Merged: Memory of Water Proven

[paximperium]

Originally Posted by Shalamar

Hmm... Wait.. So you mean I can go to Costco, buy a pallet of bottled water, pour it all together, place in a tiny insignificant drop of.. anything, dole it out as 'drops' or something like that, and sell it all as a stupidly overpriced 'homeopathic' remedy?

Sign me up. I'm a believer, I can't wait for the money to just come pouring in. What 'remedy' shall I try first?

Something vague and self limited...say the common cold.

[Shalamar]

Originally Posted by paximperium

Something vague and self limited...say the common cold.

Hmm... I could sneeze into the water, then distill it before placing it into bottles. Add a little food colouring... It'll fight the cold.. AND turning red!

[RoboTimbo]

Originally Posted by Shalamar

Hmm... I could sneeze into the water, then distill it before placing it into bottles. Add a little food colouring... It'll fight the cold.. AND turning red!

You missed the step of getting some shill to come onto a skeptic's forum and tout 'studies' of homeopathy's effectiveness.

1. Buy water at Costco
2. Hire mouthpiece
3. ????
4. Profit!

[Shalamar]

Originally Posted by RoboTimbo

You missed the step of getting some shill to come onto a skeptic's forum and tout 'studies' of homeopathy's effectiveness.

1. Buy water at Costco
2. Hire mouthpiece
3. ????
4. Profit!

Need a catchy name too. Then I'll see if I can sell it at Super Supplements or something.

"Guaranteed to to lessen the effects of the cold upon the body!"
_{"Not guaranteed to do anything at all, save slightly hydrate you. Active ingredients include whatever was in my mouth when I sneezed."}

[Pipirr]

Originally Posted by Rolfe

Hey Pipirr - I presume the PhD came through on schedule? How did the final examination go?

Rolfe.

You presume correctly! All went well.

[Mojo]

Originally Posted by Pipirr

You presume correctly! All went well.

Congratulations Dr. Pipirr!

[paximperium]

Quantum-Vitagen
Now with the essence of Shalamar
Guaranteed to balance your energies and to lessen the effects of the cold.

[JimBenArm]

I think this could revolutionize the computer industry. Just think - no more flash memory, no more hard disks! Just set a glass of water next to your computational boxy thingy and there you go! Everything stored in 35 terrabytes of hydraulic medium!

Just think of how much data we could store in Lake Mead. Or Lake Superior!

Of course, we couldn't use Lake Erie. The data would get corrupted.

[Shalamar]

Originally Posted by paximperium

Quantum-Vitagen
Now with the essence of Shalamar
Guaranteed to balance your energies and to lessen the effects of the cold.

Oh dear gods. You damn near owed me a new computer!

[Wowbagger]

One more question:

Does anyone know if these water-memory lab tests were even double-blinded, and carefully controlled?
If so, why can't they be replicated around the word, so easily?
If not, how does one honestly expect to declare the findings are "proven"?

[Belz...]

Originally Posted by Shalamar

Hmm... Wait.. So you mean I can go to Costco, buy a pallet of bottled water, pour it all together, place in a tiny insignificant drop of.. anything, dole it out as 'drops' or something like that, and sell it all as a stupidly overpriced 'homeopathic' remedy?

Oh, heavens, no!

You have to DILUTE it. You can't just drop a small amount in water, you have to drop water INTO your "anything", instead.

[Belz...]

Originally Posted by Wowbagger

Does anyone know if these water-memory lab tests were even double-blinded, and carefully controlled?

Need you ask ?

Quote:

If not, how does one honestly expect to declare the findings are "proven"?

Easy: start with the conclusion, and work your way down!

[Shalamar]

Originally Posted by Belz...

Oh, heavens, no!

You have to DILUTE it. You can't just drop a small amount in water, you have to drop water INTO your "anything", instead.

will anyone notice.. or care?

[Wowbagger]

Hey, I'm just asking questions....

[JimBenArm]

Originally Posted by Wowbagger

Hey, I'm just asking questions....

This ain't the CT forum!

And sure, just asking questions. Yeah, we've heard that before, truther!!

[Rolfe]

Originally Posted by JimBenArm

Of course, we couldn't use Lake Erie. The data would get corrupted.

OUCH!!!!

Rolfe.

