PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC BOLLOCKS or WHY MATH AND SCIENCE MATTER
I was standing in the checkout line at my friendly neighbourhood grocery store when I noticed a display of homeopathic remedies above the counter. Fresh from my experience with wheatgrass at another urban grocer I thought take a minute to look around a little more. I didn’t have to look far as there were homeopathic remedies all over the place. And, moreover, they were purporting to cure all my maladies and more.
I’d like to know why this stuff, this un-medicine, is deemed so benign? I think of homeopathy as the medical equivalent of stereotyping or racism. Sure, your it may theoretically contain a kernel of substance somewhere, somehow (and resorting to it may even, in some twisted way, make you feel better) but its substance, if there is any at all, is ultimately so ridiculous, so lacking in any real value, so in conflict with reality, as to be, more than anything, false and misleading – the very opposite of benign! Clearly the promotion, sale, and use of homeopathic “remedies” (like stereotyping) does far more to breed confusion and downright ignorance than it will ever do to improve anyone’s well-being. No?
Seeing all this stuff in the store I was reminded of an article written in the Georgia Straight by a local homeopath, a Ms Sonya McLeod. There she decried the “scare tactics that the mainstream media has resorted to regarding the recent bird-flu” and suggested that the common flu shot is not safe. To counter our manipulative media and the dishonest, self-serving medical system, Ms McLeod offered her own bird-flu remedy, one based on her “years of formal training in classical homeopathy.”
As she suggested in her article, homeopathy has been around for a long time. In fact, it was way back in 1796 that Samuel Hahnemann developed his curative treatment. And, as you might imagine (like countless other ideas born in the 18th century) the principle behind homeopathy, the “law of similars” – the idea that “like cures like” – is pure pseudoscience no different than dowsing, eugenics, phrenology, psychokinesis, or quantum mysticism.
Unlike a vaccine, in which the immune system is exposed to a diminished form of a virus in order to provoke an immune response, homeopathy purports to cure disease by exposing the body to something that causes similar symptoms to the ailment. For instance, in the homeopathy world, drinking diluted venom from a deadly snake, one that causes paralysis, will alleviate joint and muscle stiffness; a dilution of poison ivy relieves skin irritations; onion can be diluted to cure eye irritation. While this principle may sounds plausible, if you combine it with the homeopath’s assertion that the more dilute an ingredient (the less snake venom you’re exposed to in your treatment) the more potent a medicine it becomes, I hope your skepticism muscle has begun to tingle.
Of course we shouldn’t pass off this whole system just on the grounds that it sounds implausible (or even ridiculous); after all, it doesn’t sound all that crazy on the surface to a layperson like myself, certainly not when compared to other mainstream curatives like, say, chemotherapy. In fact I’d be willing to suspend disbelief for a moment and delve into how these dilutions are formulated. Maybe it does make some sense and resemble modern medicine.
An afternoon reading homeopath websites yields a lot of interesting information. As it turns out, all homeopathic remedies are derived from a rather cryptic “Centesimal” or “C scale” potency rating system created by Samuel Hahnemann. According to this scale a 2C dilution requires that an ingredient (snake venom, poison ivy, etc) be diluted with distilled water to one part in one hundred, and then that product to be diluted by the same amount again – transforming the dilution to one part homeopathic ingredient in ten thousand parts distilled water. Following this principle, a 3C dilution repeats this serial dilution process three times, resulting in the curative ingredient being diluted to one in ten million.
So, we might ask, what is a typical bottle of homeopathic remedy diluted to? The packages I saw at the store display the codes 9C, 12C, and 30C. Apparently Hahnemann, the grandmaster himself, advocated 30C dilutions – a dilution of ten to the power of sixty (10^60) – for best results.
But wait, that’s a big number. You don’t even need to have a cursory understanding of the base-ten place value number system to sense that this is a ridiculously large number, out of whack with your normal experience. This number (a novemdecillion) is so large, in fact, that only folks with an inordinate fondness for math will have even come across this word before.
People, like myself, are often confused by numbers. And it’s no wonder people get confused given how we throw around large numbers all the time with little appreciation for just how massive they are. We regularly hear things like: “the penthouse sold for twelve million bucks”, “the team’s new billionaire owner”, “national student debt has reached $1.2 trillion”... And, to be honest, it’s hard for a human to grasp even these relatively small numbers. To bring some perspective and tangibility to these numbers let’s pretend you started counting on the day you were born. And we’ll also pretend you lived a hundred years doing nothing else (with no meal breaks or bathroom breaks or time-outs to watch World Cup soccer.) Doing so you probably couldn’t count all the way to a meagre one billion (1,000,000,000 or 10^9.) And even if there was an unbroken lineage of counters like yourself – counting from birth to death for a hundred years – and this lineage stretched from the dawn of the human species to the present, we can be certain that the current living number counter would be nowhere near reaching the one trillion milestone (just 10^12) during her stint... And therefore, if our species lived against all odds another hundred thousands years the counters probably wouldn’t reach two trillion, and would have just begun thinking about starting their adventure to the next numerical milestone: one quadrillion. So are you getting an idea for how big a these numbers are (a billion, trillion, and quadrillion)?
