In the latest version of the New Scientist (http://www.netscientist.com), Jane Seymour reports a study done at Queens University, Belfast by Madeleine Ennis, professor of immunopharmacology. She took a series of “highly dilute” solutions of histamine (described in the article as “well into the homeopathic range”, which means (or should mean) that there isn’t even a single histamine molecule left in the damn thing), and a series of controls, and sent them off to four separate research centers to test them on human basophils. Basophils are (from the article) white blood cells that release histamine; histamine inhibits the response (so they don’t release too much). All four centers found that the ultra-dilute solutions inhibited histamine release from the basophils, and three out of the four found that the effect was statistically significant when compared to controls. (Note: there was no label difference between the samples that the labs could distinguish; the test was double blind).
Ouch. Chemically, there is no damn difference between the homeopathic solutions and the contols. None. They are diluted to the point where there is no histamine left. Yet they react differently in laboratory tests.
The results are due to be published in Inflammation Research this summer.
OK, Lancet has kind of said that homeopathic medicine might have something to it (vol 350, p. 834); however, at present I am aware of no double blind clinical study that establishes the effectiveness of homeopathic preparations. Homeopaths dismiss this by saying that homeopathic prescription must be done individually, and cannot be compared against allopathic preparations head to head, and a paper in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine seems to agree (if you think that is a real journal; it is peer reviewed, I believe (vol 4, page 371)). Nevertheless, up until now, I have simply been a disbeliever; there is no difference between homeopathic preparations and water, sugar, and alcohol, and I was not prepared to admit anything beyond placebo.
But this shakes me up. If it can be replicated (and replication is essential; one experiment does not a revolution make), it should shake up just about everyone up. What the hell is different about the water, for Pete’s sake? How is this effect transmitted? What is the difference between the two samples? How can it be measured?
Weirdly enough, my gf says that homeopathic medicine worked for her. She tried loads of things to cure her allergy to cats and dogs, but nothing worked: at all.
She was resigned to living with it until eventually a friend persuaded her to try this homeopathy stuff, and it worked in a couple of days…no more sneezing at poor kittens.
I suggested a placebo effect (if a remarkably good one!), but she says she didn’t expect it to work herself, and only took it to shut her friend up…I always thought a bit of belief was required to get a placebo effect?
So, I’d always considered it bollocks, but now I’m starting to wonder if there’s something in it (if you’ll excuse the expression. )
Of course, there are now results out there that say there may not be a placebo effect, so you might not even be able to count on that as an explanation: http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=SCIENCE&PACKAGEID=research
This link should work for a bit; I’m not sure how often the AP replaces their top science story. If it’s gone, you can search on the headline, “Researchers Question Placebo Effect”.
First, does the fact that extremely dilute histamine solutions have some effect on basophils in vitro (i.e. in a test-tube setting) have any relevance to homeopathy? Is histamine a homeopathic drug?
I thought homeopathy relied on extremely small concentrations, not “no detectable drug”. If the histamine had some effect in this experiment (your link doesn’t work for me), it would seem to indicate that in this setting a relatively few molecules can affect basophils. Maybe this just means that basophils are more sensitive to this stimulus than previously thought, not that that means there’s going to be any effect in the human body.
Experiments have to be replicated to have meaning. I’d be more than a little suspicious if the experimenters were out to show that homeopathy works.
For any alternative science/medicine advocate to claim that their therapy cannot be judged head to head against conventional therapy is a warning sign of quackery. I see no reason why a double blind study could not be done. Trusting individual testimonials is dangerous.
I’m sceptical too and I’m certainly not a believer in/user of homeopathy, but your statements above sound like faith, not science to me, sorry, but that’s really how it reads.
I can’t see how it would work either, but there’s potentially a big difference between what I can understand and what might be possible.
I’d like to see some more independent blind tests done on this - if they are talking about in vitro tests, there’s no reason why these can’t be done double-blind.
The thing that puzzles me most though is the thought that the tap water you drink must have been in contact at some point in it’s history with, say, a grain of the pollen to which you are most allergic, so why isn’t tap water the cure for all of our ills?
