Homeopathy tale holds no water with scientists

LIZ Gordon (Write Back, February 28) is wrong to claim that “... it is accepted within the scientific community that there is a physico-chemical change in water when producing homeopathic medicine”.

As a member of that scientific community (having studied physical chemistry at Imperial college and at Stanford and lectured in it at Durham University), I can assure her that it is not accepted at all by any of the scientists I have ever encountered.

In fact, all of the many peer-reviewed physical studies of the structure of liquid water show that the “memory effect” in solutions of high dilution claimed by homeopathy does not exist.

In fact, it is made physically impossible by the random thermal motion of water molecules and the measured rapid relaxation times of fluctuations in the structure of liquid water.

As to the randomised control trials of the efficacy of homeopathic remedies, none has shown reproducible results significantly better than placebo.

That is not to say they are useless — the placebo effect is real and if you can trigger it reliably you are on to something — but the theory of how homeopathy works involving solutions so dilute not even one molecule of active substance remains is physico-chemical nonsense.

DR NICK CANNING By email