[RationalVetMed]

Originally Posted by Wowbagger

One more question:

Does anyone know if these water-memory lab tests were even double-blinded, and carefully controlled?
If so, why can't they be replicated around the word, so easily?
If not, how does one honestly expect to declare the findings are "proven"?

Miaow either doesn't understand or care about the need for or significance of blinding. I asked the same question many many posts ago and am still waiting for an answer.

It's easier to keep cutting and pasting chunks of papers she clearly doesn't understand than to sit down and read and understand them.

As to why they can't be replicated... oh, it'll be some sort of global conspiracy that we're all party to I imagine.

Yuri

[meow]

Originally Posted by meow

Members can follow the button to see the large block of text that this refers to. Please do not spam the forum by repeatedly posting the same large blocks of text.

Responding to this modbox in thread will be off topic Posted By:Tricky

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...ac6ccc41b2ef1c
Thermoluminescence of ultra-high dilutions of lithium chloride and sodium chloride

Chemin de Verdonnet 2, 1010, Lausanne, Switzerland

Abstract

Ultra-high dilutions of lithium chloride and sodium chloride (10−30 gcm−3) have been irradiated by X- and γ-rays at 77 K, then progressively rewarmed to room temperature. During that phase, their thermoluminescence has been studied and it was found that, despite their dilution beyond the Avogadro number, the emitted light was specific of the original salts dissolved initially.


================================================== ===

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...ee65eac16a51e7


Improvement of flow cytometric analysis of basophil activation inhibition by high histamine dilutions. A novel basophil specific marker: CD 203c
Purchase the full-text article


J Sainte-Laudy1, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author and P Belon2

1Laboratoire d’immunologie et d’allergologie, 5 boulevard du Montparnasse, 75006 Paris, France

2Laboratoires Boiron, 20 rue de la Libération, 69110 Lyon, France

Received 29 September 2005;
revised 20 October 2005;
accepted 31 October 2005.
Available online 5 January 2006.

Background

Histamine is known to elicit a negative feedback effect on anti-IgE and allergen-induced basophil activation. A series of experiments performed between 1981 and 1995 using a manual method showed biological activity of highly diluted histamine. Most of the experiments used histermine in the range 10−30 (15C)–10−36 M (18C). These results were confirmed by automated flow cytometry, but this method is based on the selection of basophils by anti-IgE and analysis of basophil activation by anti-CD 63, showing significant but relatively low inhibition (approximately 14%), insufficient to convince the scientific community of the reality of the phenomenon.
Objective

We investigated if the use of CD 203c, a basophil specific, earlier marker than CD 63 of the activation cascade, increased the sensitivity of the method, testing two target histamine dilutions, 10−4 (2C) and 10−32 M (16C).
Methods


Results

Histamine 10−4 M (2C) and histamine 10−32 M (16C) were capable of inhibiting both IgE-dependent (anti-IgE) and IgE-independent (fMLP) basophil activation. The percentage inhibition depended on the activation marker used. The highest inhibition for histamine dilution 16C was observed with CD 203c (38%, P<0.001), approximately half the inhibition observed with histamine 2C (73%).

Conclusion

These new flow cytometric protocols confirmed that high dilutions of histamine may inhibit basophil activation and that the inhibitory effect is not restricted to IgE-dependent activation. The use of CD 203c instead of CD 63 increased the magnitude of the response.


===============================================

let me guess, it was replicated including all the errors from previous successful experiments.

no wait, they just plain cheated because they have an agenda.

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Yuri Nalyssus

Miaow either doesn't understand or care about the need for or significance of blinding. I asked the same question many many posts ago and am still waiting for an answer.

Perhaps Meow should approach the people who made these studies with our questions.

Mainstream medical science can deliver amazing precision on its own findings. Unless the homeopaths can obtain similar (or better) results, why should we take their claims seriously?

----------------------------------

Meanwhile, I think the findings, here, are more compelling than the stuff in this thread:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com...d.php?t=137307

[Wowbagger]

Ah, very good! Meow is now giving us some papers to study, at least!
That's better than nothing!

Hopefully, some of them will be relevent to the claims made.

[JJM]

The Journal of Thermal and Analytical Calorimetry article is incomprehensible. The bottom line should be ("The nature of the phenomena here described still remains unexplained") that unexplained phenomena do not support any hypotheses. [Full stop] I should say, instead, that the unexplained phenomena, in that paper, look like poor quality research.

I came late to this explosive thread, I do not know what preceded this, sorry.

