I have a question for Soul Doctor regarding homeopathy.?

where do all you skeptics live roughly. If you're nearby I'll buy you a pint. we could have a "yahoo skeptics in the pub"!!! (I allow emails).

Why does it really matter? Allow people to believe in what they want, and if they want to go around thinking water cures all, let them Does it hurt you? NO! You're wasting your time on irrelevance. Pick up a book, talk a walk... or maybe even get laid Oh, and please edit your details with some "witty" response because your ego is bruised. evidently, I did bruise your ego, considering you responded to me twice. I did enjoy the "loser" remark, however. VERY creative. haha

Fretochose: No - he is asking for details to support a specific claim. Even a hypothesis would help. Keep in mind that homeopathy does not work.

And aspirin is not pseudoscience. And it beats placebo.

I am pretty sure that Soul Doctor was referring to one aspect of homeopathy in regards to treating infections.

My two cents: limited thinking limits what you are capable of experiencing and grasping.

A true seeker of wisdom opens their mind to truth, whether it supports what they previously have believed or not. I love the study of western physiology, yet I seek truth and have a desire to get the whole picture, to reach beyond our current understanding.

You are trying to fit all reality into a finite box. Healing and life itself are not limited to what we can grasp. We(humans) do not have it all figured out. We can not explain everything. We are a work in progress and are all on a journey together and individually.

Even if we have identified and named many different structures(T cells) and functions(cell mediated immunity) in our bodies, we are so far from understanding the true mechanisms of healing (body, mind, spirit). We do not understand the eitology of most diseases. We blame it lifestyle or genetics, but most people know that this is not the whole story.

Step out of your box and a whole new world exists where "miracles" can happen. What we call miracles happen all the time. People spontaneously are devoid of clinically diagnosed tumors. health is restored with no use of drugs. These are miracles to us, but they follow a science and laws that we have not fully grasped yet. Think of the potential once we do.

What are bodies perform every moment of the day without a thought or instruction from our conscious mind is amazing.

Look into Quantum Physics.

"Quantum physics is the study of the behavior of matter and energy at the molecular, atomic, nuclear, and even smaller microscopic levels. In the early 20th century, it was discovered that the laws that govern macroscopic objects do not function the same in such small realms."

Note it states that the micro world has its own set of laws that are not the same as the macro world. But we are composed of atoms, hence the at the core of all things is this other existance, an enrgy world which operates differently than what is common knowledge.

Homeopathy as well as many other "alternative" practices operate at this level. Plus I have never heard of anyone dying from these "water" remedies, so why so much hostility? Do you realize that non-error negative effects of properly prescribed drugs kill over 100,000 people a year?

your questions cannot be answered for manufactured drugs with high dollar price tags and years of so-called research (funded primaily by tax dollars). only in the past 20 years has a mechanism of action for asprin been postulated. the end result of the Rx chemicals can be identified, mechanism of action guessed at. makes no sense to attack a system you do not understand.

Maybe Soul Doctor Also WANTS to Believe In Magic.

Yes can I add to this please AngryDoc?

SoulDoc: Wouldn't the theory of homoeopathy blindly 'triggering the immune system' actually create problems like auto-immune diseases?

IF homoeopathy somehow triggered the immune system, might this create an inflammatory response? If you take into consideration the fact that many of the symptoms of a disease are actually the product of your own immune system fighting the disease....

Perhaps rather than boosted or triggered, our immune system needs to be more specific?

Certainly with certain types of diseases, vaccines are surely the best way to make the immune response more specific? Adjuvants for example, can be made specific for cell types, e.g B-cells or T-cells. Some vaccines that are being created also contain lipid-micelle based delivery systems which deliver the antigen in a more specific way to target cells.

When you say that homoeopathy triggers or boosts the immune system, what part of it exactly?

What Is It?

Homeopathy, a form of medicine that relies on minute amounts of herbs, minerals and other

substances to stimulate a person's natural defenses and help the body heal it self, often tames illnesses with a single dose of medicine and causes virtually no side effects, proponents say. Worldwide, homeopathy is commonly practiced in many countries, including India, Mexico and Russia. About four in every ten people in France and in three people in England-including the British royal family-use homeopathy, according to the National Center for Homeopathy.

Like Cures Like:

Homeopathy, which is derived from two Greek words, literally means "similar suffering." Although the concept dates back to at least the tenth century B.C., modern homeopathy is based on the observations of Samuel Hahnemann, an eighteenth-century German physician. Dr. Hhahnemann considered the medical practices of the time barbaric, because patients were regularly bled, leeched and blistered to purge them of fluids believed to cause most illnesses.

Disillusioned, he quit medicine and be came a translator of scientific texts, But Dr. Hahnemann continued to experiment on himself with various substances in hopes of finding a more humane way of healing people. He suspected that disease represented an imbalance in what he called the body's vital force (moder homeopaths believe he meant the immune system) and that only a small stimulus was needed to restore balance in the body's natural defenses.

But that hunch didn't fully bloom until he began experiments to discover why small doses of quinine, an extract from a Peruvian tree bark, cured malaria. To his surprise, Dr. Hahnemann found that large doses of the drug had unexpected effects. After taking massive doses of quinine for several days, he developed trembling, heart palpitations and other symptoms of malaria. as soon as he stopped taking the drug, his symptoms disappeared. From this experiment, Dr. Hahnemann developed his belief that 'Like is cured by like," also known as the as law of similars, which is the basic of homeopathy.

Dr. Hahnemann theorized that if large amount of a substance such as quinine cause symptoms of illness in a healthy person, then small doses of that same substance should cure an ill person who has similar symptoms. So if you have a cold, for example, taking a small amount of a substance that in large doses would cause cold-like symptoms should cure your sniffles, according to Dr. Hahnemann's theory. But the remedy will work only if its pattern of induced symptoms matches the symptoms of the ill person.

Dr. Hahnemann and his early followers conducted more experiments, called proving, in which they gave large amounts of herbs, minerals and animal extracts toi healthy people and recorded all the symptoms they developed. Later, Dr. Hahnemann complied these experiments into a book, Materia Medica, a reference guide first published in 1811 that helps practitioners match a patent's symptoms with a corresponding homeopathic remedy.

Although these studies suggest that homeopathy may be effective, no one really knows how it works. But part of the answer may have to do with the dilutions and shaking mentioned earlier. Dr. Hahnemann believed that vigorously shaking the solution during each dilution releases a "spiritlike" essence that has the potential to heal the body.

Now some homeopaths think they know the science behind Dr. Hahnemann's insight. The shaking, they believe, energize a solution with an electromagnetic impression of the original homeopathic substance.This impression remains long after the molecules of the original substance have been diluted. It may be the distinct electtomagnetic energy patter of each remedy that seems to jolt the body's defenses into action against a specific ailment, Dr.Maesimund Panos, M.D., a homeopathic physician in Tripp City, Ohio says.

Researchers at Hahnemann Medical College (now Hahnemann University School of Medicine) in Philadelphia, for example, examined 23 homeopathic remedies to determine nuclear magnetic resonance, a measure of the activity of small molecules. The researchers found that the remedies had been energized-while the subatomic particles in a group of placebo remedies were inactive.