{"id":3246,"date":"2019-06-22T07:00:47","date_gmt":"2019-06-22T05:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/netzwerk-homoeopathie.info\/?p=3246"},"modified":"2021-07-15T18:39:17","modified_gmt":"2021-07-15T16:39:17","slug":"funktioniert-homoeopathie-ein-gastbeitrag-aus-indien","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/netzwerk-homoeopathie.info\/en\/funktioniert-homoeopathie-ein-gastbeitrag-aus-indien\/","title":{"rendered":"Does homeopathy work? – A guest contribution by Abhijit Chanda (berationable.com)"},"content":{"rendered":"Lesedauer \/ Reading Time:<\/span> 32<\/span> min<\/span><\/span>
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Introduction<\/h2>\n

Again and again we hear of India as the “promised land” of homeopathy. Again and again the critics are reproached of India as a shining example when it comes to constructing a “proof” of its validity through the widespread spread of homeopathy.<\/p>\n

All the more we are pleased to be able to present here today a guest contribution of an Indian author who grew up with homeopathy there and has nevertheless found a critical and negative attitude. The following article first appeared on his blog (berationable,com<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and also The Rationable Podcast).<\/p>\n

We can only speculate here about the reasons for the widespread spread of homeopathy in India. Therefore we find the message of our guest author highly interesting that the reputation of homeopathy in India is largely based on the fact that it comes from Germany – one cannot imagine there that something wrong or nonsense (“bogus”) would come from Germany. On the one hand this is astonishing and on the other hand it unmasks the reference of the local homeopaths to the popularity in India as a circular conclusion.<\/p>\n

We consider this contribution to be an extremely important document from a part of the world where critical-rational thinking is only slowly beginning to spread. We have great respect for our guest author, who has found such a critical attitude in his completely different socio-cultural environment that it hits the heart of the matter.<\/p>\n

We are very happy about the possibility of the publication and would like to thank our guest author!<\/p>\n

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Does homeopathy work?
\nA guest contribution by Abhijit Chanda (berationable.com<\/a><\/strong>)<\/h2>\n
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Homoeopathy<\/strong><\/a>, especially in India, is a treatment method in which a lot of people believe. In fact, India is one of the biggest markets for homoeopathic medicine, if not the largest. Plus, it\u2019s getting support from the government through the AYUSH initiative. My parents gave me homoeopathic treatments as a child, and they swear by it. In fact, most people do. There are college degrees for it, doctors prescribe it, and infants and animals are said to benefit from it too! But does homoeopathy really work? As I found out, it kind of does, but not in the way you think.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer: This is going to be a long article, so bear with me. If you can\u2019t here\u2019s a TL;DR version. But I recommend you go through this to get the nuances, and my side of the story.<\/p>\n

TL;DR<\/h3>\n
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      Homoeopathy is an ancient practice created in the 1700s as a counter treatment to bloodletting and other rather horrific medical practices<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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      Homoeopathy is a process of diluting a small amount substance in more water than the whole earth can contain to treat your ailment<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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      There has been no evidence to show that it works any better than a placebo, even after hundreds of clinical trials have been conducted.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      MY STORY<\/h3>\n

      For most of my life, I have taken it for granted that homoeopathy worked. I didn\u2019t know how or why, I just knew that my parents and most other people swore by it, so there had to be something to it. I was treated with homoeopathy several times. In one case, it actually made things worse. The homoeopathic doctor responded with, \u201cThings sometimes have to get worse before they get better.\u201d I have to admit, as much as I wasn\u2019t impressed with that answer, I liked the taste of the medicines. Always sugary and sweet or even with that little bit of alcohol. What more does a kid need in his life than to eat something sugary sweet for medicine!<\/p>\n

      It was only when I started becoming more of a science enthusiast, did I realise that the rest of the scientific world didn\u2019t think that homoeopathy worked. Richard Dawkins and James Randi were the first people I encountered who had publicly ridiculed homoeopathy. I couldn\u2019t believe what I was seeing! How could this form of treatment be so ineffective and yet have millions of followers?<\/p>\n

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      Pharmacist in Homoeopathic pharmacy Varanasi Benares India<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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      HOW HOMOEOPATHY WAS BORN<\/h3>\n

