FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH IN ULTRA mGH DILUTION AND HOMOEOPATHY

Fundamental Research in Ultra High Dilution and Homoeopathy

edited by

Jurgen Schulte Vepartment of Applied Physics, University ofTechnology, Sydney, Australia

and

P. Christian End1er Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Homoeopathy, Graz, Austria

SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-94-010-6484-2 ISBN 978-94-011-5878-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-5878-7

Printed on acid-free paper

An Rights Reserved © 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Origina1ly published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998 Softcoverreprint ofthe hardcover lst edition 1998 as specified on appropriate pages within. No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

To my mother.

Jurgen Schulte

This work has been supported in parts by

The Pro·Vice Chancellor Discretional Fund,

University of Technology, Sydney,

and

The Bundesministerium fur

Wissenschaft und Verkehr, Vienna.

viii

Jurgen Schulte, Dr Sci, is Director of Physical Sciences at the Ludwig Boltzmann Research Site for Low Energy Bioinformation in Graz (Austria), Lecturer in Applied Physics at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Member of the UTS Centre for Materials Technology and Member of the UTS Centre of Biomedical Technology as well as consultant to the European Union research subcommittee HOMEOMED.

P. Christian Endler, Dr Phi~ is Director of Biological Sciences and of Administration at the Ludwig Boltzmann Research Site for Low Energy Bioinformation in Graz (Austria), Research Associate at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Homoeopathy in Graz, and Associate Professor at the Institute for Holistic Medicine at the University ofUrbino (Italy). He is Member of the International Group for High Dilution Research (GIRl), as well as consultant to a European Union working group for the program BlOMED.

CONTENTS

PREFATORY WORD ...................................................................................................... Xl

PREFACE ......................................................................................................................... 1

FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH IN ULTRA ruGH DILUTION AND HOMOEOPATHY ................ 3

JURGEN SCHULTE AND CHRISTIAN ENDLER

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF HOMOEOPATHY ........... 9

THE EUROPEAN COMMITTEE FOR HOMOEOPATHY

A STRATEGY FOR RESEARCH INTO HOMOEOPATHY .................................................... 19

FRED WIEGANT, DICK KOSTER, TON NICOLAI

BIO-INFORMATION BETWEEN QUANTUM AND CONTINUUM PHYSICS .......................... .45

THE MESOSCOPIC PICTURE

JURGEN SCHULTE

BIOENERGETICS AND THE COHERENCE OF ORGANISMS .............................................. 69

MAE-WANHo

COHERENT ELECTRODYNAMICS IN WATER .................................................................. 89

E. DEL GIUDICE AND G. PREPARATA

PATHOLOGY, COMPLEX SYSTEMS, AND RESONANCE ................................................ 105

PAOLO BELLA VITB AND ANDREA SIGNORINI

INTERACTIVITY, FEEDBACK AND CHAOS CONTROL ............................................... 117

K. W.KRATKY

BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS .............................................. 127

PAOLO BELLA VITB AND ANDREA SIGNORINI

x TABLE OF CONTENTS

HIGHLY DILUTED AGITATED SILVER NITRATE AND WHEAT SEEDUNG DEVELOPMENT ..

EFFECT KINETICS OF A PROCESS OF SUCCESSIVE AGITATION PHASES .................... 143

WALTRAUD PONGRATZ, ANDREA NOGRASEK, CHRISTIAN ENDLER

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF AMPHIBIANS AND INFORMATION OF THYROXIN STORAGE VIA THE BIPOLAR FLUID WATER AND ON A TECHNICAL DATA CARRIER; TRANSFERENCE VIA AN ELECTRONIC AMPLIFIER ..................................................... 155

PC ENDLER, C HECKMANN. E LAUPPERT, W PONGRATZ, J ALEX, D DIETERLE,

C LUKITSCH, C VINATTIERI, CW SMITH, F SENEKOWITSCH, H MOELLER, J SCHULTE

FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH INTO HIGH DILUTION EFFECTS ....................................... 189

