From so simple a beginning…

Like some annoying hangover, the scientific proponents of homeopathy refuse to go away. Philip Ball, staff writer for Nature and author of many excellent books, has an insightful and comprehensive post on a new issue of the journal Homeopathy, which discusses the extremely dubious concept of “water memory”, advanced to explain the basic action of homeopathic medicines stemming from their dilution, a concept that has no currently accepted scientific basis. The papers are written by many supporters of the “water-has-memory” camp, and do include some detractors too. Most of the resulting conclusions and beliefs of the proponents are pseudoscientific to say the least. This kind of science was defined by Nobel prize winning chemist Irving Langmuir as “pathological science”.

I will let Philip’s article describe the details for those who are interested, and instead talk a little about homeopathy itself. The big problem with homeopathy is that many or indeed most homeopathic formulations are made by diluting the active principles in them to unbelievable proportions. This is a well-known fact. Most of the times, the dilution is so much that doubt exists whether even a handful of molecules survive in the resulting medical formulation. There is absolutely nothing in our current chemical and pharmacological knowledge that can come up with a consistent model for how a lower (and almost nonexistent) concentration of a drug can actually improve its efficacy. There is nothing which suggests that five molecules of a drug will be more effective than a billion molecules of the same drug. A year or two ago, I had come up with some crazy idea, whereby I imagined a higher concentration of a drug making the molecules aggregate together, thereby making them “inaccessible” to organs or proteins in the body where they exert their action. Maybe dilution “frees” up molecules and makes them accessible? Needless to say, this sounded very vague and semi-scientific. Also, no aggregation is actually observed even at higher concentrations in case of most drugs. To achieve aggregation, one may have to go to extremely high concentrations, and that concentration might make the drug prohibitively toxic to the body. Dilution in homeopathy just does not seem to have a rational scientific basis.

In any case, to get around this problem of dilution, in 1988, a scientist named Jacques Benevinste came up with a radical idea which he managed to get Nature to accept. Benevinste shifted the focus from the drug molecules to the solvent- water itself. Now, as I am quite familiar with, water is a relatively poorly understood substance. Philip has penned an excellent volume about this most familiar and least understood substance, and has a blog about it which I regularly read. If anything, discussions about water make it clear that we have a long way to go to understand its intricacies. But what Benevinste proposed went beyond even these fringes of our ignorance about water. Benevinste proposed that even if one may dilute successive solutions of a drug in water, even in the absence of that molecule, water somehow “remembers” the structure of that molecule. He proposed that water somehow acts as a “template” and some kind of a mold, and “imprints” the structure of the molecule upon itself. To support his hypothesis, he cited some experiments with fantastic implications. Not only were these experiments vague, but the results could not even be reproduced (on the other hand, it is fair to say that the original experiments at least seemed to be honestly executed). Gradually, the belief that “water has memory” seemed consigned to a watery grave, even if Benevinste seemed to believe in it until his dying day.

But fantastic beliefs die hard, and this issue of the journal makes it clear that there still are legions of scientists who are bent on proving the validity of the memory of water. To this end, they have published papers in this issue, and provided possible “explanations” for the memory of water, ranging from the at least scientific sounding (silicate templating), to the metaphysical (quantum entanglement). To a layman, all this may sound like science. But it’s not, because it is based on dubious experiments, and more importantly seems to jump to conclusions simply based on an exposition of well-known scientific principles. I don’t know much about homeopathy, but I think I know enough about water and chemistry to at least say that I found every one of the claims about how water can acquire memory outrageous. I have to admit that there is some head-scratching going on in there, and no dearth of creativity, but some of those “scientific” proclamations sound about as scientific as those of Deepak Chopra. Just like one can really weave his or her own post-modernistic existential feminist nihilistic philosophy based on quantum uncertainty (quantum leaps indeed), so can one from almost any other scientific theory.

But the greater question is, why are people so bent on proving the potential of homeopathy? Now as an Indian, it may be surprising that I ask this question. India has traditionally been one of the flourishing establishments of this system of medicine, and no less than my close family members and friends claim to have benefited from it. There are some who say that homeopathy is the only “pathy” that relieves them of their ailments, and I can only dearly hope that they don’t eschew antibiotics or anticancer drugs if they happen to be unfortunately stricken by cancer or a serious infection. I can only hope that they don’t keep on adhering to homeopathy in the hope that it will cure them, in the face of time-tested modern remedies.

