One particularly influential community of users is the British Royal family. Skeptics and some scientists have arrayed their collective forces against this alternative ...
Homeopathy Homeopathy is an alternative medicine proposed by Hahnemann in 1796. The fact is that it is used fairly widely in the western world. It seems that in general it ‘works’ according to its adherents including the patients who use the heavily diluted preparations. One particularly influential community of users is the British Royal family. Skeptics and some scientists have arrayed their collective forces against this alternative medicine. The basis of homeopathy is presumed to be the law of similars. In essence this law is a form of immunology yet the actual basis for homeopathy is at this point in time not clear. From Wikipedia: ‘In 1987, French immunologist Jacques Benveniste submitted a paper to the journal Nature while working at INSERM. The paper purported to have discovered that basophils, a type of white blood cell, released histamine when exposed to a homeopathic dilution of anti-immunoglobulin E antibody. The journal editors, sceptical of the results, requested that the study be replicated in a separate laboratory. Upon replication in four separate laboratories the study was published. Still sceptical of the findings, Nature assembled an independent investigative team to determine the accuracy of the research, consisting of Nature editor and physicist Sir John Maddox, American scientific fraud investigator and chemist Walter Stewart, and sceptic and magician James Randi. After investigating the findings and methodology of the experiment, the team found that the experiments were "statistically ill-controlled", "interpretation has been clouded by the exclusion of measurements in conflict with the claim", and concluded, "We believe that experimental data have been uncritically assessed and their imperfections inadequately reported. James Randi stated that he doubted that there had been any conscious fraud, but that the researchers had allowed "wishful thinking" to influence their interpretation of the data.’
It is a sad epilogue that Benveniste died in 2004 unable to convince science of his results that gave credence to homeopathy pointing towards a mechanism. Nevertheless homeopathy continues to be used on a widespread basis even with little support from science. Given Benveniste was an immunologist SFT suggests homeopathy to be a field interaction able to cause immunological response or antibody-antigen chemistry to take place as suggested by Benveniste’s experimental efforts
