David Beckham is a big fan of homeopathy. So are Tina Turner and Prince Charles. In fact, Britain recently spent 20 million pounds refurbishing the Royal Homeopathic Hospital. That’s an enormous investment for a practice not currently supported by modern science. Is this fervor justified?
Homeopathy is a practice based on the idea that “like cures like.” Followers of this practice believe that extreme dilutions (by 1031 or more) of a substance that would normally cause illness will relieve it in a sick patient. For example, an herb that would cause fever if eaten directly is thought to relieve fever when taken diluted to homeopathic specifications.
Homeopathic remedies are made by dissolving the harmful substance in ethanol. This “mother tincture” is then diluted several times in water, with vigourous shaking or “succussions” at every step, until the final solution is unlikely to contain even one molecule of the initial substance. “Succussions” are believed to increase the potency of the solution, meaning more dilute solutions are more potent.
For most modern scientists, the idea that what is essentially water could heal diseases is absurd. Many studies have sought to determine whether homeopathy is effective, with no consistent conclusion, although some studies have shown homeopathic treatments to be more effective than a placebo. Recently, a research group in Ireland published results showing that homeopathic dilutions of histamine can in fact modify the actions of basophils, cells involved in the immune system.
But supporters of either side of the debate have their own explanations for the inconsistencies.
Champions of homeopathy say that the experimental method itself is to blame for the lack of reproducible results supporting it, claiming that it ignores homeopathy’s approach of treating each case individually. Homeopaths say their practice is so individualized it can’t be tested by standard scientific methods.
Dr. Heather Boon, a specialist in naturopathy and homeopathy at U of T, contends that testing whether homeopathy works is analogous to testing whether “drugs,” in general, work. Conventional drugs are not all equally effective, so measuring the overall “effectiveness” of all drugs is not very useful. Boon says studies should focus on the mechanisms underlying homeopathy, instead of simply measuring whether or not it works as a whole.
But even proponents of homeopathy feel doubt. “The scientist in me can’t
embrace the practice until a mechanism is known,” admitted Boon.
Among homeopaths, the most popular explanation of how homeopathy works is the “Water Memory Theory,” which postulates that water molecules are imprinted with a “memory” of substances that had been dissolved in it.
A Swiss group recently studied homeopathic dilutions using thermoluminescence, a technique that produces a distinctive spectrum representing the contents of the solution. They found that water from a homeopathic dilution of lithium chloride had a characteristically different spectrum from water diluted with water. But other studies using different techniques, such as X-ray crystallography, found no difference between the homeopathic remedy and plain old water.
Water Memory Theory falters when it comes to explaining how homeopathic sugar tablets-which contain no water-work. These tablets are made by pouring homeopathic remedies over a sugar tablet and drying it, supposedly transferring the healing properties of the water into the sugar.
And what about the infamous placebo effect? It’s long been accepted that the suggestion that a remedy will heal can be enough to cause relief. Homeopathic practitioners also tend to spend more time with their patients than conventional doctors do with theirs. These factors are not trivial, as the healing power of a reassured state of mind has been found to exist in numerous studies, although it is still far from understood.
Without question, homeopathy is a pseudoscience. But just because a practice is pseudoscientific, does that mean it’s false? Science can’t be so closed-minded as to dismiss a phenomenon because it doesn’t fit accepted paradigms.
Although scientific studies supporting homeopathy can’t be reproduced, the fact remains that some studies do support the practice. Further, most studies refuting homeopathy can’t be consistently reproduced either. In the last decade, homeopathy has topped lists of things we can’t explain, and perhaps that is where it will stay.
