This is a molecular dynamics (with a specific TIP4 water model) and AI. I would characterize this paper (and basically most MD/AI simulation) as "guided hypothesis generation". I am skeptical that this result will hold up to experimental validation. It is incredibly easy to generate molecular dynamics results that look perfectly reasonable but have nothing to do with "reality" (i.e., how a lab experiment with the same system would turn out.)
One of the biggest challenges with water is modeling proton transport (i.e. pH, as water is a weird self-ionizing material.) Protons move too fast for MD steps to be stable, so they have to be approximated in some way. That is one reason why there are so many water models to choose from. Each model has a trade-off that is fine in some contexts, disastrous in others.
Somewhat related is the hydration shell around molecules especially proteins. It’s been shown that semi structured water around proteins help guide molecules to reaction sites. Water is an amazing thing!
>The boundary between them is thought to terminate at a "second critical point." This deeply supercooled region is so hard to study experimentally because water crystallizes rapidly
This sounds like the type of thing that could be used for some future technology that doesn’t exist yet and I can’t comprehend. Some sort of process that takes advantage of being in this second critical state.
This is not usually how technology progression works when you see it play out.
More likely, it would be something like a 2% more efficient refrigerator. These advances stack up for a hundred years and build into something that looks like magical future technology.
There were very very few exceptions to this in history.
Could someone explain why raising standing water temperature to boiling, I see a constant stream of bubbles forming at the bottom of pan and floating up? Was there air between the water molecules to begin with? Any articles to help explain? I understand the obvious phase transition to gas which would escape at the top, but cannot quite grasp how we get the trapped air at the bottom.
So there is O2 dissolved in the water. Most of what I read explains we can boiling away O2 as seen forming on the side of the walls of a pot as temp rises. What's curious is why those bubbles seem endless if they have been expelled out, like some equilibrium of oxygen getting dissolved again back into the water.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist and this is merely semi-informed speculation by an amateur enthusiast of understanding physical phenomena.
I had assumed that those were steam bubbles, not air bubbles. At high enough temperatures water becomes a gas. In a boiling pot, the highest temperatures are at the bottom. Temperature fluctuations on the bottom would lead to more steam production in some areas than others.
Any point at the bottom of the pot that did form a steam bubble would immediately lose energy to the steam and cool down. Now we likely are thinking of metal pots in this exercise, and metal conducts heat very well, so that cooled down point in the metal would draw nearby heat from the pan towards it, decreasing the chances of bubbles nearby. This would presumably lead to bubbles forming at some reasonable distance from each other, as any bubble formation causes the nearby pot metal to cool down.
Once in steam form, the steam bubble has a harder time losing energy. The energy was gained through direct contact of water with metal, but steam is much less dense, and it seems like the high-density shell of water around the steam bubble would act more like a mirror - reflecting the kinetic energy back into the bubble. This would keep the bubble stable as it travels up.
That's been my mental model of it for a while. It would be cool if someone who studied this stuff for real opined on it though.
If I understand the article correctly, they found a phase transition reaction, a chemical reaction that occurs in liquid water below 0 C that splits the body of liquid water into one continuous region of high density and one of low, so its no longer a uniform liquid.
This would also release heat, like the freezing reaction (and unlike random rearrangements of molecules in the liquid).
Okay thats wrong they didnt find that. Looks like just did some ml and it suggested that such a reaction exists and what the two species are.
Also its unclear whether during the phase transition there really is two seperate macroscopic regions as opposed to a mixture (maybe like a suspension)
But what if we find the exact same face in different rocks or pixels? I also think the researchers were aware of this issue as the article mentions they were careful not bias their model.
Yes, exactly. Water occupies the least volume per unit mass (equally, per unit molecule) at 39F. As it cools further, it paradoxically begins expanding in volume (as the polar ends seeking out their opposites in other molecules introduce a loose order to the liquid randomness).
Then, suddenly, at 32F/0C, water's real miracle happens. All the loose molecules click into place with other molecules - well, nearly all, because ice cubes aren't monocrystalline, typically, but those spare unmatched ends of molecules at crystal interfaces are still trapped by their other ends, and any single molecule unable to "find" a match for either strongly attractive end will still be trapped as well into solid-matrix mechanics. At most, those solo unmatched molecules become slight diffaction points for phonons (sound-energy propagation), but they are in fact so rare and so slight that they are generally undetectable. (The crystal faces are made of millions of unmatched molecule ends, and have therefore much more effect.)