      It took me a while to get to the root of the question – does homoeopathy work at all? I think the most comprehensive and interestingly told account<\/a><\/strong> was on a podcast called Skeptoid by Brian Dunning. It\u2019s an excellent collection of everything you need to know about Homeopathy in just around 15 minutes. You should certainly check it out.<\/p>\n

      So here\u2019s what I found out about how homoeopathy came into existence.<\/p>\n

      Back in the 1700s, the prevalent medical treatments of the time involved balancing the four humours: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. The prevailing theory was that sickness was caused by an imbalance of these \u201chumours\u201d, which wasn\u2019t at all funny because the way to balance them was primarily through bloodletting, leeching, or purging. If you\u2019re wondering if these words mean what you think, they do. They were all about somehow getting rid of some of the fluids to blame for the disease, whether it was the blood by opening a vein and letting it flow out of the victim or more slowly by using a leach. Enemas, vomiting and sweating were other ways of getting rid of these diseases. Of course, these did work some of the time if the patient had a condition that called for such treatment. However, many ended up dying due to malnutrition, dehydration or loss of blood. Or all of the above.<\/p>\n

      Out of these archaic so-called medical practices, a German physician called Samuel Hahnemann found a treatment that didn\u2019t at all affect his patients adversely. He called it Homoeopathy. The theory was published in 1807 and was governed by a couple of laws:<\/p>\n

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          Law of similars:<\/strong> which basically states that like cures like. He claimed that if you use a toxin that causes certain effects on a person, that same toxin can be used to alleviate those symptoms, but only if it was diluted very thoroughly<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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          The Law of Infinitesimals:<\/strong> The more dilute the solution was, the more profound would be its ability to balance the humours.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          So, as you can see, this does sound somewhat similar to how vaccines work – where a weaker version of a virus is injected into a person to teach the immune system to fight the disease. And vaccines work brilliantly!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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          HOW HOMOEOPATHIC REMEDIES ARE MADE<\/h3>\n
          \"Portrait
          Samuel Hahnemann<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

          However, homoeopathy is different in a fundamental way. The solutions are so dilute, there\u2019s almost no chance that even a molecule of the original toxin remains in the final product. How? To show you how this works, I\u2019ll quote Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com, who explains it particularly well<\/a>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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          Dilutions of homoeopathic products that are sold today usually range from 6X to 30X. This is homoeopathy’s system for measuring the dilution, and it doesn’t mean 1 part in 6 or 1 part in 30. X represents the roman numeral 10. A 6X dilution means one part in 106 or one in one million. A 30X dilution means one part in 1030<\/sup> or one followed by 30 zeros. A few products are even marketed using the C scale, Roman numeral 100. 30C is 10030<\/sup>. That’s a staggering number; it’s 1 followed by 60 zeros, about the number of atoms in our galaxy. In 1807, they knew more about mathematics and chemistry than they did about medicine, and it was known that there is a maximum dilution possible in chemistry. Some decades later it was learned that this proportion is related to Avogadro’s constant, about 6 \u00d7 1023<\/sup>. Beyond this limit, where many of Hahnemann’s dilutions lay, they are in fact no longer dilutions but are chemically considered to be pure water. So Hahnemann designed a workaround. Hahnemann thought that if a solution was agitated enough, the water would retain a spiritual imprint of the original substance, and could then be diluted without limit. The water is often added to sugar pills for remedies designed to be taken in a pill form. So when you buy homoeopathic pills sold today, you’re actually buying sugar, water, or alcohol that’s “channelling” (for lack of a better term) some described substance. The substance itself no longer remains, except for a few millionth-part molecules in the lowest dilutions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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          Let’s look again at Avogadro’s number. 6 \u00d7 1023 atoms are called a mole, a term any chemistry student is familiar with. How big is that number? Well, if you had 500 sheets of paper, you’d have a stack about two and a half inches high, like a ream that you’d buy at the stationery store. If you had 6 \u00d7 1023 sheets of paper, your stack would reach all the way from the Earth to the Sun. And not only that: it would reach that distance four hundred million times. Think about that for a moment. One sheet of paper, in a stack that’s 400,000,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. That’s a typical homoeopathic dilution. Sounds pretty potent, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n

