Homeopaths, Holocaust Deniers and 'Philosophers of Science'

On January 20, 2010, at 10:23 (Oxford time, we may suppose), thousands of brilliant minds tried to prove, by guzzling homeopathy pills, that homeopathic remedies could not kill people, and thus that homeopathy doesn't work (and that "there's nothing in it"). A magnificient demonstration of public adherence to the scientific method!

Reposted and updated from Pi Alpha. Edited by Martin Cohen with original research by Perig Gouanvic


“The misrepresentations of history presented by Holocaust deniers and other pseudo-historians are very similar in nature to the misrepresentations of natural science promoted by creationists and homeopaths. ... we find a wide variety of movements and doctrines, such as creationism, astrology, homeopathy, and Holocaust denialism that are in conflict with results and methods that are generally accepted in the community of knowledge disciplines. ”

- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy


The Mass Suicide of Homeopathy Skeptics

Almost all of the systematic reviews in conventional journals start on a skeptical note. Indeed, nine out of ten of the articles begin with a statement that questions the scientific plausibility of homeopathy. Some of the articles use relatively strong language to make the point. For example, one by ‘Ernst and Pittler’ suggests that it is the use of ‘highly diluted material that overtly flies in the face of science and has caused homeopathy to be regarded as placebo therapy at best and quackery at worst’.

But to get a good sense of what the masses, including those who make up ‘the scientific consensus’, really think, Wikipedia is a passable indicator. Wikipedians, amongst them, in such articles, we find watchdogs of ‘reason’, including various hired professionals from the ‘Public Understanding of Science’ (and their trusted mercenaries) love to indulge in this dusty old strawman argument:

‘a 12C [homeopathic] solution is equivalent to a 'pinch of salt in both the North and South Atlantic Oceans'... One third of a drop of some original substance diluted into all the water on earth would produce a remedy with a concentration of about 13C.’

This is a stunning demonstration of the lack of intelligence not only of the ‘scientific consensus’, but of the democratic process of knowledge itself. And leading the process is Wikipedia, which turns donkeys into horses on a daily basis, as Socrates would say, while in the background is the poor state of debate between the Orthodoxy and the scientists and philosophers who are trying to make sense of homeopathy. Hahnemann spoke about a ‘forc’ that remained after dilutions and succussions, but pseudoskeptics have kept making the same strawman argument for the last 200 years.

The reality is that Hahnemann wrote a great deal and never shied away from philosophical questions. He argues:

‘A substance divided into ever so many parts must still contain in its smallest conceivable parts always some of this substance, and that the smallest conceivable part does not cease to be some of this substance and cannot possibly become nothing; - let them, if they are capable of being taught, hear from natural philosophers that there are enormously, powerful things (forces) which are perfectly destitute of weight.’

You may not agree, but it is not foolish stuff. Indeed, these days, the ‘homeopathic force’, for instance, could be described in a context of systems biology.

According to Ilya Prigogine, a Russian-born Belgian chemist best known for his definition of dissipative structures ‘and their role in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium’(work that led him being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977), in the domain of deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the ‘present’, which follows a determined ‘past’ and precedes an undetermined ‘future’. Instead, all of time is simply a given, with the future just as determined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life.

This applies especially well to homeopathy. Orthodox scientists evaluate homeopathy through the lens of the results (it’s only water/alcohol!) and tirelessly calculate oceanographic metaphors to deride what they believe is homeopathy, oblivious of the fact that dilution is conceived as a process leading to a change in the way the molecules of the solvent behave together — a change in the structure of water and a concurrent change in the forces likely to make these structures possible.


Brian Josephson, Nobel laureate of physics, has commented on a typical debunking exercise made by the New Scientist journal that:

‘criticisms [of homeopathy] centred around the vanishingly small number of solute molecules present in a solution after it has been repeatedly diluted are beside the point, since advocates of homeopathic remedies attribute their effects not to molecules present in the water, but to modifications of the water's structure. Simple-minded analysis may suggest that water, being a fluid, cannot have a structure of the kind that such a picture would demand. But cases such as that of liquid crystals, which while flowing like an ordinary fluid can maintain an ordered structure over macroscopic distances, show the limitations of such ways of thinking. There have not, to the best of my knowledge, been any refutations of homeopathy that remain valid after this particular point is taken into account.’

