Nanoparticles

Do Nanoparticles Provide a Possible Explanation for Homeopathy?

Thomas J. Wheeler

Introduction:

This commentary is adapted from a post made to the Healthfraud e-mail discussion group in July, 2013. It was stimulated by a paper by Bell et al. on the subject of "nanomedicine." I begin with the abstract of the paper, followed by excerpts (reference numbers present in the original text have been omitted for the sake of readability). I then provide my own comments.

European Journal of Integrative Medicine

Volume 5, Issue 2 , Pages 126-140, April 2013

Advances in integrative nanomedicine for improving infectious disease treatment in public health

Iris R. Bell, Gary E. Schwartz, Nancy N. Boyer, Mary Koithan, Audrey J. Brooks

Abstract

Introduction

Infectious diseases present public health challenges worldwide. An emerging integrative approach to treating infectious diseases is using nanoparticle (NP) forms of traditional and alternative medicines. Advantages of nanomedicine delivery methods include better disease targeting, especially for intracellular pathogens, ability to cross membranes and enter cells, longer duration drug action, reduced side effects, and cost savings from lower doses.

Methods

We searched Pubmed articles in English with keywords related to nanoparticles and nanomedicine. Nanotechnology terms were also combined with keywords for drug delivery, infectious diseases, herbs, antioxidants, homeopathy, and adaptation.

Results

NPs are very small forms of material substances, measuring 1–100nm along at least one dimension. Compared with bulk forms, NPs’ large ratio of surface-area-to-volume confers increased reactivity and adsorptive capacity, with unique electromagnetic, chemical, biological, and quantum properties. Nanotechnology uses natural botanical agents for green manufacturing of less toxic NPs.

Discussion

Nanoparticle herbs and nutriceuticals can treat infections via improved bioavailability and antiinflammatory, antioxidant, and immunomodulatory effects. Recent studies demonstrate that homeopathic medicines may contain source and/or silica nanoparticles because of their traditional manufacturing processes. Homeopathy, as a form of nanomedicine, has a promising history of treating epidemic infectious diseases, including malaria, leptospirosis and HIV/AIDS, in addition to acute upper respiratory infections. Adaptive changes in the host's complex networks underlie effects.

Conclusions

Nanomedicine is integrative, blending modern technology with natural products to reduce toxicity and support immune function. Nanomedicine using traditional agents from alternative systems of medicine can facilitate progress in integrative public health approaches to infectious diseases.

http://www.europeanintegrativemedicinejrnl.com/article/S1876-3820(12)01114-6/abstract

Excerpts:

"In particular, alternative medical systems such as Ayurveda, Chinese herbalism, homeopathy, and naturopathy can show historical and observational trial evidence of good outcomes, greater safety, patient acceptance, accessibility and cost-savings over conventional drug treatments...Many herbs and homeopathic medicines act as adaptogens, i.e., nontoxic agents that increase the body's global ability to adapt to stress or environmental change without relying on specific local receptor targeting."

"In addition, skeptics of homeopathy have historically raised doubts regarding its fundamental scientific plausibility because of the manner of preparing its medicines with a process of serial dilutions and succussions (vigorous shaking)...The skeptics may be both partially correct - and incorrect.

"New empirical discoveries suggest that even though the bulk form source materials might not persist into the more 'dilute' remedy potencies, observable nanoparticles of the source material and silica do persist across all homeopathic potencies, from 'lower' to 'higher.' The unique properties of nanoparticles would help account for may perplexing findings on homeopathic medicines and reposition homeopathy as a traditional form of adaptive nanomedicine for the organism as a whole network. Understanding nanoparticles and their characteristics may finally put to rest the skeptics' well-intentioned attacks, which are based on bulk form scientific assumptions, on the preparation methods for homeopathic medicines.

"Surprisingly, advances in conventional drug targeting and safety, herbal product deliver into the body, and the nature of homeopathic remedies all converge in the fields of nanotechnology and nanomedicine."

(I will skip now to the section in "Results" dealing with homeopathy. There is too much material to quote everything of interest, so I will just summarize a lot of it.)

In the preparation of a homeopathic remedy by the succussion method, the intense fluid turbulence can break off small particles of the glass ("silica precursors and silica nanoparticles").

Electron microscopy and other methods show source nanoparticles are contained in homeopathic remedies, "transferred from dilution to dilution."

"Homeopathic medicines likely contain source particles absorbed onto lactose particles in lower potencies or silica nanoparticles at higher potencies."

Sometimes homeopathic remedies are made using "vortexing or sonication rather than manual shaking" and "polypropylene tubes rather than the traditional glass vials....In addition, nanoparticles undergo spontaneous aggregation into larger particles (which would alter their properties) if left undisturbed for periods of time."

All of these variables can affect the properties of the resulting particles. "The well-known reproducibility problems in homeopathic research could relate in part to these multiple variables." (Comment: how then can homeopathic remedies be useful drugs if they are so sensitive to the exact conditions of preparation?)

The silica in the nanoparticles may play key roles in a) drug delivery vehicles, b) "vehicles for epitaxial transfer and even memory of electromagnetic and/or structural information using the specific remedy source materials as structural template 'seeds' and biological guides for bottom-up, self-assembled formation of silica nanostructures"; c) "non-specific biological amplifiers of specific antigen or remedy source effects on immune cells and pathways."

"Rather than rejecting the entire field of homeopathy for its originally vitalistic interpretations, it is time for modern scientists to examine seriously the nanomedicine implications of Hahnemann's empirical findings for integrative health care."

"Relevant to their capacity to exert biological effects, as low dose, but highly catalytic nanoparticles, homeopathic medicines are able to initiate (1) the biphasic dose-response relationship of hormesis; and (b) endogenous time-dependent response amplification and biphasic oscillation processes."

