Homeopathy - what does water remember?

Homeopathy is nothing but quackery. It is a practice designed to relieve you from you money without actually doing any good to you (if we discount the placebo effect). So far there hasn’t been any solid scientific proof that homeopathy works, despite the prize of million dollars offered by James Randi to anyone who could prove otherwise. The main problem here is that solid science can’t do much to change people’s minds when it comes to homeopathy. For that reason, it might be better to examine the origins of homeopathy instead.

It all begun with Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), a physician from Germany who was appalled by medical practices from his day, such as leeching and bloodletting. Quite understandably he began to seek alternative therapies.  The word “homeopathy” is derived from two Greek words, homoisos (meaning similar) and pathos (disease). Hahnemann’s basic idea was that the symptoms of a disease can be cured by very small amounts of substances which cause similar effect in healthy people when taken in large amounts. He claimed that diseases are disturbances in body’s self healing abilities and chronic diseases are manifestations of a suppressed itch, which is a kind of miasma or evil spirit. In the beginning Hahnemann used small doses of medications, but later he started diluting them enormously and he claimed that the lower the dose the more powerful the effect. Today we call this the “law of infinitesimals”.

We know now that 18 century medicine didn’t have very good understanding of physiology and these kinds of claims look ridiculous. We also know that the dose response is completely opposite of what Hahnemann claimed. Another crucial information that he lacked was that all matter is composed out of atoms and molecules. Years later, when the structure of matter was discovered it was possible to calculate the number of molecules in a given amount of substance and the calculations proved that those “highly potent” homeopathic meds that are diluted beyond any reason don’t actually contain a single molecule of the active substance. By that time homeopathy was already well established business and in order to keep it running, the protagonists of homeopathy came up with “memory effect”.

According to this ridiculous notion, that wasn’t even mentioned before the existence of molecules was known, water “remembers” what has been put into it and it miraculously keeps those “healing powers”.

Now, consider this – “highly potent” homeopathic dilutions are more diluted than the solution you would get by placing a drop of some substance in the World Ocean. In other words all the water on this planet is not enough to give you the level of dilution found in homeopathic drugs (that is why they dilute in steps, up to 30 steps for those “potent” drugs). If the water really “remembers” that active substance then it should also “remember” many other things. So, do you believe that the water you just drank “remembered” the content of your toilet from several years ago? If you believe in homeopathy and the memory of water, you must believe this too.