Derek Sorensen

This blog might save your life

No, I’m not joking. The information in this blog really might save your life, or the life of someone you know.

What you are about to read is fairly old news, but surprisingly - to me, at least - not many people seem to know about it. It’s important people know this, so please take a few minutes to read it. I know it’s long, unfortunately there’s a lot of information to convey and there’s no easy way to make it shorter.
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Time for the skeptics to eat - nay, *choke on* - their words. It seems the qua homoeopaths have been right all along.

This paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7030/full/nature03383.html describes some recent scientific research which indicate that water does indeed have a memory. They’ve even managed to measure it pretty accurately.

It’s a bit of a long read, so I’ll summarise:

“Our results highlight the efficiency of energy redistribution within the hydrogen-bonded network, and that liquid water essentially loses the memory of persistent correlations in its structure within 50 fs.”

I guess that about wraps things up for the critics of homoeopathy, huh?

Oh, by the way, “50 fs” is 50 femto seconds. A femto second is 0.000,000,000,000,001 seconds. It seems that homoeopathic remedies might have a very short shelf life.

I don’t normally set a lot of store by petitions, but this I believe to be worth supporting.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Immediately ban NHS funding of homoeopathy [sic] and redirect the resources to proven medicine.

So what’s this all about? In recent years homeopathy has begun making an entry into the NHS, so much so that recently £10 million of NHS funds was used to refurbish the Royal London Homeopathic hospital. This is only a good use of NHS funds if you approve of state-sponsorship of quackery.

I was reminded recently of a story about Homeopathic Crystals. For those not familiar, the story goes like this:

One day in 2003 a New Scientist Reader named Gareth Thomas came across a site selling Homeopathic Crystals, which made all kinds of claims for these special healing stones. He posted a critical assessment of the site and it’s claims on Uk Pagan - a site devoted to all things mystical.

Several regulars on the site responded to say that Homeopathic Crystals really do work - that they are exactly as described. Other posts were less than complimentary to Thomas, even going so far as having to be removed by the site’s admins. Thomas then posted a point-by-point criticism of the site’s claims, and was met by even fiercer resistance. More heated replies followed, and Thomas was branded a cynic for his views.
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