The Nevada Sagebrush

Barry Belmont

Four weeks ago, hundreds of people almost killed themselves. These people were disgruntled, discontented and dissatisfied with current absurdities in the medical community. What could motivate people to believe that some medicines sold by trusted pharmaceutical companies were so completely ineffective that they wanted to prove this point by overdosing on the very same products?

In a word: Homeopathy.

Homeopathy is the “medical” idea that ingesting a small amount of a material that would normally cause health issues (such as arsenic) and diluting it to a ridiculous degree will cure a disease, symptom or ailment.

The basis of homeopathy, that “like cures like,” was first postulated in the 1800s by Samuel Hahnemann when he discovered that cinchona bark helped in the treatment of malaria but also caused fevers (because of its active ingredient quinine).

If this seems nonsensical, that’s because it is. Simply on the face of it, the idea that “like cures like” is wrong in just about every respect. The treatment for scurvy is not more scurvy and the treatment for diabetes is not more sugar. It’s Vitamin C and insulin, respectively.

But one could object and say that vaccines are the very definition of like curing like. Vaccines work by taking a small, non-toxic form of a microorganism that normally causes disease and injecting it into somebody, causing them to develop an immunity to the microbe. Isn’t this evidence in favor of homeopathic remedies?

Not quite.

If vaccines were as diluted as homeopathic treatments, they would be utterly useless. Homeopathic products are made by taking a given material and diluting in either nine or 99 parts of distilled water. A dilution of one part in ten is designated by an ‘X’ (1X = 1/10, 2X = 1/100, 4X = 1/10,000) and a dilution of one part in a hundred is represented by a ‘C’ (1C= 1/100, 2C = 1/10,000, 4C = 1/100,000,000). Most homeopathic treatments are labeled from 6X to 30X, but it is not uncommon to see 30C dilutions being sold.

To give you some kind of perspective, a single molecule of the original material within a 30X solution is equivalent to a drop of food coloring being put into a container about 50 times larger than the earth itself. For a 30C solution, imagine a billion of those containers. Needless to say, not a single molecule of the original agent being sold to you by a homeopath is actually there. If someone tried to do that with the polio vaccine, they would be thrown in jail.

But what about all the people who claim to be “cured” by homeopathic treatments? This is a cut and dry case of the placebo effect: People think they are taking something that will make them better, so they get better.

This leads to all sorts of medical ethics dilemmas. After all, doctors aren’t supposed to lie to their patients, but if you say a sugar pill is just a sugar pill, then the placebo effect vanishes. Can a doctor therefore prescribe a sugar pill if they think what ails their patient can be cured with the placebo effect?

Is this the place of homeopathic medicine? Or should it simply remain an ineffective drop in an ocean of medical knowledge?

Barry Belmont is happy to know that none of the people who overdosed died. He studies biology and mechanical engineering. Reach him at perspectives@nevadasagebrush.com.

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