Considera

Plant models for basic research, healthy plants, intoxicated plants, infected plants

Lucietta Betti and Stephan Baumgartner:

Fundamental research could make important contributions to
our understanding of the homeopathic and high dilutions
mechanisms of action. Plant- and microorganism-based
experimentation appears suitable to this goal, making it possible
to overcome some of the disadvantages of clinical trials:
botanical and microbial trials do not present neither placebo
effect nor ethical problems, and rely on a very cheap and almost
inexhaustible source of biological material (Betti et al., 2003a).
Moreover, relatively simple model systems can be adopted so
that a more direct treatment/effect relationship and large data
samples for structured statistical analyses can be obtained. This
is a very important feature because it allows a large number of
experimental repetitions and external replications to be
performed, useful for studying the problem of irreproducibility
so often reported in homeopathic literature (Steffen, 1984;
Baumgartner et al., 1998; Binder et al., 2005).
The present overview is divided in 4 sections:
1. models based on healthy plants, microorganisms, and viruses
2. models with impaired plants and microorganisms (abiotic
stress),
3. phytopathological models using infected plants (biotic stress),
and
4. field trials.