If I have a headache it would be expected that I could take any number of medications to alleviate the pain and allow me to get on with my life. There are many choices. I could take Aspirin, originally made from willow bark, so I could just boil the correct willow bark into a tea and drink that too. I could go for one of those modern cures like Tylenol or Advil and there are many strengths of both of those. Some work on the pain and let you get on with life with no pain. Some work by reducing inflammation and thus relieve the pain, like ibuprofen.
I could take nothing too, because headaches are temporary, usually, and they will go away. That is always an option. I usually take nothing. The reason is because I don't believe anything works. I once had a terrible headache when I was out at a friend's cottage and I unfortunately let him know. He gave me a gel cap of Super-Duper-Extra Strength Gelcap, behind the counter strength Advil. I took it, because I wanted to be polite and I wanted the pain to go away. The pill was so big that it got caught in my throat and it took a while to get down. After half an hour he told me that that pill was fast acting and I should have felt it start working right away. I nodded, mostly because I did not want him to give me something else, the pain was still there, just as intense and it was there for another few hours.
There is another option that a lot of people take for many different maladies, it is equally effective for all illnesses, from headaches to Cancer. Homeopathy, or Magic. I may be tipping my hand when I say that but let me explain. People who believe in Homeopathy believe that a little bit of medicine is better than a lot. They believe that the smaller the quantity of medicine, the more powerful the effect. They achieve this by diluting the medicine.
They take the medicine and dilute it with distiller water. Practitioners believe that the more dilute the end product the better that it works. They have a notation that they put on the medicine so that you can know how dilute and thus how powerful the medicine is, XC. That is a number like 2C. C, means a dilution of one hundred times. Take a liter of distilled water remove 10ml and add 10ml of medicine and shake vigorously and that resulting liquid would be a 1C solution. If you thought that was stupid and would be completely ineffective unless you drank the full liter, then you would be correct; everyone agrees, but homeopaths agree for different reasons than you would. Homeopaths believe that the solution is not dilute enough. Common influenza medications are diluted a lot more, often 200C. That is two hundred hundred times dilutions or scientifically put 1/1.0x10^200.
Take a cubic kilometer of distilled water add 1ml of medicine and mix well. That represents a billionth of a thousandth of a billionth dilution, 1/1.0x10^21. Or better yet take two hundred 1L bottles filled to 990ml add 10ml of medicine to the first and mix well, then add 10ml of that to the next and mix well and repeat another 198 times then you will have the appropriate dilution for the cure of the flu.
The problem with this has to do with a special number known as Avogadro's Constant equal to 6.02214129×10^23. This is the number of any molecule in its molar mass in grams. Take water H2O, which has a molecular mass as taken from the Periodic table of 18g (1+1+16) and in 18g of water there are 6.02214129×10^23 molecules of water.
Alcohol, the kind that people drink to get drunk, has a chemical formula of C2H5OH and thus a molecular mass of 46 or 46g of alcohol has 6.02214129×10^23 molecules. What is the point of this exercise? The point is that most people have drunk some alcohol in the past and know its effects, unless you are like I was until I was 30 and never touched the stuff.
If you take a mole of alcohol (46g) and dilute it 6.02214129×10^23 times you would be left with one alcohol molecule in any 46g of solution and a homeopath would call that a less than 24C dilution. And then a homeopath would dilute it a lot more and would tell you that the alcohol would have become even more potent.
What do you think? Do you think I would kill myself drinking alcohol that has had has been diluted as to have no alcohol left in it? What about a medicine that has no medicine left in it, should it cure me? If you think so, then I have a bridge that I want to sell you, it is in Brooklyn.
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