December 03, 2004

In addition to being an ex-evangelical Christian, I am also an ex-New Age flake. I am, therefore, always eager to poke at someone when they spout off with some Healing White Light-related jackassery. Maybe too eager... there is often no one so zealous as an ex-zealot.

All questions of motivation aside: Mr. Green has suffered a nasty infestation of some sort of small hostile beasties, requiring the acquisition of soothing medicaments and perhaps some anti-small hostile beastie pills. Mr. Pelto, a prolific comment-section regular who clearly needs his own blog--see 18 pages'worth of Google results--recommended homeopathy. This, as far as I am concerned, has as much effective medical action as downing a glass of tepid water, and I told him as much.

In the late 18th century, homeopathy's primary attraction was that it was better than bloodletting and leeches. It certainly had fewer side effects than the popular treatments of the day--such as, you know, death--mainly because homeopathic pioneer Samuel Hahnemann claimed that the smaller the dose of active ingredient, the more powerful the effect. This resulted in homeopathic "medicines" diluted to one part per million, tens of millions, or vastly more.

If someone wants to believe that a 200C solution of Oscillococcinum cures their flu, they're free to do so. Take full advantage if the placebo effect, I say! The "C" refers to a dilution of 1 to 100, so 1C = 1/100, 3C = 1/1,000,000, etc. But to contain even a single molecule of its supposed active ingredients--a duck's fermented liver and heart, dried and powdered--the Oscillococcinum solution would have to be diluted to 1 part per 100 to the 200th power.

100 raised to the 200th power is greater than the estimated number of molecules in the universe--it has 400 zeros in it. In order to contain even a single molecule of active ingredient, a 30C homeopathic solution--that's almost 3,400 times more concentrated than a 200C solution--would require a container of water more than 30 billion times the size of the planet.

The laws of physics indicate that there's a point at which dilution loses the original substance entirely, at one part per 10 to the 24th, which corresponds to homeopathic concentrations of 12C or 24X.

I just got over acute bronchitis with six lovely pink pills of azithromycin. Done! Finished, and eating much yogurt to restock the beneficial fauna in my guts that were innocent victims of the antibiotic WMD I unleashed upon the marauding bacteria.

I seriously doubt that I could have halted my progression towards pneumonia by utilizing, at most, a few of molecules' worth of Antimonium tartaricum in a 3X solution.

Still, there's no convincing some people. The next time I burn myself, Mr. Pelto would like me to try three sublingual tabs of Cantharis, at any dilution from 3X to 10C, and see if I "don't have as much pain or blistering and if you recover quicker." This, he calls an "experiment." Cantharis is made from Cantharis livida beetles that have killed by the steam of boiling vinegar, crushed, then triturated with milk sugar until the appropriately infinitesimal dilution is achieved. 3X to 10C is a range of 1 part mashed-up beetle per 1,000 parts milk sugar to 1 part mashed-up beetle per 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 parts milk sugar.

I haven't decided whether it's worth seven bucks to suggest to Mr. Pelto that the healing powers of his own subjective belief system and physiology do not translate into anything that remotely resembles a generally effective curative.

Also, I am particularly attached to my own remedy for burns, which involves a poultice made from jellied red newt's eyes, a tuft of fruitbat's fur, and a drop of blood from a Syrian long-haired hamster.