General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This message was self-deleted by its author [View all]backscatter712
(26,355 posts)But the fact is that there is NOTHING in homeopathy. Literally nothing.
Homeopathy operates on the "hair of the dog" principle - give someone a teeny bit of something that's related (at least in theory) to their ailment, and the disease is cured.
By "teeny", I mean proportions that can only sanely be expressed using exponential notation. For a 30x dilution, which is a typical dilution used in many homeopathic preparations (I won't call them remedies), you're taking a measure of that substance, diluting it in 10 times the amount of water, taking that dilution, diluting it 10:1, and repeating 30 times, so you have a dilution of one part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1 in 10E30, or 30X.)
Just for comparison, Avogadro's number is about 6.02*10E23, and that counts the number of carbon atoms in 12 grams of carbon. That's smaller by a factor of a million.
This means that a 30X homeopathic dilution is so extremely dilute that not one molecule of the original substance exists in the dilution.
That's why people like me immediately pounce on homeopathy, and righteously call it woo-woo. Homeopathy is nonsense! That expensive homeopathic pill you got at Walgreens is nothing but a sugar pill - the active ingredient is so dilute as to be literally non-existant.