[ravdin]

Come on, Meow. You keep copying and pasting from the article because you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Just admit it and you'll feel a lot better.

[Confuseling]

Originally Posted by anor277

I take it then that I may safely place my homeopathic remedy next to my hifi speakers? The magnetic field does not affect the remedy.

You can, if you're careful.

I can sell you these cables...

[SusanB-M1]

Skeptic

"30C dilution, "

I am just at the part in 'Bad Science' where Ben Goldacre talks about homeopathy and the above phrase occurred several times. What does it mean?, please? Actually my reader was reading '30 degrees Centigrade' so I presume that is what was on the page, but that sounds like a temperature.

You know, I sympathise with people who are still drawn to homeopathy. Although I was almost totally sceptical about it, and certainly never used any remedies, it was only when I came to these forums that I had the final doubt removed..... for which I am very pleased of course!

I caught part of an interview on BBc Radio 4 yesterday, where an expert of some sort was worried that Prince charles has again, apparently, been promoting the homeopathy cause, but I did not hear enough to get the whole picture.

[Giggywig]

Originally Posted by SusanB-M1

Skeptic

"30C dilution, "

I am just at the part in 'Bad Science' where Ben Goldacre talks about homeopathy and the above phrase occurred several times. What does it mean?, please? Actually my reader was reading '30 degrees Centigrade' so I presume that is what was on the page, but that sounds like a temperature.

You know, I sympathise with people who are still drawn to homeopathy. Although I was almost totally sceptical about it, and certainly never used any remedies, it was only when I came to these forums that I had the final doubt removed..... for which I am very pleased of course!

I caught part of an interview on BBc Radio 4 yesterday, where an expert of some sort was worried that Prince charles has again, apparently, been promoting the homeopathy cause, but I did not hear enough to get the whole picture.

It means you do a 1:100 dilution 30 times. That's 1 part of your "remedy" in 100 parts solvent, mix, take one part out of that and mix it with 100 more parts of solvent. Repeat 28 more times. Chances of having anything other than solvent get pretty astronomical pretty quickly (around 12C or so, I believe).

[ddt]

Originally Posted by SusanB-M1

"30C dilution, "

I am just at the part in 'Bad Science' where Ben Goldacre talks about homeopathy and the above phrase occurred several times. What does it mean?, please? Actually my reader was reading '30 degrees Centigrade' so I presume that is what was on the page, but that sounds like a temperature.

It's the measure of dilution. The 'C' part means a 100-fold dilution, and the 30 means that that has to be repeated 30 times. So in the end, the original substance has been diluted by a factor 10 ^ 60.

[sanguine]

Okay, I just read the Sainte-Laudy paper (that's from 2005 in "Homeopathy"). It uses a technique I'm quite familiar with, so I figured I could give an educated analysis.

Overview:

Briefly, Sainte-Laudy and Belon applied the technique of flow cytometry to do a cell-by-cell analysis of immune cell activation blocking by vanishingly dilute (i.e. homeopathic) solutions of histamine, a compound that we expect to see blocking activation these immune cells when it is applied at normal concentrations.

Curiously, this paper violates two basic concepts of homeopathy. First, the dilutions are done without succussing. Second, they are suggesting that an ultra-high-dilution prep of histamine will do what normal concentrations of histamine can do, namely blocking activation. More on this later.

Flow cytometry is an amazing analytic tool by which you feed a suspension of cells into a machine, and it passes them, one at a time, in front of a laser or set of lasers. These then activate fluorescent markers (in this case, the cells have been treated with fluorescent markers that stick to certain features on their surfaces) which you can then "read' with a detector in the machine. The upshot is that you can run, say, 10,000 cells through the machine, and look at what each cell is doing vis-a-vis whatever feature you're measuring.

Back when I did this a lot, I was looking at the abundance of a key protein, which we'd fluorescently labeled. In this paper, the authors are looking at abundance of a surface protein called CD 63, which is only present in large numbers when the immune cells in question (in this case, basophils) are activated.

Commentary:

I mentioned doing 10,000 cells above, as that's what I did. In this case, the authors started with a population of immune cells, and used various "gating" methods to try and pick out the basophils. In other words, they started with a bunch of cells, and then sifted to try and find the right ones. This is a tricky aspect of flow cytometry of mixed populations of cells, and can amplify the effects of even minor differences between samples (note that I was lucky when I was doing my work, as I had pure cultures, and did not need to do any gating at all). If you have access to the paper, figure 4 shows how this "process of elimination" worked for this study.

