Diluting a medicine in repeated steps with succussion (potentization) increases its curative power, even past the point at which no molecule of the original substance remains, so that minute, highly diluted doses are therapeutically active.
This is homeopathy’s law of infinitesimals, set out in the 1810 Organon: that serial dilution with succussion (which Hahnemann called potentization) develops rather than destroys a medicine’s power, so that doses diluted far past any material trace remain, or become more, curative. It is a mechanism-only claim and it is classified as refuted. Physical chemistry sets the limit directly: past roughly the twelfth centesimal step (12C, about 10^-24, or 24X), the Avogadro constant (about 6.022 x 10^23 per mole) makes it increasingly improbable that a dose contains even a single molecule of the starting substance (Bellavite et al. 2005), so the most-diluted remedies are materially indistinguishable from the solvent. When one such high dilution (a C30 preparation of common salt) was tested against distilled snow water under blinded, controlled conditions in the Nuremberg salt test of 1835, it produced no distinguishable effect (Stolberg 2006). No measurable property of a substance is known to survive dilution beyond the point where its molecules do.
Appears in
Sources
- Organon der rationellen Heilkunde (first edition) — Hahnemann, Samuel. Organon der rationellen Heilkunde. Dresden: Arnold, 1810. Later editions carried the title Organon der Heilkunst; the sixth edition was completed in 1842 and published only in 1921.
- Immunology and homeopathy. 1. Historical background — Bellavite P, Conforti A, Piasere V, Ortolani R. 'Immunology and homeopathy. 1. Historical background.' Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 2005 Dec;2(4):441-452. doi:10.1093/ecam/neh141. PMID 16322800.
- Inventing the randomized double-blind trial: the Nuremberg salt test of 1835 — Stolberg M. 'Inventing the randomized double-blind trial: the Nuremberg salt test of 1835.' Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 2006 Dec;99(12):642-643. doi:10.1177/014107680609901216. PMID 17139070.