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Little Mountain Homeopathy

Classical homeopath in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Award-winning holistic natural health practitioner.

What is Homeopathy?

Bruce Lipton on Homeopathy

Karma Singh interviews Dr. Bruce Lipton in July 2010
Dr. Bruce Lipton, one of the world’s leading cell biologists, explains how energy healing modalities such as homeopathy work and why pharmaceuticals do not work

Karma Singh: Professor Lipton, we heard you on the weekend telling us about the informational causation of perhaps the majority of the maladies known to mankind. Does it seem appropriate to you that a method of healing that is based on information is more likely to be more effective than one which is based upon chemistry?

Dr. Bruce Lipton: It is absolutely important to understand that a very small percentage of illness on this planet is due to organic causes, especially genetics. As a matter of fact, around 2% of diseases in this world today can be directly attributed to genetics. The rest of diseases are our relationship to the environment and genetics. The significance of the environment is that the information that we pick up – and it’s information about the environment that we pick up through our senses – this information is the information that is used to actually not just adjust our own biology and behaviour but this information from the environment even adjusts our genetics; so that every day as we respond to environmental cues, not only are we adjusting behaviour but we are also influencing the read out of all our genes; so the concept that we are made out of genetic concrete and that determines our lives gives way to a reality that the genes are essentially plastic. The read out of the genes can vary day by day based on our personal life experiences and the information that we receive from the environment, so much to the extent that one gene blueprint can be modified to create 30,000 different variations of proteins from the same gene, and all these variations are dependent upon an individual’s response to the environment. So, rather than emphasizing the organic nature of disease, it turns out that diseases are most related to how we interpret or perceive or respond to environmental cues, which by definition is information.

Karma Singh: So, then, an informationally based medicine could be effective, such as homeopathy.

Dr. Bruce Lipton: All kinds of information based medicines are very effective, starting from just psychology alone. When you start to understand the nature of the placebo effect – the placebo effect is just based on a person’s perception or belief, and a minimum of one third of all healings from the medical profession, be they drugs or surgery, one third is just due to the perceptions and beliefs and attitudes of the patient.  So, anything that will actually influence a person’s perception, or response to the environment, becomes a primal input into the nature of our health and disease.

Karma Singh: So what exactly does homeopathy do, in this sense?

Dr. Bruce Lipton: It’s interesting because homeopathy is, by conventional standards, kind of weird, but by the understanding of quantum mechanics it becomes based on hard science. Water molecules in solution communicate with each other via hydrogen bonds. And hydrogen bonds are charges of vibration of loose bonding between individual water molecules based on their polarity. What’s very interesting is that science has found out that when hydrogen bonds are formed between water molecules, the bonds also act as conduits for vibrational information. So, water molecules can pass information from one water molecule to another water molecule to another water molecule. So, whatever is influencing a water molecule can ultimately be spread in a solution of water via hydrogen bond communication between the molecules of water so that information is transferred. So if I put some information in the water, in a short period of time, the information will transfer from one water molecule to another via the hydrogen bonds. And then you might say, “Well what about the initiating piece of information, like a chemical?” Well, if you remove that chemical, but you still have the vibration in the field, the water molecules will apparently maintain the continued vibration, so that you can have the information transferred even without the chemistry anymore. And basically this is where the memory of water is applied and understood as a molecular connection between the information in the field and the hydrogen bonding of the molecules.

Karma Singh: So, for the human body, being at least 70% water, the information in water should have a very significant effect on the human body.

Dr. Bruce Lipton: Oh, absolutely. All the chemistry in water is equivalent of creating homeopathy. Just as much as I put a chemical in a beaker of water or I secrete a chemical from my brain into the blood, which the base is all water, there would be no difference in those two except for the location. So basically, the water in the body would also carry information, and this is a really interesting new insight because this actually was understood a long, long time ago. There was a Nobel Prize winner named Albert St. Georgi who actually won 2 Nobel Prizes, one was on the molecular nature of muscle contraction and the other was on the interaction of molecules. In 1959 he wrote a book, I think it was called “The Introduction to Subcellular Biology,” and introduced the concept of quantum mechanics as a fundamental element in understanding the nature of a human body. It was very interesting, because back in those days, even though he won a Nobel Prize winner, all of his conventional peers thought he was kind of crazy and losing it; they thought that St. Georgi was going a little senile when he introduced the nature of quantum mechanics. Had he lived long enough and had his peers lived long enough, they would have recognized the new understanding in biochemistry today, is that when you talk about proteins, which are the fundamental units of the body, and proteins interacting, they interact via an entanglement with quantum fields through what we call constructive and destructive interference patterns which control their behaviour. The relevance about that is proteins interact to energy fields more than they interact to chemical fields. So, quantum biophysics will be the actual future of new medicine and new biology.

Karma Singh: So, if I follow this correctly, when Hahnemann said that it’s the information of the healing substance which is paramount, and it is the chemical substance which has almost no relevancy, he was speaking nothing other than objective fact.

