Homeopathy had No Place in Pharmacy: Canadian Pharmacist

[backscatter712]

250. I'll give you some relevant bits.

Last edited Mon Aug 3, 2015, 02:49 PM - Edit history (1)

People in homeopathy flame threads talk about Avogadro's number. That number is approximately 6.02*10^23, or 602 with 21 more zeroes after it.

Avogadro's number is defined as the number of atoms in 12 grams of Carbon-12. This is the basis for a unit of measurement in chemistry known as a mole. A dozen is 12 of something, a mole is Avogadro's number of something.

And that's useful in chemistry, because now you can have your chemicals measured in units directly proportional to the number of molecules in them, so you can mix one mole of oxygen (which comes as molecules of two oxygen atoms each (O2)) with two moles of hydrogen (it also comes in molecules of two hydrogen atoms bonded to each other (H2)), burn them together, and end up with two moles of water. 2H2 + 1O2 => 2H20.

What does that have to do with homeopathy? Remember that homeopaths like to dilute the hell out of their preparations. And they express their dilutions using orders of magnitude. A common unit is "X", which is a power of 10. And a common level of dilution is 30X, with is 10^30, or 1 with 30 zeroes after it.

30 orders of magnitude, compared with Avogadro's Number, which is 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd power. There's the rub.

Say you have 1 gram of your substance. Dilute it 1 part to 10 parts water. Take that solution and dilute it again, and again, and again... Repeat until you've diluted 30 times. Now you have 1 part in 10^30th probably given to you either in a little vial of liquid with has maybe a few milliliters in it, or in the form of sugar pills that have had this dilution dripped on them.

Counting the orders of magnitude, we see that the homeopath diluted his preparation to the point where THERE IS NOT ONE SINGLE MOLECULE OF THE SUBSTANCE IN THE SOLUTION. It's been diluted a million-fold past Avogadro's Number. There is nothing left. All gone. Says so right in the math.

All the homeopaths have to say when confronted with this is woowoo about how "harmonic frequencies" are left in the water, or there's "quantum vibrations" that somehow give water a "memory" of what used to be in it. Which is all nonsense that does not have a single bit of reputable peer-reviewed scientific evidence to back it up.

When you go to the pharmacy and buy that little vial of water or bottle of sugar pills, there's nothing in them. You're taking a placebo.