Members from Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub took part in the 10:23 Challenge on Sunday 6th February protesting against homeopathy by making the statement, 'Homeopathy - there's nothing it'.
Over 300 protesters in Manchester and more than 1000 around the world participated in the largest ever single demonstration against the treatment by 'overdosing' on homeopathy.
The protesters took 100 times the recommended dose of belladonna (deadly nightshade) to show that homeopathy ie nothing more than sugar and water.
Homeopathic remedies are made from successive dilutions of a substance that causes the symptoms trying to be relieved, caffeine to relieve insomnia for instance. Even though there is an ingredient listed on the bottle, the dilution in a standard remedy means that you would need take many trillions of pills to get just one molecule of the original substance. Homeopathy is not the same as herbal medicine.
When tested under rigorous conditions -when neither the patient nor the doctor knows whether they're using homeopathy or not until all of the tests are done -homeopathy has shown to work no better than a sugar pill. That doesn't mean people do not feel better after taking homeopathy; only that those feelings aren't related to the homeopathy. This is known as the placebo effect and is often misunderstood. Conventional medicine also has a placebo effect, on top of its other benefits. The choice between medicine and homeopathy comes down to a simple question: would you have a placebo, or a placebo plus a treatment that has been proven to work?
The theoretical principles that underpin homeopathy lack any scientific credibility and the so-called 'laws of homeopathy' do not tally with anything we know about the world around us. Only a basic understanding of chemistry is needed to demonstrate that that homeopathic remedies can only be plain water.
Buy a vial of 30C homeopathic sulphur at your local pharmacy and one thing you can be sure you won't find in the bottle is any sulphur. You have significantly more chance of winning a triple rollover on the lottery than you have of finding even a single atom of sulphur in that tube; but the label still reads 'Sulphur'.
No comments:
Post a Comment