Dr. Bruce Lipton: It wasn’t known it was fact at that time, but now this is becoming much more understood and factual. There was researcher by the name of McClare at Oxford or Cambridge, one of the two serious universities in England, and what he identified was, he was looking at the spread of information, signalling, and his question was, “If cells can respond to both chemical signals, and they can respond to energetic signals, would there be a difference in the response?” And when he did the assessment he found that signalling with energy vibration is an order of magnitude greater in the ability of sending information than trying to send information via chemicals. He talked very simply about the fact that when you use chemicals as a signalling device, that when a chemical binds to another chemical, there’s something called the heat of reaction, and in the heat of reaction you give off the heat from a chemical interaction. But heat is disorganized, dissipated energy. If a molecule is carrying information, about 98% of the available energy for information is actually dissipated as heat during a chemical reaction. So, when you use a molecule to send information you are approximately getting about 1% of the information in the transfer, and about 98-99% of the information lost as heat. In contrast, he said, when you use energetic signalling, vibrational signalling, that you essentially get 100% of the signal in transfer because there’s no energy lost in the chemical reaction. Therefore this showed that vibrational energy is more effective at communication rather than chemistry.

Karma Singh: So you’re saying that modern science now says that it’s the information which counts, and the chemical substance is not only irrelevant, it’s dangerous. So science is saying that homeopathy is the thing, and science is saying that pharmaceutical medicine is unscientific.

Dr. Bruce Lipton: Pharmaceutical medicine is actually kind of lethal and is one of the primary causes of death, in what we call iatrogenic illness. For example, in the United States alone, 300,000 or more people die every year from pharmaceutical chemistry, which is vastly more people than those who die from so-called illegal drugs. Legal drugs are actually more lethal. There was an interesting article published in the journal “Nature” regarding the mechanism by which information influences the movement of molecules and why that is important is because life is derived from the movement of molecules. So the paper was studying what is the mechanics that result in the movement of molecules which result in the expression of life. They first tried to assess the movements of molecules using the mechanisms of Newtonian physics and they were completely unable to predict the movements of the molecules. As soon as they applied the quantum mechanical principles to the movement of molecules they were able to accurately predict the movement of molecules which then emphasizes this: That our conventional medicine, which is based on Newtonian physics and Newtonian chemistry, is incorrectly perceiving how molecules move, and the mechanics of life; and that the new physics is really the foundation of molecular movements. And what’s very interesting about this is that there was a review article by the two authors, Pophristic and Goodman, the ones that were looking at the mechanisms of molecular movement, and there was an editorial in the same issue of “Nature” that said, “What is the meaning of this work by Pophristic and Goodman?” I love it because it says right there in the subtitle of the article, “If you want to understand the nature of molecule movement, don’t look for the answers in your organic chemistry textbook.” And the complete important meaning of that message is that organic chemistry is used to define the principles of medicine. Medicine is built on organic chemistry. And yet, what Weinhold’s article [in “Nature”] is talking about is that when you understand the mechanisms that cause molecules to move, you’ll realize that those mechanisms are not described in conventional organic chemistry because they’re really quantum biophysics. So, if you want to understand how life works, that’s essentially what he means by if you understand how molecules move, he said you will not find the answers in organic chemistry, and organic chemistry is the foundation of allopathic medicine. So basically, allopathic medicine’s perception is totally skewed and flawed because it does not incorporate the role of quantum entanglement and the roles of vibrational energies, and what are called destructive and constructive interference patterns. So harmony and resonance is really the primary mechanism of molecular movement, not positive and negative charges or regional charges which are Newtonian mechanisms.

Karma Singh: As a former teacher of medicine in major universities, if you had a health problem and you were faced with the choice between an allopathic doctor who uses pharmaceutical medicine, and a doctor who uses homeopathy, which one would you choose?

Dr. Bruce Lipton: Very simple answer for me. I don’t go to medical doctors! I haven’t been to a medical doctor in about 15 years, and I knew exactly what I was going for then because I wanted some penicillin because I had pneumonia and I had to see a doctor to get the prescription for it. But I stay away from them as much as possible. But I don’t want to say that medicine is bad. Medicine has an important function. Medicine does miracles in its field. Then what is it that you would go to medicine for? The answer for me is trauma. If I break something, I need something sewn up, I need a part replaced, you can bet your life I’m going to go to a medical doctor before I go to a homeopath. But when it comes to issues that medicine really just plays with like diabetes, Alzeheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, cancer, obesity – these kinds of issues are not trauma related issues, and as a result of that, medicine doesn’t have a very good track record with them because medicine is coming from a wrong scientific foundation. Medicine, being founded on the mechanisms of Newtonian mechanics, is really not totally understanding the nature of life because the nature of life is based on quantum physics. The difference between them is that Newtonian physics emphasizes materialism, matter, physical chemistry; and quantum physics says no it’s the invisible forces, it’s the energy and the vibration which are profoundly important. So, from the work of McClare and the work of Pophristic and Goodman and even Albert St Georgi, their research says that the new direction of medicine will be energy medicine. But this doesn’t mean if I get into a car accident and my guts are hanging out that I will try to find a homeopath to help me. That wouldn’t work for me. Use the medicine for what it’s really good for, but consider alternatives when it comes to issues of health that are outside the nature of trauma. For example, cancer. What is cancer caused by? Well, now we’re recognizing the primary cause of cancer is perception. Genetics account for far less of cancer than 10%. So, the relevance is that 90% of cancer cannot be attributed due to the physical mechanical body, but it is attributed to the information or the perception of the individual in response to their environment, and that perception being translated into biology. So, the healing issues in our world are mostly not approached by conventional medicine. Conventional medicine would recognize, for example, that 90% of cardiovascular disease, which is one of the leading killers in the world, has nothing to do with organic causes. 90% of cardiovascular disease is a person’s personal perception or stresses or environmental lifestyle actions. And why I bring that up is because if you have cardiovascular disease, and you end up going to a conventional allopath, the first thing they are probably going to do is try to assign a pharmaceutical drug, when the fact is, the first thing they would have done in real health is to give a foundation and education and insight into the reality that cardiovascular disease is changeable just by how you change your perceptions or responses to life, and not how you change your physical body.

