Homeopathy

I think homeopathy deserves its own thread.
In the Holistic Medicine thread, Percy said:Homeopathy believes that substances diluted to the point that there is literally nothing left but water can have a positive therapeutic effect upon the body. A common homeopathic preparation approach is to do a 10:1 dilution 30 times. That means that if the concentration of the original substance was 1 (in other words, it was 100% pure substance), then after 30 10:1 dilutions there is .000000000000000000000000000001 left. If exponential notation is familiar to you, that's 10-30.
You can create your own homeopathic remedies if you're so inclined. If there's a headache medication that works reliably for you (and I do mean reliably - Tylenol doesn't work for me, but aspirin cures my headaches every single time), then the next time you get a headache, take the medication and grind it up into a powder and mix it with 10 ml of pure water. That's the 1st dilution. Now take 1 ml of that mixture, add 10 ml of pure water to it, then mix it thoroughly. Repeat this process 28 more times. Now drink the mixture. Did your headache go away?Even more important, does it make sense to you that such a dilute mixture of headache medication could have any effect whatsoever on you? That's a rhetorical question, hopefully it seems as ridiculous to you as it does to everyone else.As to mechanism, the claim of homeopathy is that the water "remembers" the substance it was mixed with, even though the mixture is so dilute that none of the original substance is left. There is no evidence of this, and the claim originates with the originator of homeopathy, who since he died in 1843 could not possibly have had any way to know such a thing even if it were true.There are those who, despite this evidence, insist that homeopathy works.I'd like to ask homeopathy's supporters this question:Is a 30X homeopathic "medication" just water?If so, how do you suppose it "works"?

The idea of "between the water molecules" is irrelevant. That's the entire point behind dissolving in the first place. Let's not assume chemists are incapable of understanding the most basic aspects of their profession.

And you haven't answered the question: If water has a "memory" of what was dissolved in it previously, then there is no possible way for homeopathy to work because the water would be overwhelmed with the "energy" of everything that had ever been dissolved in it. It is a self-refuting system. The very process by which they claim it works destroys any possibility of it ever working.

But there isn't anything in there but water.So if it isn't the water, then the conclusion is as what we see:Nothing is happening. No biological effect is seen.

But since it doesn't do anything, how can they possibly get better in reality? I'm all for the psychological part of healing. Making someone calm and confident goes a long way in having a successful treatment if only to ensure that the treatment regimen is carried out fully. But if all you have is psychology, you don't have any actual treatment taking place.