Homeopathy experiment by W. J. Boyd

TheGreatNotchweed

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Hey all :) I was debating with a supporter of homeopathy on another forum and he mentioned an experiment by one W. J. Boyd, in which he could allegedly tell apart homeopathic medicine from ordinary water by means of a flow gauge (I think), with 100% success (!)

What's with that experiment? When did it take place? Where was it published? I'm baffled; I can't seem to find anything about it on the internet (excluding purely woo pages). Have any of you heard of it?

Thanks!
 
TheGreatNotchweed said:
Hey all :) I was debating with a supporter of homeopathy on another forum and he mentioned an experiment by one W. J. Boyd, in which he could allegedly tell apart homeopathic medicine from ordinary water by means of a flow gauge (I think), with 100% success (!)

What's with that experiment? When did it take place? Where was it published? I'm baffled; I can't seem to find anything about it on the internet (excluding purely woo pages). Have any of you heard of it?

Thanks!
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The burden of proof is on your friend. Get it from him.

Edit: In what year did Mr. Boyd receive his Nobel Prize for completely overturning all of modern chemistry?
 
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I can't find any reference to a "W J Boyd" in relation to homoeopathy, but there was a William Ernest Boyd.
In 1936 he published a monograph entitled 'Low Potencies of Homoeopathy'. Dr. Boyd proved by the experiments on his Emanometer beyond any shadow of a doubt that the presence of a power exists in the 30th potency of Mercuric Chloride.
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I can't find any reference to his Nobel prize.

More information about Boyd's "emanometer" here.
As with the Abrams device, the emanometer used the abdominal reflexes of the individual he was examining. Dr. Boyd tried to see if he could determine the vibrational frequency of a remedy after he found out that humans could act like antennas on a radio. There was a lot of work done at this time due to the recent splitting of the atom and Boyd wondered if the atom released wave energy when it split. Boyd used this idea to build a machine to try and sort remedies into related groups.

He published papers in the early homoeopathic journals claiming that he could detect pathology, the administration of correct remedies, and even group remedies and pathologies. He claimed to be able to detect when a spoiled case cleared under the correct simillimum on his machine. The work is fascinating but interrupted in the journals by WW II and never really followed up.

In theory, you would be able to test a human subject, get a reading, and then find the vibratory frequency that would somehow stabilize the reading and then give the remedy of that frequency.
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I'm not quite sure how splitting the atom is relevant to homoeopathic remedies.

Note also: apparently spectacular results, but "never really followed up". This seems to be characteristic of a lot of homoeopathic research. A bit like the 15 year old meta-analysis currently being touted in another thread as evidence for homoeopathy, which said that the results looked encouraging but that more good quality research was needed. This doesn't appear to have been forthcoming.
 
It appears your friend may be referrencing the work of Dr. William Earnest Boyd who did most of his experiments in homeopathy in the 1930s. It appears he was a real medical doctor and Naval surgeon during World War I. Afterwards, he became a leading researcher and proponent of homeopathy in Scotland.

He definitely did experiments and contributed to homeopathic journals on the subject of being able to scientifically detect "emanations" from homeopathic substances. He wrote an article titled "Emanometer," published in the British Homoeopath Journal in 1923, Volume 13, p. 559.

There's not a whole lot of information debunking Boyd because he really did most of his work at the tail end of the homeopathy craze which had almost completely died out by World War II. Several meta-studies of homeopathy literature have concluded that there is no evidence of any effect from homeopathic preparations.

The book "Homeopathy in Perspective" by Anthony Campbell concludes, "Boyd's Emanometer research is tantalizing but ultimately baffling. It is in many ways reminiscent of much research in parapsychology, which likewise seems constantly to promise to yield firm evidence and then fails to do so."

Your friend should produce these 85 year-old studies so that they may be subjected to scrutiny.
 
Mojo said:
I'm not quite sure how splitting the atom is relevant to homoeopathic remedies.
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Well it was the 30s. They hadn't got as far as 'homeopathy works because of quantum', they were still on 'homeopathy works because of splitting the atom'.
 
Ah, so it was an E, not a J. That explains why I couldn't find the experiment.

Thanks for all the info, that will be useful. I'll search a little more when I have time.

So that was 70-80 years ago? o.O I should have expected something like that... this fellow seems particularly gullible :(

While on the subject, I have another question: He insists that ailments show up on a person's aura. From what I know, auras are visualizations of electromagnetic fields. Does this theory hold any water? I doubt it, but he says he read it on a popular science magazine (SciAm? not sure) so maybe there's something to it (I dunno, maybe if you have a swelling or some particular organ isn't working that could have some sort of electromagnetic effect that might show... I'm no doctor).
 
TheGreatNotchweed said:
.(I dunno, maybe if you have a swelling or some particular organ isn't working that could have some sort of electromagnetic effect that might show... I'm no doctor).
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Here's a great place to start your research on the nonsense that is auras: http://skepdic.com/kirlian.html

A swolen area might be hotter than the surrounding tissue so that when viewed through a thermal camera one could spot it. However, this only applies to swelling and doesn't tell one anything about the cause of the swelling. Not only that, but swelling causes pain, is visibly noticeable and is hot to the touch - there's no diagnostic reason to use thermal imaging. Also, thermal cameras are NOT the type used to detect "auras" in the first place.
 
TheGreatNotchweed said:
He insists that ailments show up on a person's aura.
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For that to be true, people's auras would have to show up.

While human beings do have an electromagnetic field, it is no more significant than (and largely indistinguishable from) the field around a slab of lard, a tree, or a pile of rotting potatoes.
 
TheGreatNotchweed said:
While on the subject, I have another question: He insists that ailments show up on a person's aura. From what I know, auras are visualizations of electromagnetic fields. Does this theory hold any water? I doubt it, but he says he read it on a popular science magazine (SciAm? not sure) so maybe there's something to it (I dunno, maybe if you have a swelling or some particular organ isn't working that could have some sort of electromagnetic effect that might show... I'm no doctor).
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Auras were simply, comprehensively and quite scientifically proven not to exist...by a nine-year-old girl, Emily Rosa, in 1996. She is the youngest person ever to have a scientific paper peer reviewed and published.
 
There is also this Q and A with Emily in Scientific American Frontiers that can be found here. Wow. She is my new hero.
 
Loss Leader said:
There's not a whole lot of information debunking Boyd because he really did most of his work at the tail end of the homeopathy craze which had almost completely died out by World War II.
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During WWII there were millions of "proving" preformed where a bullet was "inserted" into an otherwise healthy individual, and sure enough the "patient" would then begin to suffer the same symptoms as someone with a hole in their body. Since it has been shown that like cures like, all you would need to do is dilute a cartridge to 30C then drink it.

Here you can see some German "homeopathic scientists" preparing to do a proving on some US "patients".


LLH
 
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