The particular homeopathic claim that water can ‘remember’ substances with which it has been in contact, and that such memory might be mediated by hydrogen bonds has also been criticised, typically on theoretical grounds. Many such arguments involve the short duration of individual hydrogen bonds in liquid water ( which is about a picosecond).

However, it is not to be assumed that the mesoscale structure of water must change on the same time scale. For example, in ice, hydrogen bonds are also very shortlived but an ice sculpture can ‘remember’ its shape over extended periods. (Here our essay assumes a suitbly seasonal feel - Editor.) On a smaller scale, cation hydrates are commonly described with particular structure (for example,  the octahedral Na+(H2O)6 ion) even though the individual water molecules making up such structures have very brief residence times (measured in microseconds).

Such arguments ignore the fact that the behaviour of a large population of water molecules may be retained even if that of individual molecules is constantly changing, just as a wave can cross an ocean, remaining a wave although its molecular content is continuously changing.

Evidence denying the long life of water clusters is mostly based on computer simulations but these cover only nanoseconds of simulated time. Such short periods are insufficient to show longer temporal relationships, for example those produced by oscillating reactions. They also involve relatively few water molecules and small (nanometre) dimensions, insufficient to show mesoscale (micron) effects. In short, they use models of the water molecule whose predictions correspond poorly to the real properties of water.

Certain 'memory' effects in water are well established and uncontroversial: for instance the formation of clathrate hydrates from aqueous solutions whereby previously frozen clathrates within the solution, when subsequently melted, predispose later to more rapid clathrate formation. This is explained by the presence of nanobubbles, extended chain silicates or induced clathrate initiators.

Can a homeopathic remedy work if it contains none of the original curative substance?

John Dalton (1776 - 1844) was able to estimate relative atomic masses of various molecules, the smallest unit that a chemical can exist in without losing its identity. His values were soon improved by Amadeo Avogadro (1776 - 1856), in 1811. Avogadro made the very important proposal that the volume of a gas (strictly, of an ideal gas ) is proportional to the number of atoms or molecules that are present. Hence, the relative molecular mass of a gas can be calculated from the mass of a sample of known volume. BUT neither Avogadro nor Dalton knew how many molecules there were in a given mass of a substance.  This is historically significant because it means that, although Hahnemann realised that there was a limit to the dilutions that could be used, he had no way of knowing what that limit was. An historical curiousity - or confirmation of the importance of the homeopathic principle? - is the fact that Darwin tested out ultrahigh dilutions on carnivorous plants. In Insectivorous Plants (1875) he writes:

‘The reader will best realize this degree of dilution by remembering that 5,000 ounces would more than fill a thirty-one gallon cask [barrel]; and that to this large body of water one grain of the salt was added; only half a drachm, or thirty minims, of the solution being poured over a leaf. Yet this amount sufficed to cause the inflection of almost every tentacle, and often the blade of the leaf. … My results were for a long time incredible, even to myself, and I anxiously sought for every source of error. … The observations were repeated during several years. Two of my sons, who were as incredulous as myself, compared several lots of leaves simultaneously immersed in the weaker solutions and in water, and declared that there could be no doubt about the difference in their appearance. … In fact every time that we perceive an odor, we have evidence that infinitely smaller particles act on our nerves.’

But we have to be careful; homeopathy was not the declared, explicit, subject of this text, although it may have been an underlying riddle for Darwin (we know that he visited an homeopath, out of despair about his condition, and felt better after).

In any case, in the Sixth edition of Hahnemann's Organon, which is the ‘Bible’ for practising homeopaths, Hahnmann explicitly moves beyond ‘physical’ cause and effect into the mystical world of mesmerism - or healing by the mystical agency of the so-called vital force (popular at the time and perhaps similar to the notion of chi in Chinese medicine.)

‘I find it necessary to allude here to animal magnetism, as it is termed, or rather mesmerism (as it should be called, out of gratitude to Mesmer, its first founder), which differs so much in its nature from all other therapeutic agents. 
 

