Again about dilutions

Dear colleagues! I want to join the discussion of homeopathy in your newspaper and add something to the note “The Word of the Glavred” by Boris Stern (TRV-Nauk No. 67, November 23, 2010).

How is 100-fold dilution really achieved? Suppose there is an initial solution, say an extract from the liver of a wild duck, containing 1 g of acting (this term in pharmacology is a component of the mixture responsible for a particular biological effect of this mixture) in 100 ml of solution. With the most favorable assumptions, 1 g is ~ 0.01 praying, or ~ 1021 molecules. Then the first dilution is made - select 1 ml of the initial solution (in it ~ 1019 molecules of the desired substance) and diluted to 100 ml. Next, the same procedure with subsequent diluted solutions is repeated another 20-23 times. It is easy to count that before the last dilution of 100 ml, one molecule of the current principle should be contained. The question is, what is the likelihood that this only molecule accidentally falls into the 1 ml selected for the last dilution? This probability can also be calculated, but without this it is obvious that it, although it is not strictly equal to zero, is very little different from it! As a result of the latter dilution, a solution is obtained, which may not contain a single molecule of the active principle, and this solution serves as the basis for the manufacture of homeopathic tablets. In other words, in any such tablet, with a high probability, nothing from the current beginning of the liver of a wild duck will be! But this is not enough - move on.

In order to have confidence in the reliability of the results, it is necessary to clean the solvent (water) up to 20-23 nine (the degree of purification of the substance is customary to determine the percentage content of the main component in the form of “99,99999 ...”). As far as I know, there are no methods for cleaning anything to the same extent - even only 9 nine is considered a high achievement! It is hard to believe that homeopaths are able to clean the water so, and if they are capable, then this would be the result of the Nobel level!

But that's not all. An elementary requirement for any pharmaceutical drug (see Gosfarmakopoy) is a reliable standardization that guarantees that any medicine distributed under this name always has identical composition and properties, including the content of the current principle. However, modern analytical chemistry does not have methods to determine the content of the current principle (in addition to an unknown nature!) In those concentrations (about 10-23), which should be achieved with the stated degrees of dilution. In other words, homeopathic "medicines" are dummies that contain nothing but dirt from the water used to prepare them. Therefore, in particular, the argument of the type “neighbor helped” is not valid, since your tablet is not necessarily identical to the one that the neighbor took.

Alexey Bochkov,
Prof., Doctor. chem. sciences,
V.N.S. Institute of Biochemical Physics
them. N.M. Emanuel RAS