A CLASSIFICATION OF NON-CLINICAL RESEARCH TOPICS

CHRISTIAN ENDLER

STIMULATION OF CELLULAR DEFENCE AND RECOVERY BY SUBHARMFUL DOSES OF TOXICANTS THE HOMOLOGOUS COMPONENT OF THE SIMILIA PRINCIPLE ................ 215

R. VAN WUK AND F.A.C. WIEGANT

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION IN LIVING ORGANISMS .................................. 229

MADELEINE BASTIDE

ARE THE CLINICAL EFFECTS OF HOMOEOPATHY PLACEBO EFFECTS? ...................... 241

REVIEWING THE EVIDENCE ON HOMOEOPATHY

KLAus LINDE

GLOSSARY .................................................................................................................. 253

UST OF AUTHORS ....................................................................................................... 257

INDEX .......................................................................................................................... 259

PREFATORY WORD

THE INFORMATION MEDICINE HYPOTHESIS

Peter Fisher

Of all the so-called 'complementary' or 'alternative' therapies, homoeopathy poses by

far the greatest challenge to current scientific understanding. At least, it challenges

scientific understanding if you believe there is anything particular to understand.

Although many doctors concede that patients often feel that they have been helped by

homoeopathy, the prevailing consensus in the medical and scientific community has

long been that any improvements attributed by patients to homoeopathy are, in fact,

entirely due to 'placebo' or non-specific effects. In other words homoeopathic

medicines have no real effect, the results experienced by patients are entirely due to

expectation, suggestion, encouragement, psychotherapy, plain good advice or other

factors associated with the process of homoeopathic treatment.

However, the evidence of recent placebo-controlled clinical research makes it quite clear

that this is not an adequate explanation. The metanalysis of clinical trials of

homoeopatby by Linde et al, which forms the final contribution to this volume, is of

high quality, and concludes unequivocally that the effects of homoeopathy cannot be

attributed solely to placebo effects. Two previous independent surveys of the clinical

research literature have come to similar, positive conclusions. Yet homoeopathy

remains highly controversial, and has been accused of violating scientific laws,

including the most fundamental, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is

claimed that acceptance of homoeopathy would entail 'rewriting the textbooks'. Why

exactly is it that the claims made for homoeopathy provoke such scepticism? In order

to understand this, we need to examine certain assumptions which underlie the current

biomedical paradigm and which appear to conflict with homoeopathy.

Homoeopathy is a pharmaceutical therapy in the sense that it involves the

administration, usually by mouth, of medicines. For most doctors, pharmacologists

and other medical scientists, drugs are necessarily chemical. The idea of medicines

XI

xii PREFATORY WORD

acting in any other way than by some form of chemical reaction has never arisen for

most doctors and medical scientists and appears bizarre, if only because it is so

unfamiliar. Current pharmacological concepts are dominated by the so-called 'lock-and­

key' model of drug action, in which a drug molecule (the key) interacts with a receptor

molecule (the lock), 'turning', or, more commonly, 'jamming' it. Other models of

drug action, such as differential toxicity (as with antibiotics and cytotoxic drugs) can be

identified, but all depend on the chemical action of drug molecules.

The core of the controversy surrounding homoeopathy is its use of very high dilutions.

Homoeopathic medicines are prepared by a process, sometimes known as dynamisation

or potentization, which involves serial dilution with succussion. Succussion is

vigorous shaking, with striking against an elastic surface (traditionally a leather-bound

book). Although the substances to be diluted and the diluents are precisely specifIed in

homoeopathic pharmacopoeias, surprisingly, there is no standardisation of the rate or

amplitude of succussion. The dilutions are usually prepared in steps of 1:10 (denoted x

or dH) or 1:100 (c or cH). Dilutions of 30eH and higher are in common use by

homoeopaths.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of chemistry will appreciate that this is a problem for

those for whom medicines are chemicals: a 30e dilution is 10-60 of the starting material.

