I will just add this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_dilutions
For those readers who needs to look up “30C” like i did 🙂

I don’t discard the placebo effect, and neither does any responsible researcher doing a double-blinded study. The problem is that you can’t count on the placebo effect, or on spontaneous remission, or on any of a number of other largely coincidental (in time) possibilities for a change in a subject’s health (good or bad). They happen, but you can’t reliably make them happen.

It is entirely up to the homeopathic community to produce actual clinical studies, properly double-blinded, using only those things that they claim are doing the trick — in homeopathic dilutions — in order to demonstrate that there is anything happening with the treatment group that isn’t happening with the control group (and remember, the person administering the treatment must also be unaware of what they’re providing ; that’s what “double-blind” means).

As for water memory, there is an incredibly short-lived (on the order of femtoseconds) clustering/structural/electrical alignment change that can be induced in water by adding and then removing some foreign substances. But that’s all she wrote: femtoseconds at best. That’s the problem with liquids: they won’t stay neatly organized unless the thing that’s keeping them neatly organized is around to organize them. Robert Brown noticed it in 1827, but didn’t have enough information handy to do much but publish the curiosity. Einstein explained it in one of his annus mirabilis papers in 1905, at the same time proving atomic theory.

As for the dilution, we know how many molecules there are in any given mass of a substance whose makeup we know. Even if we don’t know its makeup, we know that there can’t possibly be more molecules of the substance than there would be hydrogen atoms constituting the same mass. 30C is several orders of magnitude too dilute to guarantee that any of that substance remains in the final product. (And no, you can’t keep it all, since that would require more water than we have on the planet — assuming a water dilution, which is being generous — even if you just started with a drop. The math isn’t difficult. If you start with one millilitre, you’d need one millilitre shy of 10 to the 42nd power cubic kilometres of water. Let’s say you’re using an especially stingy pipette that can dispense drops that are only a hundredth of a millilitre. Now you’re down to ten to the fortieth power cubic kilometres. That’s a lot of water. Just a little more than twenty-eight and a half billion billion billion times the entire volume of planet Earth, in fact.) Before Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen, one could still legitimately claim that there was a possibility of infinite dilution. That hasn’t been possible since 1905, and most of what you take for granted today that wasn’t around in 1905 wouldnt work if atomic theory and its offspring weren’t true (or as true as science can be, in any case).

Read Paracelsus some time. That’s where Hahnemann got his basic ideas, and why a sensitivity to quinine (it may have been an actual allergy; I’m not willing to go that far) locked the idea of the Law of Similars in his psyche. If you want to dispute the notion that mainstream “medicine” in Europe prior to the ascendance of the surgeons in France around the time of the Napoleonic Wars was, er, mostly less than scientific and even less effective than it was scientific, then I can’t help you. Heroic medicine was still all the rage, Avicenna was still standard reading, and the tonic you were given might well contain boiled dog (because hey, why not?). Doing bugger-all would have been an improvement over just about anything a doctor would want to do, and homeopathy is doing precisely bugger-all other than (optionally) caring about (nor for) the patient.

It seems, though, that you are determined to hang onto your magical thinking rather than question the foundations upon which your beliefs are built. Go ahead anyway: if what you believe is actually true (or as true as science can be, in any case) then it will stand up to any of the questions and tests you can throw at it. But remember that you’re not allowed to throw pixies and angels into the mix unless you can clearly see what they’re doing, even if you can’t see them. (That’s not a slight. There are things in mainstream science that we have impressive-sounding names for, but that doesn’t mean we understand them at all. We don’t know why things are attracted or repelled by the fundamental forces — we know how the forces get around, but there is absolutely zero understanding as to how that results in motion. We can say things like “Higgs field”, but that just means the math works — we still don’t understand what’s up with inertia (and no, that molasses thing you might have heard doesn’t even work as a lie to children, since neutrons can pass arbitrarily close to one another).) If you need to add the impossible rather than the merely incomprehensible, it’s time to look down another avenue. And if it can’t be backed up by rigorous and statistically sound testing, then it’s just a nice story that might need to be retold differently, or perhaps abandoned. Abandoning hypotheses, no matter how beautiful, sensible or logically consistent they may be, when they conflict with the evidence, is also a fundamental aspect of science.

Your move. If you can’t do more than assert the same unproven claims, this is finished.

And on what do you base your statements, please? And on what information do you discard the placebo effect, if that is what it is?

Or maybe I’m just set in my ways…

It does help me understand the deaf activists who reject the whole idea of cochlear implants as condescending to deaf culture, while acknowleging that they are beneficial for others.

Not sure what you mean Fly… but he has a hand… on his gun? Hand gun?

You are very welcome. Feel free to contact me on Facebook or through my e-mail dmanunderground at gmail.com anytime you have a question. If I know the answer I’ll answer, and if it’s out of my area of knowledge I’ll let you know that too.

Exactly – and you see those attributes that annoy others as things that cause them personal pain

Sometimes it takes wisdom to find and use the benefit. 🙂