Karma Singh: Last week in in one of the journals there was a large article explaining why homeopathy should be banned because it is unscientific. Would you like to comment upon this?

Dr. Bruce Lipton: I would really like to say that on a real definition basis, allopathic medicine is pretty much unscientific, because allopathic medicine is manipulated and controlled by the pharmaceutical industry, which sells chemistry. Well why is that important? Well let me just bring up a simple point. If I asked the audience, “Are you aware that there are much more efficient ways to produce energy on this planet besides burning fossil fuels that are much more efficient and effective?” I think most people would recognize yes, there are many different ways to produce energy besides fossil fuels. Then I ask the question, “Where are they?” The reason why I ask the question is they are not here. But if we know they exist then why aren’t we using them? And the answer is that it’s not in the interest of the fossil fuel industry to offer energy that doesn’t use fossil fuel, because that’s the whole business program. So what does that mean about medicine? Are there other ways to heal yourself besides medicine? And the answer is most certainly there are, and most of it involves energy. All these different forms of alternative or complementary medicine are really based on energy at the fundamental level. So if that’s really true then where are these energy modalities in our world today? And the answer is it’s not in the interest of a pharmaceutical industry that sells chemicals to offer insights into other forms of healing that don’t use chemicals. It’s not in the business plan. In fact, having been a researcher and professor in a medical school for a number of years and having received my grants and all the things I had to do I can tell you that my work was funded because when I wrote my grants I appealed to the pharmaceutical industry’s perception of chemicals and molecules involved in healing, and yet when I had the opportunity to do my work, the understanding about health was really information in the fields. What I knew and what I learned is that medical research is directed and controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. It’s not directed and influenced by the interests of the public. And why is that important? It’s a fact that in the United States today, allopathic medicine is the leading cause of death. It’s called iatrogenic illness. The relevance of that is very simple: if a healing modality is the leading cause of death then you have to ask a logical question: “If you really know how life works and you’re trying to heal with your science then how come allopathic medicine is the leading cause of death?” The answer is because something very profound is missing from their awareness: What’s missing is the nature of the role of energy and mind and field in understanding the nature of life, and that is the nature of quantum physics. Well how come I claim that modern medicine is not scientific? And the answer is that science is built on a hierarchy of fundamental sciences, built one on top of each other. The foundation of all sciences today is called mathematics. And then from mathematics you create physics which is the science of mechanisms, how things work. And then from physics you create chemistry. So if you understand the nature of physics you understand the nature of chemistry. And there are all different kinds of chemistry, and on the top of the chemistry pile is something called biochemistry. And the relevance about that is that leads to biology, which then leads to psychology. So, in a hierarchy of sciences, physics is down much lower than biology and psychology. Well why is that important? And the answer is that when a science on a lower tier changes its belief system, it is incumbant that every science built above on that foundation must incorporate those new insights into their science. So what’s wrong then with conventional allopathic medicine? The answer is it’s based on Newtonian physics. And Newtonian physics has been modified, updated and really changed by the concepts of quantum mechanics, which came in in 1925. Chemistry has now incorporated quantum mechanical mechanisms in its understanding of the new fields of chemistry where you can direct chemical reactions by vibrational frequencies. Biology, especially because of its manipulation by the pharmaceutical industry, has retained its Newtonian base in the presence of a quantum mechanical world. That means that science in the form of biomedicine is no longer scientific because until it incorporates the principles of quantum mechanics, which are the fundamental mechanisms of the universe, then conventional biology is operating from a misperception of a Newtonian universe, something that has now been proven to be totally false. So until this change occurs, conventional science, especially as it’s run by the drug companies, with its primary interest in the material mechanisms of Newton; until the new physics comes in, conventional biomedicine is by definition outdated.

Karma Singh: Thank you very much

Dr. Bruce Lipton: We need to get this information to the public as fast as we can, because we are really running into a crises in the world. When you recognize, for example, that health care crisis are undermining countries and civilizations around the world because of the high cost and less effectiveness in its approach to health, it’s time to introduce a new understanding of health, and especially one based on energy medicine because once you start to recognize that it’s energy you say, “Well how much does energy cost?” Well, it doesn’t really cost anything.

Read and Order Books by Dr. Bruce Lipton:
The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There From Here
The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth

How Homeopathic Medicines Work: Nanopharmacology at its Best

by Dana Ullman
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-ullman/how-homeopathic-medicines_b_389146.html

It is commonly assumed that homeopathic medicines are composed of extremely small doses of medicinal substances. And yet, does anyone refer to an atomic bomb as an extremely small dose of a bomb? In actual fact, there is a power, a very real power, in having atoms smash against each other.

