Memory of Water Proven

[meow]

http://www.rustumroy.com/May%2016th%20Webinar.pdf


The defining role of structure (including epitaxy)
in the plausibility of homeopathy, Manju Lata Rao, Rustum Roy, Iris R Bell,and Richard Hoover, Homeopathy (2007) 96, pp. 175–182.

Webinar with Prof. Rustum Roy and Prof. Iris Bell on recent research in materials science which shows physical evidence for unique dosage and remedy signatures in water.

May 16, 2007

by Prof. Rustom Roy and Iris Bell, MD, PhD

In May 2007, the NCH's first web cast featured groundbreaking results that may forever change the face of homeopathy.

Professor Rustom Roy, the Founding Director of the Materials Research Laboratory at Penn State and one of the world's leading experts on the structure of water, along with Professor Iris R. Bell, Director of Research Education for the Program of Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, presented their findings to an audience of prominent American scientists and medical researchers.

Roy's laboratory has found, using multiple testing methods, that not only do different remedy dilutions in excess of Avogadro's number carry unique characteristic signatures, but different potencies do as well!

These results will not only serve to prove to the scientific community that homeopathic medicines are not placebo medicine, but they also will provide a way for the homeopathic pharmacies to assure the nature and quality of their products.

================================================== =================


http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15594862

New physico-chemical properties of extremely diluted aqueous solutions
Auteur(s) / Author(s)
ELIA V. (1) ; NICCOLI M. (1) ;
Affiliation(s) du ou des auteurs / Author(s) Affiliation(s)
(1) Department of Chemistry, University ' Federico II'of Naples, Complesso Universitario di Monte S. Angelo, via Cintia, 80126 Naples, ITALIE
Résumé / Abstract
The 'extremely diluted solutions' are anomalous solutions obtained through the iteration of two processes: a dilution 1:100 in mass and a succussion. The iteration is repeated until extreme dilutions are reached (less than 1.10-5 mol kg-1) to the point that we may call the resulting solution an extremely diluted solution, namely the composition of the solution is identical to that of the solvent used (e.g. twice distilled water). We conducted thermodynamic and transport measurements of the solutions and of the interaction of those solutions with acids or bases. The purpose of this study is to obtain information about the influence of successive dilutions and succussions on the water structure of the solutions under study. We measured the heats of mixing of acid or basic solutions with such 'extremely diluted solutions', their electrical conductivity and pH, comparing with the analogous heats of mixing, electrical conductivity and pH of the solvent. We found some relevant exothermic excess heats of mixing, higher electrical conductivity and pH than those of the untreated solvent. The measurements show a good correlation between independent physico-chemical parameters. Care was taken to take into account the effect of chemical impurities deriving from the glass containers. Here we thus show that successive dilutions and succussions can permanently alter the physico-chemical properties of the water solvent. The nature of the phenomena here described still remains unexplained, nevertheless some significant experimental results were obtained.
Revue / Journal Title
Journal of thermal analysis and calorimetry ISSN 1388-6150
Source / Source
2004, vol. 75, no3, pp. 815-836 [22 page(s) (article)] (32 ref.)

================================================== =======================

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15105967

1: Inflamm Res. 2004 May;53(5):181-8. Epub 2004 Apr 21.Click here to read Links
Histamine dilutions modulate basophil activation.
Belon P, Cumps J, Ennis M, Mannaioni PF, Roberfroid M, Sainte-Laudy J, Wiegant FA.

Boiron, 20 rue de la Libération, 69110 Sainte-Foy-Les-Lyon, France.

BACKGROUND: In order to demonstrate that high dilutions of histamine are able to inhibit basophil activation in a reproducible fashion, several techniques were used in different research laboratories. OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study was to investigate the action of histamine dilutions on basophil activation. METHODS: Basophil activation was assessed by alcian blue staining, measurement of histamine release and CD63 expression. Study 1 used a blinded multi-centre approach in 4 centres. Study 2, related to the confirmation of the multi-centre study by flow cytometry, was performed independently in 3 laboratories. Study 3 examined the histamine release (one laboratory) and the activity of H(2) receptor antagonists and structural analogues (two laboratories). RESULTS: High dilutions of histamine (10(-30)-10(-38) M) influence the activation of human basophils measured by alcian blue staining. The degree of inhibition depends on the initial level of anti-IgE induced stimulation, with the greatest inhibitory effects seen at lower levels of stimulation. This multicentre study was confirmed in the three laboratories by using flow cytometry and in one laboratory by histamine release. Inhibition of CD63 expression by histamine high dilutions was reversed by cimetidine (effect observed in two laboratories) and not by ranitidine (one laboratory). Histidine tested in parallel with histamine showed no activity on this model. CONCLUSIONS: In 3 different types of experiment, it has been shown that high dilutions of histamine may indeed exert an effect on basophil activity. This activity observed by staining basophils with alcian blue was confirmed by flow cytometry. Inhibition by histamine was reversed by anti-H2 and was not observed with histidine these results being in favour of the specificity of this effect We are however unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.

p<.0001

================================================== ====================

Icy claim that water has memory

* 19:00 11 June 2003 by Lionel Milgrom

Claims do not come much more controversial than the idea that water might retain a memory of substances once dissolved in it. The notion is central to homeopathy, which treats patients with samples so dilute they are unlikely to contain a single molecule of the active compound, but it is generally ridiculed by scientists.

Yet a paper is about to be published in the reputable journal Physica A claiming to show that even though they should be identical, the structure of hydrogen bonds in pure water is very different from that in homeopathic dilutions of salt solutions. Could it be time to take the "memory" of water seriously?

The paper's author, Swiss chemist Louis Rey, is using thermoluminescence to study the structure of solids. The technique involves bathing a chilled sample with radiation. When the sample is warmed up, the stored energy is released as light in a pattern that reflects the atomic structure of the sample.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3817

[quixotecoyote]

Let's see.


Copy & Paste
Messed up formatting
Overuse of color tags
Overuse of size tags
Prime source known to be a kook, a point previously pointed out and undefended.



Looking for a high score on the crackpot index?

[Yuri Nalyssus]

Roy's laboratory has found, using multiple testing methods, that not only do different remedy dilutions in excess of Avogadro's number carry unique characteristic signatures, but different potencies do as well!
Woahh!

Here we thus show that successive dilutions and succussions can permanently alter the physico-chemical properties of the water solvent. The nature of the phenomena here described still remains unexplained, nevertheless some significant experimental results were obtained.
aaaaargh!
CONCLUSIONS: In 3 different types of experiment, it has been shown that high dilutions of histamine may indeed exert an effect on basophil activity. This activity observed by staining basophils with alcian blue was confirmed by flow cytometry. Inhibition by histamine was reversed by anti-H2 and was not observed with histidine these results being in favour of the specificity of this effect We are however unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.

p<.0001
Nooooooo, please, stop, I can't take your puissant arguments anymore. Ok, you win, the cheque's in the post... curse your devastating use of the formatting sub menu... sob...

Yuri

[Doctor Evil]

No, its not time to take the memory of water seriously. There are no experiments which actually demonstrate that the phenomena exist. In contrast, there is a large body of scientific understanding leading to the opposite conclusion.

Moreover, this have been discussed here before:
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=85020 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=85020&highlight=milgrom)
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=82393

[meow]

There are no experiments which actually demonstrate that the phenomena exist.


you're kidding, right?

[godless dave]

Proven? The study hasn't even been published yet.

[Gilmar]

Could it be time to take the "memory" of water seriously?



I remember water. It was before I discovered beer.

[Doctor Evil]

you're kidding, right?

I am dead serious. (Though possibly dead as someone who have taken a full bottle of Homeopathic sleeping pills.)

I am willing to qualify my statement a little. There are no good, repeatable, experimental results which demonstrate that the phenomenon exist. I may have been too brief, but I have taken these qualifiers to be self evident.

[Skeptic]

The real reason "Meow" started a new thread here is that she started discussing the issue in the "suicide attempt failed" thread (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=137195), in which I pointed out that I have downed a whole bottle of homeopathic sleeping drops (50 times the recommended amount) in front of my class and didn't even yawn.

"Meow" cannot face this sort of rather direct proof that homeopathy doesn't work -- that is, me betting my life, quite literally, on homeopathy being male bovine excrement, and (of course) winning the bet, as I knew in advance would happen.

It's so much more "scientific" to talk about p-values using large fonts and multi-colored posts.

Anyway, p-values in themselves mean absolutely nothing apart from the fact that the null hypothesis is wrong. If there is a systematic error in the experiment, the p-value will still be very low. To give an extreme example: if I test my psychic ability to make the coin land "heads" but, by mistake, use one of those "trick" two-headed coins, my p-values would be incredibly small, but it would not really prove I have psychic powers.

That is why science demands repeatability. When you have a small p-value but other laboratories cannot reproduce your results -- as is the case with these studies -- it is certain that the positive result you got was due to some systematic error or bias in your experiment.

It is typical of fringe pseudo-scientific experiments like those dealing with homeopathy to get some low p-value in ONE (or very few) laboratories, and when nobody else manages to replicate the result to claim a "conspiracy" and "closed mindedness" -- instead of admitting the obvious, namely, that the original experiment was (deliberately or accidentally) biased.

Whenever the actual experimental procedures of such "positive results" fringe experiments were examined in detail -- Beneviste's homeopathy experiments, Targ & Puthoff's or J. B. Rhine's psi experiments -- it was quickly seen the the experimental methods had holes you could drive a truck through. With all probability, the same is the case with these experiments, as well.

[Doctor Evil]

Proven? The study hasn't even been published yet.

And publishing a result may not say much. I have seen several wrong papers which passed peer review.

[Sherman Bay]

I understand now, how science is done. Yell, scream, print in large, bright, florescent text, repeat it often, act hurt when no one believes you, and it becomes fact.

The Million Dollar Challenge is still open. Why not try for it? Jacques BenVeniste (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7505286.stm) wasn't able to pass Randi's test protocol, maybe you could?

[meow]

The real reason "Meow" started a new thread here is that she started discussing the issue in the "suicide attempt failed" thread (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=137195), in which I pointed out that I have downed a whole bottle of homeopathic sleeping drops (50 times the recommended amount) in front of my class and didn't even yawn.




no, it's actually because i think most everything on ultra dilute solutions belongs in the science section.

[Steelmage]

Why this may explain the Loch Ness Monster, think about it, it is water having a flash back of prehistoric times when dinosaurs were around. It must be the only explanation for it. :rolleyes:

[meow]

I understand now, how science is done. Yell, scream, print in large, bright, florescent text, repeat it often, act hurt when no one believes you, and it becomes fact.

The Million Dollar Challenge is still open. Why not try for it? Jacques BenVeniste (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7505286.stm) wasn't able to pass Randi's test protocol, maybe you could?

it's a fraud. randi makes you use a magnet to blank out a remedy and use that as a control.

the entire prize is a fraud and will never be won.

as randi once said -- never play another man's game.

and besides, the only qualified people are published people.

like who is going to fall for his trickery and deception?

[godless dave]

it's a fraud. randi makes you use a magnet to blank out a remedy and use that as a control.

Source?

Plus, how would that make the challenge a fraud?

[Molinaro]

it's a fraud. randi makes you use a magnet to blank out a remedy and use that as a control.

What the heck does that mean? A magnet will somehow affect the water in a permamenent way -- is that your assertion?

[meow]

"Meow" cannot face this sort of rather direct proof that homeopathy doesn't work -- that is, me betting my life, quite literally, on homeopathy being male bovine excrement, and (of course) winning the bet, as I knew in advance would happen.



lol

give me a break.

you want to be honest?

get yourself some sulphur 30C or 200c and take a small amount 5, 6, 7 or more times per day for several days. that's how you do it.

200c would be mail order so that about rules it out. 30c could possibly mess you up pretty good if taken dozens and dozens of times over a 2 week period.

dare you to try it.

when you are about to run out of pills place the last 4, 5 , 6 in a water bottle and periodically sip from it another 40 to 50 times.


now thats an experiment that has 100 times more honesty to it than what you pulled off.

your stunt was a sad little joke.

[tyr_13]

Source?

Plus, how would that make the challenge a fraud?

I guess that would be the 'control' part. Homeopathy doesn't work with controls. :rolleyes:

[trvlr2]

I remember water. It was before I discovered beer.

I'll drink to that!:D

[meow]

What the heck does that mean? A magnet will somehow affect the water in a permamenent way -- is that your assertion?

no, i read that randi wants you to have 20 remedies of X and take 10 of them and wave a magnet over them. he assumes that the magnet will blank out the remedy and now you have to tell what from what.

he came up with the magnet idea because some homeopaths claimed (probably falsely) that a magnetic field wipes out a remedy.

more trickery from mr. magician

[ravdin]

it's a fraud. randi makes you use a magnet to blank out a remedy and use that as a control.

the entire prize is a fraud and will never be won.

I can agree with you on one thing. The prize is very unlikely ever to be won so long as Randi insists on using experimental controls to separate a valid demonstration of a supernatural phenomenon from a wildly unsubstantiated claim.

[Molinaro]

no, i read that randi wants you to have 20 remedies of X and take 10 of them and wave a magnet over them. he assumes that the magnet will blank out the remedy and now you have to tell what from what.

he came up with the magnet idea because some homeopaths claimed (probably falsely) that a magnetic field wipes out a remedy.

more trickery from mr. magician

You read that...

As in some post on a forum somewhere said so and you imagine up some innane conspiracy idea and just run with it? :boggled:

[meow]

I can agree with you on one thing. The prize is very unlikely ever to be won so long as Randi insists on using experimental controls to separate a valid demonstration of a supernatural phenomenon from a wildly unsubstantiated claim.

rustum roy and louis rey can easily win this challenge if it was fair but it isnt fair.

rustum roy has kicked your doors down!


Professor Rustom Roy, the Founding Director of the Materials Research Laboratory at Penn State and one of the world's leading experts on the structure of water, along with Professor Iris R. Bell, Director of Research Education for the Program of Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, presented their findings to an audience of prominent American scientists and medical researchers.

Roy's laboratory has found, using multiple testing methods, that not only do different remedy dilutions in excess of Avogadro's number carry unique characteristic signatures, but different potencies do as well!

[Yuri Nalyssus]

you want to be honest?

get yourself some sulphur 30C or 200c and take a small amount 5, 6, 7 or more times per day for several days. that's how you do it.

200c would be mail order so that about rules it out. 30c could possibly mess you up pretty good if taken dozens and dozens of times over a 2 week period.

dare you to try it.
Oh, now you're joking, you can't really believe that any one is going to be scared of taking lactose tablets - don't tell me you really believe this stuff; really; in your heart of hearts? I thought you were just having a laugh!

Homeopathic suicide!!! :D

Dearie me!

Yuri

[ravdin]

no, i read that randi wants you to have 20 remedies of X and take 10 of them and wave a magnet over them. he assumes that the magnet will blank out the remedy and now you have to tell what from what.

he came up with the magnet idea because some homeopaths claimed (probably falsely) that a magnetic field wipes out a remedy.

more trickery from mr. magician

If I understand this correctly, then it's a good idea! If the homeopaths are what they claim to be, this test should be absurdly easy to pass.

[Wowbagger]

Why would Randi want to use a magnet to "blank out" the remedies, if he doesn't even think a magnet would have any effect on them, to begin with?!

