Homeopathy

Cut 'n' Pasted to here, since Granny is right... It appears that you don't understand the function of a placebo.Homeopathy consists of diluting a medication tot he point where there is no longer a detectable amount of the active ingredient.If such a thing worked, then every time you drink a glass of water you should also give you the effects of any and all substances ever dissolved in it. Placebo. Demonstrate a reputable, peer-reviewed study in which homeopathic "medicine" was shown to have a significantly different effect than a sugar pill.It's no wonder it's safe and cheap - it is in most cases nothing more than a sugar pill. Your personal experiences amount to nothing, Buz. The result could be placebo, changing weather conditions, or any number of other factors even up to your own subjective inaccuracy in being able to tell the difference. Bullshit. It's diluted to the point where, if you had the volume of the Atlantic ocean in medication, the active ingredient would amount to a scant few drops. It's completely undetectable, and in most cases the chances of you actually ingesting even a single molecule of the "active ingredient" in a given pill are astronomically small. That's because they are sugar pills! Sugar pills, with no detectable active ingredient. That's right, the doctors who spend their lives learning and practicing tried-and-tested techniques of medicine under controlled and objectively verifiable circumstances are just out to get your money. The newagey college dropout hippy down the street selling snake oil obviously knows better than any silly doctor! Why pay more when they'll remove your appendix?! Save money and take a sugar pill for your appendicitis! Michael Savage is a radio talk-show host. In this case he is making comments regarding psychiatry, not nutrition. You notice how he says "in my opinion" whenever he says bullshit like this? That's because he knows that it's bullshit. You take what he says as gospel truth becasue he agrees with your other twisted and ignorant views and because he has a PhD. But Savage does not have a PhD in child psychology, and is completely unqualified to make the statements he made.Anyone who believes in homeopathy is an idiot. You're taking sugar pills, Buz, nothing more. It is objectively demonstrable to be nothing more than lies and flim-flam. And frankly I wish Savage could have his PhD revoked if he genuinely supports homeopathy, which consists of nothing more than a bunch of quack snake-oil salesmen making scads of money off of gullible little twits like you.

Potentially lethal side effects are why prescriptions are required in the first place. Chemotherapy, for instance, isn't good for you...but if you have cancer, the side effects are worth it.I mean, how dare the FDA allow, for instance, a drug that treats HIV but makes the patient incredibly nauseous almost constantly? The nerve of the "medical establishment" giving people antidepressants to prevent suicide and constant misery when those same drugs have a small chance of causing heart problems?There's no magic sugar pill that will treat disease with absolutely no side effects. In fact, did you note the label on all of those food supplements you're so fond of? The snake oil salesmen are forced to put it on their "medication" - "This product is not intended to treat any disease and has not been evaluated by the FDA."Gee, I wonder why homeopathic "medicines" wouldn't want to be tested?Perhaps the same reason James Randi was able to imbibe two entire boxes of homeopathic sleep aids with no ill effects...or even getting drowsy.You've been using flim-flam medicine. You've bought the utterly ridiculous concept that further dilution of a substance actually makes the concentration stronger, an idea any Jr. High chemistry student would be able to tell you is completely fucking stupid. You honestly believe the homeopathic idiocy that "like cures like," as if a highly diluted substance that would make you nauseous in a detectable concentration will actually do the opposite when diluted to the point where it;s unlikely a given pill contains a single molecule of the so-called "active ingredient."Idiot.

Except those two have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and probability really doesn't have anything to do with either (except of course in the sense that in homeopathy the statistical likelihood of actually imbibing a single molecule of the "active ingredient" in a given pill is astronomically tiny).Your red herring attempt to redirect the conversation towards abiogenesis, a subject you know nothing about and argue against only with personal incredulity, is asinine.Let's redirect you back to the topic.Homeopathy involves the use of substances shown to cause the very symptoms they are intended to cure, diluted to the point where for all real purposes the actual substance is no longer in the supplement. For instance, a sleep aid will contain caffein, a substance objectively proven to wake you up, diluted to the point where the caffeine is undetectable.The level of dilution varies, but is typically les than 1 part in 10^20. Some go as high as 1 part in 10^10,000.Let's do some very simple chemistry, Buzz.Do you know what a mole is? A mole is Avogadro's number of molecules of a substance. Basically, it's the total atomic weight of a single molecule, in grams. So Avogadro's number worth of Hydrogen atoms would have a mass of 1 gram, because Hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1. A gram of Hydrogen contains 6.02x10^23 Hydrogen atoms.A mole of water would have a mass of 18 grams (16 for the Oxygen, 2 for the 2 Hydrogen).The compounds typically used in a pill are significantly heavier than water in terms of atomic wight (this is different from density, remember). But let's just use water, because it's really easy for me.If you have a substance diluted 1 part per 10^23, in 18 grams of water you would have only 6 molecules of the substance in the solution.How large are your homeopathic pills, Buzz? I'm betting they're less than a gram. Maybe a few hundred milligrams? And they'll be composed mainly of a substance with an atomic weight much higher than water. This means a single mole, 6.02x10^23 molecules of the substance, would weigh a lot more than 18 entire grams. You're consuming a small fraction of a mole of the pill compounds in a single pill...meaning that, at a concentration of 1 part per 10^23, you didn't take any actual medicine at all.Let's be more specific. Let's assume you're taking a sugar pill. The atomic weight of a molecule of sucrose is 342.3 - so a mole of sucrose, 6.02x10^23 molecules, would have a mass of 342.3 grams. If you're taking a homeopathic pill that contains a concentration of 1 part per 10^23, and you take two 800mg pills (so you've taken just 0.004674 of a single mole, or 2.8x10^21 molecules), you haven't even taken a single molecule of the actual medication. In fact, you have a 1 in 50 chance per 2-pill dosage of actually imbibing a single molecule of the stuff. Aside from the effects of the sugar pill itself, you could take millions of those pills and still not have a concentration of the substance in your body sufficient to have a noticeable effect.Note that this was assuming a 1600mg dose, which is pretty freaking large. If you're taking a 200mg pill, or worse even less...Well, it really doesn't matter. Even with the giant dosage, you're taking a sugar pill with nothing else. You're actually more likely to imbibe some random molecule of a different substance from simple impurities in the manufacturing process (dirt, dust, metal from the manufacturing process, etc) than you are to imbibe the "medicine."So how exactly, Buz, does homeopathy "work" if you aren't actually taking any of the supposed medication?! The homeopaths give flimflam explanations about the "vibrations" and "memory" of water and other chemicals carrying the "vibrations" of the medicine to the body...but this is bare assertion on their part. There is no actual data that suggests this, in fact the data we do have suggests that they're making it all up.Think of it another way, Buz. If homeopathic medication is stronger with more dilution, and you drink groundwater that has come into contact with trace amounts of toxic chemicals in its long residence underground, surely you must be immune to the effects of every super-diluted substance not actually contained in that glass of water!Homeopathy is complete and total bunkum. Flimflam. Garbage. Nonsense. Snake oil. It's a tool for those unscrupulous enough (and sometimes stupid enough to believe their own bullshit) to make scads of money from gullible twits like yourself.

You forgot the other entries:

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2. Snake-oil
3. Bullshit
4. A way for immoral individuals to take advantage of the hopes of a gullible public and deprive them of all of their money

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Obviously, if you dilute the ingredients even more, you could overdose on the active ingredient that's no longer present! The caffeine molecule that's not likely to be present in your sleeping pill would be even less likely to be present, and you'd overdose on the absence of caffeine and go to sleep forever!...also, they'd stop making money.