This curative power, often so stupidly denied, which streams upon a patient by the contact of a well-intentioned person powerfully exerting his will, either acts homoeopathically, by the production of symptoms similar to those of the diseased state to be cured; and for this purpose a single pass made, without much exertion of the will, with the palms of the hands not too slowly from the top of the head downwards over the body to the tips of the toes, is serviceable in, for instance, uterine haemorrhages, even in the last stage when death seems approaching; or it is useful by distributing the vital force uniformly throughout the organism, when it is in abnormal excess in one part and deficient in other parts, for example, in rush of blood to the head and sleepless, anxious restlessness of weakly persons, etc., by means of a similar, single, but somewhat stronger pass; or for the immediate communication and restoration of the vital force to some one weakened part or to the whole organism, - an object that cannot be attained so certainly and with so little interference with the other medicinal treatment by any other agent besides mesmerism.’

According to the German newspaper Bild, a seventh edition of the Organon was recently unearthed in his native Germany, and this reveals that the doctor had continued his work on replacing dilutions with mesmerism and had completed experiments on the resuscitation of dead dogs. Alas, as the newspaper puts it, ‘He died shortly afterwards.’

The bottom line is that homeopathic dilution has not been shown o work, but nor yet has it been shown to be impossible. Some will say ‘well, you cannot prove a negative’ which may be true, but clearly the history of science is of things that people rejected as impossible becoming accepted in the light on new and more sophisticated understandings. The same could yet be said for the mystery of homeopathic dilution.

Diet Tips of the Great Philosophers ≠92: Henry Thoreau and Green Beans

Posted by Martin Cohen

Many of the philosophers whom we rely on to represent little oases of good sense and rationality in a disorganised world, disappointingly turnout, on closer inspection, to be not only rather eccentric, but downright irrational. David Henry Thoreau, an anarchist who eked out a living by making pencils while living in a shed by a pond, on the other hand, appears even at first glance to be rather eccentric. Short, shabby, wild-haired and generally rather unprepossessing, he nonetheless seems to have anticipated much of the ecological renaissance that today’s philosophers (and diet gurus) have only just begun to talk about. Oh, and yes, he was always rather thin.

In his Journal entry for January 7, 1857, Thoreau says of himself: 

'In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it - dining with the Governor or a member of Congress! But alone in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine.

I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. . . I wish to . . . be sane a part of every day.'

He is famous for having spent two years living in a small wood cabin by a pond, and living off, not so much three fruits of the woods, but his own allotment. Naturally, Thoreau was a vegetarian. He remarks how one farmer said to him: ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;’ even as the farmer:

‘... religiously devoted a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones, walking all the while behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.’

Thoreau himself cultivated, not so much an allotment, as a small bean farm, of two and a half acres, which provided for himself the bulk of the food he ate –peas, corn, turnips, potatoes and above all green beans, the last of which crop he sold for extra cash. During the second year, he reduced his crops, if anything, writing:

‘ … that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer.’

He drank mainly water, writing that it was ‘the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor’ and worrying about the temptations of a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea!

From life in the woods he learned, among other things, that it ‘cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food’ and that ‘a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.’

In a chapter of his most famous book, Walden, entitled simply, ‘The Bean Field,’ Thoreau records how:

‘I came to love my rows, my beans… They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antæus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer — to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work.’

For Thoreau, buying food, allowing others to grow food for him, would have disconnected him from the land, from direct contact with Nature, the source of both his bodily and spiritual nourishment. It was not enough to just have something to eat; he also wanted the experience of growing it.

Diet tips:

Food that you’ve grown has a special quality
You don’t need to eat a huge range of things to be healthy 

Follow @docmartincohen

Plato, Democritus and Alternative Medicine

Could the history of philosophy, and in particular the unresolved debate between Plato and Democritus, explain the present debate between alternative and conventional approaches to nature and health?

