homeopathy is a lie

I was always skeptical about how efficacious homeopathic treatment could be, because I couldn’t fathom how little all-purpose white pills, no matter how they had been treated, could cure people of diseases. For a long time my parents have been consulting a homeopath for my asthma, and for their own chronic ailments. Apparently his treatment works. I was a lot better than when we lived in Seattle, but I am inclined to attribute that to the weather more than anything else – Seattle weather being an asthmatic person’s worst nightmare. So today S said homeopathy was fake, and relied on the placebo effect more than anything else – which was really what I vaguely suspected all the while. So I decided to look up homeopathy on Wikipedia, the ever-resourceful encyclopedia, and see what it had to say on the subject.

An overview of how misguided the practice is: Homeopaths believe there is a “vital force” in each human that becomes disturbed in the event of an illness. The purpose of homeopathy is to return the force to normal. They believe that like must be fought with like, and use drugs in their concoctions that create similar symptoms in a healthy person to those of the disease they’re meant to combat. They believe that diluting a solution increases its potency, which is illogical. They use a concentration system denoted by the letter C. 1 C is 1 molecule of the homeopathic substance in 100 molecules of the dilutant. Sometimes, homeopathic solutions are diluted to the extent that no trace of the original substance remains. Homeopaths believe that such solutions are still effective, because water stores information on the substance in its “memory”. Critics argue that, if water had had a memory, it should have contained traces of every known substance that had ever been dissolved in it since water was first created – in which case, drinking water alone should have been enough to cure someone of any disease. Next: Some manufacturers manufacture medicine that is reported to be diluted to 200 C – that is, the solution supposedly contains one molecule in 10^400. The only problem is, the entire observable universe contains only about 10^80 atoms, which means it would take 10^320 more universes to create a solution that dilute. If that’s still not enough to convince you that homeopathy is a lie, wait for the next one. Some unconventional homeopaths, adhering steadfastly to the fight-like-with-like rule, even use things like pus, tissue, urine, and fecal matter in their solutions.

Homeopathy is a mere placebo. You would observe the same effects, if you swallowed a couple of plain sugar pills every now and then, while believing sincerely that you were being cured – unless you were a diabetic, of course.

On a different note, I discovered that the stifling brain-in-a-vat feeling I’ve been having since I was a kid, and first conceived of the notion that I was the only reality in my world, and felt dizzy trying to convince myself otherwise by trying to imagine that the people around me had consciousnesses similar to mine, has a name – solipsism.