homoeopathy in Australia

[Richard]

The Brauer company here in Australia, are pushing their 'medicine' into Pharmacies. In fact I use their sleeping pills in my talks, that is I take 20 or so and keep talking!

If you want to see how much these quacks hate science, take a look at:

http://www.brauer.com.au/forum/forum.htm

If you ever thought you could not test homoeopathy, read the posting "Testing".

[Marc]

The remedies are often not detectable using normal chemical tests because of the dilutions used, but they can be tested for using other methods such as infra-red and ultra violet analysis, thermoluminescence, biofield analysis, water crystalisation studies, X-ray analysis, Kirlian photography and kineseology
oohhh... testable statement!!! Time to bring up Randi's Callange and see if that garlic repells this vampire?


20 pills during your talk? Not bad, Randi has done something similar in downing an entire bottle, then reading off the "active" ingreedient which is a poison. Reminds me of a joke

"did you hear the guy who tried to overdose on homeopathic medicine? He drank 20 barrels then gave up"

[Rolfe]

Originally posted by Marc

oohhh... testable statement!!! Time to bring up Randi's Callange and see if that garlic repells this vampire?
Oh yes indeedy!

Chexk out this one here (http://vetlab.co.uk/voodoo/vettimes3.html#kerr4) as regards a similar challenge. And the Guardian Bad Science writer (http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,12980,1058569,00.html) has been challenged in much the same way.

Gosh, with all these people out there who say they can definitely tell a homoeopahtic material from a sham, I just don't know why nobody has called by to pick up the million bucks yet.

Rolfe.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

From that site:Hi Peter
Thanks for your interest in the product. To answer your questions:
1. Coffea exists in the product in 2 potencies. Like most homoeopathic remedies, it has slightly different actions at different potencies.
Wow, now that's getting complicated! If I vigorously shake the bottle, will I confuse up the two potencies?

If you mean some form of chemical analysis, you would not find much because homoeopathics are not chemically-based medicines. ...

However, you need a certain amount of the homoeopathic medicines in the tablets to get the job done. Half a tablet for an adult is not normally sufficient.
So half a dose of this nonchemical medicine is insufficient to give me enough of whatever woo-woo energy is present in it.

And then it descends into the usual rant:
I'd suggest that if this is still an issue of concern, it may be useful to ask yourself if it's possible that anything exists outside chemically based systems of medicine, and of course if you're happy with the fact that well over a thousand people die in this country every year from chemical medicines and hundreds of thousands are made very ill from side effects to them. Once again, homoeopathic medicines do not rely on chemical interactions for their initial therapeutic effects. While ever you're only thinking along these lines you'll have difficulty understanding what homoeopathy is.

Regardless of whether or not we can understand it, or reconcile it in some way with our current understanding of pharmacology, homoeopathy works. Hundreds of thousands a times a day all over the world, people and animals are healed by homoeopathic medicines and they have been for over 200 years.

~~ Paul

[Darat]

Another answer from that forum:


Hi Eran
Great question! Which of course leads me say that I wish I had a great answer.

Part of the dilemma with homoeopathy is that we don't know exactly how it works. Inherent in part of what we do know is that water can, in fact, be shown to absorb the electromagnetic energy characteristics of the physical things it's been in contact with, but that contact has to imprinted on the water molecules under the action of succussion- the violent mixing of the solvent (water) and solute (the active material) used to make the remedy.

Without succussion, the solvent acts just like a dilution of the remedy and not a homoeopathic medicine. So it may be that the reason why the water (and in the case of Brauer products only specially purified water is used)used to make homoeopathic medicines doesn't carry with it a memory of all of the physical materials it's previously been exposed to is that for the most part, that succussion hasn't occurred.

What I'd say about speculation on how the medicines work generally is that it tends to obscure the fact that the medicines do work, and work very effeciently without adverse reactions, side effects, overdose problems or potential for addiction. It's a bit like that old analogy of the Prophet pointing at the moon, and most of those around him were looking at his finger rather than what he was pointing at. We tend to get a bit caught up in the process rather than the outcome.

The fact that we currently have difficuly with how homoeopathy get results happens will never stop the fact that it does. Aeronautical engineers cannot explain how a bumble bee can fly, and yet despite our insistence that because of lift and drag characteristics etc, they cannot posibly fly, they continue to do so. Similarly, no-one has yet come up an satisfactory explanation of how radiotherapy works in cancer but it's still used around the world to save lives. No one knows how dexamphetamine works in ADHD in children but it does and does it well. Aspirin was used for over 100 years before we knew how it worked. We still don't know how electricity works yet we use it every day.

It may be that as much as we'd like to think that we do, we simply don't know everything there is to know yet, and may have to accept that when we see something like homoeopathy work, and we've see it working around the world for over 200 years with millions of people, that regardless of how it happens, it still happens.

This hasn't asnwered your question Eran, but until we know more about how homoeopathy works, this is probably about as close as we'll be able to get to satisfying your enquiry. Great question though- I wish I knew the answer.

Regards
Robert Medhurst
Brauer Natural Medicine

On 09 October 2003, Eran wrote:
> I have been doing some reading about homeopathy recently, and one question was left without any attempt at an explanation - I hope you can help:
>
> If water has memory and preserves traces of some kind of ingredients it has had contact with, then how do you get clean water to prepare homeopathic medicine? Surely every molecule of water has been in touch with plenty of different substances, some highly toxic, through billions of years of existence - how is all this removed from water?


The words are very soothing; it's only if you actually stop to think about what he is actually saying that the cracks start to appear.

With such smooth salesmanship I'm not surprised that many people can be fooled into thinking there is something in all this thin water.

[Rolfe]

The bumble bee again! After asking about this on another forum, I was sent to this article (http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/6-15-1999.html). Fount of all knowledge, this place!

Rolfe.

[Quasi]

What do the homeopaths say about the tablets?? Isn't it supposed to be based on the memory of water?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Here, this clarifies the whole shebang:

http://www.hpathy.com/RESEARCH/how_does_homeopathy_work.asp

~~ Paul

[reprise]

If you really wanted to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of homeopathic remedies, you could always infect yourself with smallpox (http://jackal.inta.net.au/w02-11.html). ;)