Homoeopathic drug dynamisation and Nanotechnology-A Review article

Dr Rakhi Kumari

ABSTRACT
The action of homoeopathic medicine remains unexplained for ages i.e. from the history of the evolution of homoeopathy. This article focuses on pharmacological mode of action of homeopathy through nanotechnology. It also gives a better understanding about the chemical and pharmaceutical analysis of mathematic- mechanical process of dynamisation followed in the preparation of homoeopathic medicine. 

Aims :-

  1. To know that how people  get  benefited from  homoeopathic potentised medicine
  2. Use of homoeopathic medicine for unsolvesd medical problems benifiting from nanomedical approach. 

 Keywords: Homoeopathy; nanotechnology; mathematic-mechanical; dynamisation 

Introduction
The word ‘nano’ is derived from the Latin word which means ‘dwarf’. The prefix ‘nano’ refers to one-billionth. When applied to linear measurement, a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. The term nanotechnology is now used to refer to the creation of new objects with nano-scale dimensions between 1 and 100  nanometers.1

At these scales, consideration of individual molecules and interacting groups of molecules in relation to the bulk macroscopic properties of the material or device becomes important, as it has a control over the fundamental molecular structure, which allows control over the macroscopic chemical and physical properties.2 

Nanomedicine is the application of nanotechnology to the field of medicine by the use of a material at the nanometer scale. The most common application of nanomedicine involves employing nanoparticles to enhance the action of drugs in treatment. 

Nanotechnology has been applied to increase absorbability. Nanomedicine is also applicable for drugs that are absorbed too quickly and removed from the body as waste before treatment can be affective. Nanomedicine can increase the time period in which a drug remains active in the body.3

Nano materials have increased surface area and nano scale effects, hence used as a promising tool for the advancement of drug and gene delivery, biomedical imaging and diagnostic biosensors. By further research in nanotechnology, it can be useful for every aspect of human life. Medicine, regenerative medicine, stem cell research and nutraceuticals are among the leading sectors that will be modified by nanotechnology innovations.4

Pharmacokinetic characteristics of various nanomedicines with different formulations are determined by particle size, shape (chemical structure), and surface chemical characteristics. Nanomedicines with particle size less than 10 nm are removed by kidneys whereas those with particle size more than 10 nm are sometimes elongated and removed by the liver and/or the mononuclear-phagocyte system (MPS). The aim of regulating particle size in nanomedicines is to increase their retention in target tissues, and to remove them rapidly when distributed to non-target tissues.5

CHALLENGES:
The reformulation of pre-existing medicines or the development of new ones has been largely boosted by the increasing research in nanomedicine. Changes in toxicity, solubility and bioavailability profile are some of the modifications that nanotechnology introduces in medicines.

In the last decades, we have assisted to the translation of several applications of nanomedicine in the clinical practice, ranging from medical devices to nanopharmaceuticals.6

It is undeniable that nanomedicines present extraordinary advantages with respect to conventional medicines including those of offering superior efficacy, bioavailability, improved transport across the biological barriers and disease-targeting, better adsorption, prolonged circulation and blood concentration, reduced toxicity and immunogenicity, etc.. These features, which depend on their basic physicochemical properties, namely their size, surface/volume ratio, softness/hardness, and their surface characteristics, have been ameliorating the lives of many patients.7

Overall, the use of nanotechnology in medicine has the potential to have a major impact on human health. It has been suggested to facilitate the development of personalized medicine for specific patient sub-groups, in which therapy is tailored by the patient’s individual genetic and disease profile. For example, disease-specific characteristics such as capillary permeability, cellular receptor expression and molecular pathway activation could be analyzed and used to design personalized nanomedicines.8 

One of the great interest in the development of nanomedicine in recent years relates to the integration of therapy and diagnosis (theranostic) as exemplified by cancer as a disease model. Good examples have been encapsulated such as, oleic acid-coated iron oxide nanoparticles for diagnostic applications through near-infrared; photodynamic detection of colorectal cancer using alginate and folic acid based chitosan nanoparticles; utilization of cathepsin B as metastatic processes fluorogenic peptide probes conjugated to glycol chitosan nanoparticles; iron oxide coated hyaluronic acid as a biopolymeric material in cancer therapy; and dextran among others.9

Although nanomedicine is still at an early stage of development, several drugs that utilize nanotechnology have been approved and marketed, and many others are being studied. Nanomedicines potentially offer a means of earlier diagnosis; more effective, safer, and personalized treatments; as well as reduced health care costs.1 Many experts agree that nanomedicine will create a paradigm shift that revolutionizes health care within the next 10 years.However, for significant progress to be made toward this goal, much more work is needed to establish testing criteria, validate efficacy, and accumulate safety data for various nanotherapeutic agents and materials.10

HOMOEOPATHY IS A BETTER ALTERNATIVE FOR NANOTECHNOLOGY AND NANOMEDICINE

“Medical nanoparticles are clearly not a version of homeopathy.”

