Here is a recipe. Into a liter bottle, pour a mixture of pancreatic juice, glucose and water. Then decapitate a muscovy duck and add 35 grams of its liver and 15 grams of its heart to the mixture. Seal the bottle and allow it to stand for 40 days until it becomes a goo. Then shake the bottle a hundred times, banging it into a leather pillow each time. Then take a milliliter of this solution and add it to a hundred milliliters of water in another bottle and shake it again the same way a hundred times. Repeat this dilution and shaking (succession) two hundred times. Then take a drop of the final solution and drop it on a little sugar pill. You have just made a homeopathic remedy against the flu! All this would be funny if it weren鈥檛 so ridiculous and dangerous. The 鈥渞emedy鈥� isn鈥檛 dangerous in any way, since after 200 dilutions there isn鈥檛 even a single molecule of the original concoction in the final product. So there is no question of poisoning the body. But there is certainly poisoning of the mind.
The vast majority of homeopaths are against vaccination, claiming that it is more dangerous than the disease it is supposed to prevent. That鈥檚 bunk. But it鈥檚 money-making bunk. They recommend that people do not take the vaccine but treat themselves with the nutty duck preparation if they come down with the flu. Even worse, they have come up with a homeopathic flu preventative which is prepared by imprinting an image of the virus on a homeopathic 鈥渧accine鈥� by the usual diluting and banging. This banality is enough to make one want to bang one鈥檚 head into something a lot harder than a leather pillow. Any claim that these ridiculous preparations can have an effect on the body flies in the face of everything we know about science. That the flu can be prevented by homeopathy is a total myth. But the flu that you may catch if you go this route, one that could have been prevented by a proper vaccine, is very real. So the theory makes no sense, but does that mean that homeopathic vaccines don鈥檛 work? No. Of course the idea of non-existent molecules having an effect on the flu is crazy, but that is not the reason science rejects homeopathy. It is rejected because there is no evidence it works! Don鈥檛 take my word for it, do a literature search and see if you can come up with any reputable, reproducible studies showing the efficacy of any homeopathic remedy in the treatment or prevention of the flu. There are none. What homeopaths offer is magical thinking and anecdotal evidence. They claim that during the 1918 flu epidemic the mortality rate was 28% if conventionally treated and only 1% when homeopathy was used. There is absolutely no evidence for this claim. True, conventional treatment in those days was awful, often using toxic mercury compounds. Homeopaths may have been more successful, because at least their remedies contained nothing. And if homeopaths are so convinced that they have the answer, why have they not designed studies to convince us skeptics of the wonderful efficacy of their products? Should that not be their public duty? Ahhh! But of course! Homeopaths will tell you that their success cannot be tested by conventional scientific means. A nice out. The supposed imprint that molecules leave on a solution through dilution and succussion is sheer fantasy, but the imprint that homeopathy leaves on public health can be very real. Finally, ask a homeopath this question. Why should that homeopathic solution 鈥渞emember鈥� only what the homeopath wants it to remember? Why is the water used not imprinted with an image of all the chemicals it has come into contact with as it flowed through lakes, rivers and sewers? And given that the theory of homeopathy is based on the idea that the more dilute a preparation, the more potent it is, will you overdose if you forget to take your pill? Of course not. The only risk with homeopathy is an overdose of nonsense.
