Non-Sense Homeopath said:
does it work in 6x, 12x or not?
Well, if we're actually going to address this, then no, as a blanket statement, I do not believe that "it works" at 6X or 12X or any other X come to that.
Why not?
Because the whole assumption that "like cures like" is a pack of nonsense based on a misunderstanding.
Little homoeopathic history lesson.
Samuel Hahnemann was a German physician living at the end of the 18th century. He had a job translating medical texts into German. One of the books he was given to translate was the
Materia Medica of William Cullen, a very famous professor at Glasgow University. In this book Cullen stated (correctly) that the bark of the cinchona tree was an effective treatment for malaria. He also speculated (incorrectly) that the reason for the efficacy was that the bark had an astringent action on the stomach.
Hahnemann thought about this, and realised (correctly) that this explanation was unlikely, because there were a number of other things with an even more astringent action on the stomach which didn't do a blind bit of good for malaria. He then decided to get some of the bark and see if he could figure it out. He took some himself, and it made him feel unwell. He believed that the symptoms he was experiencing were similar to those of malaria. He tried this several times, and indeed, the effect was reproducible.
However, what he failed to do was to find out if the effect
also happened to other people. In fact it doesn't. The vast majority of people, on taking cinchona bark, will not experience what Hahnemann experienced. It appears that he suffered an idiosyncratic, probably allergic, reaction to something in the bark.
Nevertheless, Hahnemenn concluded from this observation that the reason that cinchona bark cures malaria is that it produces malarial symptoms in healthy people. Wrong on two counts. First, as I said, cinchona bark doesn't produce malarial symptoms in the vast majority of healthy people. Second, the reason cinchona bark cures malaria is that it contains a high concentration of quinine, which kills the
Plasmodium protozoan which causes malaria.
"Like cures like" is an expression of a very ancient way of thinking called "sympathetic magic". It can be found running through the thinking and practice of almost all primitive peoples, and indeed it is so ingrained into the human psyche that even modern man finds himself thinking that way sometimes.
However, it has absolutely no basis in fact. Whether or not any particular substance is active against any particular disease has nothing at all to do with whatever symptoms it might cause in a healthy person.
Therefore, there is no reason at all to believe that "homoeopathy works" at any dilution at all.
However, at the very low potencies, that is under 24X and 12C, there are indeed some traces of the original mother tincture present. It would therefore be foolish to declare that it is entirely impossible that any such preparation could ever have any sort of physiological effect. Especially right down at 6X, it's possible that certain individual preparations of particularly pharmacologically active substances might have an effect. For example, if you started with a highly concentrated mother tincture, I think you'd be very unwise to take a 6X preparation of potassium cyanide.
This is nevertheless not any sort of admission that "homoeopathy works" at these dilutions. Merely an observation that sometimes, with certain preparations, something might happen. Probably not that a disease would be cured though!
However, we note that when homoeopaths practise, they usually use much higher dilutuions than this. 30C is a very common prescription, and 200C seems quite popular too.
We know that such preparations have absolutely nothing at all of the mother tincture in them. We therefore discard all these earler caveats and state categorically that these preparations cannot possibly have any effect at all (beyond whatever effect the carrier solvent might have).
It is thus interesting that these homoeopaths are continually turning away from our constant questions about the 30C preparations. This is the clear question, to which we want an answer.
DO YOU THEN AGREE THAT 30C PREPARATIONS DO
NOT (AND CANNOT) WORK?
Rolfe.