Nanomedicine and homeopathy both involve very small amounts of material, but that is where the similarity ends, as Chris Toumey explains.17

Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, taught that the same substances which cause symptoms of an illness in a healthy person could also cure a person afflicted with that illness by stimulating the patient’s immune system to react against the same substances that initially caused the illness. This is different from conventional vaccination, which involves stimulating the immune system before the person becomes ill.

The amount of the homeopathic substance given to the person should be very small for two reasons. First, it has to be small enough so that it does not make a bad condition worse, which means the amount has to be smaller than the initial amount that caused the illness in the first place1,2. Second, homoeopathists believe that the therapeutic effect can be increased by diluting the remedy. At each stage of dilution, the water or alcohol in which the remedy is suspended is shaken energetically to release more therapeutic effect, with multiple stages of dilution and shaking leading to more effective cures.

Homeopathy is a time-tested two-century old empirical system of healing. Homeopathic medicines are prepared through a characteristic process known as potentization, where serial dilutions are performed with strong strokes at each step of dilution. Homeopathy is controversial because most medicines do not contain one single molecule of the corresponding starting-substance.17 

Three homeopathic medicines very frequently used in clinical practice were found not to be „nothing‟, but exhibited high nanoparticle contents. Such nanoparticles were rich in silicon and had crystalline nature. During the strong strokes of potentization, the nanoparticles might acquire the information of the diluted away starting-source encrypted on them by means of epitaxy. As various forms of silica are known to interact with proteins and cells of the immune system, these nanoparticles (along with the interfacial water on their surface) might also act as carriers of this information to the target. The „size‟ of information might be related with the dilution degree of medicines. Under such possible conditions, homeopathy qualifies as a nanomedicine system not requiring high technology. For confirmation and further elaboration purposes, new research in materials and interfacial water are required.

Homeopathic remedies are low doses of source nanoparticles formed during trituration and/or succussion. Silica from the walls of remedy containers can also form nanoparticles during succussion. NPs adsorb other nanoparticles and materials onto their highly reactive surfaces and carry them across membranes into cells. Nanoparticles are highly catalytic forms of source material with properties that their bulk forms do not possess, including the ability to markedly lower the plant, drug, or antigen dose needed to evoke a biological response. Other NP properties include biological, chemical, thermal, optical, electrical, magnetic, and quantum effects that the bulk forms of the “same” material lack. Remedy nanoparticles are likely experienced by the organism as a novel, low dose but salient biological threat or danger to survival. Compensatory reactions result in a healing response that develops and evolves over time, if the individual is sick at the moment of remedy administration. Nanoparticles can cause hormesis at very low doses.

Hormesis is an organism-based adaptive response that is nonlinear and bidirectional. The specific pattern of effects that a remedy source could cause would trigger organismspecific cross-adaptations that previous higher intensity stressors in the individual’s life have already primed and sensitized. Because of the previous priming by the disease-related stressors, the low dose remedy nanoparticles elicit a cross-adapted reversal in the direction of the pre-existing adverse functional changes. The intermittent, pulsed dosing regimen for remedies allows the organism’s adaptive responses to unfold over time throughout the interconnected self-organized complex living network of the person. The adaptive immune system, metaplasticity and plasticity in the central nervous system, and endocrine factors probably all play an interactive role in mediating remedy responses. Overall, the Nanoparticle-Cross-Adaptation-Sensitization model offers a scientifically rational basis for developing focused programs of research on how homeopathic remedies affect living systems.12

Nanomaterials reputedly display ‘unique phenomena’, offering economic potential through manipulation of nanoparticles for novel applications. Hence nanotechnology requires study and‘fine-tuning’ of atomic, molecular and macro-molecular materials, whose properties may vary from those manifested by materials in ‘bulk’ dimensions. These aims imply existing (and growing) expertise regarding the required ‘fine-tuning’ processes and suggest that manipulating nano-dusts will create benefits for society, in technological and, for instance, medical, applications. Homeopathy is a holistic system of medicine, that uses very small doses of substances, and preserved potentized energy from ‘attenuated’ versions of those substances, to cure disease and discomforts. Homeopathy has occasionally been ‘lambasted’in published literature for using dosages considered too small to have an effect. Recent emphasis on nanotechnology therefore presents a window of opportunity to discuss this idea. I will briefly compass here, the question as to whether parallels exist between homeopathy and nanotechnology. To firstly render the concept of homeopathy more accessible for the general reader, the central idea underlying contemporary medical vaccinations was first derived from homeopathy’s theoretical principles. In extensive homeopathic tests, minute substances that triggered reactions in the ‘vital’ aspects of the test subjects were shown to cure diseases ‘most similar’ to the type of disease a select substance had the ability to provoke, or, to state this concisely, ‘like may be cured by like’ (hence, cowpox prevented smallpox).It’s understood in homeopathy (and, for instance, in vitamin treatments, and use of pharmaceutical medicines) that each substance ‘causes’ specific responses in living organisms, that are peculiar to itself, including triggering or suppression of various physiological processes, and signs and symptoms of ‘health’ or ‘disease’.

