Does Water Have a Memory?
By Dr Julian Kenyon Medical Director of the Dove Clinic for Integrated Medicine

We take water for granted, but it is such an important part of our environment, and we are all aware when there is too much of it and too little of it!

The question as to whether water has a memory or not is highly controversial from a scientific point of view. Homeopathy claims that water does have a memory, as medications are given which could not have any original molecules of the substance in the medicine. Also, from my own clinical experience in homeopathy, it does work consistently, and I only use a collection of twenty so called, polycrest remedies, that is remedies with wide indications. A recent Horizon programme entitled 'Homeopathy - The Test', attempted to de-bunk homeopathy from a scientific point of view. This was largely centred around repeating the work of Jacques Benviniste in 1988, who showed repeatable effects in particular cells from the blood, when exposed to so called non-material dilutions of substances which modulate the activity of the immune system. A critic of Benviniste's work, Madeline Ennis, of Queen¹s University, Belfast Medical School, repeated Benviniste's experiment and used an automated counting system, and measured several thousand samples. To her utter disbelief, she got the same results as Jacques Benviniste. The Horizon team set out to replicate her findings and settle the issue, employing state of the art equipment and independent researchers. They compared forty homeopathic samples with water controls and found no evidence of any effect on the cells. Even Ennis, who is an avowed sceptic, made the comment that the Horizon experiment was incapable of making any kind of definitive conclusions, only forty samples were tested, in Ennis work and Benviniste's work, thousands of samples were used. The Programme's statistical advisor, Martin Bland of St George's Hospital Medical School, was unable to comment on the enormous discrepancy in sample size. Perhaps he had not thought of it. He did actually say, that because the Horizon experiment showed no positive result, this does not mean to say that water does not have a memory, clearly diplomatic back pedalling in a big way.

I have done some scientific work on water in the past and indeed it is an extraordinary substance. My keen scientific interest in water has led me to an interesting Russian team who call themselves Telos, who have been working throughout Russia since 1987, claiming extraordinary results using structured water. The Telos team comprises of a group of Russian scientists who have collaborated with some of Russia's leading scientific and medical institutions since 1987. Some of their projects involve huge electricity generating stations, and the use of these super weak fields, has increased the efficiency of these industrial installations by as much as ten per cent, and in some cases nearly twenty per cent. In agriculture they have consistently increased crop yield, by treating seeds with structured water, by as much as twenty per cent. They have also increased the effectiveness of pesticides and herbicides by in some cases as much as several hundred per cent, simply by treating the pesticide or herbicide with specific low amplitude pulsed magnetic fields. We are currently adopting this technology to apply to our nutritional, herbal and homeopathic medications, with a view to increasing their efficacy.

They have brought a wealth of scientific information with them, particularly animal studies, and two studies caught my eye. The first was a series of experiments on laboratory mice, at a research laboratory in Hungerford, Berkshire. The mice were deliberately infected with BSE for which there is no known cure. A hundred mice were used, they were divided into two groups, one group was not treated, the second group was treated with Telos Structured Water and the magnetic fields were applied directly on the metal cages of the treated group of mice. At a particular age all the mice were sacrificed and were examined for organ damage particularly looking for enlarged livers and spleens and enlarged lymph glands. In the untreated group there was major enlargement of all of these organs. In the treated group, only thirty five per cent of the treated mice, showed enlargement of these organs. All the rest of the mice were perfectly normal and essentially behaved, from a post mortem point of view, as if they had managed to get rid of their experimentally induced BSE.

Another interesting study was done on mice and leukemia. If mice are irradiated with a proton gun, one hundred per cent of them will become leukemic. A test group of one hundred mice was taken, this time in a Russian scientific institution, and they were all 'treated' with a proton gun. These mice were divided into two groups, one was treated with Telos water, the other one was left as control. In the untreated group one hundred per cent developed leukemia, in the treated group, only twenty per cent developed leukemia. The outcome of this experiment was considered to be so remarkable that it was repeated ten times, and therefore over a thousand mice were sacrificed and the results were similar. These experiments have attracted the interest of Cancer Research UK and we are hopefully going to be carrying out similar work with them on this basis with animals.

From a medical point of view in Russia, they have used these approaches extensively to treat a range of chronic diseases, particularly leukemia and a range of solid tumours, non-insulin dependent diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Alzheimer¹s, and pain. The area of pain is interesting, because there are a whole range of different pains, such as musculo-skeletal pain, neuralgic pain, bone pain etc. We have found that making of a generic pain water is not satisfactory, and have obtained significantly better clinical results using specific pain waters as described. From a clinical point of view, the attraction of using structured water is that it has no down side. The structured water we make for each particular patient, is specific to them, and is, if you like, 'tailor made'. Even in life threatening illness, when patients are often on morphine based pain killers, we have been able to reduce their pain killers, in some instances by as much as fifty per cent. The advantage of giving structured water is that it does not have the downside of pharmacologically based medications. These observations for the moment are purely anecdotal, and it will be some considerable time before we have a clear idea of how this approach works in a range of chronic medical conditions, but suffice it to say at the moment, that the results are interesting, and do warrant further study.

So, this whole area is most interesting, but, what about mechanism of action?

These very low amplitude pulsed fields seem to act on bi-polar molecules. This is molecules which have a charge on each end. Water is the most obvious example, but also phospholipids which make cell membranes, are another example. What tends to happen is that all the bi-polar molecules line up in sheets, so far as a complex liquid is concerned, you get lamina and flow which essentially means that the liquid flows more easily. This is reflected in the use of this technology in large oil pumping stations in Russia. It is also effective in separating out specific fragments of oil such as heavy oil, light oil etc. In terms of clearing up polluted water, the pollutants tend to line up in sheets and can be tapped off effectively. Therefore its effect on water molecules and phospholipids may explain its action in disease, certainly so far as phospholipids are concerned, all enzymes are attached to cell membranes and lining cell membranes up is bound to have beneficial effects in a whole range of illnesses. So far as any fluid is concerned and in this instance we are talking about water, by lining up the bi-polar constituents of water with its various solutes, what it effectively means is that water is wetter and will penetrate cell membranes more easily. So, therefore we have the beginnings of a mechanism as to how this all might work. This is most reassuring, because the lack of this basic mechanism has been a major Achilles heel for the science of water memory. We are continuing to work in this area, both clinically and experimentally, and it proves to be fascinating work. So watch this space.