Other polar molecules can act similarly, but water is astoundingly smaller than most others - so its molecules "find" their matches more easily, as they don't need to "rotate" much mass to line up - and is much less flexible as a result (so the alignment on the two-molecule level forms a more rigid body than, say, a polar sugar, and the volumetric effect is more pronounced).
Sadly paper is behind paywall. But I question the choosing of the water model to be a 4-site, and why that specific 4-site one (TIP4P) instead of others that have shown to be more accurate such as OPC. Also, there seem to be previous experimental work (https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.2877) showing some evidence that apparently is not even referenced in this new paper. I wonder how does that compare, if at all.
Homeopathic medicine is a discredited theoretical explanation for a phenomenon that empirical testing shows does not exist. For 'homeopathy' to be right, it would need the to become 'right' twice -
first: new data would need to begin existing, and then second: the homeopathic mechanisms would need to become the most plausible explanation for that data
Imagine the number of citations you could get for a solid double blind study that showed homeopathy to beat placebo. The only better impact I could imagine would be showing that climate change doesn’t actually exist.
There's enough money in 'crank health' that, if it were possible to publish something that might have a chance of lending some credibility (and thus expanding the breadth of the vulnerable customer base), then I would think it would have been done already.
This implies to me that the counter-evidence is strong and complete enough to discourage 'investment' into such a pursuit.
But there is many order of magnitude more money invested in preventing the publication of something like that..
All the "reputed" journals who gets funded by pharma would not touch such a study, despite any merits it have. This is so apparent to anyone who is not completely oblivious of how the world work that no one in their right mind will even attempt to fund such a study...
They need to wait for someone not in their right mind then. Has RFK been petitioned?
(this is not a serious reply, my apologies. I get that entrenched views are very difficult to change, hence the phrase "Science advances one funeral at a time", and funding sources are bias-generating - refer oil companies and climate change. Having said that, isn't any human that drinks any water taking part in homeopathy? I mean, dehydrated folks are likely to be less healthy than hydrated folks, but I think that's a case of correlation doesn't imply causation)
It is really funny when people claim that Trump just want his friends to make money.
Will someone explain to me how all Trumps friends are making money from pseudo science and not from the biggest and ever growing pharma business, that he appoints someone like RFK in that position.
You get funding for such a study the same way you get funding for anything else: first you run cheap small studies, perhaps in mice, perhaps observational, that show an interesting effect and motivate why you need money to run a proper clinical study.
Here is an insightful comment [1] in this thread but it is "dead" now, thanks to the down votes of true believers of "science". Any study that goes against the narrative despite any of the merits, would suffer the same fate as this comment.
Don't know about right, but for a while it worked better than "regular" medicine. At least it wouldn't kill you, when the alternative was intensive bloodlettings and purgatives.
The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.
Chiropractory is another pseudoscience that started early and has been surprisingly resilient in spite of the lack of evidence. I was flabbergasted when I learned in my 30s that this was a made up medicine by an OG antivaxxer and magnetic medicine proponent due to the fact that insurance would still pay for it when I was a kid at least, and real doctors still recommended it on occasion.[1][2]
The problem with making claims about the chiropractic practices is that it spans such a huge range of "absolute bullshit" to "physically grounded adjustments". Joints and vertebrae (especially) really can be out of alignment, and you can absolutely see that on imaging. Muscles in constant tension can be self-reinforcing in ways that don't easily correct themselves without an external force. My wife has significant back issues as a result of various injuries -- one leading to an SI joint that frequently pops out of place, one due to an injury that fractured most of the spinal processes -- and you can absolutely feel the "pop" when an adjustment helps something slide back in place. This is validated by imaging and sports medicine, not just chiropractic quacks.
At the same, adjusting your back isn't going to cure your cancer, no matter what idiots with fake degrees say.
The challenge is that the latter is just as stupid as homeopathy, but whereas homeopathy really has no redeeming qualities beyond the placebo effect, at least chiropractic practices actually do sometimes have groundings in reality.
