The need for the concept of entanglement in homeopathy is to explain away why double blind trials show homeopath is no better than a placebo.

However this just begs more questions.

If a homeopath is entangled with each of his patients then it follows that all his patients are entangled together through the homeopath. If one patient changes state then not only does the homeopath change state but so do all his patients.

Now when does the entanglement begin and more importantly end and how do you know it has ended?

This could mean that all a homepath’s current patients are entangled with the homeopath’s past patients. Now if a patient sees another homepath then the patient becomes entangled with the other homeopath and all his other patients (past and present).

This is plainly daft. What is happening is that a quantum phenomenon is being equated with a human human interaction. A metaphor maybe but not an explination.

As for water memory. It does not exist.

Again this one holds if the water remembers only what the homeopath intends the water to remember for all time. What happens if two homeopaths want the water to remember different things ?

Another incorrect equivalence of a physical process with a metaphor to support the magic in a potion.

On the contrary, both Walach and Milgrom use it at great lengths to explain why double-blind randomised controlled trials (RTC) generally fail to show a specific effect for homeopathy (that is: homeopathy turns out no better than a placebo) EVENTHOUGH homeopathy is (supposed to be) much more than a placebo.
In a nice move, Milgrom even uses the entanglement idea to explain why negative outcomes of RCTs should be expected and thus do NOT show that homeopathy is just a placebo, while positive outcomes are – of course – also an indicator of homeopathys efficiency.

One of the problems with the WQT/entanglement idea is that it does not help in designing better tests of homeopathy: one the one hand, the gold-standard of evidence based medicine – the randomised double-blind trial — is rejected. On the other hand, alternatives are proposed that, when closely examined, do not account for the placebo effect.

Nobody is denying the placebo effect. The debate is not whether homeopathy is one of the best known placebos (we can agree on the fact that it certainly is), but whether it is MORE than a highly efficient placebo.

One should not be surprised to find that many that see homeopaths’ clients appear to be cured following their treatments. Those that remain ill one would hope would see a conventional doctor.

The problem for homeopaths is they need to explain why they do what they do. The simple explination “they make their patients feel better” is not good enough and removes their “magic” or authority and so their value.

What we get is long convoluted explinations that cherry pick models to justify the impossible. Just like ID.

The whole entanglement idea is really just saying homeopathy is a placebo / talking therapy, with bells on.

www.gwup.org/skeptiker/archiv/2006/3/

Basically, my conclusions – which were based on WQT and Walachs model of homeopathy as a form of generalised quantum teleportation – are still valid for Milgroms paper.

First, as previous posters have already pointed out that there are some (trivial, depending on your point of view) errors in this and previous papers by Milgrom, I have to add the following major one: regarding WQT, Milgrom writes “Complementarity and indeterminacy are epistemological in origin not ontological.” This is a serious misquote of the original paper, where it says that “[...] there is no way to argue that complementarity and indeterminacy in weak quantum theory are of ontic rather than epistemic nature. [...] one would expect them to be of rather innocent epistemic origin in many cases.” Now, this makes ALL the difference, as quantum effects like entanglement are due to the ontic nature (i.e. not simply to our incomplete knowledge) of complementarity and indeterminacy! In classical physics or in daily life, there are trivial – epistemological – examples of “entanglement”, such as 2 identical candles being lit at the same time and then separated. Nothing mysterious about the fact that they will burn at the same rate!

However, for Walachs or Milgroms models of homeopathy, non-trivial, ontic entanglement is absolutely essential.

To come back to my article in “Skeptiker”, my main conclusions about WQT and Homeopathy are:
- WQT itself is a legitimate mathematical framework for theories (in “physics and beyond”)

However, at present, the WQT-models of homeopathy are NOT SCIENCE, mainly because:
- the mathematics of WQT are not used anywhere
- the analogies to quantum mechanics are not convincing

I have to add that Milgrom makes life very difficult for the reader since it is not always clear whether a specific model is a metaphor or not. In physics, metaphors are neither a very common nor very convincing kind of argument… for a metaphor to be valid and useful, two systems should be equivalent in some way. Thus, I really cannot see how metaphors (??) like the gyroscope could be applied to people’s (at best!) hypothetical vital force. Some of these metaphors seem more like “free rides” that can be cleverly chosen to back any given claim…