {italics mine}

Also, I'm not sure you'd be able to miss a molecule in the Pacific Ocean if it was, say, the size of Hawaii. I realize this is stretching the theory out past where the experiment went, but then again, I really don't think Geckeler was doing 10^15 extractions.
Even bearing that in mind: quoteilution typically made the molecules cluster into aggregates five to 10 times as big as those in the original solutions. The growth was not linear, and it depended on the concentration of the original.

"The history of the solution is important. The more dilute it starts, the larger the aggregates," says Geckeler.


So by re-diluting and re-diluting, you're actually making larger molecule aggregates - which seems like it'd increase the chance of getting the goods floating in your particular flask, not decrease it. Unless the homeopaths are putting the remedies in a centrifuge between dilutions or something. Rather than shaking it violently. (That link, from sceptical answerman Cecil Adams, also has the maths of the dilutions down. And I agree with him that a 200x remedy seems pretty darn far fetched. Personally, I've only encountered remedies in the 4-6x dilution range, but this page does say 15x solutions are used for 'severe conditions.')

[ 31-01-2002: Message edited by: grant ]
 
 
MJ-12
14:52 / 31.01.02
quote:So by re-diluting and re-diluting, you're actually making larger molecule aggregates - which seems like it'd increase the chance of getting the goods floating in your particular flask, not decrease it.

the more aggregated the molecules are in a given are, the more area is empty (b), so it actually reduces your chances of getting the goods further than a random distribution(a).

  
 
grant
16:10 / 31.01.02
I get that, but I'm wondering just how concentrated the molecules are in the beginning solution, since they probably don't all aggregate into a single molecule.

How many molecules of substance x are in a single drop?
 
 
MJ-12
17:26 / 31.01.02
I'm not certain that that would make a difference. If you increase local concentration regardless of the baseline level, concentration will drop off elsewhere, and you're already looking at a fairly attenuated solution. OTOH, it might be that the trad level of dilution are not extreme enough, and the reduced levels outside the clusters are what give it the kick. Assuming there's anything there.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
13:34 / 15.06.07
Bumpity. Sloooow day at work got me looking at my crank science links. What do I find? This paper (pdf) by a Prof Rustum Roy, a solid state physicist and chemist.

A juicy quote:

This paper does not deal in any way with, and has no bearing whatsoever on, the clinical efficacy of any homeopathic remedy. However, it does definitively demolish the objection against homeopathy, when such is based on the wholly incorrect claim that since there is no difference in composition between a remedy and the pure water used, there can be no differences at all between them. We show the untenability of this claim against the central paradigm of materials science that it is structure (not composition) that (largely) controls properties, and structures can easily be changed in inorganic phases without any change of composition. The burden of proof on critics of homeopathy is to establish that the structure of the processed remedy is not different from the original solvent.
 
 
Evil Scientist
13:38 / 15.06.07
The burden of proof is still on the supporters of it to prove it actually works though.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
13:44 / 15.06.07
If you're talking about clinical efficacy you're right. But, the authors explicitly say the paper isn't about that, it's about removing that particular objection (dilutions can't work - see upthread) from the debate.
 
 
DecayingInsect
13:28 / 17.06.07
As the arguments over clinical trials are apt to go round in circles what is needed is evidence of a reproducible effect from an in vitro model: that's why the Benveniste affair was such a big deal.

This review article looks like a useful summary of the state-of-play as of last year.
 
 
EvskiG
17:51 / 19.06.07
The burden of proof is still on the supporters of it to prove it actually works though.

More than that. The burden of proof is still on the supporters of it to prove it actually works better than a placebo in a double-blind test.
 
 
DecayingInsect
10:25 / 22.06.07
If you do a PubMed search for homeopathy double blind you can find reports on randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials of homeopathic therapies, some claiming to have found an effect.

In 2005 the Lancet published a meta-analysis of over 100 such clinical trials and concluded that no effect greater than placebo could be demonstrated (article unfortunately not available free online).

Then articles appeared attacking the Lancet's methodology, for example here;
thus the medical consensus was not advanced.
 
 
grant
14:02 / 22.06.07
Here's a related discussion that never got off the ground:
Hormesis, the principle that small doses of poisons are good for you (that I believe *has* been proven in double-blind studies).
 
 
EvskiG
14:38 / 22.06.07
Then articles appeared attacking the Lancet's methodology, for example here; thus the medical consensus was not advanced.

That's not necessarily true.

If the Lancet is well-respected and its methodology generally is accepted as scientifically valid, and the articles attacking its methodology are from less respected, interested parties using a more suspect analysis (and I'm not saying this is or isn't the case, since I haven't reviewed the literature), then the Lancet's article did in fact advance the medical consensus.

Just like a few articles sponsored by oil companies don't necessarily refute the scientific consensus on global warming.
 
 
grant
14:40 / 10.08.07
Weird - did you know the same people who publish Nature also publish a peer-reviewed journal called Homeopathy?

They haven't discovered anything conclusive about how extreme dilution works.

What's interesting is that they should have, one way or another.

Check out this opinion piece from Nature.

The more they look at water molecules, the weirder water gets.

There are many good reasons — too many to fit in this column — to doubt that water molecules in the liquid state could mimic the behaviour of antibodies or other complex biomolecules in a way that persists through dilution after dilution. As water expert José Teixeira of the French nuclear research organisation's Saclay laboratories, outside Paris, says in the sceptic's perspective he provides in the Homeopathy special issue, "Any interpretation calling for 'memory' effects in pure water must be totally excluded." But the idea won't be squashed that easily, as some of the other papers show.

These papers report several experimental results that, at face value, are intriguing and puzzling. Louis Rey, a private researcher in Switzerland, reports that salt solutions show markedly different thermoluminescence signals, for different homeopathic dilutions, when frozen and then rewarmed. Bohumil Vybíral and Pavel Voráček of the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic describe curious viscosity changes in water left to stand undisturbed. And Benveniste's collaborator Yolène Thomas, of the Andre Lwoff Institute in Villejuif, outside Paris, reports some of the results of radiofrequency 'programming' of water with specific biomolecular behaviour, including the induction of Escherichia coli-like 'signals', the inhibition of protein coagulation, and blood-vessel dilation in a guinea pig heart.

The volume is, in other words, a cabinet of curiosities.

The author of the piece is fairly sure the homeopaths have got it all wrong - but also points out that something is going on.
 
 
delta
15:46 / 10.08.07
As a short general note futher to the above- it occurs to me that water is probably one of the most studied compounds on earth. That's not empirical, just intuition. If true though, and we discover that water does all kinds of things that we don't expect it to, what does that say about the chemistry of the world we live in?
 
  
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