Less broadly acknowledged, although explored in recent research about individually tailored treatments, is the idea that each person also reacts uniquely, in a characteristic way, to substances and energies they encounter. Homeopathic effectiveness relies on the ‘energy’ of substances prescribed, to interact with and stimulate individuals’ vital energies, in contrast to material forms of a substance which create a broadly-predictable response. Homeopathy requires only very small quantities of medicine for prescribing, making it an economic therapy choice for low-income communities. Nanotechnology is not a complete, self-contained science or healing approach, but mainly represents opportunities to improve medical diagnostic techniques. As an experimental field, it creates potential through technology. Finely powdered metals or minerals can coat target substances, permit light-harvesting, or harness reflective, fluorescing or absorptive properties of minutely disintegrated minerals for uses such as detecting metal ions, pH, or cancer biomarkers in vitro, or in living tissue, including within cells.Thus, some nano-possibilities offer exciting medical potential.Thinking creatively, light-harvesting properties of certain nano molecules might usefully direct energy from spectral light to treat depression during prolonged winter seasons. This application would ideally not be used as ‘internal medicine’, due to nano- minerals’ potential toxicity, accumulation in organs and tissues, and the body’s limited capacity to sufficiently excrete such particles. Nevertheless, suitable preparations of light-harvesting nano minerals could function as something of a personal ‘solar panel’, worn on the exterior, perhaps the forehead, to direct light energy to vital parts of the higher nervous centre,such as the pineal gland, to assist in recharging the ‘vital batteries’ and overcoming winter depression.13

Multiple studies have demonstrated that traditional homeopathic manufacturing reagents and processes can generate remedy source and silica nanoparticles (NPs). Homeopathically-made NPs would initiate adaptive changes in an organism as a complex adaptive system (CAS) or network. Adaptive changes would emerge from several different endogenous amplification processes that respond to exogenous danger or threat signals that manufactured nanomaterials convey, including stochastic resonance (SR) in sensory neural systems and time-dependent sensitization (TDS)/oscillation. SR is nonlinear coherent amplification of a weak signal by the superposition of a larger magnitude white noise containing within it the same frequencies of the weak signal. TDS is progressive response magnitude amplification and oscillatory reversal in response direction to a given low dose at physiological limits with the passage of time.

Hormesis is an overarching adaptive phenomenon that reflects the observed nonlinear adaptive dose–response relationship. Remedies would act as enhanced micro- and nanoscale forms of their source material via direct local ligand-receptor interactions at very low potencies and/or by triggering systemic adaptive network dynamical effects via their NP-based electromagnetic, optical, and quantum mechanical properties at higher potencies.

Manufacturing parameters including dilution modify sizes, shapes, and surface charges of nanoparticles, thereby causing differences in physico-chemical properties and biological effects. Based on surface area, size, shape, and charge, nanoparticles adsorb a complex pattern of serum proteins, forming a protein corona on contact that constitutes a unique biological identity. The protein corona may capture individualized dysfunctional biological mediator information of the organism onto the surfaces of the salient, i.e., resonant, remedy nanostructures.

SR would amplify this weak signal from the salient remedy NPs with protein corona adsorbed, leading to sensitized nonlinear dynamical modulation of gene expression and associated changes in biological signaling pathways. When the system reaches its physiological limits during a homeopathic aggravation or the natural disease state, the amplified remedy signal triggers a nonlinear reversal in dynamical direction back towards health.14

Recent studies reveal that homeopathic remedies contain nanoparticles (NPs) of source materials formed by “top-down” mechanical grinding in lactose and/or succussion (forceful agitation) in ethanolic solutions. Silica nanostructures formed during succussions in glass and/or biosynthesized by specific plant extract tinctures also may acquire and convey epitaxial information from remedy source materials into higher potencies. NPs have enhanced bioavailability, adsorptive capabilities, adjuvant reactivity, electromagnetic and quantum properties compared with their bulk forms. NPs induce adaptive changes in the organism at nontoxic doses (hormesis), serving as salient, low level danger signals to the biological stress response network. Activation of stress response effectors, including heat shock proteins, inflammasomes, cytokines and neuroendocrine pathways, initiate beneficial compensatory reactions across the interconnected networks of the organism as a complex adaptive system. Homeopathic remedies act by stimulating hormetic adaptive rather than conventional pharmacological effects. Updating terminology from “homeopathy” to “adaptive network nanomedicine” reflects the integration of this historical but controversial medical system with modern scientific findings.15

