Skeptical Researcher Reluctantly Admits Homeopathy Works

An article in the New Scientist points out how a pharmacologist who was attempting to debunk homeopathy had to reluctantly admit that it works.

 

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions – so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

Homeopathy Cancer Centre Makes Research Breakthrough Showing Homeopathy Affects Cancer Cells

 

Dana Ullman reports that a new study done at the Amala Cancer Research Centre in India and published in the Oxford University Press journal called e-CAM  shows that homeopathy has a dramatic impact on gene expression and various cancer cells in a long term way.

 

Dana Ullman, who has a  Masters of Public Health writes, “Of special interest is the fact that this study has repeated shown that homeopathically potentized doses have dramatic effects on various kinds of cancer cells, not just in the short-term but the long-term. This research also shows that various homeopathic medicines have dramatic effects on gene expression (this is the type of evidence that conventional drug companies LOVE to see for their drugs…and there is increasing evidence that homeopathic medicines have this profound effect).”

 

ABSTRACT:
Although reports on the efficacy of homeopathic medicines in animal models are limited, there are even fewer reports on the in vitro action of these dynamized preparations. We have evaluated the cytotoxic activity of 30C and 200C potencies of ten dynamized medicines against Dalton’s Lymphoma Ascites, Ehrlich’s Ascites Carcinoma, lung fibroblast (L929) and Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cell lines and compared activity with their mother tinctures during short-term and long-term cell culture. The effect of dynamized medicines to induce apoptosis was also evaluated and we studied how dynamized medicines affected genes expressed during apoptosis. Mother tinctures as well as some dynamized medicines showed significant cytotoxicity to cells during short and long-term incubation. Potentiated alcohol control did not produce any cytotoxicity at concentrations studied. The dynamized medicines were found to inhibit CHO cell colony formation and thymidine uptake in L929 cells and those of Thuja, Hydrastis and Carcinosinum were found to induce apoptosis in DLA cells. Moreover, dynamized Carcinosinum was found to induce the expression of p53 while dynamized Thuja produced characteristic laddering pattern in agarose gel electrophoresis of DNA. These results indicate that dynamized medicines possess cytotoxic as well as apoptosis-inducing properties.

 

—–>   http://ecam.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/6/2/257?etoc