(There is citation of success of homeopathic remedies in animal and in vitro studies; preliminary and anecdotal evidence concerning HIV/AIDS; and reduction of leptospirosis in Cuba.)

"In contrast with conventional drugs and many bulk form herbs, drug-drug and drug-herb interactions, are not a problem with homeopathic medicines. Moreover, the likely hormetic adaptive mechanisms of action for homeopathic nanoparticles typically place their dose-response curves into the nontoxic range."

"Modern observational, comparative effectiveness, and efficacy studies also indicate a strong track record for homeopathy of faster onset clinical improvements in mild to moderate common acute infections of the upper respiratory tract...In vitro, homeopathic remedies made from botanical sources demonstrate antiviral effects and the ability to stimulate patterns of change in pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokine release. Even while dismissing the favorable findings, the otherwise negative (albeit highly flawed) Shang et al's metaanalysis reported a subanalysis of homeopathy efficacy studies restricted to infectious diseases that revealed a strongly significant benefit of homeopathic treatment."

"Homeopathic dosing utilizes not only low doses, but also intermittent pulsed timing of doses, i.e., spaced intermittently in time. Their likely mode of action relates to the ability of low doses of exogenous agents or stress itself to initiate persistent, self-amplified adaptive changes in physiological self-regulation via hormesis and endogenous time-dependent sensitization in the host."

"...two centuries of experience with homeopathic medicines have demonstrated that this type of nanoparticle, administered in low intermittent doses, has an exceptionally positive safety profile for public health applications..."

Comments:

I will not deal with many of the claimed wonderful properties of homeopathy, such as its alleged effectiveness both in clinical and laboratory studies, and the claim that it acts as an "adaptogen" and can have powerful beneficial effects but no side effects. These have failed to prove convincing to the scientific community. To be sure, the authors do claim to have scientific support for their statements. For example, the sentence quoted above beginning "Their likely mode of action...." cites seven papers.

I also will not discuss the inappropriate reference to "hormesis" as if it supports homeopathy.

Rather, what I will focus on is what is new, the concept of nanoparticles, specifically the idea that small fragments of silica or other materials released in the succussion process can explain homeopathy. I do not believe that it can.

For the purpose of this discussion, I will assume that the relevant nanoparticles are those formed from the glass or plastic as noted above, not merely small particles of the homeopathic starting material. Describing these as "nano" would not contribute anything to overcoming the scientific impossibility of homeopathy.

Consider a succussion process that releases such particles (silica or other) into the solution. Suppose the concentration of the homeopathic starting material is x and the concentration of nanoparticles that is produced by succussion is y. If this material is diluted 10-fold for the next step, the concentrations will be reduced to 0.1x and 0.1y. However, the succussion produces more nanoparticles, to the same concentration y as in the original succussion. So the total concentration of nanoparticles will be 1.1y.

Diluting again 10-fold, the homeopathic remedy is reduced to 0.01x, while the nanoparticles go to 0.11y. Another succussion increases the latter to 1.11y.

Repeating this indefinitely, the homeopathic starting material will be diluted to vanishingly small concentrations. (So the suggestion that the nanoparticles can act as "non-specific biological amplifiers" is irrelevant since there is nothing left to amplify.) The nanoparticles will not be diluted to nothing, because more are created at each step. They do not increase without limit, however; they converge at a concentration of 1.11111... = 10/9 times the concentration produced in the original step.

Thus, the nanoparticles cannot constitute a homeopathic remedy. First, they do not grow more powerful with dilution; their concentration converges to a constant value which is close to what you would get from a single succussion. Second, they would not come in numerous distinct varieties; they would just be silica particles.

Suppose that it is proposed that the original homeopathic material acts as a catalyst, converting silica nanoparticles to an altered form that has a therapeutic effect. Let the concentration of such particles, produced by succussion in a solution with a concentration x of the starting material, be defined as z. In the next cycle, this will be diluted to 0.1z. The homeopathic material, now having a concentration of 0.1x, will only produce 0.1z in a given time, volume, and degree of shaking. So the total concentration of transformed nanoparticles will be 0.2z.

In the third cycle, this is diluted to 0.02z, and the 0.01x will catalyze the formation of 0.01z more, giving a total of 0.03z. Continuing, you can see that the concentration of transformed nanoparticles does not grow with succussion and dilution, but rather decreases nearly 10-fold at each step.

Besides this, we have another fundamental problem: how can all of the numerous homeopathic remedies, despite their widely divergent chemical natures (metals, salts, organic compounds, and more complex biological entities such as herbs or parts of animals), have the ability to transform particles of glass into something different, let alone something that somehow can affect the body in a specific manner related to the effects of the original undiluted material?

In order to grow stronger with succussion in the face of the dilution of the original source material, the nanoparticles must be endowed with another amazing property: they must be able to replicate. That is, the original homeopathic material provides some kind of structure or other information to the nanoparticle, and the nanoparticle then is able to transform other nanoparticles to the same type during succussion.

Summarizing: these little fragments of glass that are broken off during agitation supposedly somehow can be transformed by homeopathic source material into one of thousands of types of structures; those structures replicate during further succussion; and then, when introduced into the body, they somehow overcome all of the physiological barriers (digestion, distribution through the blood, cell membranes, etc.) to reach their sites of action, and bring about healing effects (with no side effects) that are related in some way to the effects of the original source material. From physical, chemical, and physiological standpoints these ideas make no sense. The idea of "memory of water" has just been changed to "memory of nanoparticles."

Further Reading

For more critical discussion of this topic, see the following:

Hartosh Singh Bal - The Science and Stupidity of Homeopathy

Harriet Hall - Homeopathy and Nanoparticles

David Gorsky - A Truly Homeopathic Defense of Homeopathy