As pseudoscience goes, homeopathy takes the cake for absurdity. It is an elaborate placebo system, based on nonsensical ideas about biology, biochemistry and medicine. A decision to use homeopathy is a decision to do nothing at all, because homeopathic “remedies” have no medicinal ingredients in them at all. They are inert. Homeopathy is based on the idea that “like cures like” (which is simply a form of magical thinking) involving successive dilutions of products in water. The dilutions are believed to increase, not decrease, the potency of the final product. And these are serious dilutions. Think of putting one drop of a substance into a container of water. Only that container is 131 light-years in diameter. That’s the “30C” dilution used by homeopaths. Homeopaths believe that the water molecules retains a “memory” of the original substance (while conveniently forgetting all the other products it has come in contact with.) The final remedy is diluted so so completely that most “remedies” don’t contain a single molecule of the the original substance you started with.
A homeopathic nosode is a homepathic “remedy” made from infectious material. Unbelievably, Health Canada approves homeopathic “nosodes” for sale in Canada, despite a lack of any evidence they can do anything. Due to lobbying by groups like Bad Science Watch, Health Canada eventually agreed to force products to label nosodes with the caution “This product is not intended to be an alternative to vaccination”. While this was better that the status quo, there was the fear that homeopaths and other alternative health providers (like naturopaths) would continue to promote homeopathy to prevent or treat communicable disease. And the skeptics were right. Continue reading
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