World Homeopathy Awareness Week…

It is World Homeopathy Awareness Week (WHAW) – running from April 10th until April 16th 2011. It coincides with the birthday of the late Samuel Hahnemann (10th April 1755 – 2nd July 1843), the creator of homeopathy. Homeopathy is an alternative medicine based upon three key principles.

Like Cures Like

The principle is that a material that can cause a particular symptom can be used to treat that symptom. This idea dates back to Hippocrates (460-377BC) and can be seen in conventional medicine with drugs such as Ritalin, a stimulant, which can be used to treat over-activity of the brain. One notable homeopathic treatment (remedy) is derived from coffee, which tends to keep you awake, and is prescribed to people who are having trouble sleeping.

Dilution

Samuel Hahnemann was concerned at the awful effects the medicine of his time was having on patients. He experimented with using much reduced doses to remove any toxic effects and he postulated that the more he diluted the treatment with water, the more effective it would be.

Succussion

This means the agitation of the remedy at each stage of dilution to activate the water molecules. This process, known as potentising, was designed to release the dynamic forces within the original molecules and allow them to be intensified through subsequent dilutions.

So homeopathy is not herbal medicine as some people believe. It relies entirely upon highly diluted solutions of active ingredients, chosen because they are capable of causing specific symptoms in a healthy human being. Furthermore, homeopathy attempts to treat the whole person, not just the symptoms, and a homeopathic consultation is much longer than one you would expect to receive from a conventional doctor.

The aim of WHAW is best summed up by this sentence from its website.

“Through more awareness and access to homeopathy resulting in profoundly improved health, the paradigm in the understanding of healing and healthcare can truly shift.”

(A paradigm is a philosophical or theoretical framework.)

The organisation running WHAW offers…

“free public events such as lectures, media interviews, volunteer first-aid at sports events, free & reduced clinics, written materials, pieces on Twitter and Facebook, publication articles and much more are shared in over 40 countries”

Let’s look at the idea of dilution as it links nicely with the work we do on solutions and solubility. Remedies are prepared by diluting an original sample in distilled water. One drop of the active ingredient is added to nine drops of water to make a 1X dilution. To make a 2X dilution you take one drop from a 1X solution and add it to nine drops of water. So a 2X remedy has been diluted 10 × 10 times or 100 times. This level of dilution is also known as 1C (i.e. one drop of ingredient to ninety-nine drops of water.)

A common remedy is made from the extract of onion and is called Allium Cepa (you can look here for a full list of the symptoms that may require treatment with Allium Cepa). It is commonly sold to treat colds and can be bought at 6C dilution. This is not very dilute by homeopathic standards, so is therefore not regarded as a very strong dose. To make a 6C dilution you can start with a 1C dilution and add a single drop to ninety-nine drops of water – remembering to shake it to potentise the molecules (succussion). This is now a 2C dilution, so take one drop, add it to ninety-nine drops of water, shake it, and repeat these steps three more times. You have now, in effect, a solution equivalent to 1 drop of the original onion juice in 999,999,999,999 drops of water. This mixture is then sprinkled over some tiny pilules (made from sucrose and/or lactose) and sold for around £5 per 125 pills.

The other commonly available dilution that you might find in Boots or online is 30C – a more dilute and therefore ‘stronger’ dilution. The important thing to remember is that this is not 5 times more dilute than a 6C preparation. Each ‘C’ means that the remedy has been diluted by a factor of 100 so 30C is a 6C remedy diluted by a factor of 100 twenty four more times. Or put another way…

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more dilute.

This is a big number, more easily expressed as 1 × 10⁴⁸ in standard form. So the original drop of onion is now swimming in a sea equivalent to one drop less than 1 × 10⁶⁰ drops of distilled water. What this means is that any remedy beyond 12C is highly unlikely to contain a single molecule of the original ingredient. It is, in effect, just water sprinkled over sugar pills.

Lots of people have had positive experiences with homeopathy, as is also the case with most other alternative medicines available. Personal experience cannot count as significant evidence, however, so there is yet some disagreement between the homeopathic community and the scientific community over how effective homeopathy is. Since there is no plausible explanation as to how it works, and very little evidence that it has any clinical effect, most scientists suggest that it works no better than a placebo.

A placebo is a deliberately inactive medication used as a comparison in clinical trials. The investigation then becomes, “Does my new treatment work better than doing nothing at all?” The best medical trials compare new medicines against the best existing treatment since doing ‘better than nothing’ doesn’t mean much if there is already an effective treatment out there.

Questions…

1. What is ‘distilled water’?
2. What elements are combined to make water?
3. What is a ‘saturated solution?
4. 12g of carbon contains approximately 602,214,179,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. Express this in standard form (2dp). What name is given to this number?