A short while ago I was talking to a lady who had some dealing with Homeopathy. At the time I had no idea what it was,it sounded a bit ‘alternative medicine’ which I am highly sceptical about but indulged her in her pitch.
Since then I have done some research on the subject and am still a bit amazed at what I found. Had I of known this information when I first met her I would have given her hell for her claims.
I am open minded but to believe in Homeopathy as a viable treatment for anything except dehydration is extremely hard to imagine. Leave open minded behind,insert ‘throw your brain away’instead.
OK so I am getting a bit ahead of myself,have jumped straight from intro to rant. Let me back up a bit.
Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine first expounded by German physician Samuel Hahnemann in 1796. His Homeopathic approach did much better than the ‘cures’of the time so it gained popularity. However the other popular approaches to healing people at this time mainly consisted of blood letting,Arsenic,Mercury,Lead,and other practices.
So what was it that Hahnemann come up with? He came up with the concept of ‘Like cures like’. According to Hahnemann you look at an illness,lets say the illness is something where you vomit and then pass out. You find something that will cause this in a healthy person. So if by feeding a healthy person apple tree bark it causes them to vomit and pass out,then apple tree bark is the cure for this illness. No I am not making this up,this is there procedure for finding ‘cures’.
Therefore he summised,to cure the vomiting unconscious person you need to get him to ingest this tree bark. However in it’s raw form it’s far to weak to work,to make it stronger we are told it needs to be put through a process called “dynamisation”or “potentisation”whereby the remedy is diluted with alcohol or distilled water and then vigorously shaken by ten hard strikes against an elastic body in another process called “succussion”. Another word I would use would be mixing,I guess succussion sound more scientific.
Again,I am not making this up,to make the cure more effective it needs to be diluted. The more diluted the mixture the better it works,they say. So what is required,says Homeopathy,is a diluted form of tree bark to be taken. How dilute? Well if you thought it was crazy up to this point get ready for a whole new level of madness.
The recommended dilution is what Homeopaths refer to as 60x (or 30C). This brings us to the Homeopathy dilution scale which is prefixed with an X or C,X stands for how many times it has been diluted,it is also sometimes called the D scale. C scale stands for centesimal. The scales work as follows.
- 2X (1C) is a dilution of 1/100th of original potency,or in scientific notation 10-2.
So the original apple tree bark has been diluted with water or alcohol so that for every 1 part of apple tree bark there are 100 parts of water. - 8x (4C) is a dilution of 1/100,000,000 or 10-8
Now this is obviously EXTREMELY diluted,one hundred million times to be precise. This is,by the way,the maximum allowable concentration of arsenic in U.S. drinking water. Which is to say you can have that amount of arsenic,a deadly agent,in your water and it’s not going to have any effect on you as it’s so dilute. - 24X (12C) is a dilution of 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 10-24
As if the 8X value was not bad enough this is now preposterous. At this level of dilution you are lucky if there is a SINGLE ATOM of your ‘cure’in the solution. To be exact you have a 60% chance of a single atom being there! - 60X (30C) is a dilution of 1/10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 10-60
This is the level advocated by Hahnemann. It’s now difficult for analogies to work it’s that far diluted. I think I read somewhere that it’s the equivalent of a single grain of rice in a water container the size of our solar system. The containers Homeopathy sell you is not quite as big as this so it’s extremely unlikely you are buying anything other than the dilution agent. - 400X (200C) I am not going to type the zeroes here,it’s pointlessly large,a one with four hundred zeroes after it. 10-400
This is the dilution of Duck Liver that Homeopathy says is a flu remedy and is one of there best selling products,it’s called Oscillococcinum. I could not find it for sale in the UK but lots of it in the USA,retailing at about $8 (£5.28) for 7 grams (0.24 ounce). And there was me thinking that bottled water was expensive. This is on a whole new level of expensive.
What other cures are there? Well lots,even some for brain injuries &radiation poisoning,but lets look at some a bit more reasonable,Insomnia. How do we find this cure? By using the ‘Like cures like’system we need to find something that would cause insomnia in someone not suffering from this condition. Caffeine? Sure,that certainly causes insomnia so that’s the cure says Homeopathy and this is indeed what they use. Well sort of,don’t forget it needs to be diluted till there is no caffeine left. This would seem to be a bit of a problem,if caffeine is indeed the cure for insomnia but it’s not in the remedy how does that cure you?
To get round the problem Homeopaths tells us that water has memory. The water remembers the agent it was originally mixed with! Not surprisingly there has never been any evidence that water can remember what it came into contact with. Lets imagine for a moment that they are correct and water remembers what it has been in contact with,this simply means that it would have a memory of other things it had come into contact with,arsenic,oil,urine etc.
It did make me laugh that the package for Oscillococcinum proudly boasted No side effects,no drug interaction,no drowsiness. No shit! Well I guess,looking on the bright side,nobody is ever going to die of an overdose from taking any of these ‘cures’.
Some people may argue that it’s not doing any harm and that the placebo effect could help certain people. Well tell that to the people that have died because they were told to use Homeopathy rather than take a real proven remedy.
After spending a few days researching the above I still find it hard to believe homeopathists claims for there water. Not suprisingly all large independent clinical trials have repeatedly shown there is no proof that Homeopathy works at all. More than that it’s shocking and borderline illegal surely to claim it works and be proven not too? You may want to watch this documentary here,it’s pretty poor quality but worth a watch.
Also found this poem that is sorta related and very funny.
- Guardian News article
- Richard Dawkins on Homeopathy
- Homeopathic A&E
- Homeopathic remedies:a real cure or a waste of NHS money?
- Doctors call for Homeopathy ban
- Darryl Cunningham Investigates Homeopathy
thanks !! very helpful post!
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