The Bizarre Reason I Got My PhD
It wasn't just for the floppy hat
06/06/06 The date I thought of a hypothesis on the mechanism of action of homeopathy.
I don’t think about it much anymore, but this week, I stumbled upon the Substack of
, who seems to be setting out to take down the allopathic (western) medicine machine single-handedly. Or at least bring together some ideas from inside and outside the mainstream. And he makes some very good arguments. I won’t go into (or link to) why cholesterol is actually not a bad guy at all, why sun exposure is good for you, or why autoimmune diseases may not exist; I’ll let you dive down that rabbit hole if you want to, but I will link to a couple of articles that caught my eye on homeopathics.It’s comforting to know that there are smarter people than me looking into it now, as this is a topic I’ve thought about a lot. Dedicated many years of life and brain space to it. And not just the time between that particular date and when I took the idea to the Progress in Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS) in Beijing in 2007.
Long beyond that.
But let me tell the story in a way that makes sense.
The year was 2006. I had just finished my undergraduate arts/science degree and driven around Australia in my Nissan Pulsar with a boot full of CDs, a guitar, a microphone, and a dream. The trip was challenging and rewarding in equal measure—a story for another day, no doubt.
Coming home, I was looking for some way to earn money while I continued to try to make it as a pop star. I moved in with a bunch of friends and took up an offer from my mum to manage a micro business she had selling homeopathic medicine. All the material could live in my bedroom and I just had to take orders, package them up, and send them out. Some came from individuals for a remedy or two at a time. Others from distributors for huge boxes full. Easy.
I enlisted some help from one of my housemates and we ran the business like that all year. No marketing. No sales department. Just receive orders, prepare, package, and send. And the orders kept coming, earning us enough money to live, eat, and smoke all the bongs our hearts desired, with enough left over for the business to remain in stock.
I found this curious. It wasn’t how business was supposed to work, as far as I knew, though I was no expert.
One of my majors at uni was molecular biology, so I had some background in how the body works, and I thought a lot about the fact that this medicine supposedly worked by the placebo effect. It was curious that a placebo effect could work on babies and horses. One woman bought it for her cats, said they couldn’t live without it. They must really believe strongly for it to help their sore paws, or whatever it was.
My housemates and I would take the remedies when we got sick and we would get better. Much cheaper and easier than going to the doctor, placebo or not.
We had to be careful though, because we all smoked heavily, and one of the things that ‘deactivated’ them was smoke. Another was direct sunlight. Another radiation from phones and other electronics.
Even touching them with bare skin would mess with them. We had to prepare them using white cotton gloves.
The going theory among homeopaths was that they worked by the ‘memory of water’. Some special attribute of water that allowed it to hold a message, supported by the work of Dr Masaru Emoto, who photographed ice crystals after conveying certain messages to the water:
But the homeopathics we made were rarely stored in water. Mostly, we put drops onto sugar pillules and shook them hard to cover them until they dried. Sometimes, we put vials of the pillules or an alcohol/glycerin mix into a box and pushed a button and that would make the remedy we wanted, according to numbers in a book. That was called ‘radionics’.
The other key was the core tenet of homeopathy, as defined by Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy, himself: like cures like.
The minimal dosage would cure the same things that were caused by a high dose. In a healthy person, a homeopathic dose would cause a minor symptom though—an effect he called ‘proving’, and used to figure out what each of the remedies would do by taking them himself and noting the outcomes.
Putting all that together, I had a little epiphany that day. What if a vibrational signature was embedded in the medium? And what if the vibration of the medicine matched that of the disease in the patient and they cancel each other out? You know, like destructive interference?
But what kind of vibration? How could that be demonstrated experimentally? And could that also explain how molecules communicate with each other in general?
I started reading. And quickly became completely obsessed. I spent hours in the state library, wading through hundreds of papers full of fluff and pseudoscience to get to the meaty stuff.
I wrote my findings up into a ~20,000 word document which I then distilled into a short paper that I sent off to PIERS. Honestly, I don’t know how it got accepted. There was not a single figure. It was all theory, so not backed by any original evidence at all. But accept it they did, and not for a poster—I was invited to speak at the conference.
I didn’t have an academic affiliation so my home address was marked under my name. I suspect they had very few submissions for their medical session, and they did ask for some evidence to back up my claim, but I simply replied that I wasn’t in a position to do experiments, and they let me register and gave me a 15-minute slot.
At the same time, I’d been studying to get my Teaching English as a Foreign Language certificate and had a new job lined up in China. Things came together and I was able to use a holiday from my teaching job to attend the conference.
The physicists were nice to me. They jokingly called me a heretic, and a couple came to see me speak, but it was a quiet session. I didn’t understand a word of any of the other sessions I attended. I got drunk at the conference dinner and took a physicist back to my room for shenanigans.
And life went on.
Sometimes you think that if you pit yourself against ‘the machine’, the big bad pharma guys will come to get you, but mostly, people don’t notice.
I kept thinking about it over the years, and when I got the opportunity to go back to school, I decided to get really educated in molecular biology. Like, super educated. Like, PhD educated.
I would have liked to do biophysics actually, because that’s where I thought this stuff was happening, but due to my subjects in undergrad, I had to content myself with biochemistry. My mission was to learn as much as I possibly could about how molecules communicate with each other. How do they know where to go in the body and what to do, when?
It’s all very well and good to say “the molecule comes in contact with the receptor and they bind and that produces a signal which has xyz outcome.” How did they come into contact? Of all the molecules hanging around outside that particular cell, how did Molecule A meet Molecule B so they could connect? There must be a mechanism by which they ‘talk’ to each other, right?