          Brian Dunning from Homeopathy: Pure Water or Pure Nonsense<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

          Quackwatch has another way of putting it. Here\u2019s an excerpt from their article, Homeopathy<\/a>:<\/strong> The Ultimate Fake by Stephen Barrett MD:<\/p>\n

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          Robert L Park, Ph.D., a prominent physicist who is executive director of The American Physical Society, has noted that since the least amount of a substance in a solution is one molecule, a 30C solution would have to have at least one molecule of the original substance dissolved in a minimum of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water. This would require a container more than 30,000,000,000 times the size of the Earth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

          That\u2019s really hard to wrap your head around, isn\u2019t it? To put it in simpler terms, the amount of dilution any substance goes through in homoeopathy makes it almost impossible to find even a single molecule of the original material in the final product. Simpler still, none of the original substance will find its way into your regime of treatments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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          HOW DO THE TREATMENTS WORK THEN?<\/h3>\n

          According to Hahnemann, the process of diluting and shaking the concoction (potentization) imprints the essence of the substance onto the water molecules, which then interacts with the body\u2019s \u201cvital force\u201d.<\/p>\n

          It does seem a bit spiritual, doesn\u2019t it? So is homoeopathy a spiritual medicine? It certainly seems so, even though I don\u2019t think many people would believe that. However, there is another explanation that I\u2019ve heard.<\/p>\n

          WATER HAS MEMORY …<\/h3>\n

          Apparently, water can \u201cremember\u201d, or retain the spiritual imprint of the substance that has been in it, and that is what helps treat you.<\/p>\n

          A French scientist by the name of Jacques Benveniste<\/em><\/a><\/strong> published a study in the science journal Nature<\/em> in 1988. This caused quite a ruckus in the scientific community as it didn’t seem plausible. But as the study methodology seemed sound, the journal had published it. But it did come with a note from the editor, John Maddox<\/em>, asking people to “suspend judgement” until the study was replicated.<\/p>\n

          In brief, the study took human antibodies, put them a test tube, shook it thoroughly and then diluted it to a point where not even a molecule of the first sample would be present. The team reported that when human basophils were exposed to this water, they reacted as if there was an allergic reaction.<\/p>\n

          When the time came, John Maddox<\/em> along with magician and paranormal researcher, James ‘The Amazing’ Randi<\/em>, and Walter W Stewart<\/em>, a chemist, set up the study. They noticed that Benveniste<\/em>‘s team knew where the vials with the first solutions were. Therefore, they decided to make the study double-blinded – meaning none of the researchers, or the team from Nature, would possibly know which test tube or vial was which, and went to elaborate lengths to ensure there was no cheating.<\/p>\n

          Long story short, the study came out negative, showing no effects at all. Benveniste<\/em>‘s study had been debunked.<\/p>\n

          THE EVIDENCE<\/h3>\n

          There have been literally hundreds of studies done to test homoeopathy. Every single meta-analysis<\/a><\/strong> and systematic review of the research published has come back with results claiming homoeopathy works no better than a placebo. There were quite a few studies that showed homoeopathy is better than placebo, but after analysing them, it was found that either their sample sizes were tiny or their methods were questionable.<\/p>\n

          There are way too many studies and reviews to go into each of them or even describe them in brief. However, the entry in Wikipedia has an excellent overview of the evidence<\/a><\/strong> along with all the links to the studies, if you want to dig deeper.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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          SO WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE SWEAR BY HOMOEOPATHY?<\/h3>\n

          This is probably the most critical question here. After my faith in homoeopathy had been shaken, I shared what I had found, hoping my friends would see that they had been fooled just like I had been. I wasn\u2019t ready for their responses. They defended homoeopathy quite aggressively. It felt like I had offended them by saying their beloved alternative medicine didn\u2019t have any evidence behind it.<\/p>\n

          However, I want nothing more than to share what I\u2019ve found and ask you to consider the evidence. So, if I\u2019ve angered and offended you in some way, and you think homoeopathy does indeed work, let\u2019s have a civil discussion about where you think I\u2019ve gone wrong.<\/p>\n

          Still, let\u2019s try and figure out why it seems to work so well:<\/p>\n