A New Physics of Homeopathy

It would be lovely to say Colin Lessell's latest book is a tour de force, a real thorough-going excavation into the science underlying homeopathy. Sadly, it isn't. A New Physics of Homeopathy is, in my view, merely a collection of unfocused self-opinionated ramblings that ultimately do homeopathy and those who practice it no good whatsoever. And the more I read of Lessell's work, the more I feel the past coming back to haunt me.

A few years ago, I tried to understand and verify, but ultimately had to refute, Roland Conte's experimental and theoretical work on homeopathically potentised substances.1 Using conventional scientific techniques, he had claimed objective and observable differences from substances that are merely diluted. In fact, by carefully tying to reproduce Conte's experimental procedures, we found he was chasing a chimera, an unseen artefact produced by the type of glassware he had used.2,3

The trouble was, Conte had concocted a seductive theoretical melange, based on modern physics, to explain his artefactual observations. He combined relativity and quantum mechanics so incomprehensibly, yet apparently so skilfully, that one could have thought him worthy of the Nobel Prize for appearing to succeed where more qualified physicists had failed. In the end, as his observations weren't real, there was no need for his sophisticated explanation. Unfortunately, the damage was already done, as Conte had stirred up the imaginations of a few of the more febrile souls within the British homeopathic community. 'At last!', they trumpeted, 'A scientific explanation for homeopathy!' If only that had been true! Thankfully, nobody took much notice of them and UK homeopathy as a profession avoided from making a complete ass of itself.

Nevertheless, it got me wondering if science and homeopathy could be reconciled in some way. My own preliminary forays into this area, using metaphors derived from quantum theory, seem to be bearing strange yet interesting fruit.4,5 I wish Colin Lessell had also provided some answers, but, alas, he has not. Worse, and just like Conte, Lessell could have the same effect of galvanising those who would prematurely proclaim that homeopathy now has a solid basis in science.

As I read Lessell's 'aphorisms' (presumably in homage to Hahnemann's writing style), I was struck by the similarity with Conte's unintelligible prognostications. The difference is that Conte had a corpus of testable observations to get one's experimental teeth into. Non-verification meant that Conte's convoluted theories could be dismissed. This is the very essence of the scientific method. It isn't so easy to dismiss Lessell's ideas because nowhere does he suggest ways of verifying them.

Like Conte, Lessell interprets and borrows heavily from modern physics in order to explain homeopathy, but I have grave doubts about his use and ultimately his familiarity with and basic understanding of these ideas. There is an interesting parallel here between Conte and Lessell in that neither is a physical scientist - Conte is an economist, Lessell, so the book's sleeve notes tell us, has a conventional medical and homeopathic background. Nothing wrong with that per se: quantum theory and relativity are the defining scientific concepts of our age and there are plenty of popular and accessible interpretations of these complicated subjects. It is entirely proper to attempt understanding of modern physical ideas like quantum mechanics, and try to use them as intellectual springboards into other areas. This, Lessell has tried to do with homeopathy.

But as the great American physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, anyone who thinks they understand the utter weirdness of quantum theory, scientists included, has probably got it wrong. This means that there is plenty of scope for interpretational error. Whereas Conte had the intellectual back-up of a team of engineers and scientists (apparently oblivious to the flaws in his experimental methodology), Lessell appears to be working in a vacuum. And it shows. It is telling that at no point does Lessell acknowledge help from any physical scientist in underpinning his singular interpretations of modern physics. This means that Lessell's lively but essentially untutored imagination was allowed to run wild, unhindered by any scientific reality check. Even the more wacky notions entertained by today's physicists are rigorously backed by self-consistent mathematics. Rigour is a feature entirely lacking in Lessell's hand-waving attempts to apply physics to homeopathy.

I have to say, I find Lessell's opinions (they are not theories) to be an uncritical procession of mental meanderings randomly garnered from a variety of popular physics and fringe science sources. From that perspective, it would have been better had Lessell subjected himself to the peer review process as practised in learned journals, instead of like Conte, publishing a little book. At least that way, there could have been some expert modulation of his ideas that would have made them either more credible and intelligible, or had rejected them altogether.

Looked at over time, one sees a kind of zig-zagging progression as his ideas change to 'explain' ever more phenomena but at no time do they suggest means of verification, nor do they carry any predictive power. This is important as the essence of any good hypothesis is that it should predict hitherto unobserved phenomena. In this sense, I have to say I find Lessell's opinions intellectually moribund. Any theory worthy of the name stands or falls on its predictive power. All Lessell does is attempt to explain current (and by no means rock-solid, i.e., anecdotal) observations. Consequently, one has to surmise that at some time in the future, when new observations could appear that are outside the scope of this book, he will once again have to completely rejig his ideas and we will no doubt be entertained to an An Even Newer Physics of Homeopathy.

