Efficacy of Homoeomedicines Established with Cure of the Incurable Diseases
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Efficacy of Homoeomedicines Established with Cure of the Incurable Diseases |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Rati Ram Sharma |
| Keywords | Homoeopathy, Health, Cure of incurables, Double Blind Drug Trials |
| Published | 2009 |
| No. of pages | 18 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Double Blind Drug Trials are inapplicable to Homoeopathy. Efficacy of the high potency homoeopathic medicines with no molecule of the original drug in the patient dose is established with controlled drug trials on rats, mice and by treating human patients who served as their own controls. These cases for the Modern Scientific Medicine (Allopathy) were: a) fatal/incurable, b) difficult-to-cure even with long medicinal treatment, c) required surgery, d) viral. This supports and corroborates the overwhelming clinical evidence collected by innumerable homoeopaths all over the world during the past over two centuries. It also removes the conceptual impasse created by the Avogadro's law and the Law of Mass Action. Homoeopathy is a complete medicinal therapeutics. It offers hope and efficacious cure of diseases like Allergies (food, air born, skin, eczema, asthma), Tonsillitis, Nasal Polyps, Liver cirrhosis, Hepatitis with Jaundice, Progressive Systemic Sclerosis, Sarcoidosis, Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP), Vertigo, Migraine, Kidney dysfunction, Pyrexia Of Unknown Origin, Menstrual disorders (scanty, profuse, painful), Repeated abortions, Leucorrhea, Slow healing fracture, Arthritis, Aches & pains, etc.
Overview
Rati Ram Sharma, retired Professor and Head of the Department of Biophysics with Nuclear Medicine at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGI), Chandigarh, presents here a case-series defence of high-potency homoeopathy. First posted in January 2005 and revised in February 2009, the paper is unusual in provenance: Sharma was a senior academic physicist inside a leading allopathic teaching hospital who practised homoeopathy, as he puts it, "as a hobby", and most of his patients were referred to him after conventional treatment at his own institution had failed.
The paper has two distinct evidential strands and one methodological thesis. The methodological thesis is that the Double Blind Drug Trial (DBDT) is not merely difficult but structurally inapplicable to homoeopathy, so that the demand that homoeopathic remedies pass DBDTs is a category error imposed by people who "do not know even its basics". In place of the DBDT, Sharma offers (a) controlled animal experiments in which dynamized potency is compared against simple dilution of the same factor, and (b) roughly two dozen human case histories in which the patient serves as his or her own control because the disease was declared incurable, was long-refractory, was scheduled for surgery, was viral, or occurred in an infant where placebo response is presumed absent. Sharma is explicit about the target: "to break any law just very few exceptions are sufficient."
The argument
The six obstacles
Sharma opens by setting out why homoeopathy remains "discarded and disregarded as unscientific placebo therapy". Allopathy, Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha form one group working on the Principle of Opposites, and their medicines satisfy DBDTs; homoeopathy stands alone under the Law of Similars. By Avogadro's number, 6.022 × 1023 molecules per gram-mole, a 12C potency is diluted 10012 = 1024-fold, so the 30C, 200C and 1000C potencies in routine clinical use contain no molecule of the original drug; the Law of Mass Action then makes any action impossible. Homoeopaths insist that mechanical agitation — forceful trituration in lactose, then impacted succussion in water and ethanol — at every dilution step is mandatory, which conventional chemistry denies can matter. American double-blind trials gave equivocal results. Placebo, physician authority and faith have documented effects. And natural diseases remit spontaneously. Since patients arrive at a homoeopath as a last resort, any recovery can be attributed to coincidence of faith and spontaneous remission.
Animal experiments
Sharma's answer to the placebo objection is animal work. Diabetes was induced in albino Wistar rats by intraperitoneal Alloxan; the rats were split into four groups receiving (a) dynamized 20m (30C) Alloxan potency, (b) undynamized simple dilution to the same 10030-fold, (c) ethanol, (d) nothing. He reports that only group (a) was cured, and that the Central Council for Research in Homoeopathy, New Delhi, confirmed the result and further found regeneration of the Alloxan-damaged cells.
The second experiment used 7,12-dimethylbenz-anthracene (DMBA) in albino mice. Because DMBA acts through its metabolites rather than directly, the potency was prepared from DMBA metabolites incubated with drug-metabolizing enzymes from the microsomal fraction of mouse liver. The 50 per cent survival period was 144 days for the 30C potency group against 36 days for the simple-dilution group, and 10 per cent of the latter developed fibrosarcoma at the injection site. The comparison of dynamized against simply diluted material at identical dilution is the paper's key experimental design: it is meant to isolate succussion as the active variable, since molecular content is identical (and nil) in both arms.
Why the DBDT cannot apply
Two reasons are given. First, patients cannot be randomized by pathology or designated disease, because homoeopathic prescribing is on the symptom totality, and two patients with the same label — "Osteoarthritis", "Bronchial Asthma" — usually require different remedies. Trials such as Rhus tox in osteoarthritis or Arsenic iodatum in bronchial asthma are therefore "flawed for being not consistent with homoeopathic philosophy". Second, the physician cannot be blinded, because he must know the total symptoms before and after every dose to check that cure is proceeding according to Hering's laws and to adjust remedy and dose frequency.