'Alternative Medicine' is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "any of a range of medical therapies not regarded as orthodox by the medical profession", citing chiropractic, faith healing, herbalism, homeopathy and reflexology as examples. ¹ Yet a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that over one third of people preferred alternative medicine to conventional methods, citing the medical establishment's emphasis on diagnostic testing and drug treatments that did not consider the patient's well-being and health as a whole.² Edzard Ernst, a Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter in the U.K puts usage even higher, saying that "about half the general population in developed countries use complementary and alternative medicine".³ And in some countries, notably China and India, what are considered 'alternative' treatments are central to government health strategies. ⁴ In fact, there are social and cultural dimensions to health policy as well as scientific and historical ones. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the response and acceptance of so-called 'alternative' health treatments.

Health as bodily harmony

The underlying assumptions of alternative medicine are that health is a state of bodily harmony or balance, and disease is a disharmony or imbalance ⁵ . This idea, central to traditional Chinese and Indian herbal treatments, is also present in the Western medical tradition, often taken as starting with Hippocrates. Hippocrates believed that the elements of good health were essentially environmental, such as a calm mental state, a balanced diet and physical exercise. Even that 'commonsense' health mantra of ‘fresh water, sunshine and exercise’ is by no means universal, it has its own social and cultural roots. 

Vitalis, the doctrine that the functions of a living organism cannot be fully explained by the laws of physics and chemistry alone, has a long history in medical philosophies. Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is sometimes referred to as the 'vital spark', 'energy' or élan vital, which some equate with the 'soul'. 

Most traditional healing practices propose that disease reflects some imbalance in those vital energies that distinguish living from non-living matter. In the Western tradition, these vital forces were identified as the four humours; Eastern traditions posit forces, such as qi, particularly important in conceptualising acupuncture and prana in Yoga. 

Philosophically speaking, the split between 'modern Western approaches and 'traditional, Eastern ones seems to have come about in the seventeenth century, around the time that René Descartes (1596-1650) split the world into two parts - the mental world of minds and the physical world of bodies - the theory known as 'dualism' and the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, described people as 'but an Artificial Animal, the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels'. (It is no coincidence that Descartes' Meditations starts with an account of the French philosopher's dissection of a monkey...) 

However, conventional medicine is seen to have split away from the 'bodily harmony' approach in the nineteenth century, particularly following the discovery of disease-carrying microbes - germs, viruses, bacteria and so on. Prior to this, medical practitioners in Europe shared what is sometimes called the 'humoural' model of the human body, but no one school had a monopoly of authority in health matters.

The Theory of the Four Humours

The humoural theory, developed by the Roman doctor [[Galen]], held that the four elements in nature - fire, air, water and earth - corresponded to four fluids in the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Herbs were believed to positively affect the humours through four key properties: being hot, dry, cold or moist. Health was a matter of balancing the humours or ‘bodily juices’. 

Nonetheless, Europeans at this time were particularly open to new treatments that arrived from abroad as a result of trade in far-off and mysterious lands. ⁶ These were seen not merely as a response to a more fundamental bodily imbalance, but as the essential 'cause' of the imbalance. Hence they could be treated in isolation, usually through drugs. 

Where conventional medical treatment is seen as effective in dealing with certain 'emergencies', such as physical injuries, other long-term illnesses and bodily dysfunction's seem to many people to remain poorly understood and conventional treatments ineffective and even harmful. Another objection to conventional medicine is its emphasis on 'treatment' rather than 'prevention'. Almost all health spending in Western countries is on the former - some 85% in the case of the United States - as opposed to the latter. ⁷

 

The importance of lifestyle

A report by the US Centers for Disease Control stated that 54%of heart disease, 37% of cancer and half of cerebrovascular and atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) was preventable through changes in lifestyle. ⁸

 

As Roberta Bivins puts it, in Alternative Medicine - A History, "medical practices are typically culturally specific - that is, they are internally coherent with and respond to practically the cultures in which they initially developed". Bivens puts it thus: "The incorporation of dissection in to medical training and knowledge production was clearly integrated with Enlightenment ideas of rationalism and empiricism." And today, recent advocates of 'enlightenment thinking' invariably cite examples of treatment by Alternative Health practitioners as dire evidence of the spread of 'irrationality". Yet how rational is say, modern medicine, and how irrational are alternative remedies? If, according to World Health Organisation figures, in the 30 years from 1967 to 1998, just under 6000 ‘adverse events’ world-wide can be traced back to the prescription of herbal and other alternative medicines, this figure can only be contrasted with those from a University of Toronto study in 1998 which found that there were at least 106 000 fatalities each year, in the US alone, from side-effects of officially sanctioned and proved drugs.⁹

