Broadly speaking homoeopathy can be divided into two kinds of scam: the idiotic honest; and the dishonest for idiots. It has no medical merit, either logical, factual, scientific, or practical. It's one field of success from the point of view of the patient, the placebo effect, has no roots in homoeopathy, although homoeopathy has considerable roots in the placebo effect. Centuries ago one might claim a minor logical merit rooted in the as-yet mysterious effectiveness of vaccination – where something related to the cause of the disease served to prevent that very disease. Nowadays however, we know that vaccination is pretty nearly a direct opposite of homoeopathy and its fundamental assumed principles, so that solitary virtue too, has left the field in the lurch.
Some persons prominent in various fields of science have inadvertently assisted in demonstrating, completely superfluously, how some very unscientific minds can produce valuable results by dint of industry, as long as their logical deficiencies and aberrations are constrained by fortunate, if onerous, external disciplines. Once they become prominent however such disciplines relax and we find world-renowned First World institutions publishing work that would do credit to the least ethical of the parasitic enterprises of quack medicine taking refuge in Third World countries.
There are various factors contributing to the continued survival of such quackeries as homoeopathy (which, believe it or not, is not the worst, though that makes very little difference; being painted faintly more ordurally brown than the black of one's rivals is no very enviable distinction.) The main contribution is wishful thinking on the part of everyone involved, ranging from dupe to parasite. The second is probably the unrelenting, unblushing repetition of dishonest claims in the face of fact and logic. This works smoothly and without repercussions in the most contentious of First World medical regulations. One even finds such quackeries supported by professional medical insurance bodies with government approval. Matching support for witchcraft would have no less merit nor less logical justification.
Homoeopathy habitually takes refuge in unfalsifiability. When people point out that at the relevant concentrations there is no active ingredient, it is claimed that the water itself, under the influence of succussion, adopted structures that achieved the necessary beneficial effects. No explanation was necessary for why higher degrees of dilution should cause intensification of the benefit. When favourable evidence for the claims vanish under double blind testing, this either is ignored or written off to unethical bias and harassment on the part of the investigators.
It requires no justification on the part of the supporters to fend off questions such as why succussion is necessary to produce such structures in the first place, how the structures survive further succussion, and in fact how they could survive, assuming they existed in the first place, with a half life measured even in picoseconds. Neither the frauds nor the dupes are aware, or apparently care, that our knowledge of the physics of water, incomplete though it may be, is quite well enough advanced to deny any reasonable claim of the reality of such structures.
Note that the nature of vaccination is totally alien to any such structures, and depends on the actual, demonstrable, physical presence of particular compounds in the vaccine. Furthermore the dosage-response behaviour of vaccines has no resemblance whatsoever to the claimed behaviour of homoeopathic remedies. If there is too little vaccine, the vaccination simply does not work. And in fact the dosages of vaccine required typically are not particularly small by modern standards. What a surprise! So much for some of the original justifications of homeopathic theory.
I do not present a comprehensive critique here, partly because I lack the stamina and I reckon that any readers would lack the necessary stamina as well, but I would like to present two points for your consideration:
Firstly, let us imagine a typical example of dilution and succussion, namely the preparation of a homeopathic solution of Nat. Mur. or as you and I might call it, a non-solution of sodium chloride. How might we go to work? Take some nice, highly purified, table salt or close equivalent (let us not quibble, quibbling over whether it must be table salt or highly purified is exactly the kind of weaselling that quacks thrive on.) We dissolve it in highly purified water according to whatever protocol is preferred, say a 1% solution, and depending on the personal tastes of the practitioner we either shake it by hand or some mechanical method. We dilute it by a factor, typically of 100, shake again, and carry on until everyone is happy, possibly even including the patient. What could possibly be simpler or more logical?
Well first of all, what exactly have we done? Where exactly do we get our pure sodium chloride from? Crystallisation? Distillation at over 1000°C? Where do we get our highly purified water from? Reverse osmosis? Mass spectrographic separation? Well, if you know of anything better than such means, then by all means propose them. Now what do you have? You have mixes incorporating some dozens of different elements in possibly thousands of different compounds and complexes. After all, even before you start, we do you keep your materials? Silly question? No doubt, but really you do have to keep it somewhere don't you? Did I hear someone propose a high-quality glass container? Straight away, what ever you have in there is polluted more than half the elements from lithium to iron. Only a few atoms of most of them, but that is already millions of times more than you will find, not only in the final product, but in the final levels of dilution before the last atoms have been discussed and diluted out of there.
Ah! But you are a really clever homoeopathist aren't you? No crude contact with anything for your ingredients, right? You use electromagnetic levitation so that your absolutely pure ingredients never touch anything right?
And then, what about your diluents? Nice pure water as well as nice pure sodium chloride?
It breaks my heart to tell you that if such things existed, which they do not, then as soon as you magically release them onto your electromagnetic levitating device, you pollute them beyond redemption. Merely exposing them to the air in a clean room to put the most stringent medical or electronic clean room to shame, peppers your materials with hordes of impurities. What? But you are working in a vacuum? Why, how clever of you! That must be very special water, apart from its impurities, even if frozen, if you can work with it in a vacuum! But never mind you have worked many other miracles in your time and this is merely one more. Unfortunately I weep to point out that even then your product is sullied to untouchability even in a hard vacuum. Do you have the slightest idea how many cosmic rays are passing through you every second? And how many of them are in fact atoms of various elements?
So much for C200 dilutions!
Now let's get this dilutions thing clear once more. Our succussion works on successive dilutions, and the greater the dilution, the greater the strength. Right? Well then you are taking your say 1% sodium chloride solution and shaking it up with dozens of elements and thousands of compounds and complexes in far lower concentrations, which means that by the time you reach say a concentration of C100 sodium chloride, you are dealing with an explosively dangerously diluted solution of all sorts of other substances, substances totally uncharacterised, every single one of which must necessarily have its own homoeopathic effects, and every one at a greater dilution than the sodium chloride.
It gets worse: sodium and chloride are common in glass and not particularly rare in the air we breathe. After every dilution, by the time you are left with merely isolated atoms of sodium and of chlorine in their respective ionised forms, every single time you pass to the next level of dilution, you are adding more sodium and chloride than are left in the solution. So your sodium chloride concentration cannot possibly approach respectable levels of homoeopathic dilution, not ever!
So if you feel that there is any basis for any defence of any logic in favour of the mechanism of homoeopathy, I can offer you no sympathy and indeed there truly is naught for your comfort; you don't deserve any. By supporting it with your custom, you are a party to the exploitation of millions of people the world around. Don't bother to feel ashamed though; you have worse problems than that.
But never mind that either. The real world has little to do with fine distinctions or sound logic or for that matter common sense. While you and I and the spin doctors and propagandists point fingers and chop logic, the laboratory gnomes in the back rooms are working on the succussion. And succussion is a tedious, laboriously business, even when carried out on automated, mechanical devices. The commitment of such gnomes to their vocation is unbelievable! There is no question of error or negligence.
So surely it must be an aberration in my memory when it seems to me that on the one occasion that I spoke to a young lady who in her student days had worked in such a laboratory, she told me that although they did keep the succussion apparatus busy, whenever anyone had any order in a hurry, they simply made it up by filling the bottles with tap water or whatever diluent was appropriate.
Comebacks? What comebacks?
There never was a single one...
