Today I was reflecting on how my recent post about How not to die in America didn't get any upvote love even though I'd poured some heart and soul, not to mention graphic personal photos, into it. Oh well. So I decided to see what was getting upvote love these days under the health tag. Pretty soon I'm looking at a recent high-earning post about a homeopathic miracle cure for possible (but not actually clinically diagnosed) autism. Of course, we all (should) know that in the field of medicine it is virtually impossible to say one single patient and their response to treatment establishes a cause-and-effect, let alone that the treatment is an effective one. Naturally, this did not stop the post attracting glowing comment and lots of upvotes. Sadly the adage "correlation is not causation" is apparently completely unfamiliar to the typical Steemit user...
However, with homeopathic remedies, science has unintentionally provided a convenient laboratory to test such assertions because clinical trials put the real treatment up against a double-blinded placebo and a no-treatment group. That's because the placebo (and now nocebo) effect is widely recognized, indeed statistically proven to be real. The power of mind over matter to change a patient's reported state of health. This has even been demonstrated with surgical procedures where the patient thinks they got a surgery but didn't such as orthroscopic knee surgery.
But this all got me thinking - since homeopathy says if a substance causes a health issue then taking some of it, dramatically diluted will help prevent that health problem... then wouldn't a substance that causes cancer, if taken as a homeopathic remedy, cure that problem? So I started thinking, what's a substance that is highly correlated to cancer and I came up with plutonium. It's radioactive as heck, and will trigger all kinds of cancer.
Turns out there actually is a homeopathic remedy based on plutonium and you can actually buy it. There's even a whole book about how they "proved" it. That basically means some shamen like person claiming to have some black-arts skills will interpret the remedy's side effects on a bunch of people and determine what they think it is good to cure.
But sure no one would be crazy enough to actually ingest plutonium... that would be crazy right? Then I remember, homeopathic cures are based on taking something and diluting the fuck out of it. According to some sites 6C is considered a "weak" dose and that is 1/100th dilution done 6 times which actually means if you start with 1 g of the substance then you'll end up with 10^-12 or one-trillionth of a gram of that substance.
It turns out that one gram of plutonium contains about 3*10^15 plutonium atoms so that means if you take a gram of it and dilute to 10^-12 then you have 3*10^15*10^-12 or about 3,000 atoms of plutonium. Hmmm.... I wonder if any homeopathic doctor would actually want to ingest a dose of 6C plutonium? Perhaps that is why they consider a remedy is strong the more it is diluted and a 300C remedy is actually approaching a "strong" dose. That's really convenient because the entire universe has about 10^80 atoms. So when you get 1 gram of plutonium with 3*10^15 atoms, dilute to 100th concentration about 300 times then you're left with 3*10^15/100^300 or... 3*10^-585
So yeah, that means if every atom in the universe was another universe and each atom in that universe was another universe and so on... you'd have to go down around 7 times before ever possibly encountering a plutonium atom in your 300C mixture. Really, the number describing the probability of their actually being a plutonium atom in your mixture is so small that you're more likely to spontaneously morph into a whale after drinking it via some quantum mechanical weirdness than finding an atom of plutonium in your drink.
But still, I wonder how many homeopath doctors will be willing to drink 300C plutonium if it was actually prepared correctly - with an original 1g of plutonium in it? Or how about the "weak" version of 6C with a few thousand plutonium atoms in it? Among the experiments you could perform related to plutonium and homeopathy I think that would actually be the most interesting one.
And to be sure, the largest meta-analyses of tests on the effect of homeopathic remedies concluded: "At the moment the evidence of clinical trials is positive but not sufficient to draw definitive conclusions because most of the trials are of low methodological quality and because of the unknown role of publication bias." and then "This indicates that there is a legitimate case for further evaluation of homeopathy, but only by means of well-performed trials."
Shouldn't that be a huge hint for homeopathic institutions to go and do real research and produce higher quality data definitively proving their case? Well apparently not because The UK Society of Homeopaths has stated: "It has been established beyond doubt that the randomized controlled trial is not a fitting research tool with which to test homeopathy."
Oh wow, isn't that fucking convenient? The gold standard for proving the effect of anything has just been eliminated by that org in an out of hand statement with no basis in fact. On what possible grounds? This person basically said out of hand reality does not apply and then moved swiftly on. This is the kind of rank bullshit used by the alternative-fact people now in control of Washington - we should really be afraid, very afraid of the spread of such magical, nonsensical, made up thinking. It bears no relationship to the rational universe. But somehow why am I not surprised?