Homeopathic medicines are made through a specific pharmacological process of dilution and vigorous shaking. However, when skeptics say that there is nothing but water in homeopathic medicine, they are proving their ignorance, despite the incredible arrogance in which they make these assertions. Dr. Martin Chaplin, a respected British professor who is one of the world’s experts on water, has verified that “homeopathic water” and “regular water” are not the same, and his review of almost 2,000 references to the scientific literature on water (!) confirm this fact (Chaplin, 2009).

It should be noted that a large number of homeopathic medicines sold in health food stores and pharmacies are made in doses with known physiological doses. In fact, there are several thousand (!) studies in conventional scientific journals showing a wide variety of biological effects from extremely small doses of various substances on specific systems.

Homeopathic medicines can and should be considered to be a type of “nanopharmacology” (Ullman, 2006). Although the word “nano” also means one-billionth of a size, that is not its only definition. In fact, “nano” derives from the word “dwarf,” and “nano” is the only word in the English language that is used on common parlance as denoting extremely small AND yet extremely powerful. Homeopathic medicines are both extremely small in dose and yet extremely powerful in their therapeutic effect.

For 200 years now, millions of physicians and hundreds of millions of homeopathic patients have observed and experienced the power and effectiveness of homeopathic medicines

The Power of Nano-doses

Precisely how homeopathic medicines work remains a mystery, and yet, nature is replete with mysteries and with numerous striking examples of the power of extremely small doses.

For instance, it is commonly known that a certain species of moth can smell pheromones of its own species up to two miles away. It is no simple coincidence that species only sense pheromones from those in the same species who emit them (akin to the homeopathic principle of similars), as though they have developed exquisite and specific receptor sites for what they need to propagate their species. Likewise, sharks are known to sense blood in the water at distances, and when one considers the volume of water in the ocean, it becomes obvious that sharks, like all living creatures, develop extreme hypersensitivity for whatever will help ensure their survival.

That living organisms have some truly remarkable sensitivities is no controversy. The challenging question that remains is: How does the medicine become imprinted into the water and how does the homeopathic process of dilution with succussion increase the medicine’s power? Although we do not know precisely the answer to this question, some new research may help point the way.

The newest and most intriguing way to explain how homeopathic medicines may work derives from some sophisticated modern technology. Scientists at several universities and hospitals in France and Belgium have discovered that the vigorous shaking of the water in glass bottles causes extremely small amounts of silica fragments or chips to fall into the water (Demangeat, et al., 2004). Perhaps these silica chips may help to store the information in the water, with each medicine that is initially placed in the water creating its own pharmacological effect. In any case, each medicinal substance will interact with the silica fragments in its own idiosyncratic way, thereby changing the nature and structure of water accordingly.

Further, the micro-bubbles and the nano-bubbles that are caused by the shaking may burst and thereby produce microenvironments of higher temperature and pressure. Several studies by chemists and physicists have revealed increased release of heat from water in which homeopathic medicines are prepared, even when the repeated process of dilutions should suggest that there are no molecules remaining of the original medicinal substance (Elia and Niccoli, 1999; Elia, et al., 2004; Rey, 2003).

Also, a group of highly respected scientists have confirmed that the vigorous shaking involved with making homeopathic medicines changes the pressure in the water, akin to water being at 10,000 feet in altitude (Roy, et al., 2005). These scientists have shown how the homeopathic process of using double-distilled water and then diluting and shaking the medicine in a sequential fashion changes the structure of water.

One metaphor that may help us understand how and why extremely small doses of medicinal agents may work derives from present knowledge of modern submarine radio communications. Normal radio waves simply do not penetrate water, so submarines must use an extremely low-frequency radio wave. The radio waves used by submarines to penetrate water are so low that a single wavelength is typically several miles long!

If one considers that the human body is 70-80 percent water, perhaps the best way to provide pharmacological information to the body and into intercellular fluids is with nanodoses. Like the extremely low-frequency radio waves, it may be necessary to use extremely low (and activated) doses for a person to receive the medicinal effect.

It is important to understand that nanopharmacological doses will not have any effect unless the person is hypersensitive to the specific medicinal substance. Hypersensitivity is created when there is some type of resonance between the medicine and the person. Because the system of homeopathy bases its selection of the medicine on its ability to cause in overdose the similar symptoms that the sick person is experiencing, homeopathy’s principle of similars is simply a practical method of finding the substance to which a person is hypersensitive.

The homeopathic principle of similars makes further sense when one considers that modern physiologists and pathologists recognize that disease is not simply the result of breakdown or surrender of the body but that symptoms are instead representative of the body’s efforts to fight infection or adapt to stress.

Using a nanodose that is able to penetrate deeply into the body and that is specifically chosen for its ability to mimic the symptoms helps to initiate a profound healing process. It is also important to highlight the fact that a homeopathic medicine is not simply chosen for its ability to cause a similar disease but for its ability to cause a similar syndrome of symptoms of disease, of which the specific localized disease is a part. By understanding that the human body is a complex organism that creates a wide variety of physical and psychological symptoms, homeopaths acknowledge biological complexity and have a system of treatment to address it effectively.

