Talk:Homeopathy

Dilution and succussion

I've done a little rearranging of this section. I've moved the paragraph about analogies used for homoeopathic dilutions out of the "dilution debate" subsection, where they don't really belong, and replaced them immediately above this subsection.

I've also moved the paragraph about the Horizon tests from "dilution debate/Preparation of remedies", where I don't think it really belongs, to the "High dilutions" subsection under "Medical and scientific analysis". I'm adding a sentence about the high dilutions making homoeopathy implausible to the "dilution and succussion" section in its place. The source I've used for this sentence states: "Although the basic idea of homeopathy is similarity, the most controversial and, for many, implausible claim concerns the properties of the ultramolecular dilutions characteristic of it." Brunton (talk) 19:03, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I've added a fact tag to the comment about Oscillococcinum - while this may well be a fair comment (the dilution involved is greater by a factor of well over 10³⁰⁰ than the number of particles in the known universe) we really ought to have a source for it. Brunton (talk) 19:23, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I also feel that the subsections headed "Provings" and "Repertory" should be moved from "Preparation of Remedies" to the end of the "General philosophy" section, since they're not really to do with the actual preparation process. Does anyone have any objection to this? Brunton (talk) 19:28, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I've been thinking again about this, in particular the organisation of the section "Preparation of remedies", with a view to arranging it in a more logical order.

What I propose is:

1) Renaming the "Preparation of remedies" section "Remedies";

2) Moving the subsection "Remedies" from "Treatments" to the start of this section;

3) Following this with the first paragraph of the current "Dilution and Succussion" subsection, renamed "Preparation of Remedies";

4) Second paragraph onwards of this subsection to be renamed "Dilutions", to be followed by current "Dilution debate", "Provings" and "Repertory" subsections;

5) Remainder of "Treatments" section to be renamed "Related treatments".

Any comments? Brunton (talk) 12:49, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Oh well, I suppose I'll go for it. I'm sure it'll get reverted if people object. Brunton (talk) 11:26, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Go for it. — NRen2k5^(TALK), 13:56, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Agree in principle, but have a couple of minor quibbles. The section titles should use sentence case, so "Dilution and succussion" or "Preparation of remedies" would be correct. Because the word "remedy" has a more common non-homeopathic meaning of "cure", we need to be careful to avoid an accidental endorsement of the homeopaths' implicit claim that a homeopathic "remedy" is a cure. I suggest we could avoid that error without excess controversy by simply calling them "homeopathic remedies" in full.LeadSongDog come howl 15:44, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Done. Brunton (talk) 16:17, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Case in Australia

I'm not sure if this deserves mention or not, so I'll just post it here. An Australian homeopath and his wife have just been jailed for criminal negligence for treating their child with homeopathic remedies instead of seeking conventional medical treatment (the child died). From the article... "Justice Johnson said Thomas Sam displayed "an arrogant approach to what he perceived to be the superior benefits of homeopathy compared with conventional medicine". Here's the link for the sentencing and links to associated articles can be found there as well. Manning (talk) 07:15, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

There has already been discussion of this case here, with consensus to add it as a footnote (currently ref 138 - "Case of Baby Gloria, who died in 2002") but not to make specific mention of it in the article. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Homeopathy/Archive_39#Baby_Gloria. Possibly a note of the sentence could also be added. Brunton (talk) 11:32, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Bad science vs crackpot pseudoscience

Yeah, verifiability and all, but this is no reason to promote fringe theories, such as that the universe does not exist:

"As there are only about 10⁸⁰ atoms in the entire observable universe, a dilution of one molecule in the observable universe would be about 40C. Oscillococcinum would thus require 10³²⁰ more universes to simply have one molecule in the final substance."

I don't know how many batches of Oscillococcinum are sold every year, but the stuff is reportedly popular in some circles, so I suppose it's not a few. Let's also give the homeopaths the benefit of doubt and assume that some genuine duck liver actually went into the preparation in the first step.

The above claim, from a logical standpoint, consequently falsifies the existence of one of the following things:

1. The universe
2. Oscillococcinum

Note that I did not say "Oscillococcinum as that what it purportedly is". Since the actual duck liver they presumably one diluted a hundredfold (or rather its constituent molecules) cannot disappear as long as the First Law of Thermodynamics holds (which was still the case last time I checked...), the stuff has got to be somewhere. It cannot be evenly distributed, though - not in this universe it don't.

The caveat is that the statistics prove that 200C dilutions are impossible, while both the universe and Oscillococcinum do exist. The "Oscillococcinum would thus require..." part is demonstrably misleading, if not outright false.