The issue with changing the alignment of bones with an “adjustment” is it’s your body keeping things in that position. Physical therapy is almost always a better long term fix because it can actually strengthen muscles and increase flexibility through stretching enabling someone to actually maintain proper alignment.
Physical manipulation can work, but the most useful techniques are in widespread use such as dealing with a dislocated shoulder. Which leaves chiropractic practices with almost nothing that’s both unique and particularly useful.
Your understanding of modern homeopathy is rooted in misconceptions. Many homeopathic products actually contain a sufficient amount of the active ingredient that they absolutely can conceivably have a significant biological effect.
> Many homeopathic products actually contain a sufficient amount of the active ingredient that they absolutely can conceivably have a significant biological effect
On the upside, "the risk of bioaccumulation of metals/metalloid from the homeopathic medicines seems to be rather low, due to small quantities of those products prescribed to be applied per day, as well as insignificant metal contamination of the majority of tested products" [1].
In my country in the EU it's illegal to market homeopathic remedies if they contain active ingredients in quantities that could have an effect.
Otherwise they become regular medicine with different marketing requirements.
> The problem with making claims about the chiropractic practices is that it spans such a huge range of "absolute bullshit" to "physically grounded adjustments".
No it’s not a problem. When the founder claims he got the information from a ghost of a doctor 50 years ago, the whole thing is bullshit from the ground up. It’s pseudoscience.
Chiropractic “medicine” isn’t just claiming that they can make your joints feel better, the claim that it can cure cancer is at the core of it. It’s no better than a massage, but wants to claim the title of “medicine” or “doctor” for its practitioners when that’s as far from the truth as homeopathic “medicine”.
As I recall homeopathy does pretty fine statistically compared to many treatments. Not because the water does anything, but because the provider has time, and talks to patients about their problems and life.
A lot of doctors are shoving people out the door based on their first thought inside a short appointment as they type up a prescription.
Homeopathy is ineffective kookery, but our medical system has some well known gaps.
Your comment is in violation of the rule (applicable to comments):
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
Avoid commenting with tangents that have nothing to do with the article. If you don't agree, the site moderator dang can explain to you with administrative action.
There is no basis to suggest that any product uses this property of water. As for homeopathy, it isn't one thing. The effects, if any, can vary greatly by the substance and the concentration. Some low-dilution products work and many high-dilution products don't. There is such a thing as excessive dilution. Anyone who is painting a simpler picture of it is almost certainly wrong.
You're speaking of classical homeopathy, not practical observation. In practice there are many homeopathic products with varying dilutions, many of which have a meaningful amount of the substance, and therefore the distinct possibility of a biological effect.
Agree! Someone once told me that homeopathic doctors often put significant amounts of allopathic medicine in their “homeopathic” concoctions. Does wonders for effectiveness! Perpetuating the classical myth in this manner is also great for business!
Of course, there are also a number of cases where western “supplements” were caught containing actual prescription medicine, not just natural precursors or such. Same idea…
That might be true but it's absolutely not what I was getting at. Certainly I have never had or even seen a supplement containing any prescription medicine.
My comment was strictly in the context of ingredients and isolated labeled products that are used only in the homeopathic space.
Perhaps some very traditional ones would. Most people are just concerned with addressing their symptoms.
Rightly or wrongly, homeopathic products are considered medicines, not supplements, and people in general are very mindful of spending money on medicines that don't work.
> Rightly or wrongly, homeopathic products are considered medicines, not supplements, and people in general are very mindful of spending money on medicines that don't work.
[Citation needed].
People spend enormous amounts of money on junk "cures" and have done for centuries. Homeopathy is just one of the many current such scams.
You are forgetting the fact that many allopathic medicines are also junk cures which are seldom not better than a placebo (pushed through by flawed methodologies and corruption). And when they are found, they gets banned in US, but continued to be used in third world, where the now "junk" cures are sold as legit science!
This could be why Homeopathy can compete with allopathy because both the versions are "junk", so "junk" sold by someone who has more time to talk with the patients win..
