Homeopathy and Anthroposophic Medicine belong to the broad spectrum of CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine). A considerable number of clinical trials are in favour of efficacy and efficiency of both methods for various medical indications.

Both methods use homeopathically prepared substances as remedies with a presumed specific drug action. For conventional scientific reasoning this presumption is quite difficult to accept. This is mainly due to the fact, that the homeopathic potentisation process involves a series of iterative dilution and succussion steps leading to a logarithmic decrease in concentration of the initially diluted substance. Dilution may even exceed the Avogadro number, implying a virtually zero probability finding a single molecule of the substance potentised. This fact leads to the widespread view that the effects of homeopathic potencies cannot differ from those of the dilution medium. Thus, any clincial effects of homeopathic preparations must be unspecific.

The main goal of the basic research subdepartment of KIKOM is the investigation of the presumed specificity of homeopathic preparations. In case this specificity can be assured further goals of research can be defined as follows: 1) optimisation of homeopathic pharmaceutical procedures (production procedures, stability against external influences, etc.) and 2) elucidation of the mode of action of homeopathic remedies. Special attention is given to the well-knwon key problem of homeopathic basic research: the reproducibility of any effects identified.

The main investigation methods used are:
1. physicochemical determination of structure and dynamics of the remedies,
2. bioassays with organisms of different complexity and hierarchy (cells, micro-organisms and plants; alone or in combination),
3. in vitro assays of human blood cells.

The three methods cover specific and complementary research fields. Physicochemical methods are objective in nature, simple to standardize, rapid to perform, and capable of automatization. Any direct relation to clinical relevance is difficult, however. Bioassays with living beings in their wholeness have the advantage of combining organisms capable of auto-regulation with the demand for systems with a low variability. Human blood cell cultures are nearest to the primary target organism of homeopathic therapy: the human being. They correspondingly exhibit a quite large range of inter-individual variability. This is a quest for reproducibility, but also opens the possibility to study individual specific therapeutic responses.