Swines and Birds and Homeopaths, Oh My!
With all that's been going on with Swine Flu and the scare around it, people are looking around for medicines to help protect themselves and their families. Unfortunately, they're being preyed upon by a group whose theory of medicine goes counter to everything that is known about physiology, physics, chemistry, germ theory, and hydro-dynamics. And if you already know that this article is about Homeopathy, than it may not be for you.
Personally, I think that one of the biggest reasons why homeopathy persists is that the general public doesn't know much about it. It sounds good. Homeopathy -- it's a great sounding word. But I think that there are plenty of people out there who hear the word, hear that it's medicine without side-effects, and that's all they need to hear. One of my favorite writers, for example, is Brian K. Vaughn. Yeah, I'm a geek and I like comic books. Anyway, the other day, I'm reading through the final volume of "Y: The Last Man" (by the way, one of the more depressing volumes on my bookshelf), and near the end of it, one character (Beth) tells another (Hero) that she's found some great "homeopathic stuff" to help her voices. Now, I could be reading into the page a bit, but the two characters talking here are a couple lovers living in the Bush, trying to protect the last of the Lionesses, so I feel that the implication is that Beth has found some homeopathic plant, and not that she stumbled on a little bottle of pills. And unfortunately, if Beth did find some sort of herb or plant, it just isn't homeopathic. You could create a homeopathic preparation of it, but the plant itself is not homeopathy. No plant in the world is inherently homeopathic. That just isn't what homeopathy is.
So, you may be asking, what is homeopathy? Well, homeopathy is an alternative medicine hypothesis that was formed a little over two hundred years ago by a man named Samuel Hahnemann. Hahnemann produced a series of laws to govern homeopathy that have persisted until present day. The first law is that like cures like. Let's explain this with an example. Caffeine is well known to all of us. Personally, I can't actually move without it. The effect of caffeine on a body is to wake them up, and if taken at the wrong hour, you'll probably give yourself a nice case of insomnia. This is the effect of caffeine on a healthy person. Now, let's say that instead of being a person with normal circadian patterns, you are an insomniac. According to homeopathy, if caffeine can give you insomnia when you're healthy, it should be able to cure your insomnia as well. Sort of. See, Hahnemann realized that if he was going to be giving people potential poisons to cure their ills, he couldn't give them a lot of them. So, it's not caffeine that cures insomnia, it's a specially diluted form of caffeine. This is the second law of homeopathy. Pretty much, they take one part caffeine and nine parts water, they mix them together, shake them ten times side-to-side and ten times up-and-down, and that is what they call a 1 homeopathic solution. But homeopathy has another law as well: the more diluted a solution, the more powerful the medicine is. Typical homeopathic remedies are 30. This means that it has been diluted one part of the medicine to nine parts distilled water, with the side-to-side up-and-down shaking 30 times, which means that even if you started with a pure sample of whatever your active ingredient was, there should be about one part of it for every 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 parts diluted water. I can't even say that number. And here's an interesting note, there's 30 zeroes here. When you get past 23 zeroes, you pass by a special number in chemistry, Avogadro's number (6.02 x 10 to the 23rd). Avogadro's number, if you can remember from chemistry, is the number of molecules in a mole of any substance, it's the key unit of measurement in chemistry. It's the number of atoms of carbon that will weigh about twelve grams. It's an uncomfortably huge number. When you get orders of magnitude bigger than Avogadro's number (in the case of a 30 solution, seven orders of magnitude), you get to the point where it is almost statistically impossible to find a single molecule of the active ingredient in the entirety of the homeopathic solution. And don't forget this fact too: a 30 solution, that's just a standard strength medicine. The extra strength stuff goes all the way up to 100. I don't even know how they make that. There aren't enough molecules of water on the planet to dilute one molecule of the active ingredient that much.
Homeopaths will tell us that water has a memory. That it vibrates in a certain way and thus knows exactly what the homeopath put into it. The thing is, if Hahnemann is somehow right about homeopathy, then it doesn't only fly in the face of all those sciences I listed above (physiology, physics, chemistry, germ theory, hydro-dynamics), it flies in the face of public safety. Because the Florine in our water will have less of an effect than the 65-million year old dinosaur feces that have been naturally distilled for millennia. They say that it has no side effects, and they're right. What they don't say is that it doesn't have any primary effects either.
It's not that homeopathy is by itself dangerous. Frankly, the reason it caught on in the first place was because medicine in Hahnemann's day was still a crap-shoot. Doctors didn't know how the body worked yet, a lot of medicine could kill you, and homeopathic solutions didn't. They were pure water, not a lot of people die from pure water. So though homeopathy isn't going to hurt you, relying on it to the exclusion of effective medicine might. If the stuff makes you feel better, great. Have a ball. But it's important that people know that the biggest victory homeopathy had, Dr. Jacque Benveniste's article in Nature magazine in June of 1988, was swiftly overturned a month later, when an investigation found that all their positive results were really due to improper blinding of the tests, and that it was due to Benveniste's assistants not wanting the man to be wrong that they'd ever found positive results to begin with.
