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

From the first high dilution experiments in 1984 to the present, thousands of experiments have been made, enriching and considerably consolidating our initial knowledge. Up to now, we must observe that not a single flaw has been discovered in these experiments and that no valid counter-experiments have ever been proposed.

In fact, within a year of Benveniste’s original 1988 paper, Nature had published three papers by scientists who failed to reproduce the supposed effect of ultra-dilute solutions. Even the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) collaborated with homeopaths to test DigiBio’s claim that Benveniste’s effects could be digitized and sent via email, but they came to the following conclusion: ‘Our team found no replicable effects from digital signals.’

On the other hand, there have been occasional papers that claim to replicate the sort of effects observed by Benveniste, but so far none of them has consistently or convincingly presented the sort of evidence that would posthumously vindicate the Frenchman. In 1999, Dr Andrew Vickers looked at 120 research papers related to Benveniste’s work and other types of basic research into the actions of homeopathic remedies. At the time, he was based at the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital, so he was certainly open-minded about the potential of homeopathy. Yet Vickers was struck by the failure of independent scientists to replicate any homeopathic effect: ‘In the few instances where a research team has set out to replicate the work of another, either the results were negative or the methodology was questionable.’ Independent replication is a vital part of how science progresses. One single set of experiments can be wrong for a range of reasons, such as lack of rigour, fraud or just bad luck, so independent replication is a way of checking (and re-checking) that the original discovery is genuine. Benveniste’s research had failed this test.

Indeed, James Randi has continued to offer his $1 million to anyone who can independently reproduce the effects claimed by Benveniste. BBC television took up the challenge as part of its Horizon science documentary series, gathering together a team of scientists to oversee the project. They examined the effect of a homeopathically diluted histamine on cells, and compared this with the effect of pure water. Histamine is associated with allergic responses in cells, but would it still cause cells to react if it had been diluted to the extent that it was no longer present? Professor Martin Bland of St George’s Hospital Medical School announced the final result: ‘There’s absolutely no evidence at all to say that there is any difference between the solution that started off as pure water and the solution that started off with the histamine.’ As anecdotal evidence to reinforce the point, Randi mentioned the following story during the programme: ‘I also consumed sixty-four times the prescribed dosage of homeopathic sleeping pills and didn’t even feel drowsy. I did this before a meeting of the US Congress — if that doesn’t put you to sleep, nothing will.’

While biologists were trying and failing to find evidence for homeopathy acting at a fundamental cellular level, physicists tried to examine homeopathy at a basic molecular level. It was clear that ultra-dilute homeopathic solutions contained only water and no molecules of the active ingredient, but some physicists wondered if the water molecules somehow had altered their arrangement in order to retain a memory of the earlier ingredient.

Over the last two decades, physicists have published the results of dozens of experiments examining the molecular structure of normal water versus homeopathically prepared water. They have used powerful and arcane techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Raman spectroscopy and light absorption to look for the slightest evidence that water has a memory of what it once contained. Unfortunately, a review of these studies published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2003 showed that these experiments were generally of poor quality and prone to errors.