How “highly dilute” were these solutions? They may have been using a more lax definition of “the homeopathic range” than homeopaths use. Perhaps they weren’t as dilute as you suspect. Or perhaps the solutions were sufficiently dilute, but some residue of histamine clung to the inside of the test tube glass.
And how similar were the “controls” to the highly dilute histamine solutions? Were they made from the same water/sugar/alcohol mixture? Or were the controls, say, made of distilled water while the highly dilute histamine solutions were diluted with tap water? Basophils may have their histamine production impaired by factors other than just the presence of outside histamine.
As the students say when the sex ed. class hands out homework assignments, further research is needed.
And why don’t homeopathic remedies cause disease? Homeopathic water could get contaminated with all kinds of junk during preparation; with single molecules of acetyl salycylic acid (aspirin), single molecules of acetaminophen (tylenol), or single molecules of sildenafil citrate (Viagra). Shouldn’t that cause headaches, or cause impotence:eek:? Since immeasurable small amounts are the bread and butter of this technique, wouldn’t small contaminants create a quality control nightmare?
Repeat after me:
Homeopathy can’t work
Homeopathy can’t work
Homeopathy can’t work
Homeopathy can’t work
Homeopathy can’t work
[sub](Unless you employ it to pad your wallet)[/sub]
No, I think we should control the knee jerk responses here. If they think they’ve got something then the only intellectually honest thing that can be done is to repeat the test (and create other, similar tests) to demonstrate that it is or is not a repeatable phenomenon. Then we’ll find the crux of the biscuit.
Anything else would be an abrogation of the scientific method. I don’t think homeopathy has anything to it either, but I’m willing to test for the truth when my conscience says I should.
Knee jerk. Knee jerk!? Sir, you take that back, or I will force you to drink this 1:1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 dilution of apple that I just finished succussing.
I figure if an apple a day keeps the doctor away, this tonic will have the medics swarming over you.
And if that don’t finish you off, then let me explain why your knee jerk remark annoyed me so (you must be a Zappa fan so you’re not all bad). The OP’s article presents a phenomenolgy (ie. there might be something to this homeopathy stuff). The homeopaths propose a mechanism whereby their medicines derive their effects (ie. near infinite dilution of a substance causes the resultant solution to affect the body in a manner opposite to the original substance). I pointed out a mechanistic inconsistency (ie. Nothing is 100.000000000000% pure. With these kinds of dilutions, contamination would most certainly be rampant. Why aren’t effects related to contaminants observed?).
My concern with alternative therapies in general is that they are understudied. Why that is so is a complex interplay of scientific, social, and political factors. This study, clearly, is a change in the right direction. Thoroughly investigate some of these mixtures, and see if there exists any basis for the claims of their manufacturers.
However, were I a small profiteer, making a buck selling water in little vials to a credulous public, how vigorously would I pursue double-blinded random control trials of my little money-maker?
[sub]Answer: Very un-fucking vigorously[sub]
Sorry, I’m not buying into this wholesale dismissal, the only thing that will work is to do what Jonathan Chance suggests, independently repeat the tests, if a solution with no trace of the drug seems to have an effect, test it spectroscopically to see if there’s really no trace.
Personally, I think that it’s most likely that one or more of:
[list=1]
[li]Fraud[/li][li]Experimental error[/li][li]Hi Opal[/li][li]Statistical fluke[/li][li]Contamination[/li][li]Wishful thinking[/li][/list=1]
are responsible for this announcement, but putting your fingers in your ears and shouting “La La La, Can’t hear you” will not do anything except reinforce the mistrust that the general public already feel towards the scientific community. You can’t dismiss apparently ‘real’ experimental data with a thought experiment that just says “this can’t work because I can’t see how it could”
You also can’t dismiss a specific finding that may support a theory by attacking the theory in general; “Oh yeah, well if that’s true, then why doesn’t XYZ…”, yes, contaminants should have a magnified effect too, but let’s see if the experiment can be repeated first, if it can be repeated then maybe we’re wrong about what should and shouldn’t happen.
If they want to establish that Homeopathy is responsible for the findings, it should also be necessary to demonstrate that a less dilute solution has less effect too.
