And the more I think about it, I think serious consideration of the subject is so open-ended as to even require assumptions and/or conclusions about broader considerations, such as the influence of desire, intentionality or expectation (etc.) as agents of change in the physical.

bob brueck

For the rest, see this previous post.

Sometimes, when people refer to conventional medicines being used “homeopathically” they mean “in a highly dilute form”, but this is a metaphorical use of the term. Samuel Hahnemann himself used the example of Arsenic being deadly in large amounts, less deadly in small amounts, and used as an aphrodisiac and angina treatment in very small doses, because it makes the blood rush.

It makes a kind of limited sense. If large doses kill and small doses are actually beneficial, then maybe very small doeses are very beneficial.

As for the preparation method, it originally involved saying an incantation over the substance to be diluted, weighing the proportions (sometimes in scales made of precious metals), mixing slowly, then shaking ten times front-to-back, ten times side-to-side and ten times up-and-down (known collectively as “agitation”), then saying another incantation.

One by one, the various features of this process were dropped, and now modern homeopathic labs just mix and shake (not in the prescribed way). It would be ludicrously slow and cost-inefficient to mix the classical way.

As for the stimulation you mention to provoke the body’s reaction against the original toxin, the notion may have been based on the observation that drinking alcohol is a treatment for a hangover. Or that some poisons, taken in small doses, cause vomiting, which can purge the stomach of other poisons. Or indeed that frequently consuming very small amounts of a poison can build up immunity to it.

All these perfectly valid observations, if extrapolated further, sound kind-of logical, but are of course invalid. Folk medicine tends to be based on this kind of reasoning, and one time out of every hundred might get it right. The rest of the time it’s ineffective and sometimes lethal.

There is also the small issue that any sample of water has had millions of substances diluted in it over its history, retaining the imprint of all – if it does indeed possess a memory. It’s strange how only those memories created by homeopathic practicioners are have an effect – if they do.

One would expect ordinary tapwater to kill and cure the drinker thousands of times over, given how many memories it must contain.