Avogadro's Constant, the number of particles (atoms or molecules) in a gram mole of

any substance, is of the order of 10-23 • The implication is clear, and not disputed by

homoeopaths: any dilution above 23x or 12c is very unlikely to contain even a single

molecule of the starting substance, whose name appears on the label. Such dilutions

are termed ultramolecular. In practice the ultramolecular limit is passed at much lower

dilutions for many substances (because of initial concentration etc). In any case the

sources of many homoeopathic medicines are complex mixtures of molecules of

variable molecular weight and concentration. Even for pure substances of known

molecular weight and concentration the 'ultramolecular limit' can only be stated in terms

of probability.

Clearly, the mechanism of action of homoeopathy cannot be a key-and-lock interaction,

since there is no 'key'. To those accustomed to thinking of the action of medicines in

exclusively chemical terms, this appears to be an excellent reason why homoeopathy

cannot possibly have any real effect. So deep-rooted and unquestioned is the

assumption that medicines must act by chemical means that the tone of criticism of

P. FISHER xiii

homoeopathy has sometimes gone well beyond expressions of scepticism, and has

instead been couched in emotive terms, inappropriate to scientific discourse.

A more rational strand of criticism is based on Bayes Theorem, whereby the probability

of a proposition being true can be calculated from its 'prior' probability and the

strength of the evidence, to give a 'posterior' probability. In other words, implausible

propositions require strong proof in order to be accepted. Of course, 'plausibility' may

be somewhat arbitrary, and vary between individuals. In the case of homoeopathy one

could frequently substitute 'unfamiliar' for 'implausible'. Nevertheless scepticism

concerning homoeopathy is greatly amplified by the lack of a generally accepted

theoretical framework to account for the effects observed in placebo-controlled clinical

trials. From the Bayesian perspective, there are two ways in which the scientific

impasse around homoeopathy might be resolved: either more and stronger empirical

evidence; or a plausible theoretical framework, which would increase the prior

probability.

In the last few years, opinion within the homoeopathic scientific community has

converged around the 'Information Medicine hypothesis', as the most promising

theoretical approach to the mode of action of homoeopathic medicine. The Information

Medicine hypothesis can be simply stated as: 'Water, (and perhaps other polar

solvents), can under certain conditions, retain information about substances with which

they have previously been in contact, and subsequently transmit this information to

presensitized biosystems.' In this conception, the medicine is physical rather than

chemical in nature, and its action is understood in terms of cybernetic processes,

instead of key and lock interactions. This accounts for the basic principle of

homoeopathy, the treatment of 'like with like' (similia similibus curentur), in terms of

regulatory feedback, as well as the problem of ultramolecular dilutions.

The Information Medicine hypothesis has two essential components: the storage of

information by water, and its reception and processing by biological systems. If the

former has been little investigated, the latter is, if anything, even less explored!

Although information processing by biosystems has been extensively investigated at the

neurological and genetic levels, relatively little work has been done at the inter- and

intracellular level, and again it is generally assumed that communication at this level is

exclusively chemical. Fundamental Research in Ultra High Dilution and Homoeopathy

brings together a series of contributions which examine these two aspects of the

Information Medicine hypothesis, their interfaces and implications.

xiv PREFATORY WORD

The popularity of homoeopathy is growing worldwide, and its potential is increasingly

recognised, but for too long it has languished in a scientific limbo, for lack of a

coherent, plausible theoretical underpinning. In this and their previous bookl, Jurgen

Schulte and Christian Endler have assembled a group of high-level authors of diverse

backgrounds who are prepared to confront the challenging scientific problems posed by

homoeopathy. This is an exciting book about an exciting area of scientific endeavour,

it marks an important step in the opening up of a whole new domain of biomedical

knowledge. I strongly recommend Funtkunental Research in Ultra High Dilution and

Honweopathy to anybody interested in grasping current theoretical and basic research

aspects of this fast-evolving area of science.

