The room was crowded and somewhat stuffy. Participants jammed in nearly elbow-to-elbow. Neat, white tablecloths spread before a shabby group of students painted a contrasting picture of randomness and order. I never liked sitting in hotel conference rooms for hours on end passively listening to speakers drone on about endless technical information.

But this one was different. The topic was homeopathy. Specifically, how homeopathy could be used to heal a variety of illnesses. I was a student in chiropractic college and was fascinated by anything even remotely linked to alternative medicine. The speaker was a medical doctor who presented a long list of cases and protocols for using homeopathy to heal.

Two things he said fascinated me. He said that with homeopathic remedies, the greater the dilution the more powerful the effect. I thought about this for a moment and wondered how this could be so. How could making something weaker have a stronger effect? His next statement was even more radical. He said that at the higher dilutions there was virtually none of the actual substance in the remedy. The healing occurred with nothing other than water!

I could not believe what I just heard. How could mere water, or in some cases an inert substance such as alcohol, heal such a variety of problems with such good results? I would not discover the answer to this question for another eleven years.

Homeopathy is one of the most puzzling and controversial healing systems in use today. Homeopathy is extremely popular with remedies found in local pharmacies and advertised on television. Homeopathy is even more popular in Europe with thousands of satisfied users. Many are aware of how effective homeopathy is but until recently there has been no explanation as to how it works.

Homeopathy is an important modality in informational healing. In order to understand how it works we must examine some of the scientific studies and theories that support the idea of homeopathic remedies as information sources. At present however, there is no definitive explanation of how it works but there are some very interesting theories. The theories explain the effect of homeopathy in terms of a non-local effect. Homeopathic remedies are capable of transferring information through the non-local channel. They heal by reducing entropy. 

The Water Cure

Water is essential to life on our planet. Virtually all living systems need water to survive. Our bodies consist of about 70% water. Water is needed to dissolve and carry substances and is an integral part of our tissues. It would seem logical that water would be an important part of healing. But is it possible for water to carry information beyond its simple structure of one oxygen molecule connected to two hydrogen molecules? This is just what the healing art of homeopathy suggests. 

Homeopathy has been around since the late 1700s. Its founder, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, discovered that he could elicit a healing response by giving a very small amount of a substance that produced the same symptoms as the disease. Hahnemann’s approach was opposite to the thinking of the day. Instead of using treatments eliminating the symptoms of an illness he sought out substances that had the opposite effect. These substances produced the symptoms of a particular illness. The idea was that the body would rebound back to health. This concept is somewhat analogous to a vaccine whereby the injected organism is not strong enough to cause the disease but strong enough to activate the immune system so it can fight off the disease. He called this idea “like cures like” and set out to discover a variety of symptom-producing substances. He did this with a method he developed called “proving.”

In order to “prove” a substance a homeopath will conduct a number of trials with healthy subjects. Diluted substances are given to subjects who record any resultant changes in symptoms or health. The goal is to find substances that produce the same symptoms in healthy people as the disease does in sick people. Hahnemann kept detailed records of symptoms observed in the proving sessions. He categorized them and published a series of books. 

Homeopathic remedies contain a variety of substances diluted a great deal. Some of these substances are actually harmful or poisonous to the body in larger doses but the dilution renders them harmless. A remedy labeled 1C consists of one drop of active substance mixed with 100 drops of water or alcohol. If one drop of this substance is again diluted with another 100 drops of water then the remedy is labeled 2C. To give you some perspective as to how dilute these substances are, a 3C remedy is diluted to one part in one million.

Remedies with dilutions greater than 12C are so dilute that it is unlikely the remedy contains even a single molecule of the active substance. After each step in the dilution process the remedy is shaken vigorously in a technique called succussion. The idea is that the succussion helps to imprint the essence of the substance on the water or alcohol. The remedies are generally available in liquid form with the active substance diluted with alcohol or a small pill that contains a drop of the diluted substance. The patient is told to either place a drop of the liquid or pill on their tongue and let it dissolve.