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

Bee stings are therapeutic, but do they actively seek out sick people?

Paradoxically, stings of the order hymenoptera have been shown to be generally therapeutic for humans. The colloquial expression of this: "beekeepers never get arthritis."

There is a specialty called apitherapy that uses bees and bee products for enhancing human health. There have been various standard medical studies showing that bee sting therapy in particular is effective, this one looks at its "adverse effects" (anaphylactic shock in the worst case).

So bee stings (and wasp and yellow jacket stings too, but these two are just harder to manage than are bees) have been used to treat arthritis and other conditions for millennia.

But this doesn't mean that bees actively seek out sick people to sting, does it?



Here's another story (possibly the origin of this Youtube story above?) by somebody saved from Lyme Disease by bee stings ...

Readers? Ever hear of any such story?

A mainstream article on Reiki

Venerable magazine The Atlantic magazine published a not-too-skeptical article on Reiki recently ...

No surprise; it turns out there is a bunch of scientific evidence that Reiki works, but no theory as to why it works.

One part of the Atlantic article that leapt out to me: veterans whose "body had forgotten how to sleep" were asleep on the Reiki table in minutes ...

My Lovely Wife is an insomniac:

But maybe after a few Reiki sessions she could learn to sleep more like this:

We'll have to give this a try!

A precognitive dream? Maybe ...

I have been interviewing for jobs lately and really need to go back to work as soon as possible as I have payments (including rent) coming up the first of next month.

This came up in my dreams, though, when I got a very clear message:

It won't happen until after the 18th

And in fact: I got the initial acceptance call on the 16th and the first actual paperwork acceptance ... on the 19th.

I'll have to watch for other messages carefully!

Crystal healing: nonsense? This doesn't fit my experience

There was a big flap a while back on Google searches for "crystal healing" having spiked ... and how that was such nonsense.

Let me tell you about an experience I had in the 1980's ...

I was a young kid from the South who had moved to Seattle and met a Sophisticated Older Woman who recommended I try massage. I had never heard of such a thing, but this woman had recommended various other activities that were generally fulfilling, so I decided to try it.

I can't find an image of the kind of massage I received ... there are a lot like this, but mine was different.

The therapist started working on my back and shoulders, where I carry most of the tension, and came across a knotted muscle. She stopped and instead of working on it with her hands, took some kind of crystal (I think quartz), somehow focussed her consciousness through it, and the knot in my shoulder dissolved.

I have no explanation for this and no theory of how it could work. The therapist moved away maybe a year after I started seeing her, and I haven't found anyone else doing this since.

But don't be so sure that crystals are "nonsense" ... I'd love to talk with anyone who's had an experience like this or can refer such a practitioner!

How I stopped smoking marijuana by failing to have an out-of-body experience

I smoked marijuana rather successfully (i.e. I graduated from college in 1978 and

worked throughout the rest of the period as a computer programmer) from 1977 to 1987.

But in 1985 I started reading Robert Monroe's book Journeys Out of the Body, about

his OOBE's. The sequel, Far Journeys, revealed that Monroe had quit his career as

a cable TV executive and founded a research institute to explore the OOBE. 

The Monroe Institute, which still seems to be going strong today, gives various programs for the public. In the 1980's their first program was "The Gateway Voyage". (They're still at it; check their website.)

Far Journeys has a section describing an episode of OOBE sex between two participants.

Since at that point in my life I was unattached (yet on fire sexually!) I signed up the week after I read this.

The Institute responded with an intake form that one was supposed to fill out and return with the fee, and I answered the questions honestly. One was "what mind-altering substances do you use?" ... or words to that effect. I replied honestly that yes, I smoked marijuana once or twice per week.

The Institute replied that "you're accepted for the August 1987 Gateway Voyage ... and please cease your use of marijuana" for the duration. This was in February 1987.

I thought "oh, no" but wanted to give the program a chance on its own
terms. I had "one more for the road" and gave the rest of my stash away to a colleague. I didn't miss it as much as I had  anticipated ...

For one thing, TMI sends participants this audio package (at the time tape but these days probably mp3) of 'hemi-sync' that is designed to get the two halves of your brain in sync and in shape to experience "expanded awareness." OK, I was ready to try this ...

I started using the tapes regularly when they arrived, and at some point I started to feel these episodes of  "vibration," as if I were a water pipe and someone had turned on high pressure water through me. I didn't know what to make of this, though it didn't seem to be harmful.

I kept this up through the 6 months before I left for the Gateway Voyage, just "vibrating" periodically but not otherwise getting much into expanded awareness as far as I could tell.

The course itself wasn't mindblowing, at least for me, but was very pleasant. The setting is in the rolling hills near Charlottesville VA, in a dormitory-style building that has sleeping quarters wired for audio, the better to put hemi-sync through to the participants ... There are way more bathrooms than would otherwise be justified in such a facility, as the staff advises all to relieve themselves before one of the hemi-sync sessions so as not to be slammed back into one's body by having to pee!

As for any improvement in my sex life, there was none either in body nor out. I basically got blasted with hemi-sync all week but I really didn't have anything like a paranormal experience; just "vibrated" a bit.

I came home and was just feeling wonderfully energetically "open" until ...

I got ahold of another batch of marijuana and smoked a bit ...

This was like turning off a light switch the way the energy in my body was closed down.

I was shocked ... until I thought about it a bit.

I started smoking marijuana as a completely left-brained teenager, so the energy blocked would have been mainly my left brain and for the first time allowed me to experience colors, taste food, etc.

But at age 30 when operating on both energy channels ... an energy block is just a block.

I stopped smoking grass after that one joint and haven't had another since ... I since then have been energetically a bit more open or closed at various times and really haven't missed marijuana.

Dowsing for a missing harp

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer was a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 when her daughter's "smaller, uniquely valuable" harp went missing.

She tried all the normal routes: the police, instrument dealers, a television news story. None of this worked.

A friend suggested that "you should be willing to try anything. Try calling a dowser."

She did, and the dowser found the harp's location accurately.

The rest of the book is Dr. Mayer's exploring further out of the bounds of her scientific training, everything from talking with Hal Puthoff on the Pentagon's remote viewing experiments to counseling a Ph.D. researcher who was running scared after intuiting answers to four decimal places that she couldn't have known rationally.

I usually think of dowsing looking for water, something like this:

But apparently there's more than one kind of dowser! As for the dowser ...  his name is Harold McCoy and he's since then founded the Ozark Research Institute, dedicated to "healing, education and research." He's also written a book:

I am ordering this book and I'll report on it in a future post.