So then, given the extreme humongousness of a trillion, say, how does Mr Hahnemann’s 30C (10^60 or a NOVEMDECILLION, many orders of magnitude larger) translate into reality? Well, it doesn’t really. This number, a novemdecillion, is far more ridiculous than it might seem to you even now. Looking at this number makes it clear that formal training in classical homeopathy doesn’t have a lower level mathematics prerequisite. Why? Because, remedies said to have the greatest healing powers, the more dilute ones, the 30C variety, require ... (wait for it) ... MORE WATER MOLECULES THAN EXIST ON EARTH! (Which should at least make you wonder where and how they perform their planet-sized dilutions and store their many oceans of extraterrestrial water.)
But wait, the utter ridiculousness doesn’t end there. Even more remarkable is the Oscillococcinum remedy Sonya McLeod offers as a common homeopathic treatment for the flu (of which there was plenty at my neighbourhood grocer.) For generations this stuff has been rated at 200C! Unfortunately for Ms McLeod, as far as my brief bit of research revealed, there are likely to be only about 10^80, or 40C, atoms in the visible universe. I’m not sure how many universes Ms McLeod has in her basement, but I hope she has a shipment on order; after all, she’ll need a whole mess of universes – something like 10^320, or three-hundred twenty googol, universes – just to produce a single batch of homeopathic serum for herself, should she come down with a sore throat or a fever. I suppose, if nothing else, we can honestly refer to homeopathy as being “out of this world.”
Now if you’ve taken an introductory course in chemistry (or biology) sometime in the last century you’ll have heard of the molar limit. Knowledge of the molar limit tells us that the purest that water can possibly be is to just ten parts per billion. (And, as you can imagine, water of such purity cannot be contained in common materials due to the receptacle itself transmitting contaminants into the water diminishing the water’s purity.) So what does ten parts per billion translate to on th "C scale"? Sadly, for Henneman and McLeod, ten parts per billion only gets you to 4C, and in nowhere near 30C or even 12C. Even if you notice that homeopathy has corrected this problem in recent years – and now uses a numbering system that takes elementary math into account and relates to the universe we actually live in – the foundational principles are still fatally flawed.
But you don’t have to trust my admittedly poor math skills, even recent episodes of popular investigative news shows like ABC’s 20/20 and the BBC’s Horizon showed investigators unable to differentiate homeopathic remedies from plain water – even using tests and measurements suggested by the homeopaths themselves. That’s right, homeopaths across the globe appear to be selling water (for $10, $20, or even $50 a drop) and calling it medicine.
Let’s imagine for a moment that I published an article in a popular local magazine proposing bloodletting as a cure for your child’s sniffles. I could recommend sending your children to the barber when the flu hits, as our great grandmothers might have done. And, in the absence of a skilled barber, or for those wanting a more natural and holistic remedy, I might recommend regular leech treatments. After all, bloodletting, like homeopathy, has been called a “natural healing art”, and is one with a long science-based medical history. In fact it may be the most widely used healing technique ever. Bloodletting has been practised all across the globe and is so common throughout history that one might even suggest the curative effects of bloodletting are an ancient and universal wisdom, almost a pure instinct. Bloodletting was valued by the Greeks, Romans, Mayans, and Aztec. It’s also found to be recommended in Ayurvedic texts and by early Arab surgeons. Judeo-Christian writings even recommend certain days of the week for best results. More recently, in 1923, around the same time that McLeod’s recommended Oscillococcinum remedy was developed, Sir William Osler – a Canadian physician and “the Father of Modern Medicine” – recommended bloodletting in his textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine. Several twentieth century European medical texts recommend bloodletting as an almost universal panacea with promises to cure, well, almost anything: acne, asthma, cancer, cholera, coma, convulsions, diabetes, epilepsy, gangrene, gout, herpes, indigestion, insanity, jaundice, leprosy, plague, pneumonia, scurvy, smallpox, stroke, tetanus, tuberculosis. That’s just a small list, many other ailments have been said to be resolved by blood removal. Bloodletting, logically, has even been used over the centuries to treat many forms of hemorrhaging such as nosebleed, excessive menstruation, and hemorrhoidal bleeding... Given such a long history and such remarkable proponents, far older and more significant than homeopathy for sure, my bloodletting practice should have no problem finding legitimacy, a widespread following, and taxpayer funding.
And yet to the contrary, my bloodletting advice would undoubtedly, and very reasonably, result in someone calling the police on me and my being condemned and run out of town. And yet homeopaths somehow garner respect, serious wages, and, apparently, they’re also allowed to acquire prime retail space in local businesses and to freely publish damaging nonsense within the pages of local newspapers.
The fact is, we know that homeopathy can have an effect on people: a placebo effect. (No, it can’t work on your dog or cat.) Homeopathy can help patients through the caring, compassion, and convincing authority of its practitioners (not because it’s medicine.) And we know this because of a little thing called SCIENCE (What, you’ve never heard of it? Google that, yo!) And, thanks to science, we don’t have to believe anything ridiculous or unsubstantiated in order to benefit. Of course, you’re welcome to still believe in the ridiculous claims of archaic nonsense, like homeopathy; or, instead, you can believe the scientifically demonstrable fact that caring and compassion are essential to human well-being. Yes, the truth does matter. And yes, knowing this truth may diminish homeopathy but in doing so it strengthens our understanding of the human experience and enables us to improve our medical system. A sacrifice I think we should all be willing to make.
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