The Right to Culturally Appropriate Healthcare
 
The World Health Organization determines four criteria for the adequate delivery of health care and the realization of the highest attainable standard of health: Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability, and Quality (AAAQ)
 
Acceptability : All health facilities, goods and services must be respectful of medical ethics and culturally appropriate, as well as sensitive to gender and life-cycle requirements. ¹

However, anatomical dissection is opposed to the social values of Confucian China and Buddhist India, contributing to the continued acceptance of 'alternative medicine' in these cultures and conversely the added resistance to it in the West. ¹¹ Equally, approaches such as acupuncture and moxabustion were in harmony with the philosophical beliefs of the East, but opposed to those of the West. Central to both techniques is "an immense pharmacopoeia, a detailed disease classification system and a set of body-maps" which define relationships between the body's organs and systems, as mediated by a circulatory system "that moves both tangible and intangible substances" around the body. In particular, the strange (to Western eyes) concept of qi.

At certain points on the body's surface, the various vessels or channels through which these fluids move, and which connect different functional and sensory organs, can be stimulated, thereby altering the flows of qi within them and between the organs. In moxabustion, this is done through the medium of small cones of fibre (extracted from the leaves of Artemisia vulgaris or mugwort) that are burnt on top of the points. In acupuncture, needles, inserted to different depths and sometimes manipulated, are the means of intervention ¹²

The mystical lore of plants crosses virtually every cultural boundary. For example, according to Kathleen Karlsen, MA , an advocate of herbal medicine, a 60,000 year old burial site excavated in Iraq included eight different medicinal plants. ¹³

"This evidence of the spiritual significance of plants is echoed around the globe”, she adds. In Europe, works such as Pliny’s ‘’Natural History’’, which describes the supposed properties of plants gathered from numerous cultural traditions including the herbal practices of the Celtic Druids, and Dioscorides’ ‘’De Materia Medica’’ , which is a work regarded by some as the cornerstone of modern botany and by herbalists today as a key pharmaceutical guide. But the Romans were not the first.

In ancient times, healing formulas existed for almost every known disease. Specific conditions were treated with a variety of methods such as tinctures, teas and compresses or by inhaling the rejuvenating fragrances of essential oils. ¹⁴

Indeed, as Kathleen Karlsen also notes, “Shamanistic medicine, alive and well in traditional societies today, often incorporates the use of hallucinogenic plants which enable the herbal practitioner to reach unseen realms to obtain higher knowledge and guidance. “ 

The esoteric wisdom of ancient healers and of plant lore has been central to medicine since ancient times, not only spawning approaches such as herbalism, traditional Chinese medicine, biofeedback, and homeopathy, but also influencing mainstream approaches to illness. These approaches draw upon general theories, such as the 'theory of similars' or the related 'theory of signatures'. 

For instance, the onion was favoured by the Egyptians not only as a food, and used as a medicine, but also respected for reflecting their view of the universe's multi-layered structure. Egyptians identified medicinal properties in plants such as myrrh, aloe, peppermint, garlic and castor oil. Healing plants are also featured extensively in ancient Arabian lore, in the Bible, and in the druidic tradition of the ancient Celts. Herbal tradtions were central to life in the Mayan, Aztec and Inca civilizations, and north American Indian herbal rituals. 

The medical use of plants by the ancient Greeks reflected their idea that each of the twelve primary gods had characteristic plants. Such approaches are clearly methodologically incompatible with conventional medicine, to say the least. The US Food and Drug Administration strictly patrols claims made for herbal medicine, to prevent medical claims being made to promote them. On the other hand, herbs lacking such elevated 'connections', such as parsley, thyme, fennel and celery were allowed correspondingly more everyday roles in health, and are to many today more easily accepted as having 'health-giving' properties.

 

 Different languages for discussing health

(That's 'tea' on the left...)

