A Trip To The Chemist.

[logical muse]

On our stove buying trip to town to get a new one today we called into the chemist, (Read: Drugstore for Americans), to get a script filled for the wife.

While waiting there I see some nicely coloured bottles of hangover cure sitting on the counter. Hey ho, this is what old Alias needs so I grab one and look for the ingredients. A lovely collection of homeopathic "remedies"! Excellent, just what I need!

Why the hell is the chemist, a place for dispensing medicines and the like, selling this crap?

One of these bottles, about 200 ml by the look of it, cost $16.

Yes folks, for only $16 you can have a 200 ml bottle of water, a sure hangover cure.

You think $16 for water is bad?

A doctor recently came clean about selling $10 bottles of skin cleanser for $285 as a head lice treatment.

Read all about it.

 

[Rolfe]

I believe Randi did just this in front of a room full of politicians / vested interests / bleevers - he got one of them to purchase 2 boxes of 50 "sleeping tablets" from a local drugstore. They had the dire warning of not taking more than 2 in any 8 hours (obviously so they appear to be a "real" medicine to gullible punters).

Randi proceeded to swallow the lot in front of them, to no ill effect

They get out of this two ways.

First, many of them declare that a dose is a dose is a dose, and the amount of remedy consumed is irrelevant. So if you take one pill or the whole bottle at once, there's no difference.

Second, homoeopathy doesn't work by allopathic principles. You're making a big mistake if you think that a homoeopathic remedy for insomnia will send you to sleep. It only works on people who actually have insomnia, to fix the disordered vital force. It will have no effect on anyone who doesn't have insomnia.

Slippery, or what?

But this is why, although stunts like that can be fun and can make an impression on the general public, they are no use for actually countering deep-seated homoeopathic woo-ism.

Rolfe.

 

[John Jackson]

In a similar vein I'd love to post the cartoon series printed in a recent Viz comic where there is a parody of WWII action comics of my youth. In it a gruff sergeant is wounded in the stomach by a sniper whilst clearing a house in 1944, only to have his medic save him by giving him a bath of essential oils, rubbing some crystals and chanting a bit. He then proceeds to kill the sniper by use of reverse Feng-Shui, reorganising the snipers nest to disrupt the harmonious energies in the room whilst shouting "Take that you swine!" Priceless.

The sniper of death

It's hilarious.