Of all the pseudo-sciences on offer, homeopathy is the most obviously spurious. Devised by Samuel Hahnemann in the late 18th century, it holds that the smaller the dose of a mineral or herb the more potent it is. Thus, if you go into a chemist and buy a homeopathic sulphur remedy marked 30C, the proportion of sulphur to inert packaging in a pill is 1 to 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. A glass of water is more likely to cure you.I'm not opposed to herbal or natural remedies per se, nor even to the "organic foods" movement, however dubious many of its claims (and if you are swallowing an herbal pill rather than an actual herb from the garden, you, my friend, have succumbed to clever marketing). The good part of those movements is that they may represent a healthy desire for self-sufficiency -- it's simply not necessary to go the doc for every little thing, and to the extent people take their health in their own hands, it's probably to the good, even if certain elements of the natural/organic movement talk as if life expectancy under our medical regime weren't 5-fold what it was when we all lived "organically." And when President Hillary is elected and she and the Dem Congress dismantle the Patriot Act and allow one or more of our major cities to be destroyed by nukes, disrupting interstate commerce, we'll all be happy we have vegetable gardens and that some of our neighbors remember where food comes from and can point the way to the local farms.
But homeopathy is another thing again. I have a doll of a friend whose advice I would take on any other matter, but once when Eldest Weed was suffering a severe bout of hayfever, she seriously recommended that I put a bottle of water in our yard and collect pollen overnight. Then I was to seal the bottle and rub it up and down my son's back three times (not 2, not 4) each evening to cure him. I am sorry, but that seems like an incantation to me, not a remedy-- and I highly suspect the Catechism warns us against such practices. I didn't have the guts to tell her that, though. As the article notes:
dismissing homeopathy as quackery given by and for the feeble-minded is surprisingly hard.
