This was a surprisingly tough entry to write.  I try not to actively dump on pseudoscientific notions too much, at least not before I’ve detailed why I think they’re bunk.  If you go too overboard with the insults and sarcasm, you’ll come off as a jerk and scare off people sitting on the fence.  Worst-case scenario, you can actually drive these people towards the woo-pushers, even if your evidence and reasoning are perfectly sound.  This problem is compounded by the fact that many woo-pushers are extremely good at dealing with the public and selling themselves, while scientists and doctors are historically quite terrible at it.

While I’m aware of this problem, some ideas are so out there that it’s difficult to turn down the burners and write an even-keeled discussion of them.  For me, homeopathy is one of those topics.  As we’ll see, the ideas behind homeopathy go against some of the most fundamental aspects of chemistry and physics.  And, as if that’s not enough, people pushing this pseudoscience have managed to frame homeopathic remedies as just another type of herbal or natural supplement.  This is little short of a miracle of marketing, and I’m not one to toss around the word miracle lightly.

It’s taken a few rewrites, including the painful deletion of some pithy one-liners and choice ad hominem attacks, but I think I’ve whittled my initial ranting and raving down to an almost-balanced treatment of homeopathy.  We’ll start with a bit about how I discovered homeopathy.  After that, I’ll cover some background on the principles behind homeopathy, which should shed some light on why this drives the chemistry-loving part of me bonkers.  Finally, I’ll go over a few calculations to determine the actual contents of any homeopathic remedy you might purchase.

Onto the Vicious Screed

We’re talking alternative medicine, so I’ll steal the opening line from Quackcast.  I thought it was a common phrase, but Google disagrees with me.  So, Mark Crislip, I hereby grant you the sincerest form of flattery.  (My google-fu tells me that’s a common phrase, at least.)  Quackcast is an informative podcast about alternative medicine, but, as its name implies, it doesn’t really take much of my above writing to heart.  For instance, Mark opens each episode with something like the following line:  “I’ll be discussing quacks, frauds, and charlatans … oops!  I mean: Supplements, and Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or SCAMs.”

I find homeopathy personally interesting for two main reasons.  The first reason is that I really had no idea what it was until rather recently.  It’s popular in Europe and well-known among the skeptical community, but it doesn’t seem to be a household term in America.  The SGU prompted me to look into homeopathy, because the rogues completely tore into it during an early episode without defining exactly what it was.  I remember bristling at this, because I didn’t think homeopathy was pseudoscience.  I suppose I hadn’t ever thought about what it was, but I knew the British royal family had a homeopath, and they couldn’t possibly be that wrong about their health, right?

Wrong.  Which brings me to the second reason that I find homeopathy interesting: it is a surprisingly silly notion.  Many of the so-called ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ treatments at the very least seem plausible when you glance at their underlying ideas and theories.  Homeopathy quite simply does not.  I’ll bet you think that, in saying all this, I’ve already dismissed my stated goal of playing nice with the homeopaths.  However, I suspect that’s merely because you don’t know the theories behind homeopathy.  Let’s go over them.

Impressive in Name (Or Latin) Only

The main principle of homeopathy is the law of similars, often stated as “similia similibus curentur” or “like cures like.”  Now this sounds good (especially in Latin), but it’s just a pre-scientific notion of disease that a guy named Hahnemann invented out of whole cloth in the early 19th century.  The law of similars is the idea that taking a substance that causes a reaction similar to your symptoms will treat the underlying disease.

This conception of medical treatment is more than enough for me to stop here and get on with the rest of the article.  To quote Ron Popeil, “but wait, there’s more!”  Hahnemann, to his credit, realized that it was a bad idea to, for instance, tell people with indigestion to drink a beaker of acid.  Thus, he developed what I’ve heard called the law of infinitesimals.  Homeopaths believe that decreasing the concentration of a substance dissolved in a solvent increases its potency.  Thus, if you have that acid I mentioned above dissolved in some water, you can increase its tummy-settling power by diluting it into more water.  (Provided, of course, you mix and shake your preparation bottles in the special way prescribed by Hahnemann.)