One way to approach the debate (and lack of debate) between alternative and conventional approaches to health and biology is by comparing their two languages and trying to find proper translations, as Thomas Kuhn suggested, and acknowledge when there is incommensurability:

Incommensurability thus becomes a sort of untranslatability', localized to one or another area in which two lexical taxonomies differ ... Members of one community can acquire the taxonomy employed by members of another, as the historian does in learning to understand old texts. But the process which permits understanding produces bilinguals, not translators ... The bilingual must always remember within which community discourse is occurring. ¹⁵

Alternative medicine operates under a holist paradigm. It tries to identify shapes, as in the doctrine of signatures, and make them "resonate", as in homeopathy, which lies on the law of similars. It should be reminded that Plato, when he conceived the notion of Ideas, was also referring to the notion of shape (eidolon, from which "idea" comes, also means shape or structure).

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Shape and symbol

Does science have, in its own terms, a way to account for shapes in nature?

 

Conventional medicine, of course, is concerned with shapes, as exemplified by our modern icons : the double helix (DNA), the key-lock model of chemical messenger-receptor action, and the more elaborate 3D protein simulations that fascinate most of us. However, although molecular biochemistry is entirely based on the shape of proteins, molecules and electron clouds around nuclei, it would be erroneous to assume that molecular biochemistry covers all shapes and forms found in the living universe. It is not its purpose, because it operates with the worldview of logical reductionism.

Under this paradigm, it is believed (but not provable) that, by reducing life to its most fundamental components, by analyzing all its details, it will be possible to account for the observed universe.

The alternative view (which was the conventional view before the Enlightenment), on the contrary, adopts a phenomenological perspective. Observing that one plant, because of its shape, evokes an image, an idea, or an impression, the alternative-minded practitioner will immediately use it as a tool to discover occurrences of this Idea in the sick or healthy body or mind. 

'Magical thinking' will link the appearance of the St-John's Wort flower with hope or happiness because of its unexpected yellow colour, or the concentric organization of the onion with the orderly organization of the cosmos. Nonsense? 

This analogical thinking is prevalent in dreams and normal thought processes, but it is not accceptable in scientific discourse, where it is condemned as dangerous and fallacious. Yet could it be that the active molecules of the St-John's Wort and the onion do deliver a message, through the algebra of organic molecules? 

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• 1Oxford English Dictionary, ninth edition 1996
• 2Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg (Celestial Arts, 2002) page 3
• 3 in a paper in the Medical Journal of Australia - Ernst E. "Obstacles to research in complementary and alternative medicine." Medical Journal of Australia, 2003; 179 (6): 279-80 available at http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/179_06_150903/ern10442_fm-1.html
  
• 4 "In 1948, the Committee by Planning Commission in 1951 and the Homoeopathic Pharmacopoeia Committee in 1962 testify to this. At the instance of the recommendation of these Committees, the Government of India have accepted Homoeopathy as one of the national System of Medicine and started releasing funds for its development" from http://indianmedicine.nic.in/html/homoeopathy/homoe.htm accessed December 16 2008
  
• 5Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg, Celestial Arts, 2002, page 6
• 6 Alternative Medicine?: A History by Roberta Bivins, Oxford University Press 2007, p46
  
• 7 Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg, Celestial Arts, 2002, page 4
  
• 8 Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg (Celestial Arts, 2002) page 4
  
• 9As catalogued, wittily in The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim It by Dan Hind, Verso, 2007.
• 10 [www.who.int/entity/mediacentre/factsheets/fs323_en.pdf Joint fact sheet WHO/OHCHR/323], August 2007
  
• 11 Alternative Medicine?: A History by Roberta Bivins p44
  
• 12Alternative Medicine?: A History, by Roberta Bivins p45
• 13 Shamanism and the Ancient Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Archaeology, James L. Pearson, Rowman Altamira, 2002 p. 114 ISBN 0759101566, 9780759101562 Google books
  
• 14 http://www.livingartsoriginals.com/infoherbalmedicine.html accessed December 16th 2008
  
• 15 Kuhn, Thomas S. (1990) Anno%20Kuhn%20The%20Road%20after%20Structure%201990.htm 'The Road since Structure'. Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers