Hormesis and homeopathy: a step forward

The links between hormesis and homeopathy have long been debated, but the remarkable findings of Chikramane et al. from the Indian Institute of Technology group led by Jayesh Bellare and reported in this issue of Homeopathy, showing, for the first time, hormetic activation with standard homeopathic high-dilutions medicines, will open a new chapter in the debate and have a profound effect on the understanding of these extreme dilutions from a biological perspective.[ ¹ ]

The link between homeopathy and hormesis started early, a year or two after Hugo Schulz first observed the biphasic dose response for multiple chemical disinfectants on yeast. Schulz observed the unexpected, a low dose stimulation of metabolism while at higher doses the expected occurred, inhibition and at even higher doses death. This unexpected observation was troubling, making Schulz think that something there was an error in his experimentation but he could not figure out what.

After he determined that there was no irregularity with his methods, he did what he was trained to do, to try and replicate the findings. Thus, he and his assistant repeated the experiment over and over until they “doubted the doubt out” (a phrase taken from the obituary of Thomas Hunt Morgan, Nobel Prize, 1933 by his former graduate student Hermann J. Muller, Nobel Prize, 1946). Even though they had doubted the doubt out, Schulz still could not place his exciting new findings in context and got little or no feedback when he first presented them at a meeting of the Greifswald Medical Society in 1884.[ ^2–4 ]

Schulz was a well-educated and trained pharmacologist and toxicologist as well as a physician. In addition, he was familiar with the theory and practice of homeopathy, from his own study and also due to family associations. During the approximate time of his yeast studies he also became aware of a study claiming that a homeopathic preparation had success in treating a type of gastroenteritis. Since the bacteria presumed to be causative had just been identified, Schulz obtained the bacteria and tested to see if the homeopathic preparation killed the disease causing organism. It failed to do so, regardless of the dose. For most scientists that might have been the end of the story. That is, the revised conclusion was that the homeopathic preparation did not work. This was not the case with Schulz, who kept an open mind.

At some point following discussions with his colleague Rudolph Arndt, he came up with the idea that the homeopathic preparation was effective, not by killing the bacteria but by enhancing the adaptive capacity of the body to resist the infection. Finally, after a few years Schulz created a hypothesis and a context for this set of bewildering data.

However, Schulz took a major step further, as only an inexperienced young academic would, proclaiming that he had discovered the explanatory principle of homeopathy. Given the political climate of the times, Schulz was quickly proclaimed an enemy of traditional medicine and was targeted by his former academic friends resulting in professional isolation and marginalization.

As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. Thus, the hormesis concept, at a very early age, got associated with homeopathy, and became the target for ridicule, marginalization and death by the new powerhouse, the emerging and all powerful biomedical establishment. Hormesis and Schulz never really knew what hit them. The life of hormesis would never be the same. As I have written in several past articles, Hugo Schulz, despite his major discovery, created a terrible future for his idea.

Even though the biomedical community did its utmost to marginalize hormesis, by denying its existence, keeping it out of teaching and textbooks, preventing funding and research and denying positions to those who might be supportive, it is not possible to kill an idea if it is real. The enemies of hormesis were mostly acting from a political and economic motives. Their form of medicine would be the only one and if hormesis was the explanatory component of homeopathy then it would have to die. It all could have been different for hormesis if only Schulz had not linked his creation with homeopathy, if he had only simply called it a biphasic dose response and encouraged others to study it as well. However, Schulz went beyond the data and in doing so, created a living hell for his dose response idea.

It should be pointed out that Schulz's idea of hormesis was not ultra-dilutionist. Schulz always believed that measurable low doses of agents induced or upregulated adaptive responses. Thus, the idea of doses below Avogadro's Number were biologically active made no sense to him. Even though he was not a true believer in this extreme low dose homeopathic tradition he was still their hero and still a major villain of traditional medicine. But Schulz had a mind of his own, he was a leader, not a follower.

When I became seriously involved with the study of hormesis in the late 1980s it seemed that Schulz's linkage of hormesis to homeopathy was the worst thing that could happen to hormesis! I strove to distance hormesis from homeopathy in a scientific manner. I also painstakingly assessed the history of the dose response and showed how the medical community made a mistake by rejecting the biphasic dose response because of its early association with homeopathy.[ ^5–9 ] Finally, after 30 years, hormesis is represented in leading toxicology and pharmacology textbooks, the object of extensive multi-disciplinary research, vast increases in yearly citations in the major indices. It is seen as a fundamental evolutionary concept with profound biological and medical implications.