The authors say this in their methods section:

"We only included experiments fulfilling the following criteria: significant activation (>15% CD 63 expression or MFI ratio >5), inhibition induced by histamine 2C higher than 50% and number of counted basophils higher than 500."

I find this worrying, and had I been a peer reviewer, I would have flagged it and asked to see their full set of original data. Here are the concerns:

1) 500 cells is not an awful lot. It's good that they set a minimum bar, but a larger sample size would have been better. See my 10,000 above. That said, I'd let this one slide if there weren't other concerns, because it's a pain getting enough basophils.

2) Why did they rule out samples with less than 15% CD 63 expression, or with lower fluorescence? To explain, MFI ratio compares the fluorescence of an experimental sample to the negative control. For no particularly good reason, they threw out a slew of samples at the lower range of fluorescence and at the lower range of activation. If their protocol is activating cells at this lower range and they think that's a problem, they need to fix their protocol (perhaps by adding more of the immune cell activator). My concern here is that:

A - If you include the full range of activation/fluorescence, their "effects" from the homeopathic solutions disappear.

B - When they go to higher concentrations of activator (that would help reduce the number of low-activation cells) their effects disappear.

The fact that they had such uneven activation effects suggests that either they are doing something wrong or their cell populations have problems. By comparison, when I ran flow cytometry experiments, treating cells with the same conditions reliably yielded the same results (which, you know, you'd expect, because that's how controlled experiments work).

3) Again, what's with throwing out more results? In this case, they threw out more results where real concentrations of histamine had less of an effect.

Again, I don't think this paper would have passed peer review at a better journal, because there are serious issues with how the data were handled.

This gains extra significance because the effects are very small.

Now, I mentioned at the beginning that I found it interesting that the authors suggest in this paper that homeopathic dilutions of histamine have the same effect as real amounts of histamine. By conventional homeopathic belief, if you wanted to block basophil activation, wouldn't you have to use something that would activate basophils at normal concentrations?

Notably, in 2001, Sainte-Laudy used a different method to show that while 10C and 20C dilutions of histamine blocked basophil activation, 13C dilutions enhanced it.

Neat, right?

This highly suggests to me that Sainte-Laudy and colleagues do sloppy work that leads to highly variable responses, and then throw out all the data that doesn't match their hypothesis. With five gates and three other qualifiers, they have ample opportunity to massage their essentially random results into anything they want, and I think, willfully or not, they're likely doing so.

[Paulhoff]

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Paul

[Rolfe]

Thank you very much Sanguine.

Rolfe.

[RationalVetMed]

Originally Posted by meow

Thermoluminescence of ultra-high dilutions of lithium chloride and sodium chloride etc etc... big fonts, little fonts, bright colours etc etc etc...

... no wait, they just plain cheated because they have an agenda.

So I take it that you still don't understand what blinding is and why good methodology is important.

Yuri

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Originally Posted by Rolfe

Thank you very much Sanguine.

Rolfe.

Seconded. Much better than all the arm waving we get from the "believers".

[Foolmewunz]

Originally Posted by Shalamar

Hmm... Wait.. So you mean I can go to Costco, buy a pallet of bottled water, pour it all together, place in a tiny insignificant drop of.. anything, dole it out as 'drops' or something like that, and sell it all as a stupidly overpriced 'homeopathic' remedy?

Sign me up. I'm a believer, I can't wait for the money to just come pouring in. What 'remedy' shall I try first?

Don't be silly. You can't just dump the dose of "anything" into it and stir. You have to be a homeopath, put on a white jacket, and when you put the anything in the water, hold it up to the light and go "Hmmm?", like Mr. Wizard so you look all sciencey and stuff.

What you're describing? Well, just any old person could do that. Why that'd make a mockery of the hundred-year tradition of homeopathy.

[Mojo]

Originally Posted by sanguine

Now, I mentioned at the beginning that I found it interesting that the authors suggest in this paper that homeopathic dilutions of histamine have the same effect as real amounts of histamine. By conventional homeopathic belief, if you wanted to block basophil activation, wouldn't you have to use something that would activate basophils at normal concentrations?

Not necessarily - the idea of "like cures like" is often explained in terms of the remedy stimulating the body to heal by inducing the symptoms of the disease.

