More than 500 million patients from 100 countries of the world use homeopathic drugs. Although these products are popular and commercially successful, scientists question whether they help or do harm. Today, homeopathy itself is going through a crisis.

January 16, 2018. the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic held a discussion on "Homeopathy or placebo," which brought together a number of prominent scientists in the fields of chemistry, medicine, pharmacology, philosophy..

WHO warns against homeopathic treatment of infectious and any other serious diseases. As the experts of the organization note, "the use of homeopathy has no evidence base, and in cases when it is used as an alternative to the main treatment, it poses a real threat to the health and life of people". Among government organizations, negative conclusions about the effectiveness of homeopathy were made by the Committee on Science and Technology of the British Parliament, the US Federal Trade Commission, the National Council for Health and Medical Research of Australia.

In October 2017 g. the EASAC task force, composed of leading European scientists, stated that there is no reliable, reproducible evidence that homeopathic drugs affect any known disease, although "sometimes a placebo effect" [2]. In addition, the use of homeopathy as an alternative treatment can stimulate a patient's refusal to provide medical assistance or discredit evidence-based medicine, undermining public confidence in scientific facts. These findings had serious consequences in the formation of public health policies in many countries of the European Union.

However ... In the Czech Republic, homeopathy is officially recognized as an "alternative method of treatment". In Switzerland, following the results of the 2017 referendum. homeopathy was included in compulsory health insurance. In 2016 year. The US Federal Trade Commission ordered manufacturers of homeopathic medicines to inform consumers that "homeopathy is based on the theories of the 18th century. , and the drugs themselves do not pass the necessary clinical trials and are not approved by medical experts ".

For reference. EASAC is the Advisory Council of European Academies. EASAC recommended:.

creation of agreed regulatory requirements for legislative acts relating to the effectiveness, safety and quality of all medicines on the basis of verifiable and objective evidence proportional to the declared requirements. The need for reliable data concerns products for humans and for use in veterinary medicine;.

do not provide public health systems with compensation for homeopathic products and services unless their effectiveness and safety are proven through rigorous testing;.

on the label of homeopathic products indicate the description of the ingredients and their quantity in the composition of the preparation as well as for other products of the healthcare system available in pharmacies and elsewhere;.

regulate the advertising and marketing of homeopathic products and services so that statements regarding their effectiveness and safety are backed up by obvious and reproducible evidence.

Strict scientific evidence or nothing in this?.

In the production of most homeopathic medicines, the limit of the constant Avogadro (Permanent Avogadro - 6,022 · 10 mol-?) Is exceeded, so the drugs practically do not contain the molecules of the initial substance and are essentially a placebo.

In homeopathy, "decimal" (1:10) and "hundred" (1: 100) dilutions are used, denoted by the Roman numeral X (or the letter D) and the Roman numeral C respectively. These dilutions are repeated many times, the number of repetitions is denoted by a digit before the dilution symbol. For example, the repeated decimal dilution (1: 1000) means "3D", and the twelve repeated "hundredth" (1: 1024) - "12C". The mechanism, explaining why homeopathic medicines work even in such ultra-small doses, is called a "memory of water", but it causes a lot of controversy.

Scientific disputes around this topic erupted in the early 1980s in the. after the scandalous publication in the journal Nature of the article [3] of the famous French immunologist Jacques Benveniste. The article was preceded by a long-standing discussion between followers and practitioners of homeopathy, on the one hand, and representatives of academic science on the other. Homeopaths claimed that water retained its newly acquired properties even after the substance or preparation was diluted in it to a near "zero" concentration. Opponents believed that such a statement violates all existing scientific ideas about the laws of chemistry. Nevertheless, the Nobel laureate virologist Luke Montagnier in an interview with the journal Nature in December 2010. spoke out in defense of Benveniste as a scientist who "was rejected by everyone because he looked far ahead," but "thought mostly correctly" [4].

Professor Pavel Jungwirt during the discussion noted that the theory of "memory of water", which homoeopaths like to refer to, "does not work", since "memory of water", that is, conditionally speaking, a "snapshot" of a molecule in a 3D grid of water molecules not more than a few picoseconds.

However ... In 2003. Louis Rey performed a thermoluminescence analysis of solutions of low concentrations of lithium chloride and sodium chloride [5]. Some of these solutions did not contain a single molecule of the substance previously dissolved in them. Meanwhile, their thermoluminescent "imprint" remained the same as it would be if the substance were still dissolved in water. It can be assumed that the mechanisms of action of homeopathic medicines can not be explained solely by the "memory of water" and they have yet to be studied.

The assumption of the existence of a "memory of water" gave rise to a lot of speculation. In the year 1999. in Japan, the book of Masaru Emoto "Messages from Water" came out, in which it was asserted that water changes its structure in a certain way under the influence of certain human emotions. As evidence, the author gave photographs of ice crystals that look "beautiful" (if the water was previously influenced by positive stimuli-pleasant music, thoughts, emotions) or "ugly" (if the stimulus was negative). Masaru organized the sale of so-called structured water Homeopathy and modern evidence-based medicine.

Professor Paul Klener in his report stated that the effectiveness of homeopathy began to be questioned in recent years in connection with the results of a number of reviews and clinical studies.

On the website of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health of the United States, it can be read that "the results of individual controlled studies on homeopathy are contradictory ... It is difficult or impossible to give evidence of the effectiveness of homeopathy in any disease". Data on multicenter placebo-controlled studies in the field of homeopathy are very limited and require additional verification.

Previously, systematic reviews and meta-analyzes comparing the efficacy of homeopathic drugs with placebo were more likely to produce positive results, but were generally unconvincing. A positive conclusion about the effectiveness of homeopathy, obtained in one of the most famous early meta-analyzes, published in The Lancet in 1997. , was later refuted by the authors themselves [6].

The psychic mechanisms of the formation of a response to a placebo in the brain and the subtleties of pharmacology were revealed in the report by Professor Kirill Heschl. In his opinion, comparing the drug with the placebo effect can be very difficult. Thus, the pharmacological effect of drugs can be potentiated by placebo, as demonstrated in studies of analgesic agents. A similar effect with placebo is even "waiting for a drug," since this mechanism, like a placebo, is realized in the central nervous system by blocking pain impulses in the cortex "from above," and already with the introduction of an analgesic acting on the spinal-thalamic pathway "from below," the pathway painful impulses are blocked completely.

As you know, the patient is affected by everything that happens "around the drug" - the shape, size and color of the tablets (red tablets are exciting), the route of administration (for example, the hidden injection of the drug is less effective), the words of the medical staff when preparing the patient for medication and t. The authors of the meta-analysis published on August 27, 2005. in the journal The Lancet, concluded that the clinical benefit of taking homeopathic drugs is due to the placebo effect [7]. Therefore, it is practically impossible to separate homeopathy from a placebo, and whether it is necessary, if the patient becomes better.

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