Just what the hell are you arguing? They're not condiments or decorations or supplements or foods. Medicine is the word we use for drugs that are intended to address an active medical concern whether they work or not.
Also for the record, standard pharma medicines often try to pass off seriously toxic ingredients in their products, e.g. benzalkonium chloride, which is a quarternary ammonium compound, a notable tissue irritant causing significant tissue injury, such as to the nose and throat. The FDA doesn't care about you; they exist to protect the vendors.
Many mainstream medicines absolutely are junk, e.g. phenylephrine as a nasal decongestant. Moreover many can be fairly harmful, sometimes causing permanent damage. As a case in point, I have a prescription medicine induced permanent tinnitus. Other prescription medicines gave me kidney injury and high blood pressure, but at least those effects were temporary and reversible. Practically all rx medicines also come with an assortment of harmful additives and even petroleum dyes (artificial colors) that are known to be inflammatory and injurious.
Anyhow, it's not the angle of discussion that I was going for. Your assertion that homeopathy as a whole is a scam is rooted in a tiring misconception that all of its products are too dilute to work which is a falsity. Numerous homoeopathic products absolutely have a sufficient amount of the product to result in a biological effect.
Wait, wouldn't it just be "Oh, science just made a mistake, and that is how it progresses"...
Despite the "consensus" thoroughly "debunking" it conclusively many times...
Also, if it ever happens, I think it would be during course of many decades that all the existing "scientists" can save their faces, and new generations won't care about "Science" being wrong once again, despite all the projections of "certainity" back then..
"Water has memory, and whilst its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice seems infinite, it somehow forgets all the poo it's had in it."
- excerpt from Storm, by Nick Minchin
Dehumidifiers will end up being more efficient in one mode. When the manufacturer creates the new ones, a firmware update moves all legacy devices to the less efficient mode.
"I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing.
In the water I am beautiful." ― Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House
This is a molecular dynamics (with a specific TIP4 water model) and AI. I would characterize this paper (and basically most MD/AI simulation) as "guided hypothesis generation". I am skeptical that this result will hold up to experimental validation. It is incredibly easy to generate molecular dynamics results that look perfectly reasonable but have nothing to do with "reality" (i.e., how a lab experiment with the same system would turn out.)
One of the biggest challenges with water is modeling proton transport (i.e. pH, as water is a weird self-ionizing material.) Protons move too fast for MD steps to be stable, so they have to be approximated in some way. That is one reason why there are so many water models to choose from. Each model has a trade-off that is fine in some contexts, disastrous in others.
My money is on a TIP4 artifact.
Somewhat related is the hydration shell around molecules especially proteins. It’s been shown that semi structured water around proteins help guide molecules to reaction sites. Water is an amazing thing!
Study published in Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03301-8
>The boundary between them is thought to terminate at a "second critical point." This deeply supercooled region is so hard to study experimentally because water crystallizes rapidly
This sounds like the type of thing that could be used for some future technology that doesn’t exist yet and I can’t comprehend. Some sort of process that takes advantage of being in this second critical state.
> some future technology that doesn’t exist yet
This is not usually how technology progression works when you see it play out.
More likely, it would be something like a 2% more efficient refrigerator. These advances stack up for a hundred years and build into something that looks like magical future technology.
There were very very few exceptions to this in history.
Could someone explain why raising standing water temperature to boiling, I see a constant stream of bubbles forming at the bottom of pan and floating up? Was there air between the water molecules to begin with? Any articles to help explain? I understand the obvious phase transition to gas which would escape at the top, but cannot quite grasp how we get the trapped air at the bottom.
Yes it's the dissolved gas in the water that comes out, see: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=3197
So there is O2 dissolved in the water. Most of what I read explains we can boiling away O2 as seen forming on the side of the walls of a pot as temp rises. What's curious is why those bubbles seem endless if they have been expelled out, like some equilibrium of oxygen getting dissolved again back into the water.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "endless". Does this help? https://www.quora.com/Does-oxygen-leave-water-as-it-boils-an...
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist and this is merely semi-informed speculation by an amateur enthusiast of understanding physical phenomena.
I had assumed that those were steam bubbles, not air bubbles. At high enough temperatures water becomes a gas. In a boiling pot, the highest temperatures are at the bottom. Temperature fluctuations on the bottom would lead to more steam production in some areas than others.
