A Tipping Point For Homeopathy?

Yazmin · February 2010

A landmark paper on homeopathy and cancer has appeared in the February 2010 issue of the International Journal of Oncology. Scientists at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (MDA), led by Moshe Frenkel, MD, have confirmed the ability of four homeopathic remedies to induce apoptosis (programmed cell death) in breast cancer cell lines in the laboratory. The scientists in question were from the Integrative Medicine Program, the Department of Molecular Pathology, and the Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology of MDA. Their two Indian collaborators were from the Banerji Homeopathic Research Foundation, Kolkata, India, where these same remedies are employed clinically with apparent success. The four ultra-dilute remedies in question were Carcinosin, Phytolacca, Conium and Thuja.
"The remedies exerted preferential cytotoxic effects against the two breast cancer cell lines, causing cell cycle delay/arrest and apoptosis" the authors wrote.
It was particularly interesting that the cell-killing effects of two of the remedies investigated in this study, Carcinosin and Phytolacca, appeared similar to the activity of paclitaxel (Taxol), the most commonly used chemotherapeutic drug for breast cancer, when it was tested in the same two adenocarcinoma cell lines investigated in this study.
Phytolacca is better known as pokeweed root, which grows as a towering weed in the US and elsewhere. Conium maculatum is poison hemlock, while Thuja occidentalis comes from the Eastern Arborvitae tree. Carcinosin is the only non-botanical in the group. It is made from a highly diluted extract of breast cancer tissue. These are typically used at the Banerjis' clinic in India to treat breast cancer. The use of poisonous plants to treat cancer, while unusual, is not necessarily controversial. Madagascar periwinkle, for instance, yields the familiar vinca alkaloids--vincristine and vinblastine. The aforementioned paclitaxel (Taxol) is derived from the bark of the Pacific Yew tree.
Even the use of a cancer tissue extract might be explained in immunological terms. No, what makes these remedies highly unusual is the degree to which they have been diluted. These are given in the Frenkel article as follows: Carcinosin, 30C; Conium maculatum, 3C; Phytolacca decandra, 200C and Thuja occidentalis, 30C.

The "C" Number

What exactly does this "C" number mean? It is indication of the dilution of the active ingredient in an inert medium such as water. Thus, a "3C" dilution means that there is one molecule of an herb like Conicum maculatum in one million molecules of inert medium. It is theoretically possible that a medicine could consist of just one part of a chemical in a million molecules of inert liquid. For instance, we know that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has set a limit of 2 ppm for polychlorinated biphenols (PCBs) in fish (two parts of PCBs per million parts of fish tissue, per Maxim, 1984).
But as the "C" number rises, so does the dilution. Samuel Hahnemann, MD, the 19th century inventor of homeopathy, used 30C dilutions for many diseases. This means that there is 1 molecule in "10 to the minus sixty" molecules of inert solvent. On average, this means you would have to give two billion doses of a 30C remedy per second to 6 billion people for 4 billion years in order to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient!
TO BE CONCLUDED, WITH REFERENCES, NEXT WEEK.

--Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.

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AnneW · February 2010

Awesome! I hope this can work outside the petri dish, too!

Anne

Yazmin · February 2010

Indeed, Anne.

And here comes Part II of this bizarre discovery.

A Tipping Point For Homeopathy? Part II

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?Sunday, 28 February 2010
Last week I began a discussion of the very important new paper on homeopathy and cancer from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (MDA). I conclude, with references, this week.

Phytolacca's 200C dilution takes us into a realm of the bizarre. 200C means that there would be a single molecule of pokeweed in "10 to the minus 400" molecules of solvent. However, there is a total of "10 to the 80th power" atoms in entire known universe. So a 200C dilution would require "10 to the 320th power" more universes (yes, whole universes) in order to simply deliver one single molecule of Phytolacca in the final substance!
Is it any wonder that many scientists regard homeopathy as logically impossible and ascribe any therapeutic benefit to the placebo effect? There is no end of critics of homeopathy on the Internet and elsewhere, who consider homeopathy to be quackeryand believe it is their bounden duty to expose this fraud whenever possible. They have trouble stretching their minds and imagining that there are other possible explanations for the action of homeopathic remedies—in other words, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.
One such innovative theory is of "water memory," which was proposed by the French scientist Jacques Benveniste to explain the purported therapeutic powers of homeopathic remedies (Benveniste 1994). With this MDA publication, open-minded scientists may need to revisit Benveniste's original claims.
I think the real question is whether science is a set of dogmatic "facts" determining in advance what is possible or impossible, or a methodology for rigorously testing hypotheses and following the data wherever it leads. I applaud Moshe Frenkel, Lorenzo Cohen, and their coworkers for taking the second path. To me, they have performed a great service to science, at considerable personal risk to their own careers.
MD Anderson is ranked (by U.S. News) as America's number one cancer center and so it will be particularly interesting to see if the professional skeptics will try discredit this study with their usual sort of personal attacks. I hope that this outstanding paper will be a tipping point, wherein conventional science is finally forced to re-evaluate its rigid opposition to this puzzling but fascinating mode of treatment.
"Homeopathy has been a very controversial system of care, commonly practiced in Europe, but not commonly used in cancer care," Frenkel recently told me. "This is the first scientific study that investigated the effect of homeopathic remedies on breast cancer cells. This study raises the exciting possibility of a window of therapeutic opportunity for preferentially eliminating breast cancer cells with minimal damage to the surrounding normal mammary tissue by using homeopathic remedies."

--Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.

References
Benveniste J, Ducot B, Spira A. Memory of water revisited. Nature. 1994;370(6488):322.
Frenkel M, Mishra BM, Sen S, et al. Cytotoxic effects of ultra-diluted remedies on breast cancer cells. Int. J. Oncol. 2010;36(2):395-403.
Frenkel M. Personal communication, Feb. 20, 2010.

A Tipping Point For Homeopathy?

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