homeopathic physics abuse vs. the skeptics

Just when you think that one of the web’s greatest spouts of imbecility, the man who will believe anything that any scientific or political authority figures have debunked or dismissed, Mike Adams, can’t top himself with yet another ignorant rant, he manages to prove you wrong. This time our conspiracy theorist/astrologer/alt med ghoul/professional ignoramus decided to focus his energies on the 10:23 Campaign, a skeptical movement that’s been staging mass overdoses of homeopathic remedies to show that there’s nothing in them and that the whole homeopathy thing is a scam at best or a conscious delusion at worst, and once again shows why a good education is important by showing what happens to someone who lacks it.

What one would generously call his thesis, as highlighted by Steve Novella, comes down to daring the 10:23 supporters to overdose on a real, actual, scientifically valid medication and claiming that because they’d likely die if they swallowed thirty or forty capsules of painkillers, sleeping pills, or cold meds but not homeopathic water, homeopathy is superior to real medicine thanks to its mystical vibrations. Yes, I know, this level of total, abject stupid is a pathology.

Here’s the thing. The activists with the 10:23 Campaign feel pretty safe about overdosing on homeopathy for a fairly simple reason. With so many dilutions, they might only get a molecule of a supposed active ingredient at worst and the last time a molecule of anything hurt us, life was just getting started in the primordial ooze. Take several homeopathic remedies to a lab and the chemists will tell you that they can barely detect the tiniest and vaguest of traces of something in the water but that something is so imperceptibly small that they just couldn’t tell you what it is.

Going by chemistry, you can take absolutely any homeopathic remedy for any condition that’s bothering you because the effects will be exactly the same on the macro scale. If ultrasensitive lab equipment can’t tell the difference between two homeopathic sugar pills, neither will your body. Homeopathic concoctions just can’t have an effect on you because they won’t carry enough active ingredients and coupled with the idea that the less active ingredient is in the remedy, the more potent it is, just putting one pill on your tongue should be lethal were this absurd notion even remotely true. But of course our brilliant sage of all things medical has a perfect explanation for why you simply can’t overdose on homeopathic serums…

But homeopathy isn’t a chemical. It’s a resonance. A vibration, or a harmony. It’s the restructuring of water to resonate with the particular energy of a plant or substance. We can get into the physics in a subsequent article, but for now it’s easy to recognize that even from a conventional physics point of view, liquid water has tremendous energy, and it’s constantly in motion, not just at a molecular level but also at the level of its subatomic particles and so-called “orbiting electrons” which aren’t even orbiting in the first place. Electrons are vibrations and not physical objects.

How does one cram so much stupid into such a short paragraph? Like we’ve seen before, homeopaths don’t understand even middle school physics. Remember Charlene Werner, the woman who seems incapable of doing elementary math? What about John Benneth, the unhinged conspiracy theorist and crank who hasn’t the faintest idea of how radiation works? Mike isn’t much smarter than them, which is why he doesn’t seem to be aware that electrons are not vibrations but charges that form a cloud around an atomic nucleus.

Bosons would be closer to his description, but bosons don’t orbit anything or attune themselves to physical objects, so the idea of boson-propagated vibrations wouldn’t work either since they behave more like waves propagating particular forces rather than a mystical harmony which sounds as if was ripped from a Theosophy manual, or something out of an esoteric text that Crowley composed for his Hermetic groups. And come to think of it, if an incredibly potent homeopathic remedy was basically just a resonating vibration, wouldn’t taking too much of it basically vibrate you to death? It would be even worse if that mystical vibration behaved exactly how they say it does, because taken in too large of a dose it could hit your resonant frequency and shatter your body just like repeatedly hitting a resonant frequency of other objects could stress them beyond their physical limits.

Of course homeopaths rush to say that the frequency magically fine-tunes itself to each person so it’s simply impossible to make this resonance dangerous, and I’m reminded of games in which little kids just invent an arbitrary new rule whenever they start losing. All of a sudden, “swords” can’t hurt them because they came up with a force field, or they get an extra life because they just happen to have a magic potion for that, or they can turn invisible on a whim. These weren’t the rules with which the game began but if you’re winning, they’re now the rules by which you have to play and you can’t make up any new rules because that would be cheating.

And this is exactly home homeopaths debate. Every time you have them on the ropes, they come up with a new or more ridiculous statement mid-sentence. Honestly, my little nephew is infinitely better at following a few basic ground rules than them. I’m not asking for much from homeopaths either. Just stick to real science. Calling an electron a vibration or saying that mass of the entire universe can be consolidated into a bowling ball isn’t just demonstrably false, but outright stupid. Don’t tell me that the sky is purple and if I can’t see that then either my eyes are broken or I’m with the Big Blue Sky conspiracy doing what my handlers tell me. Just because you’re satisfied with how something sounds in your own head doesn’t mean that it’s clever or true. I’m not cheating if your numbers are plugged into a relevant formula during a debate, you’re just an ignoramus who was caught spewing nonsense and the sooner you get over it and hit the books, the better.