The best of accepting science as a way to observe the world, is that you're never wrong... at the worst cases, you may find a way to show at least how things are-not (I'm sorry, yes, thunderbolts don't come from Zeus). Everything is marvelous up to that point. What people don't tell is that: just as you're never wrong, you're also, never right.
Attempting to live everyday under the perspective of evident analysis equals renouncing to the concept of absolute truth, immaculate and eternal. If at a moment in history Einstein got Newton's ear wet, we are all vulnerable to understand the universe in an incomplete way and the closest thing we've that resembles "truth" is a liquid, uncertain, ephemeral sketch disguised as a complete model.
What materializes this thing that resembles truth is that, unlike opinion, it is not something that is created spontaneously. In 1807, Samuel Hahnemann found an incomplete truth that was born out of evidence. Translating one of William Cullen's works he found out that he proposed the use of the bark of the quina (Cinchona pubescens) to treat malaria. Samuel Hahnemann decided that is was a nice moment to serve himself a bark's tea and started to experiment fever, joint pain and shivers. All malaria's symptoms. Immediately after that, he deducted that the cure for certain pathologies were low doses of substances that provoked similar symptoms of the diseases.
Under the motto "Yo, Samuel! how should we call this?", Sam happily replied "How does Homeopathy? sound? It's mixing homios and pathos", yeah, looks like Greek was really "in" during the 1800s. And there's where the construction of models based on evidence finishes and the quantum fantasies of water memory and laws of susceptibility start, it established that an organism was exposed to diseased and illnesses based on a mental predisposition that attracted entities called miasmas that triggered the pathology. Don't even mention the invasion of living entities into an organism, Pasteur, everything is just psychosomatic.
On top of that, visiting a hospital back in the 19th century mean dying by 200 other reasons other than the one that took you there in the first place, many caused by the medical treatments themselves, something that didn't happen with the homeopathic treatments. Obviously when you compared results, people ended up better with a homeopathic treatment than with a traditional medicine one, mainly because the advantage of homeopathy resided in the fact that, by doing nothing, it was free of secondary effects.
Oh! and the dilutions! Samuel thought that by diluting an active substance the effectiveness increased. This makes a lot of sense, specially if you analyze it from the point of view that has absolutely nothing to do with evidence. So, Samuel developed a scale of exponential dilutions where he grabbed an active substance and diluted it 100 times (that one was called 1C). That flask was then diluted agan another 100 times (2C), and so on, until he reached the "recommended" grade of 30C. This meant that, for a homeopathic treatment to be "at its best", it was necessary that for every molecule of the main active substance: there were 100^30 molecules of water, or 10^60. This is a 1 with 60 zeroes.
1/1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.
This number basically says NOTHING, because it's huge and a brain cannot use a number as such. This made that more than 2 centuries later anyone with a basic understanding of chemistry could make a relatively simple calculation: if we suppose that the dilution is 1 molecule of active substance in 1060 molecules of water and we know that Earth has approximately 1.36x10^9 square km of water, after passing by moles, supposing the molar mass of water in 18,015 g/mol, taking all the water as 1g/mL and lots of blabber with huge exponential and roundups, you notice that you need 2,2x10^10 Earths to get the dilution Samuel liked. 22000000000000 planets for ONE SINGLE MOLECULE. Statistically, for a homeopathic mix to be at "full power/efficiency" we needed a flask of something that held NO MOLECULES of the active substance and water, lots of water. Only water. A flask of water, not tap water, any water; a water that could have 100ppm of arsenic, not to mention other ions. Water water, water. H2O. Aitchtwo-O.
(I'm going mad here) Only water. Not distilled water, that contains millions and billions more impurities. Neither bi-distilled water. Just water. Un-thought water. Pure water. So pure, that this water is almost theoretic.
Theoretic magic curative water.
But, that is logic, not evidence. what if the flask of water actually works? Because, the friend of the brother of a cousin of mt grandma's friend got healed with homeopathy.
Look at that coincidence! ... mine too!
Source: Bravotv.com
There's a ton of articles that attempt to compare the effects of homeopathy against the placebo effect. Dozens or papers where half of the individuals are subject to homeopathic treatments and the other half to a placebo. A half that have no real difference from an alternative therapy (that we will not call medicine) that naufragate proving its effectiveness to the point that, even governments, characterized by their slow pace, have started to tag it as a non-medical practice without any proof or evidence. The same kind of evidence you ask from any lab, that sometimes does great things and other terrible ones, with their seek of profit, and from those bad things another homeophillic argument is born "allopathic medicine is corrupt and wastes millions". And yes, it IS corrupt, sometimes it even does not work at all. But when it works one can tell, and when it doesn't, you can also tell. But always, they've their "Papers" done.
Evident papers. Studies, control groups, blind experiments, thousands of participants. Significant differences, repeated processes, consistent, measurable and reproducible, and WAY more solid as evidence than "The cousin, of the friend of your uncle's sister that lost weight thanks to homeopathy; as long as she did diet and exercise".
Homeopathy enthusiasts getting their Cancer treatment.
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