[meow]

Why would Randi want to use a magnet to "blank out" the remedies, if he doesn't even think a magnet would have any effect on them, to begin with?!

well that's exactly it. it's extra insurance that no one can possibly tell the difference because the magnet does nothing and therefore the tubes are all the same

[ravdin]

Why would Randi want to use a magnet to "blank out" the remedies, if he doesn't even think a magnet would have any effect on them, to begin with?!

I think the idea is that half of the samples are "blanked out", then you should be able to separate the ones that are valid remedies from those that are not. If you did this correctly for 10 out of 20 samples, I'd see it as highly convincing evidence that this was not due to chance.

[wexer9]

Why isn't all water undrinkable?
Wouldn't water retain the "memory" of all the sewage treatment plants it has been through?

[Wowbagger]

I think the idea is that half of the samples are "blanked out", then you should be able to separate the ones that are valid remedies from those that are not. If you did this correctly for 10 out of 20 samples, I'd see it as highly convincing evidence that this was not due to chance.
So, it's the applicant who will claim the remedies can be blanked out with a magnet, is that right?

If that is the case, perhaps Meow can develop and propose an alternative protocol that would not require use of magnets.

[Yuri Nalyssus]

well that's exactly it. it's extra insurance that no one can possibly tell the difference because the magnet does nothing and therefore the tubes are all the same
Miaow's got a point, the tubes would all be the same. :D

Yuri

[paximperium]

well that's exactly it. it's extra insurance that no one can possibly tell the difference because the magnet does nothing and therefore the tubes are all the same
That makes sense. The magnet does nothing therefore it is cheating.

[meow]

Why isn't all water undrinkable?
Wouldn't water retain the "memory" of all the sewage treatment plants it has been through?

i shouldn't be speculating but if i were then i would say that the strength would be infintessimally(sp?) small.

my guess is that if you take a substance at some set ratio 1/10, 1/20, 1/50, 1/100 and if you keep up with the succession and dilution then you are somehow or another magnifying the effect as shown by dozens and dozens of researchers.

see ennis 2004 study

p<.0001

[The Atheist]

Why isn't all water undrinkable?
Wouldn't water retain the "memory" of all the sewage treatment plants it has been through?

It does. That's why they put chlorine in it...

But hang on.... Wouldn't that make water the most potent form of hypochloritic acid on earth?

DON'T DRINK THE WATER! STICK TO KOOL AID.

[meow]

yuri's a funny guy

too bad you make up your mind depending on which way the herd is already pointed.

[anor277]

well that's exactly it. it's extra insurance that no one can possibly tell the difference because the magnet does nothing and therefore the tubes are all the same

I take it then that I may safely place my homeopathic remedy next to my hifi speakers? The magnetic field does not affect the remedy.

[paximperium]

i shouldn't be speculating but if i were then i would say that the strength would be infintessimally(sp?) small.

my guess is that if you take a substance at some set ratio 1/10, 1/20, 1/50, 1/100 and if you keep up with the succession and dilution then you are somehow or another magnifying the effect as shown by dozens and dozens of researchers.
How many dilutions does it take?
How long does water hold its memory?
How does this memory interact with human physiology?
Why isn't some water more toxic than others because they are less dilute?
Why do most homeopathic solution use ALCOHOL instead of water?


see ennis 2004 study

p<.0001
Meow please tell us what a p-value means?

[Skeptic]

lol

get yourself some sulphur 30C or 200c and take a small amount 5, 6, 7 or more times per day for several days. that's how you do it.

200c would be mail order so that about rules it out.

Yes, that would be the EXTRA SPECIAL nothing pill, as opposed to the ol' plain nothing pill. Worth the money, I suppose: after all, with a 30C dilution (100^30, or 10^60) there is still some astronomically small chance that there might be a single molecule of sulfur in it somewhere, which, it seems, would ruin the whole thing. 200C, 10^400, on the other hand, means a dilution of, I think, one sulphur molecule in a pool of water the size of the visible universe.

30c could possibly mess you up pretty good if taken dozens and dozens of times over a 2 week period.

dare you to try it.

"Dare I" take a sugar pill or drink a few drops of water every day for a month? Of course.

And yes, I'd take sulphur homeopathic pills if you want, but why stop with plain old sulphur? Sure, it's bad for you, but surely there are worse things in the homeopath's powerful aresenal.

At 30C dilution, I'm willing to take anything at all. Let's try the most deadly poison homeopathy can offer: How about 200C plutonium three times daily? 30C homeopathic arsenic twice a week? 100C homeopathic cyanide?

Knock yourself out! Remember: I want the MOST powerful poison homeopathy can devise!

Do you know anybody who sells these homeopathic pills (sulphur or whatever poison you choose)? Brand name of homeopathic medicine you'd prefer I'd use?

After all, we want to make absolutely clear I'm using the CORRECT, EXTRA POWERFUL, REPUTABLE nothing pills, not some phoney-baloney, cheapo nothing pills. The physical effect of homeopathic medicine, as we all known, is mysteriously related, not to what's in them (there's nothing in any of them, of course), but to how much you paid for them and how credulous you are.

when you are about to run out of pills place the last 4, 5 , 6 in a water bottle and periodically sip from it another 40 to 50 times.

Yes, I quite agree: 4-5 homeopathic pills are just as effective as 40 or 50 of them. Or as 4,000 of them or 50,000,000 of them, for that matter, since to get a single molecule at 30C dliution you'd need, rougly, enough pills to fill the earth (if not a sphere the size of its orbit, or something like that).


your stunt was a sad little joke.

Indeed it was a joke. At homeopathy's expense.

[meow]

Y How about 200C plutonium three times daily? 30C homeopathic arsenic twice a week? 100C homeopathic cyanide?


none of these would kill you but i think you would experience something quite annoying after taking about a 100-200 doses spread out evenly over 7 to 14 days.

i dare you.

are 75,000 european medical doctors and about 3,000,000 over the last 200 years complete and total idiots?


would you absolutely 100% bet the lives of your children, brothers, sisters, father, mother, nieces, nephews, uncles and aunts lives on the fact that Rustum roy is wrong?

would you accept a wager that if you are correct you receive $10,000,000, Edited to remove inappropriate remark.


Do not get personal.

[paximperium]

are 75,000 european medical doctors and about 3,000,000 over the last 200 years complete and total idiots?
We can see the obvious honesty:
Meow (known and loved by us all as Xanta, in another existence) bases this assertion, which she has been making repeatedly since at least 2003 to my certain knowledge, on figures detailing the number of doctors in various countries who have either prescribed a homoeopathic remedy, or referred a patient to a homoeopath.

Nothing to do with supporting or believing in homoeopathy.

Many doctors welcome the existence of homoeopathic provision as a way to offload the chronic complainers who have little wrong with them. In particular, even doctors who are implacably opposed to homoeopathy will accede to a request from a patient to be referred to a homoeopath. (One of my best friends is a doctor who physically burned an entire consignment of ante-natal advice leaflets sent to her practice because of a one-line recommendation of homoeopathy on the back page, despite the leaflets otherwise containing good advice. But she tells me she has referred patients to homoeopaths, when they requested the referral, and she believed they had nothing actually wrong with them anyway. And she is included in meow's 75,000 because of that.)

In an identical exchange some time ago (Xanta has a very short repeat cycle) Badly Shaved Monkey, leading light of the anti-homoeopathy illuminati, admitted that he had referred patients to homoeopaths when requested to do so by the client, and when he believed the resulting lack of effective care would not cause harm.

Wait for it, the next bit of the cycle involves "THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND. AND HER SON." In large bold red letters.

Rolfe.



would you absolutely 100% bet the lives of your children, nieces and nephews and uncles and aunts lives on the fact that Rustum roy is wrong?

would you accept a wager that if you are correct you receive $10,000,000, but if you are wrong you and all your loved ones are slowly burned to death? No no no.The question is will you?
Unlike you, skeptics are open to evidence. If he is proven right and actually produces evidence, we will accept this finding.
The question of course is will you accept if he completely and utterly wrong?

[tuc0]

Memory of Water Proven

That's great. Now get to the "like cures like" part and maybe in another 200 years homeopathy will finally "prove" that it maybe, on some quantum level, exists, while medical science is making frog men fight on Pluto.

[temporalillusion]

he came up with the magnet idea because some homeopaths claimed (probably falsely) that a magnetic field wipes out a remedy.

more trickery from mr. magician

So Randi is a fraud because he asked the homeopaths how to take 20 remedies and render 10 of them ineffective so that an experiment could be run to see if the good remedies did better than the ineffective ones? And they told him how, and he followed their advice? And he's a fraud?

Lets get this sulfur thing rolling.

If someone takes the sulfur dilution as you direct and doesn't get sick or die, will you admit that homeopathy has no basis in reality?

[meow]

would you absolutely 100% bet the lives of your children, brothers, sisters, father, mother, nieces, nephews, uncles and aunts lives on the fact that Rustum Roy is wrong?

would you accept a wager that if you are correct you receive $10,000,000, but if you are wrong you and all your loved ones are slowly burned to death?


would you wager the lives of all your loved ones and yourself that there was in no way shape or form a HOMEOPATHIC EFFECT in the basophil studies that came back p<.0001?


be honest, would you.

Edited to remove inappropriate remark.

Do not get personal.

[LarianLeQuella]

would you absolutely 100% bet the lives of your children, brothers, sisters, father, mother, nieces, nephews, uncles and aunts lives on the fact that Rustum roy is wrong?



Absofrikenloutly! I'd even bet my own life on that wager.

Not sure what the other wager has to do with homeopathy though.

[paximperium]

would you wager the lives of all your loved ones and yourself that there was in no way shape or form a HOMEOPATHIC EFFECT in the basophil studies that came back p<.0001?


be honest, would you.


if you are wrong then all your loved ones are tied to a spit and slow cooked over a bed of red hot coals.
The answer of course is no. I could be wrong and I actually care about the lives of my love ones, unlike you it seems.

Meow I'm still waiting for you to tell me what a p-value means. Why are you ignoring this simple question since you keep posting it?

[quixotecoyote]

would you wager the lives of all your loved ones and yourself that there was in no way shape or form a HOMEOPATHIC EFFECT in the basophil studies that came back p<.0001?


be honest, would you.


if you are wrong then all your loved ones are tied to a spit and slow cooked over a bed of red hot coals and if you are right then you walk away with ten million tax free.

AND If YoUr wromng, ALL YOUR fmily is tied to bareels in a lake and force fed honey so they die slowly as iscents drwan by massve dirrahrea infst gangrnous wonds

eta: This is a fun game. Let's play more.

[meow]

The answer of course is no.

thank you for answering that honestly. i wouldn't do it either because there is always the .001% chance that i am bat ***** crazy and have imagined the whole thing along with ennis, roy, rey, and the 3,000,000 MD's over the last 200 years.

i wouldn't take that chance cuz i think burning to death would be the most painful way to go

[The Atheist]

AND If YoUr wromng, ALL YOUR fmily is tied to bareels in a lake and force fed honey so they die slowly as iscents drwan by massve dirrahrea infst gangrnous wonds

eta: This is a fun game. Let's play more.

Sure, can you just let me in on what language you're using?

[meow]

AND If YoUr wromng, ALL YOUR fmily is tied to bareels in a lake and force fed honey so they die slowly as iscents drwan by massve dirrahrea infst gangrnous wonds

eta: This is a fun game. Let's play more.

:)

[Third Eye Open]

well that's exactly it. it's extra insurance that no one can possibly tell the difference because the magnet does nothing and therefore the tubes are all the same

Meow, it's far worse than that. Even if you can search Randi and make sure he has no magnets, the challenge is still a sham. Many people don't know this because he has tried so hard to suppress it, but Randi has very powerful psychic powers, and he can erase the water memory easily if he stands close enough to it. Why do you think all the other psychics that enter the challenge always fail? It is because he can block their powers with his powers, it is an evil and wrong thing to do and someone needs to show the world the real face of this evil wizard.

In order to prove the water memory and get the million here is what you must do:
Since Randi will never agree to enclose himself in an aluminum cube room, you must make your water vials out of aluminum (silver if you can afford is much better to block psychic rays) do not let Randi or any of the others there touch the water, Randi has the ability to project his powers through others, so you cannot trust anyone to look at the water or it could be erased and cause you to fail the test.

Once you have won the challenge I hope you will donate it to a respectful cause, maybe a charity that will make Quantum Stir Wands available to the impoverished who have no access to clean drinking water of their own.

[Rolfe]

You read that...

As in some post on a forum somewhere said so and you imagine up some innane conspiracy idea and just run with it? :boggled:


Pretty much. Someone suggested on a forum somewhere, during a discussion on what evidence there was for a homoeopath's claim that going through an airport security scanner would inactivate a remedy, that this might be a useful control for a MDC-type experiment.

So far as I know, Randi himself never mentioned it. He only ever said you have to be able to tell a potentised remedy from an identical preparation from the same stock solvent prepared with no mother tincture. Or words to that effect.

Just what Roy claimed to have done. And published the method so that anybody else could replicate it if they wanted to. Unfortunately it was all too obvious that he and his co-workers screwed up.

The letter to the editor, published, refuting the claims in Roy's paper, written by four forum members (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=88831&highlight=spectroscopy&page=7).

27th August 2007.

Dr. Peter Fisher,
Editor, Homeopathy,
The Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital,
60 Great Ormond Street,
London, WC1N 3HR.

Dear Sir,

We wish to draw to your attention serious anomalies and incongruities in the UV absorption data presented in the paper by Rao et al., published in your July 2007 issue [1].

In a study of this nature, which in effect is examining multiple samples of ethanol, the over-riding concern must be absolute uniformity in the source of the solvent. For the data to be valid, it is essential that every drop of ethanol used must be sourced from the same stock bottle. However, the authors fail to make any mention of this point, and it is clear from the results presented that the source of ethanol in this investigation was most certainly not uniform.

The most striking anomaly is the UV spectrum presented for "plain ethanol", a single trace repeated three times in figure 3. The provenance of this sample is not recorded. This trace reveals extremely high absorbance (greater than 0.8 absorbance units) at 250nm, falling off steeply towards 400nm but still above 0.4 units by 350nm, and demonstrating an absorbance peak of 0.65 units with a lambda-max of about 330nm. It is simply impossible to represent this trace as being ethanol of any recognised degree of purity. Spectroscopic grade ethanol has an absorbance of less than 0.05 units between 250 and 400nm [2], and even USP/NF pharmaceutical grade ethanol has an absorbance of less than 0.3 units at 250nm, falling off to less than 0.1 units by 270nm [3]. If the substance measured by the authors as "plain ethanol" was indeed ethanol at all, it is clear that it contained extremely high levels of impurities, possibly including acetone.

In contrast, the spectra of the samples which were diluted and succussed (Nat mur, Nux vomica and the "succussed ethanol" with no mother tincture), and which were presumably all supplied by Hahnemann Laboratories as detailed on page 178, demonstrate substantially lower levels of impurities. While still not being spectroscopic grade ethanol, these samples could well represent ordinary pharmaceutical grade ethanol. The authors claim these samples are "different", however the evidence presented for this is weak to nonexistent.

Figure 1 presents one trace each for Nat mur and Nux vomica, each at 6C, 12C and 30C potencies. The traces are said to be "representative", however with no information on repeatability or how the "representative" traces were selected, it is impossible to say whether there is any real difference between any of the six spectra.

