Homoeopathy article from Penn State

Sounds just like what Roy said, and look how credible he turned out to be. We're still olaf-ing at him.

Come on, explain the details of the findings of these papers you're touting, and why you give them such credit.

Rolfe.
 
http://esciencenews.com/articles/200....matter.qubits

For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing. Teleportation may be nature's most mysterious form of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been achieved between photons over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third. None of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances.


hey rolfe, this violates everything we know about the way the world works, what shall we do?

what's next, teletransporting of molecules?
 
I emailed the interviewed professor:
Dear Professor Karpa,

I have recently read an article in Penn State Live where you were interviewed by reporter, Joy Drohan, published 02-05-09.
http://live.psu.edu/story/37417

"So should you throw away your homeopathic tinctures and pills? Maybe not, says Karpa. "My thinking is that if people who are using them think they’re getting a benefit and it’s not causing them any harm, then why stop it?"


Let me give you three reasons why health care providers and the scientific community should speak out against homeopathy and other comparable "bad medicine" remedies.

1.) It wastes money and resources. We could probably pay for everyone's health care with the money spent on these worthless products.

2.) People substitute these useless products for evidence based medical interventions. Lost opportunities have been fatal.

3.) The sCAM industry and supporters have become pervasive in society today. Snake oil sells as well today as it did in the 1800s. Science based health care providers owe it to their patients to combat the lack of critical thinking skills which sCAM depends on to propagate. The placebo effect of these products is grossly overstated as evidenced by research on placebos. The public's lack of the ability to understand the difference between science based medicine and sCAM does great harm in the long run to all of society.

I refer you to the following web sites for further information and encourage you to take a stand against bad medicine rather than viewing it as a quaint benign patient practice that does no harm:

Science-Based Medicine Blog
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/
Archive for the 'Homeopathy' Category
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?cat=5

Dr Harriet Hall, The SkepDoc
http://www.skepdoc.info/
(Writes about sCAM for the above blog and Skeptical Inquirer)

The Quack Files,
http://www.quackfiles.com/
(links to Homeowatch for homeopathy but has other useful entries)

Quackwatch, Dr Stephen Barrett
http://www.quackwatch.org/index.html
Homeowatch
http://www.homeowatch.org/

And, The National Council Against Health Fraud
http://www.ncahf.org/
NCAHF Position Paper on Homeopathy
http://www.ncahf.org/pp/homeop.html


In addition, you may be interested in our discussion of the article on the JamesRandiEducationalFoundation forum
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=135175

We invite you to join the discussion if you would care to.
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Let you know if he replies.
 
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Cuddles said:
So what's your opinion on the fact that the vast majority of homeopathic remedies are either dry pills or use alcohol as a solute?

This is one of the many big problems homeopathy has. The claims are nonsensical enough on their own, but when the actual practice has virtually nothing to do with either the claims or things that are supposed to test them it just gets silly.
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alcohol is a polar molecule same as water as are sugar molecules. polarity appears to play a role in this from a korean experiment performed a while back.

not sure on the whole homeopathy aspect but possibly polar sugar molecules act as a storage device.



http://www.jcrows.com/dilution.html
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Andy Coghlan

It is a chance discovery so unexpected it defies belief and threatens to reignite debate about whether there is a scientific basis for thinking homeopathic medicines really work.

A team in South Korea has discovered a whole new dimension to just about the simplest chemical reaction in the book - what happens when you dissolve a substance in water and then add more water.

Conventional wisdom says that the dissolved molecules simply spread further and further apart as a solution is diluted. But two chemists have found that some do the opposite: they clump together, first as clusters of molecules, then as bigger aggregates of those clusters. Far from drifting apart from their neighbours, they got closer together.

The discovery has stunned chemists, and could provide the first scientific insight into how some homeopathic remedies work. Homeopaths repeatedly dilute medications, believing that the higher the dilution, the more potent the remedy becomes.

Completely counterintuitive
Click to expand...
 
hahaha!

listen to
Edited by Darat: 
Breach of Membership Agreement removed.
skeptigirl try and dictate what every person should do as far as their health care options.

ahh, i think the way it works is that people almost ALWAYS follow the traditional path and after years and years of frustration they seek out other methods.

i suppose if you had your way and were the supreme ruler of the universe you would take those choices away.

"here ye here ye, i now decide how, when, and where you spend your money -- for i am skeptigirl beholder of all knowledge"

LOL!
 
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If I were posting knowledge I gathered from my crystal ball, meow, you would have more of a case. But since I post instead, heavily supported positions with citations people can investigate the sources of information for themselves, you have no case.
 
meow said:
http://www.jcrows.com/dilution.html
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Andy Coghlan

It is a chance discovery so unexpected it defies belief and threatens to reignite debate about whether there is a scientific basis for thinking homeopathic medicines really work.

A team in South Korea has discovered a whole new dimension to just about the simplest chemical reaction in the book - what happens when you dissolve a substance in water and then add more water.

Conventional wisdom says that the dissolved molecules simply spread further and further apart as a solution is diluted. But two chemists have found that some do the opposite: they clump together, first as clusters of molecules, then as bigger aggregates of those clusters. Far from drifting apart from their neighbours, they got closer together.

The discovery has stunned chemists, and could provide the first scientific insight into how some homeopathic remedies work. Homeopaths repeatedly dilute medications, believing that the higher the dilution, the more potent the remedy becomes.

