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| Homeopathic medicine is nanopharmacology |
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 Dana Ullman invites us to think of homeopathy as medicine at ultra-small doses, or nanopharmacology, which avoids the often debilitating side effects of conventional pharmacology.- Nanotechnology Western science has been marching towards the discovery of increasingly smaller particles of matter for the past centuries, from molecules and atoms to sub-atomic particles and quarks. Likewise, the evolution of technology has witnessed the miniaturisation of devices along with their increased capabilities. "Nanotechnology" has become the popular term to refer to the study and manufacture of devices of molecular dimensions, of the range of nanometers or one-billionth of a meter. Dr. Neal Lane, former director of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) said, "If I were asked for an area of science and engineering that will most likely produce the breakthrough of tomorrow, I would point to nanoscale science and engineering." A 1999 report from NSF Technology Council predicted that nanotechnology’s impact on the health, wealth, and security of the world’s population is expected to be "at least as significant as the combined influences of antibiotics, the integrated circuit, and human-made polymers". So far, research and development in nanotechnology in medicine have been limited to devices that monitor or replace biochemical processes in the body. But as yet, conventional scientists and physicians have not considered using nanopharmacological doses of medicinal agents. Our conventional medical paradigm has tended to assume that increasingly large doses of pharmacological agents will create increasingly significant biological effects, even when it is well recognized that large doses of pharmacological agents do not necessarily lead to better or improved health. In fact, increasing doses of most drugs generally lead to increased side effects. Most drugs have primarily been developed to replace, suppress, minimize, or interfere with specific biochemical function, while the discovery of pharmaceutical medicines to augment a person’s own immune and defence system has been an elusive and usually ignored goal. Ironically, the few pharmacological agents that have been used in conventional medicine today that do something to augment a person’s immune system are immunization and allergy treatments, both of which are based on an ancient (and modern) pharmacological principle of "similars." (Although there are obvious similarities between these conventional medical treatments and homeopathic medicines, there are also significant differences, including: the homeopathic medicines are considerably smaller in dose and are individualized to the person’s total syndrome of symptoms, not simply to a localized or defined disease.) This concept of similars, that is, of using a medicinal agent in small doses based on what it causes in larger, toxic doses, represents the underlying principle of homeopathic medicine. Largely as a result of the AIDS epidemic, it has made sense to seek to discover drugs that strengthen a person’s immune and defense system rather than seek to minimize the various individual symptoms that a person experiences. However, most physicians and scientists lack a conceptual framework for pharmacological agents that have this effect. And sadly, most are also ignorant and disdainful of homeopathy, which they commonly but incorrectly assume, uses such small doses that the medicines cannot have any biochemical let alone clinical effect. - Nanopharmacology and Homeopathy While this skepticism of the efficacy of small doses of medicine is understandable from a strictly rational perspective, it ignores the large body of evidence from basic science, controlled clinical studies, epidemiological data, clinical outcomes trials, and historical review of the field. Before discussing this evidence, it is useful to understand that homeopaths are the first to recognize that their medicines will not have any biological effect or clinical result unless the complex of symptoms that the sick person experiences are similar to the complex of symptoms that the medicine has been found to cause when given in larger doses to healthy volunteers. It is not as though small doses of simply any medicine will elicit therapeutic results; such small doses can and will only initiate a healing response when a person is hypersensitive to a specific medicine. Basic principles of physics teach us that hypersensitivity exists when there is resonance. Homeopathy is itself based on resonance (commonly referred to as the "principle of similars"). Even the word "homeopathy" is derived from two Greek words, "homoios" which means similar, and "pathos" which means suffering or disease. Typically, homeopaths engage patients in a detailed interview to elicit the various physical, emotional, and mental symptoms that the sick person is experiencing. Homeopaths seek to find a medicinal agent that has the capacity to cause in healthy people the similar symptoms that the sick patient is experiencing. Rather than treating localized symptoms or a specific disease, homeopaths treat syndrome complexes, of which the symptoms and the disease are a part. Once a conventional medical diagnosis is determined, the homeopath then seeks to find the symptoms that are unique to the patient, and then, a homeopathic medicine is individualized to each patient’s symptom complex. - Homeopathic medicine: A nanopharmacology Homeopathic medicine presents a significantly different pharmacological approach to treating sick people. Instead of using strong and powerful doses of medicinal agents that have a broad-spectrum effect on a wide variety of people with a similar disease, homeopaths use extremely small doses of medicinal substances that are highly individualized to a person’s physical and psychological syndrome of disease, not simply an assumed localized pathology. Homeopathic medicines are so small in dose that it is appropriate to refer to them as a part of a newly defined field of nanopharmacology. To understand the nature and the degree of homeopathy’s nanopharmacology, it is important to know the following characteristics of how homeopathic medicines are made. 1. Most homeopathic medicines are made by diluting a medicinal substance in a double-distilled water. It should be noted that physicists who study the properties of water commonly acknowledge that water has many mysterious properties. Because homeopaths use a double-distilled water, it is highly purified, enabling the medicinal substance to solely infiltrate the water. The medicinal solution is usually preserved in an 87% water/alcohol solution. 2. Each substance is diluted, most commonly, in 1 part of the original medicinal agent to 9 or 99 parts double-distilled water. The mixture is then vigorously stirred or shaken. The solution is then diluted again 1:9 or 1:99 and vigorously stirred. This process of diluting and stirring is repeated 3, 6, 12, 30, 200, 1,000, or even 1,000,000 times. 3. It is inaccurate to say that homeopathic medicines are just extremely diluted; they are extremely "potentized." Potentization refers to the specific process of sequential dilution with vigorous stirring. The theory is that each consecutive dilution in conjunction with the process of shaking/stirring infiltrates the new double-distilled water and imprints upon it the fractal form of the original substance used (fractal refers to the specific consecutively smaller pattern or form within a larger pattern). (Source: i-sis.org.uk)   Socialize this Subscribe to our RSS feed to stay in touch and receive all of TT updates right in your feed reader
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