Any point at the bottom of the pot that did form a steam bubble would immediately lose energy to the steam and cool down. Now we likely are thinking of metal pots in this exercise, and metal conducts heat very well, so that cooled down point in the metal would draw nearby heat from the pan towards it, decreasing the chances of bubbles nearby. This would presumably lead to bubbles forming at some reasonable distance from each other, as any bubble formation causes the nearby pot metal to cool down.
Once in steam form, the steam bubble has a harder time losing energy. The energy was gained through direct contact of water with metal, but steam is much less dense, and it seems like the high-density shell of water around the steam bubble would act more like a mirror - reflecting the kinetic energy back into the bubble. This would keep the bubble stable as it travels up.
That's been my mental model of it for a while. It would be cool if someone who studied this stuff for real opined on it though.
a couple of breadcrumbs regarding the molecular organization of water.
Dissecting the hydrogen bond network of water: Charge transfer and nuclear quantum effects[2024]
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads4369
Resonance Character of Hydrogen-bonding Interactions in Water and Other H-bonded Species[2005]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16581375/
I wonder if we are finding structure here because we are looking for structure.
Similar how you can find human faces in random pixels or rocks.
Nah.
If I understand the article correctly, they found a phase transition reaction, a chemical reaction that occurs in liquid water below 0 C that splits the body of liquid water into one continuous region of high density and one of low, so its no longer a uniform liquid.
This would also release heat, like the freezing reaction (and unlike random rearrangements of molecules in the liquid).
Okay thats wrong they didnt find that. Looks like just did some ml and it suggested that such a reaction exists and what the two species are.
Also its unclear whether during the phase transition there really is two seperate macroscopic regions as opposed to a mixture (maybe like a suspension)
You should still be able to confirm it with calorimetry though I guess?
I'm confused about this.
But what if we find the exact same face in different rocks or pixels? I also think the researchers were aware of this issue as the article mentions they were careful not bias their model.
Very interesting point though!
"Density is greatest at 39F, not 32F"
But density at "greatest" would mean volume shrinking...right?
I don't understand the article's logic.
Yes, exactly. Water occupies the least volume per unit mass (equally, per unit molecule) at 39F. As it cools further, it paradoxically begins expanding in volume (as the polar ends seeking out their opposites in other molecules introduce a loose order to the liquid randomness).
Then, suddenly, at 32F/0C, water's real miracle happens. All the loose molecules click into place with other molecules - well, nearly all, because ice cubes aren't monocrystalline, typically, but those spare unmatched ends of molecules at crystal interfaces are still trapped by their other ends, and any single molecule unable to "find" a match for either strongly attractive end will still be trapped as well into solid-matrix mechanics. At most, those solo unmatched molecules become slight diffaction points for phonons (sound-energy propagation), but they are in fact so rare and so slight that they are generally undetectable. (The crystal faces are made of millions of unmatched molecule ends, and have therefore much more effect.)
Other polar molecules can act similarly, but water is astoundingly smaller than most others - so its molecules "find" their matches more easily, as they don't need to "rotate" much mass to line up - and is much less flexible as a result (so the alignment on the two-molecule level forms a more rigid body than, say, a polar sugar, and the volumetric effect is more pronounced).
Sadly paper is behind paywall. But I question the choosing of the water model to be a 4-site, and why that specific 4-site one (TIP4P) instead of others that have shown to be more accurate such as OPC. Also, there seem to be previous experimental work (https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.2877) showing some evidence that apparently is not even referenced in this new paper. I wonder how does that compare, if at all.
Your linked preprint has been also published in Nature Communications: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3401
This neural network stuff does give me real divination vibes, not gonna lie.
> Much of the evidence for the LLPT has therefore come from computational studies.
So it's just a numerical simulation with some ML techniques?
It would be hilarious if homeopathy turned out to be right!
(To be clear, I don't think that will actually happen, but it would be hilarious if it did!)
You can be sure they’ll start using this paper as “evidence” all the same.
Everyone does that. Not only "they"!