Figure 2 purports to address this point, but then fails to present the necessary data. The legend declares that 10 samples of each of the six remedy preparations were analysed. The accepted way to present such data would be as mean absorbance ± standard deviation for each wavelength point, or at least for a representative selection of wavelength points. Statistical analysis could then be used to demonstrate whether or not there was a real difference between any of the remedies or potencies. However, the authors have instead chosen to present only two traces for each preparation, as "envelopes of differences". The derivation of these traces is not explained, although we surmise that "extreme" high and low traces for each preparation were chosen to provide an impression of the range of results obtained. This is not an appropriate method of handling data of this nature, as most of the information is lost and statistical analysis is rendered impossible.

A further difficulty with figure 2 is that the upper (open circles) trace in the top graph of fig 2a (30C Nat mur) appears to be a duplicate of the upper (filled circles) trace in the top graph of fig 2b (30C Nux vom). Comparison with other traces of the two remedies indicates that this trace is really one of Nux vom, which has been duplicated into the Nat mur graph in error.

Paucity of data, ambiguity of presentation and lack of statistical analysis prevent any conclusions being drawn from the information in figure 2.
Comparison of figure 2 with figure 1 reveals that all six traces presented in figure 1 are taken from figure 2, in each case the filled-circles traces. If indeed the traces in figure 2 represent the extreme range of results obtained, this is startling, as the traces in figure 1 are stated to be "representative". In addition, while it does appear that the Nux vom samples tended to demonstrate higher absorbances than the Nat mur samples (excluding the obvious mistake noted above), in two out of the three potencies the higher Nux vom trace from fig 2 has been chosen for inclusion in fig 1, thus exaggerating the apparent difference.

Figure 3 (b and c) again repeats the same six traces as figure 1, this time grouped by remedy. Presented in this way, it is clear that there is absolutely no difference between the three potencies of Nat mur, and that while variation between the Nux vom potencies is a little more pronounced, again all three appear to come from the same population. The same is true of the three potencies of "succussed ethanol" presented in fig 3a.

On simple visual inspection it does appear that there may be genuine differences between the three remedies (although no statistics are presented to allow this to be tested), with the Nat mur showing the lowest absorbtion and the Nux vom the highest, with the succussed ethanol lying somewhere between. Nevertheless, these differences are entirely consistent with small differences in purity of the ethanol stock used for preparation of the three remedies - small, that is, relative to the very high level of impurity evident in the "plain ethanol" sample presented alongside. This degree of variation in UV absorbance is entirely to be expected between different batches of pharmaceutical grade ethanol, which is not prepared with spectroscopic analysis in mind. The authors make no mention of having stipulated to Hahnemann Laboratories that all material sent to them should be prepared from the same stock bottle, and the data presented indicate that the different remedies, possibly prepared at different times, simply came from different bottles of ethanol.

We hope you will agree that these are very serious points, and it is regrettable they were not identified by your own scrutineering process. It is clear that the data presented are wholly inadequate to support the authors’ assertion that UV spectroscopy can differentiate between the two remedies, and between different potencies of the remedies. If the authors wish to test their assertion so that it can be substantiated it will be necessary to repeat the work from the beginning, ensuring that all samples used in the study are sourced from the same bottle of stock solvent, that all duplicate preparations for precision assessment are separately prepared de novo from the mother tinctures, and that sufficient data are generated to allow robust and valid statistical analysis of the results.

Yours faithfully,

Rolfe
JJM
Wilsontown
Pipirr

References:
1. Rao, M. L., Roy, R., Bell, I. R. & Hoover, R. (2007) The defining role of structure (including epitaxy) in the plausibility of homeopathy. Homeopathy 96, 175-182.
2. Sigma Aldrich catalogue, ACS spectrophotometric grade ethanol 95.0%, at www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/search/ProductDetail/SIAL/493511 (http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/search/ProductDetail/SIAL/493511)
3. Sigma Aldrich catalogue, USP/NF grade ethanol 190 proof, at www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/search/ProductDetail/ALDRICH/493538 (http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/search/ProductDetail/ALDRICH/493538)


Rao, the primary author, was granted right of reply. She had nothing coherent to say, but accepted that the material used was contaminated.

By the way, in view of Meow's repeated spamming of a p-value, note that there isn't one single p-value contained in the Rao/Roy paper.

Rolfe.

[Gord_in_Toronto]

thank you for answering that honestly. i wouldn't do it either because there is always the .001% chance that i am bat ***** crazy and have imagined the whole thing along with ennis, roy, rey, and the 3,000,000 MD's over the last 200 years.

i wouldn't take that chance cuz i think burning to death would be the most painful way to go

What's the p-value for that?

[meow]

Many people don't know this because he has tried so hard to suppress it, but Randi has very powerful psychic powers, and he can erase the water memory easily if he stands close enough to it. Why do you think all the other psychics that enter the challenge always fail? It is because he can block their powers with his powers, it is an evil and wrong thing to do and someone needs to show the world the real face of this evil wizard.




i suspect that there is something to 'remote viewing' although i am far from certain. i took a look at the govt sponsored studies that started during the cold war and was somewhat impressed with what i saw. although could be wrong.

ignore this post cause i'd rather not derail the thread.

[Rolfe]

none of these would kill you but i think you would experience something quite annoying after taking about a 100-200 doses spread out evenly over 7 to 14 days.

i dare you.

are 75,000 european medical doctors and about 3,000,000 over the last 200 years complete and total idiots?


would you absolutely 100% bet the lives of your children, brothers, sisters, father, mother, nieces, nephews, uncles and aunts lives on the fact that Rustum roy is wrong?

would you accept a wager that if you are correct you receive $10,000,000, but if you are wrong you and all your loved ones are slowly burned to death?


Hi Xanta. Missed ya.

Rolfe.

[meow]

Rao, the primary author, was granted right of reply. She had nothing coherent to say, but accepted that the material used was contaminated.

Rolfe.

why dont you post it

[meow]

hey rolfey, how certain are you of your beliefs on this topic?

if you're correct that there is zero basis for homeopathy (solutions diluted beyond 30C) then you are granted 10 wishes,Edited to remove inappropriate remark.

how certain are you of your beliefs?

[paximperium]

hey rolfey, how certain are you of your beliefs on this topic?

if you're correct that there is zero basis for homeopathy (solutions diluted beyond 30C) then you are granted 10 wishes, if you are wrong you and all your loved ones are staked to the ground and have 100's of filthy disease ridden rats gnaw you to death.


how certain are you of your beliefs?I find this dishonest argument via manipulation and threats against loved ones extremely distasteful. Disgusting.

[temporalillusion]

Why the silly setups, I thought we were going to do a real test here.

[meow]

I find this dishonest argument via manipulation and threats against loved ones extremely distasteful. Disgusting.

that's because all of a sudden everyone's certainty dips below 100%

i think it's rather beautiful. it makes you ask the question, "perhaps i am wrong"


it makes you take a look at studies like ennis 2004 and say, "hmmm, they came up with p<.0001 --- maybe there is some quirky thing going on that we just have not caught on to yet."

[paximperium]

that's because all of a sudden everyone's certainty dips below 100%
And who here has ever claimed 100% certainty in anything? You are obviously ignorant about science and how NOTHING can ever be 100% proven right or wrong.

i think it's rather beautiful. it makes you ask the question, "perhaps i am wrong"
Really? You think it is beautiful to threaten people and their loved ones?


it makes you take a look at studies like ennis 2004 and say, "hmmm, they came up with p<.0001 --- maybe there is some quirky thing going on that we just have not caught on to yet."You still haven't told us what is the meaning of a p-value yet.

[Sherman Bay]

Meow, no value of P (and we're still waiting for you to define it) has any validity if the data isn't handled properly, double-blinded and performed by unbiased personnel. A red, orange, green or pink P value isn't impressing anyone, no matter how big the type is. But you sure are funny.

[Third Eye Open]

You still haven't told us what is the meaning of a p-value yet.

'P' value is the level of psychic influence required to affect something. A p< 0.0001 is very low, and means that water is very easily affected by emotions and psychic energies.

Randi is know to have P emissions of well above 0.62, so for him to be doing any testing on water memory or the effects of emotions on water is irresponsible, he will be able to skew the results any way he wants.

[Madalch]

if you're correct that there is zero basis for homeopathy (solutions diluted beyond 30C) then you are granted 10 wishes, if you are wrong you and all your loved ones are staked to the ground and have 100's of filthy disease ridden rats gnaw you to death.

If you had any way of convincing me that that you could grant a single wish, let alone ten, or that you wouldn't declare me wrong and release the rats no matter how the experiment turned out, I might consider it.

Why not consider Randi's challenge? If you don't believe that a magnet will destroy water's memory, then propose some other way of making a control that "main-stream science" declares would be indistinguishable from the homeopathic preparation, while homeopathy declares it would be different.

Protocols for the MDC are agreed to by both Randi and the applicant.

[ravdin]

that's because all of a sudden everyone's certainty dips below 100%

i think it's rather beautiful. it makes you ask the question, "perhaps i am wrong"


it makes you take a look at studies like ennis 2004 and say, "hmmm, they came up with p<.0001 --- maybe there is some quirky thing going on that we just have not caught on to yet."

Fixed the font for you.

Speaking as a skeptic, I would not say with 100% certainty that any of these claims are wrong. But if you can't prove it (p<.0001 is not proof), then there's no reason for me to take you seriously. I could claim that I can fly like Superman, and there's no way you could be 100% certain that I can't. That doesn't mean you wouldn't have good reason to doubt my claim.

These claims are worth the investigation, if done honestly. While I doubt you'll see fruitful results in the "memory of water" department, who knows- the universe works in mysterious and wonderful ways and you could find a breakthrough in a way that no one expects.

I should point out that no knowledge has ever been discovered by wishful thinking. If your claim is not receiving the respect that you think it deserves, then do the hard work to prove your point in a way that can't be ignored.

What's more, I just told you what it would take to change my mind. What would it take to change your mind, and convince you that this "memory of water" claim has no basis in reality?

[I Ratant]

And publishing a result may not say much. I have seen several wrong papers which passed peer review.
.
Any "peers" that could swallow this water stuff don't have real jobs.

[temporalillusion]

get yourself some sulphur 30C or 200c and take a small amount 5, 6, 7 or more times per day for several days. that's how you do it.

200c would be mail order so that about rules it out. 30c could possibly mess you up pretty good if taken dozens and dozens of times over a 2 week period.

dare you to try it.

when you are about to run out of pills place the last 4, 5 , 6 in a water bottle and periodically sip from it another 40 to 50 times.


now thats an experiment that has 100 times more honesty to it than what you pulled off.

your stunt was a sad little joke.

http://www.elixirs.com/products.cfm?productcode=S66E

Here we go, 1000x, would this be good enough?

[meow]

http://www.elixirs.com/products.cfm?productcode=S66E

Here we go, 1000x, would this be good enough?
yeah but u can find much cheaper elsewhere. go with 200c

[Rolfe]

get yourself some sulphur 30C or 200c and take a small amount 5, 6, 7 or more times per day for several days. that's how you do it.

200c would be mail order so that about rules it out. 30c could possibly mess you up pretty good if taken dozens and dozens of times over a 2 week period.

dare you to try it.

when you are about to run out of pills place the last 4, 5 , 6 in a water bottle and periodically sip from it another 40 to 50 times.


I did this. Well, it was Belladonna 30C which a homoeopathic colleague urged me to take, as he insisted that something would happen that would convince me homoeopathic remedies were physiologically active.

Nothing happened at all, other than my shock at being charged £5.99 for what was admittedly, according to the label, a teaspoonful of sugar. (As opposed to about 65p for a bottle of actual paracetamol, for example.)

Absolutely nothing.

Same thing when MRC_Hans tried it.

Suppose I did this again, Xanta, and nothing happened, what would you blame for the lack of a response? What would I (in retrospect) have been found to have done wrong to invalidate the experiment?

You know, I'm having these terrible flashbacks here. Deja vu all over again. It's like homoeopathic Groundhog Day....

Rolfe.

By the way, it's way past my bedtime. Goodnight all.

[PbFoot]

thank you for answering that honestly. i wouldn't do it either because there is always the .001% chance that i am bat ***** crazy and have imagined the whole thing along with ennis, roy, rey, and the 3,000,000 MD's over the last 200 years.

i wouldn't take that chance cuz i think burning to death would be the most painful way to go


Umm... is that a homeopathic .001% that you're bat **** crazy? 'Cause you know, the higher the dilution ...


-PbFoot

[meow]

rolfe you were and always will be heavily emotionally invested in seeing it your way. sores could have broken out from head to toe and you would have ignored it.

[paximperium]

rolfe you were and always will be heavily emotionally invested in seeing it your way. sores could have broken out from head to toe and you would have ignored it.
And you seem unable to to answer a simple question.
What is a p-value and the relevance of you posting it repeatedly?

[hodgy]

would you wager the lives of all your loved ones and yourself that there was in no way shape or form a HOMEOPATHIC EFFECT in the basophil studies that came back p<.0001?


be honest, would you.


if you are wrong then all your loved ones are tied to a spit and slow cooked over a bed of red hot coals and if you are right then you walk away with ten million tax free.

This is a false dichotmy squared :)

Maybe I would risk the above but certainly not being gradually desolved by the digestive powers of a million spiders - that would definitely make me think seriously about homeopathy

[quixotecoyote]

Emotional involvement make ones immune to poison :jaw-dropp

Amazing discoveries every day here at the ol JREF!

[paximperium]

Emotional involvement make ones immune to poison :jaw-dropp

Amazing discoveries every day here at the ol JREF!
The Mind is more powerful than Homeopathy.

[Foolmewunz]

Okay, Meow.

Bring your group of witnesses. We can get the most reputable homeopathic pills available (gah, it's hard to type those three words together - my fingers cramped up!). And you will be here to witness the experiment, and report back to the faithful.

Yes, you can, if I get sick and/or die, stake my children to an anthill, smear honey over them, and then roast them over burning hot coals, and then make them sit in a sealed room with a flatulent koala and watch a repeating loop of Benny Hinn UNTIL THE END OF TIME!!!!!.

But, for every five pills I take (per day, per hour, per whatever) with no effect, I get to hack off one of your body parts and feed it to the carp in Victoria Park Lagoon. Are you so sure of your faith that you'll take this bet. If so, you're just as full of it as I am, because I'm not in the least bit serious, so stop with this "Can I torture your children if you're wrong crap, okay?"

Get back to the science. Last I saw we were waiting for the value of P.

[detroitus]

rolfe you were and always will be heavily emotionally invested in seeing it your way. sores could have broken out from head to toe and you would have ignored it.

So it seems that even if someone does the experiment Meow suggested, exactly as was suggested, it still wouldn't be good enough since you would have obviously just ignored the negative consequences.

This whole conversation has made me all twitchy. Is there a homeopathic cure for obstinant willful ignorance?

[paximperium]

So it seems that even if someone does the experiment Meow suggested, exactly as was suggested, it still wouldn't be good enough since you would have obviously just ignored the negative consequences.

This whole conversation has made me all twitchy. Is there a homeopathic cure for obstinant willful ignorance?
Take nothing, it is the most powerful homeopathic remedy.

[detroitus]

Take nothing, it is the most powerful homeopathic remedy.

Well, to be fair, there is one ailment that large doses of homeopathic remedies can cure.... Dehydration.

[Paulhoff]

it's a fraud. randi makes you use a magnet to blank out a remedy and use that as a control.

the entire prize is a fraud and will never be won.

as randi once said -- never play another man's game.

and besides, the only qualified people are published people.

like who is going to fall for his trickery and deception?
Do you know Randi, I do, Randi plays no games when it comes to testing and many times he is not the one who does the test in the first place. You have no idea what you are talking about.

