Anti-Science

World Homeopathy Awareness Week – Day 3: Death by Homeopathy

Happy Saturday Night!  I know you’re not going to be seeing this until the morning since you’re all out at your Homeopathic House Parties celebrating World Homeopathy Awareness.  But on the off chance your parties got broken up by the cops and you were sent home to surf the interwebs all hopped up on homeopathic martinis, I thought I’d keep the reading to a minimum.  So I bring you the YouTube documentation of a suicide attempt using homeopathic sleeping pills by South Africa’s Owen Swart.  Not to give away any spoilers or anything, but the fact that it’s a 6 video series is a bit telling.


The saga continues after the fold


Skepchickal recap:  The only thing that came close to killing Owen was the taste of the pills.

See you tomorrow!

Elyse

Elyse MoFo Anders is the bad ass behind forming the Women Thinking, inc and the superhero who launched the Hug Me! I'm Vaccinated campaign as well as podcaster emeritus, writer, slacktivist extraordinaire, cancer survivor and sometimes runs marathons for charity. You probably think she's awesome so you follow her on twitter.

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10 Comments

  1. Actually, the active ingredient is caffeine. That’s what the whole like-cures-like idea is. If you are suffering from “being awake” you take a remedy that would cause you to be awake. Then you dilute it, whack the dilution against a book, dilute it again, whack it again, dilute, whack, dilute, whack… etc. And each time you dilute and whack, the solution becomes stronger but stronger meaning working to cure the thing that it normally would cause. So the caffeine dilution would become stronger as a sleep aid the more you shake it and dilute it… dilute it until it is 1 part caffeine to 1 trillion parts water and shake it for a half an hour, drink it and you’ll become Rip VanWinkle.

    or you’ll just be like poor Owen here – still unable to sleep.

  2. I thought so. I remember watching one of Randi’s YouTube videos on homeopathy and he recited the active ingredient on one of the boxes he had as caffeine, so I thought I’d ask. I knew about homeopathy’s argument that like cures like and that they can artificially replace the cause of your disease with that teeny tiny amount of active ingredient and your body will be able to heal. I just didn’t do the math that they’d use caffeine to cure insomnia because of that logic. Silly me.

  3. If homeopathy really worked, wouldn’t ocean water cure just about everything? Virtually everything is exposed to water that eventually goes into some river that makes its way to an ocean. The substance is diluted and shaken as it goes down the river making it curative powers more potent. Or do true believers argue that some essences counteract others?

  4. Johnea-

    My understanding from the last few days of research is that there is one remedy given to each person to cure all his symptoms. That’s why homeopaths have such extensive questionnaires. They go over all their patients’ ailments (like cancer, headache, loneliness, fear of spiders, and AIDS) then find the one remedy that causes, and therefore cures, all of those symptoms.

    Canadian- very funny!

  5. With the accent (yes, I realize it’s not British, but still) and the suicide attempt theme, all I could think of was a Pythonesque “I’m not dead yet!”

    Funny stuff — thanks for posting it!

  6. I think he specifically says that the active ingredient isn’t caffeine in the second video when he goes over like cures like. But it doesn’t even matter since the active ingredient could be cyanide and he still wouldn’t of died.

  7. Tom-

    My bad. I thought he said they DID contain caffeine. But you are right, unless he was awake due to lack of lactose, the pills would have done nothing.

  8. Peter Bowditch (of ratbags.com) did the same thing quite some time ago. The video proves that among the many things which homeopathy cannot cure is an Australian accent.

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