Sociopathic Remedies
on January 14th, 2011Apologies: due to a sizing error, the text in this comic is fucking tiny. I’ll try to sort it out, but it might be difficult.
There’s a story behind this, but I’m far too tired right now to explain what it is. Goodnight!
UPDATE: Had to change the format of the entire comic. I find it less aesthetically pleasing, but at least it’s legible now.
So this might seem to make very little sense at all. Fair enough, it’s sort of supposed to. But this did actually happen to me at work – A guy came in to buy some homeopathic tablets, and was quite insistent that I not let them touch the large tub of ice-cream that he was also purchasing. Assuming that it had something to do with astronomically minute quantities of poison that such remedies are reputed to contain (they don’t, by the by – it is entirely water,) I assured him that there was no threat of contamination.
He then proceeded to explain to me, as a primary school teacher would an infant, that homeopathy works due to molecular vibration. Being a mere layman, I will try to explain this process to the best of my limited ability. The water molecules vibrate with the same resonance as the poisons that give them their efficacy. This in turn causes human molecules to vibrate upon ingestion, curing one’s ills. Close contact with the tub of ice-cream will cause the vibrations to shift to the new medium, resulting in an ineffective medicine.
He fucking believed this.
I asked him politely why such problems didn’t occur when simply handling the box, as the human hand also contains molecules. Or why havoc did not arise when different remedies are stored on the shelves next to one another (as they are in our store). To this he had no answer. Perhaps ice-cream is the only fluid capable of destabilising the molecular rhythm. Perhaps it is the kryptonite of homeopathic medicines.
Bottom line: if you think that homeopathic medicine is even slightly credible, you’re a fucking idiot and you need to help yourself to a god-damn chemistry book.
This comic is pure awesome. It drives me crazy that places like Whole Foods seem to be shrinking their areas devoted to wonderful things like cheese, and expanding their magic water section. (Though I imagine the profit margins on tiny bottles of water must be quite a bit higher than on cheese – that actually costs something to produce). When one walks past those aisles of magic water, you can see people actually picking the vials off the shelf, and reading the back to decide which magical vial of water is the right one. Adults. Literate adults. *facepalm* I just don’t get it.
Until recently, I was simply ignorant about two big areas (at least…) : 1) what homeopathy was and how it claimed to work; and 2) the principles of otherwise respectable stores regarding stocking very expensive but completely worthless products along side–and even mixed in with–regular, conceivably effective products. I had bought a number of homeopathic products–a “Rescue Remedy” for human stress, something similar for calming cats, “HeadOn” for my wife’s migraines, and so on–thinking that they were something akin to “herbal” remedies. While herbal remedies may or may not be effective, at least there is the *potential* to do something: after all, plants do contain many chemicals with known effects, and some animals will, for example, preferentially eat certain plants when suffering certain conditions. I just saw the common and scientific names of plants, but had no idea what “100C” or “12X” was indicating. Perhaps I thought it had something to do with “concentration” (as in, “12 times” some amount) rather than “dilution”. What aided my gullibility, and what ticks me off the most, is that the stores seem to have no problem passing off these worthless and fraudulent products. “Fraudulent” is appropriate, I believe, since most customers are likely not indoctrinated in the theory of homeopathic hocus-pocus and are not choosing them knowing, but just are looking for some real relief, having good faith in the due diligence the store/pharmacy makes in stocking and presenting effective products. Silly me.
HeadOn, for what it is worth, at least has something else–a menthol or such–that feels good when rubbed on the temples, but the Rescue Remedy is just a small amount of bad alcohol, and my cats aren’t even going to appreciate any ‘buzz’ from that in the feline version of remedy nor, of course, are they going to get any placebo effect as a human might.
Americans are the most gullible people in the world. Why? Because they are not taught real science in the schools. If somebody comes along and claims to be able to magically turn pure water into a cure-all, they credulously accept it; that’s because they were never taught to think critically. Hasn’t anybody noticed that, despite the wide popularity of nostrums like this, the incidence of the diseases they claim to cure has not decreased?
Fantastic!! I’ve been blathering about alternative medicine and quackery like Jenny frikkin’ McCarthy on my own blog recently. Thanks for what is possibly the most cogent explanation of homeopathy to have ever been drawn as a comic.
Next your gonna tell me some magic carpenter zombie is gonna save the world.
Oh, now that’s unkind …
… and super-awesome with chilli fries ^_^
@Dale…Americans aren’t the *most* gullible people in the world…although we are getting closer to the title (India comes to mind as #1 despite some very good education). Proper science is taught in most of the schools…unfortunately, it gets tempered by religion who teaches the science of faith (i.e. do not think, just accept what the leader says). Too many Americans take lack of thought as a virtue…until that changes, we will remain quite gullible overall.
I take it that your day job requires that you take the rubes’ money and dispense the homeopathic stuff as requested. Not that I have any problem with that. We all have to eat.
Sadly, furtivezoog’s experience is far from rare. Many people don’t understand what homeopathy is until they’re already emotionally invested and it is hard to let go. To make matters worse, there seems to be some confusion among the lay public between “homeopathic” and “holistic” — the latter being a term that, while often associated with quackery, is not in itself inherently quack-tastic. (Treating the “whole person” is generally agreed upon to be a good idea by everyone, and those in the mainstream medical community who are honest will tell you that it’s something the current system, particularly in the US, struggles with… but that’s a whole other story, the takeaway just being that there is nothing wrong with the word “holistic”)
A friend of my wife’s had recommended some homeopathic teething pills for our first child, which they said worked wonders. (FWIW, I think they do “work”, as it were — putting a fast-dissolving sugar pill under the tongue of a teething infant seems, unsurprisingly, to give pretty effective short term relief) I told her homeopathy was nonsense, and that it involved diluting substances down to a level where the original “medicine” wasn’t even present any more. She initially brushed off my concerns, telling me later that the reason was because she thought I must be mistaken — because after all, how could anybody believe something so stupid?
So she checked the Wikipedia article on homeopathy and she was like, “Oh my god, Jay was right, it is that stupid.” hahahaha….
I really believe that (some) homeopaths deliberately try to make sure that the lay public remains ignorant of what homeopathy actually is… if every person, before they ever tried a homeopathic remedy — thereby becoming emotionally invested and perhaps have a confirmatory anecdotal experience — were to be given a brief overview of the process, homeopaths would be out of business in no time.
I love this, hahaha.
I’d come to acquiesce with you on this subject, which is not something I usually do! I enjoy reading a post that will make people think. Also, thanks for allowing me to speak my mind!
this all reminds me of a South Park episode called Cherokee Hair Tampons.