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.”