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Report from HRI conference London– June 2023 Report by Ilse Pedler
The 5th Homeopathic Research Institute Conference took place from 16th-18th June 2023 at the Leonardo Tower Bridge Hotel in London. There were over 200 delegates and speakers from 27 counties including Australia, India, Hong Kong, Brazil, Switzerland, Mexico and Bulgaria among others. Among BAHVS members, it was good to see Chris Aukland, Ann Wood and Edward De Beukelaer as well as me attending. It was a packed two and a half days of lectures and presentations detailing the latest in Homeopathic research from across the world and it was an overwhelmingly positive and uplifting experience.
There were two things that struck me most forcibly; the first was that homeopathy is serious science; there are laboratories and institutes in some countries dedicated wholly to homeopathy and research. These include the Institute of Complementary and Integrative Medicine at the University of Bern and the Department of Homeopathy, Durban University of Technology in South Africa.
The second thing was that for those scientists and researchers present, the debate had completely moved on from
Does Homeopathy Work?
The many and repeated studies of all kinds show without a doubt that homeopathy has an effect on a living system, the question now was
How Does Homeopathy Work?
For me that was a revelation, I think we as vets have become so bogged down in Does it work/doesn’t it work question and if it works where’s your evidence that we have almost lost confidence in the fundamental truth that as homeopathic practitioners we know deep down. Homeopathy works because we see it having an effect every day in our patients. I think one of the reasons we have become bogged down in the UK is because of the fight we’ve had with our regulatory body, the RCVS and their insistence asking for ‘evidence that homeopathy works’. That and the twisting of the concept of ‘Evidence Based Medicine’ to mean no or limited value is put on a therapy unless it has double blind placebo trials, and meta- analysis to back it up.
So, what sort of evidence is there that is so compelling? One key researcher is Professor Stephan Baumgartner who has worked at the Institute of Integrative Medicine at the University of Witten in Germany and the Institute of Complementary and Integrative Medicine at The University of Bern in Switzerland. He has been conducting experiments in plant models on the effects of homeopathic remedies for 25 years. His work mainly focuses around different potencies of Arsenicum album and Stannum and his research teams have developed a number of lab models to test the effect of different potencies on plant growth. The experiments had potentised negative controls in blinded and randomised experiments and in 15 out of 18 different laboratory
models he observed a statistically significant effect for specific homeopathic effects over placebo. Moreover because of the rigorous nature of the lab models, these experiments were able to be replicated in different labs in different parts of the world by independent teams of researchers. So, he is able to produce reproducibly solid evidence for the effect of the remedies. Because of this certainty his working group is now focusing on the mode of action of homeopathy on a physiochemical level and early research has shown that homeopathic medicines produce a change in water molecule dynamics and one possible explanation he is pursuing is modification of the hydrogen bond within the water molecule.
Another area of research is into solvatochromic dyes, dyes that change colour with different solvent. Dr Stephen Cartwright of the Cherwell Laboratory for Fundamental Research in Homeopathy in Oxford, has been working with solvatochromic dyes for the last 10 years, his studies are again repeatable and consistent. His results show that: • Homeopathic remedies have a measurable and
repeatable effect on solvatochromic dyes.
• They seem to act in a general manner which result in changes to a number of specific chemical reaction
involving the dyes.
• Arsenicum 10M appears to possess an electric field of
magnitude similar to the potential across cell
membranes.
• A weak electric current can neutralize potencies of Ant-crud • Macrophages amplify the activity of potencies of Ant-
crud.
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