Overdosing on Woo for #ten23

I only write in this blog about woo woo things that I personally encounter, rather than the state of general woowooness that pervades our society.  This morning some friends of mine took part in the www.1023.org.uk campaign against Boots selling homeopathic ‘remedies’ even though they know there is nothing in them.  This happened all over the UK (and some other countries), but I witnessed the Oxford event.  See:

• http://www.1023.org.uk/
• http://www.1023.org.uk/an-open-letter-to-alliance-boots.php
• http://www.1023.org.uk/the-1023-overdose-event.php
• http://www.1023.org.uk/get-involved.php
• http://www.1023.org.uk/what-is-homeopathy.php
• http://www.1023.org.uk/why-you-cant-trust-homeopathy.php
• http://www.1023.org.uk/whats-the-harm-in-homeopathy.php
• http://www.1023.org.uk/videos.php
• http://www.1023.org.uk/faq.php
• http://www.1023.org.uk/media-coverage.php

for more information about the campaign.

They assembled in the square around the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford from about 9:45 where Rosie’s stunningly efficient organisational skills meant that they had around 30 volunteer ‘swallowers’ and a number of others to help out.  My friend had got around 1000 A5 leaflets and 750 A6 leaflets printed up previously at quite a cheap price.  My friend had distributed some previously, and have some of the A6-sized ones left over, but they must have given away at least 1000 of them in a very short time over the morning.  From the Radcliffe Camera they went to Carfax tower, just down the road from Boots, where we participated in the ten23 overdose event.  This involved each of them taking all of the little sugar pills inside a whole container of Boots 30C homeopathic ‘remedy’.  My friend had previously purchased  ‘Arsenicum Album 30C’, which means that the water put on the pill originally had some deadly arsenic in it…however, this is then diluted, and rediluted, and rediluted so much that in order to assure myself of a single molecule of arsenic in 30C homeopathic arsenic I’d have to drink an Atlantic ocean’s worth of the stuff. It was more embarrassing for him to buy this woo-woo stuff than, I don’t know, porn or something.  These little sugar pills are just that, sucrose and lactose… nothing more.  Any benefit you get to them is either placebo (works cuz you expect it to) or regression to the mean (you were going to get better anyway).  Homeopaths believe that although there is no active ingredient it works because water ‘remembers’ the thing it was in touch with.  This goes aganist all we know about the physical universe. Additionally, they believe it remembers the one special thing it was in touch with, and not all the urine, feces, and well, everything else that water touches, because in making it they ‘successus’ it (i.e. bang it 10 times or something) on a special leather board.  This is bonkers! Do we really want our tax revenue to go towards funding these quacks?!

Here is a video of the event:

Afterwards they distributed leaflets to people up and down cornmarket, and everyone did a really good job of offering leaflets, not forcing them on people, and when people wanted to discuss the inevitable FAQs (“Isn’t it just herbal medicine?”, “But where’s the harm in placebos?”, “What do you mean millions of my tax revenue is spent on this crap?”) they did so in a polite and well-informed manner. I won’t rehearse the answers to these and the many other mind-numbingly banal arguments that homeopaths come up with in this post, there are much better sources linked to on the 1023 website.

Some of them also did something that probably wasn’t as useful, in sneaking into Boots (outside of which they were distributing leaflets) and hiding lots of leaflets in and amongst their products.  One of their number was told in no uncertain terms to leave the store or else the police would be summoned.  Fair enough, it is Boot’s property and they don’t want to cause any sort of disruption that might inconvenience people getting real medicine.

After a majority of the leaflets were handed out, the Oxford ten23 crowd retired to the pub for some well-earned warmth.  As it turned out to be the organiser Rosie’s 18th Birthday, so we had an additional reason to celebrate.

While this one international protest will probably not change Boots’, the Government’s, the NHS’s, or homeopath’s minds about the validity of the completely bonkers claims that homeopathy makes, hopefully the campaign as a whole will raise awareness amongst the general public of what nonsense homeopaths believe in, and so they can spend their hard earned cash somewhere else.  If eventually in a generation or two we move to having homeopathy be seen for what it is, and ridiculed accordingly.

Homeopaths often criticise so-called ‘Big Pharma’… but the alternative medicine market is worth billions. Homeopaths support Boots’ selling of homeopathic remedies (sugar pills at extraordinary markup), so doesn’t that mean they are benefitting from the same ‘Big Pharma’ machine? As one person put it recently, are homeopaths really just corporate shills for ‘Big Alternative Pharma’ or ‘Big AltMed’ or ‘Big Homeo’?  It isn’t that I believe that real medicine doesn’t sometimes have nasty side-effects, but at least it is real medicine not made up magical woo woo wackiness!

All in all the first 1023 event in Oxford was a big success!  Let’s hope the others are just as good!

Unfortunately this blog http://lesmondine.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/woo-icide-is-painless/ beat me to using the  much better article title of ‘Woo-icide is painless’. I wish I had got there first with that title for this post.