The 30% solution

Some things shouldn’t work, but they do. Homeopathy is a classic example . One of the things that its originator, Dr Samuel Hahnemann , claimed was that the more a medication was diluted, the more effective it would be since the dilution process apparently ‘potentised’ the drug’s ability and enhanced its ‘spiritlike medicinal power’.

But even a normal dilution of, say, 30C — one followed by 60 zeroes — means having only one molecule of the substance in a sphere of water with a diameter of 150 million kilometres . At higher dilutions that are supposed to be much more effective , there are no molecules of the medication left at all!

Now Hahnemann, who was not a fool, knew this could sound like poppycock. So he devised a further theory maintaining that the absent molecules were irrelevant to the treatment process because the water they had originally been dissolved in retained a ‘memory’ of the substance.

However, this too is bilge because if water has memory then all the water in the world should by now remember everything that has ever been dissolved in it and be the ultimate panacea for all diseases.

Be that as it may, the fact still remains that homeopathy works about 30% of the time. Scientists attribute this to the placebo effect — the beneficial effect in a patient following a particular treatment with an ineffectual substance such as a sugar pill that arises from the patient’s faith in the intervention rather than from the intervention itself.

But here’s another irony : no one knows how placebos work 30% of the time, either. It’s another thing, like homeopathy, that shouldn’t work but does. Yet, placebos are so important in the allopathic drug manufacturing process (for conducting double blind trials in which the identity of those receiving a test treatment is concealed from both administrators and subjects until after the study is completed ) that without it no real drugs could ever be made.
Nevertheless, the one thing that becomes clear is that expectation or belief in getting results works.

In other words, faith works. It’s sort of official, too. A meta-analysis of previous studies done by the National Institute for Healthcare Research in the US, which analysed nearly 126,000 people and was published by the American Psychological Association, found that regular churchgoers were more likely to live longer by — you guessed it! — a margin of 30%.