In which I attend mass suicide event...

Yesterday I attended a mass suicide attempt, in which 50 or so people in central London, as well as hundreds elsewhere in the UK and the rest of the world, consumed whole bottles of homeopathic medicine.

The 10:23 campaign was organised by the Merseyside Skeptics Society, designed to raise public awareness of the sham alternative medicine that is homeopathy. In particular, the campaign  is aimed at the UK's largest pharmaceutical chain Boots, in an effort to stop them selling homeopathic substances as medicine. 

 

The trigger for this campaign was the testimony of Paul Bennett, professional standards director for Boots, before the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee investigating the scientific evidence behind homeopathy. In his testimony, Mr Bennett admitted that Boots sell homeopathic medicine not because there is evidence to suggest they work, but simply because people want to buy them.

"There is certainly a consumer demand for these products," he said. "I have no evidence to suggest they are efficacious.
"It is about consumer choice for us and a large number of our customers believe they are efficacious."

"So what?" you might think. If people wish to buy these products, who are we to stop them? And you're right, people are entitled to buy whatever they like. However, the problem is that these products are designed to look like real medicine, and sold to people as real cures.  A major pharmaceutical chain selling them makes them look even more like authentic medicine. Not only that, the NHS also spends around £4 million every year on homeopathic medicine, money that could pay the salaries of 200 nurses. There is even an NHS-funded Homeopathic Hospital!

So, in an effort to show the public how worthless and ineffective homeopathic medicine is, over 300 people across the UK, as well as others in Canada, the US, Australia, NZ and other places, consumed whole bottles of homeopathic pills, in a mass "suicide" attempt. So why were they not afraid of dying due to excess consumption of arsenic, sulfur, deadly nightshade or whatever else their meds supposedly contained? If you look at the numbers involved, you'll see why.

What is it?

It was only recently that I realised how bat-shit insane homeopathy actually is. Read this page for a full description of the principles behind homeopathy, but basically it comes down to:

1. Like cures like - you can be cured of your ailment with diluted substances that can cause the symptons you're displaying. For example, a rash can be cured with dilute preparations of poison ivy, or your insomnia could be treated with a dilute preparation of caffeine, which would ordinarily keep you awake. (Note that this is a different principle to vaccination, which introduces weakened or inactive pathogens that actually DO cause an illness, in order to spur the body into developing an immunity to the pathogen, so that when the body encounters the live pathogen it knows how to fight it.)
2. The substance must be diluted.... and diluted and diluted and diluted. Apparently the more diluted the substance is, the more powerful its effect... flying in the face of common sense. A 1C prepation would involve diluting one volume of the substance in 99 volumes of water, so the final preparation of 1C sulfur would be 1% sulfur. However, 1C is far too strong (or weak?) for homeopathic purposes - most substances are sold at 30C strength - meaning this diluting process takes place 30 times. So the concentration of the "active ingredient" in the final preparation is one part per 10^60, ie for every 1 molecule of "active ingredient", there are 10^60-1 molecules of water. Given the molecular mass of water is approx. 18g/mol, this means that in a final solution of 30C homeopathic substance, to be sure of still having a single molecule of your active substance, it would have to contained in approx 3x10^37 grams of water, or 3x10^34 (3 with 34 zeros after it) litres of water. This is equivalent to 3x10^31 cubic metres, so if you imagine this as a ball of water, the radius of the ball would have to be 1.9x10^10km - that's 131 times the distance from the earth to the sun. And in that ball is exactly 1 molecule of sulphur, caffeine, or whatever the "active ingredient" is. Another brilliant example can be found on the wikipedia page for homeopathy:
   
   
   

   A popular homeopathic treatment for the flu is a 200C dilution of duck liver, marketed under the name Oscillococcinum. As there are only about 10⁸⁰ atoms in the entire observable universe, a dilution of one molecule in the observable universe would be about 40C. Oscillococcinum would thus require 10³²⁰ more universes to simply have one molecule in the final substance.

3. So how do homeopaths get around these staggering numbers? After all, you'd need a lot more than 1 molecule of a substance for it to do any effective work in your body. As Matt Parker puts it:
   
   
   

   To put homeopathy in a medicinal context, if you wanted to consume a normal 500mg paracetamol dose you would need ten million billion homeopathic pills. Where each pill is the same mass as the Milky Way galaxy. There is actually not enough matter in the entire known Universe to make the homeopathic equivalent of a single paracetamol pill.

   The answer, according to homeopaths is that water has memory, and so somehow retains a memory of the substance it has had in it. Right... To quote Tim Minchin from his brilliant "9 minute beat poem" Storm:
   
   
   

   Water has memory!
   And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
   It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

   Then, as in the case of the homeopathic medicines many of the attendees of yesterday's event had, the much diluted preparation (that has apparently retained a memory of the original substance, and somehow forgotten all of the bladders it has passed through throughout history - probably repressed those memories) is dropped onto a small sugar pill.  And then evaporates. So you're really just eating sugar - after all that diluting, none of the memory-retaining water is even left. You may as well be eating Tic Tacs. In the case of homeopathic liquids, you're just drinking water.
   

So the 10:23 campaign really is true - there's nothing in it.

So did anyone die yesterday?

No, of course not. The only way someone could have died from consuming a bottle of homeopathic pills was if they were diabetic. Or choked.

And what was the homeopaths' response?

According to The Press Association:

The Society of Homeopaths said treatments are "person specific" and based on taking a series of small doses, so it did not expect any reaction in the protesters unless one already had symptoms matched to their remedy.

"Person specific" - right, that's almost the ultimate "get out of jail free" card. And the "based on taking small doses"? Well remember that according to homeopathy, the weaker the dilution, the stronger the effect. Which reminds me of a joke I heard recently (I can't remember where):

What happened to the man who forgot to take his homeopathic medicine?
He died of an overdose.

 

So what's the harm? Why shouldn't people use homeopathy?

The 10:23 website gives a pretty thorough rundown of Why You Can't Trust Homeopathy. I would say that number 9 on that list is the most important reason - if people think of homeopathy as a viable and effective alternative to real medicine, it means that they may put themselves in danger by either not having serious conditions diagnosed, or by using ineffective remedies in cases where taking the correct precautions is extremely important. Some examples I've seen given include someone suffering depression committing suicide  as they were taking homeopathic medicine instead of a real anti-depressant, or someone visiting a homeopath to treat their high blood pressure, which then leads to a heart attack, something they could've avoided if they'd visited a real doctor. Another frightening example is given by Simon Singh on the page "Homeopathy; what's the harm?" - in this case a woman taking a homeopathic anti-malarial, prescribed by her homeopath, contracted malaria and suffered multiple system organ failure, spending two months in intensive care.

So there you go - homeopathy is bullshit. Spread the word.

Note: Before I really got into this, I associated homeopathy with herbal medicine. As the 10:23 site makes clear, they are very different:

Herbal medicine and homeopathy are two distinct concepts, with homeopathic 'remedies' being more akin to a magic potion than anything else. Many herbal medicines can have real, measurable effects on the human body; some even form basis of modern medical treatments. Aspirin, for example, was derived from willow tree bark.
Conversely, there is no active ingredient in most homeopathic treatments. They are just sugar and water.