Homeopathy -- Dilute And Heal

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Homeopathy -- Dilute And Heal by Andy Patrizio

3:00 a.m. 15.Mar.2000 PST With a little help from a scientist looking for a way to clean car engines, a physician has been able to explain the confounding paradox behind why homeopathic medicine gets more potent as it's diluted.

Homeopathic medicine, discovered by a German physician more than 200 years ago, espouses many concepts seen in other forms of alternative medicine -- namely, that the body can and knows how to heal itself.

"Everybody's fine and hunky dory with [homeopathic concepts] until they come to the part where the more you dilute and shake the substance, the more powerful it gets and the deeper it reaches," said Dr. Bill Gray, author of Homeopathy: Science or Myth.

"That doesn't make sense [for most practitioners], because we're used to thinking in a chemical sense."

Just how the body reacts to varying dosages of medicine is still being debated. Pharmaceutical and herbal medicines both operate under the notion that more is more; whether it's aspirin, Prozac, or Echinacea, the more milligrams per dose, the quicker the cure.

Not so in homeopathy. The "law of infinitesimals" states that the more you dilute a drug, the more potent it gets. Arnica, for example, can address a sprain or bruise in low potencies. In high potency, it can adversely affect a person's mental state.

Remedies are made with one part of the material, which can be a chemical, element, plant, or even poison, added to nine or 99 parts water. The water is vigorously shaken after the material is added. Then one drop of that water is added to another nine or 99 drops of water, a process called "successing."

The mixture is again shaken and the process repeated. After repeating this hundreds or even thousands of times, the water is poured onto sugar pellets, which is how the medicine is administered.

This intense watering down conflicts with accepted laws of chemistry, namely Avogadro's Principle, which states that any substance becomes untraceable if it is diluted beyond when a single molecule of the chemical can be found.

Critics point out that homeopathic medicines are diluted far beyond Avogadro's Number. The thesis of Gray's book is that water gains structure through the whole successing process.

"The point is, now that modern research shows that water that's prepared homeopathically is altered in its structure, this water does actually alter tissue cultures, organ function, and entire animals," said Gray, who has been practicing homeopathy in the San Francisco Bay Area for 29 years.

Validation of the dilution process came in a roundabout way, thanks to research by California Institute of Technology chemistry professor Shui Yin Lo, who was performing experiments on how to improve car engine efficiency. Lo found that water molecules, which are random in their normal state, begin to form a cluster when a substance is added to water and the water is vigorously shaken -- the exact process homeopaths use to create their medicine.

Lo said every substance exerts its own unique influence on the water, so each cluster shape and configuration is unique to the substance added. With each dilution and shaking, the clusters grow bigger and stronger. This water, which homeopaths call "potentized," is considered "structured water," because the water molecules have taken on a shape influenced by the original substance.

The clusters start to assume a form that mimics the structure of the original substance itself. So even though the chemical can no longer be detected, its "image" is there, taken on by the water molecules.

"If these clusters were unique to the original solute, and the observations are true that they can perpetuate themselves the more they are diluted or shaken, then the original material becomes irrelevant," Gray said.

The American Medical Association, which stated in its charter it was formed "to stamp out the scourge of homeopathy," declined to comment on Gray's book, homeopathy, or alternative medicine.

"We just believe [alternative medicine] needs to be studied more and patients should keep their physician in the loop. But we don't talk about one alternative therapy over another," said an AMA spokeswoman.

Dr. Sarnat, a medical doctor and president of Alternative Medicine Inc. in Highland Park, Illinois, said the theory of clustered water has been around for some time, but up until now it hasn't been proven. The book could help further the acceptance of homeopathy by explaining how it works.

"I think year by year, these types of ideas are more readily accepted into the medical community as a whole," Sarnat said. "Acupuncture in the 1960s was considered voodoo. Given the full range of things we've researched in alternative medicine, [electromagnetics] is no bigger a stretch than any other phenomenon under investigation."

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