Although no one knows precisely how homeopathic medicines initiate the healing process, we have more than 200 years of evidence from hundreds of thousands of clinicians and tens of millions of patients that these medicines have powerful effects. One cannot help but anticipate the veritable treasure trove of knowledge that further research in homeopathy and nanopharmacology will bring.

Nobel Prize-winning Scientist on Homeopathy…

Brian Josephson, Ph.D., (1940-) is a British physicist who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for work he completed when he was only 22 years old. He is currently a professor at the University of Cambridge where he is the head of the mind-matter unification project in the Theory of Condensed Matter research group.

Responding to an article in the New Scientist (October 18, 1997) that expressed skepticism about homeopathy, Josephson wrote:

Regarding your comments on claims made for homeopathy: criticisms centered around the vanishingly small number of solute molecules present in a solution after it has been repeatedly diluted are beside the point, since advocates of homeopathic remedies attribute their effects not to molecules present in the water, but to modifications of the water’s structure. Simple-minded analysis may suggest that water, being a fluid, cannot have a structure of the kind that such a picture would demand. But cases such as that of liquid crystals, which while flowing like an ordinary fluid can maintain an ordered structure over macroscopic distances, show the limitations of such ways of thinking. There have not, to the best of my knowledge, been any refutations of homeopathy that remain valid after this particular point is taken into account.

A related topic is the phenomenon, claimed by Jacques Benveniste’s colleague Yolène Thomas and by others to be well established experimentally, known as “memory of water”. If valid, this would be of greater significance than homeopathy itself, and it attests to the limited vision of the modern scientific community that, far from hastening to test such claims, the only response has been to dismiss them out of hand. (Josephson, 1997)

Later, when Josephson was interviewed by the New Scientist (December 9, 2006), he chose to emphasize that many scientists today suffer from “pathological disbelief”; that is, they maintain an unscientific attitude that is embodied by the statement “even if it were true I wouldn’t believe it.” Sadly, such scientists are simply showing evidence of an unscientific attitude.

Quantum Medicine

Quantum physics does not disprove Newtonian physics; quantum physics simply extends our understanding of extremely small and extremely large systems. Likewise, homeopathy does not disprove conventional pharmacology; instead, it extends our understanding of extremely small doses of medicinal agents. It is time that physicians and scientists began incorporating both Newtonian and quantum physics into a better understanding of what healing is and how to best augment it.

The founder of homeopathic medicine, Samuel Hahnemann, MD, rewrote and updated his seminal work on the subject five times in his lifetime, each time refining his observations. Homeopaths continue to refine this system of nanopharmacology. While there is not always agreement on the best ways to select the correct remedy or the best nanopharmacological dose to use, the system of homeopathic medicine provides a solid foundation from which clinicians and researchers exploring nanopharmacologies can and should explore.

Dana Ullman, MPH, is America’s leading spokesperson for homeopathy and is the founder of www.homeopathic.com. He is the author of 10 books, including his bestseller, Everybody’s Guide to Homeopathic Medicines. His most recent book is, The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy. Dana lives, practices, and writes from Berkeley, California.

References:

Chaplin, Martin. 2009 (updated regularly) http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/index2.html

Demangeat, J.-L., Gries, P., Poitevin, B., Droesbeke J.-J., Zahaf, T., Maton, F., Pierart, C., and Muller, R. N. Low-Field NMR Water Proton Longitudinal Relaxation in Ultrahighly Diluted Aqueous Solutions of Silica-Lactose Prepared in Glass Material for Pharmaceutical Use, Applied Magnetic Resonance, 2004, 26:465-481.

Elia, V. and Niccoli, M. Thermodynamics of Extremely Diluted Aqueous Solutions, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1999, 879:241-248.

Elia, V., Baiano, S., Duro, I., Napoli, E., Niccoli, M., and Nonatelli, L. Permanent Physio-chemical Properties of Extremely Diluted Aqueous Solutions of Homeopathic Medicines, Homeopathy, 2004, 93:144-150.

Josephson, B. D., Letter, New Scientist, November 1, 1997.

Rey, L. Thermoluminescence of Ultra-High Dilutions of Lithium Chloride and Sodium Chloride. Physica A, 2003, 323:67-74.

Roy, R., Tiller, W. A., Bell, I., and Hoover, M. R. The Structure of Liquid Water: Novel Insights from Materials Research; Potential Relevance to Homeopathy, Materials Research Innovations, December 2005, 9(4):577-608..

Ullman, Dana. “Let’s have a serious discussion of nanopharmacology and homeopathy”. FASEB. 2006;20:2661.

Why Skeptics Love to Hate Homeopathy

by Amy L. Lansky, PhD

www.impossiblecure.com

Perhaps the most derided of alternative medicines is my own favorite — homeopathy.  Over the past few years, detractors have focused their efforts in the United Kingdom and have succeeded in crippling homeopathic hospitals and clinics funded by the National Health Service, as well as the practices of many homeopaths. A few well-placed editorials in prominent newspapers have done the trick, despite the fact that Prince Charles and the rest of the royal family are ardent supporters of homeopathy.