Paul

:) :) :)

[PbFoot]

Take nothing, it is the most powerful homeopathic remedy.

Did you hear about the homeopathy who overdosed and died?

Yeah... he forgot to take his medicine.

[meow]

Okay, Meow.

Bring your group of witnesses. We can get the most reputable homeopathic pills available (gah, it's hard to type those three words together - my fingers cramped up!). And you will be here to witness the experiment, and report back to the faithful.

Yes, you can, if I get sick and/or die, stake my children to an anthill, smear honey over them, and then roast them over burning hot coals, and then make them sit in a sealed room with a flatulent koala and watch a repeating loop of Benny Hinn UNTIL THE END OF TIME!!!!!.

But, for every five pills I take (per day, per hour, per whatever) with no effect, I get to hack off one of your body parts and feed it to the carp in Victoria Park Lagoon. Are you so sure of your faith that you'll take this bet. If so, you're just as full of it as I am, because I'm not in the least bit serious, so stop with this "Can I torture your children if you're wrong crap, okay?"

Get back to the science. Last I saw we were waiting for the value of P.

:)

[paximperium]

Well, to be fair, there is one ailment that large doses of homeopathic remedies can cure.... Dehydration.
Or alcohol withdrawal.

[paximperium]

Bump.
Meow why aren't you answering this simple question?
And you seem unable to to answer a simple question.
What is a p-value and the relevance of you posting it repeatedly?

[PbFoot]

Or alcohol withdrawal.

Also, hypoglycemia.

[Paulhoff]

Did you hear about the homeopathy who overdosed and died?

Yeah... he forgot to take his medicine.
You heard Randi say that, believe it or not he got the idea from me.

Paul

:) :) :)

[Wowbagger]

Well, it seems to me that the idea that "memory of water" was proven scientifically was essentially debunked on page one...

How many dilutions does it take?
How long does water hold its memory?
How does this memory interact with human physiology?
Why isn't some water more toxic than others because they are less dilute?
Why do most homeopathic solution use ALCOHOL instead of water?

If water memory was truly proven, in a scientific manner, not only would these questions be answered, but they would be answered to many decimal places of precision! And, the studies would be published for other labs to conduct and verify (or improve) the accuracy of.

(And then, of course specific mechanisms would be identified, but, that's a different story.)

I, for one, was willing to see if homeopathy had a chance of being proven, in some form. But, I am more than dissapointed in its actual scientific score-card, at the moment.

[Wowbagger]

And a few other questions I came up with:

* Would a certain kind of shaking deprogram the remedies?
* If so, shouldn't homeopathic remedies come with a warning not to shake them inappropriately?
* If not, how would one go about deprogramming the water's memory, if one wanted to?

* Is water prone to remember certain molecules better than others?
* If so, what factors determine this?
* If not, how come my tap water doesn't remember all the toxins and sewage it must have been in contact with, in the past?

* What, exactly, does p-value mean?! How does one measure it, in a lab?

These would also be answered, if water memory was actually demonstrated scientifically.

[meow]

none of these would kill you but i think you would experience something quite annoying after taking about a 100-200 doses spread out evenly over 7 to 14 days.

i dare you.

are 75,000 european medical doctors and about 3,000,000 over the last 200 years complete and total idiots?


would you absolutely 100% bet the lives of your children, brothers, sisters, father, mother, nieces, nephews, uncles and aunts lives on the fact that Rustum roy is wrong?

would you accept a wager that if you are correct you receive $10,000,000, Edited to remove inappropriate remark.


Do not get personal.


how's that getting personal? it is nothing more than a hypothetical to see how absolutely certain a person is on an issue.





will someone tell me why i have 42 emails from the mods already? i only have 170 posts.

no, i'm not kidding, i have 42!


can you people really look yourselves in the mirror and say that you are fair?

[Tricky]

how's that getting personal? it is nothing more than a hypothetical to see how absolutely certain a person is on an issue.

will someone tell me why i have 42 emails from the mods already? i only have 170 posts.

no, i'm not kidding, i have 42!


can you people really look yourselves in the mirror and say that you are fair?

If you have a question about forum management, please raise it here.
http://forums.randi.org/forumdisplay.php?f=19

[alfaniner]

will someone tell me why i have 42 emails from the mods already? i only have 170 posts.


Maybe you should read them.

[ravdin]

Maybe you should read them.

When you're done reading your 42 emails from the mods, maybe then you can address some of the questions that many of the forum members have patiently posted here in good faith. You'll notice that many of us have indulged you in discussing the science instead of making ugly personal attacks- an example you'd do well to follow.

[Skeptic]

none of these would kill you but i think you would experience something quite annoying after taking about a 100-200 doses spread out evenly over 7 to 14 days.

In that case, why all those big red warning labels on homeopathic medicine against taking too much (?) of the stuff -- contact a doctor immediatelly, the poison control center, etc., etc.?

Why the fuss, if taking the whole bottle is "just a cheap stunt", and even when you deliberately try to overdose the "right" way, the worst that can happen is "something quite annoying" IF you take the same overdose for weeks?

Is calling the doctor or the poison control center there for psychological treatment -- the soothing voice of the doctor on the other side of the line laughing heartily in your face when you explain you just ovedosed on homeopathic medicine is supposed to calm you down?

Anyway...

Why WON'T any of that kill me? Is there ANY amount of ANY homeopathic medicine that causes anything more specific or serious than "you would experience something quite annoying"?

Why CAN'T you be more specific about the effects of overdose than "You would experience something quite annoying"? Real medicine knows if the side effect is extra coughing or heart failure -- depending on what the real dose does.

The answer to these questions is simple: homeopathic "medicine" has no active ingredient at all, so there IS no such thing as a an overdose, and the only side effect is psychosomatic (cramps, say, or nausea) -- "something quite annoying" -- caused, not by the overdose, but by the psychological expectation that something must go wrong because you "overdosed".

Amazingly enough, these "side effects" happen only to those who believe in the homeopathy nonsense..

So anyway, I ACCEPT YOUR DARE. Do your worst. Choose the most damaging homeopathic medicine and I will take it as per your instructions. Two conditions: it has to be real homeopathic medicine -- one that really doesn't have any active ingredient (30C or so dilution is fine) -- and from a reputable company (so I can be sure they're not putting any actual active ingredient in by mistake).

So choose the poison and its brand. I will take it as per your instructions.

Go ahead.

are 75,000 european medical doctors and about 3,000,000 over the last 200 years complete and total idiots?

As far as homeopathy is concerned, the answer is yes. Or rather, not idiots -- simply wrong or deluded, which does not imply idiocy. It can and does happen often to smart people.

What's more, as others noted, the majority of those "supporters of homeopathy" probably use the "homeopathic" reference as a way to offload chronic complainer and annoying patients that have nothing actually wrong with them: sending a patient to an homeopath is an excellent way to "treat" someone who, they know, only needs to get some attention.

For one thing, it doesn't offload the patient on a colleague; for another thing, it doesn't risk the other doctor giving them real medicine (if only to get rid of them) and the patient therefore being overmedicated for no good reason.

A homeopath is a perfect answer: the doctor gets rid of an annoying patient; the homeopath gets a client; the patient gets some tender loving care and attention and a bunch of sugar pills that do nothing, risking no overdose.

That's not exactly "support of homeopathy". And besides, yes, 75,000 doctors CAN be wrong. I bet my life on it in public, remember?

would you absolutely 100% bet the lives of your children, brothers, sisters, father, mother, nieces, nephews, uncles and aunts lives on the fact that Rustum roy is wrong?

Yup. I will.

Let's start with betting my own life (again), however -- I am not going to annoy my family by forcing them to take sugar pills for weeks just to win an internet bet.

Is trying to get myself killed good enough for starters? Oh wait -- I forget you can't actually do that with homeopathy, you can only bet "experiencing something quite annoying".

See above -- choose your poison, as they say.

[meow]

skeptic, your complete denial of the 4 studies i posted in the 1st post boggles my mind.

[meow]

So anyway, I ACCEPT YOUR DARE. Do your worst. Choose the most damaging homeopathic medicine and I will take it as per your instructions. Two conditions: it has to be real homeopathic medicine -- one that really doesn't have any active ingredient (30C or so dilution is fine) -- and from a reputable company (so I can be sure they're not putting any actual active ingredient in by mistake).

So choose the poison and its brand. I will take it as per your instructions.

Go ahead.



phosphorous 200c might be a good one. i'd be curious to see if your teeth become painfully sensitive to even body temperature water.

and remember it has nothing to do with taking the whole bottle rather repeated dosing 8, 9, 10x's a day for several days.

along with popping a pill every hour you can spike a water bottle or spike every glass of water or liquid that you drink for the next 2 weeks.

[temporalillusion]

Sensitive teeth? Ye gods, we want misery and death!

There has to be something homeopathic that is deadly. Don't make us go searching on homeopathic forums.

[luchog]

would you wager the lives of all your loved ones and yourself that there was in no way shape or form a HOMEOPATHIC EFFECT in the basophil studies that came back p<.0001?


be honest, would you.

Edited to remove inappropriate remark.

Do not get personal.

Any time any day. I have done it before, and will happily do so again.

I take multiple random homeopathic "remedies" every single day. Multiple times a day, and have been doing so for a very long time. Nothing whatsoever has changed.

If you want to send me a bunch, then I'll happily take those, too, as long as they're from a reputable supplier that is guaranteed free from contamination during the manufacturing process. That goes for any homeopath out there. If you send me the remedies, as long as they're truly homeopathic (not herbal remedies disguised as homeopathic) of 10m/30c/100x dilution or better, and guarenteed free from contamination, I will take any remedy, in any dosage, for any length of time you specify. I will even take video of myself doing it and post it on the web.

So, it's on you. Put up or shut up.

[Verde]

give me a break.



You appear to have been given several.


you want to be honest?



Most respondents seem to be.


get yourself some sulphur 30C or 200c and take a small amount 5, 6, 7 or more times per day for several days. that's how you do it.



Atomic sulphur has a very low solubility index in water. How do you form the mother tincture, before you get to 30C?


200c would be mail order so that about rules it out. 30c could possibly mess you up pretty good if taken dozens and dozens of times over a 2 week period.



Having spent quite a bit of time up at Fort McMurray, with its large stockpile of sulphur, I'm sure my nostrils have absorbed at least that dose. I now realize that the most dangerous time was when I was driving towards the site, with the windows rolled up, so the concentration was in the sub 1 part per billion range. Little did I know.....


dare you to try it.



I'd be happy to, except for having no particular desire to travel back to Northern Alberta. Do you have an alternative(TM) suggestion?

V.

[PixyMisa]

are 75,000 european medical doctors and about 3,000,000 over the last 200 years complete and total idiots?
Yes.

would you absolutely 100% bet the lives of your children, brothers, sisters, father, mother, nieces, nephews, uncles and aunts lives on the fact that Rustum roy is wrong?
Yes.

[UnrepentantSinner]

Why isn't all water undrinkable?
Wouldn't water retain the "memory" of all the sewage treatment plants it has been through?

Depends on whether it's been succused or not. Water in earthquake prone areas is more homeopathic than that in more geologically stable areas.

[paximperium]

skeptic, your complete denial of the 4 studies i posted in the 1st post boggles my mind.
And I am still waiting for you to tell us what the relevance of the findings are and what a p-value is.

[dafydd]

it's a fraud. randi makes you use a magnet to blank out a remedy and use that as a control.

the entire prize is a fraud and will never be won.

as randi once said -- never play another man's game.

and besides, the only qualified people are published people.

like who is going to fall for his trickery and deception?


You have this bassackwards.It's the people who apply for the challenge who are the frauds and who practice (self) deception. Randi is not trying to cheat or decieve anyone.What does ' the only qualified people are published people' mean? As far as I know he has never made anyone 'use a magnet as a remedy' Where is your proof of this strange statement?

[dafydd]

So Randi is a fraud because he asked the homeopaths how to take 20 remedies and render 10 of them ineffective so that an experiment could be run to see if the good remedies did better than the ineffective ones? And they told him how, and he followed their advice? And he's a fraud?

Lets get this sulfur thing rolling.

If someone takes the sulfur dilution as you direct and doesn't get sick or die, will you admit that homeopathy has no basis in reality?

I volunteer to take the sulphur dilution 3 times a day for a year.After all,what harm can distilled water do? I have in the past swallowed bottles full of homeopathic sleeping pills to prove to believers in this nonsense that they have no effect.I have at various times swapped folk's homeopathic dilutions and pills for distilled water and calcium pills,and they swore that they were having a wonderful effect. I never told them about it,most people who believe in this stuff are impervious to logic. You can lead a horse to water,but you can't make him think.

[a_unique_person]

you're kidding, right?

No, I think you are.

[dafydd]

And a few other questions I came up with:

* Would a certain kind of shaking deprogram the remedies?
* If so, shouldn't homeopathic remedies come with a warning not to shake them inappropriately?
* If not, how would one go about deprogramming the water's memory, if one wanted to?

* Is water prone to remember certain molecules better than others?
* If so, what factors determine this?
* If not, how come my tap water doesn't remember all the toxins and sewage it must have been in contact with, in the past?

* What, exactly, does p-value mean?! How does one measure it, in a lab?

These would also be answered, if water memory was actually demonstrated scientifically.

We are still waiting for the answers to these questions Meow.

[Yuri Nalyssus]

yuri's a funny guy

too bad you make up your mind depending on which way the herd is already pointed.
Moo, moo, moo

Yuri

[Foolmewunz]

Maybe you should read them.

Or post them here and we'll read them for you.

[Belz...]

you're kidding, right?

No, they're not.

However, although water doesn't have memory, the other principle of homeopathy clearly works: dilution makes things more powerful. Why ? Look at knowledge... the less you have of it, the more convinced you are!

[Belz...]

it's a fraud. randi makes you use a magnet to blank out a remedy and use that as a control.

the entire prize is a fraud and will never be won.

Well, if you wanted to sound like a complete kook, that's pretty much the way to do it. Congrats!

[Belz...]

get yourself some sulphur 30C or 200c and take a small amount 5, 6, 7 or more times per day for several days. that's how you do it.

200c would be mail order so that about rules it out. 30c could possibly mess you up pretty good if taken dozens and dozens of times over a 2 week period.

I love how woo-woos cover their asses in the obvious event that it doesn't happen the way they claim.

[Belz...]

i shouldn't be speculating but if i were then i would say that the strength would be infintessimally(sp?) small.

Shouldn't that make it even more powerful ?

My head hurts.

[Mojo]

no, i read that randi wants you to have 20 remedies of X and take 10 of them and wave a magnet over them. he assumes that the magnet will blank out the remedy and now you have to tell what from what.

he came up with the magnet idea because some homeopaths claimed (probably falsely) that a magnetic field wipes out a remedy.

more trickery from mr. magician


Where did you read it?

[Soapy Sam]

hey rolfey, how certain are you of your beliefs on this topic?

if you're correct that there is zero basis for homeopathy (solutions diluted beyond 30C) then you are granted 10 wishes, if you are wrong you and all your loved ones are staked to the ground and have 100's of filthy disease ridden rats gnaw you to death.

On behalf of rats everywhere, I demand an apology.:mad:

[Molinaro]

skeptic, your complete denial of the 4 studies i posted in the 1st post boggles my mind.

Posts have been made showing flaws in the study referenced in the OP. Do you intend to ignore those flaws and still proclaim the truth of the results?

Don't you care if the studies are done properly or not?

[Paulhoff]

There is no water in the pill, so no so-called memory of water, which there isn't any water memory to begin with.