This alleged healing power increases even as you reach and surpass the level of dilution where it becomes unlikely that even a single atom of the original substance remains in your homeopathic remedy.  This is because homeopaths believe that the water retains the curative essence or spirit of the original substance, and the power of this quintessence increases with dilution for unexplained reasons.  To maximize the purported strength of these remedies, homeopaths dilute them to an extraordinary degree.  Thus, if you buy a homeopathic remedy, you are purchasing either an extremely expensive bottle of water or an extremely expensive bottle of sugar pills soaked in water.

Don’t worry if the law of similars and the law of infinitesimals sound a little fishy to you.  This is magical thinking that flies in the face of the most basic tenets of chemistry and physics.  There is no medical or biological plausibility to the law of similars, nor is there any chemical or physical plausibility to the law of infinitesimals.

Some Quick Calculations

Note that I said quick calculations, not quack calculations.  I’m behaving!

I’d like to go over just how dilute homeopathic solutions are, mainly to demonstrate that a bottle of a homeopathic product is almost certainly pure water.  For the sake of this example, the basis of the remedy will be table salt (NaCl).  If you’d like to have flashbacks to high school chemistry and check my calculations, the trick is c1v1=c2v2.  Concentration times volume is just the total amount, which stays constant during dilution.  Each “X” in a homeopathic remedy signifies a tenfold dilution.

Let’s say you’re planning on drinking a cup of a homeopathic salt remedy; what potency would you need to have just one molecule of salt in that cup?  By my calculations, 24X should give you a couple salt molecules in that entire cup.  What’s fun is that the most common dilution for most homeopathic remedies is 30X.  That’s right, folks: six orders of magnitude past the point where you might have a single molecule in a cup of the remedy.  Sticking with salt, you’d need to drink all the water that fits in a 14.5’x14.5’x14.5’ cube to get at one molecule at 30X dilution.

And that’s not the worst of it.  The homeopathic flu remedy Oscillococcinum is usually sold at 400X dilution.  Again using salt as an example, this dilution comes to far less than one salt molecule per the volume of the observable universe.  According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, you should find a salt molecule or two in a sphere roughly a googol light-years in diameter at this dilution.  You’re probably more likely to quantum tunnel through a brick wall by running into it than you are to find even a single atom from the Muscovy duck liver extract used as the basis for Oscillococcinum in your remedy.

That’s Enough Stoichiometry for Today

Hopefully, I managed to sufficiently whittle my original diatribe down to a somewhat fair assessment of what homeopathy really is.  My overall goal in writing this entry was to inform people that homeopathic is not just another word for natural or herbal.  Homeopathy carries much more pre- and pseudoscientific baggage than that.  Of course, some homeopaths do indeed posit a handful of scientific-sounding explanations for the law of similars and/or the law of infinitesmals, and I’m sure I’ll cover the most popular of those in later entries.

If I failed to tone down this entry enough for you, I do apologize.  Don’t hesitate to call me out in the comments; but, conversely, don’t think I’ll hesitate to ask for some evidence that homeopathy isn’t complete and utter woo.  Using my psychic powers, I predict that any such reply would provide me with some new article topics.    My guess is that homeopathy just strikes me especially hard because it conflicts with chemistry at an extremely fundamental level.  It ultimately contradicts the very concept of atoms, unless you ascribe some kind of supernatural power to substances inside bottles used to make homeopathic remedies.

I mentioned that homeopathy isn’t particularly common or popular in the United States, but I fear that I’m getting more and more incorrect every day.  I’ve seen homeopathic mints at Trader Joe’s, an entire homeopathic display at a local ‘alternative’ grocery store, and homeopathic remedies for dogs at the pet store where my girlfriend shops for cat food.  Decide on the evidence for the curative ethereal spirit of duck liver as you see fit, of course.  But, know that any homeopathic remedy you purchase is pure placebo unless you believe that said quintessence exists and can affect human (and canine, it seems) health.