Article Type: Review Article

Published: April, 2018

Journal Name: Advances in Complementary & Alternative Medicine

Abstract: Biological efficacy of infinitesimally diluted substances is still controversial. However, homeopathic remedies are manufactured through an iterative dilution/dynamization procedure which induces collateral phenomena, especially nanobubbles and release of silica from the glass container. Our own NMR studies and a review of the literature show that dilutions could contain much more molecules than expected, moreover in nanoparticulate forms which increase with dilution. Dilution/dynamization beyond a threshold of 10-6-10-8 generates superstructures associated with the solute, which grow at each step by affixing layers of nanobubbles and silica, or by self-assembly. Sizes from 1-2nm to hundreds of nanometers could be demonstrated by electron microscopy. Dynamization appears crucial, by producing specific superstructures (distinguishable according to the dissolved substance), and inducing paradoxical biological effects. Superstructures are neither observed without dynamization nor at low dilution, where even a paradoxical chaotropic effect on the solvent is observed by NMR. Thus, a dual structure of the homeopathic medicine is highlighted. We postulate that dynamization and nanobubbles ensure formation, stereospecificity, growth and transfer of superstructures across dilutions. The sampling tip may play a major role by catching the superstructures and conveying the encaged remedy across the successive dilutions. Some studies managed to show the presence of the remedy source, as a non-zero asymptote, in ultrahigh dilutions, far beyond the Avogadro’s limit. Owing to this physical duality, low dilutions would act on organ receptors through ligand-receptor interactions, and high dilutions on systemic size-dependent targets, due to peculiar properties of nanoparticles, able, as a function of size, to cross physiological barriers, stimulate endocrine and immune systems or enter nerves to directly reach the brain. Inverse effects, observed within the 10-3-10-6 range, might correspond

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