I can be convinced for much less than that.
I'm going to talk about something which that illustrates very well.
I would like to see hands, please, and holding your hand up isn't like this
but it's like this, so I can really see it.
If anyone can give me just-
it doesn't have to be detailed or scientific or anything like that,
just give me an idea what they think homeopathy is all about.
Does somebody have a notion? Yes, sir, this gentleman down here.
- Yes, homeopathy is the promise
that diluting something past the point of having any atoms
can still have an essence that will heal people.
That's essentially it, yes.
The gentleman said, in case you didn't hear him,
that diluting a substance down beyond the point where it's
actually present in the solution anymore, can still have some efficacy.
And they base it on theories of vibrations, you see,
the vibrations of the original medicine that was there.
I'm going to give you the four rules of homeopathy, which should blow you away,
I'm glad again that you're seated.
I'd hate to see people fall over in hilarious laughter and damage themselves.
Homeopathy started over 200 years ago.
It was started by a man named Hahnemann.
Samuel Hahnemann came up with a wonderful idea.
Now, 200 years ago, medicine was not then what it is today.
Today, it's an art and science, back then it was essentially an art.
There was very little science to it.
They were barely out of the age of Paracelsus, and Paracelsus
- though a disagreeable chap, I never knew him, I'm not that old... yet -
and Paracelsus came up with this really rather smart idea.
The idea was that you don't have to use natural substances,
such things as weeds and bark and things like that,
in order to heal diseases,
you can use simpler, non-organic chemicals.
And he started up by using things like mercuric chloride, lead acetate,
arsenic sulfide, few things like that, and the diseases... my golly,
the symptoms went away like that, and unfortunately so did the patient.
But they were the best looking corpses in the cemetery, I can tell you that!
It usually cleared it up the symptoms right away.
Mercuric chloride was used for a long time, even into Victorian days,
and it's a deadly poison, but it was used in very small quantities,
so they didn't die right away, and they could pay the bill, you see.
Now, this is what Paracelsus introduced to medicine.
So you can imagine, at that time that people who could afford doctors
had a much greater chance of dying from the disease -or the treatment-
than people who couldn't afford doctors,
and indeed that seems to be supported by the statistics of the day.
So Hahnemann came along with an idea,
that he would prepare medicines that wouldn't poison people like that.
It was a good intention, but...
I want you to know the four rules of homeopathy.
Each increasingly more embarrassing.
The first one is that you do what they call a 'proving'.
A proving in homeopathy, and I'm not going to go into all the details,
that would take me three nights here,
the proving consists of taking a substance, we'll call it a substance X,
and you give it to a patient who is well, that is to a person who is 'well'.
Now, that definition isn't arrived at, maybe somebody who can walk and sit down
and stand up again and is warm, would be a person that's 'well', I don't know.
But you give it to a person who is well, and that person develops symptoms A, B and C.
Now, we'll say that the substance is... the milk from milkweed,
oh that must taste awfully bad, sap from milkweed, bleh!
You give that to a well patient in a proving,
and in this proving, the patient develops these three symptoms:
A) face gets very, very red,
B) head swells up round like a balloon,
C) and every twenty minutes he falls down on the ground in a dead faint.
Now those are symptoms you'd be likely to notice. I think you'll agree with that.
So they write that down in a book.
That's called the proving, that's the first rule of homeopathy.
Second rule of homeopathy is...
suppose you have a patient walk into the office,
and the patient sits down and says: "Oh... am I sick",
and the homeopath looks to the patient and notices that the patient has
head swollen up like a balloon, and it's bright red,
and the homeopath says:
"Hmm... every twenty minutes you fall on the ground in a dead faint?"
And the patient looks at his doctor: "You're wonderful, yes I do!"
- "Wait a minute!"
You go through the book, you find out what caused that in a well patient,
and then you give them that medicine, and that reverses the effect.
Don't look at me, it's their idea!
People out there go "Whaaaa...?"
It's their idea, not mine, I'm just telling you what it's all about!
Third rule of homeopathy says: you don't do that.
I told you they got sillier, as they went along.
Third rule of homeopathy says that you give them
a highly diluted mixture of that substance.
You haven't heard 'dilution' until you hear this...
I'm going to step over to the board here.
This is a simple mathematical lesson, OK?
10 to the power of 1 is... 10. OK, we knew that.
10 to the power of 2 is 100.
It's the number of zeros after the 1 that the index refers to.
OK, so 10 cubed, 10 to the 3rd power has 3 zeros,
and it goes on and on like that, OK?
Now, in homeopathy, to prepare a solution, you take 1 part of the substance
and you put it in 10 parts of water, and you succuss it.
That we will call a '1 solution'.
They never use that. Far, far too strong.
Now, what they do to prepare it, is they take the substance, put it in the water
and then they succuss it. That means, shake it up and down ten times...
...sideways ten times...
...and back and forth ten times
in three different dimensions, ten times each.
That's called 'succussion',
I call it 'shaking it'.
But I'm not scientific, so what do I know?
That's a '1 solution'. As I say, they never use that.
Then they take 1 part of that solution and put it in 10 parts of water
and chucca chucca chucca the whole thing all over again,
and they get a '2 solution', 1 part in 100, do you follow now?
Then, they repeat it one more time, 10 parts, and they get 1 in a thousand,
but that's far far far too concentrated.
No!
They prefer dilutions of 1 in 10 to the 20th parts of water.
That's 1 with twenty zeros after it.
That's what I call dilute.
'Attenuated' is the term they use.
'Attenuated'.
That's really 'attenuated'!
And the fourth rule of homeopathy, as if you weren't ready for it,
the more dilute the medicine is, the stronger it is.
I told you they get sillier as you go along.