It now seems that some of these folks are taking their show on the road.  Two key UK players, Michael Baum and Edzard Ernst have published a commentary in the November 2009 issue of the American Journal of Medicine [2] in which they state, “a belief in homeopathy exceeds the tolerance of an open mind.  We should start from the premise that homeopathy cannot work and that positive evidence reflects publication bias or design flaws until proved otherwise.”

Not surprisingly, their commentary also reflects a complete ignorance of homeopathy and the range of studies that support its effectiveness.  For example, their article incorrectly uses the term “potentation” instead of “potentization” for the method used to create homeopathic remedies (more on this later).  The authors also insist on citing a single negative meta-analysis study that has already been shown to be methodologically flawed [3], while ignoring many positive studies in respected publications, including two other meta-analyses that showed positive results [4-9].

So why do the skeptics love to hate homeopathy?  Perhaps because it is one of the most threatening alternative modalities — financially, philosophically, and therapeutically.  Actually, homeopathy has been a threat to allopathy ever since the 1800s, when German physician Samuel Hahnemann developed the homeopathic system.


Founder of Homeopathy

Hahnemann, a respected doctor and chemist who helped to pioneer the importance of hygiene as well as homeopathy, was forced to move frequently during his life because the local German apothecaries objected to the fact that he created his own medicines rather than use theirs. A fierce battle was also waged against homeopathy in the United States during the 1800s, where homeopathy had achieved a strong presence by 1840.  In fact, in 1847, the American Medical Association (AMA) was formed specifically to fight the battle against homeopathy.

Most homeopaths of the 1800s were former allopaths who had abandoned their brethren because they found Hahnemann’s system to be more successful in battling cholera, typhus, yellow fever, diptheria, influenza, and other epidemics of the 1800s.  In retaliation, the preamble to the AMA’s charter forbade its members to associate with homeopaths or to use their medicines, and many doctors were expelled for failing to comply.

But does homeopathy really pose such a threat to conventional medicine today? To see how the little David of homeopathy could take down the Goliath of big pharma, we need to take a closer look at what homeopathy is all about.


Like Cures Like

Homeopathic practice is based on a single law of therapeutics called the Law of Similars. This law states that a substance that can cause the symptoms of a disease can also cure it.  In fact, that’s exactly what word “homeopathy” means:  similar (“homeo”) suffering (“pathy”). For example, one reason that the remedy Coffea Cruda (made from coffee) can be curative for insomnia is that coffee can cause sleeplessness.  Interestingly, allopaths sometimes utilize the Law of Similars, but are unaware of it when they do and are perplexed by the phenomenon.

Ask any conventional doctor why Ritalin (a substance that would normally cause hyperactivity) can treat hyperactivity in children, and they’ll scratch their heads in confusion.  Ask a homeopath, and it’s a no-brainer: the Law of Similars.

The reason why homeopaths run into trouble with the skeptics, though, revolves around how homeopathic remedies are prepared. Obviously, many of the substances that can cause the symptoms of disease are toxic.  This inherent toxicity poses a challenge if you want to administer these substances safely.  In an effort to deal with this problem, Hahnemann tried various methods of diluting his medicines so that they would become less harmful to his patients.  This proved unsuccessful until he also incorporated vigorous shaking or succussion into the process.  The result was a method that he called potentization, in which a substance is serially diluted and succussed over and over.

Much to Hahnemann’s own surprise, these ultradilutions — so dilute that they cannot possibly contain a single molecule of the original substance — were still potent therapeutically.  In fact, they were even more potent than low levels of dilution.

Of course, this was and still is too much for the skeptics to bear.  It turns much of accepted science on its head!

What the skeptics keep ignoring, however, are an increasing number of scientific studies that indicate that some kind of signature of the original substance is embedded in a potentized ultradilution. In a 2007 paper by Professor Rustom Roy, the founding director of the Materials Research Laboratory at Penn State and one of the world’s leading experts on the structure of water, it was demonstrated that lab instruments could pick up energetic signatures in ultradilutions that were not only specific to individual homeopathic remedies, but to specific potencies of these remedies [10].

Indeed, science has backed up the phenomenon of potentization for over 20 years. In 1988, Nobel Prize nominee and medical researcher Jacques Benveniste turned the course of his life upside down when he discovered that ultradilutions could retain substance-specific properties.  In particular, he found that a certain antibody could be serially diluted and succussed beyond the point where a single molecule could remain, but still cause the same effects [11].

Naturally, the skeptics quickly attacked Benveniste. But he continued his work and further demonstrated that the electromagnetic signature of an ultradilution could be recorded electronically, transmitted via Email, replayed into water, and still achieve the same substance-specific effects in the laboratory [12]. Eventually, Benveniste’s results were replicated [13]. Most recently, a 2009 paper by Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier underscored the power of ultradilutions too [14].


Drug Companies Are Running Scared

Now think about it.  This is what big pharma is scared of.


What if an expensive drug could be potentized to create billions of effective doses at essentially no cost?
It would destroy big pharma entirely. Medicines that cost essentially nothing?  Nontoxic ultradiluted medicines that cause fewer side effects? How could the coffers of big pharma be sustained?  Forget about the Law of Similars.  It’s potentization — the process of creating effective ultradilutions — that big pharma is scared of! No wonder Baum and Ernst got the word “potentization” wrong.  This one word is the small stone that could take Goliath down.

