Altern Ther Health Med. 1997 Jul; 3(4): 35-9.

A communication process: a new paradigm applied to high-dilution effects on the living body.

Bastide M, Lagache A.

University of Montpellier, France.

Living beings communicate with their world nonverbally, whether on a somatic or a psychological level. This paradigm of signifiers or sense takes place in the framework of the logic of analogy. The signifier is the semantic object that materially designates information to be transmitted and dealt with; a homeopathic remedy is the mimetic representation of the disease. Differential levels of information organize the spread of signifiers; each level is the result of regulation and integration of the previous level. The living self is the never-ending process whereby levels of information are synthesized in the face of the informing environment. Such representations meet one another in the communication between the patient and the physician-remedy system. The medical device must reinform the patient and make the patient's signs and symptoms move toward a higher level of integration. The dilution of the remedy permits us to receive and treat it as information about disease. Signs and symptoms can be recognized as an erroneous adaptation; the organism is engaged in a process of paradoxical negation. The action of the remedies consists of a dynamic analogy between pieces of information. The paradigm of signifiers offers a new possibility for the exploration of informative therapeutics.