Completely counterintuitive
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

WTF?? :confused: Somebody took until 2001 to discover that hydrophilic and hydrophobic compounds act differently in water? And that's supposed to buttress homeopathic "theory"? Seriously??
 
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meow said:
alcohol is a polar molecule same as water as are sugar molecules. polarity appears to play a role in this from a korean experiment performed a while back.

not sure on the whole homeopathy aspect but possibly polar sugar molecules act as a storage device.
Click to expand...

That's some top quality speculation you've got there.
"A property which has never been observed and can't possibly exist in one molecule could also fail to exist in other, completely different molecules. But I have no idea and I'm actually just making this up."
Brilliant. Are you even trying to support your case?
 
Cuddles said:
That's some top quality speculation you've got there.
"A property which has never been observed and can't possibly exist in one molecule could also fail to exist in other, completely different molecules. But I have no idea and I'm actually just making this up."
Brilliant. Are you even trying to support your case?
Click to expand...

hey, you asked.

and the property has been shown to exist for water.

see the article in the Physica A journal. the one with the nobel winning prize chemist --DR Rey-- and his thermoluminescence experiment.

that's the one that terrifies the "water memory is bunk" crowd, and is a gimme as far as taking the million.
 
*Yawn*

Your excerpt was treating aggregation of compounds in solution as if it were something previously unobserved. My sarcasm was posted in order to point out that there is indeed a very well known situation where compounds aggregate in solution, and that is when it's a hydrophobic compound. Whether or not that was the case in that specific experiement, the fact remains that there are in fact compounds that clump, cluster, aggregate, or otherwise come together in the presence of water. To see this, "dilute" cooking oil in water, then tell me what happens. Whether a given material truly dilutes or aggregates in solution depends on its properties, and to act as though it never happens is to act in contradiction to centuries of established chemistry.

Now go back to talking with Skepticgirl and Rolfe about the utter lack of demonstrated effectiveness with homeopathic solutions. You're running away from that debate far too easily, and I shouldn't have provided you with an easy way out of that.
 
arthwollipot said:
Go ahead then. Take the million. Oh yeah, that's right. Randi is allowed to sabotage the challenge. I notice that you still haven't provided any evidence of this claim, by the way.
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meow meow

not going to waste my time. show me where he isn't allowed to change the design at any time
 
meow said:
...http://www.jcrows.com/dilution.html
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So, going to the original source of information you linked to, that is the NewScientist article, not Mr Crow, the apple cider man's interpretation of the article you linked to....

Bizarre chemical discovery gives homeopathic hint

First we see this article is from 2001. Got anything more current?

Then we see the author has fudged an important little fact about homeopathy that doesn't fit with trying to fit this unrelated bit of research into supporting homeopathy.
The discovery has stunned chemists, and could provide the first scientific insight into how some homeopathic remedies work. Homeopaths repeatedly dilute medications, believing that the higher the dilution, the more potent the remedy becomes.
Click to expand...
Sounds good until you find out homeopathic remedies typically have no evidence of the diluted chemicals detectable in the final products. Instead, the solutions are diluted until nothing can be detected except the water which is supposed to have 'memory'. A concentration of molecules in a solution would be detectable. :rolleyes:

Of course the author ignores this and instead says:
Some dilute to "infinity" until no molecules of the remedy remain. They believe that water holds a memory, or "imprint" of the active ingredient which is more potent than the ingredient itself. But others use less dilute solutions - often diluting a remedy six-fold. The Korean findings might at last go some way to reconciling the potency of these less dilute solutions with orthodox science.
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(emphasis mine)

So which is it? Apparently homeopaths don't have a clear idea of their own pseudoscience. Or, is it more likely this NewScientist author, true to the magazine's (aka NOT a science journal) intent of drawing the interest of customers, has merely fit with quite a bit of effort, unrelated research to the claims of homeopaths?



Further stated in the article is mention of work with white blood cells:
Benveniste claimed the solution still worked because it contained ghostly "imprints" in the water structure where the antibodies had been. ... Other researchers failed to reproduce Benveniste's experiments, but homeopaths still believe he may have been onto something.
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(emphasis mine)

Failing to repeat the results is key here in an eight year old study. While I couldn't find the original work from Shashadhar Samal & Kurt Geckeler, I did find this:
Homeopathy, still without an explanation
Almost a year ago, German chemist Kurt Geckeler invited other scientists to repeat the results that he and his colleague Shashadhar Samal achieved in an experiment carried out at the Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology, in South Korea. They found that consecutive dilutions of one substance in another formed increasingly larger aggregates of molecules. This effect could help to understand homeopathy, according to which the biological action of a substance dissolved in water is preserved after a series of dilutions. Chemist Alfredo Mayall Simas, his student, studying for a doctorate, Fernando Hallwass and physicist Mário Engelsberg, from the Federal University of Pernambuco, tried to apply this idea in research.

Except that they did not arrive at the same results - which, in the scientific world, checkmates any experiment, the worth of which depends on its reproducibility. "The successive dilution did not affect the final size of the aggregate in our experiments", says Simas, who also coordinated work on molecules with special optical properties. The Brazilians used sodium chloride (NaCl) and cyclodextrin, compounds used in the original work. The study comes out this month in theChemical Communications magazine, which had already published the experiment by Geckeler and Samal.
Click to expand...
(emphasis mine)



It appears the fools who prefer to find evidence confirming their beliefs rather than checking what the evidence actually supports have all latched on to the 2001 NewScientist summary of research and echoed it over and over again in various homeopathy promotions. Not that I expect any of this to matter to meow.
 
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