Homeopathy: Medicine for People Who Failed Medical School, and Probably Middle School as Well
Here’s a fun little home experiment. Get a beer and dilute it with water to the point where the beer constitutes one part per 10,000. Then bump up the dilution until not a single molecule of beer exists in the solution. Now drink the “beer.” Do you feel buzzed?
Of course you don’t, because there’s no alcohol left. But the 18th century principles of homeopathy claimed that your water “remembers” the drug that it once mingled with. And it’s this principle that was once applied, totally ineffectively and therefore dangerously, to administering medicine. You see, practitioners of homeopathy believed that to cure a sick patient, you take a drug that causes similar symptoms in a healthy person and dilute it as much as possible. The more you dilute a drug, the more powerful it becomes for the patient. And various European governments bought into this, covering homeopathic treatments under their public healthcare programs.
Ha. I was kidding when I was talking in the past tense. People still believe this stuff. And some public healthcare programs in Europe, including in the U.K., still cover homeopathic treatments.
Unsurprisingly, study after study has proved homeopathy to be, in more scientific words, totally wack. But don’t take it from me. Watch the Amazing Randi down an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills. And somehow not fall asleep. That old fella must have a ton of energy.
Image: Wikimedia