Every positive study of homeopathy, when repeated under more stringent conditions, has shown it to have no more effect than a placebo. Take it if you like, but please don't use it to cure Swine Flu. And if there are any homoeopathists out there who can show proof that my article is bunk, I know a man in Florida with a million dollars for you.
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Good article exposing homeopathy for the woolly minded mumbo-jumbo quackery it is. Now if we could only get more medical articles on HuffPo based on science and evidence. Getting rid of the in-house homepath editor would be a good start, but for now this will do.
Bravo! Finally, a HuffPo science piece based on, you know, science.
AWESOME ARTICLE! Good to see that someone at the Huff Post has the sense to tell the truth about alternative medicine and anti-scientific "medicine." I was losing hope and thinking that the the Huffington Post was become the soapbox of Jenny McCarthy, anti-science, anti-vax lunacy.
Fact is, as you said, homeopathy is nothing more than water. And water only cures thirst and dehydration.
Just when i was sure that The Huffington Post was being edited by Silvia Brown, this comes along. Thank you. "Bout Time!
Fantastic article giving the smackdown to homeopathy! Thank you, Mr. Dickerman! Nicely done - I hope there are many more just like this.
Just when I was about to assign Huffington Post to the same Category as O magazine, this article comes along and shows me that there can actually be some good content here. Thank you, Huffington Post, for helping to spread at least this voice of reason.
Fantastic! Its good to see a science-based article on Huffington Post for once, after all the lunacy about swine flu, colonic irrigations, vaccination fearmongering and other pseudoscientific nonsense lately.
I must echo the comments of Dianne Verstappen about the dangers of homeopathy. Yes, drinking water will not usually kill you. But using it in place of scientifically proven cures has killed thousands of people in recent years.
I document these cases on my website What's The Harm http://whatstheharm.nett). See my page of victims of homeopathy here for more details: http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html
Wow, I don't believe it. A scientifically sound article - and a brilliant one at that! Kudos to you Jacob, and thank you so much for exposing this quackery for what it is.
Huffpo has a terrible reputation for its pseudo-scientific articles which muddy reality with woo woo, which is why I had to come and see this one when I was alerted to it. I've never been here before, but this article prompted me to create an account to post this comment expressing my support.
Thanks again Mr. Dickerman. Critical-thinking is at a premium around here. Please give us more!
Come on! Don't you know that homeopathic dinosaur dung prevents dehydration? Sounds like real medicine to me.
Bravo!...
You may want to link to some other huffpo articles like this one...
Oh, wait....
Oh yes, like the Jim Carrey blog on the link between vaccinations and autism? Oh wait… scientific you said…
Unfortunately, homeopathy is dangerous. It kills children, only today in Australia the Supreme Court heard that nine-month-old Gloria would have lived if she had been treated by conventional doctors even days up until the moment her parents brought her into hospital.
Homeopath Thomas Sam, 42, and Manju Sam, 36, from Earlwood, are on trial in the Supreme Court charged with manslaughter by gross criminal negligence after their daughter, Gloria Thomas, died of septicemia in May 2002.
"The Crown case is that, during that 2½-week period while they were travelling around, Gloria's skin condition became so bad that any reasonable parent, let alone any reasonable homeopath, would have immediately taken her for urgent medical attention at either a hospital or some conventional medical practice," Mr Tedeschi said.
"Thomas and Manju continued to administer homeopathic drops to their daughter. Gloria was not taken to the emergency department of the Sydney Children's Hospital until her skin was weeping, her body malnourished and her corneas melting, the court heard.
In Australia little Dana McAffrey died of whooping cough, a preventable disease. The area that she lives in has low immunisation rates and because of lack of herd immunity she contracted the worse case variation of whooping cough. She died. For more information please google her name and skepticsbook.
Unfortunately there are groups in Australia (AVN) that suggest to immunise homeopathically. Needless to say you may as well eat a jelly bean to prevent deadly childhood diseases.
Homeopathy is dangerous after all.
Unfortunately I spelled Dana's last name wrong. The correct spelling is McCaffery. Apologies.
See Jacob Dickerman's Profile
Eh. I misspelled "Fluorine", and honestly, I should have just used "Fluoride". I figure if you're commenting on an article that's got misspellings in it, you should be allowed at least one, right?
C'mon, Jacob. You know as well as I that all the chemists, physicists, pharmacologists, pharmacists, and physicians, with their "scientific method" and "evidence-based decision making," are merely tools of Big Pharma to enslave the world and make everyone dependent on chemical-containing drugs and genetically modified foods, which, unlike natural organic foods and supplements, only make us sicker. ;)
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