Homeopathy - there’s nothing in it

That explains why coffee has been added to the sleeping pills I’m about to take. But, I’m still hazy on why my box of pills clearly shows a list of ingredients that my friends insist are not contained in the product inside.

Keith and Trent explain that an ingredient with 2C beside it means it has been diluted twice. The first time, the active ingredient is steeped in water at a ratio of 1:99 parts. This forms the mother tincture. (Sometimes alcohol is used instead of water, but let’s keep it simple.) Then, one part of that diluted solution is added to a further 99 parts water. A 30C solution repeats this dilution process 30 times.

The boys reel off a string of numbers, ratios and percentages which I don’t really comprehend. But I listen intently and grasp enough to realise that what’s listed as an ‘ingredient’ on the packet is actually diluted so significantly it’s highly unlikely that any of it ended up in one of my pills - and certainly not in sufficient quantity to do me any harm.

So, I down two cards of homeopathic sleeping pills and, as predicted, I feel no ill-effect or drowsiness whatsoever. I’m still going strong hours later, after a big lunch and a two hour drive home.

At home, I decide to take a closer look at the math that made my head spin earlier in the day. As Keith and Trent suggested, the manufacture of my homeopathic sleeping pills began with 275 micrograms of each of the listed ingredients, but that’s not what went into each pill. The coffee, for instance, was diluted by a factor of 30C.

I’m shocked to read that, after a 30C dilution, only 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1 per cent of that amount actually remains. If that many numbers makes your head hurt, here’s a simpler way of putting it: at that rate of dilution the chance that even one molecule of coffee is left is one in a billion billion billion.

And the highly toxic and potentially fatal Hyoscyamus? That’s diluted 6 times, each time at a ratio 1:99. So, what is actually added to each pill is 0.000 000 000 1 per cent of 278/1000 of a milligram. By my inexpert calculation, I’d have to take 125 thousand, nine hundred million million pills in order to reach the lethal dose of 35g. That’s not quite no active ingredient, but close enough.

In fact, I read that anything beyond a 12C dilution is generally the point at which one can say, without fear of contradiction, that not a single molecule of the original ingredient remains. This is called the Avogadro limit, or 10 to the 23rd power - and it’s this number which gives the 10:23 Challenge its name.

But this is all knowledge gained after the fact. Back at the Brisbane 10:23 Challenge, organiser, Jayson Cooke, has brought along a copy of the book, Trick or Treatment (2008) by physicist and science journalist, Simon Singh and medical doctor, professor of complementary medicine and former homeopath, Professor Edzard Ernst. Trick or Treatment provides a fair, thorough and scientifically credible assessment of alternative medicines, explained in layman’s terms. I flick through the chapter on homeopathy as my colleagues pass out flyers and converse with passers-by.

I have a giggle at a skeptical verse written by Episcopalian Bishop William Croswell Doane (1832-1913), who described the homeopathic method thus:

Stir the mixture well

Lest it prove inferior,