While on the topic of weird theories of water, there's always Polywater:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater
Homeopathic medicine is a discredited theoretical explanation for a phenomenon that empirical testing shows does not exist. For 'homeopathy' to be right, it would need the to become 'right' twice - first: new data would need to begin existing, and then second: the homeopathic mechanisms would need to become the most plausible explanation for that data
>empirical testing shows does not exist..
But what are the incentives of those who did those tests? That should be said in the same breath as you say "empirical testing/evidence".
Imagine the number of citations you could get for a solid double blind study that showed homeopathy to beat placebo. The only better impact I could imagine would be showing that climate change doesn’t actually exist.
Mmmm..the question is..who would fund it. And if someone funded it, who would publish it...
There's enough money in 'crank health' that, if it were possible to publish something that might have a chance of lending some credibility (and thus expanding the breadth of the vulnerable customer base), then I would think it would have been done already.
This implies to me that the counter-evidence is strong and complete enough to discourage 'investment' into such a pursuit.
>There's enough money in 'crank health' that,
But there is many order of magnitude more money invested in preventing the publication of something like that..
All the "reputed" journals who gets funded by pharma would not touch such a study, despite any merits it have. This is so apparent to anyone who is not completely oblivious of how the world work that no one in their right mind will even attempt to fund such a study...
They need to wait for someone not in their right mind then. Has RFK been petitioned?
(this is not a serious reply, my apologies. I get that entrenched views are very difficult to change, hence the phrase "Science advances one funeral at a time", and funding sources are bias-generating - refer oil companies and climate change. Having said that, isn't any human that drinks any water taking part in homeopathy? I mean, dehydrated folks are likely to be less healthy than hydrated folks, but I think that's a case of correlation doesn't imply causation)
>Has RFK been petitioned?
It is really funny when people claim that Trump just want his friends to make money.
Will someone explain to me how all Trumps friends are making money from pseudo science and not from the biggest and ever growing pharma business, that he appoints someone like RFK in that position.
You get funding for such a study the same way you get funding for anything else: first you run cheap small studies, perhaps in mice, perhaps observational, that show an interesting effect and motivate why you need money to run a proper clinical study.
Approximately how old are you? 20s? 30s? 40s? 50s?...
Is this a bit? Please state your point clearly instead of conspiratorial innuendo.
I think the point is clear. If it is not clear to you, you are already beyond help...
More vagaries.
Here is something real for you.
Here is an insightful comment [1] in this thread but it is "dead" now, thanks to the down votes of true believers of "science". Any study that goes against the narrative despite any of the merits, would suffer the same fate as this comment.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48728644
Don't know about right, but for a while it worked better than "regular" medicine. At least it wouldn't kill you, when the alternative was intensive bloodlettings and purgatives.
> for a while it worked better than "regular" medicine. At least it wouldn't kill you
Homeopathy was invented after the discovery of germ theory [1][2]. So not really. And homeopathy has always suffered from an adulteration problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
As an idea sure, but not in practice.
Homeopathy was created in 1796, and we still haven’t gotten rid of it.
Meanwhile 65 years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.
Chiropractory is another pseudoscience that started early and has been surprisingly resilient in spite of the lack of evidence. I was flabbergasted when I learned in my 30s that this was a made up medicine by an OG antivaxxer and magnetic medicine proponent due to the fact that insurance would still pay for it when I was a kid at least, and real doctors still recommended it on occasion.[1][2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic_controversy_and_c...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_David_Palmer
The problem with making claims about the chiropractic practices is that it spans such a huge range of "absolute bullshit" to "physically grounded adjustments". Joints and vertebrae (especially) really can be out of alignment, and you can absolutely see that on imaging. Muscles in constant tension can be self-reinforcing in ways that don't easily correct themselves without an external force. My wife has significant back issues as a result of various injuries -- one leading to an SI joint that frequently pops out of place, one due to an injury that fractured most of the spinal processes -- and you can absolutely feel the "pop" when an adjustment helps something slide back in place. This is validated by imaging and sports medicine, not just chiropractic quacks.
At the same, adjusting your back isn't going to cure your cancer, no matter what idiots with fake degrees say.
The challenge is that the latter is just as stupid as homeopathy, but whereas homeopathy really has no redeeming qualities beyond the placebo effect, at least chiropractic practices actually do sometimes have groundings in reality.
