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Homeopathy 2018; 107(03): 189-195

Ultra-High Dilutions and Homeopathy: Can They Be Explained without Non-Local Theory?

Yannis Almirantis (1), Konstantinos Tsitinidis (2)

1 Institute of Biosciences and Applications, National Centre for Scientific Research ‘Demokritos’, Athens, Greece
2 ‘Homeopathie’, Homeopathy Centre, Athens, Greece

Abstract

We discuss questions related to the ‘Benveniste Affair’, its consequences and broader issues in an attempt to understand homeopathy. Specifically, we address the following points:
1. The relationship between the experiments conducted by Benveniste, Montagnier, their collaborators and groups that independently tested their results, and ‘traditional’ homeopathy.
2. Possible non-local components such as ‘generalised entanglement’ as the basis of the homeopathic phenomenon and experimental evidence for them.
3. The capability of highly diluted homeopathic remedies to provoke tangible biological changes in whole organisms and cellular experimental systems.
4. Aspects of the similia principle related to the above.
5. Suggestions that can lead to experimental verifications of the non-local hypothesis in homeopathy.

Free full text:
https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/html/10.1055/s-0038-1656513


Excerpts:

"The purpose of the present article is mainly twofold, with its two objectives strongly interconnected. First, to point out that Benveniste and his followers' work constitutes an integral part of the field of homeopathy, as it is motivated by homeopathic medicine and it may serve to shed light on the foundation of the homeopathic phenomenon. Second, to present evidence that the combined corpus of data from the line of research of Benveniste, the rest of the experimental work on ultra-high dilutions (UHDs) and homeopathic medicine, cannot be understood outside a non-local approach, in the spirit described by Walach,[7] [8] [9] Milgrom,[10] [11] [12] Weingärtner,[13] [14] [15] Beauvais[16] [17] [18] and other investigators.

"The opinion that the experiments of Jacques Benveniste[19] were erroneous or ill-founded may be encountered even among people from the homeopathic community.[20] However, we believe that the verification of these experiments by Jean Sainte-Laudy, Madeleine Ennis and others,[21] [22] despite the subsequent equivocal results of different scientific teams in their attempts to replicate that outcome, renders the picture very complex, as well as open to alternative explanatory hypotheses."

"Several authors have proposed that both homeopathy and experimentation with (potentised by succussion) UHDs might involve non-local aspects of nature, in the spirit of non-locality found in quantum mechanics[25]; see also references given in the introduction. The principal motive for the search for connections between these remote scientific fields, which might appear unorthodox, has been the observation of an elusive aspect[7] [26] in homeopathic medical practice and in experimentation with UHDs. This elusiveness becomes particularly evident since repeatability is clearly weak. This weak repeatability, along with some other features of homeopathic medicine, are landmarks indicating that here we might not simply have experimental errors...Instead, there is growing evidence that in the fields we examine here, we witness the appearance of epistemologically novel features: to use the terminology of T. S. Kuhn, we see the emergence of a new paradigm.[27] It is very premature to fully describe this new scientific realm, but the ‘weak quantum theory’ as formulated by Atmanspacher et al,[25] theoretical work by Beauvais,[17] [18] and a few other attempts, might represent previews of what its principal components are.

"Within this line of thought, Harald Walach suggested that the often poor outcome of double-blind clinical trials (DBCTs) in assessing homeopathy might be a consequence of an impossibility of UHDs to convey information about their initial solute. Reasons for this are paradoxes and contradictions created by constraints due to special relativity.[9]...One completely blinded study,[29] with two groups of provers taking different remedies and one group taking placebo, led to statistically significant ‘paradoxical’ results, such as finding symptoms in a group typical of the remedy given to the other group, and symptoms typical of a remedy found in a group that only later received it: that is, a kind of ‘presentiment’ effect. According to Walach, if such effects are treated causally, ‘they go away, change channel or do something crazy’.[9] As suggested by Beauvais, finding symptoms typical of one remedy in another study group may represent such a ‘channel change’ due to the inadequacy of non-local correlations for the transmission of information.[17]

"In homeopathy, and especially in view of some key properties of remedies, a direct implication of contextuality and significance appears...Such features of homeopathy are entirely inexplicable on the basis of any biomolecular or more generally conventional explanation, which does not imply some extended form of causality directly involving significances."

