A topic of life science I’d like to explore is homeopathy, an alternative take to medicine. Homeopathy is defined as a system of alternative medicine based on the doctrine “like cures like,” claiming that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure similar symptoms in sick people. This is interesting because as a student who wants to practice medicine in the future, I do not understand how, for example, injecting a virus into a sick patient, would make them feel better. It is common knowledge that medication is used to cure a disease, which contradicts homeopathy. Another doctrine that homeopathy follows is “potentization.” The claim states that disease-causing ingredients in a substance would be more potent in a diluted setting, enhancing the effects. This does not make sense either because the more diluted a solution, the less concentrated/powerful it is. An external resource goes so far to say that if scientists want a single atom of the disease-causing substance (the most powerful way to enhance the effects) is to dissolve the single atom into 1*10^20 parts of water, making a pill that would be as long as the distance from the Earth to the Sun (150,000,000 km), “a pill so massive it would collapse into a black hole under its own mass.” The third doctrine that backs the second one up is that “miasms” exist in solution. Essentially, a “bad air” or “spirit-like essence” is left inside the solution after extreme dilution, making the solution useable. We now know today that these doctrines are not true, and we do scientific research and experiments to know what works and what doesn’t work.
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