Now, I happen to have some homeopathic medicines here on the table-
No, I have homeopathic *preparations*; I won't dignify them by calling them 'medicines'.
This one is called "Cold and Flu Relief." This is a spray.
Oh, it's got a rebate offer. Damn, I missed that.
"Breakthrough medicine! No side-effects!" That's true.
My question is, are any other effects there?
It does remove that dreadful lump from your wallet, because it's very expensive.
"Active ingredients" folks, listen to this now.
"Active ingredients", ooh... You see, the one that is listed first,
is the one that's the most prevalent in the compound.
"Arsenicum album." In brackets it says: "arsenious acid".
Not to be confused with Arsenio Hall... of course.
Arsenious acid. Hmm. What concentration...?
30X.
That means, 1 followed by thirty zeros parts of water
and 1 part of arsenicum album.
I wouldn't worry about it!
I wouldn't worry about it at all, friends, because that's what 30X means.
Now, wait a minute, we passed a certain point here.
It's called a sort of the point of no return I suppose,
but a fellow named Avogadro came up with a thing called
Avogadro's limit and Avogadro's number. He was very awkward, but he was right.
What's that? Sorry?
I was just about to tell them that, yes. You're padding your part.
You're the one that runs on in flames after, isn't it?
Yes, 10 to the 23rd. Once it gets to 23rd solution there,
if you can call it a solution at that point, there's only a chance of there being
one molecule or atom of the original substance present in the mixture.
So by the time you get to the 10 to the 24th,
you've got 1 chance in 10 of there being one molecule there.
I'm going to illustrate something for you, you see,
I have here also a box of another homeopathic compound.
This is Calms Forte, a sleep aid. "Non habit-forming." I'll bet.
"100% natural, no side-effects!" You see, again they tell us this.
I see... Now, there are 32 capsules in here.
Not too long ago, I did a demonstration for the US Congress,
a group of congressmen and congressional aids,
and I started the lecture by going to an aid sitting in the front row,
and I gave him a twenty dollar bill, and I said,
"I want to you run across the street to the Kurt's Pharmacy over there",
big pharmaceutical chain, and I said "I want you to buy me two boxes of this",
and I gave him the original box and he came back with the two boxes,
and I'd open them up, and pour the 32 pills and 32 pills
that makes...
...64... and...
put them in the glass there, put them in a glass
and I told the congressional aids and congressmen there
what this was all about and I downed 64 of them,
took a glass of water, swallowed them down.
They're in a base of lactic acid, which is lactose,
and tastes about like packing material, I would suggest.
Sort of like plasters, and it gets a really bad taste.
It says on package, it says: "Maximum dose 2 tablets every 8 hours,"
"in case of an overdose, call your poison control center."
(laughter)
I'm still here, Charlie!
I took 32 tablets,
and though some of the congressmen fell asleep, I didn't! I'm still here!
And I do this regularly.
Except that lactic acid really tastes awful. It's nasty stuff.
But there's nothing in these tablets. Oh, what is the active ingredient?
Come on, you should be able to tell me by now.
Caffeine! You got it. The sleeping pill.
It works the opposite wa... don't look at me,
it's their idea, not mine!
This is what homeopathy is all about! But wait, it gets better!
I said that the more diluted it is, the better it works, right?
Ha-ha!
Guess how high they go, folks!
They go up to 10 to the power of 1500.
I'm not going to start writing all the zeros, I tell you that.
Those zeros would run right out of the room, I'm sure.
That's really powerful stuff when you get to that extent.
Now, I asked my good friend Martin Gardner, formerly of Scientific American magazine,
I said: "Martin, do a little math for me, would you?"
"It'll save me some time and I'll have it from an authority like you",
I said "what would that be equivalent to?"
And he said, "You need some sort of a metaphor?"
And I said, "Yes, some sort of a figure of speech,"
because I'm talking to technically-minded people,
scientifically-minded people, and the laymen,
and reasonably intelligent folks,
who can grasp something if it's made a little easier for them.
And figures like "one thousand and five hundred dilutions"...
I don't care how scientific you are,
you can't get a notion unless it's simplified for you, and here it is.
He said: "It's equivalent of taking one grain of rice -that's one, uno, eins-
one grain of rice, crushing it to a powder,
and dissolving it into a sphere of water the size of the Solar System...
(laughter)
...with Sun at the center and the orbit of Pluto at the outside.
Wait a minute...
What about chucca chucca chucca...?
I don't know, it's their problem, not mine.
And then repeating that process two billion times.
Now if that ain't dilute, I don't know what is.
But folks, sure, you can laugh at this, we all laugh at this, it's comical,
it's juvenile, it's asinine! There's no other way to describe it!
But these medicines are being sold in leading pharmacies today,
in pharmaceutical chains across the country!
And just recently, just three or four days ago, they came up on the Internet
offering people who are worried about terrorist attacks,
homeopathic medicine that they say are antidotes for radiation poisoning,
bubonic plague, smallpox, and anthrax.
Now if this isn't taking advantage of people's grief and their need
for some sort of relief, I don't know how else you can determine that.
You can't label it any other way.
These are swindlers, liars, cheats, frauds, fakes, criminals!
Come on, sue me!
No, they won't sue me.
They know damn well their case won't stand up in a court of law.
It doesn't stand up in science at all. It falls apart.
And they say: "Well, we've got these affidavits!"
Yeah, and Nixon said he didn't know about Watergate too,
and he was president of the United States, remember?
Now, am I understandably angry about this thing?
Have I got a good cause to be angry? And to run this foundation in Florida?
And try to attract people to it,
so they subscribe to the foundation and help to support it?
It's what I'm shamelessly doing for you right now.