"The cumulative results from 886 experiments, both blinded and open, conducted by Benveniste's group over almost a decade, have been presented and analysed by Beauvais.[6] [16] [33] These experiments, pertaining to the field named by Benveniste as ‘digital biology’, concern the transmission of the activity of a potentised solution of a pharmacological agent to pure water through an electromagnetic signal and then testing if this transmission did in fact occur, by means of an isolated heart model...In brief, the open experiments and those blinded by a member of the group were successful with high statistical significance: that is, the response of the animal heart was consistent with the use either of ‘informed’ or of ‘naïve’ water... In contrast to that, experiments blinded by scientists unrelated to the experimenters' group systematically failed to distinguish the identity of the tested sample."

"Francis Beauvais[17] developed a quantum-like model for the study of probabilities in DBCTs. Beauvais showed a parallelism between single-photon interference experiments and randomised placebo-controlled homeopathy trials. He proposed specific modifications of the DBCT procedure (which he named in situ randomisation and unblinding), which could suppress the smearing effect occurring between verum and placebo group."

"As Walach has commented, the elusive aspect and several specific features of the clinical testing of homeopathy and of the associated experimental work remind one of characteristics commonly observed in the field of parapsychology.[8] Another link between the domain of the study of mind–matter interaction and homeopathy stems from a highly automated attempt to repeat an experiment...by an independent team of experts...There, in the final experiment conducted in the absence of any member of the French team, no biological effect was found to be transmitted through electromagnetic signals—as had been the case with the initial observation of Benveniste's group. Thus, the result of the attempt of the DARPA team to replicate Benveniste's experiment was declared negative. However, in preliminary repetitions of the experiment where a member of the French team participated, such transmission appeared!

"This ‘experimenter effect’ was extremely strange, as the aforementioned publication stresses that no activity took place on the part of Benveniste's collaborator in this experiment that might have influenced the result or violated the research protocol, including blinding and randomisation."

"The experimenter effect and the related features of homeopathic therapeutics, which we have mentioned thus far, might correspond with the ‘role of the observer’ in quantum mechanics, and with aspects of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox and its implementations, which have led to the conclusion that nature as described by quantum mechanics is non-local.[36]...[The authors] contended that here a novel situation presents itself where some (but not all) of the features of the quantum microcosm reappear,[8] [14] [25] where quantum mechanics may serve as a metaphor for homeopathy,[10] and where new tools, such as contextuality and entanglement, may be sourced from the quantum formalism.[14] [17]"

"Metaphors from quantum mechanics have been of great importance for us to realise just how fundamental the role of non-repeatability is for the understanding of the whole homeopathic phenomenon and the recognition of the eventual crystallisation of a new scientific paradigm."

"Could we say that the quantum-like formalism describes the general modalities, while individuals involved are represented by, say, the values of suitable coefficients? Are things as simple as that or is the quantum metaphor not able quantitatively to describe the experimenter effect?"

"Fisher comments on an apparent difficulty of most theories involving generalised entanglement to account for self-treatment with homeopathy.[38] We suggest that perhaps this should be viewed in the way Lacanian psychoanalysis considers the collective paternal role in society through the use of language, the so-called Name-of-the-Father, instead of the true, physical father in its role in the development of the Oedipus complex.[39] "

"In a recent article referring to the Benveniste case,[20] Vithoulkas stated that, from the very beginning, he considered Benveniste's attempts for in vitro experimentation with UHDs incompatible with the principles of homeopathy. A main point in Vithoulkas' objection is: ‘A high potency can never bring about a structural change in the organism, like the one Benveniste claimed’."

"He bases this claim on the conviction that a homeopathic remedy always cures symptoms that are produced by the substance which is at the basis of this remedy (‘the mother tincture’ or more generally ‘the crude substance’).

