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Originally Posted by tracilicious
It seems to be a combination. But what do you mean?
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It can't be a combination. Either your stuff has something in it, or it doesn't.
Homeopathy is the theory that if something causes a symptom then consuming a very small quantity of that item will cure that symptom, even if that isn't what is causing the symptom in the specific case. So, if you're exposed to toxin that causes your eyes to water excessively, a minute quantity of onion (perhaps, this is a made up example of a treatment) would cure you of that toxin exposure. The second half of the theoryis that the smaller the dose, the more powerful the medicine.
Now, when talking about minute quantities, I mean truly
infinitesimal quantities. Start with 1 ml of the substance and dilute it to 100 ml. Take 1 ml of the diluted mixture and dilute
that to 100 ml (one such dilution is called 1C).
When Hahneman first put forward his theory of homeopathy he recommened a dosage of 30C (doing the dilution described 30 times). This means that for every molecule of the original substance you have 10^60 molecules of water.
To put it another way. If you wanted enough of this homeopathic solution to guarantee that you were getting at least
one molecule of the "curing chemical" you would need 10^34 gallons of water. That is if you had a glass that could hold 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water you would likely on be drinking one molecule of "onion." So, when you take a single capsule or eyedrop or whatever of a homeopathic solution your chances of actually consuming the substance that will supposedly cure you is essentially zero.
To put it yet another way: if you took that one "onion" molecule and dropped it into the Pacific Ocean (and assumed that all water on earth was connected), it would still be too concentrated by a factor of 10^16.
And this is just Hahnemann's original theory. Modern homeopathy frequently uses dilutions of 50,000C (called LM). This means that if you had a swimming pool the size of our galaxy, it likely would still not contain even a single molecule of curative substance.
To counter the obvious bunkness of all this, many homeopathy proponents posit that molecules of water somehow remember the "vibration" of the curative substance. This ignores the fact that most of the water in the dilution was never anywhere near a molecule of the curative and that all water on Earth has been in contact with billions of non-water molecules since the Earth first cooled and how exactly is it supposed to remember the onion molecule but not the time it was in Caesar's bladder?
The great advantage for homeopathists is that since all they are selling is water, their materials overhead is minimal and margins are very high.