Quick answer: Most of the homeopathic medicines being sold have no potential for actually doing anything medicinal. The technology is based on diluting a material, and if the dilution is large enough there is no way the homeopathic remedies are functioning in your body.
First off let us make a distinction between herbal remedies and homeopathic remedies. There is a large grey area here because there is no regulation on the way these companies are marketing their products, so many of the boxes and ads are intentionally labeled to be confusing.
Herbal remedies do have some scientific evidence in terms of being functional (depending on the remedy), but in this article, we are specifically looking at homeopathic remedies and sometimes these two overlap. Not all herbal remedies are homeopathic and not all homeopathic remedies are herbal. So, let’s make sure we have an accurate definition of what homeopathic medicine is because sometimes these definitions get blurred.
“Homeopathic remedies are prepared by making a tincture from seeds, bark, roots, minerals and other elements, then diluting this mixture with distilled water and alcohol, then shaking and diluting further to potentize the remedy (making the mixture even more potent). So homeopathic medicine is different than herbal remedies, and is based on the idea of diluting.”
This definition was taken from the website: Stayhealthyandwell.com
The National Cancer Institute defines homeopathic medicine as follows:
“An alternative approach to medicine based on the belief that natural substances, prepared in a special way and used most often in very small amounts, restore health. According to these beliefs, in order for a remedy to be effective, it must cause in a healthy person the same symptoms being treated in the patient. Also called homeopathy.”
You can find several different definitions on depending on which website you choose to look at. Some websites claim that dilution of a chemical changes the shape of water, or that water has a memory, and “like heals like”, or that there is “vibrational energy”, but they all have some description of diluting a solution to make the remedy. Many even claim that the more dilute a solution is, the more powerful the remedy will be. This idea of dilution is where the concept falls short.
Let’s start by looking at a typical homeopathic remedy. Go to Amazon and search for “homeopathic remedy” and pick a random product. I found one that was a homeopathic medicine that relieves sleeplessness. It looked something like this:
The active ingredient is Coffea Cruda and is labeled as 30C (this is the dilution rate). This medicine is currently priced at $6.36USD for 80 pellets, and the recommended dosage is to dissolve 5 pellets in your mouth 3 times per day until the symptoms stop or as directed by a doctor.
First question: What is Coffea Cruda? Coffea Cruda is essentially coffee. As defined by Ivy Roses Holistic Magazine, Coffee Cruda is made from the roasted coffee bean.
OK, so the company is taking coffee and diluting it down to make a homeopathic medicine at a dilution rate of 30C. But, what is the 30C? This is where it gets interesting. The term C (or Ck in some instances) is a one to 100 dilution. A 2C solution would be doing that dilution two times making it one to 10,000 dilution. 3C would be one to 1,000,000. You can see where this is going.
The formula for how many times dilution the herbal remedy shows is as follows:
Dilution = 100^C
So 30C would be 100^30. That is 1 with 32 zero’s after it. Here is what that number looks like written out: 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.
That is ludicrously diluted.
Let’s conceptualize this. Think of a Splenda packet. Those little yellow non-sugar sweetener packets that you see at every restaurant you go to. A Splenda packet has about 1 gram of Splenda. So, let’s say the original manufacturer started off with 1 Splenda packet worth of coffee. How much water would that get diluted into to make the 30C solution?
30C would be a Splenda packet diluted into all the water on the earth… but not only all the water on the earth, but all the water on 8.1 quinquatrigintillion (yes that is a real word, I looked it up) other earths with the same amount of water. And to put that number in perspective, if every star in our entire universe (which is about 1billion trillion stars) was replaced with an earth with the same amount of water as our earth. You would need 800 trillion universes to get to the amount of water to dilute 1 Splenda packet.
That’s pretty crazy on its own, but let’s look at this one other way. Let’s say the active ingredient is caffeine (so we can do a direct calculation because coffee cruda is not a chemical we can get any numbers on), and the remedy is straight caffeine at 30C dilution. If we assume that each pellet is about 10 grams, a 30C pellet of caffeine would statistically not have a single molecule of caffeine in it.
Here’s a table showing the dilution factor and the associated number of molecules in a liter of water, and how many grams of material you would need to get a single molecule of the caffeine.
Based off those numbers, how many pellets would you need to get before you statistically got a single molecule at a dilution rate of 30C? Assuming each pellet weighs about 10 grams, you would need approximately 322,574,750,830,565,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000pellets to statistically get one molecule of caffeine. That is aproximately the same number of grains of sand on all earths, if there were as many earths as there are grains of sand on our earth (how’s that for a mind bender).
So how do they do this if the volumes necessary are so large? The magic comes from what we call serial dilution. You take the Splenda packet and put it in a cup of water, and then take a drop of that solution, and put it in another cup of water. And then you take a drop of that water and put it in another cup of water. When you that 30 times, it dilutes it so much there isn’t statistically any left of what you started with, and all you need is about 30 cups of water and an eye dropper.
This is not to say that some herbal remedies do not have merit. There are several herbal remedies that have shown that they have some medicinal effect, but they are not homeopathic. If you pick up a medicine and it says Homeopathic on the side, or it has a dilution rate greater than a few C, they’re selling you a small sugar pill, or a piece of purified sidewalk chalk.
So, take your packet of science straight and don’t dilute it.
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