The issue with changing the alignment of bones with an “adjustment” is it’s your body keeping things in that position. Physical therapy is almost always a better long term fix because it can actually strengthen muscles and increase flexibility through stretching enabling someone to actually maintain proper alignment.
Physical manipulation can work, but the most useful techniques are in widespread use such as dealing with a dislocated shoulder. Which leaves chiropractic practices with almost nothing that’s both unique and particularly useful.
Your understanding of modern homeopathy is rooted in misconceptions. Many homeopathic products actually contain a sufficient amount of the active ingredient that they absolutely can conceivably have a significant biological effect.
> Many homeopathic products actually contain a sufficient amount of the active ingredient that they absolutely can conceivably have a significant biological effect
On the upside, "the risk of bioaccumulation of metals/metalloid from the homeopathic medicines seems to be rather low, due to small quantities of those products prescribed to be applied per day, as well as insignificant metal contamination of the majority of tested products" [1].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20674842/
In my country in the EU it's illegal to market homeopathic remedies if they contain active ingredients in quantities that could have an effect. Otherwise they become regular medicine with different marketing requirements.
> The problem with making claims about the chiropractic practices is that it spans such a huge range of "absolute bullshit" to "physically grounded adjustments".
No it’s not a problem. When the founder claims he got the information from a ghost of a doctor 50 years ago, the whole thing is bullshit from the ground up. It’s pseudoscience.
Chiropractic “medicine” isn’t just claiming that they can make your joints feel better, the claim that it can cure cancer is at the core of it. It’s no better than a massage, but wants to claim the title of “medicine” or “doctor” for its practitioners when that’s as far from the truth as homeopathic “medicine”.
> Homeopathy was invented after the discovery of germ theory [1][2]. So not really.
Germ Theory was only finally accepted (after initially being rejected) due to the advent of evidence-based medicine, which homeopathy popularized.
> due to the advent of evidence-based medicine, which homeopathy popularized
Source?
As I recall homeopathy does pretty fine statistically compared to many treatments. Not because the water does anything, but because the provider has time, and talks to patients about their problems and life.
A lot of doctors are shoving people out the door based on their first thought inside a short appointment as they type up a prescription.
Homeopathy is ineffective kookery, but our medical system has some well known gaps.
Your comment is in violation of the rule (applicable to comments):
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
Avoid commenting with tangents that have nothing to do with the article. If you don't agree, the site moderator dang can explain to you with administrative action.
Homeopathic medicine is already recommended by 1 out of 1000000000000000000 doctors.
Nice, this comment broke my composure.
Are those commodity doctors? Or real doctors?
Homeopathy actually works great depending on what you use it for: I've been trying homeopathic vodka and it's done wonders for my health.
You are microdosing alcohol
Stealing this forever.
Vaccines is homeopathy working, in a way :)
There is no basis to suggest that any product uses this property of water. As for homeopathy, it isn't one thing. The effects, if any, can vary greatly by the substance and the concentration. Some low-dilution products work and many high-dilution products don't. There is such a thing as excessive dilution. Anyone who is painting a simpler picture of it is almost certainly wrong.
If I add water to a glass of whiskey and dilute it, why don't I get twice as drunk?
But you can drink a lot more that way and get way more drunk!
Assuming the original dilution is adequate, further dilution will slow the consumption, making one less drunk.
Try drinking a pint dry, and try drinking it diluted with water. And let me know what was easy...
Because the amount of total intoxicant is the same.
Let:
A = amount of ethanol
V = initial whiskey volume
W = added water
Initial concentration: c₁ = A / V
After dilution: c₂ = A / (V + W)
If you drink the entire diluted glass: ethanol consumed = c₂(V + W) = A
Intoxication ∝ ethanol consumed
Therefore: drunkenness ∝ A not ∝ (V + W)
Adding water changes concentration, not the total ethanol: A = constant ⇒ drunkenness = constant (ignoring effects of drinking rate).
Homeopathy is very literally the singular concept that more diluted medicine works better.
Saying that “less diluted works better” is saying the diametric opposite of what Homeopathic “theory” does!
