Homeopathy Effective

Homeopathy is Effective

“Homeopathy cures a larger percentage of cases than any other method of treatment” – Mahatma Ghandi

Evidence
There is abundant evidence for the effectivity of homeopathy. For more than 200 years patients have been treated effectively with homeopathy. Homeopathy has been favoured despite all the drawbacks. Even doctors with strong aversion to homeopathy have been turned over. Studies show that patients are very satisfied with homeopathic treatment. Studies have shown that homeopathic treatment is very, very cost-effective. In practices of general practitioners where also homeopathy is used, the overall cost of health are reduced by 30 to 40%.

Nothing
Why then is there so much resistance to homeopathy? What makes it so difficult to accept? Critics often show their resistance in saying that there is nothing in homeopathic remedies. In the process of potentisation all substance is lost, due to the diluting aspect of the potentisation. When looking at the substance part, the material aspect of the world, the critics are right. There is no-thing in homeopathic remedies. In contrast there is information in it. Homeopathy is an information science and and an information healing therapy. It is the information that has healing qualities.

Water information
Water has a memory. It can retain information, forms or structures from the substances with which it has been in contact. This was already known from homeopathic experience, where remedies were made in a special procedure called potentisation. Potentisation is a combination of diluting and shaking. So, it is incorrect to use the term dilutions for homeopathic remedies, as many critics do. Dilutions do not work as studies have shown. The shaking is an spect of potentisation that is essential to transfer the information of the substance to the water. There have been done many studies to show that water holds information from the original substance, as one can see in the list below.

Epidemics
The power of homeopathy has been shown often in the past in epidemics. It has been very effective in typhus in armies. For instance, in the cholera of London around 1850 about 50% of the patient teated by conventional medicine died, in the patient treated with homeopathy only 4% died.

Research
These days proof is asked in the form of double blind studies, called RCT, Randomized Clinical Trials. The patients in the study are split randomly in two groups, a verum group, who receives the studied medicine and a placebo group who receive only a placebo. Many such studies have shown clearly positive results for homeopathy, doing much better than placebo. Remarkable is that those studies are much more easy to implement than in conventional medicine; the placebo is more easy because all homeopathic remedies look, smell and taste identical, and thus also placebos; and the verum remedies have no side effects and are thus less easily identified in the study.

Meta-analyses
In meta-analyses many Randomized Clinical Trials are taken together to come to a conclusion about a certain kind of treatment. Several meta-analyses have been done. They are listed below with their conclusions

1. Kleijnen en Knipschild analyzed 107 researches. Their conclusions: At the moment the evidence of clinical trials is positive.
2. Boissel and Cucherat analyzed 15 studies. Their conclusion is: There is some evidence that homeopathic treatments are more effective than placebo. The results of our meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homeopathy are completely due to placebo.
3. Linde analyzed 89 studies in 1998 and concluded: The results of our meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homeopathy are completely due to placebo.
4. Linde analyzed 32 studies in 1998 and concluded: The results of the available randomized trials suggest that individualized homeopathy has an effect over placebo.
5. Mathie analyzed 93 studies and concluded: This represents a body of research where the null hypothesis has been rejected in favour of homeopathy.
   In general it is regarded as sufficient for the recognition or a certain kind of therapy to have 2 positive meta-analyses. All 5 meta-analyses concluded that homeopathy was an effective medicine and the result could not be explained as placebo.
   There was one meta-analysis, doen by Shang, which came to the conclusion that homeopathy was due to placebo effects. But it turned that that this study was based on scientific fraud. Shang made a careful selection of only eight studies and compared them with another selection of eight studies in conventional medicine. In the article he did not mention which studies he had selected and on which grounds. Rutten and others have argued successfully against Shang’s last conclusion and showed that almost any kind of selection would show homeopathy to be effective, except the selection chosen by Shang. Their conclusion was that effects of homeopathy are no less effective than those of conventional medicine.
   The false conclusion of Shang made headlines in the media. All five earlier meta-analyses and their conclusions were not mentioned in journals or on television.

Literature

1. Femtosecond Mid-IR pump probe spectroscopy of liquid water: evidence for a two-component structure; Woutersen S, U Emmerichs, H J Bakker; 1997; Science 278:658-660.
2. Anomalous state of ice; Lo, Shui-Yin; 1996; Modern physics Letters. B vol 10, 19:909-919.
3. Physical properties of water with IE structures; Shui-Yin Lo, Angelo Lo, Li Wen Chong, Lin Tianzhang, Li Hui Hua, Xu Geng; 1996; Modern Physics Letters B vol 10, 19:921-930.
4. Induction and regulation of human peripheral blood TH1-Th2 derived cytokines by IE water preparations and synergy with mitogens; Bonavida, B en X H Gan; 1997; In: S Y Lo & B Bonavida, Proceedings of the first international symposium on ‘Physical chemical and biological properties of stable water IceElectromagnetic clusters’, 167-183. World Scientific, New Jersey.
5. Thermodynamics of extremely diluted aqueous solutions; Elia, Vittorio & Marcella Nicoli; 1999; Tempos in Science and Nature, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol 879: 241-247.
6. Thermoluminescence of ultra-high dilutions of lithium chloride and sodium chloride; Louis Rey; 2003; Physica A: Statistical mechanics and its applications, Vol 323, 67-74, DOI 10.1016/S0378-4371(03)00047-5.
7. Bell IR, Lewis DA 2nd, Brooks AJ, Lewis SE, Schwartz GE; 2003; Gas discharge visualisation evaluation of ultramolecular doses of homeopathic medicines under blinded, controlled conditions. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 9:25–38.
8. Anick DJ; 2004; High sensitivity 1H-NMR spectroscopy of homeopathic remedies made in water; BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 4:15.
9. Datta S, Biswas SJ, Khuda-Bukhsh AR (2004). Comparative efficacy of pre-feeding, post-feeding and combined pre- and post-feeding of two microdoses of a potentized homeopathic drug, Mercurius solubilis, in ameliorating genotoxic effects produced by mercuric chloride in mice. Evidence Based Complementary and Alternatative Medicine, 1:291–300.
10. Elia V, Niccoli M (2004). New physico-chemical properties of extremely diluted aqueous solutions. Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry, 75: 815–836.
11. Binder M, Baumgartner S, Thurneysen A; 2005; The effects of a 45x potency of arsenicum album on wheat seedling growth – a reproduction trial. Forschende Komplementärmedizin und Klassische Naturheilkunde, 12:284–291.
12. Klopp R, Niemer W, Weiser M; 2005; Microcirculatory effects of a homeopathic preparation in patients with mild vertigo: an intravital microscopic study. Microvascular Research, 69:10–16.
13. Roy R, Tiller WA, Bell IR, Hoover MR; 2005; The structure of liquid water; novel insights from materials research; potential relevance to homeopathy; Materials Research Innovations, 9-4:577–608.