And why would it only remember what you what it to to begin with, and not the pill it is in, which again it isn't in.

Paul

:) :) :)

[wilsontown]

Don't you care if the studies are done properly or not?

This is what I find baffling. OK, you might disagree with our critique of Rustum Roy's work. That's fair enough. But if you disagree with it, surely you would want to explain why? Why would you think that simply asserting that the critique is wrong, without any discussion, gives you any credibility? Especially when you're posting in a forum stacked to the rafters with sceptics?

[Pipirr]

Roy hasn't shown that water had memory.

He didn't even show that ethanol had memory, which was the substance analysed in his paper. Not water.

Water is not the same as ethanol.

It also, and one really shouldn't have to point out something so obvious, is not the same as lactose. Which has also not ever been shown to have a memory.

The memory of water is just not relevant to the vast majority of homeopathic remedies on sale, which consist of substances other than water.

[Rolfe]

Hey Pipirr - I presume the PhD came through on schedule? How did the final examination go?

Rolfe.

[NewtonTrino]

Wow I've seen some delusion before but meow takes the cake. Sign me up to take some poison too, it sounds like fun.

[paximperium]

Roy hasn't shown that water had memory.

He didn't even show that ethanol had memory, which was the substance analysed in his paper. Not water.

Water is not the same as ethanol.

It also, and one really shouldn't have to point out something so obvious, is not the same as lactose. Which has also not ever been shown to have a memory.

The memory of water is just not relevant to the vast majority of homeopathic remedies on sale, which consist of substances other than water.
Bah! Details. Silly details.

[Shalamar]

Hmm... Wait.. So you mean I can go to Costco, buy a pallet of bottled water, pour it all together, place in a tiny insignificant drop of.. anything, dole it out as 'drops' or something like that, and sell it all as a stupidly overpriced 'homeopathic' remedy?

Sign me up. I'm a believer, I can't wait for the money to just come pouring in. What 'remedy' shall I try first?

[paximperium]

Hmm... Wait.. So you mean I can go to Costco, buy a pallet of bottled water, pour it all together, place in a tiny insignificant drop of.. anything, dole it out as 'drops' or something like that, and sell it all as a stupidly overpriced 'homeopathic' remedy?

Sign me up. I'm a believer, I can't wait for the money to just come pouring in. What 'remedy' shall I try first?
Something vague and self limited...say the common cold.

[Shalamar]

Something vague and self limited...say the common cold.

Hmm... I could sneeze into the water, then distill it before placing it into bottles. Add a little food colouring... It'll fight the cold.. AND turning red!

[RoboTimbo]

Hmm... I could sneeze into the water, then distill it before placing it into bottles. Add a little food colouring... It'll fight the cold.. AND turning red!

You missed the step of getting some shill to come onto a skeptic's forum and tout 'studies' of homeopathy's effectiveness.

1. Buy water at Costco
2. Hire mouthpiece
3. ????
4. Profit!

[Shalamar]

You missed the step of getting some shill to come onto a skeptic's forum and tout 'studies' of homeopathy's effectiveness.

1. Buy water at Costco
2. Hire mouthpiece
3. ????
4. Profit!

Need a catchy name too. Then I'll see if I can sell it at Super Supplements or something.

"Guaranteed to to lessen the effects of the cold upon the body!"
"Not guaranteed to do anything at all, save slightly hydrate you. Active ingredients include whatever was in my mouth when I sneezed."

[Pipirr]

Hey Pipirr - I presume the PhD came through on schedule? How did the final examination go?

Rolfe.

You presume correctly! All went well. ;)

[Mojo]

You presume correctly! All went well. ;)


Congratulations Dr. Pipirr!

[paximperium]

Quantum-Vitagen
Now with the essence of Shalamar
Guaranteed to balance your energies and to lessen the effects of the cold.

[JimBenArm]

I think this could revolutionize the computer industry. Just think - no more flash memory, no more hard disks! Just set a glass of water next to your computational boxy thingy and there you go! Everything stored in 35 terrabytes of hydraulic medium!

Just think of how much data we could store in Lake Mead. Or Lake Superior!

Of course, we couldn't use Lake Erie. The data would get corrupted.

[Shalamar]

Quantum-Vitagen
Now with the essence of Shalamar
Guaranteed to balance your energies and to lessen the effects of the cold.

Oh dear gods. You damn near owed me a new computer!

:D

[Wowbagger]

One more question:

Does anyone know if these water-memory lab tests were even double-blinded, and carefully controlled?
If so, why can't they be replicated around the word, so easily?
If not, how does one honestly expect to declare the findings are "proven"?

[Belz...]

Hmm... Wait.. So you mean I can go to Costco, buy a pallet of bottled water, pour it all together, place in a tiny insignificant drop of.. anything, dole it out as 'drops' or something like that, and sell it all as a stupidly overpriced 'homeopathic' remedy?

Oh, heavens, no!

You have to DILUTE it. You can't just drop a small amount in water, you have to drop water INTO your "anything", instead.

[Belz...]

Does anyone know if these water-memory lab tests were even double-blinded, and carefully controlled?

Need you ask ?

If not, how does one honestly expect to declare the findings are "proven"?

Easy: start with the conclusion, and work your way down!

[Shalamar]

Oh, heavens, no!

You have to DILUTE it. You can't just drop a small amount in water, you have to drop water INTO your "anything", instead.

will anyone notice.. or care?

[Wowbagger]

Hey, I'm just asking questions....

[JimBenArm]

Hey, I'm just asking questions....
This ain't the CT forum!

And sure, just asking questions. Yeah, we've heard that before, truther!!

[Rolfe]

Of course, we couldn't use Lake Erie. The data would get corrupted.


OUCH!!!! ;)

Rolfe.

[Yuri Nalyssus]

One more question:

Does anyone know if these water-memory lab tests were even double-blinded, and carefully controlled?
If so, why can't they be replicated around the word, so easily?
If not, how does one honestly expect to declare the findings are "proven"?
Miaow either doesn't understand or care about the need for or significance of blinding. I asked the same question many many posts ago and am still waiting for an answer.

It's easier to keep cutting and pasting chunks of papers she clearly doesn't understand than to sit down and read and understand them.

As to why they can't be replicated... oh, it'll be some sort of global conspiracy that we're all party to I imagine.

Yuri

[meow]

Members can follow the http://forums.randi.org/helloworld2/buttons/viewpost.gif button to see the large block of text that this refers to. Please do not spam the forum by repeatedly posting the same large blocks of text.



http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVG-481MMWB-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=0dd37a60a935ce27e1ac6ccc41b2ef1c
Thermoluminescence of ultra-high dilutions of lithium chloride and sodium chloride

Chemin de Verdonnet 2, 1010, Lausanne, Switzerland

Abstract

Ultra-high dilutions of lithium chloride and sodium chloride (10−30 gcm−3) have been irradiated by X- and γ-rays at 77 K, then progressively rewarmed to room temperature. During that phase, their thermoluminescence has been studied and it was found that, despite their dilution beyond the Avogadro number, the emitted light was specific of the original salts dissolved initially.


================================================== ===

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WXX-4HYWN31-3&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=9e8e1f990e969e1555ee65eac16a51e7


Improvement of flow cytometric analysis of basophil activation inhibition by high histamine dilutions. A novel basophil specific marker: CD 203c
Purchase the full-text article


J Sainte-Laudy1, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author and P Belon2

1Laboratoire d’immunologie et d’allergologie, 5 boulevard du Montparnasse, 75006 Paris, France

2Laboratoires Boiron, 20 rue de la Libération, 69110 Lyon, France

Received 29 September 2005;
revised 20 October 2005;
accepted 31 October 2005.
Available online 5 January 2006.

Background

Histamine is known to elicit a negative feedback effect on anti-IgE and allergen-induced basophil activation. A series of experiments performed between 1981 and 1995 using a manual method showed biological activity of highly diluted histamine. Most of the experiments used histermine in the range 10−30 (15C)–10−36 M (18C). These results were confirmed by automated flow cytometry, but this method is based on the selection of basophils by anti-IgE and analysis of basophil activation by anti-CD 63, showing significant but relatively low inhibition (approximately 14%), insufficient to convince the scientific community of the reality of the phenomenon.
Objective

We investigated if the use of CD 203c, a basophil specific, earlier marker than CD 63 of the activation cascade, increased the sensitivity of the method, testing two target histamine dilutions, 10−4 (2C) and 10−32 M (16C).
Methods


Results

Histamine 10−4 M (2C) and histamine 10−32 M (16C) were capable of inhibiting both IgE-dependent (anti-IgE) and IgE-independent (fMLP) basophil activation. The percentage inhibition depended on the activation marker used. The highest inhibition for histamine dilution 16C was observed with CD 203c (38%, P<0.001), approximately half the inhibition observed with histamine 2C (73%).

Conclusion

These new flow cytometric protocols confirmed that high dilutions of histamine may inhibit basophil activation and that the inhibitory effect is not restricted to IgE-dependent activation. The use of CD 203c instead of CD 63 increased the magnitude of the response.


===============================================

let me guess, it was replicated including all the errors from previous successful experiments.

no wait, they just plain cheated because they have an agenda.

[Wowbagger]

Miaow either doesn't understand or care about the need for or significance of blinding. I asked the same question many many posts ago and am still waiting for an answer.

Perhaps Meow should approach the people who made these studies with our questions.

Mainstream medical science can deliver amazing precision on its own findings. Unless the homeopaths can obtain similar (or better) results, why should we take their claims seriously?

----------------------------------

Meanwhile, I think the findings, here, are more compelling than the stuff in this thread:
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=137307

[Wowbagger]

Ah, very good! Meow is now giving us some papers to study, at least!
That's better than nothing!

Hopefully, some of them will be relevent to the claims made.

[JJM]

The Journal of Thermal and Analytical Calorimetry article is incomprehensible. The bottom line should be ("The nature of the phenomena here described still remains unexplained") that unexplained phenomena do not support any hypotheses. [Full stop] I should say, instead, that the unexplained phenomena, in that paper, look like poor quality research.

I came late to this explosive thread, I do not know what preceded this, sorry.

[ravdin]

Come on, Meow. You keep copying and pasting from the article because you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Just admit it and you'll feel a lot better.

[Confuseling]

I take it then that I may safely place my homeopathic remedy next to my hifi speakers? The magnetic field does not affect the remedy.

You can, if you're careful.

I can sell you these cables...

[SusanB-M1]

Skeptic

"30C dilution, "

I am just at the part in 'Bad Science' where Ben Goldacre talks about homeopathy and the above phrase occurred several times. What does it mean?, please? Actually my reader was reading '30 degrees Centigrade' so I presume that is what was on the page, but that sounds like a temperature.

You know, I sympathise with people who are still drawn to homeopathy. Although I was almost totally sceptical about it, and certainly never used any remedies, it was only when I came to these forums that I had the final doubt removed..... for which I am very pleased of course!

I caught part of an interview on BBc Radio 4 yesterday, where an expert of some sort was worried that Prince charles has again, apparently, been promoting the homeopathy cause, but I did not hear enough to get the whole picture.

[Giggywig]

Skeptic

"30C dilution, "

I am just at the part in 'Bad Science' where Ben Goldacre talks about homeopathy and the above phrase occurred several times. What does it mean?, please? Actually my reader was reading '30 degrees Centigrade' so I presume that is what was on the page, but that sounds like a temperature.

You know, I sympathise with people who are still drawn to homeopathy. Although I was almost totally sceptical about it, and certainly never used any remedies, it was only when I came to these forums that I had the final doubt removed..... for which I am very pleased of course!

I caught part of an interview on BBc Radio 4 yesterday, where an expert of some sort was worried that Prince charles has again, apparently, been promoting the homeopathy cause, but I did not hear enough to get the whole picture.

It means you do a 1:100 dilution 30 times. That's 1 part of your "remedy" in 100 parts solvent, mix, take one part out of that and mix it with 100 more parts of solvent. Repeat 28 more times. Chances of having anything other than solvent get pretty astronomical pretty quickly (around 12C or so, I believe).

[ddt]

"30C dilution, "

I am just at the part in 'Bad Science' where Ben Goldacre talks about homeopathy and the above phrase occurred several times. What does it mean?, please? Actually my reader was reading '30 degrees Centigrade' so I presume that is what was on the page, but that sounds like a temperature.

It's the measure of dilution. The 'C' part means a 100-fold dilution, and the 30 means that that has to be repeated 30 times. So in the end, the original substance has been diluted by a factor 10 ^ 60.

[sanguine]

Okay, I just read the Sainte-Laudy paper (that's from 2005 in "Homeopathy"). It uses a technique I'm quite familiar with, so I figured I could give an educated analysis.

Overview:

Briefly, Sainte-Laudy and Belon applied the technique of flow cytometry to do a cell-by-cell analysis of immune cell activation blocking by vanishingly dilute (i.e. homeopathic) solutions of histamine, a compound that we expect to see blocking activation these immune cells when it is applied at normal concentrations.

Curiously, this paper violates two basic concepts of homeopathy. First, the dilutions are done without succussing. Second, they are suggesting that an ultra-high-dilution prep of histamine will do what normal concentrations of histamine can do, namely blocking activation. More on this later.

Flow cytometry is an amazing analytic tool by which you feed a suspension of cells into a machine, and it passes them, one at a time, in front of a laser or set of lasers. These then activate fluorescent markers (in this case, the cells have been treated with fluorescent markers that stick to certain features on their surfaces) which you can then "read' with a detector in the machine. The upshot is that you can run, say, 10,000 cells through the machine, and look at what each cell is doing vis-a-vis whatever feature you're measuring.

Back when I did this a lot, I was looking at the abundance of a key protein, which we'd fluorescently labeled. In this paper, the authors are looking at abundance of a surface protein called CD 63, which is only present in large numbers when the immune cells in question (in this case, basophils) are activated.

Commentary:

I mentioned doing 10,000 cells above, as that's what I did. In this case, the authors started with a population of immune cells, and used various "gating" methods to try and pick out the basophils. In other words, they started with a bunch of cells, and then sifted to try and find the right ones. This is a tricky aspect of flow cytometry of mixed populations of cells, and can amplify the effects of even minor differences between samples (note that I was lucky when I was doing my work, as I had pure cultures, and did not need to do any gating at all). If you have access to the paper, figure 4 shows how this "process of elimination" worked for this study.

The authors say this in their methods section:

"We only included experiments fulfilling the following criteria: significant activation (>15% CD 63 expression or MFI ratio >5), inhibition induced by histamine 2C higher than 50% and number of counted basophils higher than 500."

I find this worrying, and had I been a peer reviewer, I would have flagged it and asked to see their full set of original data. Here are the concerns:

1) 500 cells is not an awful lot. It's good that they set a minimum bar, but a larger sample size would have been better. See my 10,000 above. That said, I'd let this one slide if there weren't other concerns, because it's a pain getting enough basophils.

2) Why did they rule out samples with less than 15% CD 63 expression, or with lower fluorescence? To explain, MFI ratio compares the fluorescence of an experimental sample to the negative control. For no particularly good reason, they threw out a slew of samples at the lower range of fluorescence and at the lower range of activation. If their protocol is activating cells at this lower range and they think that's a problem, they need to fix their protocol (perhaps by adding more of the immune cell activator). My concern here is that:

A - If you include the full range of activation/fluorescence, their "effects" from the homeopathic solutions disappear.

B - When they go to higher concentrations of activator (that would help reduce the number of low-activation cells) their effects disappear.