The case series
The bulk of the paper is case reports, given with names, addresses, hospital registration numbers, biopsy and laboratory values. Among them: two children with biopsy-proven Indian Childhood Cirrhosis, discharged from PGI with a prognosis of a week's survival, treated with Arsenic 200 and Phosphorus 200 — one improved over months and later died in a fall from a roof, the other reported well in 1983; HBV and HCV cirrhosis; a decade-long jaundice later diagnosed as Dubin-Johnson syndrome, treated with Aurum met 200; several psoriasis cases on Sulphur 200 and Psorinum 1M, including a professor of pharmacology whose two letters are reproduced at length; thyrotoxicosis with exophthalmos and amenorrhea; aural vertigo (Natrum sulphuricum CM); twenty-year migraine (Lachesis); cervical spondylosis in which surgery was avoided, published jointly with the patient's allopathic medical officer in Hahnemannian Gleanings 45(3) 1978; repeated abortions treated with Cimicifuga racemosa 200; asthma; progressive systemic sclerosis; sarcoidosis with serial chest X-rays reported as regressing then normal; and three cases of idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura in which platelet counts are tracked numerically from below 5,000/cmm to normal ranges on Lachesis 200.
Sharma insists his conclusion "does not violate the Avogadro's law or the Law of Mass Action." Instead he claims a new phenomenon: during trituration and succussion the diluent molecules are "resonantly promoted to acquire the chemically exchangeable energy of the solute drug molecules", so that the diluent itself becomes the therapeutic agent, its molecules mimicking the chemical specificity of the drug. He refers the reader elsewhere for the physics, and to the three sciences he proposes — Inductive Chemistry, Xenobiology and Inductoxenopathy. He closes by conceding that "Homoeopathy too is not 'all cure'", proposes Navayurveda — a combination of homoeopathy, allopathy and yoga — and calls for a Centre of Homoeopathic Research at PGI or AIIMS in which diagnosed patients would be randomized into three arms (homoeopathy, allopathy, Navayurveda) and assessed by conventional tests.
Assessment
What is genuinely valuable here is the animal work and the shape of its design. Sharma understood correctly that the decisive question is not whether homoeopathic patients get better but whether dynamization does anything, and he built the one comparison that isolates it: dynamized 30C versus simple dilution to the identical factor, in a species that cannot form expectations, with an objectively induced pathology and a hard endpoint (SP-50 of 144 versus 36 days). That is the right experiment. His final proposal is also creditable and unusual in this literature — he asks for a three-arm randomized comparison run inside a mainstream institution and evaluated by mainstream tests, which is precisely what a confident claimant should want.
The paper does not, however, establish what its title asserts, and the reasons are structural rather than incidental. The animal results are reported in a paragraph each, without group sizes, randomization procedure, blinding of the assessors, mortality tables, or statistical analysis; the reader is referred to Journal of Scientific Homoeopathy 1(3-4), 1995. Neither the alloxan nor the DMBA experiment is described in enough detail to be replicated or checked, and no replication by an independent group is cited beyond a bare statement that CCRH "confirmed" it. Given that this is the load-bearing evidence, the omission is serious.
The human material cannot bear the weight placed on it. "The patient served as his own control" is not a control: it is a before-and-after observation in a self-selected series reported by the treating physician, with outcomes largely conveyed through the patients' own grateful letters. Selection here runs directly against the argument — patients who did not improve had no reason to write. Several of the cases undercut their own claim on inspection. The first ICC child was concurrently under investigation with an uncertain diagnosis and died in an accident before any durable outcome was established. The second child's own biopsy report, quoted in full in the paper, states that the pathologist was "inclined to make it portal cirrhosis of post hepatic type" rather than ICC — that is, the "incurable" diagnosis on which the case turns was not confirmed. The cervical spondylosis case is honest that the follow-up X-ray "did not show any change", so what improved was symptoms in a condition famous for fluctuation, and the same patient was advised knee replacement 25 years later. Both children with ITP had received high-dose methylprednisolone within days of starting homoeopathy, and childhood acute ITP resolves spontaneously in the large majority of cases; the platelet trajectories reported (rising, then falling to 79,000, then rising again) are the natural history. Sarcoidosis, likewise, remits spontaneously in a substantial fraction of patients with bilateral hilar lymphadenopathy — the precise presentation described.
The methodological thesis is the paper's weakest link, because it is self-sealing. If the DBDT is inapplicable in principle, then no possible negative result counts, and the claim has been placed outside test. This is also inconsistent with the paper's own practice: Sharma's animal experiments are controlled comparisons against inert dilution, and his closing proposal is a randomized trial. Individualized prescribing does not in fact preclude blinding — the standard design randomizes patients to the individually selected remedy or to an indistinguishable placebo after the consultation, leaving the prescriber's judgment intact. Sharma does not discuss that design. His second reason, that the physician must follow symptoms to adjust the remedy, argues against blinding the prescriber but not against blinding the patient or the outcome assessor.
Finally, the proposed mechanism is asserted, not derived. "Resonantly promoted to acquire the chemically exchangeable energy of the solute drug molecules" names no interaction, predicts no spectroscopic or calorimetric signature, and offers no reason why the effect should survive the further hundredfold dilutions that follow, nor why the diluent should retain one solute's specificity while forgetting every other substance it has ever contacted. Against this, the measurement that must be answered is not Avogadro's number as an abstraction but the direct one: no analytical technique — NMR, mass spectrometry, calorimetry, conductivity — has distinguished a succussed high potency from its solvent, and where such claims have been tested under blinded conditions they have not replicated. Sharma's own alloxan/DMBA design is the correct instrument for settling that; what the field needs is that experiment run at adequate power by independent hands, which is exactly what his final section asks for.