You're speaking of classical homeopathy, not practical observation. In practice there are many homeopathic products with varying dilutions, many of which have a meaningful amount of the substance, and therefore the distinct possibility of a biological effect.
Agree! Someone once told me that homeopathic doctors often put significant amounts of allopathic medicine in their “homeopathic” concoctions. Does wonders for effectiveness! Perpetuating the classical myth in this manner is also great for business!
Of course, there are also a number of cases where western “supplements” were caught containing actual prescription medicine, not just natural precursors or such. Same idea…
That might be true but it's absolutely not what I was getting at. Certainly I have never had or even seen a supplement containing any prescription medicine.
My comment was strictly in the context of ingredients and isolated labeled products that are used only in the homeopathic space.
Sure, but homeopaths would consider the less diluted ones to be the weaker “medicine”!
Perhaps some very traditional ones would. Most people are just concerned with addressing their symptoms.
Rightly or wrongly, homeopathic products are considered medicines, not supplements, and people in general are very mindful of spending money on medicines that don't work.
> Rightly or wrongly, homeopathic products are considered medicines, not supplements, and people in general are very mindful of spending money on medicines that don't work.
[Citation needed].
People spend enormous amounts of money on junk "cures" and have done for centuries. Homeopathy is just one of the many current such scams.
You are forgetting the fact that many allopathic medicines are also junk cures which are seldom not better than a placebo (pushed through by flawed methodologies and corruption). And when they are found, they gets banned in US, but continued to be used in third world, where the now "junk" cures are sold as legit science!
This could be why Homeopathy can compete with allopathy because both the versions are "junk", so "junk" sold by someone who has more time to talk with the patients win..
> [Citation needed]
Just what the hell are you arguing? They're not condiments or decorations or supplements or foods. Medicine is the word we use for drugs that are intended to address an active medical concern whether they work or not.
Also for the record, standard pharma medicines often try to pass off seriously toxic ingredients in their products, e.g. benzalkonium chloride, which is a quarternary ammonium compound, a notable tissue irritant causing significant tissue injury, such as to the nose and throat. The FDA doesn't care about you; they exist to protect the vendors.
Many mainstream medicines absolutely are junk, e.g. phenylephrine as a nasal decongestant. Moreover many can be fairly harmful, sometimes causing permanent damage. As a case in point, I have a prescription medicine induced permanent tinnitus. Other prescription medicines gave me kidney injury and high blood pressure, but at least those effects were temporary and reversible. Practically all rx medicines also come with an assortment of harmful additives and even petroleum dyes (artificial colors) that are known to be inflammatory and injurious.
Anyhow, it's not the angle of discussion that I was going for. Your assertion that homeopathy as a whole is a scam is rooted in a tiring misconception that all of its products are too dilute to work which is a falsity. Numerous homoeopathic products absolutely have a sufficient amount of the product to result in a biological effect.
[dead]
Wait, wouldn't it just be "Oh, science just made a mistake, and that is how it progresses"...
Despite the "consensus" thoroughly "debunking" it conclusively many times...
Also, if it ever happens, I think it would be during course of many decades that all the existing "scientists" can save their faces, and new generations won't care about "Science" being wrong once again, despite all the projections of "certainity" back then..
"Water has memory, and whilst its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice seems infinite, it somehow forgets all the poo it's had in it." - excerpt from Storm, by Nick Minchin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U&t=353s
The entirety of this song is a listen worth your time. Doubly so if you've never heard of Nick Minchin before.
Who said it forgets it?
So the OTA firmware updates on my dehumidifier for when they discover a new kind of water will come in handy after all!
Dehumidifiers will end up being more efficient in one mode. When the manufacturer creates the new ones, a firmware update moves all legacy devices to the less efficient mode.
Nah, IFIFY: So the OTA firmware updates on my dehumidifier is for when they make a new kind of dehumidifier that they want me to buy!
"In a neural network." is the new "In mice."
Well put. That's exactly right. (And I don't even mind mouse studies!)
[dead]
Great to see progress on ice-9 /s
"I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful." ― Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House
So if liquid water is really a mixture of water and water, is it safe to say that this paper establishes that water is wet?
Only if the molecules have a hydration shell
[flagged]
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html