But the story will be greatly energized by the new findings of Chikramane et al. which appear in this issue of Homeopathy. The paper offers a marked advance in the understanding of some critical aspects of homeopathy and how homeopathy and hormesis can be reunited again, this time forcing homeopathy to play by the low dose rules of hormesis and the biomedical community. The present paper of Chikramane et al. is the result of a decade long effort to understand what takes place in the processing of commercial homeopathic preparations.[ ¹⁰ ],[ ¹¹ ]

Bellare's team specifically dissected the process of succussion in which the preparation solution is vigorously shaken by mechanical means and then progressively diluted to hypothetical solutions far below Avogadro's number. They thought outside the box and looked for nanoparticle residuals rather than impossible-to-measure metal concentrations in solution. Following a very meticulous procedure they were able to show that the sample preparation process led to the formation of highly irregular nanoparticles that tended to float to the surface.[ ¹ ]

The number of nanoparticles passed on to each dilution was asymptotically described such that the amounts were similar in preparations diluted from 6c and lower. Thus, they were able to demonstrate that highly dilute homeopathic solutions actually retained material from the original preparation, but transformed into nanomaterial of highly diverse shapes and sizes, very different from the nanoparticles typically produced by industry. Now came the big test: its biological activity, the subject of the present paper. As will be seen, the multiple different metal based homeopathic nanoparticles at the level of pico-grams per milliliter all showed reproducible biphasic dose responses clearly indicative of an hormetic dose response.

Hugo Schulz would have been delighted by this! He would have loved to assess the new paper of Chikramane et al. These findings are potentially very important for the field of nanoparticles and their biological applications. They are also important for homeopathy but may well be unwelcome in other circles for indicating, as they do, that homeopathic preparations can display biological activities, but at doses that are measureable and fully quantifiable, a point that I have argued was necessary for decades.

Like all new discoveries the findings will raise more questions than answers. However, the series of papers by Chikramane and colleagues show what happens when scientists actually try to understand the physical system and what is happening while others were simply dismissive. It also took the creation of the field of nanotechnology to give life to their activities. It is my hope that the fields of homeopathy and traditional medicine will find more common ground in their search for biological truths and medical applications in light of these new findings.

• References

• 1 Chikramane P.S., Suresh A.K., Kane S.G., Bellare J.R. Metal nanoparticle induced hormetic activation: a novel mechanism of homeopathic medicines. Homeopathy 2017; 106: 135-144.
• 2 Calabrese E.J. Historical blunders: how toxicology got the dose-response relationship half right. Cell Mol Biol 2005; 1 (07) 643-654.
• 3 Calabrese E.J. Getting the dose-response wrong: why hormesis became marginalized and the threshold model accepted. Arch Toxicol 2009; 83 (03) 227-247.
• 4 Calabrese E.J. Toxicology rewrites its history and rethinks its future: giving equal focus to both harmful and beneficial effects. Environ Toxicol Chem 2011; 30 (12) 2658-2673.
• 5 Calabrese E.J., Baldwin L.A. Chemical hormesis: its historical foundations as a biological hypothesis. Hum Exp Toxicol 2000; 19 (01) 2-31.
• 6 Calabrese E.J., Baldwin L.A. The marginalization of hormesis. Hum Exp Toxicol 2000; 19 (01) 32-40.
• 7 Calabrese E.J., Baldwin L.A. Radiation hormesis: its historical foundations as a biological hypothesis. Hum Exp Toxicol 2000; 19 (01) 41-75.
• 8 Calabrese E.J., Baldwin L.A. Radiation hormesis: the demise of a legitimate hypothesis. Hum Exp Toxicol 2000; 19 (01) 76-84.
• 9 Calabrese E.J., Baldwin L.A. Tales of two similar hypotheses: the rise and fall of chemical and radiation hormesis. Hum Exp Toxicol 2000; 19 (01) 85-97.
• 10 Chikramane P.S., Suresh A.K., Bellare J.R., Kane S.G. Extreme homeopathic dilutions retain starting materials: a nanoparticulate perspective. Homeopathy 2010; 99: 231-242.
• 11 Chikramane P.S., Kalita D., Suresh A.K., Kane S.G., Bellare J.R. Why extreme dilutions reach non-zero asymptotes: a nanoparticulate hypothesis based on froth flotation. Langmuir 2012; 28: 15864-15875.