What is homoeopathy?

Homoeopathy is in the news again. Most of us know of homoeopathy, often touted to be a safe and holistic way to treat illnesses. But what is homoeopathy, really?

Tomorrow, at 10:23 UK time, a group of people who are skeptical about homoeopathy, will give a public demonstration, as reported by R.C. Camphausen. But what is homoeopathy exactly? Homoepathy is a system of healing that was dreamed up at the end of the 18th century by German Physician and translator Samuel Hahnemann. It is based on the following main principles: 1. When someone is sick, that means that this person's "vital force" needs help to cure the person. 2. The homoeopath must have a long, thorough talk with the patient to find out what's wrong with her/him. 3. The idea of similia similibus curentur or like cures like. What this means is that homoeopathy attempts to find products that create an artificial disease with symptoms that are similar to the one it wants to treat. The idea is that this will help the vital force to focus on the symptoms, and by attacking and removing these symptoms, the original disease will be gone as well. For example, if you have trouble sleeping, the homoeopath will prescribe you something that supposedly causes sleeplessness. In this case, coffee is the obvious candidate. This is not necessarily obviously silly. Many people point out that this is what vaccines do. Unfortunately, the resemblance is a very superficial one. Vaccines are not given to cure diseases, they are given to teach the immune system about a specific (dangerous) micro-organism to give it the opportunity to build a defence against it. In other words, vaccines are a form of preventative medicine, not curative medicine. Homoeopathy doesn't look for causes of diseases. The whole system is based on looking for symptoms and then choosing a product that superficially seems to produce the same effect, according to the homoeopathic pharmacopoeia. 4. The product that has been chosen will now be diluted. There are two main reasons for this: homoeopathic products often have unpleasant effects, or are downright toxic (mercury comes to mind). By diluting them, this effect becomes less. There is a prescribed way to do this and Hahnemann explains it at length in his book (which is written in stanzas, not unlike the Qur'an). Leaving out some of the unimportant details, the homoeopath (or whomever prepares the product) takes one drop of the product, and adds 99 drops of water. The test tube or the vial in which this is done, must then be hit against a hard object several times, to shake it. This is called "succussing". From the resulting liquid, one drop is taken, diluted with 99 drops of water and succussed. From this, one drop is taken... This process of diluting and succussing is supposed to make the product more potent (potentisation). This is the really silly bit: the more diluting and succussing is done, the more potent the result is supposed to be. In chemistry and physics, we have a number known as the Avogadro constant (it used to be known as Avogadro's number). It is the number of atoms in exactly 12 grammes of carbon-12. This quantity is called a mol and it is an important unit for measuring quantities of a product in chemistry, because it counts atoms, rather than looking at weight. The Avogadro constant is written as 6.02214179 x 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or, in a more convenient notation: 6.02214179 x 10^23. Why do we use this to refer to homoeopathy? Because it gives us an idea of how far we can dilute something before it disappears completely. Imagine that you take a glass of wine and a glass of water. You mix them: you now have two glasses of "water-wine," watered-down wine. You take one glass of this mixture. This mixture contains only half of the original wine. The more you repeat this, the less wine you will taste and the more watery your beverage will be. Same goes for homoeopathy. A typical dilution in homoeopathy and the one Hahnemann used in his book, is 30C, or one drop diluted in 100 drops of water, and so on, 30 times in a row, a dilution of 10^60. Because the Avogadro constant is substantially smaller, we know that you will most likely not get even a single molecule of the original substance. Homoeopaths don't deny this. They claim that the water somehow retains a memory of the original substance. Peter Fisher, homoeopath of the British royal family goes so far as to claim that nobody knows the structure of water, so it could well be hiding a memory. This is about as silly as it gets. Yes, water sometimes forms clusters of molecules that stay together. This is one of the reasons that water is so incredibly hard when you fall on it, but this "clustering" only lasts fractions of fractions of seconds, and this hypothesis is useless to begin with. For example, why would water give preference to remembering some caffeine molecule some homoeopath put in rather than the pee and the poo that have dwelled far longer in it? It gets funnier. Tests have been done in which the homoeopaths were given the possibility to recognize their own "potentised" products by any means necessary except for cheating, even supernatural means if they wanted. They have all failed. It doesn't matter anyway. Who cares about how homoeopathy is supposed to work if it doesn't work in the first place? We have about 2 centuries worth of tests now, and we have seen pretty conclusively that homoepathy does not work. However, if you have followed me so far, you now know why the homoeopathy demonstration is going to take place at 10:23, right? Look at the Avogadro constant.