What do you think of homeopathy? It's supposed to work best for infectious diseases at controlling symptoms: cutting back an overreaction.
The argument homeopaths make is that bacteria would otherwise populate within an overreacted tissue, leading to further overreaction (the body creates its own symptoms: dis-ease) and they also say the body is full of bacteria/pathogens anyhow yet homeostasis can still be found.
There's no reason to think homeopathy works. Testing has been very poorly done, there's no measurable mechanism of action, and they can't even explain how a body could distinguish the intended active ingredient from the thousands of contaminants which were surely present in similar concentrations—that stuff isn't prepared in cleanrooms, and distilled water is far from pure.
Well, the body does overreact to things: look at the Spanish Flu. If a policeman told you that your family were all killed in aeroplane crash, you'd react in a certain way, even though it wasn't true and they injected no chemicals into you. To me, homeopathy is a way of hacking the body. Anyway, I've mentioned homeopathy once before on HN and was also downvoted, so probably not a great place to bring it up.
Add: if a doctor said you only had 5 months to live, you'd probably start doing all these things you'd never got around to doing, or thought you could do, the bucket list - then in 5 months when you're still around, you realize it may have been a lie, but your depression has lifted and you have a new lease on life: that's what I think homeopathy is supposed to be: tiny signals on certain levers, accepted as true, leading to massive effects.
Oh, the immune system's function is to sequester and kill pathogens, so it's no surprise that it has the right tools to attack the body if it gets confused (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm). I just don't see any demonstrated or plausible way to distinguish a 12C (1:10^24) dilution of anything from a plain water placebo.
I am not out to defend homeopathy, but if you take a remedy (and I'm not suggesting you do), see if it has any effects on your mind or body. If it does, then accept that you don't know how or why it is doing so, but it is.
In my experience, homeopathic remedies are very powerful and absolutely do work in evoking a reaction, but in terms of curing illness, it becomes more difficult to work out the remedy and dosage: and within such difficulty a skepticism is born.
According to my research, homepathic remedies often contain no molecules of the source substance.
Vaccines and drug treatments are two different avenues of attack. The primary purpose of a vaccine is to prevent infection. Certain vaccines, if administered immediately post-exposure, can have some use as treatment, but they are generally used to prevent the initial infection.
If you were to become infected, the first route for attack would be neuraminidase inhibitors. There are two widely available kinds of these drugs, and so far they have proven mostly effective against H5N1. There is the possibility for resistance to develop, but so far they do work. If they prove to not work, then (and I am not a doctor, so don't quote me) I imagine the recommended treatment would be high-dose steroids coupled with antibiotics. This is the generic treatment for problematic inflammation. If this treatment proved insufficient, then as a last resort you might try immune-suppressive therapies, but as far as I know that route is largely untested in the field.
The bigger point, though, is that modern medicine has many tools in its toolbox, and homeopathy is definitely not one of them. It has never been proven to have any real effect in any sort of rigorous trial. In contrast, all of the other items I listed above (vaccine, neuraminidase inhibitor, steroid, immune-suppressive) have all been extensively tested and verified to be effective.
"Homeopathic therapy was found to be useful in relieving menopausal distressing symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, palpitation, depression, insomnia, and so on. This study proves the usefulness of homeopathic medicines in relieving DDCY."
"A simple description is provided of the process of potentization in homeopathic dilutions. With the exception of minor details, this simple model replicates the results previously obtained from a more complex model. While excited states are short lived in isolated molecules, they become long lived in nanodomains that form coherent cooperative aggregates controlled by the geomagnetic field. These domains either slowly emit biophotons or perform specific biochemical work at their target."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22073975
All of the links you provided (except for the last) are articles published in one of two journals: "The journal of alternative and complementary medicine : research on paradigm, practice, and policy" or "Homeopathy". Do you have any links to peer-reviewed research published in a first (Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS) or second-tier biomedical research journal?
I mean, I regularly publish "The Journal of Cryptozoology and Mythical Beasts I Wish Were Real", but that doesn't really mean anything...
See who's funding or advertising in a publication and it'll give you a pretty good idea of what to expect and what not to expect. The onus of proof against homeopathy is on you, I feel.
Quantum mechanics, statistical thermodynamics, and the ergodic theory preclude the possibility of water "remembering" a molecule which was present previously but is no longer in solution. Forget big pharma...what do you think is more likely: that there is some as-yet-undiscovered fundamental principle of physics that allows homeopathy to work, or that practitioners of homeopathy are playing on the well documented and sometimes surprisingly strong placebo effect?
It works sometimes through the remembering (and syncing the patient's body to it) of an unknown mechanism, sometimes the placebo and sometimes both (I also think it fails badly too). Homeopathy is supposed to be vibrational medicine. I do think it will be vindicated the better our scientific instruments become (it seems an inexact science, shelved, but with the possibility of a renaissance.) Also, there'd be well produced dilutions and poorly produced ones, and some people are more sensitive and open to such approaches. Placebo effect works in conventional medicine too. The body can overreact to a virus, it can overreact to a dilution: in fact that's what it would be doing wouldn't it.. it's a complete overreaction to the shadow of a substance. Ironically, is that so different to a placebo cure anyhow?
> For the special class of ergodic systems, the time average is the same for almost all initial points: statistically speaking, the system that evolves for a long time "forgets" its initial state.
Water, at room temperature, is a member of this special class of ergodic systems. In that sentence, "statistically speaking" refers to the fact that we describe water on a molecular scale as a statistical system (it does not mean that sometimes the system remembers). Also, "a long time" in statistical mechanics is taken as a time period much greater than the average time it takes for any two random water molecules to collide...in other words: "a long time" == nanoseconds.
By the ergodic theorem, once you remove a molecule from water, it forgets that molecule was ever present within nanoseconds. There is nothing in the spatial organization, the molecular translations, or any of the modes of vibration that would give you any clue that molecule had been present. In essence, the information of that molecules presence is erased. We call this entropy.
Ergodic theory is a mathematical theory that is key in describing systems in statistical mechanics. This is not a question of better scientific instruments. You would need to invalidate 100+ years of scientific knowledge for homeopathy to work as advertised.
Edit: In all fairness, I guess I should clarify the "statistically speaking" bit. Technically, there is a non-zero probability that some bit of water will "remember" a molecule that was previously disolved in it. The nice thing about statistical mechanics is that it allows you to calculate exactly how frequently this would be expected to occur. The answer is that you would expect a volume of 1ml of water to "remember" for at least 1 second somewhere in the universe less than once...not once per minute or once per hour, but once per the lifetime of the universe. So, yeah, homeopathy is complete BS.
What do you think of homeopathy? It's supposed to work best for infectious diseases at controlling symptoms: cutting back an overreaction.
The argument homeopaths make is that bacteria would otherwise populate within an overreacted tissue, leading to further overreaction (the body creates its own symptoms: dis-ease) and they also say the body is full of bacteria/pathogens anyhow yet homeostasis can still be found.