For an example, from many, of the appalling science, look at Fig 3, no information is given about the methods of analysis, what is being analysed or even the units used. The authors suggest, without any offered evidence, that the contamination comes from the glassware. The triangles are stated to represent ‘pH of aqueous solution containing the same amount of impurities determined by analytic methods in the homeopathic solutions.’ This is not so. The last point in the curve shows an significantly higher concentration than any of the homeopathic dilutions. It also begs the obvious question of how they made up these solutions. From results such as these the authors state ‘Figure 1, Figure 2 and Figure 3 show: (i) how the contributions of impurity were taken into account’. These data show no such thing. The sloppiness in reporting and the conclusions from this one set of figures pervades the paper.

Finally, for me, the authors state ‘we cannot derive reproducible information concerning the influence of the different degrees of homeopathic dilution or the nature of the active principle (solute) on the measured physicochemical parameters.’ After ten years they have no reproducible data?
The paper is valueless.

To start with, I have little understanding of the physics and molecular dynamics they describe, but have an understanding of data analysis.

The most serious problem is that they give no details of the numbers of replicated run for each experiment (if n=1, it is all potentially rubbish), nor do they analyse the data with statistics, nor do they present any measurement of the spread of the data. The results may just experimental noise. The sentence “…from the studies
so far conducted, we cannot derive reproducible
information concerning the influence of the different
degrees of homeopathic dilution or the nature of
the active principle (solute) on the measured physicochemical
parameters” makes me worry that they haven’t put in all of the above (P valuse, standard errors) because it shows the results to be meaningless.

Just as bad, the methods section does not describe the methods, nor cite a reference for where I could find the methods described.

To discuss a specific bit in the paper: Figure 1 (as it is the first). First of all, the title isn’t clear what is going on at all; I’m assuming that the black dots are the homeopathic solutions, the red line is the control. Most importantly, why are the control data presented as line, the homeopathic data as points? Is the line the best fit to the control experimental data, if so, what is the r value and p value (at least!)? If the control data were presented as points as well, I could at least go away and do the stats myself, or visually confirm that they look like two different populations of data. The amount of scatter on the balck dots makes even more suspicious about this!

Other points:
-The results section is non-existant, but results are given in the methods section, and in a bizzare section labelled “Ageing effects”.

- The discussion is mixed in anywhere (I might be being fussy, but clear sections make it easy to read an evaluate).

Overall, the way the data are presented leaves no way of evaluating if they have found anything at all. I don’t understand how any referee or reviewer allowed this non-analysis of the data through.