Here in Australia two parents have recently been convicted of manslaughter for the death of their nine month old baby girl. The child died after five months of suffering with chronic , yet easily treatable eczema. One of the medical professionals who testified said that conventional medical treatment could have seen the girl recover in 24 hours, but the parents chose to pursue homeopathic remedies. The child had been neglected so badly that by the time she was taken to hospital, her corneas were melting. The last five months of her life (more than HALF her life) were spent in terrible pain.

As a parent I’m particularly livid about this. As someone who uses his brain for thinking, I’m also fairly incensed. If you care to read on, you’re going to hear a lot of rather strong language. You’ll learn why homeopathy isn’t medicine, too, but just be aware of what you’re in for.

Here’s a pretty picture. Post continues afterwards.

cat

Homeopathy is NOT medicine.

Here’s why: medicine is a science, which means it follows the scientific method. In medicine, therefore, when you want to say that activity X (such as in this case, imbibing a certain substance) causes effect Y, you have to perform that activity with a large enough sample size of test subjects, and your sample size needs to include a diversity of people to ensure that your results were actually caused by the substance and not some other factor. With homeopathy, some idiot piece of shit loser just goes ahead and imagines that his magic water will cure something or other, and then babies die. Asshole.

I say ‘magic water’, because that’s precisely what homeopaths are convinced they are administering. Homeopathy involves taking an amount of water and adding a tiny amount of some element – said to be the active ingredient in the ‘cure’ – to the water, then diluting the ever-living shit out of it until NONE OF THE ACTIVE INGREDIENT REMAINS. The ‘magic water’ is said to have a memory of active ingredient, which it passes on when taken. I’m serious – that’s what homeopaths actually think is going down. You would have to bee a metric assload of retard to possibly consider that to be medicine.

Hmm, should I make some tea out of fairy dust to cure grandma’s cancer or should she get chemo? Tough call.

As an example, the allowable ratio of arsenic to water in tap water is 10−8 or 1 arsenic molecule per 100,000,000 molecules of water. The standard dilution for homeopathic ‘remedies’ is 10−60 or 1 particle of the active ingredient per 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (stupid formatting – you’re missing about a quarter of the zeros) molecules of water. I would die from water intoxication (again and again and again) long before I ever found that one molecule. It is impossible for any of the active ingredient to remain in any quantity of a homeopathic remedy that could physically be consumed – by a factor of A RIDICULOUS AMOUNT. I’m talking a container billions of times larger than the Earth kind of ridiculous.

While I’m quite pleased that these two bowls of dick have publicly proven their unsuitability for passing on their genes, it’s a shame they had to do it in a manner that culminated with two months of terrible, agonizing (and AVOIDABLE) suffering for this poor child. Both parents have been sentenced to lengthy jail terms. Dear Mr. Thomas Sam (the father and practicing homeopath), I can only hope that one of the charming fellows in cell block D stabs you repeatedly in the anus with a sharpened toothbrush – I hear that ass-stabbing is one of the most lengthy and painful ways to die, not counting having treatable eczema ravage your whole body while your shithead parents watch you cry in pain for five months.

In closing: fuck you, homeopathic practitioners. If I ran into you in the street, I’d cockpunch you so hard you’d have to stick your hand up your rectum in order to jerk off. That statement makes no sense, and yet it’s nowhere near as ludicrous as you and your fucking magic water. Douchebags.

If you want more info (and less pottymouthed antics), there’s a good article at Ars Technica about the pseudoscience that is homeopathy.