I appreciate the thoughtful discussion and I hope you don’t mind me chiming in here. I agree with everything that Michael and Bucky have said. There is an abundance of research that points to the activity of homeopathic doses above and beyond placebo. Much of that research is done on allopathic terms; in other words, it involves methods not ideal and not conducive to successful homeopathic prescribing. And yet, many such studies yield positive results. It is pure skeptic propaganda that there is no confirmative research.
There is no active ingredient in a homeopathic medicine because it is not material medicine. Even if nanoparticles are found in the dilutions, they are not present in quantities that could act at a biochemical level. Therefore, there must be some other explanation. I explain to inquisitive patients that homeopathic medicines do not act like conventional drugs, which usually need to be repeated daily to sustain an effect. That effect is to subdue or suppress symptoms. Take away the drug and the symptoms return.
Homeopathic remedies, conversely, operate according to a stimulus-response model. A microdose of the energy signature of a substance capable of mimicking a patients’ symptom profile is designed to provoke an energetic response from the life force (vital force, Chi, bioenergetic field, etc). An accurate prescription presumably assists the life force to throw off the energetic grip of the illness that had been holding it in place, so to speak. The correct stimulus provokes a healing response. Once a healing response is under way, there is no need to repeat doses unless it begins to fizzle out. For an average patient with a chronic illness, I give a couple doses on day one and then evaluate the response a month later. The doses are not material doses; they are small pulses of energy. The discovery of nanoparticles has been hailed by homeopaths as a means to placate the sensibilities of materialists who need something physical to believe in.
Homeopaths and their patients wouldn’t be so concerned with providing “plausible” explanations to satisfy the rational demands of scientific logic if it weren’t for the fact that the very survival of homeopathy is dependent upon the scientific powers that be. It is the remarkable clinical results that keep homeopaths doing what they do and patients coming back for care. There is an enormous body of literature spanning the past 200 years documenting “cured cases,” which are conveniently dismissed by allopaths as “anecdotal” evidence. To me personally, those first hand experiential reports of doctors and their patients are far more convincing than highly abstract sanitized and homogenized research studies.