The fact that they had such uneven activation effects suggests that either they are doing something wrong or their cell populations have problems. By comparison, when I ran flow cytometry experiments, treating cells with the same conditions reliably yielded the same results (which, you know, you'd expect, because that's how controlled experiments work).

3) Again, what's with throwing out more results? In this case, they threw out more results where real concentrations of histamine had less of an effect.

Again, I don't think this paper would have passed peer review at a better journal, because there are serious issues with how the data were handled.

This gains extra significance because the effects are very small.

Now, I mentioned at the beginning that I found it interesting that the authors suggest in this paper that homeopathic dilutions of histamine have the same effect as real amounts of histamine. By conventional homeopathic belief, if you wanted to block basophil activation, wouldn't you have to use something that would activate basophils at normal concentrations?

Notably, in 2001, Sainte-Laudy used a different method to show that while 10C and 20C dilutions of histamine blocked basophil activation, 13C dilutions enhanced it.

Neat, right?

This highly suggests to me that Sainte-Laudy and colleagues do sloppy work that leads to highly variable responses, and then throw out all the data that doesn't match their hypothesis. With five gates and three other qualifiers, they have ample opportunity to massage their essentially random results into anything they want, and I think, willfully or not, they're likely doing so.

[Paulhoff]

BWE1tH93G9U

Paul

:) :) :)

[Rolfe]

Thank you very much Sanguine.

Rolfe.

[Yuri Nalyssus]

Thermoluminescence of ultra-high dilutions of lithium chloride and sodium chloride etc etc... big fonts, little fonts, bright colours etc etc etc...

... no wait, they just plain cheated because they have an agenda.
So I take it that you still don't understand what blinding is and why good methodology is important.

Yuri

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Thank you very much Sanguine.

Rolfe.


Seconded. Much better than all the arm waving we get from the "believers".

[Foolmewunz]

Hmm... Wait.. So you mean I can go to Costco, buy a pallet of bottled water, pour it all together, place in a tiny insignificant drop of.. anything, dole it out as 'drops' or something like that, and sell it all as a stupidly overpriced 'homeopathic' remedy?

Sign me up. I'm a believer, I can't wait for the money to just come pouring in. What 'remedy' shall I try first?

Don't be silly. You can't just dump the dose of "anything" into it and stir. You have to be a homeopath, put on a white jacket, and when you put the anything in the water, hold it up to the light and go "Hmmm?", like Mr. Wizard so you look all sciencey and stuff.

What you're describing? Well, just any old person could do that. Why that'd make a mockery of the hundred-year tradition of homeopathy.

[Mojo]

Now, I mentioned at the beginning that I found it interesting that the authors suggest in this paper that homeopathic dilutions of histamine have the same effect as real amounts of histamine. By conventional homeopathic belief, if you wanted to block basophil activation, wouldn't you have to use something that would activate basophils at normal concentrations?


Not necessarily - the idea of "like cures like" is often explained in terms of the remedy stimulating the body to heal by inducing the symptoms of the disease.

Hahnemann's original idea was that material doses of Cinchona bark were an effective treatment for malaria because, in material doses, it appeared to induce the symptoms of malaria in him. From this he jumped to the conclusion that any condition could be treated by a medicine that would normally produce the symptoms the patient was suffering. The dilutions were only introduced later to get around the problem that large doses of drugs that produced symptoms tended to make patients worse.

Modern "provings", in which homoeopaths determine what symptoms a remedy is supposed to treat, use potentised remedies (Hahnemann himself recommended "proving" with 30C remedies in the last two editions of The Organon), not material amounts of the substance from which the remedy is prepared.

The idea that homoeopathy involves highly dilute remedies producing opposite effects to material doses is probably a misconception - in fact the claim is that diluting and succussing the remedies intensifies the effects.

[sanguine]

The idea that homoeopathy involves highly dilute remedies producing opposite effects to material doses is probably a misconception - in fact the claim is that diluting and succussing the remedies intensifies the effects.

Got it. Out of curiosity, did any of the historical advocates of homeopathy have a line of reasoning that would explain the weird multimodal thing that Sainte-Laudy claims in the 2001 paper, where the intermediate dilution had an opposite effect?

[Mojo]

You have to be a homeopath, put on a white jacket, and...


...get someone to tie up the sleeves behind your back.

[athon]

Got it. Out of curiosity, did any of the historical advocates of homeopathy have a line of reasoning that would explain the weird multimodal thing that Sainte-Laudy claims in the 2001 paper, where the intermediate dilution had an opposite effect?

First of all, thank you so much for the breakdown of the paper. I also read it a while back, and came to similar conclusions ultimately, but you've highlighted a couple of other interesting particulars that (having not ever personally engaged in this particular assay process) I never considered.

As to the reasons why the intermediate dilution had an opposite effect, I got the feeling that this study was not necessarily concerned with validating homeopathy per se, but rather introducing the possibility that a solvent could hold some information from the solute, even if it is diluted down to homeopathic levels.

In any case, I'd venture that your response will be ignored by meow. I for one, however, found it most educational.

Thanks.

Athon

[Elizabeth I]

Take nothing, it is the most powerful homeopathic remedy.

For faster effect, take nothing three times a day, once after every meal.

Hmm... Wait.. So you mean I can go to Costco, buy a pallet of bottled water, pour it all together, place in a tiny insignificant drop of.. anything, dole it out as 'drops' or something like that, and sell it all as a stupidly overpriced 'homeopathic' remedy?

Sign me up. I'm a believer, I can't wait for the money to just come pouring in. What 'remedy' shall I try first?

I think you have to thump it, too.

[th!nk]

here are some simple arguments against homeopathy using basic chemistry. imagine for a second that homeopathy is true. first of all, if water has a memory, then it recalls previous solutes were added to it, thats homeopathy's claim. if homeopathy claims to be a science, then homeopathic water should have some noticable effect in chemistry experiments. for example, if i add 1 mole of hydrochloric acid to 10 moles of water, and dilute to homeopathic levels, when tested on litmus paper, that water should cause it to turn red showing that water has "remembered" the hydronium ions and is no longer neutral. this is not what happens. in excessive dilution, the amount of hydronium in water is severely diminished and water is shown to be mostly neutral, or in 30x dilution, neutral.

[th!nk]

Now imagine that water does have memory. how does it choose between the healing effects of a subsdtance and the harmful ones. water, an inanimate compound, cannot consciously choose something.
These are simple questions any person with a background in chemistry should be asking. Yet so called homeopaths who claim they have a scientific undertsanding of the principles do not even ask these. if homeopathy falters to these, how will it match up to the tough questions, evidence based and logically sound questions?

[arthwollipot]

Not everything gets imprinted in water. This is why the ocean is not one vast homeopathic cure-all. The water has to be "succussed" at each dilution. This means that it has to be vigorously shaken in a very specific way for the solute to be properly imprinted on the water. I read one analysis which said that it had to be shaken exactly thirteen times in each of the three directions of motion: up/down, left/right and back/forth. Another method I've seen is that it has to be banged against a wooden table a certain number of times. Precisely what this does to the structure of the water is never made clear, but homeopathy certainy doesn't "work" without it.

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Not everything gets imprinted in water. This is why the ocean is not one vast homeopathic cure-all. The water has to be "succussed" at each dilution. This means that it has to be vigorously shaken in a very specific way for the solute to be properly imprinted on the water. I read one analysis which said that it had to be shaken exactly thirteen times in each of the three directions of motion: up/down, left/right and back/forth. Another method I've seen is that it has to be banged against a wooden table a certain number of times. Precisely what this does to the structure of the water is never made clear, but homeopathy certainy doesn't "work" without it.

Bugger! I had been banging mine on the Bible as I was told to. No wonder it's not working.

-- Gord wanders off shaking his head disconsolately --

;)

[Foolmewunz]

@th!nk,
Welcome to the forums. No fair jumping right in and making sense. You have to go over to the Welcome thread where you can be sufficiently razzed and harassed by the practicing professional Razzers and Harassers who reside there. (Good to see you got that shift key fixed by the second post.)

[Foolmewunz]

Not everything gets imprinted in water. This is why the ocean is not one vast homeopathic cure-all. The water has to be "succussed" at each dilution. This means that it has to be vigorously shaken in a very specific way for the solute to be properly imprinted on the water. I read one analysis which said that it had to be shaken exactly thirteen times in each of the three directions of motion: up/down, left/right and back/forth. Another method I've seen is that it has to be banged against a wooden table a certain number of times. Precisely what this does to the structure of the water is never made clear, but homeopathy certainy doesn't "work" without it.

And don't forget the white lab coat, hold it up to the light, and say, "Hmmm." That looks all sciencey and stuff and impresses the rubes to no end. (I supposed you could substitute "Eureka", but that's a little too emotional for these quacks. They like the calm and studied approach. Makes them appear wiser(by far) than they really are.)

[The Atheist]

Now imagine that water does have memory. how does it choose between the healing effects of a subsdtance and the harmful ones. water, an inanimate compound, cannot consciously choose something.
These are simple questions any person with a background in chemistry should be asking. Yet so called homeopaths who claim they have a scientific undertsanding of the principles do not even ask these. if homeopathy falters to these, how will it match up to the tough questions, evidence based and logically sound questions?

Welcome along.

& what FMW said:

@th!nk,
Welcome to the forums. No fair jumping right in and making sense. You have to go over to the Welcome thread where you can be sufficiently razzed and harassed by the practicing professional Razzers and Harassers who reside there. (Good to see you got that shift key fixed by the second post.)(Bolding mine)

And you describe yourself as a Grammar resistance leader.

I've won, haven't I?

Precisely what this does to the structure of the water is never made clear, but homeopathy certainy doesn't "work" without it.

Homeopaths are tea drinkers. If it works with tea - as it demonstrably does - it must work with water. Except you can't read tea leaves with water.

[th!nk]

I never learned to type correctly so i type with two fingers. That's why I make so many spelling and grammar errors. I try to teach myself to type with both hands on the keyboard, but I always stop thanks to force of habit.

I'll be sure to to check out the Welcome Thread so i can be "razzed and harassed". :)

[UnrepentantSinner]

Hmm... Wait.. So you mean I can go to Costco, buy a pallet of bottled water, pour it all together, place in a tiny insignificant drop of.. anything, dole it out as 'drops' or something like that, and sell it all as a stupidly overpriced 'homeopathic' remedy?
You have to DILUTE it. You can't just drop a small amount in water, you have to drop water INTO your "anything", instead.
I think you have to thump it, too.

Open one bottle, place a dab or drop or cat hair (if you're trying to cure allergies) or whatever in it and put it back.
Have the forklift operator drop the pallet on the floor 10 or 15 times.

Meh, that should be good enough... repackage and sell for enormous profit.

[SusanB-M1]

It means you do a 1:100 dilution 30 times. That's 1 part of your "remedy" in 100 parts solvent, mix, take one part out of that and mix it with 100 more parts of solvent. Repeat 28 more times. Chances of having anything other than solvent get pretty astronomical pretty quickly (around 12C or so, I believe).
Oh, I see. Thank you for explaining.
Thank you also, ddt.

[Rolfe]

Open one bottle, place a dab or drop or cat hair (if you're trying to cure allergies) or whatever in it and put it back.
Have the forklift operator drop the pallet on the floor 10 or 15 times.

Meh, that should be good enough... repackage and sell for enormous profit.


No, no, you have to "prove" the remedy "cat hair" first. First thing to do is to give it a really cool name. "Ailuro pillosa" or something like that. Be sure to mix classical languages and mis-spell something.

The you give your preparation to some "provers". No need for too many, half a dozen will do it. And you don't need a control group, "good provers are too valuable to waste on placebos." And you get them to write down every tiny, tedious little detail of their lives for a couple of weeks or more (probably more, actually). And of course they know each other and can communicate with each other while it's all going on. But it's "blinded", because they don't know what is isn't in the remedy you've given them.

Then you gather all the transcripts together and start trawling the data, looking for "themes" that you can relate to allergies of some sort. These needn't be physical symptoms, they could be feelings of aversion, dislike of common items, that sort of thing. Since there will be an enormous amount of tedious, self-obsessed detail (a lot of it in the "too much information!" category), and you know what you're looking for, you should have no trouble finding it.

On the other hand, you may spot a different theme running through some of the scripts. Something that isn't obviously related to allergies. Well, don't let that be a problem. Just market the remedy slanted to the sort of condition that theme seems to evoke.

Or there might be a real coincidence - for example, one prover's aunt may be involved in a train crash during the proving, while another witnesses a road accident. Clearly, this is a powerful property of the remedy, and you need to build on this when deciding on how to market it.

You guys have so little imagination!

Rolfe.

[Belz...]

will anyone notice.. or care?

Probably not. Why ?

[Mojo]

No, no, you have to "prove" the remedy "cat hair" first. First thing to do is to give it a really cool name. "Ailuro pillosa" or something like that. Be sure to mix classical languages and mis-spell something.

The you give your preparation to some "provers". No need for too many, half a dozen will do it. And you don't need a control group, "good provers are too valuable to waste on placebos." And you get them to write down every tiny, tedious little detail of their lives for a couple of weeks or more (probably more, actually). And of course they know each other and can communicate with each other while it's all going on. But it's "blinded", because they don't know what is isn't in the remedy you've given them.

Then you gather all the transcripts together and start trawling the data, looking for "themes" that you can relate to allergies of some sort. These needn't be physical symptoms, they could be feelings of aversion, dislike of common items, that sort of thing. Since there will be an enormous amount of tedious, self-obsessed detail (a lot of it in the "too much information!" category), and you know what you're looking for, you should have no trouble finding it.

On the other hand, you may spot a different theme running through some of the scripts. Something that isn't obviously related to allergies. Well, don't let that be a problem. Just market the remedy slanted to the sort of condition that theme seems to evoke.

Or there might be a real coincidence - for example, one prover's aunt may be involved in a train crash during the proving, while another witnesses a road accident. Clearly, this is a powerful property of the remedy, and you need to build on this when deciding on how to market it.


And whatever you do, don't try a double-blind proving (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1884394)!

[Belz...]

Open one bottle, place a dab or drop or cat hair (if you're trying to cure allergies) or whatever in it and put it back.

Don't forget the eye of newt.

[MRC_Hans]

no, i read that randi wants you to have 20 remedies of X and take 10 of them and wave a magnet over them. he assumes that the magnet will blank out the remedy and now you have to tell what from what.

he came up with the magnet idea because some homeopaths claimed (probably falsely) that a magnetic field wipes out a remedy.

more trickery from mr. magicianAre you really this dense? That may have been Randi's response to some homeopaths who claimes the magnet bit, which is entirely fair as it tests exactly their claim.

If your claim is different, however, then that is what the protocol is built from. ... Provided, obviously, that you have a testable claim at all.

Hans

[Mojo]

And whatever you do, don't try a double-blind proving (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1884394)!


Here's another nice one: Walach H, Sherr J, Schneider R, Shabi R, Bond A, Rieberer G. Homeopathic proving symptoms: result of a local, non-local, or placebo process? A blinded, placebo-controlled pilot study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15532695) Homeopathy. 2004 Oct;93(4):179-85, which managed to conclude that "Homeopathic proving symptoms appear to be specific to the medicine" although the full text (http://www.smeddum.net/downloads/2005_Homeopathy_Proving_Symptoms_Nonlocal.pdf) reveals that "The materia medica expert was not able to determine the correct medicine, either in step 1 (unrestricted choice), or step 2 (restricted choice)". The "materia medica expert" was blinded, and was "an accredited homeopathic physician deemed by the proving supervisor (JS) to be competent for the task since she has been practising in a full time homoeopathy [sic] for 13 years".