Presumably the dilution process involves taking only a fraction of each preceding step and diluting it. (Homeopathic dilutions is basically a slant - in good faith, but a fairly noninformative slant regardless - instead of what ought to be a technical description a la Bookbinding, with some critique added for good measure)

That means that the an individual dosage of Oscillococcinum has either odds of containing anything beyond water that are precisely zero, or odds that are much higher than the statistics given. Consider:

Since even the longest-lived noncovalent structures in liquid water at room temperature are only stable for a few picoseconds, critics have concluded that any effect that might have been present from the original substance can no longer exist.

That also means that a homogenous distribution is not practically achievable. Anything hydrophobic in particular - and most organic macromolecules are hydrophobic to some extent - will inevitably aggregate. In a nutshell, what you dilute is not a solution, but an unstable emulsion.

The consequence is that the dilutions of homeopathic preparations even below 12C are almost certainly never what they claim to be. In many cases, the stuff is simply undiluted water that continues to be non-diluted with even more undiluted water in each successive step. In some - if a particularly "rich" drop of the preceding dilution step was picked - the concentration of whatever gunk went in it may be significant. I do not know if such a study has ever been conducted; most that went in that direction were a sort of show trial. If it had been done, using a low dilution (say 6C), I'd predict that in part of the batches the effective dilution would be infiniteC (i.e. pure water), in others it would be high enough to possibly have a therapeutic effect (say 4C or so). And that would explain a lot - the claim of therapeutic effects versus their general insignificance, and the bad reproducability of studies.

So it might be better to cut out the crappy statistics that assume that homeopathic dilutions are true solutions when they are not, and that they are homogenous solutions when not enough water exists on Earth to make them so even if they were solutions in the first place and thereby "prove" that "no" homeopathic solution contains anything but water or sugar. A rebuttal of homeopathy must not lower itself to the "standards" of these quacks with such flawed math; the claims should rather be tackled like in the "no stable water molecule clusters" example. Homeopaths are quacks, but even quacks deserve an empirical falsification rather than theoretic arguments based on demonstrably false assumptions.

Verifiability is our basic standard of Wikipedia, but empirical science demands more than just a citation. A lot of claims exist that fulfil WP:V, but have simply not been rebutted because scientists have better things to do with their time (the most common case are misreportings or misreadings of scientific studies in the news). At least when the empirical sciences are concerned, the "verifiability is enough" rule is simply not enough; Wikipedia cannot have lower standards than the subject matter it discusses. So "verifiability and truth" it must be in topics of an empirical nature. (Obliquely related but a must-read for anyone interested in this topic is this)

I say this because what concerns me is that the very same "statistically improbable" argument is advanced by creationists against an abiotic origin of life - and like here, it is intellectually vapid and scientifically bankrupt: it is true that a billion years from a molten ball of rock to poisonous oceans inhabited by rather complex bacteria is statistically unlikely if driven by chance alone. But with ribozymes and clay mineral adsorption (which the statistical trick does not care to figure in), the odds are actually pretty damn high.

(I have also added "almost certainly" to the intro pic, for even if the statistics were correct, odds even infinitesimally above zero are not zero odds. The claim that this particular product item is devoid of any therapeutically active substance violates WP:V.) Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 17:11, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Avogadro's number is fact. You seem to be forgetting that when producing homeopathic dilutions such that there wouldn't be one molecule in a volume of water the size of the solar system, they don't need to use water of the volume of the solar system. The trick is serial dilution. At each stage the bulk of the molecules from the duck's liver remain in the part that you don't dilute further, i.e. 99% of those in solution, until very quickly none remain at all in the portion you're diluting. It's not magic. Clumping just reduces the effective number of "molecules".

Instead of a tl;dr post with a lot of personal opinion and speculation, why not present some sources that address this issue and suggest how we can better write that section? We don't need to speculate as to what homeopathic remedies contain in practice, as it's been studied:[1] Fences&Windows 22:38, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

I did some calculating. 1g of duck liver might have say 3 x 10^19 molecules in it, I think that's 30 quintillion. Assume it is totally homogenised to give the most possible number of particles. At 200C, what is the probability that a single molecule remains in your sample? Answer:

0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003 Or a 3 in 10^400 chance. To give an idea of how small a number this is, there have only been about 4.3 x 10^17 seconds since the universe began. Fences&Windows 01:37, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Current Introduction

Excellent. The current top-level introduction to this topic is very well-written and researched. Hopefully, the wiki-editors monitoring this page will lock it down. Groovymaster (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 21:41, 8 October 2009 (UTC).

I think the current introduction violates NPOV. Granted, I'm new here.

Jim Steele (talk) 23:46, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Good luck convincing opinionated editors of that one - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 00:36, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Could you give a concrete example of what you think is POV? That would be really helpful. --Six words (talk) 16:15, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree that the introduction to this page is excellent. One of the best examples of any "Fringe Theory" intro I have seen. --Jaxpac (talk) 22:53, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

References

Please keep this section at the bottom. TO ADD A NEW SECTION, just click the EDIT link at the right and add the new section ABOVE this one. Then copy the heading into the edit summary box.