Homeopathic sugar pills (Image via Wikipedia)
A couple of weeks ago, Boiron Italy did something that can be most kindly described as balls-down mindfuckingly stupid:
A letter sent by the Italian arm of multinational company Boiron, threatening to sue an amateur blogger over remarks he made about homoeopathy, has sparked a strong internet reaction in defence of freedom of speech.
That’s pretty dumb right there, but it gets even better:
Samuele Riva posted two articles on his blog, blogzero.it, on 13 and 27 July, which included pictures of Boiron’s blockbuster homoeopathic product Oscillococcinum, marketed as a remedy against flu symptoms. The pictures were accompanied by captions, which joked about the total absence of any active molecules in homoeopathic preparations.
On 28 July Boiron fired off a letter to the internet provider, complaining that both the articles and the captions were “untrue and derogatory both of homeopathy and [the] company,” and responsible for tarnishing the company’s reputation…
Presumably Boiron only objects to other people tarnishing its reputation, since pushing expensive sugar pills as effective medical remedies to potentially serious illnesses via huge TV campaigns is about as low as you can get without serving fried babies on toast during executive board meetings (JOKE! But only just).
Want to know how Oscillococcinum is made? From the US website:
Active Ingredient:
- Anas barbariae hepatis et cordis extractum 200CK HPUS – To reduce the duration and severity of flu-like symptoms
The letters “HPUS” indicate that the active ingredients are officially included in the Homeopathic Pharmacopœia of the United States.
Inactive Ingredients:
- lactose, sucrose
Anas barbariae sounds like a plant, doesn’t it? Um, no. It’s a duck.
QUACK!
The Muscovy (or Barbary) duck, as seen in your local restaurant. Hepatis et cordis extractum means heart and liver. Seems a bit of a waste when I’ve got this great recipe for pâté. I’ve got some good recipes for the rest of the duck too. Anyway, what happens next? Ah, the vaguely obscene-sounding 200CK HPUS. HPUS, as they so obliging explain in about as many words, merely means “it’s just a list of stuff we use to make homeopathic products in the USA”. So 200CK must be the good shit, than?
Well, It doesn’t mean Calvin Klein, so that’s possibly a point in its favour. Nor does it refer to the temperature of preparation (you know, like UHT or pasteurised milk).
No, it refers to the number of dilutions. And also to the number of WTF that just spontaneously exploded out of your brain. You take your duck heart and liver, presumably all mashed up, put them in a container, shake the container really hard (the fashionable word is ‘succussion’, apparently), throw away 99% of the contents, top up with pure water, shake the container really hard, throw away 99% of the contents…
This continues for 200 dilutions, bearing in mind that after the 12th dilution not a single fucking trace of duck remains in the container. That is a totally criminal waste of pâté source material. It is also totally fucking insane as a methodology.
So, here we are at the 200th dilution and we now have… Well, a really clean test-tube filled with well-shaken water. Homeopathic theory would have us believe, despite no proof for the hypothesis and a huge amount to the contrary, that the water ‘remembers’ the active ingredient in some magical way via being pounded energetically on the workbench or whatever. The theory is a bit hazy on how the water simultaneously ‘forgets’ awkward stuff such as what fish do and have done in it since prehistoric times. Never mind, we’re into 1984-style doublethink here.
The water is then mixed with the inactive ingredient, or excipient, and it’s all dried out to make the little round pills. So there’s not even any magic water left in the final product.
Just so that everybody is quite clear on what Oscillo is really made of, I lifted this verbatim from Boiron’s own blurb on the website:
Each 0.04 oz. dose (1 g) of Oscillo contains 1 g of sugar.
That’s saying in as many words: “It’s just sugar”. That’s Boiron itself saying that there is no active ingredient in Oscillo.
Nor is there in any other homeopathic product. That’s the whole point. Sugar pills and water. That cream for scratches? It’s the vaseline ‘excipient’ that actually soothes. You can choose to pay over the odds for sugar and vaseline if you like, but don’t try to tell me it’s a treatment for anything other than a sweet tooth or a sore arse.
via Homoeopathy multinational Boiron threatens amateur Italian blogger — Turone 343 — bmj.com.
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- Homoeopathy on trial [Derek Sorensen] (ecademy.com)
- Strychnine for your child’s cold – courtesy of your friendly homeopath (genome.fieldofscience.com)
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