[Moochie]

Woahh!


aaaaargh!

Nooooooo, please, stop, I can't take your puissant arguments anymore. Ok, you win, the cheque's in the post... curse your devastating use of the formatting sub menu... sob...

Yuri


Bravo! Well done! Another lovely old word resurrected for modern times!


M.

[MRC_Hans]

that's because all of a sudden everyone's certainty dips below 100%

i think it's rather beautiful. it makes you ask the question, "perhaps i am wrong"


it makes you take a look at studies like ennis 2004 and say, "hmmm, they came up with p<.0001 --- maybe there is some quirky thing going on that we just have not caught on to yet."

Jeesh, what a maroon.

Hans

[Giggywig]

that's because all of a sudden everyone's certainty dips below 100%

i think it's rather beautiful. it makes you ask the question, "perhaps i am wrong"


it makes you take a look at studies like ennis 2004 and say, "hmmm, they came up with p<.0001 --- maybe there is some quirky thing going on that we just have not caught on to yet."Jeesh, what a maroon.

Hans

Meow's certainty cannot dip below 100% because that leads to questions that can only come up with answers that are unacceptable.

[fuelair]

you're kidding, right?
No, he isn't. Memory does not work that way. Water does not have it.

[Frinkiak7]

Don't forget the eye of newt.

I find that a 30C dilution of fillet of a fenny snake (Linguam Bardicus) works wonderfully for anxiety, depression, and getting rid of annoying ghosts on the battlements.

[temporalillusion]

Cmon meow, there should be something that would be truly dangerous, I'm anxious to start taking some stuff.

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Cmon meow, there should be something that would be truly dangerous, I'm anxious to start taking some stuff.

I think the cat has been grabbed by the scrawny scuff of its neck and tossed out the forum door onto the steps. It has apparently used up another of its nine lives -- I don't know how many are left. :D

[Yuri Nalyssus]

Cmon meow, there should be something that would be truly dangerous, I'm anxious to start taking some stuff.
Allow me to recommend some of my favourite remedies for your delectation:

Venus (http://www.btinternet.com/~wellmother/venusbase.htm) (yes, that’s the entire planet)
Seahorse (http://www.nyhomeopathy.com/seahorsesum.htm) (Hippocampus kuda)
Storms (http://www.maryenglish.co.uk/stormremedy1.html) (tempesta)
Antimatter (http://www.hominf.org/posi/posiintr.htm) (positronium) - surely that would have to be fatal, I mean, I've watched star trek y'know.
The Berlin Wall (http://www.biolumanetics.net/tantalus/Cases/BerlinWall.htm)
The peregrine falcon (http://www.hominf.org/articles/posheal.htm) (falco)
A condom (http://www.hominf.org/rubber/rubframe.htm) (latex vulcani)
Mobile phones (http://www.littlemiracle.freeuk.com/#Proving%20of%20Mobile%20Phone%20Radiation)
Nitrogen (http://www.littlemiracle.freeuk.com/#Proving%20of%20Nitrogen)

Nitrogen is one of the best, how you prove that I have no idea, perhaps the provers held their breath for 2 weeks while they were doing it to eliminate confusion by the atmosphere. I’ve got to say though, Berlin Wall is my favourite, this is how the provers reacted:

There was a tremendous intensity of focus which came from an unusual and forceful use (or misuse) of their ‘will’; these individuals had decided that their surrounding environment was hostile and suppressive and chose to create a ‘wall’ of fury that encircled their way of being... Most individuals who benefited dramatically from this remedy, seemed to have taken on a subtle delusion that life was a ‘war zone’ and that the best policy was to engage in pursuits and ideals with a monomaniacal quality. Nevertheless, I discovered that in each of these cases the individual had developed his ‘will’ to an extraordinary degree to pursue his aims, yet at the same time suppressed the emotional aspects of his personality. In each case, too much emotion in a ‘war zone’ showed a weakness that one could ill afford to have, so his use of will was directed with intensity towards an aim at the expense of a normal evolution of the emotional side of his personality.
Some faily distinct symptoms there, you could hardly miss that "metaphorical wall of fury" I would imagine.

Classic stuff.

Yuri

[ravdin]

Sounds weird I know, but antimatter does have valuable medical applications.

See this article on positron emission tomography, aka PET scans.

[I Ratant]

Water! Euuuuuuuuuuuu!
Fish screw in it!

[temporalillusion]

I think the cat has been grabbed by the scrawny scuff of its neck and tossed out the forum door onto the steps. It has apparently used up another of its nine lives -- I don't know how many are left. :D

The cats, well, they always come back.. Often the very next day.


Some faily distinct symptoms there, you could hardly miss that "metaphorical wall of fury" I would imagine.

Classic stuff.

Yuri

LOL awesome! Thanks for that.

[sanguine]

And don't forget the white lab coat, hold it up to the light, and say, "Hmmm." That looks all sciencey and stuff and impresses the rubes to no end.

This is, incidentally, what every photographer always asks any of us to do when they need to do a story on biology. Whereas my normal work clothes (that I'm wearing now) are a t-shirt, pants, closed shoes (no spilling bad things on my feet!), and then gloves and safety glasses as circumstances demand, the "press" model is to have the biologist wearing a white lab coat and either looking at a neat image or pipetting some colored liquid. I have, in fact, knocked together some random colored liquid for that last task before (gel loading buffer is good for this).

[technoextreme]

Just out of curiosity there has never been a scientific theory that actually described how this "phenomenon" works right?

[sanguine]

Just out of curiosity there has never been a scientific theory that actually described how this "phenomenon" works right?

Although I'm not in a position to comment on the actual results of the thermoluminescence paper that was also cited above, in the discussion section its author posits that the compound imparts a unique hydrogen bonding structure to the water, and that this propagates to the other water involved because of the succussing. Of course, that paper also suggests that this "unique" structure continues even when the water has been frozen, which puts it into the zone of frank nuttery, since frozen water has a distinct lattice structure (and in general, this hydrogen-bonding concept is nutty, since hydrogen bonds are necessarily forming and breaking all the time in a fluid).

That's the closest I've seen to a 'theory' that tries to ground itself in the terminology of real chemical knowledge. Otherwise, it's all magical thinking, with 'energy' being imprinted, yet the ocean somehow not being a giant multidrug because you need to smack the water around a little to get it to behave.

[Myriad]

Not necessarily - the idea of "like cures like" is often explained in terms of the remedy stimulating the body to heal by inducing the symptoms of the disease.

Hahnemann's original idea was that material doses of Cinchona bark were an effective treatment for malaria because, in material doses, it appeared to induce the symptoms of malaria in him. From this he jumped to the conclusion that any condition could be treated by a medicine that would normally produce the symptoms the patient was suffering. The dilutions were only introduced later to get around the problem that large doses of drugs that produced symptoms tended to make patients worse.

Modern "provings", in which homoeopaths determine what symptoms a remedy is supposed to treat, use potentised remedies (Hahnemann himself recommended "proving" with 30C remedies in the last two editions of The Organon), not material amounts of the substance from which the remedy is prepared.

The idea that homoeopathy involves highly dilute remedies producing opposite effects to material doses is probably a misconception - in fact the claim is that diluting and succussing the remedies intensifies the effects.


The opposite effect is also implied by the cures in like cures like.

A substance that causes the symptoms of an allergic reaction is supposed to cure an allergic reaction.

I suppose whether or not there's an "opposite effect" depends on whether you consider basophil activation to be an outward symptom of the illness (which introducing the homeopathic substance is expected to mimic, and hence cause basophil activation) or a part of the illness itself (which introducing the homeopathic substance is expected to cure, and hence suppress basophil activation).

This appears to be sufficient to reject homeopathy on a definitional basis alone. When you're observing at the scale of cellular protein chemistry, can any clear distinctions be made between a disease process, and its symptoms?

Respectfully,
Myriad

[Ashles]

Everytime I think of the wondrous claims of Homeopathy
('Like cure Like'... 'Water has a memory'... 'Water only remembers that which is successed exactly right'... 'The more you dilute something, the stronger the effect'... 'The water memory effect somehow works equally with ethanol, sugar and starch'... 'Homeopaths treat the entire person so to prescribe the correct treatment a homeopath needs to meet and talk to the person, yet it also works on children and pets and if you buy stuff from the pharmacy'...)
it always reminds me of the following quote from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy:

If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways—the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

[Rolfe]

I think the cat has been grabbed by the scrawny scuff of its neck and tossed out the forum door onto the steps. It has apparently used up another of its nine lives -- I don't know how many are left. :D


Not that I know of. It's very difficult to prove sockpuppetry after an absence of getting on for three years, to give a wild, unrelated example.

Just saying.

The current incarnation is the sixth life, I reckon.

Rolfe.

[fuelair]

Water! Euuuuuuuuuuuu!
Fish screw in it!
Not exactly - but they do get rid of waste in it!!:D

[meow]

Allow me to recommend some of my favourite remedies for your delectation:

Venus (http://www.btinternet.com/~wellmother/venusbase.htm) (yes, that’s the entire planet)
Seahorse (http://www.nyhomeopathy.com/seahorsesum.htm) (Hippocampus kuda)
Storms (http://www.maryenglish.co.uk/stormremedy1.html) (tempesta)
Antimatter (http://www.hominf.org/posi/posiintr.htm) (positronium) - surely that would have to be fatal, I mean, I've watched star trek y'know.
The Berlin Wall (http://www.biolumanetics.net/tantalus/Cases/BerlinWall.htm)
The peregrine falcon (http://www.hominf.org/articles/posheal.htm) (falco)
A condom (http://www.hominf.org/rubber/rubframe.htm) (latex vulcani)
Mobile phones (http://www.littlemiracle.freeuk.com/#Proving%20of%20Mobile%20Phone%20Radiation)
Nitrogen (http://www.littlemiracle.freeuk.com/#Proving%20of%20Nitrogen)

Nitrogen is one of the best, how you prove that I have no idea, perhaps the provers held their breath for 2 weeks while they were doing it to eliminate confusion by the atmosphere. I’ve got to say though, Berlin Wall is my favourite, this is how the provers reacted:


Some faily distinct symptoms there, you could hardly miss that "metaphorical wall of fury" I would imagine.

Classic stuff.

Yuri



my only comment on this is that homeopathy attracts a lot of flakes. yet the fact remains that polar solvents have a memory of sorts, rustum roy and many others have shown this to be true.

continue to bury your head in the sand and ignore the research.
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=4506792#post4506792

Replaced with link to post where same material was posted. Please do not spam the forum by repeatedly posting the same large blocks of text.

[paximperium]

So Meow do you have any insights or even thoughts of these studies or are you just posting them for fun?

People are still waiting for you to tell us what the meaning of a p-value is.

[meow]

So Meow do you have any insights or even thoughts of these studies or are you just posting them for fun?

People are still waiting for you to tell us what the meaning of a p-value is.
p stands for the peter effect

[Evilgiraffe]

p stands for the peter effect

Really?

I had no idea that how the reading habits of literacy teachers affects their ability to do their jobs had any relevance to the statistics of clinical trials*.

I guess you really do learn something new every day.

*No, I have no idea what meow is on about either. The only occurence of a "peter effect" I can find comes from Applegate & Applegate, The Peter effect: Reading habits and attitudes of preservice teachers, READING TEACHER, 2004, 57 (6), 554-563

[paximperium]

p stands for the peter effect
Are you trying to come off as an idiot or was a lame attempt to hide the fact that you have no idea what a p-value is?

[Mojo]

my only comment on this is that homeopathy attracts a lot of flakes.


The multicolored and differently sized text they often use is a bit of a giveaway.

[slingblade]

Perhaps Meow meant the "Peter Principle," instead? It seems somehow apt... :p

[UnrepentantSinner]

p stands for the peter effect

Are you trying to come off as an idiot or was a lame attempt to hide the fact that you have no idea what a p-value is?

Maybe it's something like the Jamal effect (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=benveniste+Jamal+effect) that Jacques Benveniste claimed was effecting his DigiBio experiments for DARPA.

[MRC_Hans]

p stands for the peter effect

OMG!

Meow, did you know that I originally looked into homeopathy because I was genuinely interested to see if there was something there?

Do you know who convinced me there was not??

Hans

[arthwollipot]

Perhaps Meow meant the "Peter Principle," instead? It seems somehow apt... :pAhhhh hah hah hahahahah hhahhahahhahhhhhh... hahahhaaaaa... haha...

haha.

Mfff.

Yeah. That.

Woof.

[ElMondoHummus]

Can I ask a really stupid ****** question? How in the world do homeopaths justify the concept of water memory in the face of Brownian motion?

On top of that (here's a second stupid ****** question): Given that the predominant force at the molecular level would be the Van Der Waals interactions, how does a homeopath justify the notion of water memory? Because say what you will about water "forming" around the molecules of the original substance, once you've diluted down to the point where there are no molecules of that original substance down, there's nothing keeping simple VDW forces from "collapsing" water back down to fill the "hole", and if somehow a structure around the hole was maintained - much as, say, a "hole" can exist around where an object lay under collapsed roof of a building or cave - what about the preparation could possibly freeze that in place? The simple mechanical act of adding more water would disrupt things, I would think; no matter how gently it was added, at the molecular level there would still be disruption from the incoming water flow. And hell, let's go back to Brownian motion; there's still random motion from mere room temperature; it's not like water is at it's freezing point here and therefore the molecules are fixed in place. How are VDW forces prevented from keeping water molecules from re-forming normal water-to-water dimers?

I'm serious here; I'm not trying to disguise an argument against homeopathy backhandedly by asking rhetorical questions. I'm genuinely curious how homeopaths argue their case in the light of both Brownian motion and the lack of mechanism by which VDWs forces are prevented from "collapsing" the water molecules back together. There's a contradiction there that I've not seen any answers to. All I ever see is a handwave about "energizing" water, which is no answer.

[Mojo]

Bugger! I had been banging mine on the Bible as I was told to.


Is that some sort of euphemism?

[Yuri Nalyssus]

Is that some sort of euphemism?
Something to do with religious nuts I imagine :D.

Yuri

[Pipirr]

Roy keeps getting a mention as proof for the memory of water, even though his published paper was on ethanol, which is not water.

Regardless, Rao, Roy et al. proposed that different remedies could be distinguished from each other using a spectrophotometer, which is a very simple piece of lab equipment.

Most labs have one. Some schools have one. Replicating Rao et al. is school science fair stuff; in fact, doing a better job than Rao et al. is well within the powers of most high schoolers, with just a rudimentary understanding of statistics.

So I say bring on the replications, homeopaths! You don't need tricky basophils, flow cytometers, low temperature fluorescence, liquid nitrogen or high pressures. You just need your remedies, the ethanol stock from which they were prepared, and a UV-VIS spectrophotometer. It really is easy.

So... what's holding you back? It's been two years now.

[Meadmaker]

the entire prize is a fraud and will never be won.


She's half right.

[tsig]

Can I ask a really stupid ****** question? How in the world do homeopaths justify the concept of water memory in the face of Brownian motion?

