IIT scientists said the homeopathic medicines work on the principle of nanotechnology.

MUMBAI: Six months after the British Medical Association rubbished homeopathy as witchcraft with no scientific basis, IIT scientists have said the sweet white pills work on the principle of nanotechnology.

Homeopathic pills containing naturally occurring metals such as gold, copper and iron retain their potency even when diluted to a nanometre or one-billionth of a metre, states the IIT-Bombay research published in the latest issue of 'Homeopathy', a peer-reviewed journal from reputed medical publishing firm Elsevier.

IIT-B's chemical engineering department bought homeopathic pills from neighbourhood shops, prepared highly diluted solutions and checked these under powerful electron microscopes to find nanoparticles of the original metal.rnrn''Certain highly diluted homeopathic remedies made from metals still contain measurable amounts of the starting material, even at extreme dilutions of 1 part in 10 raised to 400 parts (200C),'' said Dr Jayesh Bellare from the scientific team.rnrnHis student, Prashant Chikramane, presented the homeopathy paper titled, 'Extreme homeopathic dilutions retain starting materials: A nanoparticulate perspective', as part of his doctoral thesis.

"Homeopathy has been a conundrum for modern medicine. Its practitioners maintained that homeopathic pills got more potent on dilution, but they could never explain the mechanism scientifically enough for the modern scientists,'' said Bellare.

Source:
IIT-B team shows how homeopathy works - The Times of India
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/IIT-B-team-shows-how-homeopathy-works/articleshow/7108579.cms#ixzz18TUyUgtz

Extreme homeopathic dilutions retain starting materials: A nanoparticulate perspective

Homeopathy is controversial because medicines in high potencies such as 30c and 200c involve huge dilution factors (10 to the power 60 and 10 to the power 400 respectively) which are many orders of magnitude greater than Avogadro's number, so that theoretically there should be no measurable remnants of the starting materials.

No hypothesis which predicts the retention of properties of starting materials has been proposed nor has any physical entity been shown to exist in these high potency medicines. Using market samples of metal-derived medicines from reputable manufacturers, we have demonstrated for the first time by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), electron diffraction and chemical analysis by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Atomic Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-AES), the presence of physical entities in these extreme dilutions, in the form of nanoparticles of the starting metals and their aggregates.

Prashant Satish Chikramane,1
Akkihebbal K. Suresh,1,2
Jayesh Ramesh Bellare,1,2
Shantaram Govind Kane,1

1. Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, Adi Shankaracharya Marg, Powai, Mumbai 400 076, Maharashtra, India

2. Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, Adi Shankaracharya Marg, Powai, Mumbai 400 076, Maharashtra, India

Source :
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WXX-518T4YP-3&_user=10&_coverDate=10%2F31%2F2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_origin=browse&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=a3db0372718ee97b89c5e0e5c84be515