4 Belfast homeopathy results
This is from an article in New Scientist called "13 that do not make
sense":
[HOTEXAS] homeopathy experiment
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the
scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy
could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single
molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that
is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of
ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in
inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under
attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study,
replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute
that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like
histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits
that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things
like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting
this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of
dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on
the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still
imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains skeptical. And it remains true that no
homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised
placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation
Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis
says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to
encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be
real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics
and chemistry.
This and the other 12 things are described at: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524911.600