Homeopathy: How can it be sold?

A version of this article was published on the Yahoo! 7 News Blog on September 1, 2009

If someone pointed a gun at you and demanded that you give them money, you could go to the police and have the thief charged with a criminal offence. If someone claimed that they could prevent or treat a life-threatening disease and charged you $200 per litre for water to do the job, you would waste your time going to the police because this form of theft is called "homeopathy" and there are no criminal sanctions against it. I find it impossible to believe that the people promoting this scam are not aware that it is fraud. I do not believe for a moment that anyone follows the manufacturing process that would be required to produce the extreme dilutions claimed on product labels. Why would you bother to spend money on all that diluting and succussing when the exact same effect can be achieved by filtering some tap water and putting it into small bottles? (If you think that $200 per litre for water is improbable, I have seen cheap brandy being sold as a homeopathic preparation for $1,695 per litre. Of course it wasn’t labelled “brandy”, it was called “Bach’s Relief”.)

A few years back homeopaths were selling little bottles of water pretending to contain vaccines against Hepatitis B and Meningococcal Disease. The labels on the bottles included the expression "200C". This means that these preparations had been made by taking 1% of a mixture, adding 99 times the resulting quantity of water or alcohol, shaking the new mixture, taking 1% again and repeating this process 200 times. That's 200 times that 1% is further diluted a hundredfold.

The final product in these bottles, if prepared according to the labels, would contain the following percentage of active ingredient:

.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

In the real universe in which most of us live, if 25 millilitres of water contained only one molecule of the active ingredient, the percentage would be:

.00000000000000000000012%

For those who think that there is a possibility that manufacturers of homeopathic preparations really do go through the claimed process, consider that each 25ml bottle of “vaccine” would require in excess of 800 manufacturing steps and would produce 495 litres of contaminated waste water. When these “vaccines” came out the Australian government was about to introduce a nation-wide vaccination campaign against meningococcal disease. The amount of water required to produce the number of homeopathic doses needed for this campaign would have been 78% of the amount used to produce all of the Coca Cola consumed by Australians in a year.

Think about these things the next time someone tries to steal your money by selling you some homeopathic medicine. Did I say "steal"? Did I suggest that the practice is dishonest? Why, yes I did. Good! I would not have wanted to make a mistake.

You can see the article and comments here.