"However, homeopaths know at least one situation where homeopathic remedies often produce the same type of effects as the substance used for their preparation: their administration to healthy individuals during the proving of the remedy, where the observed symptoms of the tested potentised remedy often largely coincide with the symptoms caused by the crude substance."

"Oscillatory responses to a remedy have also been observed.[40] In Benveniste's article in Nature,[19] an oscillatory response of the intensity of basophil degranulation is observed, in this case not over time but depending on the degree of dilution of the utilised anti-IgE."

"On closer examination of the similia principle itself, claimed by Vithoulkas as contrary to the whole concept behind Benveniste's experiment,[20] it is well known that several homeopathic remedies...cure the same ailments or symptoms as those for which the mother tinctures (used in their preparation) are used. The formulation of the similia principle verified by homeopathic experience is: ‘The more complete is the similarity between a patient's symptoms and the remedy picture during homeopathic pathogenetic trials (HPTs, provings), the more effective the remedy will be when prescribed to this patient’."

"In fact, all three of the following cases may be encountered in Materia Medica: (1) the standard case where the homeopathic remedy cures symptoms caused by the corresponding crude substance, (2) the inverse case, where the homeopathic remedy cures symptoms that the corresponding crude substance also cures, and (3) remedies whose crude substance causes symptoms unrelated to the curative spectrum of the remedy or is mostly inert from a medical point of view."

"Even so, we cannot invalidate the outcome of Benveniste's work as contradicting any main principle of homeopathy, because, as discussed above, such fundamental contradictions do not exist."

"Experimental work by the Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier builds on Benveniste's last years of investigation that dealt with electromagnetic signals emitted by potentised solutions. Montagnier et al verified this property for bacterial DNA as well.[43] More unexpectedly, they carried out experiments where pure water had been exposed to signals emitted by potentised solutions of DNA and pointed out that the DNA sequence information may be transmitted in this way."

"Montagnier's work was heavily criticised, yet a number of experts from several countries collaborated with him and verified the originality of the reported results."

"We have not found any published results of this team differentiating between blinded and non-blinded experiments, let alone between internally and externally blinded ones. We suggest that the production of such results for the work of Montagnier is of paramount importance.

"In this case, samples of naïve water should be included in the tests; both open and blinded. The distributional features of the ‘failed’ experiments would indicate whether PCR without the DNA template distinguishes between blinded and non-blinded repetitions, and between internally and externally blinded ones as well. These features, if present, will be a clear indication that the theoretical framework involving non-locality and generalised entanglement is suitable for this line of research."

"Nonetheless, the conjecture that non-locality and generalised entanglement lie at the origin of the homeopathic phenomenon can be tested by various different experimental setups and clinical trials or provings targeting different aspects of existing data."

"Benveniste's pioneering work and its follow-up, with their often ambiguous outcomes, have challenged some widespread ways of thinking and methodological conventions, even among scientists who had worked ‘against the stream’."

"We have to keep in mind that non-local and local theories about the foundations of the homeopathic phenomenon are not mutually exclusive and they might both be valid, not only in homeopathy but (although in a more subtle way) in conventional medicine as well.[11] [49] Perhaps the homeopathic remedy presents a local component of ‘memory’. This might be dependent on clusters of solvent molecules (clathrates),[50] silicates[51], active oxygen species,[52] ‘coherence domains’ formed in water[53] or combinations of them, depending on the way of preparation of the remedy."

"Differences in the participation of the classical/local component in the homeopathic phenomenon, either in experimentation or in homeopathic treatment, might also exist. These could relate to the well-documented differences in reproducibility between experimental models when working in the range of UHDs."

"The experiments by Benveniste, Ennis and Montagnier (as well as those by other groups,[58] [59] to cite only two other studies involving potentised UHDs), have shown that the conventional ‘sceptical’ approach that such solutions are ‘no more than’ pure water, and that homeopathy is simply placebo effect, have to be seriously reconsidered."