Peter Fisher Director of Research Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital Great Onnond Street London WCIN 3HR England

Fax +44 171 833 7212 Email pfisher@gn.apc.org

1 Endler P and Schulte J eds., Ultra High Dilution: Physiology and Physics. Kluwer, Dordrecht 1994.

PREFACE

Jurgen Schulte and Christian Endler met in 1990 at an international conference on the

Structure of Water held in the Lecture Halls of the University of Graz (Austria).

Disappointed by the lack of a systematic strategy of research into the physics of

homoeopathy Jurgen Schulte started to work on the establishment of scientifically

acceptable research standards in physics of homoeopathy and encouraged academic

researchers to establish a coordinated and focused research strategy. In 1994, with the

help of major representatives of the international research community, they edited one

of the fIrst academic interdisciplinary books on Ultra High Dilution and homoeopathy

that underwent a rigorous scientific international referee process before publishing. Due

to the dedicated help of the prominent referees (BD Josephson, Nobel Laureate,

Cavendish Lab., Cambridge; M Bastide, Fac de Pharmacy, University Montpellier; RG

Jahn, Aerospace Science, Princeton University), the book 1994 was quickly

considered a mile stone and turning point for the scientific approach of research into

Ultra High Dilution and homoeopathy. Since then the academic research community

has grown considerably and many international conferences have been held. Today,

research into homoeopathy is to be accepted by the European Union as part of the

academic sciences, worthy to be funded at European Union level; an effort that took

many years of research coordination and research strategy development. Excerpts of the

Research Strategy of the European Committee for Homoeopathy (ECH) have been

included in this book.

In this volume we present a collection of current efforts addressing the fundamental

problem in homoeopathy and Ultra High Dilution research, namely the concept of

biologically relevant information transfer and storage in Ultra High Dilutions and

physiological systems. As there is a multitude of parameters involved in possible

information storage in aqueous solutions, and an equal multitude of approaches to

address this problem, we tried to focus only on those models that are based on

established academic science and their standard verifIcation processes. In a research

fIeld that has received academic interest only recently, it is quite natural that during its

initial state the vast amount of problems to be tackled may sometimes result in

uncoordinated research, especially when cross-disciplinary research ranging over more

than two faculties is involved. Communication problems and lack of conceptual

understanding of other science faculties makes it difficult to address a scientifIc problem

that is inherently multidisciplinary.

2 PREFACE

For that reason, we are addressing some fundamental (theoretical) problems of

information transfer and storage in ultra high diluted systems at the beginning of the

book, setting the ground for stimulating possible questions to be asked in the following

more experimental section. We feel that after more than two centuries of trying to verify

effects of homoeopathic remedies and the recent successes of bio-assay experiments, it

is of utmost importance to develop a fundamental understanding of the underlying

physics responsible for producing the measured results. Thus, in this book we place

physical models with relevance to homoeopathy and ultra high dilutions next to each

other and, wherever possible, tried to refer to direct links between them. The results of

new and greately extended experiments start to present a consistent pattern.

Nevertheless, verification of the experiments is still required, and of course, presented

the theories presented are still trying to converge towards a common understanding of

the underlying physical processes. In this sense, we are presenting current fundamental

approaches in theory, experiments and clinical trials, the foundation of future

coordinated research efforts. A Glossary at the end of the book which covers technical

terms frequently used in physics and physiology is intended to bridge some language

barriers among our readers from different science faculties.

We hope that this book will help to stimulate further research as well as

interdisciplinary discussion.

We wish to thank all those who directed our interest towards the research field and who

critically accompanied our work (T. Kenner, M. Haidvogel, G. Kastberger, G.

Karrnapa, D. Lama); the authors whose work was included; Suyash Prasad for

valuable comments to the manuscript and E. Lauppert who helped us survive the time

of editorial difficulties; our families and friends, as well as the publisher. We are

especially grateful to L. Johnson, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) at University of

Technology, Sydney, for the trust in this work and the financial support.

1998

Sydney, Australia Graz, Austria

Jurgen Schulte Christian Endler