Homeopathy in Perspective [View All]

[beam me up scottie]

In today's spam serving, along with the offers to make my breasts larger and penis bigger was an offer for homeopathic growth hormone. This miracle of modern medicine, so the advertisement says, will make me feel younger, give me more energy, "supercharge" my sex drive (should go well with the larger breasts and penis) and cause all sorts of vaguely worded benefits to come my way. They didn't promise me the winning numbers in the Powerball Lottery, but I thought that it might have been implied.

Being the scientific curmudgeon that I am, I thought that a few minutes with a calculator might be in order. The advertised elixer of youth claimed to be a 40C homeopathic dilution, which meant that the original human growth hormone solution had undergone 40 consecutive 100-fold dilutions (take one volume, dilute it to 100 volumes). This is equivalent to a dilution of one volume to 10^80 (10 to the 80th power) volumes - that's a one (1) with 80 zeros following it (to the left of the decimal place). For those who aren't up on their math, that's a REALLY big number.
*****

The fact is that the proponents of homeopathy have painted themselves into a corner. As long as they simply said "It works, we don't know how.", they were on fairly safe ground. Their claims still had no scientific merit, but they didn't give the real scientists an edge to pry against. Now that they have invested in this "memory of water" fantasy, trying to make it into a "science", they are out from under their rock and scurrying in the daylight.

I hold to no hope that the vast legions of the inilluminati are going to be at all persuaded by my little exercise. Ignorance is still the chief religion of the masses - as it has been since the dawn of time. However, if this can put a little sand in the gears, can cause one person wavering on the edge of the abyss to pull back, then it was worth all the time and effort.

Prometheus

http://photoninthedarkness.blogspot.com/2005/06/homeopathy-in-perspective.html

What do you think, DU scientists?

thanks to Moggie for discovering Prometheus' blog.