Proof of Homeopathy's effectiveness (except on Wikipedia)

In the late 1980's this researcher, Jacques Benveniste:

made a remarkable discovery. His team had been studying the reaction of white blood cells to allergens. But due to a team member's error, the concentration of allergen being tested was too diluted to be effective ... but somehow still showed an effect.

"Go back and do the work over," he said.

She did, but also tried the same ultra-dilute solution and got the same "impossible" results.

"Looks like homeopathy", a tutor on the team with a background in this specialty said.

But homeopathy claims that ever more dilute "remedies" produce stronger and stronger effects:

Benveniste and his team decided to investigate this alleged property and found that it worked ... more dilute concentrations produced stronger effects, even to the extent that it was extremely unlikely that a single molecule of the subject under investigation would exist in the ultra-dilute solution.

From 1985 to 1989 Benveniste's lab and cooperating labs in France, Israel, Italy and Canada, all of which were able to replicate these results!

Unfortunately these results ran afoul of the dominant paradigm of the day: fundamentalist materialism.

John Maddox, editor of Nature, where the paper was published, acted as self-appointed priest of the materialist "church", using explicitly religious terminology in defending the faith:

"This book is the best candidate for burning in many years," on Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life in 1981. He otherwise was known to use the word "heresy" for work he didn't like.

Benveniste and 12 coauthors published their paper in Nature, nonetheless ...

And I submit that Benveniste's treatment thereafter was effectively his having been branded a heretic.

 a heretic being burned at the stake

By 1988, the high materialists priests were no longer allowed to burn heretics at the stake; instead they just got to shun and excommunicate them from the Scientific Materialist Church.

Not that shunning is much less painful; one former Mennonite referred to the Amish practice of "shunning" as a "living hell of torture".

The ensuing storm destroyed Benveniste's reputation as a mainstream scientist and caused him to leave the lab where he'd been working for decades ... instead, according to one report, he wound up working in a "shack" on the parking lot of his former lab.

He worked on related "too weird for the mainstream" experiments on the electromagnetic signaling between cells. He died in 2004.

I normally link to Wikipedia for some subjects I discuss, but the Wikipedia article on homeopathy looks to have been written and maintained by Maddox's heresy-busting heirs. They label it a "pseudoscience."

In fact there is a later researcher that also replicated the original results, Madeleine Ennis from Queen's University in Belfast.

References and Further Reading

Andrew Weil, M.D., Health and Healing (1983), chapter 1 "A Homeopathic Cure?"

Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. The description above on Benveniste and his troubles comes from chapter 4 of this excellent book.

Shunning quote: Lynne McTaggart, The Bond, chapter 5.

Where the 'shack' note comes from https://q-mag.org/jacques-benveniste-and-the-memory-of-water.html