Of course, homeopaths add fuel to the fire.  The fundamental philosophy of homeopathy implies that the primary tools of allopathy are harmful.   In particular, homeopaths believe that suppressing symptoms with anti-pathic drugs — drugs that oppose the symptoms of a disease rather than mimic them — cannot cure and can even do harm.  If a symptom is suppressed — for example, if a seasonal allergy is suppressed by an antihistamine — it is only temporarily palliated.

A patient still has allergic tendencies and his or her symptoms will eventually return.  That’s why suppressive drugs must be taken again and again.  And of course, big pharma loves that!  It’s good for business.


Deceptive Cures

Unfortunately, if a substance succeeds in completely suppressing a symptom, there may be an illusion of “cure,” but the real result is more sinister.  Another key tenet of homeopathy is that the true result of suppression is a deepening of the underlying disease state — because the energy of the disease is now forced to manifest in a more serious way. That’s why repeated application of cortisone cream to eczema can lead to asthma.

That’s why the suppression of arthritis pain can lead to heart disease. That’s why teenagers who take acne drugs sometimes develop suicidal depression.  Doctors call this phenomenon a “side effect” or a “natural disease progression.” But that’s because they don’t understand the effects of suppression or the signs of true cure.

Over the past two hundred years, homeopaths have discovered that homeopathic medicines — drugs that mimic a person’s symptoms rather than oppose them — can lead to genuine cure of chronic disease, not mere palliation or suppression.  Rather than creating a deeper disease, a homeopathic medicine that is similar to a patient’s disease can not only cure it, but reveal previously suppressed layers of disease that can be treated too.

That’s why good homeopathic treatment can often cure asthma — and also reveal and treat previously suppressed eczema. That’s why it has the potential to cure arthritis and chronic bladder infections, not simply palliate them with endless medications. Indeed, homeopathy can effectively treat acute diseases like influenza and bacterial infections too. With its ability to successfully treat both chronic and acute disease with low-cost medicines, homeopathy really could be a threat to big pharma, given half a chance.


Ideal for Poor Countries or Rich Ones with Declining Economies

Poor countries with less access to expensive drugs have already discovered this. That’s why homeopathy is the second most widespread form of medicine in the world. In India, homeopathy is a full-fledged medical system with its own medical schools and hospitals.  Homeopaths in India successfully treat the full range of diseases, including AIDS, cancer, and malaria.

In Cuba, a poor country with a health care system that often does better than our own, homeopathy is being used more and more.  In 2008, 2.5 million Cubans were given a homeopathic remedy to prevent Leptospirosis, an infectious disease also known as swamp fever.  This disease has plagued the country for several years in the aftermath of flooding, but the year in which homeopathy was used, in contrast to previous years, there were no fatalities and very few cases of the disease [15].

But here’s the rub.  Homeopathy is harder to practice than allopathy.  There are no cookie-cutter cures, especially for chronic disease. (Luckily, however, effective treatment of epidemic diseases like the flu is easier; see Resources.) Each patient’s health pattern is unique, so each patient must be treated as an individual.

A homeopath must find a single remedy (among thousands of possible homeopathic remedies) whose associated symptoms match those of the patient — not just their main complaint, but their entire symptom picture that includes emotional, mental, behavioral, as well as the physical symptoms of the entire body.  It’s a daunting task.  A practitioner who practices classical homeopathy (the kind of homeopathy I advocate) typically needs at least two hours for an initial case interview and may spend just as long deciding upon a remedy.

And sometimes it takes a homeopath several tries to find just the right remedy — the one that homeopaths call the simillimum.  This process also requires patients to engage in their own treatment, because symptoms are gathered not by machines or by using tests, but through direct communication between patient and homeopath.

Of course, this is not something big pharma, conventional doctors, or insurance companies would be happy about.  No expensive medicines or tests or equipment needed?  No five-minute appointments reimbursed at $300 a shot?  A medical system that requires long appointments, time for case analysis, and patients who must participate in the healing process?  Not very lucrative.


How I Broke Out of the Mold and Reliance on Failed Medical Therapies

Of course, I used to be a lover of conventional medicine like most people. Back in the early 1990s, my husband Steve Rubin and I were both computer researchers in Silicon Valley and followed our doctors’ instructions obediently, loading our kids up with every recommended vaccine on schedule.  Our allopathic trance began to break in 1994 when our 3-year-old son Max began to show signs of autism.

I first read about homeopathy in the January 1995 issue of Mothering Magazine, which contained an article about the successful homeopathic treatment of ADD and other children’s behavioral problems [16]. Steve and I decided to give it a try and found a practitioner in our area.  Within a week we began to see small and subtle improvement in Max — improvement that became a slow and steady trend. After two years of treatment, he was testing normally and was released from eligibility for special education benefits.

His speech and language therapist told the county representative that she had never seen an autistic child recover like Max had, and she fully credited homeopathy for his recovery.  By the time he was eight, nearly all signs of Max’s autism were gone. Today he is 18, a freshman at a leading university, completely autism free, and without restrictions of any kind.

