Jun. 18 2009 - 10:47 am | 28 views | 2 recommendations | 0 comments

Homeopaths Are Trying to Give You Fantastic Powers

By ALEX PAREENE

This could happen to you!

According to Ig Nobel Prize organizer Marc Abrahams, a British researcher went down the chemist (that is London-talk, not a typo) to pick up some plutonium, the radioactive element that is most often used to make nuclear arms and other items unsuitable for hugging your children with. And she was in luck! The Helios Homeopathy Shop at Covent Garden had some in stock!

“I went to Covent Garden and went into the shop and said, ‘Please, may I have some plutonium.’ And the lady behind the counter said, ‘I shall fetch the chemist.’

“The chemist was duly fetched, and I said, ‘I’d really like a sample of plutonium.’ She asked, ‘And how strong would you like it, madam?’

Unfortunately, homeopaths do not actually sell very strong samples of their make-believe medicines.

“I had gone in there with the very good intention of asking what their original source was, because it’s my understanding that, although they dilute everything until there’s not even a molecule left, they do start off with one drop. But I got frazzled, and forgot to ask.

“The chemist gave me pillules, which very entertainingly have a ‘best before’ date of the 31st of March, 2013. And as I was leaving she pointed out that there was no plutonium in it.

But what, exactly, does homeopathic pretend plutonium actually cure? An inability to turn invisible and fight crime? A tragic lack of radiation poisoning? No, it cures something awesome that does not even need to be cured:

Where can one go for therapeutic indications about medicinal plutonium? Provence, France.

In 2005, Dr Ramon Frendo of that city wrote one of the few existing monographs on the subject. Published in the Revue Belge d’Homoeopathie, it describes two patients whom Frendo treated with plutonium nit. One was a 59-year-old woman who had delusions and “had dreams about sharks”, the other a 39-year-old who “hated her mother but could not leave her” and who “also dreams of sharks”.

It cures dreams about sharks? Now these quacks have gone too far! It is every human’s right to have awesome dreams about sharks, sirs. Just fucking look at them! Filled with cocaine or no, shark dreams are not something to be cured.

[Via Scienceblogs.]