Martin Pool's blog

Liberals on homeopathy

AJ points to this ABC story in which Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan says:

The testing regime that's being used [for chemical contamination of water catchments] has difficulty in identifying chemicals at a homoeopathic level, down to the level where it slowly poisons you rather than taking a gut full of poison, which you're inclined to sick up.

(I'm not sure if the spelling error originated in Heffernan's statement or the ABC report.)

What is a homeopathic level, anyhow? Homeopathy uses active substances, repeatedly diluted by 1:10, 1:100 or 1:50,000 dilution dozens of times, for a total dilution factor such as 1:10400. At such astronomically high dilutions not a single molecule of the substance will remain.

In other words, the testing regime Heffernan criticizes has difficulty identifying chemicals when not a single molecule is present in the whole state. What a shocking failure! Maybe we ought to bring in dowsers to check whether the vibrations of the chemicals are still present?

And the Liberals say the Greens are kooky...

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