I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue

Lionel Milgrom has his paper out again, and this time it's called “Towards a Unified Theory of Homeopathy and Conventional Medicine”.¹ As a kind of prelude to this, in the same issue of J. Alt. Comp. Med there's also a short article by Cyril W. Smith entitled “Apologia Homeopathica” which is rather interesting for a couple of reasons.²

Now it's never been obvious if Milgrom's familiar “Patient-Practitioner-Remedy” (PPR) entanglement idea is founded in real quantum mechanics, in ‘Weak Quantum Mechanics’³ (WQT, something which has the weirdness of proper quantum mechanics with none of the grounding in reality, described by Milgrom as being a use of “quantum mathematics”), or in a fantasy world for which the quantum mechanics is only a “metaphor”. But the idea seems to be that in a double-blind randomized controlled trial (DBRCT) in which neither the patients nor the practitioner know who gets a remedy and who gets a placebo there is some sort of “entanglement” (I'm fairly sure that Milgrom thinks this term means something it doesn't) so that the beneficial effects (sic.) of the homeopathic remedy are spread across patients in both verum and control groups, or something. This provides an excuse for why homeopathy works identically to a placebo, in good-quality trials at least.⁴ It doesn't seem to have been explained why such entanglement doesn't apply to conventional medicine, for which DBRCTs are generally used to find out if it works or not. Things get even more confusing when Milgrom cites “fully peer-reviewed papers showing that homeopathy does indeed have effects beyond placebo”^5-9 - the Linde⁵ et. al. trial concludes that “we found insufficient evidence from these studies that homoeopathy is clearly efficacious for any single clinical condition” and the other references are to the journals “Homeopathy” (twice) and “Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine” (twice) where one might not be surprised that the peers doing the reviewing are sympathetic to homeopathy already. (We will see if either of these journals ever publish the letters critical of Milgrom¹⁰ or the ‘Memory of Water’¹¹ which have been written by myself and others. [Edit: see below]) In any case, if homeopathy really had statistically significant effects beyond placebo then there'd be no need for all this PPR-entanglement gubbins to explain why it doesn't. Milgrom seems to then suggest that even if it is only a placebo, that wouldn't be so bad anyway:

“The placebo effect has always been part of every doctors kitbag, and is enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath. Also, homeopaths say their therapy encourages the body to heal itself, suggesting at the very least a more humane appreciation of the placebo effect.”

Or does “encouraging the body to heal itself” suggest that homeopathy is supposed to act on the immune system?

Regarding ‘entanglement’ though, I keep wondering if there's a way to sensibly explain it in words. Milgrom cites badhomeopath.com as an example of “naïve criticisms” from those who don't realize that “[e]ntanglement in a quantum system occurs if its seemingly separate parts are so holistically matched that measurement of one part of the system instantaneously (i.e., not limited by the speed of light and therefore without classical signal transmission) provides information about all of its other parts, regardless of their separation in space and time, or their size.¹²” But there's a crucial difference between the physical size of a system and the number of elements in it and whether they are interacting. Two photons several kilometres apart may count as a system which is large in spatial extent but it only has two particles in it.^13-15 A piece of superconducting metal can be as large as you like and contains loads of particles but they pair up over sub-millimetre scales and are prevented from interacting.¹⁶ Quantum computers based on NMR have been demonstrated involving seven nuclear spins on one molecule.¹⁷ Interactions tend to destroy delicate entangled states. Milgrom is proposing entanglement between humans and that's just nonsense within proper quantum mechanics^18-20 and therefore probably nonsense within reality.

