#6: Homeopathy: Still Crazy After All These Years:
Homeopathy was invented by Samuel Hahnemann in the late 1700s. It is based on the now-outdated principle that “like cures like”, and the more dilute the dose the better in homeopathy. How dilute? Serious dilution, as in comparable to one drop diluted in all the water on Earth. When they realized that no molecules of the original substance were left in most homeopathic dilutions, homeopaths rationalized that the water must “remember” what it had come into contact with–as in clusters of water molecules somehow holding the memory of their encounters with the allegedly curative substances. Unfortunately, homeopaths have failed to explain how water can remember what it’s supposed to remember, and forget all the other memories of coming into contact with various trace contaminants, elements, bacteria, and whatever else happened to float by a the time.

I’m rather fond of my recipe for the homeopathic Oscillococcinum from my “Curing the Common Cold” column: “start with duck liver, dilute the duck out of it, and hope the the water remembers the duck.” In my opinion, all that leaves is a “quack.”