But in any case, there is no doubt that there are anecdotal cases of benefits from homeopathy, and it is these die-hard fans of the system who continue to inspire faith and interest in it. Homeopathy in Germany is well-established (it was founded there) and is gradually coming into fashion in the UK and the US. The result is the channeling of millions of dollars or rupees or pounds into new homeopathic colleges, and an emerging band of young people who especially in India settle for homeopathy as the “next best option” to pursuing a career in modern medicine. There is a resurgence of universities awarding homeopathic degrees in the UK, universities which one of my British colleagues refers to as “only holes dug in the ground”. The outrage of these proponents of modern medicine (and I count myself one of them) is understandable, since they not only see people sticking to a system of medicine that can be dangerously ineffective when stuck to in case of a serious disorder, but they also see a lot of money being channeled towards the education of homeopathic doctors, money that can always be put into research in modern medicine.

However, I can think of one explanation for why homeopathy may work in certain cases. If, and this is a big if, the active drug in question is not diluted and instead prescribed in a concentrated form, then there is no reason to treat this substance as any different from a modern drug. The root of all drugs, whether modern, ayurvedic, or homeopathic, is a molecule that can interact in the body and exert some physiological action. So admittedly, my grudge is not as much with homeopathic substances themselves as with the bedrock of dilution on which the theory rests. This is one reason why in spite of its own anecdotal evidence, I find ayurveda much more believable than homeopathy. Some of the active principles of ayurveda, like colloidal gold, have in fact been proven to be efficiacious through sophisticated modes of action. One can definitely argue about the purported benefits of a chemical substance. Nothing like that can be done for the possible value of a substance that hardly exists.
Naturally, if it turns out that almost all homeopathic medications are diluted so much as to contain only one molecule of the drug, then the case for homeopathy in my mind will become far more tenuous and my hypothesis will merit no consideration.

One common thread I find in many of these expositions is that they fail to differentiate between what can be and what is, thus neatly treading over the boundary in what unfortunately seems like pseudoscience. After all, one can always make a good theoretical case for possibilities based on our current knowledge. For instance, based on our current knowledge, one can easily string together a thread of would-bes and claim the existence of an extraterrestrial being far far away, that would sound perfectly logical. However, it is clear that science has a safety mechanism built in itself that dismisses such armchair speculation, and with good reason. If every possibility were assigned an equal weight, then “anything goes” would become the norm. Of course, there have been some pretty wild-sounding scientific ideas in our history, which were then accepted later by the community. But in most of these cases, the ideas were based on some pretty good evidence and sound theorising. A recent astounding example that comes to my mind is the late and brilliant Thomas Gold’s theory that fossil fuels are not formed from fossils, but inside the molten bowels of the earth. This idea sounds woolly indeed, but read Gold’s book, and we realise that his arguments are so water-tight that we can almost dare someone to challenge them. Needless to say, his astonishing contentions are slowly being validated through experiments in recent years. But even his theory took 40 years to be regarded as real, and only when experiments pointed to it as being reasonable. In Benevinste’s case, not only did his experiments suggest a radically puzzling anomaly, but it challenged the very basic foundations of chemical and physical theory and observation. It did not simply suggest a glaring exception to known laws, but a revision of the laws themselves. That is simply a pill too bitter to digest.

There is a reason why the arbiter of science, reproducible experimentation, sets such a high standard. It is to preserve our sanity, and prevents us in believing in things simply on the basis of general and associative “evidence”. Homeopathy is not yet even close to satisfying the gold standard of basic reproducible experimentation. Whatever large-scale studies that have been done on homeopathy have to my knowledge only concluded fringe benefits and slight statistical significance, if any. In addition, homeopathy’s basic hypothesis of dilution-effected benefits strains almost any scientific mind. Even though we don’t know everything about water, we know a good deal, and we at least know what’s likely to….hold water. The foundational principle of dilution in homeopathy does not, even if we can agree that anecdotal evidence in its practice can be real, and that the actual substances used in it could possess some value. And no matter how much we may hear about its benefits, there is no reason to accord homeopathy the same status of being a “science” as modern medicine (with all its fuzzy areas). If one day homepathy points us to some astounding never before thought about basic principle of chemistry, then we will all be the wiser for it.

But as of now, the idea of water possessing memory belongs on the rim of, if not inside, the dustbin of pseudoscience.