Hahnemann's original idea was that material doses of Cinchona bark were an effective treatment for malaria because, in material doses, it appeared to induce the symptoms of malaria in him. From this he jumped to the conclusion that any condition could be treated by a medicine that would normally produce the symptoms the patient was suffering. The dilutions were only introduced later to get around the problem that large doses of drugs that produced symptoms tended to make patients worse.

Modern "provings", in which homoeopaths determine what symptoms a remedy is supposed to treat, use potentised remedies (Hahnemann himself recommended "proving" with 30C remedies in the last two editions of The Organon), not material amounts of the substance from which the remedy is prepared.

The idea that homoeopathy involves highly dilute remedies producing opposite effects to material doses is probably a misconception - in fact the claim is that diluting and succussing the remedies intensifies the effects.

[sanguine]

Originally Posted by Mojo

The idea that homoeopathy involves highly dilute remedies producing opposite effects to material doses is probably a misconception - in fact the claim is that diluting and succussing the remedies intensifies the effects.

Got it. Out of curiosity, did any of the historical advocates of homeopathy have a line of reasoning that would explain the weird multimodal thing that Sainte-Laudy claims in the 2001 paper, where the intermediate dilution had an opposite effect?

[Mojo]

Originally Posted by Foolmewunz

You have to be a homeopath, put on a white jacket, and...

...get someone to tie up the sleeves behind your back.

[athon]

Originally Posted by sanguine

Got it. Out of curiosity, did any of the historical advocates of homeopathy have a line of reasoning that would explain the weird multimodal thing that Sainte-Laudy claims in the 2001 paper, where the intermediate dilution had an opposite effect?

First of all, thank you so much for the breakdown of the paper. I also read it a while back, and came to similar conclusions ultimately, but you've highlighted a couple of other interesting particulars that (having not ever personally engaged in this particular assay process) I never considered.

As to the reasons why the intermediate dilution had an opposite effect, I got the feeling that this study was not necessarily concerned with validating homeopathy per se, but rather introducing the possibility that a solvent could hold some information from the solute, even if it is diluted down to homeopathic levels.

In any case, I'd venture that your response will be ignored by meow. I for one, however, found it most educational.

Thanks.

Athon

[Elizabeth I]

Originally Posted by paximperium

Take nothing, it is the most powerful homeopathic remedy.

For faster effect, take nothing three times a day, once after every meal.

Originally Posted by Shalamar

Hmm... Wait.. So you mean I can go to Costco, buy a pallet of bottled water, pour it all together, place in a tiny insignificant drop of.. anything, dole it out as 'drops' or something like that, and sell it all as a stupidly overpriced 'homeopathic' remedy?

Sign me up. I'm a believer, I can't wait for the money to just come pouring in. What 'remedy' shall I try first?

I think you have to thump it, too.

[th!nk]

here are some simple arguments against homeopathy using basic chemistry. imagine for a second that homeopathy is true. first of all, if water has a memory, then it recalls previous solutes were added to it, thats homeopathy's claim. if homeopathy claims to be a science, then homeopathic water should have some noticable effect in chemistry experiments. for example, if i add 1 mole of hydrochloric acid to 10 moles of water, and dilute to homeopathic levels, when tested on litmus paper, that water should cause it to turn red showing that water has "remembered" the hydronium ions and is no longer neutral. this is not what happens. in excessive dilution, the amount of hydronium in water is severely diminished and water is shown to be mostly neutral, or in 30x dilution, neutral.

[th!nk]

Now imagine that water does have memory. how does it choose between the healing effects of a subsdtance and the harmful ones. water, an inanimate compound, cannot consciously choose something.
These are simple questions any person with a background in chemistry should be asking. Yet so called homeopaths who claim they have a scientific undertsanding of the principles do not even ask these. if homeopathy falters to these, how will it match up to the tough questions, evidence based and logically sound questions?

[arthwollipot]

Not everything gets imprinted in water. This is why the ocean is not one vast homeopathic cure-all. The water has to be "succussed" at each dilution. This means that it has to be vigorously shaken in a very specific way for the solute to be properly imprinted on the water. I read one analysis which said that it had to be shaken exactly thirteen times in each of the three directions of motion: up/down, left/right and back/forth. Another method I've seen is that it has to be banged against a wooden table a certain number of times. Precisely what this does to the structure of the water is never made clear, but homeopathy certainy doesn't "work" without it.