Homeopathy: There’s Nothing In It

This coming weekend, protesters from 10 different countries and 23 different cities will be overdosing on Homeopathic remedies in the 10:23 campaign.

Don’t worry. They’ll be fine.

The point of the demonstration is not only show that homeopathic remedies are nothing more than sugar pills and are merely placebos, but also to gain some publicity and get the word out that Homeopathy is pseudoscientific nonsense.

There are several Canadian cities participating in the demonstration as well:

• Montreal
• Vancouver
• Toronto
• Ottawa
• Kitchener
• Edmonton
• Winnipeg

For those who don’t know, 10:23 is a reference to Avogadro’s number, which is 6.022 x 10²³. It is a number used frequently in chemistry to link the number of atoms of a particular substance to the mass of the substance (specifically it is the number of atoms in 12 grams of the Carbon-12 isotope). In essence it links the microscopic and macroscopic world.

It is a fitting name for this campaign since homeopathic remedies are diluted to the point that virtually (or literally) no atoms or molecules of active ingredient remains. The products are, in fact, only sugar pills.

The event is being organised by the Merseyside Skeptics Society. The event will culminate on February 6th when more than 300 people will overdose on homeopathic “medicine” at the QED conference in Manchester.

This comes at a particularly good time in Canada. The recent episode of Marketplace on CBC about Homeopathy (called “Cure or Con”) has raised quite a stir. In that episode, a small group of skeptics in Vancouver gave a demonstration of an overdose of homeopathic medicine. Nothing happened.

So hopefully this weekend’s events will garner some strong media attention and help expose this practice for what it is: nonsense.