Among all the discoveries of Hahnemann, potentisation was the most important, though controversial. The curative effect of individualised homeopathic potencies is empirical but inexplicable by the conventional principles of science. This paradox is a highly contentious topic of debate between rationalists and homeopaths. Recent discoveries relating to the nano-particulate nature of homeopathic ultra-high potencies and their potential effect on individual gene expression give new insights into this complex issue. It is concluded that homeopathy may be viewed as ‘personalised nanomedicine’.16

The authors uncovered a number of promising experimental techniques that warrant replication to assess the reported physicochemical properties of homeopathic preparations compared with controls. They further discuss a range of experimental aspects that highlight the many factors that need to be taken into consideration when performing basic research into homeopathic potentization. For future experiments, the authors generally recommend using succussed (vigorously shaken) controls, or comparing different homeopathic preparations with each other to reliably identify any specific physicochemical properties.

 The publications analyzed described 203 experiments. Less than 25% used blinding and/or randomization, and about one third used adequate controls to identify specific effects of homeopathic preparations. The most promising techniques used so far are nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxation, optical spectroscopy, and electrical impedance measurements. In these three areas, several sets of replicated high-quality experiments provide evidence for specific physicochemical properties of homeopathic preparations.18

Conclusion 
The practice of homoeopathy is in conflict with nothing in the great field of modern medicine. It is purely additional and supplemental. There are a great many sincere and successful gentalmen of medical prefession who know nothing about homoeopathy.

Homoeopathy is defined as the therapeutic method of symptom-similarity. So it will be seen that homoeopathy is a special form of using drugs. Homeopathy deals with therapeutics or treatment of disease. Moreover this homoeopathic treatment of disease is further limited to the use of pharmacologic preparations according to certain well-defined principles.  Chemistry and especially of colloidal chemistry, has done much to throw light on the principles of homoeopathic drug action. The action of extremely minute doses of medicine is explained on the theory of surface development and also the opposite action between small  and large doses of the same agent. In the past,chemistry and pharmacology have been called upon to explain the action of a drug by its chemical, pharmaceutical analysis. Homeopathic medicines are prepared through a mathematic-mechanical process by virtue of which the inherited dormant dynamic curative power of drugs are aroused by modifying drug strength or drug power to dynamic power through simultaneous and successive process of dilution and friction in definite order according to pharmacopoeia. Last I want to conclude that homoeopathic system of medicine is very precise medical system which is based upon the  visionary comprehensible principles.

LIST OF REFERENCES: 

1.API Textbook of Medicine (Volumes),9th Edition

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2890134/ Nanotechnology: The Future Medicine

3. https://www.clinam.org/benefits.html The Benefits of Nanomedicine

4. Nanotechnology and its Applications in Medicine

5. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40005-017-0370-4 . Nanomedicines: current status and future perspectives in aspect of drug delivery and pharmacokinetics

6..https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fchem.2018.00360/full   Nanomedicine: Principles, Properties, and Regulatory Issues

7.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmedt.2019.00001/full Grand Challenges in Nano-Based Drug Delivery

8.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2018.00790/full current Trends and Challenges in the Clinical Translation of Nanoparticulate Nanomedicines: Pathways for Translational Development and Commercialization

9.https://jnanobiotechnology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12951-018-0392-8  Nano based drug delivery systems: recent developments and future prospects

10. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3462600/ The Nanomedicine Revolution

11.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267767309_Homeopathy_emerging_as_nanomedicine Homeopathy emerging as nanomedicine

12.https://homeopathyusa.org/uploads/Research/Bell2012-105.pdf  Homeopathy as Systemic Adaptational Nanomedicine: The Nanoparticle-Cross-Adaptation-Sensitization Model

13.https://lupinepublishers.com/nano-science-nano-technology-journal/pdf/ANOAJ.MS.ID.000124.pdf Understanding Parallels Between Homeopathy and ‘Nanomedicine’

14.Enhancement of adaptive biological effects by nanotechnology preparation methods in homeopathic medicines – ScienceDirect (2).mhtml

15. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23277079/ 2013 Jan 1;5:685-708. doi: 10.2741/s400. Adaptive Network Nanomedicine: An Integrated Model for Homeopathic Medicine

16. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30208493/ 2019 Feb;108(1):66-70. doi: 10.1055/s-0038-1669988. Epub 2018 Sep 12.Homeopathy Seen as Personalised Nanomedicine

17. https://www.nature.com/articles/nnano.2009.97?proof=true Small differences

18.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6760181/Physicochemical Investigations of Homeopathic Preparations: A Systematic Review and Bibliometric Analysis—Part 2 DATE- 17-8-2020

Dr.Rakhi Kumari
Department-Practice Of Medicine
A.M.Shaikh Homoeopathic Medical College Nehru Nagar Belgavi

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