At 02:26 PM 03/16/2000 +0100, Tom Vogt wrote:
>the interesting aspect here is that while there IS some effect (people
>get better) it can't yet be explained by science,
AARRRGH! What an appallingly biased and bad way to say that! :-)
Homeopathy is a quack theory backed by 200 years of trial and error
but little if any actual scientific study. Because so much of it is
quackery, real scientists haven't been motivated to do many studies
to find out what's going on, yet practitioners (or at least the ones that
publish popular books on it) don't seem to have been motivated to do
scientific study either - making hypotheses that are falsifiable
and testing whether they're valid or not.
This means it's not trustable for dealing with actual disease
(because it doesn't provide adequate models, backed by real testing,
of why people get sick and how homeopathic treatments can cure the diseases),
but it may still be useful for treating symptoms.
For instance, homeopathy is often useful for treating allergies,
where the objective is to make the symptoms go away,
and it offers treatments with different side-effects than
anti-histamines and other products of scientific medicine.
There's a homeopathic flu medicine I use that usually takes me from
feeling totally awful to merely feeling not very good,
which is a major win; it contains small amounts of ipecac,
so it causes some nausea, but it's still worthwhile.
And one of the quack aspects ("the less you take, the stronger it is!")
means that it's less likely to have dangerous side effects than
other medical products (whether quack or real), though some products
are not very diluted and therefore can still have bad side effects
Diluting them by another factor of 10**10 would reduce the side effects,
increase the price, and let you achieve Total World Domination, I suppose,
but at only 3X dilution, it still does something.
(Notational alert - Homeopathy generally uses dilution by factors of 10,
so 3X is diluted by 10**3, 6X by 10**6, 10X by 10**10, etc.)
There's one practitioner who says that if you dilute it by some factor
(I think it was 10X or 12X), you end up with NO MOLECULES AT ALL of the
medicine,
and the water gets HIGHLY ENERGIZED by it having been there.
Well, Avogadro's Number is about 6x10**23, so depending on the molecular
weight of the medicine, you've typically got at least 10**10 molecules
of it per ml of water, and since she doesn't know how to measure matter,
she's unlikely to be able to measure energy well enough for her claim
of the water being highly energized to be worth validating either :-)
>in the end, a lot of recent quantum physics reads MUCH weirder than
>structured water. :)
Ice-9 is, once again, your friend....
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