Needless to say, this experience was both mind-boggling and life-transforming.  I began to study homeopathy myself and ultimately wrote what became the best-selling patient education book in the USA — Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy [17] — a comprehensive introduction to homeopathic history, philosophy, science, and experience, sprinkled with dozens first-person cure stories for a variety of ailments, along with a chapter about Max’s cure.

In the end, I left my work in computer science and devoted myself to letting others know about the healing powers of homeopathy. I got involved in the successful campaign for health freedom legislation in California too [18].  Steve also got involved and developed the National Vaccine Information Center’s online interface to the VAERS database [19] (the CDC’s public record of vaccine injuries).  I guess Max’s  healing led us both to become alternative medicine activists, and we haven’t looked back.


Conclusion

So why not take a look at homeopathy for yourself?  Make it your New Year’s resolution to find a good classical practitioner and to learn more about this amazing medical modality.  The skeptics manage to create a lot of smoke in an effort to hide homeopathy from public view.  But where there’s smoke, there’s fire.  Find out about how this powerful healing system — a system that packs a lot of firepower into an infinitesimal punch — can help you and your family.

Resources

(1) Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy – www.impossiblecure.com.

This website includes:  book ordering information; autism help page; free archive of Amy’s show on AutismOne Radio – There’s Hope with Homeopathy; Cure Stories Database; helpful links.


(2)
National Center for Homeopathy – www.nationalcenterforhomeopathy.org.

Leading open-membership organization for homeopathy in the USA that organizes the yearly national conference.  Membership buys a quarterly magazine, Homeopathy Today, monthly eNewsetter, online chats with leading experts, extensive online resources and social network.  Website includes many free resources, including practitioner and resource referrals lists and flu treatment information.


References

[1] www.bolenreport.net.

[2] Baum, Michael and Edzard Ernst, “Should We Maintain an Open Mind about Homeopathy?” The American Journal of Medicine, Vol. 122, No. 11, pp. 973-974 (November 2009).

[3] Shang, A. et al. “Are the Clinical Effects of Homeopathy Placebo Effects?  Comparative Study of Placebo-Controlled Trials of Homeopathy and Allopathy,” The Lancet, 366, pp. 726-732 (2005).

An extensive refutation of the results of this study, including statistical analyses and evidence of foul-play, can be found here: http://www.liebertonline.com/toc/acm/11/5.

[4] Linde, K. et al.  “Are the Clinical Effects of Homoeopathy Placebo Effects?  A Meta-Analysis of Placebo-Controlled Trials,” The Lancet, 250, pp. 834-843 (1997).

[5] Kleijnen, J. et al. “Clinical Trials of Homeopathy,” British Medical Journal, 302, pp. 316-323 (1991).

[6] Jacobs, J. et al. “Treatment of Acute Childhood Diarrhea with Homeopathic Medicine: A Randomized Clinical Trial in Nicaragua,” Pediatrics, Vol. 83, No. 5, pp. 719-725 (1994).

[7] Bell, I.R. et al. “Improved Clinical Status in Fibromyalgia Patients Treated with Individualized Homeopathic Remedies Versus Placebo,” Rheumatology, 2004b; 43 (5):577-82.

[8] Taylor, M.A. et al. “Randomised Controlled Trial of Homoeopathy Versus Placebo in Perennial Allergic Rhinitis with Overview of Four Trial Series,” British Medical Journal, 321, pp. 471-476 (2000).

[9] For more trials, see www.nationalcenterforhomeopathy.org (under Articles, click Research).

[10] Rao, et al. “The Defining Role of Structure (Including Epitaxy) in the Plausibility of Homeopathy,” Homeopathy, 96, pp. 175-182 (2007).

[11] Davenas, et al. “Human Basophil Degranulation Triggered by Very Dilute Antiserum Againt IgE,” Nature, Vol. 333, No. 6176, pp. 816-818 (1988).

[12] Aissa, J. et al. “Transatlantic Transfer of Digitized Antigen Signal by Telephone Link,” Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 99:S175 (1997).

[13] Brown, V. and M. Ennis. “Flow-Cytometric Analysis of Basophil Activation: Inhibition by Histamine at Conventional and Homeopathic Concentrations,” Inflammation Research, 50, Supplement (2), S47-S48 (2001).

[14] Montagnier, Luc, et al. “Electromagnetic Signals Are Produced by Aqueous Nanostructures Derived from Bacterial DNA Sequences,” Insterdiscip Sci Comput Life Sci, 1:81-90 (2009).

[15] http://homeopathyresource.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/successful-use-of-homeopathy-in-over-5-million-people-reported-from-cuba/

[16] Reichenberg-Ullman, J. “A Homeopathic Approach to Behavioral Problems,” Mothering, Number 74, pp. 97-101 (1995).

[17] Lansky, Amy. Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy.  R.L. Ranch Press (2003).

[18] www.californiahealthfreedom.com.

[19] www.medalerts.org.


Amy L. Lansky, PhD was a Silicon Valley computer scientist when her life was transformed by the miraculous homeopathic cure of her son’s autism. In April 2003 she published Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy, one of the best-selling books on homeopathy in the USA (www.impossiblecure.com).

Amy is an executive board member of the National Center for Homeopathy (www.nationalcenterforhomeopathy.org). She speaks and writes internationally about homeopathy and hosts a monthly radio show on Autism One Radio (www.autismone.org).

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