On top of that (here's a second stupid ****** question): Given that the predominant force at the molecular level would be the Van Der Waals interactions, how does a homeopath justify the notion of water memory? Because say what you will about water "forming" around the molecules of the original substance, once you've diluted down to the point where there are no molecules of that original substance down, there's nothing keeping simple VDW forces from "collapsing" water back down to fill the "hole", and if somehow a structure around the hole was maintained - much as, say, a "hole" can exist around where an object lay under collapsed roof of a building or cave - what about the preparation could possibly freeze that in place? The simple mechanical act of adding more water would disrupt things, I would think; no matter how gently it was added, at the molecular level there would still be disruption from the incoming water flow. And hell, let's go back to Brownian motion; there's still random motion from mere room temperature; it's not like water is at it's freezing point here and therefore the molecules are fixed in place. How are VDW forces prevented from keeping water molecules from re-forming normal water-to-water dimers?

I'm serious here; I'm not trying to disguise an argument against homeopathy backhandedly by asking rhetorical questions. I'm genuinely curious how homeopaths argue their case in the light of both Brownian motion and the lack of mechanism by which VDWs forces are prevented from "collapsing" the water molecules back together. There's a contradiction there that I've not seen any answers to. All I ever see is a handwave about "energizing" water, which is no answer.

I see you are still wedded to your "Pathetic level of details" and are missing the forest for the trees.

Teh substance achieves quantum entanglement by being percussed by a practicioner who is in harmonic alignment with the energy orientation of the cosmos. This entanglement then allows both the Brownian and the VDW forces to be used to vectorially align the molecules of water to act as desired.

For further study buy my book "QM and Me, a story of entanglement"

[Evilgiraffe]

Given that the predominant force at the molecular level would be the Van Der Waals interactions

[unnecessary technical pedantry]

The dominant force in water is not Van der Waals' but hydrogen bonding. Van der Waals' forces are instantaneous dipole-induced dipole interactions. These instantaneous dipoles arise when the electrons within a molecule find themselves unequally distributed giving a charge separation from one end of the molecule to the other. This can then affect the distribution of electrons in nearby molecules giving rise to an induced dipole. This pair of dipoles will then attract one another.

The difference in electronegativity* between oxygen and hydrogen and the asymmetric shape of the water molecule means that electrons in water are always unequally distributed hence water has a permanent dipole. The oxygen atoms have a slight excess of electronic charge and are therefore slightly negative whilst the hydrogen atoms are slightly positive. As a result water tends to adopt configurations in which hydrogen atoms point at oxygen atoms on neighbouring molecules as though there were a weak chemical bond between the two molecules. Hydrogen bonds are pretty weak compared to proper covalent bonds and are transient.

* The tendency of an element to attract electrons in a bond towards itself

[/unnecessary technical pedantry]

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Is that some sort of euphemism?

;)

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Something to do with religious nuts I imagine :D.

Yuri

;)2

[sanguine]

The dominant force in water is not Van der Waals' but hydrogen bonding.

Now, if we were making homeopathic preparations in hexane...

:)

[tsig]

;)

Only if you're into homopathy.

[quarky]

I found myself defending water to some Rudolph Steiner groupies a while back. They are very fascinated with vortexes, and how water 'wants' to travel in certain ways. They even have a water 'purifying' device that involves vortexes.

I mentioned the typical carpenter's level, and how we make use of water's tendency to level itself; that the twisted paths of small streams was due to the obstacles and resistance; that a water droplet would fall straight in a vacuum; etc...to no avail.

[Moochie]

Deleted.


M.

[Paulhoff]

Ozfio_e1Xj0

bMDV-4KGWi8

5SMegB9-QUk

bxnaSNkKOvo

QPOK3f1OoBg

http://forums.randi.org/picture.php?albumid=37&pictureid=179

Paul

:) :) :)

[Madalch]

[unnecessary technical pedantry]

The dominant force in water is not Van der Waals' but hydrogen bonding. Van der Waals' forces are instantaneous dipole-induced dipole interactions. These instantaneous dipoles arise when the electrons within a molecule find themselves unequally distributed giving a charge separation from one end of the molecule to the other.

Being even more pedantic, those are London forces. van der Waals' forces include London forces but also other attractions, IIRC.

[logical muse]

Meow, you've 'dared' people to take homeopathy remedies several times a day for prolonged periods, with warnings that it will 'mess them up'.

I'd like to try this. Can you advise on which remedy I should take, and exactly how it will mess me up? Also, can you offer some guarantee that it will mess me up? I don't want to waste my time, or yours.

I'm serious. I will do this and blog about it.

[Evilgiraffe]

Being even more pedantic, those are London forces. van der Waals' forces include London forces but also other attractions, IIRC.

You're right, as usual, Madalch.

The problem with the term "van der Waals' forces" is that there is almost no concensus as to what they actually comprise. Instantaneous dipole - induced dipole, permanent dipole - induced dipole and permanent dipole - permanent dipole can all be classified as "van der Waals'" depending on who you talk to. The term is nebulous to the point of uselessness.

I think the prejudices of my university professors are showing :blush:

[Moochie]

Ozfio_e1Xj0

bMDV-4KGWi8

5SMegB9-QUk

bxnaSNkKOvo

QPOK3f1OoBg

http://forums.randi.org/picture.php?albumid=37&pictureid=179

Paul

:) :) :)


Thanks for putting this in one place, Paul. I've just finished watching, and I guess the telling phrase comes in the last sentence on the soundtrack: "Homeopathy is impossible."

Interesting stuff.


M.

[wexer9]

It does. That's why they put chlorine in it...
Yes, but even after the chlorine removed the bad stuff, it should "remember" the bad stuff.
But we're safe because water memory is hooey! Bunk, even.

[Dave_46]

You're right, as usual, Madalch.

The problem with the term "van der Waals' forces" is that there is almost no concensus as to what they actually comprise. Instantaneous dipole - induced dipole, permanent dipole - induced dipole and permanent dipole - permanent dipole can all be classified as "van der Waals'" depending on who you talk to. The term is nebulous to the point of uselessness.

I think the prejudices of my university professors are showing :blush:

My bolding. This is what makes it an ideal phrase for the homoeopathetic practitioners to use. You've given them new BS terminology.

Dave

[Evilgiraffe]

You've given them new BS terminology.

Bah.

Water's weird and fascinating enough without homeo-woos giving it magical healing properties.

In any case, the whole mechanism by which homeopathy works is rendered completely moot since not one of them has ever shown that it does actually work better than placebo.

[ElMondoHummus]

I see you are still wedded to your "Pathetic level of details" and are missing the forest for the trees.


ACCCCK! That's my problem! :eek:

;)

[unnecessary technical pedantry]

The dominant force in water is not Van der Waals' but hydrogen bonding.

:mgduh D'oh! Can you tell it's been well over a decade since my last chemistry course? :o


ETA:
You're right, as usual, Madalch.

The problem with the term "van der Waals' forces" is that there is almost no concensus as to what they actually comprise. Instantaneous dipole - induced dipole, permanent dipole - induced dipole and permanent dipole - permanent dipole can all be classified as "van der Waals'" depending on who you talk to. The term is nebulous to the point of uselessness.

I think the prejudices of my university professors are showing :blush:

I did remember something more or less correctly? I protest! You're destroying my excuse nebulous claim self-diagnosis of early-onset senility! :D

[Madalch]

You're right, as usual, Madalch.

The problem with the term "van der Waals' forces" is that there is almost no concensus as to what they actually comprise. Instantaneous dipole - induced dipole, permanent dipole - induced dipole and permanent dipole - permanent dipole can all be classified as "van der Waals'" depending on who you talk to. The term is nebulous to the point of uselessness.

I consider it to include "forces that can be observed in the gas phase, and may force one to use the van der Waals eq'n instead of the ideal gas law in order to correct for them". So ionic attractions and covalent bonds are out, but everything else pretty much applies.

Whether or not the rest of the physico-chemical community agrees with that definition or not is irrelevant, since I rarely speak to them. It works for me.

[Evilgiraffe]

Pragmatism rules!

The professor who was most upset by the term is a hardcore theorist. I think that bundling all of the forces into a single "van der Waals'" term in her models upset her sensibilities. Why use a a single term when there are well known and understood functional forms for each of the separate interactions?

[Madalch]

The professor who was most upset by the term is a hardcore theorist. I think that bundling all of the forces into a single "van der Waals'" term in her models upset her sensibilities. Why use a a single term when there are well known and understood functional forms for each of the separate interactions?
Because they can all be summed up into a single term (P + an2/V2) in the van der Waals' Equation.

[Paulhoff]

A million dollars (U.S.) for someone to prove that Water has memory, and the money waits.

Paul

:) :) :)

[Gord_in_Toronto]

A million dollars (U.S.) for someone to prove that Water has memory, and the money waits.

Paul

:) :) :)

I have a memory of Water http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240200/
does this count? ;)

[CORed]

I remember water. It was before I discovered beer.

I like water. It's good for diluting whiskey (but definitely not to homeopathic ratios),

[meow]

A million dollars (U.S.) for someone to prove that Water has memory, and the money waits.

Paul

:) :) :)


rustum roy has successfully proven that water has memory.



http://www.rustumroy.com/May%2016th%20Webinar.pdf


The defining role of structure (including epitaxy)
in the plausibility of homeopathy, Manju Lata Rao, Rustum Roy, Iris R Bell,and Richard Hoover, Homeopathy (2007) 96, pp. 175–182.

Webinar with Prof. Rustum Roy and Prof. Iris Bell on recent research in materials science which shows physical evidence for unique dosage and remedy signatures in water.

May 16, 2007

by Prof. Rustom Roy and Iris Bell, MD, PhD
Roy's laboratory has found, using multiple testing methods, that not only do different remedy dilutions in excess of Avogadro's number carry unique characteristic signatures, but different potencies do as well!

These results will not only serve to prove to the scientific community that homeopathic medicines are not placebo medicine, but they also will provide a way for the homeopathic pharmacies to assure the nature and quality of their products.

================================================== =================


http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15594862

New physico-chemical properties of extremely diluted aqueous solutions
Auteur(s) / Author(s)
ELIA V. (1) ; NICCOLI M. (1) ;
Affiliation(s) du ou des auteurs / Author(s) Affiliation(s)
(1) Department of Chemistry, University ' Federico II'of Naples, Complesso Universitario di Monte S. Angelo, via Cintia, 80126 Naples, ITALIE
Résumé / Abstract
Here we thus show that successive dilutions and succussions can permanently alter the physico-chemical properties of the water solvent. The nature of the phenomena here described still remains unexplained, nevertheless some significant experimental results were obtained.
Revue / Journal Title
Journal of thermal analysis and calorimetry ISSN 1388-6150
Source / Source
2004, vol. 75, no3, pp. 815-836 [22 page(s) (article)] (32 ref.)

================================================== =======================

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15105967

1: Inflamm Res. 2004 May;53(5):181-8. Epub 2004 Apr 21.Click here to read Links
Histamine dilutions modulate basophil activation.
Belon P, Cumps J, Ennis M, Mannaioni PF, Roberfroid M, Sainte-Laudy J, Wiegant FA.

Boiron, 20 rue de la Libération, 69110 Sainte-Foy-Les-Lyon, France.
CONCLUSIONS: In 3 different types of experiment, it has been shown that high dilutions of histamine may indeed exert an effect on basophil activity. This activity observed by staining basophils with alcian blue was confirmed by flow cytometry. Inhibition by histamine was reversed by anti-H2 and was not observed with histidine these results being in favour of the specificity of this effect We are however unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.

p<.0001

[athon]

Meow, can you do any other tricks? I've seen you post these studies over and over, and even made them pretty and colourful...but I'm wondering if you understand them well enough to discuss them.

Let's start with 'sanguine's detailed critique. You can respond to that, if you can follow it. If not, please, continue to spam the boards with the same thing. Maybe if you put it up a few more times, somebody will spontaneously come around. :rolleyes:

Athon

[Pipirr]

rustum roy has successfully proven that water has memory.

The defining role of structure (including epitaxy)
in the plausibility of homeopathy, Manju Lata Rao, Rustum Roy, Iris R Bell,and Richard Hoover, Homeopathy (2007) 96, pp. 175–182.



That paper was on ethanol, not water.

Try drinking a litre of ethanol. There's definitely a difference.

[Mojo]

That paper was on ethanol, not water.


And didn't prove anything, as anyone capable of understanding the published criticisms of the paper would realize.

[Paulhoff]

rustum roy has successfully proven that water has memory.
Oh, really, did you watch the videos I posted above, a million dollars (U.S.) is just waiting for him.

Paul

:) :) :)

[JimBenArm]

p<.0001
Man, if your pee is red, you need to get to the doctor, pronto! And if this is all the pee you can do, maybe a prostate exam is in order as well.

A long, slow prostate exam. Yeah.

[Rolfe]

I think it's a she, actually.

Rolfe.

[Hellbound]

I think it's a she, actually.

Rolfe.

Nah, it's a he diluted to 500C potentcy.

:D

[Skwinty]

Water does have a memory, it never forgets to be wet:)

[Rolfe]

It also remembers the shape it was in, once you take it out of the freezer.

For a little while, anyway.

Rolfe.

[Giggywig]

I wonder what it feels like to be soooo wrong that you feel compelled to use lots of colors and font sizes as a last recourse to try to make your point.

[Paulhoff]

never mind

Paul

[JimBenArm]

I think it's a she, actually.

Rolfe.
So? Doesn't mean that she couldn't have a prostate exam. Just would take extra long, to try to find it.

[quarky]

ethanol's memory is more vindictive than water's.

[Mojo]

It also remembers the shape it was in, once you take it out of the freezer.

For a little while, anyway.


See: Paolo Bellavite, M.D. and Andrea Signorini, M.D., The Emerging Science of Homeopathy: Complexity, Biodynamics, and Nanopharmacology, 2002, pp.68-69

[Rolfe]

Mojo, I know I could rely on you! :D

Rolfe.

[MRC_Hans]

I have been wondering for some time if some of the results that are listed in favor of homeopathy could be due to the MAS effect ;).

MAS (Dr. MAS to certain people in Pakistan) loves to claim that there is molecules in homeopathic delusions .. sorry dilutions. He supported that with pictures of dirty labs in Pakistan, but looking at what was supposedly Ennis' lab in the Horizon video, made me think that the same thing could be happening there: It does actually require extraordinarily rigourous lab practices to reach even fairly moderate homeopathc levels.

If the preparation of the verum is even s little bit sloppy, there could easily be some of the active substance present in what was supposed to be diluted past the Avogadro limit. When you then use an extremely sensitive method, such as basophil/histamine interaction, you might actually be able to distinguish this not entirely inactive dilution from the control.

Such an error may have foiled many of the experiments made.

ETA: Notice the neat twist in the Horizon protocol: At around 6C (already a quite astronomic dilution), the samples were randomized, and further serial dilution was performed on both verum and controls in the same process. This means that any systematic error due to inadequate lab practice would be randomized, and thus without effect.

That was a very neat experimental design!

Hans

[quarky]

ethanol's memory is more vindictive than water's.

[Yuri Nalyssus]

It also remembers the shape it was in, once you take it out of the freezer.

For a little while, anyway.

Rolfe.
So you're saying water is confused ice, I like that concept.

Yuri

[skyhand]

Meow's red p is quite irritating, but has awakened memories of over 30 years ago. I wasn't a very serious chem. major and my attention was more focused towards the social part of college, so the finer points of statistics is pretty foggy. I can't remember all the math involved. I can remember some parts of the lectures of things that make the statistics mean something. These are the things I can't see in red: the design of the experiment, collecting the data, analyzing the data, interpreting the results, the control group, sample size, negatives rejected etc.

[I Ratant]

ethanol's memory is more vindictive than water's.
.
Considering the way you're gonna treat it in the morning, wouldn't you raise a fuss yourself, if you were ethanol?