Unfortunately, when you get into a lab meeting as an Honours student, the conversation may sound like English, but you don’t really get much of it. It’s all ‘ligand’ this and ‘efficacy’ that, and you go into the lab and learn to culture cells, which is an art form in itself. And then to put them in a 96-well plate and add the exact right concentration of stuff to make them respond (or not), and then measure that response using light or fluorescence or whatever, takes so much brain space that you tend to forget what you’re even looking at, and you just do the experiments your supervisor tells you to do and nod along with the interpretation of the results he tells you, because you don’t have a clue how any of this relates to what’s happening inside a living body.
As years go by, things start to make more sense of course, and I became fluent in lab meeting-speak and watched the new students’ eyes glaze over as we got started comparing our results of the week. I learnt a lot and published some papers and produced enough data to fill a thesis. Which was convenient because then I could slap it all together and put on a floppy hat and get called “Dr Shoni”.
Working inside academia gave me a new perspective. I started to feel like big pharma is not the enemy my mother and her naturopath friends made it out to be. We all looked to our colleagues who had gone to ‘industry’ as very lucky, because they could do research unimpeded by constantly looking for funding. Reps would come and talk to us about how much time and money it required to get a drug to market, and scientists would go through their long journeys of trial and (many) errors as they attempted to make the world a better place by curing, or at least treating, their disease of interest. They all seemed like nice, reasonable, intelligent, well-meaning individuals, which I’m sure they are, even if they sometimes talk about their obligations to share-holders.
When you read some of Remnant MD’s stuff, you feel like the medical field is full of evil, money-hungry monsters, who feed on the misery of humanity to line their own pockets. And as a net force, maybe that’s what has happened.
But is the alternative sector that different? Can we sweep everything into one side or the other? Should there even be a ‘mainstream’ and an ‘alternative’?
The same could be said for other mega industries. Fast fashion. Fast food. Pesticides. Oil and gas. All populated by people trying to contribute to the human effort to improve life for the masses. Right?
I’m not here to answer these questions.
My PhD supervisors didn’t throw me out because of my interest in alternative medicine, any more than they threw out the postdoc who proudly wore a cross around her neck or the student who came to the lab every day in a full face-covering burqa. She got her certificate, same as me.
At the same time, there was certainly no incentive to talk about homeopathy as if it was a ‘safe space’. I remember a postdoc coming into the lab one day gleefully telling everyone that a paper had come out proving without a doubt that homeopathy was no better than placebo.
The lab head who used homeopathic remedies for his baby’s teething, saying it was the only thing that worked, just shrugged when I said “well, if light can activate a receptor, why not?” He wasn’t going to write a grant to look into it by any means.
And fair enough. He’d never get funded.
When I reached out to Paolo Bellavite, the main guy in the world researching homeopathics, to see if I could study with him, he said he had no money for PhD students. I’ve never even visited his lab, though it’s on my bucket list (don’t judge—get your own weird list).
But the point is, I never felt like the road blocks stopping me from proving a mechanism of activation of homeopathic medicine were due to big, powerful stakeholders.
But there is certainly a heavy prejudice against it, and it won’t be part of the mainstream funding package any time soon.
And in the end, I didn’t feel like I had the cognitive capacity to figure it out. There are lots of things about it that don’t make sense. Which is why I’m so glad that the case has been taken on by someone as clever as Remnant. If you’re interested in the mechanics of it, read this dissection of a paper where researchers move a DNA signal through water using only electromagnetic waves.
Mindblowing stuff!
I don’t know about you, but I’ll be watching this space.
Food for thought:
Do you think the mainstream doesn’t really have people’s best interests at heart?
Are alternative streams any better?
Do you feel like there are things you can’t think or talk about because vested interests wouldn’t allow it?
Have you tried homeopathic medicine? What were your results?
Tell me in the comments!
This is a great piece and I'm going to have to check out some of those links you provided when I have time. These are subjects which greatly interest me after all (I've done a lot of medical translation so I have to have a good grasp of a range of topics).
I also understand a fair amount of proper physics, so your suggestions make perfect sense to me as it happens. Especially about the use of light. Light after all is composed of photons, which are, in fact, a quantum (fundamental particle). The so-called standard model of physics is wrong on many levels, but one level is their opinion that the photon doesn't have mass. This is absurd of course because any object that genuinely exists must have mass. Furthermore, what we call 'heavier' particles, like electrons or protons/neutrons are simply photons with extra spins (e.g. a photon is a quantum with spin in just the x axis, an electron is a photon with an extra spin in the y axis, and a proton is the same with an extra z-axis spin). It simply 'appears' like they are different particles. But they're all made of the same quantum material.
Anyhow, the point is that atoms and molecules are constantly emitting particles (photons). Other elements are 'electropositive' meaning they emit electrons. This is somewhat obvious if you think about it because otherwise we couldn't see these objects. We then have the Schumann resonance field of course. Given that 'information' can be carried by particles and such particles can interact (i.e. have an effect on) other particles they come into contact with, this seems to me like a potential method of the kind of communication you are talking about. An interaction is a kind of kinetic effect. If you send a spinning object at another object then the spin of object 1 is going to have an effect on the spin and direction of movement of object 2 (and vice versa for that matter). Magnetism is one manifestation. Gravity would be another perhaps.
This can also be used for quantum computing of course using photonics rather than electron-ics.
In other words, I do think there is a lot in the idea of 'biophysics'. It makes a lot of sense to me.
Sorry for the rambling comment. You got my brain working. Thank you!
Once again, I love the easy conversational tone you bring to your writing on any topic. I don't think that the mainstream medicine (or any other industry) is out to get the small guy. I also don't believe that the alternatives have only our best interests at heart. I do believe however in the usefulness of questioning everyone from time to time and checking if we're all all aligned and going in the right direction. Looking at medicine as a business is a cynical approach to health. Such views for example need an update and upgrade.