Anick David J
Harvard Medical School Mailman Building 123, McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA 02478, USA.
BMC Complement Altern Med. 2004 Nov 1;4:15. doi: 10.1186/1472-6882-4-15.
The efficacy of homeopathy is controversial. Homeopathic remedies are made via iterated shaking and dilution, in ethanol or in water, from a starting substance. Remedies of potency 12 C or higher are ultra-dilute (UD), i.e. contain zero molecules of the starting material. Various hypotheses have been advanced to explain how a UD remedy might be different from unprepared solvent. One such hypothesis posits that a remedy contains stable clusters, i.e. localized regions where one or more hydrogen bonds remain fixed on a long time scale. High sensitivity proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy has not previously been used to look for evidence of differences between UD remedies and controls.
Homeopathic remedies made in water were studied via high sensitivity proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. A total of 57 remedy samples representing six starting materials and spanning a variety of potencies from 6 C to 10 M were tested along with 46 controls.
By presaturating on the water peak, signals could be reliably detected that represented H-containing species at concentrations as low as 5 microM. There were 35 positions where a discrete signal was seen in one or more of the 103 spectra, which should theoretically have been absent from the spectrum of pure water. Of these 35, fifteen were identified as machine-generated artifacts, eight were identified as trace levels of organic contaminants, and twelve were unexplained. Of the unexplained signals, six were seen in just one spectrum each. None of the artifacts or unexplained signals occurred more frequently in remedies than in controls, using a p < .05 cutoff. Some commercially prepared samples were found to contain traces of one or more of these small organic molecules: ethanol, acetate, formate, methanol, and acetone.
No discrete signals suggesting a difference between remedies and controls were seen, via high sensitivity 1H-NMR spectroscopy. The results failed to support a hypothesis that remedies made in water contain long-lived non-dynamic alterations of the H-bonding pattern of the solvent.
顺势疗法的疗效存在争议。顺势疗法药物是通过从起始物质开始，在乙醇或水中反复振荡和稀释制成的。效力为12C或更高的药物是超稀释的（UD），即不含起始物质的任何分子。已经提出了各种假设来解释超稀释药物与未处理溶剂的不同之处。其中一个假设认为，药物含有稳定的簇，即一个或多个氢键在长时间尺度上保持固定的局部区域。高灵敏度质子核磁共振光谱以前尚未用于寻找超稀释药物与对照之间差异的证据。
通过高灵敏度质子核磁共振光谱研究在水中制成的顺势疗法药物。总共测试了57个代表六种起始物质且效力范围从6C到10M的药物样品以及46个对照。
通过对水峰进行预饱和，可以可靠地检测到代表浓度低至5微摩尔的含氢物种的信号。在103个光谱中的一个或多个中，有35个位置出现了离散信号，理论上这些信号在纯水光谱中应该不存在。在这35个信号中，15个被确定为机器产生的伪像，8个被确定为痕量水平的有机污染物，12个无法解释。在无法解释的信号中，每个信号仅在一个光谱中出现6次。使用p <.05的临界值，伪像或无法解释的信号在药物中出现的频率并不比对照中更高。发现一些商业制备的样品含有痕量的一种或多种这些小有机分子：乙醇、乙酸盐、甲酸盐、甲醇和丙酮。
通过高灵敏度1H-NMR光谱，未发现表明药物与对照之间存在差异的离散信号。结果未能支持水中制成的药物含有溶剂氢键模式的长寿命非动态改变的假设。