However, before Lessell embarks on this next great project, there are some scientific misconceptions he really needs to correct. Let's look at a few: first, the memory of molecules. Lessell seems to think that this (still contentious, it has to be said) phenomenon is a property of the individual molecules that comprise a substance. Thus, according to him, individual water molecules are each possessed of a 'memory', without bothering to offer any sensible explanation, within the known laws of chemistry and physics, as to what that memory consists of. A much more plausible explanation, backed up by modern quantum mechanical calculations, and some of the latest experimental data,6 is that molecular memory is an emergent (in the sense used in complexity theory)7 property of large numbers of molecules all physically interacting with each other, via known physical principles. In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In this way, the complex relationships between parts, e.g., atoms, molecules, cells, living beings, etc, and the larger wholes they are a part of, make perfect sense. This notion of emergent properties of large numbers of interacting parts also allows an entirely reasonable (i.e., not requiring an appeal to invisible 'occult auric fields') explanation of vital force (VF) in terms of the total activity of all the cells in the body, such that the VF via feedback, maximises itself by organising the cellular totality.8 Thus, modern complexity theory based on sound physical and chemical principles, chimes more with the holism suffusing homeopathy than do Lessell's ideas.

Let's take another of Lessell's aphorisms; number 36, the treatment of suckling infants. Lessell ditches the most obvious explanation - that the remedy is transmitted through the breast milk - for something unnecessarily more bizarre. So, according to Lessell, at the time of feeding, the infant 'comes under the influence of the mothers auric field'! I am not denying the possible existence of such fields (indeed Kirlian photography has supplied some evidence in this area). But why appeal to untestable auric connectivity when there is a much simpler conventional and verifiable explanation?

I well remember my wife nursing our middle daughter many years ago in Normandy, while dining on guinea fowl cooked in calvados sauce (a specialité de la region). The poor infant was then sleepless and constipated for 3 days and nights (and the poor parents were exhausted). Finally, when she managed to relieve herself, a beautiful aroma of calvados rose from her steaming nappy! Now, in my book, you don't need 'hyperspatial auric fields' to explain that particular olfactory phenomenon! Clearly, Lessell seems never to have heard of Occam's Razor.

In fact, one of the highly disturbing elements of Lessell's book is how it seemingly goes out of its way to dissuade any conventional scientist or medical practitioner from taking homeopathy seriously. Just what are they to make of, 'Potentised water, the memory of which is essentially supra-dimensional, acts directly on the occult auric field, and so only indirectly on physical processes'? They will take one look at this statement, and its, for them, highly charged, button-pushing words like 'aura' and 'occult', and run a record-breaking mile from homeopathy and all who practice it. Thanks a bunch, Colin. You've really done homeopathy a great service!

Having said all that, I do detect in Lessell's writings, a sort of kindred spirit. We are both interested in non-locality (the way the behaviour of quantum systems can be instantaneously affected by other events in vastly separated regions of the universe, i.e., supra space-time entanglement, or spooky action at a distance as Einstein put it, between everything in the universe) and its possible role in the homeopathic process. And we are both clearly excited by the possibilities of what modern physics has to offer in the search for an explanation of how homeopathy could work. The difference is that while Lessell seems to have concentrated more on the homeopathic remedy as an entity in itself, my explorations have forced me to also consider the remedy in the context of a tri-partite entangled (in the quantum mechanical sense of the word) relationship with the patient and the practitioner.4,5

But looked at from a post-modern perspective, in trying to place homeopathy in a scientific context, are we not responding to an ancestral calling? There are exceptionally loud echoes of this in Lessell's book, 'aphorism' 10, entitled 'Casts', for example. Thus, 'Atoms, molecules or ions…are thus always associated with a compression or distortion of primary space in their immediate vicinity. This distortion forms a sort of cast of the atom, molecule, or ion rather like that used by artists to encase a wax model in preparation for the pouring of bronze. This cast is indeed the negative spatial image of the nuclear and electronic structure…..' and so on. Reading this, I was strongly reminded of Plato's Republic, where he describes the search for unchanging truths in all things. Plato imagined another world in which a perfect and eternal mould of everything existing, ours being a world of fleeting shadows and dust, a mere pale reflection of this perfection. And what this taps into ultimately is the sub-text behind most of Western philosophy, which is that the world can somehow be apprehended by thought alone. It is this classical paradox that ultimately, in my view, shines right through Lessell's latest attempt to explain homeopathy in terms of his own personal interpretation of modern physics.

For if physics in general, and quantum mechanics in particular teach us anything, it is that classical notions about the world itself have to give way to non-classical ones that deal with what we can possibly know about the world. In other words, we now have to factor human experience, knowledge, and its limitations into fundamental theories about the universe. Lessell appears either not to have noticed how our theoretical maps are changing or has chosen to ignore it.9

In homeopathy, this means that we can only really know anything about remedies in the context of their prescription by a practitioner and their action in a patient. Ironically, this conclusion was reached long ago by arguably the greatest homeopath after Hahnemann; none other than James Tyler Kent himself. He stated that a remedy is only homeopathic when it cures the case.10 Or to put it another way, Kent was saying that an unprescribed potentised remedy sitting on a shelf is not homeopathic until it goes through the seemingly magical processes of prescription for and successful action in a patient. And that is regardless of whether water has a memory or not.

So why bother trying to square homeopathy with science at all? 'Because it is my nature!', as the scorpion once said to the frog, shortly before they both drowned. It is our doom in the West to wonder and theorise and try to understand the world in the way we think we know best: but perhaps it is also our doom to be dazed and confused by those explanations.

Who knows? Perhaps in the not too distant future, these two ancient protagonists, science and homeopathy, might one day learn to like each other. If and when that great day arrives, my guess is that A New Physics of Homeopathy will not be seen as the seminal work that kick-started the relationship.