Comments on: Homeopathic Mass ‘Overdose’ – The 10:23 Campaign

By: gildedtiger

gildedtiger — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:11:35 +0000

Hear hear Marsh! Well said.

By: Gittins

Gittins — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:34:40 +0000

I noticed the Guardian’s most commented on article of the week is related to your 10:23 compaign.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/03/homeopathy-overdose-hadley-freeman

By: Marsh

Marsh — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:03:29 +0000

Sorry to hear you think so, Rich. As it happens, I disagree – what we were doing wasn’t a test, the tests have been done over a century ago, and they showed that homeopathy doesn’t work. All of the studies since then support that. So the science didn’t need advancing, it needed promoting.

What our stunt has done is thrust homeopathy into the headlines. People reading about it generally don’t know what homeopathy is, how the ‘laws’ of it ‘work’, and why it’s nonsense – most think it’s just herbal alternatives. This has gotten people to ask questions, and that’s a good thing.

Of course the homeopaths say the stunt wouldn’t have harmed us – they need to justify their belief system. Instead, apparently, we should have been taking the pills regularly for hours/weeks to feel an effect. Useful, then, in the case of homeopathic sleeping tables (which I took) or pain relief (which my friend took). What use is a sleeping tablet that takes a week of constant use before it kicks in? And if the amount of dosage you take doesn’t affect things, why take 100 pills when 1 will do? Why therefore take 1 pill, when 1/2 a pill, or 1/100th a pill will work exactly the same?

These are the things that don’t make sense, and these are the things that rational people reading about the stunt will think, so in that sense we’re getting people to think about homeopathy fully – once they do that, we trust they’ll see it’s not useful.

By: Rich

Rich — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:09:19 +0000

I’m no fan of homoeopathy, nor of the way many homoeopaths have gone about ‘supporting’ their pov recently…
But this was an idiotic stunt: surely even according to homoeopathy itself an arbitrary dose of an arbitrary remedy taken once by healthy people wouldn’t be expected to have any effect: your test was invalid, and you’ve done the cause of science a disservice.