Contributed by: evilscientist
The CBC show Marketplace recently did a show exposing homeopathy for the sham it is. For those of you that may be unfamiliar with this particular form of non-medicine, homeopathy is the belief that if you take some form of "natural" medicine, dilute it till there's none left and drink the water, you'll feel better.Look at it this way, homeopaths allege that a "30C" dilution, that is a 1:100 dilution 30 times, makes a potent medicine for what ails you. Lets look at this more closely. Lets say I start with a mole of the original active ingredient, that is roughly 6.02x10^23 molecules of the ingredient. Let us also say that we dissolve this amount in one litre of water. This provides us with a concentration of the active ingredient of 1 mol/L to start. Doing a 1C dilution means we take our container of 1L of solution and pour it into a container containing an additional 99 L of pure water. So now we have 1 mole of our active ingredient in 100L of water or 0.01 mol/L. Take 1 litre of this new solution and dump it into a further 99L of pure water and the result is 0.01 mole of ingredient in 100L or a 0.0001 mol/L 2C solution. Another dilution to 3C results in a 1.0x10^-6 mol/L solution, that is only 1 millionth of the original active ingredient is left. Continuing the dilution to 10C results in a 1.0x10^-20 mol/L solution. This means at 10C there are 6020 molecules of the active ingredient in 1L of water or roughly 30 molecules in a teaspoon.
So moving along to 11C the solution is now at 1.0x10^-22 mol/L, leaving a mere 60 molecules in a litre, and a 30% chance you'll get one molecule of the active ingredient in a teaspoon of the dilution at this point. At 12C the concentration is now 1.0x10^-24mol/L which has a 60% chance of any particular litre of the 100L used for the dilution to have one single molecule of the active ingredient in it as there are only 60 molecules of the original active ingredient left in the whole 100L, this is a 1 in 333 chance of a single molecule being in a teaspoon. 13 C gives us a dilution of 1.0x10^-26 mol/L dilution or 6/1000 particles in the whole 100L. That is to say at this point, there is no active ingredient left and all you have is water. Any further "dilution" from this point accomplishes nothing as there's nothing left to dilute.
So basically a 12C (24X, 24D) solution is the only one left where, in 100L of the solution, you are guaranteed to have any of the active ingredient left, albeit only 60 molecules of it. The practical upshot of this is that by taking any homeopathic medication with a dilution of 12C or more you are basically injecting water. This means taking the popular homeopathic remedy Oscilloccinum which is allegedly a 200C dilution, you are quite literally taking a sugar pill.
This leads me to think that any health or healing benefit anyone has received from a homeopathic medication is due entirely to the placebo effect given that none of the actual "medicine" is left in most homeopathic solutions. It also makes me think that homeopaths and the homeopharma companies behind them are scamming the uninformed, in essence at best committing fraud and at worst murder.
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Evilness
http://www.evilscientist.ca/article.php?story=2011011815232376