Hmm…you’re limiting your thinking here. It did appear to work in at least the case that I described above, and I’m not sure why a placebo effect wouldn’t have been more effective from the properly prescribed remedies that my gf tried.
Anyway, just for arguments sake, a way around your dismissal:
Now, we’re starting with strong solution. Let’s pretend that this somehow creates a small effect in the structure of the water itself.
Now, when the first dilution occurs, you have (say) a half strength solution, but the water structure influences the newly introduced water, passing on the structure to it, so that all the water has the new structure (the newly introduced stuff has a random one, and is “overwhelmed” by the major structure).
You now have a half strength solution, but 100% “structured water”.
Repeat, and repeat, and…
At the end, you still have 100% structured water, but with just about none of the original solution…as long as you never overwhelm the structured water with too much randomness, you can allow it to retain that structure.
It’s this effect that works, not the actual ingredients.
OK, so it’s a bit daft…but the point is that it might not be as straightforward as you seem to assume!
ps. If no-one else has come up with this theory before (I don’t read about this stuff much…erm, at all really) can I patent it?
Not being a homeopath, I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter; the experiment (if replicated) verifies the homeopathic effect.
The link would not give you the article, just the table of contents; you have to buy the magazine to get the article (otherwise I would not have spent the time with a detailed summary that I did). Homeopathy relies on dilutions past the point where there is anything left at all of the original substance, not “extremely small concentrations.” That is why the effect is so confusing.
In fact, the head of the study was out to show that there was no effect; she was extremely irritated with the experimental results, but being a scientist could not fudge things.
Agreed (and one of the reasons I have always dismissed homeopathy). But this was a double blind test (controls were sent to the labs, and were not identified differently from the diluted solutions).
The New Scientist article did not specify the dilution factor; I may have to go to a bit of trouble to get the actual journal article, since Inflammation Research is not on my monthly reading list.
Wouldn’t the water used to dilute the solution have whatever structure it had from the last homeopathic remedy it came into contact with last?
Or do they go through some arcane procedure to destructure (is that a word?) it before using it.
I think it’s pretty goofy as well, but it’s fun to try and make it work theoretically.
Nope, the water is taken from random source, and is so mixed up it doesn’t have any particular structure. It’s only when it’s in concentrated solution and then carefully diluted (never overwhelming the structure, so you can’t just add a tiny drop to lots of water to get the dilute one, you have to do it in stages) that it works.
Yeah, it’s a bit daft, but it’s holding together so far
I’m not exactly sure how they do the homeopathy stuff though…is it this careful dilution process, or just a drop in a bucket?
Good point, and I think that we’d have to suppose that the action and intention of making the solution somehow affects it’s properties and thus predispose the final mixture to having the desired effect only.
Admittedly, then we would be talking about making holy water really as Cecil has said in his column, but we mustn’t dismiss this simply because it seems to be a logical impossibility, we can dismiss it just as soon as (and if) we can disprove it experimentally.
dylan_73 Re: ‘structured water’:
Yes, I think this is one of the key areas of thinking behind homeopathy, although I believe that wooly terms like ‘resonance’ and ‘vibrations’ are also in there somewhere.
Bugger. I knew it was too good to expect me to come up with something original. Well, actually the idea sprang to mind because I remembered reading something about water retaining its frozen structure partly while liquid (in some science mag). Also, there was something about the polarity of the water molecules changing under certain conditions…vague, I know, but it was a while ago I read it.
Well, never meant it that seriously anyway; more as an example of why homeopathy shouldn’t be dismissed by a simplistic thought experiment.
It should be dismissed when we have some good solid proof, instead
Well, I guess for my scenario, we can accept a factor of ten as not being too much to destroy the structure. As long as it wasn’t aforementioned “drop in a bucket” since that would lead to the same problems that we face with the minor contaminants that we had earlier.
I think that it’s considered pretty much essential to dilute in stages rather than just a drop in a bucket, but perhaps a homeopath (if there is one out there reading this) can give us a potted procedure.
It would be terrible pseudoscience, but I suppose if we were going to try to formulate a theory, sooner or later someone will throw electron spin and quantum effects into the pot.
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