I also notice that maybe he's even realized that the Copenhagen Interpretation is a bit dated. He probably has to ditch his idea that a patient knowing whether he's getting the placebo collapses the PPR wavefunction if he doesn't believe in nonunitary state evolution anymore. He is at pains to point out that it's all only a metaphor, but on what level? Is the quantum mechanics real or not? If not, how does it help anyone understand what's going on? WQT isn't grounded in reality, it's just wishful drunken student thinking that “mind-matter duality” is equivalent on some meaningful level to wave-particle duality. It occurred to me earlier that the Vital Force gyroscope doesn't actually go round because there's no part of the wavefunction that has time in it. The k parameters just refer to the shape in whatever passes for space in the metaphor. So the stuff about “applying torques” doesn't make sense - it involves things changing with time and his equations don't. Milgrom suggests the Vital Force is a near equivalent to the homeostatic immune system, without elaboration or citation. The Vital Force is actually closer to medieval ideas of the soul and it doesn't actually exist in the same way that the immune system does.

I think he needs to force this equivalence because he wants to unify homeopathy with proper medicine. The idea being that the homeostatic immune system responds liked a damped harmonic oscillator just like the Vital Force does. Except he doesn't put it like this, because his equations don't have damping in and would oscillate forever instead of settling down into whatever state they should be in. But his mathematical model of the homeostatic immune system considers only side effects (of proper medicines, I think) which of course homeopathic medicines don't have (they only have beneficial effects, because any maleficial effects aren't due to homeopathy in the mind of the practitioner). What the main effects of drugs look like in this model I don't know but I'd expect that would be of vital importance. Do they just correct the original deflection of the gyroscope due to the disease? But is the initial deflection in the right direction for ‘very low potency’ (i.e. undiluted) homeopathic remedies, which are simply poisons? And anyway, it makes no sense what he does, taking a small-angle approximation and extrapolating back out to large angles with it.

I'm not sure what I make of Milgrom's assertion that proper biomedicine is reductionist, as he tries to reduce all states of wellness and illness to states of a (metaphorical) quantum gyroscope, and actions of proper medicine and homeopathy to ladder operators - it's just reductionism in a different dimensional space.

I'm happy to note that Milgrom has now learnt to spell John Gribbin's name²¹ and maybe in the next paper he'll get Sunny Y. Auyang²² right too. He doesn't misspell Del Giudice²³ because he doesn't cite him at all. (Smith cited another paper with him on ²⁴ and got it right.)

Smith's article² seems to be in support of Milgrom but it turns out that Smith's idea of why homeopathy works (sic.) is completely different. He's interested in the precession frequencies of proton spins (i.e. hydrogen atom nuclei) lined up in magnetic fields, which is the thing studied by one kind of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR).²⁵ He reckons that placebos can turn into homeopathic remedies by “proximity or impact” with them, and that “everything will be erased” if the remedies are placed in a steel box and therefore no longer have the magnetic field of the Earth to line up with. This is nonsense: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which uses strong magnetic fields, wouldn't be safe to do on humans if proton precession was that big a deal in terms of actual chemical behaviour. And it also provides an interesting counterpoint to the argument of whether airport x-ray scanners neutralize homeopathic remedies: does it mean that you can't take them through the magnetic scanner either? But at least it's nonsense in terms of proper quantum mechanics rather than WQT and doesn't merely claim that proton spins (which are real) are only a metaphor or model for something else. Smith ruins it by linking homeopathy to acupuncture via electrosensitivity:²⁶

“... my work with electrically hypersensitive patients has shown that coherent frequency is the relevant parameter.²⁷ Thus, I would represent Milgrom's Vital Force parameter, S₂ and homeopathic potency parameter ΔS₂ by patterns of coherent frequencies for both the patient and the remedy.”

Why doesn't Milgrom reply, “get your hands off my concepts”? Smith continues:

“The frequency pattern for a patient arises from the endogenous frequencies of acupuncture meridians.”

And it goes downhill from there, with a table of numbers which isn't explained well enough what it is that it can mean anything. Where's the evidence that homeopaths and those interested in the theory of it are ready to constructively criticize each other? Do Smith and Milgrom not realize or care that their work is contradictory? I think they're both wrong but at least one of them must be.

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