Last week, I wrote about Main Street Plaza’s ex-Mormon awards. Well, good news: This site was nominated for two “Brodies”!

USU SHAFT is in the running for “Best Humor Piece” (my post entitled “Watching LDS General Conference so you don’t have to”) and “Best New Blog.” If you follow this blog, please show your support by voting for us here. It’s a great way to bring more traffic to our humble blog.

Thanks.

Prepare to be humbled and inspired.

More Games at arcadecabin.com | Cool Generators

Just a quick post, then we’ll get back to the fun stuff:

♦ UofU’s SHIFT is bringing Austin Dacey, a former UN representative for the Center for Inquiry,  to their campus to give a talk! So we thought we’d organize a carpool to go down there and support our fellows while enjoying a good speaker. The event starts promptly at 4pm on February 27, a Saturday. If you can provide rides or just want to tag along (and split gas :D ) please comment here or on Facebook with your status as a driver/rider.

♦ Would you like to be a guest blogger for USU SHAFT? Just contact us through Facebook or at info@usu-shaft.com it may take us a while to get back to you, but we’ll get there.

♦ Would you like to be our new webmaster? Please contact us through Facebook or at  info@usu-shaft.com. You must be a member of the club at USU (enrolled student, staff, etc).

♦ There will be a bake sale at the first week of April, so start thinking of delicious recipes. The proceeds will either go toward funding club activities or a charity; we haven’t decided yet.

Thanks for your time!

So-called alternative medicine hasn’t gotten much talk around here, so I thought I’d change that. Let’s talk about homeopathy.

Homeopathy was first proposed in 1796 by German physician Samuel Hahnemann. His idea was to treat patients with diluted solutions of chemicals thought to cause effects similar to the symptoms–for example, a substance thought to cause rashes would be diluted in order to treat hives. “Like with like” is the term homeopathic practitioners use. (See also Sympathetic Magic)

A typical homeopathic treatment is called “30C”. This means that whatever substance has been chosen for the treatment is diluted one drop in 100, 30 times. On the Society of Homeopaths site, in their “What is homeopathy?” section, they say that “30C contains less than 1 part per million of the original substance.” This is a giant understatement. In more precise terms, the ratio is 1 part “stuff” to 100^30 parts water, or 1^60. This is a 1 followed by 60 zeros, so the dilution is 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Anyone who’s taken any chemistry should be scratching their head at this point (Avogadro’s Number). It gets worse: remedies of 100C are also routinely sold, and are claimed to be even more powerful than 30C. Again, this is 1 drop diluted in 100, this time 100 times over. 1 in 100^100. That means that the substance is diluted by more atoms than there are in the universe. Homeopathic “remedies” are statistically no different than distilled water. Homeopathy was invented before we knew about atoms, how big they are, or how many there are, and has not updated its belief system to reflect this “new” information.

Normally, I would be like “haha, dummies, take a chem class” and think no more of it. But just like the anti-vaccination nutters (not unrelated, as we’ll see below), homeopathy has real health consequences for real people in the real world. It’s a routine marketing practice for these guys to denigrate mainstream (evidence-based) medicine. One study found that more than half of all homeopaths approached in Great Britian advised their patients to forego the MMR vaccine for their kids. A BBC Newsnight investigation found that almost all the homeopaths approached recommended ineffective homeopathic pills to protect against malaria, and advised against medical malaria prophylactics, while not even giving basic advice on bite prevention.

At the extreme, when they’re not undermining public-health campaigns and leaving their patients exposed to fatal diseases, homeopaths who are not medically qualified can miss fatal diagnoses, or actively disregard them, arrogantly telling their patients to stop their inhalers, and throw away their heart pills. The Society of Homeopaths has held a symposium on the treatment of AIDS, featuring the work of Peter Chappell, a man who claims to have found a homeopathic solution to the epidemic.

Many homeopaths bizzarely claim they can transmit homeopathic remedies over the internet, in CDs, down the telephone, through a computer, or in special music. Peter Chappell is one of them. He makes dramatic claims about his ability to solve the AIDS epidemic using his own homeopathic pills called “PC AIDS”, and his specially encoded music. “Right now,” he says, “AIDS in Africa could be significantly ameliorated by a simple tune played on the radio.”

I remember the year right before I stopped going to church. It seemed like every month, the bishop would issue a ‘new challenge’ to the congregation.  Ok, so it wasn’t so much a new challenge, as the same challenge over and over again.

“Ok, ward, this year, we’re going to read the Book of Mormon straight through!”

“But I just barely finished it….”

“Don’t care! Read it again!”

So, in the vein of my old bishop, I am going to issue all of you a challenge. Hopefully this will be a little more enlightening, and exciting, than reading the BoM. (Chloroform in print, as Mark Twain put it.) I challenge all of you to read a book this year that you disagree with. All the way through, no skipping the boring parts. If your ideas and beliefs are solid, then you should have no problems with this. If your ideas need some tweaking, that’s okay. You will have learned something.

Personally, I think I will be reading either Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. I despise Ayn Rand. *ducks to avoid flung tomato*  I don’t care if you guys like her, I don’t, so feel free to tell me what ideas/authors you disagree with.

What are you guys going to read?

The good folks over at Main Street Plaza recently announced the William Law X-Mormon Awards.

William Law, as you may know, was a member of the First Presidency under Joseph Smith. He became disillusioned with Smith over his involvement in polygamy and what Law perceived to be Smith’s theocratic ambitions.

This is a fun way to recognize your favorite blogs and bloggers. Main Street Plaza is now offering awards (named “Brodies,” after controversial Smith biographer Fawn Brodie) in a variety of different categories. Please consider nominating this site for some of the awards. I think we have a real shot at “Best New Blog.” To view the categories and submit your nominations, go here.