Thanks for your comments.

While Hahnemann had probably never heard of Avogadro's number (which was only determined half a century after Hahnemann published Organon der Rationellen Heilkunde in 1810) he surely must have realised that his dilutions were stretching even the limits of utter impossibility. However, Hahnemann had his own explanation for the skeptic using his potentization-dynamization theory. The vigorous shaking or pulverizing of a substance in between dilutions, he claimed, caused the substance to leave behind a 'spirit-like' essence which, although 'no longer perceptible to the senses', was nevertheless 'remembered' by the water, and thus retained healing properties.

A problem with that explanation, of course, is that such essences would remain from things that weren't in the original preparation. If it works for the 11 herbs and spices prepared by the practicioner, why doesn't it work for the trilobite spit or the coelacanth piss? And if it does work for those other things, then how can one do science on it?

It seems much more likely to me that homeopathy "works" when it does due to placebo effects and due to body finding a way to fight attackers on its own.

There are many deadly diseases, like [link|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola|ebola]. As deadly the Za\ufffdre ebolavirus variant is, 10% of people who get it survive. Estimates of survivability are always estimates. As you say, too many physicians memorize numbers and put much more faith in that than actual observation and thinking about the patient.

Cheers,
Scott.

There may well be things that we can't detect now that may be detectable in the future. And those things may be important in treating disease. But at the moment, the explanations sound too much like jibber-jabber.

After all, our picture of the body is that it responds to stimuli and that physical things are incorporated and excreted. Chemistry and electromagnetism are the foundation. If something isn't detectable, then how can the body respond to it? If someone wants to come up with a new picture of how the body works, it needs to take what we know and build upon it - not expect us to rely on explanations without evidence.

Cheers,
Scott.