Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

As the decades passed, tens of millions of Indians grew to rely solely on homeopathy for their healthcare. And, having imported homeopathy from the West, India then exported it back to the West in the 1970s. At a time when Western patients were looking to the East for alternative systems of medicine — such as acupuncture and Ayurvedic therapies — they also began to embrace homeopathy once again. It was considered by many Westerners to be an exotic, natural, holistic and individualized form of medicine, and an antidote to the corporate medicine being peddled by giant pharmaceutical corporations in Europe and America.

Meanwhile, Western scientists continued to scoff. There were a few scientific trials examining the benefits of homeopathy in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but they were so flimsy that the results were unreliable. In short, there was still no sound evidence to support the idea that such ultra-dilute solutions could act as meaningful medicines. Therefore scientists still considered it absurd that any medical system could be built upon this principle.

Scientists even began to poke fun at homeopaths. For example, because homeopathic liquid remedies are so dilute that they often contain only water, scientists would sarcastically endorse their use for the treatment of one particular medical condition, namely dehydration. Or they would jokingly offer to make each other a drink of homeopathic coffee, which was presumably incredibly diluted and yet tasted incredibly strong, because homeopaths believe that lower amounts of active ingredient are associated with greater potency. Similar logic also implied that a patient who forgot to take a homeopathic remedy might die of an overdose.

Homeopaths accepted that repeated dilution inevitably removes the presence of the active ingredient, and sure enough chemical analysis has always confirmed that ‘high-potency’ homeopathic remedies are based on nothing more than pure water. Homeopaths were adamant, however, that this water was special because it had a memory of the active ingredient that it once contained. This caused the Australian Council Against Health Fraud to make fun of homeopathy by pointing out that this memory must be highly selective: ‘Strangely, the water offered as treatment does not remember the bladders it has been stored in, or the chemicals that may have come into contact with its molecules, or the other contents of the sewers it may have been in, or the cosmic radiation which has blasted through it.’

Then, in June 1988, the laughing suddenly stopped. Nature, arguably the most respected science journal in the world, published a research paper with the snappy title ‘Human basophil degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE’. It took a little deciphering before non-specialists could appreciate the significance of the paper, but very rapidly it became clear that here was a piece of research that seemed to back up some of the claims of homeopaths. If the paper was correct, then ultra-dilute solutions that did not contain any active ingredient did indeed have an impact on biological systems. This could only be possible if the ingredient had left a memory of itself in the water. In turn, such a discovery would imply that homeopaths might have been right all along.

This piece of research, which has become the most famous experiment in the history of homeopathy, was conducted by a charismatic French scientist named Jacques Benveniste, a former racing driver who had taken up medical research after suffering a back injury. Although he published several important scientific papers on a variety of subjects during the course of his career, he would ultimately be remembered only for his Nature paper on homeopathy, which shocked the scientific establishment and made headlines around the world.