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This doesn’t come up often in itself, but I’ve mentioned homeopathy several times over the last couple of months and each time I have to mention that it’s complete pseudoscience, and each time I just don’t no time to get to the heart of the matter. the details of why it’s pseudoscience. Some of you asked if I could make a video to go into detail, and I’ve been putting it off because there’s simply no newsworthy reason to do so. But this week I was looking for another video topic and I realized I would talk about it again, and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to have another video that I could point to and say ” If you want to know more about it, just go watch it.” this”? Good. Here we go.
Many years ago, when I was 21 or 22, I was a dirty little hippie living in low-income housing in Seattle, where I had no health insurance. I had a health problem but since I couldn’t afford to see a doctor, I went to my local herbalist, because that’s like a doctor, right? Of course. He gave me an all-natural homeopathic treatment, which I followed. It didn’t do anything. I just blamed myself, thinking that I probably hadn’t explained the problem clearly enough or something. Surely the problem wasn’t natural medicine, right??
It was only a few years later that I learned that “alternative medicine” is so-called “medicine” that doesn’t work, and also that there is a difference between “naturopathy” and “naturopathy”. homeopathic.” Here’s what it is: “Naturopathy” is a broader category that can include a wide range of questionable treatments and downright bullshit, but it is generally based on vitamins, minerals, changing diet to “whole foods”, stuff like that.
Homeopathy is sometimes considered a subset of naturopathy, and unlike many other naturopathic treatments, homeopathy contains absolutely no active ingredients. Not a single molecule of vitamin or painkiller or anything. This is what makes homeopathy, in my opinion, the second most ridiculous alternative medicine modality of all time.
The first, if you’re wondering, is “therapeutic contact,” in which no one touches anyone and a nurse or nursing school dropout waves their hands over the patient’s body for a moment before calling it quits. cured.
But homeopathy is a close second, and to explain why, I’ll just tell you the honest truth about what homeopaths themselves say. I promise I’m not making this up. Homeopathy is based on two essential truths:
First, “like heals like.” A medication is effective when it causes the symptoms the patient is currently experiencing. This is the origin of the name “homeopathy”: a combination of the Greek words meaning “to love” and “to suffer”.
This means that, for example, if you have a bothersome itch, you should consume something that CAUSES itching in a healthy person, like poison ivy. If you have cancer, X-rays should help. If you suffer from migraines, perhaps a falling anvil will do the trick. Etc.
This idea was started by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796, after hearing that a particular type of tree bark could cure malaria. He didn’t have malaria, but he ate the bark to see what would happen and found that he began to experience the same effects as malaria patients: high fever, uncontrollable chills, and headaches. joint pain. Thus, “like heals like”.
This is a very good example of the difference between “medicine” and “alternative medicine”, in that the alternative medicine specialist stopped after one anecdotal data point and built an entire industry on that base, while real doctors figured out that the bark of the tree contained quinine, which is toxic to the parasite that causes malaria but delicious when paired with a good gin.
So here is the first rule of homeopathy: like cures like.
Hahnemann himself quickly realized that this was NOT enough: OBVIOUSLY, if you drop an anvil on the head of a patient with migraines, his headache will only get worse, not s ‘improve. So the second rule must be that less is more. Maybe a tiny anvil? And if dilution makes the treatment better, it stands to reason that diluting something even more makes it EVEN BETTER effective, and if you take this to its natural conclusion, the strongest possible dilution has to be well beyond the point where only one molecule of the “treatment” remains. In our migraine example, we may be getting to the point where we simply draw an anvil on a post-it note and stick it to the top of the patient’s head.
“Now wait Rebecca,” some of you say, “surely you’re being hyperbolic. They certainly don’t dilute things to the point where there’s not a single molecule left. And I’m sorry to inform you that this is the case. Hahnemann used the “C” scale to measure dilutions, with C representing 100. Thus, a 1C dilution corresponds to one part of the original substance diluted in 100 parts of water or alcohol. 1% of the substance would remain. The scale increases logarithmically, so a dilution at 2°C is equivalent to one part of the original substance in 10,000 parts of the solution, meaning 0.01% of the original substance would remain .
12C is the highest dilution in which a single molecule of the original substance is likely to still exist in the formula. Mathematicians accurately describe 12C as “a pinch of salt in the North and South Atlantic Oceans.” 13C would be less than a drop of the original substance in all of Earth’s water. Hahnemann recommended that treatments be diluted to at least 30°C, or 1 in 10 to the power of 60. A quick search for homeopathic products Emissions currently sold generally range from 30°C to 200°C.
“Okay Rebecca,” you think now, “you weren’t exaggerating about it, but it was really mean to make that joke about drawing an anvil on a post-it and sticking it on your head. a patient. You are really poisoning the well with such a ridiculous example.
Friends. Keep your hats on.
In June 2000, the Homeopathic Society of New Zealand published its quarterly newsletter containing a editorial criticizing other homeopaths who distributed paper treatments:
“…if you lack a suitable homeopathic remedy, you can write its name and potency on a piece of paper and put it in a pocket, or pin it to the left side of the patient’s chest. Be careful not to rate the power too high, he warns.
“But my laughter stopped when I continued reading and discovered that this practice was being promoted by someone describing herself as a classical homeopath, and that it was all very serious.
“And even more frightening were the numerous reports of people claiming to have tried ‘paper remedies’ like EXCESS FAT 30c for weight loss, INSUFFICIENT FUNDS 30c to boost real estate sales, WORK COMPUTER 200c for a hard drive problem, CAR START 30c for a sick vehicle, COURAGE 30c for public speaking, TOTAL RECALL 30c for an exam, and the more prosaic HEADACHES 30c, VERTIGO 30c, ITCHING FEET 30c, etc. One person found that AGNUS CASTUS 30c gave bad effects while AGNUS CASTUS LM1 felt good.
“The woman I am referring to is Eileen Nauman, who is planning to teach a course in New Zealand.
“For people who find it too difficult to write the names of remedies on slips of paper, Gillian Lee, owner and manager of a company in England called White Mountain, has had a device made for sale resembling a pocket tape recorder in which the surrealist homeopath simply had to pronounce the name of a remedy and its potency – then the lactose tablets placed in a well inside would be transformed into the remedy thus pronounced.
So, yes, it is a fringe practice, but there are homeopaths who write treatments on pieces of paper and claim that it will cure the patient.
What’s funniest about this is the idea that “traditional” homeopaths are like yeah, like remedies like, I get it… dilute it until there’s no nothing left, sure, that makes sense… wait, write it down on a piece of paper. paper? It’s just stupid. Ridiculous. Don’t we have standards??
In short, it’s homeopathy! A bunch of nonsense. Now you know, and I won’t need to stop to explain it the next time I mention homeopathy in videos. I just saved countless seconds!
