Why Homeopathy Makes Sense and Works

Homeopathic Medicine:  Nano-doses, Powerful Results

Homeopathic medicine presents a significantly different pharmacological approach to treating sick people.  Instead of using strong and powerful doses of medicinal agents that have a broad-spectrum effect on a wide variety of people with a similar disease, homeopaths use extremely small doses of medicinal substances that are highly individualized to a person’s physical and psychological syndrome of disease, not simply an assumed localized pathology.

Homeopathic medicines are so small in dose that it is appropriate to refer to them as a part of the newly defined field of “nanopharmacology” (the prefix “nano” derives from Latin and means dwarf; today, the prefix is used to refer to “nanotechnology” or the “nanosciences” which explore the use of extremely small technologies or processes, at least one-billionth of a unit, designated as 10^-9).  To understand the nature and the degree of homeopathy’s nanopharmacology, it is important to know the following characteristics of how homeopathic medicines are made.

Making Homeopathic Medicines

1)      Most homeopathic medicines are made by diluting a medicinal substance in a double-distilled water.  It should be noted that physicists who study the properties of water commonly acknowledge that water has many mysterious and amazing properties.  Because homeopaths use a double-distilled water, it is highly purified, enabling the medicinal substance to solely infiltrate and imprint the water.  People interested in the mysteries of water will be very interested in reading The Hidden Messages in Water by Japanese scientist, Dr. M. Emoto, who was featured in the movie “What the Bleep do We Know?”

2)      Each substance is diluted, most commonly, 1 part of the original medicinal agent to 9 or 99 parts double-distilled water.  The mixture is then vigorously stirred or shaken.  The solution is then diluted again 1:9 or 1:99 and vigorously shaken.  This process of consecutive diluting and shaking or stirring is repeated 3, 6, 12, 30, 200, 1,000, or even 1,000,000 times.  Simply “diluting” the medicines without vigorously shaking them doesn’t activate the medicinal effects. 

3)      It is inaccurate to say that homeopathic medicines are extremely diluted; they are extremely “potentized.”  “Potentization” refers to the specific process of sequential dilution with vigorous shaking.  Each consecutive dilution infiltrates the new double-distilled water and imprints upon it the fractal form of the original substance used (fractal refers to the specific consecutively smaller pattern or form within a larger pattern).  Ultimately, some type of fractal or hologram of the original substance may be imprinted in the water.  For a more detailed and technical description of what may make a homeopathic medicine active, see writings of chemist and homeopath, Brian Connelly  (Connelly, 2002).

Over 200 years of experience by homeopaths throughout the world has shown that the more that a substance undergoes potentization (the process of sequential dilution with vigorous shaking in-between each dilution), the more powerful the medicine becomes, the longer it acts, and the less doses are generally needed.  Because of these observations and experiences, homeopaths refer to medicines that have been potentized 200 times or more as “high potencies” and those that have been potentized less than 12 times as “low potencies.” 

In this light, homeopaths insist that their medicines are NOT extremely small doses.  Instead, they assume that the double-distilled and purified water is changed and becomes imprinted and activated. 

Homeopaths will be the first to acknowledge that their medicine will not have any effect at all, unless the person taking them has a hypersensitivity to the medicine.  A person will have this hypersensitivity if and when they exhibit the syndrome of symptoms that the substance has previously been found to cause.

Still, it is admittedly difficult to initially accept the possibility that such nanopharmacological doses can have any effect at all.  And yet, some highly respected basic scientific research has begun to verify the claims that homeopaths have made since its inception in the 1800s.

Principle and Power of Resonance

Before discussing these scientific studies, it may be helpful to make brief reference to a subject for which there is common knowledge.  Basic principles of physics teach us that hypersensitivity exists when there is “resonance.”  An example from music is helpful here:  Whenever a “C” note is played on a piano (or any instrument), other “C” notes reverberate, while other notes are not affected at all.  Even when one instrument is relatively far away from another, its C strings will reverberate when a C note is played. 

Ultimately, homeopathy is a medical system based on resonance (commonly referred to as the “principle of similars”).  Two hundred years of experience by hundreds of thousands of homeopaths have consistently discovered that specially prepared, extremely small doses of medicine can powerfully augment a person’s healing response when there is a similarity between the toxicology of the medicine and the symptom complex of the sick person.  One of the special features of homeopathy is that whenever a patient is given a homeopathic medicine that does not match his or her symptoms, nothing happens.  But when there is a match, people experience significant improvement in their overall health.

Other Evidence on the Power of Nano-Doses

There is a significant body of conventional scientific research that has verified the powerful biochemical effects of extremely low concenetrations of biological agents. Chemicals in the brain called beta-endorphins are known to modulate natural killer cell activity in dilutions of 10^-18 (this dilution means that a substance was diluted 1:10 eighteen times).  Interleukin 1, an important part of our immune system, has been found to exhibit increased T-cell clone proliferation at 10^-19.  And pheromones (hormones emitted externally by various animals and insects) will result in hypersensitive reaction when as little as a single molecule is received.  (For an excellent review of many substances that have significant biological activity in extremely small doses, see Drs. P. Bellavite and A. Signorini’s Emerging Science of Homeopathy: Complexity, Biodynamics, and Nanopharmacology; see also Eskinazi, 1999).

The doses mentioned immediately above are still in the molecular dose range, and as such, they do not in themselves create cause for a revolution in science or medicine.  However, few scientists and physicians are knowledgeable of the power and potential of nanodoses commonly used by homeopaths all over the world.  This is particularly disappointing because it is commonly observed that organisms experience a biphasic response to various chemicals, that is, extremely small doses of a substance exhibit different and sometimes opposite effects than what they cause in high concentrations.  For instance, it is widely recognized that normal medical doses of atropine block the parasympathetic nerves, causing mucous membranes to dry up, while exceedingly small doses of atropine causes increased secretions to mucous membranes (Goodman and Gilman, 2001). 

This fact that drugs can have two phases of action, depending upon their concentration, is a little known but consistently observed phenomenon.  In fact, many medical and scientific dictionaries refer to “hormesis” or “the Arndt-Schulz law” (listed in leading medical and scientific dictionaries under the word “law”) as the observations that weak concentrations of biological agents stimulate physiological activity, medium concentrations of agents depress physiological activity, and large concentrations halt physiological activity. 

There is a significant body of research on hormesis (hundreds of studies) conducted by conventional scientists, none of whom even mention homeopathy (Stebbins, 1982; Oberbaum and Cambar, 1994).  Even the journal, Health Physics devoted an entire issue to this subject (May, 1987).  For further information on hormesis, click here.

Just as humankind went west to explore new frontiers and is now exploring the frontier of space, today scientists and physicians are exploring nanotechnologies and nanopharmacologies.  It is only a matter of time before scientists and physicians learn that homeopathic medicine presents a fertile ground for exploring and exploiting the power of these powerful nanodoses.